Snow Falling on Cedars Read Online Free Page B

the water, a salmon struggling in the net beside him, the skin of his collarbones, just above the highest waves, hued an icy but brilliant pink. He appeared to have been parboiled in the sea.
    Abel Martinson vomited. He leaned out over the transom of the boat and retched and cleared his throat and vomited again, this time more violently. ‘All right, Abel,’ Art said. ‘You get ahold of yourself.’
    The deputy did not reply. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He breathed heavily and spat into the sea a half-dozen times. Then, after a moment, he dropped his head and pounded his left fist against the transom. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll bring him up slow,’ answered Art. ‘You keep his head back away from the transom, Abel. Get ahold of yourself. Keep his head back and away now.’
    But in the end they had to rattle up the lead line and pull Carl fully into the folds of his net. They cupped the net around him like a kind of hammock so that his body was borne by the webbing. In this manner they brought Carl Heine up from the sea – Abel yarding him over the net roller while Art tapped gingerly at the beaver paddle and squinted over the transom, his Juicy Fruit seized between his teeth. They laid him, together, on the afterdeck. In the cold salt water he had stiffened quickly; his right foot had frozen rigidly over his left, and his arms, locked at the shoulders, were fixed in place with the fingers curled. His mouth was open. His eyes were open too, but the pupils had disappeared – Art saw how they’d revolved backward and nowlooked inward at his skull. The blood vessels in the whites of his eyes had burst; there were two crimson orbs in his head.
    Abel Martinson stared.
    Art found that he could not bring forward the least vestige of professionalism. He simply stood by, like his twenty-four-year-old deputy, thinking the thoughts a man thinks at such a time about the ugly inevitability of death. There was a silence to be filled, and Art found himself hard-pressed in the face of it to conduct himself in a manner his deputy could learn from. And so they simply stood looking down at Carl’s corpse, a thing that had silenced both of them.
    ‘He banged his head,’ whispered Abel Martinson, pointing to a wound Art hadn’t noticed in Carl Heine’s blond hair. ‘Must have banged it against the gunnel going over.’
    Sure enough, Carl Heine’s skull had been crushed just above his left ear. The bone had fractured and left a dent in his head. Art Moran turned away from it.

3
    Nels Gudmundsson, the attorney who had been appointed to defend Kabuo Miyamoto, rose to cross-examine Art Moran with a slow and deliberate geriatric awkwardness, then roughly cleared the phlegm from his throat and hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders where they met their tiny black catch buttons. At seventy-nine, Nels was blind in his left eye and could distinguish only shades of light and darkness through its transient, shadowy pupil. The right, however, as if to make up for this deficiency, seemed preternaturally observant, even prescient, and as he plodded over the courtroom floorboards, advancing with a limp toward Art Moran, motes of light winked through it.
    ‘Sheriff,’ he said. ‘Good morning.’
    ‘Good morning,’ replied Art Moran.
    ‘I just want to make sure I’m hearing you right on a couple of matters,’ said Nels. ‘You say the lights on this boat, the Susan Marie, were all on? Is that right?’
    ‘Yes,’ said the sheriff. ‘They were.’
    ‘In the cabin, too?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘The mast lights?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘The picking lights? The net lights. All of them?’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Art Moran.
    ‘Thank you,’ Nels said. ‘I thought that was what you said, all right. That they were all on. All the lights.’
    He paused and for a moment seemed to study his hands, which were riddled with liver spots and trembled at times:Nels suffered from an advancing neurasthenia. Its foremost symptom was