Mercy Falls

by William Kent Krueger

  “It’s pretty,” Dina said. “If you like trees.”

  “You don’t?”

  “A city girl. I spent a lot of summers at Camp Wah-kee-shah, though. That’s Wah with a soft a.”

  The windows were open, and the wind ruffled her hair, loose strands drumming her cheeks like tanned, restless fingers. Cork thought again what a remarkably pretty woman she was.

  “Me and a bunch of kids like me, Jewish mostly, sent to camp to be out of our parents’ hair.”

  “You didn’t come away with an appreciation of nature?” he asked.

  “Not at all. But I can braid a pretty mean lanyard. You were a Chicago cop for a while. What brought you back here?”

  “This is my home.”

  “A lot of people leave home at the first opportunity and never look back.”

  “You, for one?”

  He waited but she never replied. The wind smelled of pine sap and of the yellow dust the Pathfinder kicked up. The road cut through an open area blanketed with purple fireweed, the first thing to grow after a burn. Ahead of them, the sky filled in the gaps between the trees like blue water. Except for the road, the land felt untouched.

  “There are problems in a small town, sure,” Cork said. “You can’t have a thought without everybody knowing it. If your family doesn’t go back a few generations, you can spend your whole life here and still feel like an outsider. The nearest foreign film is five hours away. And yeah, the kids leave as soon as they can, go to college, into the service, whatever. But a lot of them come back eventually. Why? It’s a good place to raise a family, a good place for kids to grow up.”

  “And that’s important?”

  “Are you married?”

  “I was. At the moment, no.”

  “Any kids?”

  “Just little old me.”

  “It might be tough for you to understand.”

  Dina was quiet for a bit, then said, “I understand.”

  They came out on County 33, half a mile south of the North Star Bar. Cork turned onto the asphalt road.

  “I’m going to stay with the car,” Dina said. “I’d just as soon keep our relationship out of the limelight. Out here anyway.”

  “Don’t want to kill the potential of the push-up bra?”

  “Or any of my other tricks,” she said.

  “Other tricks?”

  “Don’t ask.” It sounded like a wisecrack, but she didn’t smile. “If Lizzie’s there, let me know. Maybe I’ll come in anyway.”

  Cork pulled into the dirt lot and parked away from the half dozen vehicles already there, dusty in the morning sunlight. Inside, it felt like a dark cave. Johnny Cash was on the jukebox. Cork didn’t see Lizzie Fineday or her father. Leonard Trueur was tending bar. He was a heavy man, slow, with fat hands and fingers, a shuffle for a walk. It was still early in the day and the bar wasn’t crowded. A couple of Shinnobs Cork didn’t recognize sat at a table under an old neon sign that said Hamm’s. They weren’t talking. Maybe they fell silent when Cork came in, but they also had the look of men who didn’t say much anyway. Three others played pool in the corner, ball caps shading their faces. They glanced at Cork. He knew them. They went on with their game.

  “Boozhoo, Leonard,” Cork said, stepping up to the bar.

  Leonard wiped the bar, a needless thing because at the moment no one sat there. In fact, the rag looked more in need of a good cleaning than the bar top.

  “I’m looking for Will.”

  Leonard watched his fat hand moving the dirty rag and shrugged.

  “Is he around?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Lizzie here?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Think I’ll go up and knock,” Cork said.

  Leonard didn’t offer an objection, and Cork headed toward a door to the left of the bar that opened onto a steep stairway leading to the second story. At the top of the stairs was a small landing and another door, this one closed. Behind it were the rooms where Will Fineday lived with his daughter. Cork knocked, put his ear to the wood, knocked once more, very hard. Finally he turned away and went back down.

  The music had stopped. The men under the Hamm’s sign hadn’t moved. At the pool table, two men held their cues while the third hunched and lined up a shot.

  “You guys seen Will or Lizzie?” Cork asked.

  “Ain’t seen shit, cousin,” said Dennis Finn, the one bent over the green felt.

