“I never should have left him alone at the wheel,” Harley had mused aloud to a reporter for the Barrow Gazette, “but I always liked to give a kid a chance.”

He’d also recounted how, after the boat had hit the rocks, he had single-handedly carted Richter the engineer up from the hold—“the old man was drowning in a sea of crabs”—and tried to get him into the lifeboat, only to find that the crew had already launched it. Shaking his head, he had told the local reporter, “If they’d just waited, I could have gotten them all out of there alive.”

It was only when he had assured himself that no one else was still aboard, and the Neptune II was lost, that he had reluctantly plunged into the churning sea and taken his miraculous trip to shore atop the carved coffin lid. “Sometimes, I wish I’d just let myself go down with the ship and my crew,” he’d mused, while the Gazette’s photographer had taken a shot of him gazing soulfully out to sea.

Not that many of the locals believed it, however. Port Orlov was a tiny town, and the Vane boys had lived there their whole lives. Their mother had absconded back when they were kids—“bewitched,” their father had said, “by a local shaman”—and the boys had grown up wild and, as they got older, downright dangerous. Charlie, the older one, had led the way, breaking and entering other folks’ cabins when they were off on hunting trips, fouling another boat’s halibut with gasoline to raise the price of his own, and finally wrecking the first Neptune by falling asleep, drunk and stoned, at the wheel. The boat had run out of fuel at sea, gotten caught up in some ice, and crumpled like a tin can. After that, nobody would sail with Charlie Vane at the helm. Now, with the Neptune II at the bottom of the sea, it looked like nobody was likely to join a crew if Harley was in command, either.

“Hail the conquering hero,” Charlie said, dryly, when Harley showed up at the family homestead. It was a rambling old structure with a lighted cross mounted on the roof like an antenna. The whole house was raised a few feet off the ground on cement pylons, and so ill conceived and built that every room felt like it had been an add-on. The floors sloped, the ceilings were either too low or too high, and ramps had been placed anywhere that Charlie’s wheelchair would have trouble going. After sinking the boat, Charlie had tried to operate a nautical sales franchise, but a couple of months in, he’d tried to run the rapids at Heron River Gorge, at the full height of the spring runoff, and when his canoe cratered on the rocks, he’d emerged a paraplegic. The burglary rate around town had dropped precipitously in the immediate aftermath of the accident. “Come on into the meeting room,” he said, turning the chair down a wooden ramp.

What Charlie called the meeting room was a big raw space with a timbered ceiling and a dozen old rugs thrown on the floor to keep the cold from coming through. A stack of folding chairs leaned against one wall, in case he ever got more than a few people to attend one of his Sunday prayer meetings. In the two years since his accident, he’d claimed to have found God, and to spread the word he’d started an online ministry called Vane’s Holy Writ, which was a strange brew of evangelism, antigovernment polemics, and conspiracy theory. Harley, who had glanced at the site once or twice and even attended a couple of the prayer meetings, was never entirely sure if his brother actually believed the crazy shit he was saying or was just pulling another con. Once he’d even asked him, point-blank, if he was serious, and Charlie had indignantly ordered him out of the house.

But that could have been part of the con, too.

“You want some tea?” he asked, and Harley, who was frozen stiff from the long walk to the house, said okay, even though the tea in Charlie’s house was all but undrinkable.

“Tea!” Charlie shouted, propelling his chair over a knotty patch where the rugs overlapped. On the trestle table he used as a desk, he had two computers — one for what he called his research, and the other permanently displaying his website and its logo: a timber wolf, fangs bared, defending a wooden cross.

Harley flopped down on a dilapidated armchair that smelled like a wet dog.

“So,” Charlie said, rubbing his stubbly chin with one hand, “I’ve been reading about your adventures. You’re a hero. What’s it feel like?”

“It’s all right,” Harley said.

“Just all right?” Charlie scoffed. “I’d have thought you’d be on top of the world by now — or at least on top of Angie Dobbs.”

That was just the kind of remark that got Harley so confused. On the one hand, his brother went around claiming to be a man of God, all pure and everything, and on the other he was exactly the same mocking asshole he’d always been — at least when nobody else was around to hear him.

“You make any money off of it yet?” Charlie asked. “I saw that article in the Barrow Gazette, and I bet you gave ’em the interview for free. You did, didn’t you?”

“You don’t charge to be in the paper.”

“That’s what they tell you, but you think movie stars and singers and baseball players don’t get paid every time they open their mouths?”

“I’m not a movie star.”

“No,” Charlie said, “that’s for damn sure.”

Rebekah, Charlie’s wife, came in with a tray of tea and some muffins that would probably taste just as bad. Harley had never been asked to any wedding, and he strongly doubted there’d been one, but then his brother had probably claimed to have channeled the Holy Spirit directly. Rebekah was a scrawny woman, and his brother had found her on the Internet, when she responded to his online ad for a “helpmeet.” She’d brought her younger sister Bathsheba along, too. She poured out the tea, made from tree bark or anything else that contained no caffeine — all stimulants were against his brother’s religion now — and served up the muffins that were sure to contain no sugar or spice of any kind. Harley figured she made them from sawdust left lying around the wood chipper out back.

Harley said hi, but Rebekah, in her usual long dress with its buttoned-up collar, just nodded. On her way out, she said to Charlie, “We’re almost out of fuel oil.” She had a thick New England accent — she was from some hick town not much bigger than Port Orlov — where she’d been living in a so-called Christian commune that had been broken up by the state. Still, Harley often wondered what had made her, and her sister, do something so stupid as to come all this way to Alaska.

Charlie grunted and, once she was gone, picked up where he’d left off. “Maybe you oughta let me handle the press from now on.”

“There’s not much left of it. Nobody’s called me today, except the Coast Guard. They want to know more about that coffin top that came up in the nets.”

“What’d they say, exactly?”

Harley knew that his brother would be intrigued by that. “They want to be sure that’s all that came up.”

“That’s what you told ’em, right?”

“What do you think?” Harley said, looking steadily into his brother’s dark eyes. “Of course I did.” He sipped the hot tea, which tasted like it was made from boiled leather.

Charlie met his gaze and didn’t blink.

Screw it, Harley thought; it was now or never. “You came to the hospital,” he said, pointedly, “and you left with my anorak.”

“What about it? You want your coat back, it’s in the hall closet.”

Harley put the cup down on a stack of old newspapers, went out into the hall, and came back with his coat. He sat down and began rummaging through the various zipped pockets, and apart from a packet of throat lozenges, came up empty-handed. “Okay,” he said, “where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Charlie answered, but with that malicious glint in his eye that told Harley he knew perfectly well what he was talking about. It was like they were kids again, and Charlie was holding out on him.