Solemn looked up at him and tried to speak.
“Don’t talk.” Cork held him tenderly and whispered, “Please, God. Don’t let him die.”
Where Solemn found the strength, Cork didn’t know. The young man’s hand slowly rose, touched Cork’s chest over his heart, held there a moment, then dropped to the floor where it hit with a hollow sound.
Solemn Winter Moon was gone.
“Oh, Solemn, Solemn,” Cork said. He laid his cheek against the young man’s blood-matted hair, and before he knew it, he was weeping deeply, grieving as he would have for a son.
42
Cork sat on the front steps, in the glaring wash of colors from the cruisers’ blinking lights, drinking coffee Cy Borkmann had poured from the Thermos he always kept in his cruiser. The steps were broad, and the crime scene team had no trouble moving past him, in and out of the house. He was grateful for the coffee. The bitter taste of it was something familiar, grounding. Even so, he felt as if he’d taken a long fall and had left an important part of himself behind.
With Solemn dying in his arms, he’d said a desperate prayer, but it had done no good. Maybe if he’d believed, if he’d been sure of God the way Solemn had, it would have made all the difference.
It was ridiculous thinking, he knew. The kind of thinking that sprang from guilt and grief. From believing that he hadn’t done enough to protect Solemn. From realizing too late how much he’d cared. He drank his coffee, and he remembered the small boy with fierce, dark eyes who’d loved fishing and Sam Winter Moon’s jokes. He wanted to block from his memory the feel of Solemn limp in his arms, the sight of his chest shredded by buckshot, the helplessness that had led to a prayer unanswered.
Gooding came out and Borkmann followed him.
“Finished?” Cork asked.
“We’re just about to bag the bodies.” Borkmann heaved a sigh that sounded like the wheeze of a tired draft horse. “You take a good look at things before you called us?”
“Good enough, I guess.”
“Notice the top of Kane’s desk?”
“I didn’t look that good, Cy.”
“Nice cherry wood, but scratched up pretty bad. New scratches. Gooding, here, thinks they’re from the recoil of the shotgun. I think he’s right. I think Kane laid the barrel across the desk and pointed it directly at Winter Moon where he sat. The kid had to know what was coming. I don’t see any way Kane could have sprung the shotgun on him sudden, a piece that big.” He held off for a moment, as if waiting for Gooding or Cork to offer another theory. When they didn’t he said, “Murder-suicide is what I’d say.”
A cruiser door slammed, and Pender came up the walk.
“Dross just radioed. She finished interviewing Olga Swenson.”
Borkmann glanced at Deputy Gooding and nodded approval. Immediately after they’d arrived at the house, Gooding had recommended to the acting sheriff that, despite the late hour, he dispatch someone immediately to talk to Kane’s housekeeper.
Pender looked at his notes. “According to Ms. Swenson, she had dinner on the table at eight o’clock, which was a little later than usual, but she said Kane’d been keeping odd hours. After the food was out, she left. Didn’t stick around for any compliments on her cooking. I guess the drill was that Dr. Kane bused his own dishes. As far as she knows, Kane was alone in the house. She also said that he still insisted on her fixing a big family meal even though he wasn’t eating much these days. Getting pretty lax in all his personal habits, too. Sounds like he was definitely on the edge. Dross’ll give you a full report back at the office.”
“Eight o’clock,” Borkmann said. “And what time did you get here, Cork?”
“Ten-forty-five.”
“All right.” Borkmann tipped back the brim of his hat. “Looks like, Dr. Kane made a pretty good dent in that pot roast on the dining room table. And that bottle of wine is better than half empty, so he took some time to mellow out good. Let’s assume he started eating right after the housekeeper left, and took his time stuffing his face. Maybe half an hour. Now from what you say, Cork, Winter Moon left his mother’s place around twenty hundred hours. If he came straight here, he’d have arrived at about twenty-thirty hours, just about the time Kane was finishing his meal, sipping on that last glass of wine. Winter Moon comes in. They palaver, end up in the study with the shotgun between them. I’m guessing time of death is going to be around twenty-one hundred hours. It’s a miracle he was still alive when you got here, Cork.”
