What the Ice Keeps

Pulling a locked strongbox from a frozen lake, a grieving teen unearths a decade-old disappearance and a new purpose.

The auger screamed. It was a noise that ripped through the quiet of the lake, a high-pitched, angry sound that felt like it was drilling right into my skull. My hands, even through the thick gloves, were numb, vibrating with the two-stroke engine's rage. Below my boots, two feet of solid, black ice. Below that, thirty feet of water so cold it would stop your heart in a minute. I hated it. I hated the noise, I hated the cold that crept into the seams of my coat, and most of all, I hated the silence that crashed down the second I killed the engine.

My uncle Mark watched me from about fifty yards away, a dark shape against the endless white. He didn’t shout instructions or offer to help. That wasn't his way. He just stood there, hands in his pockets, letting me wrestle with the machine he’d insisted I learn to use. ‘You live up here, you learn how things work.’ That was his philosophy for everything, from the auger to the wood stove to my so-called grief. Just learn how it works. As if my dad’s death was a faulty engine I could strip down and fix with the right tool.

I kicked the slush away from the newly-bored hole. Dark water swirled, a perfect black circle in the snow-dusted ice. It looked like a wound. Another one. The sky was the color of a dirty plate, promising more snow later. The air smelled of nothing but cold and pine from the shoreline, a smell so clean it felt like an accusation.

Dad would have loved this. He would have called the silence ‘peaceful.’ He would have pointed out the way the snow clung to the jack pines, making them look soft, and he’d have known the name of the bird that just called out from the woods, a lonely two-note whistle. I just heard a bird. I just saw trees. Since he died, the world had lost its labels. It was just a collection of ugly, meaningless things.

Mark was the one who called Mom. ‘Cole needs a change of scenery. The city’s no good for him right now.’ And Mom, drowning in her own sea of paperwork and memories, had agreed. So I was shipped north to live with my dad's estranged brother, a man whose entire vocabulary seemed to consist of grunts and one-syllable words. He was a conservation officer. His uniform, perpetually smelling of damp wool and motor oil, hung by the door like a silent threat. I was his special project. His troubled-teen reclamation case. It was thrilling.

I baited the hook with a shivering minnow from the bucket, my fingers clumsy and stiff. The little fish squirmed against my glove, a frantic, tiny life about to be extinguished for the sake of catching a bigger life, which would then also be extinguished. The whole system seemed pretty stupid to me. I dropped the line into the hole. The little lead weight pulled it down, zipping the orange line through my fingers until it stopped, hitting the bottom of Sparrow Lake with a faint, almost imperceptible thud I felt more than heard.

I sat on the overturned bucket, my throne of misery, and stared at the tip-up. A small, spring-loaded flag that would pop if a fish took the bait. Nothing ever did. For a week, I’d been coming out here, drilling holes, drowning minnows, and freezing my butt off for absolutely nothing. It was Mark’s idea of therapy. ‘Fresh air. Gives a man time to think.’ I had too much time to think. Thinking was the whole problem. My thoughts just circled the same drain: the police report, the phrase ‘unsolved blunt-force trauma,’ the way my dad’s car looked in the impound lot. The case was cold, they said. Like this lake. Like my hands. Like everything.

My phone didn't get service out here, which was probably part of Mark’s grand plan. No distractions. Just me and the vast, empty landscape. He thought it was majestic. I thought it was a prison. I pulled my toque down over my ears and hunched my shoulders, trying to disappear inside my parka. An hour passed. Then another. The sun, which had never really shown up for work, started to dip, turning the grey sky to a bruised purple. The cold sharpened, getting personal. It felt like it was looking for a way into my bones.

Mark started walking towards me, his boots crunching a steady rhythm on the snow. Time to go. Thank God. He stopped a few feet away, his breath pluming in the air. He wasn't a big man, but he was dense, solid, like he was carved from the same hard earth he patrolled. His face was all angles, chapped by the wind, with pale blue eyes that saw everything and said nothing.

‘Anything?’ he asked. His voice was rough, like gravel.

I shook my head, not looking at him. ‘Nope. Not a thing.’

