The day before Ragnar Hansen took to his bed to die, he planted the last of a thousand fir seedlings, a little something to replace all the old growth trees Hansens logged over the years. A little something for Kelda, daughter of the Landing, who would inherit all forty acres with its old house, four run-down cottages, a rotting dock, some good timber, and taxes at one-thousand an acre.

The salt-scented breeze coming off Liberty Bay lifted hair gone too thin over the years to warm his head. Gone white, too, though color didn’t matter much when it came to stopping the chill. He figured dying would take a day or two, three at most. Norwegians could do prit-near anything they set their minds to, and he’d set his to joining his six brothers in the beyond. Six brothers and one sister-in-law, Lydia, who’d come to life in his head of late, fussing over the wee tree planting that stirred up aches in his bones in the April air. His hands felt good—rough and soiled with Hansen earth—in spite of the chill.

Calluses that softened with age were toughened up a bit from this planting. They’d started as blisters when he was but five years old and swinging an axe to help bring down a Douglas fir on Hansen land.

Loggers, that’s what Hansens were back when, that’s all he’d ever been. A simple man who’d run short on cash since buying his two nephews’ shares of the Landing. He had his Last Will and Testament prepared and them thousand seedlings planted for forgiveness when Kelda learned that the truth of that selling and buying. He had the Indian lawyer, Walkingstick by name, ready to put other growing things in the ground, native plants, while Kelda settled the estate. Way he figured, Kelda would have enough money for a year or two; it would take that long to straighten out the mess. Like as not, after that, she’d have to turn the Landing over to her husband and his construction business.

He pushed himself to his feet and hobbled toward the dock for one last stroll out over salt water. Out there, where steamboats once called in at the Landing, he felt his closest brothers with him. Rolf and Karli not so much older but long since dead, and little Olav who’d rested at the bottom of Pearl Harbor over fifty years.

He made it halfway across the sloping lawn before he heard a car coming down Hansen’s Lane. “Damn it all to hell,” he said without turning, figuring it was Emma Stern butting in when he’d already told her the house was clean enough for a month. A man set on dying doesn’t need so much fussing over dust or ironed handkerchiefs for his back pocket. He raised a fist in protest and kept it raised even when the car turned out to be some new sporty thing, its door already opened by a youngster like as not lost. His mind was on a chat with Lydia, only woman he’d ever loved, dead thirty-five years but alive in his head and full of advice. She’d sent Walkingstick, told him so in his head. Maybe she’d sent this red-haired boy, too.

“Mr. Hansen?” the boy called in a voice deep enough to be a man’s, ordinary enough to be a Hansen’s. “Mr. Ragnar Hansen?”

“Ja, that’d be me, but I’m not needing to buy anything, or be saved by some religion neither. You might just as well get back in your automobile and drive on out of here.”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m from the paper, the Poulsbo Herald. I write the history column—twenty-five years ago, fifty years ago, that kind of thing. Wallace Taylor’s body washed up on a beach sixty years ago next month. May 1932. My boss figures an unsolved murder is worth some space, and I thought you could comment, him having been your brother-in-law.”

Ragnar dusted his hands, reached down and dusted his pant legs from knee to hem for good measure. His bones creaked both bending and straightening. “I have a hard time remembering anything that far back, I’m eighty and some-odd years old, memory’s not what it used to be.”

“Records show you were married to Ruth Taylor, sister to Wallace.”

“Seems to me that was along about 1935, my marriage to Ruth. Her brother was already dead by then, so he couldn’t be my brother-in-law. Fell off the ferry from Seattle and drowned long before Ruthie and me married.”

“Old reports said suspected murder victim, Mr. Hansen. No water in his lungs. Drowning victims always have water in their lungs.”

Ragnar shook his head, one shake, still unsettled at how he’d come to marry Ruth. He’d done it to please Lydia, who’d chosen Olav for herself. Ruth needed a husband, what with her poor health, her dead brother, and their parents not so good in the aftermath. A darned shame it was, Wally’s body washing up like that. He poked around in his head for an answer that would satisfy this young reporter.

“Mr. Hansen, let’s say, for the sake of the paper’s story, that Wallace Taylor was murdered. Who do you think might have killed him?”

The reporter waited, leaving Ragnar no choice but to come up with something. He and his brothers made up truths right and left at the time, to get investigators off the scent of local Indians, they’d been that sure someone from the Suquamish tribe had killed Wallace, payback for death of one or two of theirs.