Gooding had been conspicuously quiet. He leaned against one of the big stone pillars of the porch and stared down at his feet. Every once in a while, he shook his head, as if he were having a conversation with himself.
“Dot Winter Moon still at your house, Cork?” Borkmann asked.
“Probably. She thinks I went out to Henry Meloux’s place. She’s waiting for me to come back with word about Solemn.”
Borkmann looked like he had bad indigestion. “Guess I better head on over and break the news.”
“I’ll do it, Cy.”
“Part of the job, whether I like it or not.”
“I think it’ll be easier coming from me.”
Gooding said, “It wouldn’t be good for her to see you like that, all covered in blood.”
“I’ll stop by Sam’s Place and clean up. I keep a change of clothing there.”
Borkmann said, “All right. But come on down to the office afterward. We’ll get a formal statement from you there, okay?”
“Fine.”
Borkmann went back into the house. Gooding stayed a minute longer.
“Dorothy Winter Moon called the office this evening,” he said. “I took the call. I went out to Sam Winter Moon’s old cabin first. I should have come here, Cork. I might have stopped this.”
“You didn’t know, Randy.”
Gooding looked down at a Bible in his hand. “This was in the living room. It’s the one Winter Moon had with him in jail. I thought maybe his mother might want it.” He gave it to Cork. “We don’t see any way that it’s relevant to the investigation.”
Gooding turned away and returned to his duties inside the house.
Cork stared at the book. A small, New American Bible, white cover. A simple thing, really, but weighty enough in Solemn’s thinking that he’d brought it to the scene of his death.
Why had Solemn come here? Did he hope he could ease Kane’s suffering, take away his hate? Did he really believe that he could offer the peace he himself had found in Blood Hollow? If so, Cork wished he could think of it as something courageous, but in his grief, he could only think how tragic and useless a gesture it had been.
He lifted himself from the steps and started toward home, carrying the burden of the news that would destroy Dorothy Winter Moon’s world.
43
Solemn’s wake lasted two days. It was held on the rez, in the community center in Alouette, with friends and relatives of Dorothy Winter Moon taking turns sitting with the body. The evening Cork paid his respects, he ran into George LeDuc, Eddie Kingbird, and old Waldo Pike standing outside the building, smoking.
“Boozhoo,” LeDuc said in greeting.
“Boozhoo,” Cork said to them all.
“Look at that.” Kingbird grinned. “Just in time for the food.”
Pike said, “Stick around awhile, Cork. Rhonda Fox is gonna sing. She don’t sing good, but she knows the old songs. Not many left who do.”
Waldo Pike had white hair, plenty of it. He stood with a slight stoop, not from infirmity, but from back muscles overdeveloped across a lifetime of wielding an ax and a chain saw, cutting timber for a living.
Cork said, “I’ll stick around.”
“Your grandmother used to sing,” Pike said.
“Yes.”
“I heard her once when I was a young man. It was when Virgil Lafleur passed on. Singers came from all over. A lot of people looked up to Virgil, came to pay their respects. Some all the way from Turtle Mountain. Your grandmother’s singin
g, that was something.”
Waldo Pike fell silent and smoked awhile. Cork waited respectfully. Pike was an elder who talked on Indian time, comfortable with long silences, and Cork didn’t want to show disrespect by leaving before he’d finished saying all he had to say.
“I’m hungry,” the old man finally said. “How about we eat?”
Inside, the largest of the meeting rooms had been set up for the visitation. The casket was situated in front of a window with a view of the playground behind the community center. Flowers and cards had been laid out on tables on either side. Folding chairs stood in a half dozen rows before the casket. Along the sides of the room, small tables had been arranged, with a few chairs at each so that visitors could sit and eat. The food, a potluck affair, had been placed on several long tables at the back. Among the other aromas Cork’s nose picked up were the good smells of fry bread, wild rice stew, and Tater Tot hot dish.