‘Sometimes it’s like that.’ He gestured with his chin towards my tip-up. ‘Patience is the price of admission.’

I hated his little sayings. They were like something you’d read on a wooden plaque in a cheap gift shop. I just wanted to go back to the cabin, blast music through my headphones, and forget where I was. Forget who I was with. Forget everything.

As I reached down to pull up my line, to surrender for the day, I felt a tug. Not the frantic jerk of a fish, but a heavy, solid pull. A snag. Perfect. The perfect end to a perfect day. ‘Stuck,’ I grunted, yanking on the line. ‘Bottom.’

Mark moved closer, peering down at the hole. ‘On what? It’s all mud and rock down there.’

‘Tell that to my hook.’ I pulled again, harder this time. The line went taut, humming with tension. It didn't budge. It felt like I’d hooked the planet itself. ‘Great. Just cut it.’

‘Hold on.’ Mark took the line from me, his bare hand wrapping around the thin filament. He was one of those guys who never seemed to feel the cold. He pulled gently, then a little harder, his head cocked as if he were listening to the line. ‘That’s not a rock. There’s… give. A little.’

He handed it back to me. ‘Pull steady. Don’t jerk it. Just lean back with your body weight.’

I rolled my eyes, but I did what he said. I wrapped the line around my gloved hands, planted my boots, and leaned back. For a second, nothing. Then, I felt a scraping sensation travel up the line. Something was dragging across the bottom of the lake. It was heavy. Unbelievably heavy. My muscles screamed. The line dug into my gloves.

‘What the hell?’ I gasped, a plume of steam erupting from my mouth.

‘Keep going,’ Mark said, his voice suddenly sharp with interest. He got down on one knee beside the hole, peering into the black water. ‘Easy now. You’re bringing it up.’

It was a battle. A slow, agonizing battle against dead weight. My arms burned, my back ached. Whatever this was, it felt impossibly large. Every foot of line I gained felt like a major victory. The sun was almost gone now, and the world was bathed in a deep, cobalt blue. The only sounds were my own ragged breaths and the groan of the line being dragged through the ice-rimmed hole.

‘I see something,’ Mark said, his voice low. ‘It’s… dark. And square.’

My curiosity, an emotion I thought had died with my dad, flickered to life. I gave one last, desperate heave. A dark shape broke the surface, shedding water and muck. It wasn't a log or a rock. It was a box. A metal strongbox, covered in rust and slime, trailing weeds like dead hair. It was about the size of a shoebox, maybe a little bigger, with a heavy-duty latch on the front.

I fell back on the ice, panting, the line slack in my hands. The box bobbed in the hole, clunking against the edges of the ice. It looked ancient, alien. Something that belonged to the dark and the cold, not the world of air and light. Mark reached in without hesitation, his arm disappearing into the frigid water up to his elbow. He grunted with effort, his fingers finding a purchase. With a final, sucking sound, he hauled it onto the ice.

It sat there between us, dark and silent. The rust was thick, layered like bark. A small, tarnished brass plate on the front was mostly illegible, but I could make out a few letters: ‘…rth…inch…’. A padlock, so corroded it was barely recognizable, held the latch shut. We stared at it, the silence of the lake rushing back in, deeper this time. The weight of the thing wasn't just physical. It felt heavy with time, with secrets. I had reached into the black, forgotten heart of the lake and pulled out a ghost.

We dragged it back to the cabin on the little gear sled, the metal runners hissing over the snow. Neither of us spoke. The box sat between my feet, cold and solid. It felt like I was smuggling a body part. Back at the cabin, the warmth was a shock, smelling of woodsmoke and the stew Mark had left simmering on the stove. But I couldn’t think about food. I couldn't think about anything but the box.

Mark set it on the rough-hewn pine table in the middle of the room. It dripped muddy water, forming a dirty puddle. He went to the shed and came back with a hammer and a crowbar. He looked at me, a question in his pale eyes. ‘You do the honours.’

