The Point

They went out to the ice house on the night of the twenty-fifth of August, four of them, in two cars, with a bolt cutter and a lamp and a cooler, because Ruth had said that a person who is about to drive north into the last week of another person's account should first go and look at the piece of it that is behind her.

The road out to the point ran past the yacht club and then along the shore, and there was nothing on it at that hour except a raccoon and a light on a pole.

The building was locked and the lock was new and the bolt cutter went through it in a second and a half, which nobody commented on.

The loading bay was cold in the way that concrete is cold when it has spent a hundred and ten years at forty degrees, and the four of them stood in it with the lamp up and looked at what was still in it, and what was still in it was four crates.

They were long boxes, banded with steel, stencilled in a script that none of the four of them could read, standing in a row on a ring of rust in the middle of the bay where the old scale had been. The ring was the size of a crate, and the four bright scratches at the corners of it showed where crates had been dragged on and off it over and over, and the ring had gone dark at the edges, which meant that whatever had stood on it had stood on it for months and not for days.

"Four," Vance said. "He keeps four here."

"He keeps four here because this is the water," Ruth said. "He keeps four at the water because a man who has one port never leaves the port, and every one of these is a door. Look at the drag marks. They come off the ring and they go to the inner door, and they stop at the freezer."

Vance had gone further in, into the old freezer rooms, with the lamp, and when he came back he did not say anything for a moment, and then he said: "You should come and see the freezer."

The freezer was a room thirty feet by twenty with a steel door and a rack of hooks still standing in it, and it was cold and it was clean, and along the back wall, on the floor, in the dust, was a row of small marks that Ruth got down on her knees to look at with the lamp close, and they were shoe prints, or the remains of shoe prints, seven of them, each about the length of a woman's shoe, and every one of them facing the wall.

"Facing the wall," Ruth said.

"Yes."

"Why would anybody stand facing a wall in a freezer?"

"Because they were put there," Vance said. "Seven, in a row, facing the wall, over maybe three days, and every one of them walked in and then stopped and did not turn around, and whoever was behind them did not need them to turn around." He looked at the marks for a while. "This is where he kept the others, Ruth. Not the ones he was feeding on. The ones who had run out."

And then he raised the lamp, because he had not until that moment looked at the far corner of the room.

There was one more crate in the freezer.

It stood alone in the corner, up against the wall, banded, stencilled the same way, with the frost on it an inch thick along the top edge and the frost on the other four almost gone, and the significance of that did not arrive for several seconds, and when it did, it arrived in the form of Grant Halloway saying, from the doorway, in a voice that was doing arithmetic it would rather not do: "Somebody opened that one and sealed it again. You can see the bands. The bands on the four in the bay are rusted and the bands on that one are new."

Grant, who had not said anything for several minutes, was standing in the doorway with the lamp turned down and looking out into the bay, and when he spoke again it was not about the crate.

"Six people left the ship," he said. "Five of them were interviewed and sent home. One of them was found in this building by a customs officer on the fourteenth of May and taken to a hospital in Portland and discharged on the sixth of June into the care of a private medical transport service, which billed nobody, at an address on the same street as the clinic in Paterson." He turned around. "There are seven footprints in that freezer and the ship had eleven crew and two of them died and three of the eleven signed off at the last port and were never registered as having arrived anywhere, and I have been looking at this for four months and I have just now, standing in this doorway, understood what it is that we are actually looking at."

"Say it," Ruth said.

"He does not throw anything away," Grant said. "That is the whole of it. That is the entire business. He is not a predator and he is not a monster and he is not even cruel, and every single thing that any of us has been doing for five months has been wrong, because we have been hunting a man who does something for pleasure, and he does not do anything for pleasure. He keeps an account, and the account has two columns, and when a thing comes into his hands it goes into one column or the other, and there is no third column, and there is no line in his book that says discard."

They worked the freezer for twenty minutes, and Ruth walked the room twice with her hand flat on the walls, the way a person does in the dark, and it was on the second pass, on her knees at the shelf under the empty scale frame — because the scale had a shelf, and the shelf had a back, and the back of a shelf is a place where a person who is interrupted puts something — that she found the bundle.

It was wrapped in oilcloth and tied with tarred twine, about the size of a thick book, and it had been behind the scale for a long time.

They put it on the concrete in the bay in the light and cut the twine with Owen's penknife, and unwrapped it, and inside were eleven sheets of paper.

Eleven pages, each one a single leaf, each one ruled at the top for a date and a name, and each one filled in, in a different hand every time, and the hands were not the hands of one man. They were the hands of eleven women: a careful one, a large one, a schoolroom one, one that had been cried on, one written in a language that was not English and signed at the foot in block letters by somebody who had been told how. Each page had a date at the top and a name in the box and, at the foot, in the small square hand, in brown ink, in the column an insurance company would have used, the same two words eleven times.

ACCOUNT OPEN.

There were no amounts. That was the thing all four of them noticed at the same moment and none of them said out loud until Ruth said it, in the bay, with the lamp going and the eleven pages on the concrete in front of her.

"There's no amount," she said. "He doesn't write what he takes. He only writes that it started."

They looked like pages taken out of a ledger and kept, which is what they were: a date ruled at the top, a name in the box, and a ruled column at the foot with two words in it, in a hand that had been making that mark on that kind of page for a very long time.

And then Owen Mercer, who had stood in the doorway of that building for a quarter of an hour without saying anything at all, said the thing that none of the other three had yet worked out, and said it flatly, the way a lawyer reads a paragraph of a document he has already decided to be bound by.

"The numbers, laid out, are these. Forty-one crates came off that ship. Thirty-six went up the county road on four flatbeds. Four are standing in that bay with the steel bands rusted onto them. And there is one in the freezer, banded in new steel, in the corner where nobody looks."

Grant said: "One."

"One," Owen said. "It never got onto a truck, because a second mate counted the forty-one on the dock on the fourteenth of May and found one of them still on the pier under a tarp, and then he did the only thing that anybody in the whole history of this business has ever managed to do, which was to take one thing off the account before the account closed. He carried it up here, into the only cold room in this town, and stood it in the corner of a freezer, and then he sat down in that bay and waited to be found, and when the customs officer came he would not leave the building, and nobody has ever understood why a man would refuse to leave a building." Owen put his hand flat on the lid of the forty-first crate. "He was guarding it. He died in custody in June and he never said a word about it to anybody, and the reason he never said a word is that he had already understood what none of us understood until this week, which is that the only way to take anything away from a man who keeps an account is to make it unaccountable."

Grant Halloway, who had been a kind man in an unexamined way for the whole of his life up until that August, said the sentence that is at the bottom of that page of the folder in Ruth's hand, and it is the shortest entry in the whole document, and it is the last thing anybody said in that building.

"Then we'll write the ending," he said. "Somebody has to write it, because he never does."