  “How about Moose LaRusse?”

  “The Moose? Thought you had him doing a stretch in Stillwater.”

  “He was here yesterday.”

  “News to me, cousin.”

  Cork looked to the other men, but no one met his gaze.

  “Migwech,” Cork said to Leonard, who was still working the rag over the bar. Thanks. He walked back out into the sun.

  He stood with his back to the bar, thinking. A couple of crows hopped around the Dumpster at the side of the building, looking for a way to an easy meal. A moment later, the door behind him opened, and Ernie Champoux, one of the men at the pool table, stepped out. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke into the windless air. Champoux was a hard man, but his dealings with Cork had always been reasonable.

  “Stone,” Champoux said. Then he said, “Moose, him I ain’t seen.”

  That was all. He went back inside.

  Cork walked to his vehicle and got in.

  “Lizzie not there?” Dina said.

  “No.”

  “You find out where?”

  “Maybe.” Cork started the car and pulled away from the bar. “We’re going to see Stone.”

  They drove awhile before Dina asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “An investigation on the reservation.”

  “I do most of the law enforcement work on the rez myself.”

  “Why?”

  “My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. Things tend to go a little smoother because of that.”

  “What I mean is, I thought reservations were under federal jurisdiction.”

  He explained about Public Law 280.

  “Lucky they have a sheriff who’s part Ojibwe.”

  “Not everybody thinks it’s such a good idea.”

  He turned north onto County Road 17.

  “This Stone,” Dina said. “What’s he like?”

  “Smart like a wolf. Balls of a grizzly bear.”

  “I don’t know about bear balls. Is that good?”

  “He’s stripped himself of most everything you think of as common goodness. A lot of men like him are just plain stupid, and they’re also afraid, which limits their impact. Stone’s sharp, and if there’s something he’s afraid of, I don’t know what it is. On the rez, there’s the legitimate authority, the tribal council. If you want something that’s less than legitimate, Stone is who you go to.”

  “I like a man who’s a challenge.”

  “This guy’s a land mine.”

  “As in ‘Watch your step’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about the noble red man?”

  “Stone’s real father was a decent guy. A Shinnob poet, actually. Got himself killed in a car accident on his way back from the Twin Cities when Stone was just learning to walk. His mother remarried, a white man named Chester Dorset, owned a string of Dairy Queens, had money. He was also a drunk, a brutal drunk, and I mean to tell you, Stone had it tough as a kid. One night, Dorset’s loaded, lays into Stone’s mother. Stone splits his stepfather’s head with an ax.”

  “Sounds justified to me.”

  “Problem was, he waited to do it until his stepfather had gone to sleep. He was sixteen and certified to stand trial as an adult. Convicted of manslaughter one. Got eighty-six months and served every day of it in the prison at St. Cloud. That’s where he got his name: Stone. His real name is Byron St. Onge, but his papers got screwed up. Somehow they dropped the g from his name and missed
the period after Saint. He went in as Byron Stone instead of St. Onge. Stone stuck.” Cork swerved to avoid hitting a red squirrel that scampered across the road. “While he was in prison, his mother died, destitute, because Chester Dorset’s kids from his first marriage got all his money. Stone’s had a clean record since he got out of prison, but I’m certain he’s been involved in an enormous amount of illegal activity. Smuggling for sure. Drugs, arms, cigarettes.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “Back in the nineties. The Canadian tax on cigarettes was high and Canucks were paying through the nose for a smoke. They could buy smuggled cigarettes for a song. A lot of evidence suggested the tobacco companies were complicit in the smuggling. I worked with ATF for months trying to get something on Stone. Nothing. Same with DEA and Customs. Stone was way too smart to get himself caught. Knows the woods along the border better than any man I can think of. And he intimidates the hell out of anyone who might be inclined to testify against him.”

  They’d been driving half an hour and were approaching the northern edge of the Iron Lake Reservation where it butted against the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Cork turned off onto a road that was barely wide enough for the Pathfinder. A few hundred yards farther, the road skirted a long narrow lake that ended at the base of a ridge covered with jack pine. A ragged thread of wood smoke climbed the face of the ridge.