A couple of dozen people were in the room, some just getting into the food line, others sitting in the folding chairs, listening to Chet Gabriel, who stood at a microphone to the right of the casket. Gabriel was a poet of sorts, and he was reciting from a sheet of notebook paper he held in his hand. Cork knew most of those present, most of them Iron Lake band.
Dorothy Winter Moon was at one of the side tables. She wore a dress, plain blue. Cork couldn’t ever recall seeing her in anything so feminine. When she was alone for a moment, he walked to her.
“Evening, Dot.”
“Hi, Cork. Thanks for coming.” Despite the dress and the circumstances, she seemed strong as ever.
“Jo will be here in a bit. She had a late meeting with a client.” He glanced around. “Lot of folks.”
“It’s nice,” she said. “Thanks, Cork.”
“What for?”
“Doing all you did. Solemn thought a lot of you.”
“I wish I could have done more.”
“You couldn’t have saved him, if that’s what you mean. He knew what he was doing. He had his reasons.”
Cork was sure it helped her to think so, and so he said nothing. Others came to the table to speak with Dot, and Cork left her to them.
When the poet finished to polite applause, Cork went to the casket, which was open. Solemn lay on a bed of white satin, dressed in the kind of dark suit Cork had never seen him wear, his arms uncomfortably stiff at his sides. A new shirt and tie covered his chest, but Cork knew the violation hidden beneath the thin cotton fabric. Solemn’s face was a work of cosmetic art, given color with rouge and powder, like a wax figure in a museum. Whatever Solemn Winter Moon had actually been, reluctant saint or madman, this dressed and painted body was a million miles removed from that. Henry Meloux would have said that Solemn was already far along in his journey on the Path of Souls. Mal Thorne probably believed that Solemn had taken his place in purgatory, awaiting the day his sins would be purged and he could enter heaven. Cork had no idea where the spirit of Solemn now resided.
“I used to think he was a shame to the Ojibwe.”
Cork half-turned. Oliver Bledsoe stood beside him, staring down into the casket.
“Now?” Cork asked.
“Now I think The People will remember him with great respect.” He turned from the body. “Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Outside.”
On one of the tables that flanked the casket was a small dish full of cigarettes, and beside the dish sat a box of wooden kitchen matches. Cork took a cigarette and a match. Bledsoe did the same. Outside, they lit up. Cork had quit smoking a couple of years earlier. The cigarettes were part of the Anishinaabe reverence toward tobacco, biindaakoojige, and the old belief that the smoke carried prayers to the creator, Kitchimanidoo.
Bledsoe said, “I heard the sheriff’s department is dropping the investigation of Charlotte Kane’s murder. I heard that unofficially they’re still pinning it on Solemn.”
“Yeah.”
“You think that’s what happened? Solemn did it?”
“No,” Cork said.
“Leaving it that way, it’s not good,” Bledsoe said. “Indian kid kills a white girl. You know how often that’ll be thrown at us around here?”
“I know.”
Bledsoe smoked for a while. People kept arriving, nodding or waving as they went inside.
Bledsoe said, “I talked with the tribal council. They want to hire you to clear Solemn’s name.”
Cork watched the cigarette smoke drift upward toward a clear, cornflower sky.
“All right,” he said.
“Good.”
“I was going to do it anyway, you know.”
Bledsoe laughed quietly. “That’s what George LeDuc said.”
“That’s why he’s chairman of the tribal council.”
Inside the building, a woman began to sing. The notes weren’t pure, but the words were Ojibwe.
“Rhonda Fox,” Cork said.
“Going back inside?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
The day Solemn Winter Moon was buried, a sun dog appeared in the sky. Not many people had ever witnessed this phenomenon, a rare occurrence in which sunlight, refracted off ice crystals in the atmosphere, created the illusion of a second sun. Cork had seen it only once, and then in winter, and had no idea why it was called a sun dog. He and Jo and the others who’d gathered for the burial stood at the graveside in the cemetery behind the old mission building deep in the reservation, staring east, marveling at the two suns in the morning heaven. The sun dog stayed until the casket was lowered, and the dark mouth that was the open grave had swallowed the body of Solemn Winter Moon. Then, as those who’d gathered to pay their final respects silently scattered, the false sun faded away.