My heart was pounding, a dull, heavy rhythm against my ribs. This was ridiculous. It was probably just some old trash, maybe a fisherman’s lost tackle box. But it didn't feel like trash. It felt important. I took the crowbar. The metal was cold and heavy in my hand. I jammed the flattened end into the space between the lid and the body of the box, right next to the corroded lock.

I pushed. Nothing. The metal was thick. I repositioned it and put my weight into it. A loud groan, a screech of tortured metal. The rust flaked away under the pressure. I could feel Mark’s presence behind me, watching, waiting.

‘Use the hammer,’ he said quietly. ‘Tap the end of the bar.’

I wedged the crowbar in as far as it would go and tapped the end with the hammer. Once. Twice. On the third hit, the lock gave way with a sharp crack that echoed in the small cabin. The lid, released from a decade of pressure, sprang open an inch.

My breath caught in my throat. I looked at Mark. He just nodded, his face unreadable. I dropped the tools on the floor and used my fingers to lift the lid. It creaked open, releasing a smell of damp earth, mildew, and something else… something like old paper, like a library left to rot.

Inside, nestled in a bed of silt and lake water, was a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. My hands were shaking as I lifted it out. It was heavy, dense. I placed it on the table and carefully unwrapped the stiff, cracking material. The contents spilled out, a strange collection of a life interrupted.

There was a small, leather-bound journal, its pages swollen and warped by the water. A brass compass, heavy and beautifully made, its glass face cracked. A small, intricately carved wooden bird, maybe an owl, its painted eyes somehow still bright. And a metal canister, the kind used for photographic film. Everything was coated in a thin layer of grime.

I picked up the journal. The leather was slick and cold. I tried to open it, but the pages were fused together into a solid block of paper pulp. My heart sank. It was useless. ‘Damn it.’

‘Try the compass,’ Mark suggested, pointing with his chin.

I picked it up, wiping the muck from the back on my jeans. There was an inscription, finely engraved. ‘For Arthur, my true north. Always find your way home. - E.’ Arthur. The name on the brass plate. ‘…rth…inch…’. Arthur Finch? I turned the name over in my mind. It meant nothing to me.

‘Arthur Finch,’ Mark said, his voice quiet. He was staring at the compass in my hand. ‘I remember that name. Went missing about ten years back. Local fella. Amateur historian, photographer. Loved the woods. They searched for months. Found his truck parked at the trailhead over on the east side of the lake. Never found him. The consensus was he fell through the ice.’

My skin went cold. This wasn't just some lost tackle box. This was a man's life. These were the last things he ever touched. This box was his tombstone. ‘He didn't fall through the ice,’ I said, my voice barely a whisper. ‘He was out here. Where we were. Miles from the east trailhead.’

Mark nodded slowly, his gaze fixed on the box. ‘And people don't generally go ice fishing with a locked strongbox.’

A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold ran down my spine. This man, Arthur Finch, hadn't just gotten lost. Something had happened to him out on that ice. And this box was the only witness.

That night, I didn't sleep. While Mark snored softly from his room, I sat at the pine table with my laptop, the strange artifacts of Arthur Finch’s last day spread out before me under the glow of a single lamp. The cabin was silent except for the hum of the old refrigerator and the occasional pop and sigh of the cooling wood stove. For the first time since I’d arrived, the silence didn’t feel empty. It felt… full. Expectant.

I started with the name. Arthur Finch. I typed it into the search engine, along with the name of the town, Northwood. The results were sparse. A few articles from the local paper, the *Northwood Chronicle*, all dated from the winter of 2015. ‘Local Man Missing.’ ‘Search for Arthur Finch Enters Third Week.’ ‘Search Scaled Back, Hopes Fade.’ The stories were brief, painting a picture of a quiet, 50-year-old man, a widower with no children, who kept to himself. He owned a small bookstore in town that had closed down after he disappeared. The articles quoted a sheriff, long since retired, who said all signs pointed to a tragic accident.

But the box told a different story. Why would a man planning a simple winter hike be carrying a locked strongbox? What was so important that he had to keep it under lock and key?