  “Stone built his cabin himself, where he could see anyone approaching from a good distance away,” Cork said. “The land on either side is mostly marsh, so it’s almost impossible to come at it on foot. And directly beyond that ridge is the Boundary Waters. He’s got himself a decent stronghold.”

  “Boundary Waters?”

  “The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Over a million acres of forest along the Canadian border. On the other side is the Quetico, another wilderness just as large. Easy place for a man to lose himself, on purpose or not.”

  Cork pulled into the clearing where Stone’s cabin stood, and he saw Will Fineday’s old Dodge pickup parked behind Stone’s new Land Rover. Both vehicles were covered with a thick coat of red dust.

  The two men faced each other in the open in front of the cabin. Fineday gripped a tire iron in his huge hands. Stone, shirtless, held an ax. Fineday didn’t look when Cork pulled up, but Stone’s dark eyes flicked away for an instant.

  Stone was smaller, but where Fineday had gone to fat, Stone was smooth rock under taut flesh. He wore his hair long, tied back with a folded red bandanna that ran across his forehead. He was handsome, and there was a certainty in his face, particularly his eyes, that most men found intimidating and women, Cork had heard, found exciting.

  Near Stone was a flat-topped stump that he used as a chopping block, and around the stump lay sections of split birch waiting to be gathered and stacked. Stone’s chest glistened, and the bandanna was stained dark with sweat. It looked as if Fineday had interrupted preparation for a winter supply of wood.

  Cork walked to the men slowly.

  “Will, Stone, what’s going on?”

  “None of your business, O’Connor,” Fineday said.

  “Looks to me like you’re both ready to let a little blood, and that is my business. This have anything to do with Lizzie?”

  Fineday didn’t answer, but he said to Stone, “Let her go, or I swear I’ll kill you.”

  “You think I’m keeping her here against her will, Will?” Stone laughed at that, the ax held easy in his hands, the split wood on the ground around him like killed things. “Why don’t I just call her out here, then, and let’s see.” He yelled her name over his shoulder.

  They all waited. The sun was high and unusually hot. The drone of blackflies, an oddity for so late in the season, filled the quiet. The insects lit on Stone’s bare, salty skin and crawled over his hairless chest and shoulders. He seemed not to notice, although blackflies were vicious biting insects, one of the worst scourges of the north country.

  “Lizzie,” he called again, more harshly this time. “Get your ass out here, girl.”

  The door opened slowly and Lizzie Fineday stepped out. She wore a bright blue knit sweater and wrinkled khakis. Her hair snaked across her face, wild. She hung back in the shadow of the cabin, smoking a cigarette. She stared at her father, then at Cork, as if she didn’t quite understand their presence.

  “Lizzie, you come on over here. I’m taking you home,” Fineday hollered.

  He took a step toward his daughter, but Stone moved to block his way.

  “Ask her, Will,” Stone said. “Stay right where you are and ask her if she wants to leave.”

  Fineday gave him a killing look. “Lizzie, you come home with me. You come home now. You hear?”

  “You want to go home with him, Lizzie?” Stone asked.

  The young woman smoked her cigarette, finally shook her head.

  “See?” Stone said to Fineday. “If that’s what you needed, you have it. You, too, O’Connor. She’s not a minor. She makes up her own mind. She wants to stay, she stays.” He finally shifted his gaze from Fineday and spoke to Cork directly. “Unless you have a warrant of some kind, it’s my right to ask you to leave.”

  “Lizzie,” Cork called to her, “I’d like you to step out into the sunlight so we can see you clearly. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t react immediately, but eventually she took a step forward into the light.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Cork said.

  She carefully drew the hair away from her eyes and nodded slowly.

  “You see?” Stone said.

  “If you come with us, I promise nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  “Nobody’s going to hurt her here,” Stone said, then called out, “Lizzie, you want to go with these folks, you go.”

