Chapter 6

There are two ways out of the Zamboni tunnel, and I had designed both of them.

The first is the bay doors, and those were twenty feet wide, hydraulic, and operated from a panel in Julian's office, which was why Julian had bolted the corridor door and felt clever.

The second is the fire alarm.

When I was building this arena, the fire marshal told me I needed a manual pull station in every service zone, and the electrician put one on the wall of the Zamboni bay. But this is my town and my fire code says what I say it says, so I had him run a second line - a big brass lever, right there in the tunnel, painted red, three feet off the floor. It releases every mag-lock in the building, opens the south standways, and calls the fire department in the same breath. I paid eleven thousand dollars for it. Julian had signed the invoice in a stack of forty and never read it.

"It's three feet off the floor," I said through the door. "Left of the tire rack. Brass lever, painted red. Pull it down with both hands."

Silence. Then boots.

"Sir-" Tessa.

"Do it."

The lever going down made a sound like a trapdoor in a gallows. Then the building began to scream.

Horns everywhere, strobes in the corridor strobing red across the bleach-bright floor, and somewhere above us two hundred of the most important people in northern Minnesota turning in a panic toward the exits while the bass player's amp fed back and the crystal chandeliers shook. Every door in the arena unlocked at once. It was the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life, and it was mine.

The tunnel door swung.

Tessa came out first, hand behind her, Mabel's fist in it. The girl's blanket was gone, her parka hood up, her face white.

"This way," I said.

"Sir, dispatch-"

"They're coming. This way."

I took them out the south door of the Zamboni bay and into the cold, and the blizzard hit us like a wall of pins. The loading dock. The service road. And then the boathouse.

The boathouse is the old building on the property - the one that was here before the arena, when my father and I ran barges out of here and the lake took two of my cousins before I was twelve. Peak roof, steel door, no windows above the waterline, and a padlock the size of my hand.

I had opened that door ten thousand times. There was no key on earth I had carried longer.

But I had heard something on the loading dock. Under the horns, under the wind, under the lake - a sound from behind the boathouse door. A dull, regular knocking, like someone hitting steel with the flat of a hand, too weak to make the door itself move.

Tessa heard it. Her face changed.

"That lock's been changed," she said.

"Not for me." I pulled the ring out of my pocket with cold fingers and found the flat iron key, black as a fish, that had hung there since 1974, and I put it in the padlock and turned, and it opened.

I hauled the door back and the boathouse breathed out at us: diesel, lake rot, cold.

"Mabel? Mabel, honey, don't-"

Too late. The girl was past me, into the dark, her boots slapping the boards, and she screamed one word at the top of her lungs into that freezing black room.

"RUTH!"

And from somewhere inside, against the far wall, under the sound of the horn and the wind and my own heartbeat, a woman's voice, wrecked, said: "Mabs?"