My focus shifted to the journal. It was my best hope, but it was a wreck. I spent the next hour working on it with a painstaking slowness I didn't know I possessed. I used one of Mark’s filleting knives, the blade thin and flexible, to carefully separate the pages. It was like performing surgery on a ghost. Most of the pages were a lost cause, the ink washed away into illegible grey swirls. But near the middle of the book, where the pages were packed tighter, some of the writing had survived.

The script was small and neat, the ink faded to a watery blue. Much of it was mundane. Weather observations, notes on local flora and fauna. But then I found a section that was different. The handwriting was more hurried, more urgent.

‘…followed the old logging trail past the whispering falls. S is getting paranoid. He thinks I’m onto him. He’s not wrong. The maps don’t lie. The survey lines are clear. What he’s doing on that parcel is illegal. More than illegal, it’s a desecration…’

S. Who was S? And what was he doing?

Another entry, a few pages later, was even more cryptic. ‘…the bird is the key. He doesn’t know I have it. It’s proof. Met with E today. She’s scared. For me. Told her not to worry, that the truth is a light. I hope I’m not wrong. Taking the box out to the island cache tomorrow. Just in case.’

The bird is the key. I looked at the small, carved wooden owl on the table. It was beautifully detailed, made from some kind of dark, heavy wood. I turned it over and over in my hands. It felt solid. There were no hidden compartments, no secret buttons. It was just a carving. What could it be proof of?

The island cache. There was only one island on Sparrow Lake, a small, rocky outcrop covered in pines that we called Blueberry Island. He was taking the box there. He must have been on his way when something happened. He didn't fall through the ice. He was stopped.

I spent the rest of the night falling down a digital rabbit hole. I pulled up old satellite imagery of the area from 2015, looking for anything out of place near Blueberry Island. Nothing. I searched county property records, looking for land owners with the initial ‘S’ near the locations mentioned in the journal. There were dozens. I cross-referenced them with old newspaper articles, social media from the time, anything I could find. It was a haystack of data, and I didn't even know what the needle looked like.

By the time the first grey light of dawn seeped through the cabin windows, my eyes were burning and my head ached. I hadn't found a smoking gun. I hadn't found anything, really. Just a ghost's vague warnings and a name that was ten years cold. But I wasn't discouraged. I was the opposite. I felt a hum under my skin, a feeling I hadn't felt in months. Purpose. My dad's case was a brick wall. The cops had given up. There were no clues, no answers, just a gaping hole where my life used to be. But this… this was different. This was a puzzle. And I was going to solve it.

When Mark came into the main room, I was still at the table, staring at the screen. He stopped, taking in the scene – me, hunched over the laptop, the artifacts from the box arranged like evidence. He walked over to the coffee maker and started a pot without a word. The smell of brewing coffee filled the room.

He brought a mug over and set it down next to me. ‘Find anything?’ he asked.

I was expecting a lecture. About obsession, about letting things go. Instead, he just sounded… curious.

I blinked, trying to bring my tired eyes into focus. ‘Maybe.’ I told him about the journal entries. About ‘S.’ About the illegal activity and the island cache. I told him about my dead-end searches through the property records.

He listened, sipping his coffee, his gaze drifting from my screen to the items on the table. He picked up the carved owl, turning it in his rough hands. ‘Arthur Finch carved these. He was good. Used to sell them at the farmer’s market in the summer.’

‘The journal says it’s proof,’ I said, my voice hoarse from lack of sleep. ‘The bird is the key.’ But I don't see how.’

Mark set the bird down. ‘Maybe it’s not the bird itself. Maybe it’s what’s in it.’ He walked over to his workbench in the corner, a cluttered space of tools and half-finished projects, and came back with a magnifying glass and a powerful headlamp.

He strapped the lamp to his forehead, flooding the little wooden owl with brilliant white light. He bent over it, the magnifying glass held close to his eye, examining every millimeter of the carving with an intense, practiced focus. This was his world. The world of tiny details, of reading the story that things left behind. He was like a detective of the natural world. For the first time, I saw him not as my jailer, but as someone who might actually understand.