That same day, Cork watched another man’s body being lowered into the earth.
It was late in the afternoon. The air had turned hot and sultry. Cork parked his Bronco in the shade of a burr oak inside the cemetery with a good view of the road that wound up the hill from town. He could feel a storm in the air, forming somewhere beyond the western horizon, the thunderheads just now rising above the distant trees.
As he waited, he thought about Fletcher Kane. He’d been wrong about Kane in important ways, wrong because he’d blinded himself. He’d wanted Kane to be the kind of man capable of abusing his daughter. Kane wasn’t, although the rumors about him persisted. Was it any wonder he’d gone over the edge? In the end, what did Kane have to lose? His life had already been destroyed. He’d lost what he most loved-twice-and in the end had even been robbed of the respect of the community.
What had been Cork’s part in this? He had voiced suspicions, and they’d become rumors as a result of Borkmann’s loose tongue. But Cork knew Borkmann and was well aware of the man’s weakness where confidentiality was concerned. Was there a dark place inside him that had calculated this and used the sheriff to ruin Kane? How well did he know himself? Cork wondered. Christ, he thought, how well did anyone?
After a thirty-minute wait, he saw the line of cars, only a half dozen strong, making its way up the hill, led by a shiny hearse. Directly behind the hearse was Randy Gooding’s Tracker. As the abbreviated procession came through the gate, Cork saw that Gooding was serving as driver to the priest, and he also saw that the priest wasn’t Mal Thorne but old Father Kelsey instead. The cars followed along the narrow lanes to the place that had been prepared, a plot of ground far from Charlotte’s grave.
During the service, the doddering priest bent toward Fletcher Kane’s coffin. Cork couldn’t hear what the priest said. The old priest was too far away, and his voice was a whisper that died in the heavy air. The service was blessedly short. As things came to an end, Gooding stepped to Donny Pugmire, one of the pallbearers, and the two men exchanged words. Then Pugmire took the old priest’s arm and led him to his own car, while Gooding walked up the hill toward Cork.
“Didn’t know you were that fond of Fletcher Kane,” Cork said.
“Father Mal called me. He said th
ey didn’t have enough pallbearers, asked if I’d lend a hand. I didn’t mind.”
“Where is Mal?”
“Sick.” Gooding watched the cars leave the cemetery. “You know, I thought that when I quit the big city, I’d seen the last of hard things.”
“They’re worse here in some ways,” Cork said. “Here, when tragedy visits, it knocks on the door of people you know.”
Gooding nodded toward the new grave. “I hope this puts the lid on tragedy for a while.”
“You think it’s over?”
“Borkmann wants the Kane girl’s murder to go in the cold case files. I think that’s a good place for it.”
“You believe Solemn did it?”
Gooding was quiet for a while. He looked toward the cemetery gate where, as the last of the funeral procession exited, an old, tan station wagon entered and stopped. A man got out and stared across the field of gravestones. He shielded his eyes against the sun with his hand.
Gooding said, “I think in the end he came to see the world differently, but before that he was certainly capable of murder. I know the Ojibwe don’t want to believe that, and for the peace of this community, which I care about a lot, I’m willing to let sleeping dogs lie.”
The man near the gate got back into the rusted station wagon and began to maneuver along the lanes between the rows of the dead. As the vehicle drew nearer, Cork saw that there were two other people in the car.
“What if it wasn’t Solemn?” he said. “What if some monster is still out there?”
“No homicides since January, Cork.” Gooding shook his head. “No more monsters. My money is on the man who was buried on the rez today.”
“Any objection if I were to take a look at the case file?”
“None from me. You’ll have to clear it with Borkmann. Or maybe just be patient a couple of weeks.” Gooding smiled. “I hear the board of commissioners is thinking of offering you the sheriff’s job until they can put together a special election. You wouldn’t need any permission then.”
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