(Angle shot to emphasize the dimensions of the boat)
Jensen: Was it all buried? Or just part of it?
Lasker: All of it.
Jensen: Mr. Lasker, who would leave something like this on your land?
Lasker: Carole, I haven’t a clue.
Jensen: (Turning full face) Well, there you have it, Ben. I wonder what else is lying around the Red River Valley. We might want to pay a little more attention when we put the begonias in next spring. This is Carole Jensen reporting from the Lasker farm near Fort Moxie.
(Stage shot)
Markey: And that’s a wrap for your news team. Good night, Julie.
Hawkins: Good night, Ben. (Full face to camera) Good night, folks. We’ll see you tomorrow at ten. Late Edition is next.
The number of visitors swelled considerably the day after Lasker’s boat made Ben at Ten, which is to say there were seldom fewer than a half-dozen people and sometimes as many as twenty. The kids took to selling coffee and sweet rolls and turned a nice profit right from the beginning.
Hal Riordan, who owned the Fort Moxie lumberyard, showed up. He wandered through the cabins, where the Laskers had installed a battery-powered heater. He peered closely at the hull and at the masts, and he finally arrived at Lasker’s front door. “Something you got to see,” he said, leading the way back to the boat. Hal had been old when Lasker was in school; his hair, gray in those days, was now silver. He was tall and methodical, a man who would not go to the bathroom without careful consideration. “This is very odd, Tom,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” asked Lasker.
“Take a look where the mast is joined to the cabin roof.”
Lasker did. “What about it?”
“It’s all one piece. The mast should have been manufactured separately, I would think. And then bolted down. Everything here looks as if it came out of a single mold.”
Riordan was right: there were no fittings, no screws, nothing. Lasker grunted, not knowing what to say.
In the morning Lasker leased a trailer and brought in a contractor from Grand Forks to lift the yacht onto it and move it close to the barn.
The crowd was growing every day. “You ought to charge admission,” suggested Frank Moll, an ex-mayor and retired customs officer. “You got people coming in all the way from Fargo.” Moll was easygoing, bearded, short, strongly built. He was one of Lasker’s old drinking buddies.
“What do you make of it, Frank?” he asked. They were standing in the driveway, watching Ginny and Moll’s wife, Peg, try to direct traffic.
Moll looked at him, looked at the boat. “You really don’t know how this got here, Tom?” There was an accusation in his tone.
“No.” With exasperation. “I really don’t.”
Moll shook his head. “Anybody else, Tom,” he said, “I’d say it’s a hoax.”
“No hoax.”
“Okay. I don’t know where that leaves you. The boat looks to be in good shape. So it was buried recently. When could that have happened?”
“I don’t know. They couldn’t have done it without tearing up the area.” He was squinting at the ridge, shielding his eyes. “I don’t see how it could have happened.”
“Thing that baffles me,” said Moll, “is why. Why would anyone put a boat like this in the ground? That thing must be worth half a million dollars.” He folded his arms and let his gaze rest on the yacht. It was close to the house now, just off the driveway, mounted on the trailer. “It’s a homebuilt job, by the way.”
“How do you know?”
“Easy.” He pointed at the stern. “No hull identification number. It would be in raised lettering, like the VIN on your car.” He shrugged. “It’s not there.”
“Maybe this was built before hull numbers were required.”
“They’ve been mandatory for a long time.”
They hosed off the sails, which now hung just inside the barn door. They were white, the kind of white that hurts your eyes when the sun hits it. They did not look as if they’d ever been in the ground.
Lasker stood inside, out of the wind, hands in his pockets, looking at them. And it struck him for the first time that he had a serviceable boat. He’d assumed all along that someone was going to step forward and claim the thing. But on that quiet, bleak, cold Sunday, almost two weeks since they’d pulled it out of the ground, it seemed to be his. For better or worse.
Lasker had never done any sailing, except once or twice with someone else at the tiller. He