‘Here,’ he said after a minute, his voice a low rumble. He pointed to the base of the owl, to a spot that looked like just another shadow in the carved feathers. ‘Look.’

I leaned in. Under the bright light and magnification, I could see it. Not a shadow, but a line. A hairline fracture, almost invisible to the naked eye. The base of the owl was a separate piece, fitted so perfectly it was seamless.

Mark took out his pocketknife, the blade worn thin from years of use. He inserted the very tip into the crack and twisted. There was a faint click, and the base of the owl popped off.

It was hollow inside. And nestled in the small cavity was a tiny, tightly rolled cylinder of paper. My breath hitched. Mark used the tip of his knife to coax it out. It was a roll of microfilm. Old tech, but secure. Harder to find, harder to read.

‘Holy crap,’ I whispered.

‘Finch was a clever man,’ Mark said, a note of respect in his voice. ‘Now we just need to figure out how to look at this thing.’

Finding a microfilm reader in Northwood in 2025 was a challenge. The library had gotten rid of theirs years ago. The high school too. I finally found one listed in the inventory of the county records office, a dusty old machine shoved in a storage closet. After some cajoling from Mark, who seemed to know everyone, a clerk agreed to let us use it after hours.

The office was quiet and smelled of old paper and floor wax. The machine was a clunky, beige behemoth from another era. I threaded the tiny roll of film onto the spool, my fingers feeling clumsy and huge. Mark and I huddled close as I switched on the lamp. A bright square of light illuminated the screen. I slowly advanced the film.

The first frames were blurry. Then, an image snapped into focus. A hand-drawn map. It was a section of the forest east of the lake, near the old logging trails Finch had mentioned in his journal. But this map had details the official ones didn't. Lines and symbols I didn't understand. And photographs. Dozens of them.

The pictures were grainy, taken from a distance, but the subject was clear. A man, burly and bearded, directing a small crew of workers. They were cutting down trees, but not just any trees. They were massive, ancient white pines, the kind that were protected. In other photos, the same man was overseeing the loading of the huge logs onto an unmarked flatbed truck at night.

‘Poaching,’ Mark said, his voice grim. ‘Old-growth timber. A single one of those trees can be worth tens of thousands on the black market. It’s a big problem up here. Hard to patrol, easy to cover your tracks.’

We kept scrolling through the film. There were close-ups of documents. Falsified logging permits. Bank statements showing huge, unexplained cash deposits. Finch had been building a case. He had everything. Names, dates, photographic evidence.

And the main name on the bank statements, the man in the photos, was Silas Carter. I typed the name into my phone’s browser. The first hit was a recent article from the *Chronicle*. He was a local businessman, owned a successful logging company. He was a pillar of the community, a sponsor of the local hockey team. He lived in a remote cabin on the far side of Sparrow Lake.

S. Silas.

‘This is him,’ I said, my voice tight. ‘This is the guy from the journal.’

‘Silas Carter,’ Mark said the name slowly, tasting it. ‘He’s been around forever. Always struck me as… slippery. But no one’s ever been able to pin anything on him.’

‘Finch did,’ I said, looking at the screen. ‘He had him dead to rights.’

And Silas must have known it. He must have followed Finch out onto the lake that day. He must have known about the box, about the proof. He confronted him. He killed him. And he sent the box, the evidence he couldn't get his hands on, to the bottom of the lake. He probably thought it was gone forever.

A cold fury settled in my stomach. For ten years, this man, Silas Carter, had gotten away with murder. He’d lived his life, run his business, probably smiled and waved at people in town, while Arthur Finch lay somewhere at the bottom of that cold, dark lake. The injustice of it was a physical thing, a sour taste in the back of my throat. It was the same feeling I got whenever I thought about my dad. The same rage at a world where people could just be erased, their killers walking free.

‘What do we do?’ I asked Mark. My hands were balled into fists.

Mark was silent for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the illuminated face of Silas Carter on the microfilm reader. His jaw was tight. ‘This is ten years old, Cole. The evidence is circumstantial. Carter will have a dozen lawyers who’ll tear this apart. We take this to the provincial police, they’ll open an investigation, and it’ll get buried in paperwork. He’ll walk.’