  She blinked in the bright sunlight but she did not move.

  Fineday gripped the tire iron and cocked his arms like a batter in the box. “Stone, you fucking son of a bitch.”

  “Will Fineday,” Cork said, “you’ve been asked to vacate this man’s property. You’ll do that or I’ll arrest you for trespassing.”

  “He’s got my daughter, goddamn it.”

  “Your daughter is here of her own volition. You heard her as clear as I did. Let it go, Will. Leave her be.”

  “Lizzie,” he tried one last time, but his daughter turned away and went back into the cabin.

  “Come on, Will,” Cork said. “You need to leave. We all do.”

  Fineday stormed to his truck and sped down the narrow lane.

  “I’m looking for a way to come back, Stone,” Cork said.

  “You find it, I’ll be here.” Stone lifted his ax and went back to chopping wood.

  In the Pathfinder, Dina said, “Prison tattoos?”

  She was speaking of the designs on Stone’s upper arms and chest.

  “Yeah,” Cork said. “Inked them himself. The feather on each arm recalls the eagle feathers on a warrior’s shield. The bear over his heart is because he’s Makwa, a member of the bear clan.”

  “I’m sure I saw a thunderbird, too.”

  “You did. Bineshii. Thunderbird was one of the six original beings that came out of the sea to live with the Anishinaabeg. Unfortunately, every Shinnob that Bineshii looked at died, so Thunderbird was sent back to the sea.”

  “A Shinnob-killer. Interesting choice for a tattoo.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Fineday was waiting for them where the road met the county highway. He stood with his legs spread, the long scar that cleaved his sandstone-colored face white as jagged lightning.

  “He hurts her, and he’s not the only one I’ll come after,” he said as Cork got out of the Pathfinder.

  “At the moment, Will, the law’s on his side.”

  “The white man’s law. When did it work for me?”

  “What’s she running from? What’s she afraid of? Help me with that and I can take her away from Stone.”

  “She’s running from nothing.”

  “She
just likes Stone’s company, is that it?”

  “I’ll get her myself.”

  “He’ll be watching for you. And think about this. You try something, it’s not only Stone you’ll have to deal with, it’ll be me as well. Wouldn’t you rather have me on your side?”

  “Fuck you, chimook.”

  Fineday spun away, climbed into his truck, and slammed the door.

  “I’ll be around to talk to you again, Will, you can bank on it. In the meantime, stay away from Stone.”

  Fineday sped off, kicking up a tail of dust and gravel.

  “Did he call you a schmuck?”

  “Chi-mook,” Cork said, enunciating each syllable. “Ojibwe slang for white man. Not complimentary.”

  “But you’re part Ojibwe. Doesn’t that count?”

  “When people are pissed at me, I’m not Ojibwe enough for the Ojibwes, and not white enough for the whites,” Cork said.

  25

  JO HAD SPENT the day calling clients, judges, rearranging court dates, appointments. Everyone understood, she told Cork. She’d washed clothes, packed, helped the girls and Stevie get ready to travel. Cork promised to call the high school and Stevie’s teacher and explain the children’s absence.

  Dinner was a subdued affair: ham and cheese sandwiches, Campbell’s tomato soup, chips. They talked quietly about Chicago, seeing Rose and Mal, visiting Northwestern and maybe Notre Dame. No one said a word about the dynamite in the Bronco. Afterward, they played a game of Clue. Stevie won, although Cork and probably everyone else knew a couple of turns earlier that it was Mrs. White in the study with the candlestick.

  Cork read to Stevie, something he enjoyed doing. The book was Hatchet, about a boy lost in the wilderness who uses his own wiles and strength of character to make his way back to safety. Stevie’s dark brown Ojibwe eyes locked on the ceiling as he imagined the scenes painted by the words, saw the story playing out in his mind. Eventually, his eyelids began to flicker, and when they’d closed for good, Cork kissed him good night on his forehead and turned out the light.