What My Hands Found in the Vann House, and What the Law Did With What They Could Not Find

Two bodies, eleven days of examination, two pages of finding. I will set down what I did not, in Corvus’s account or Yusuf’s, see written: what the hands actually found.

Aksel Vann’s lungs held water consistent with drowning while submerged and still breathing — froth in the airway, the characteristic foam a body produces only while the heart is still working to move blood through lungs filling with river. Liska Vann’s lungs held the same. This tells me both were alive when the water reached them. It does not tell me which stopped living first. Water does not mark a body the way a blade does, or a fall. It arrives everywhere at once and asks the same question of every organ simultaneously. I looked for bruising that would show one had tried to reach the other, or had been struck by falling debris before drowning, and found nothing on either body that a flooded, furnished room could not equally explain by its own collapse. I examined the positions as reported — his in the stairwell, hers a street away against a mooring post. Position after death in moving water tells you about current, not about sequence. I wrote undeterminable because that is what eleven days of looking produced, not because eleven days were not enough.

I did not know, until I read Corvus’s account and then Yusuf’s, what my two pages did afterward. I knew the law would presume. I did not carry forward, because it was not mine to carry, that the presumption would hand a boat five ways divided to a cooper’s apprentice who has never pulled a line, and take it from the brother who worked beside Aksel nineteen years. My finding was correct. I would write the same two pages again tonight, examining the same two bodies with the same hands. I did not examine the boat, or the brother, or what either of them was owed. Nobody asked me to, and it was not where my hands belonged.