‘So that’s it? He just gets away with it?’ The unfairness of it choked me.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Mark said, turning to look at me. His pale blue eyes were hard, like chips of ice. ‘I said we can’t take it to the police. Not yet. We need something more. We need something that ties him directly to Finch’s disappearance. We need a confession. Or we need to find Arthur.’

The thought of finding Finch’s body, of what ten years in that water would do to a person, made my stomach clench. We drove back to the cabin in silence, the weight of what we’d discovered pressing down on us. The investigation had been a kind of game up until now, a puzzle to be solved. It wasn’t a game anymore. It was real. Arthur Finch was real. And so was his killer.

Over the next few days, Mark and I became a team. The awkward silence that had defined my first few weeks here was replaced by a shared, focused energy. We spread a topographical map of the lake out on the pine table, pinning our evidence to the wall like detectives in a movie. The film canister, the journal, the owl. We had printouts of the microfilm images, the bank statements, the grainy photos of Silas Carter.

Mark’s knowledge of the area was encyclopedic. He knew every cove, every current, every abandoned trapper’s cabin. He pointed to a spot on the map, a deep channel not far from where I’d found the box. ‘If you were going to get rid of a body in the winter,’ he said, his voice clinical, ‘that’s where you’d do it. The current there is strong. It would pull it down, wedge it under the rock ledges.’

My job was the digital side. I lived on my laptop, diving deeper into Silas Carter’s life. I built a timeline, cross-referencing the dates in Finch’s journal with Carter’s known activities. I hacked into the archives of the Northwood town council website, digging up old meeting minutes. I found it, buried in an appendix from 2014: a controversial zoning variance that allowed for logging in a protected watershed area. The variance had been pushed through by a council member who, I discovered after more digging, had received a very generous ‘campaign donation’ from a holding company owned by Silas Carter.

Finch must have stumbled onto the illegal logging first, and then, as he dug deeper, he must have uncovered the bribery, the corruption that went far beyond a few stolen trees. He wasn't just going to expose a poacher; he was going to expose a man who had the town in his pocket.

We were building a case, piece by piece. And with every piece, the rift between me and Mark closed a little more. We’d sit up late, drinking coffee, talking through theories. He’d tell me stories about the woods, about tracking animals, about his life as a CO. I found myself telling him things, too. Small things, at first. About my friends back in the city. About the coding project I’d been working on. And then, one night, I told him about my dad.

I told him about the last time I saw him, the stupid argument we had over my grades. I told him about the phone call, the sterile smell of the hospital, the detective who kept saying he was ‘very sorry for my loss.’ The words just poured out of me. Mark didn't say much. He just listened, his gaze steady, and when I was done, he just nodded and said, ‘He was a good man, your dad. My brother. I miss him too.’

It wasn't a big, dramatic moment. But it was everything. The wall I had built around myself, the one made of anger and grief, started to crumble.

I even started to see the place differently. When I went out on the lake now, it wasn't a prison. I noticed the way the light changed on the snow, the intricate patterns of frost on the bare branches of the birch trees. I learned to identify the tracks of a fox, the call of a chickadee. The landscape wasn’t empty anymore. It was full of stories, full of life. It was a place where things happened, where secrets were kept. It felt less like I was adrift and more like I was… anchored.

Our breakthrough came from the film canister. I’d almost forgotten about it. Mark took it into his workshop and spent an entire afternoon carefully working on it. He eventually managed to pry the lid off the corroded container. The roll of film inside was miraculously dry.

Getting it developed was another problem. The last photo lab in Northwood had closed a decade ago. But I found a place online, a specialty lab in Toronto that still processed old film formats. I overnighted it, my hopes ridiculously high. For three days, I checked the tracking number obsessively. When I finally got the email with the link to the digital scans, my hand was trembling.

Mark and I huddled over the laptop again. The first few photos were just what we expected. Beautiful, artistic shots of the winter landscape. Finch was a talented photographer. And then, the last three frames. They were different. Shaky, out of focus. Taken in a hurry. The first one was a picture of Silas Carter’s face, close up, angry, distorted by a wide-angle lens. He was on a snowmobile, wearing a heavy winter jacket.

The second photo was of the strongbox, sitting on the ice. In the background, blurry but unmistakable, was Blueberry Island.

The last photo was a selfie. Arthur Finch’s face, wild-eyed, terrified. His toque was askew, and there was a dark bruise blooming on his cheek. He was looking right at the camera, right at us, across a decade of silence. It was the last thing he ever saw. A photo of his own terrified face, taken a moment before his death.

‘He took these with his last breath,’ I whispered. It was a ghost story, a final message sent from the other side.

Mark stared at the screen, his face grim. ‘This is it, Cole. This puts Carter on the ice, with Finch, with the box. This is what we needed.’

But we still had a problem. We could take this to the police now. With my digital evidence and this new photo, they’d have to act. But Carter was smart, connected. He’d lawyer up, deny everything. He’d say Finch was stalking him, that he acted in self-defense. It would be a mess. A long, drawn-out legal battle he might still win.

‘We need to push him,’ Mark said, his voice low and dangerous. ‘We need to make him make a mistake.’

The plan was risky. It was probably stupid. But it was the only thing we could think of. We had to go back to the beginning. We had to go back to the box.

The next day, Mark made a phone call. He called the provincial police detachment in the next town over, skipping the local guys who were probably in Carter’s pocket. He didn’t mention the murder. He just reported that he’d found some old items on the lake that might belong to a man named Silas Carter, and that he’d be returning them to him tomorrow morning. He knew the call would be logged. And he knew that in a town this small, word traveled fast. The call was bait. We were hoping Carter would hear about it and panic.

That night, the temperature plummeted. A hard, bitter cold settled over the lake, freezing the snow into a crust of ice. The wind picked up, howling through the pines. It was a perfect night for a ghost.

We didn’t go to Carter’s cabin. We went to the spot where I’d found the box. We took the empty strongbox with us. Mark drilled a new hole in the ice a few feet away from the original one. We set up my tip-up, the little orange flag a stark slash of color against the blue-white twilight. Then we waited.

We sat in Mark’s truck, parked on the access road, the engine off, watching the lake through binoculars. The cold was immense, a living thing. The waiting was agony. Every shadow, every gust of wind, made me jump. What if he didn’t come? What if this was all for nothing?

Then, just as true darkness fell, a single headlight appeared on the far shore. A snowmobile. It moved quickly, a hornet buzzing across the vast, empty expanse of the lake. It was heading directly for our position.

‘He took the bait,’ Mark breathed. He had his phone out, already dialing. ‘This is Officer Mark Peterson. I’m on Sparrow Lake, near Blueberry Island. I have a visual on Silas Carter. He is approaching what could be a crime scene. I believe he may be armed and is here to tamper with evidence. Requesting immediate backup.’

He relayed our position and then hung up. ‘They’re twenty minutes out,’ he said to me. ‘Stay in the truck, no matter what. Do you understand me, Cole?’

I nodded, my throat too dry to speak. He got out of the truck, pulling his service pistol from its holster. He didn’t look like my uncle anymore. He looked like what he was. A cop. He moved off into the trees at the edge of the lake, melting into the shadows.

The snowmobile slowed as it approached the tip-up, its engine dropping to a low growl. The headlight cut a bright, lonely path across the ice. I could see the driver now. It was Silas Carter. He was just as he looked in the pictures, big and burly, his face hidden in the shadows of his helmet. He killed the engine, and the sudden silence was deafening.

He dismounted, carrying a heavy-looking duffel bag. He walked over to the hole, his boots crunching on the ice. He knelt down, and for a moment, he just stared at the dark water. What was he thinking? Was he remembering that day, ten years ago? Did he feel any remorse? Or just the fear of being caught?

He opened his bag and pulled out a set of grappling hooks attached to a rope. He was going to retrieve the box himself. The box he thought the police had found. The box that would tie him to the murder. He didn’t know it was sitting empty on the table back at our cabin.

Just as he was about to drop the hooks into the water, Mark’s voice cut through the darkness. ‘Looking for something, Silas?’

Carter spun around, dropping the hooks. He froze, a cornered animal. Mark stepped out from the trees, his pistol held steady in a two-handed grip. ‘Don’t move.’

Carter held his hands up, but there was a smirk on his face. ‘Peterson. What a surprise. Just enjoying a little night fishing.’

‘We found the box, Silas,’ Mark said, his voice flat and cold. ‘We found what Arthur Finch put inside it.’

The smirk vanished. I saw his eyes dart around, looking for an escape route. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You killed him,’ Mark said. ‘Right here. You hit him, and you sent him and his evidence to the bottom of the lake. But you didn't know he had a camera. You didn't know he took your picture.’

That was it. That was the moment he broke. Panic flashed across his face. He wasn't a pillar of the community anymore. He was just a killer in a trap. He made a desperate lunge for his snowmobile. Mark shouted, ‘Police! Stop!’ But Carter was already on the machine, fumbling with the ignition. The engine roared to life. He twisted the throttle and shot away, a spray of ice and snow kicking up behind him.

Mark didn't fire. He just stood there, watching him go. Carter was racing across the lake, heading for the far shore, for the dark woods where he could disappear.

But he wasn't looking where he was going. He was looking back at Mark. And he didn't see the pressure ridge.

It happened so fast. One moment he was a speeding headlight, the next, the front skis of the snowmobile hit the jagged ridge of ice. The machine cartwheeled through the air, a mess of spinning metal and flailing limbs. It landed with a sickening crunch, sliding across the ice for fifty feet before coming to a stop. Carter was thrown clear. He lay motionless on the ice.

In the distance, I could hear the faint wail of sirens, getting closer. Mark walked slowly out onto the ice towards the crumpled figure. I got out of the truck, my legs shaking, and followed him. By the time I reached them, Carter was groaning, trying to push himself up. One of his legs was twisted at an unnatural angle.

It was over. Ten years later, out here in the bitter cold and the dark, it was finally over. The sirens grew louder, and soon the lake was awash in flashing red and blue lights.

The aftermath was a blur. Paramedics, police officers, statements. They took Carter away in an ambulance, his face a mask of pain and defeat. They told Mark that with our evidence and Carter’s attempt to flee, the case was airtight. Justice for Arthur Finch. It was a real thing. It had a sound – the crunch of boots on ice, the wail of a siren. It had a feeling – the sharp, clean bite of the winter air.

Standing on the shore, watching the flashing lights recede into the darkness, a strange calm settled over me. We had done it. We had pulled a ghost from the water and given him a voice. I looked over at Mark. He was just standing there, looking out at the lake, his shoulders slumped, the tension of the last few weeks finally draining out of him. He looked at me, and a small, tired smile touched his lips. He clapped me on the shoulder, a solid, heavy weight. We didn’t need to say anything.

We walked back to the cabin, the snow crunching under our boots. Inside, the fire in the wood stove had burned down to glowing embers. The strongbox was still on the table, its empty lid gaping open like a mouth. I had found justice for a stranger. I had pieced together a man's life and found the thing that had taken it away.

But as I sat there in the quiet warmth of the cabin, the hum of purpose that had filled me for days began to fade, replaced by a familiar ache. The police report on my dad's death was still sitting in my laptop's documents folder. ‘Unsolved.’ ‘No witnesses.’ ‘Case inactive.’ Solving Arthur’s murder didn't change that. It didn't bring my dad back. It didn't fix the hole in the world.

I looked out the window at the dark lake. The ice holds its secrets, but sometimes it gives them back. I knew now that answers were possible. That puzzles could be solved, that ghosts could speak. It wasn't a magic cure. The anger and the sadness were still there, a low hum beneath the surface. But they weren't the only things inside me anymore. There was something else now. Something quieter, steadier. The future was still a vast, white, empty landscape, stretching out before me. I didn't know where I was going. But for the first time in a long time, I felt like I might be able to find my way. Justice was a real thing, I knew that now, but it wasn't coming for my dad. Not yet.