by Stephen Frey
No one knows where Karen went. All she left was a note Bear woke up to around noon on Christmas Day. It was pinned to his old gray fleece and it said she couldn’t take living with him anymore. It warned him not to come looking for her, that there’d be trouble if he did. Of course, she didn’t say where she went in the note, so it would have been tough for him to find her even if he’d wanted to.
He hasn’t mentioned Karen once since he came to our house on New Year’s Day and he doesn’t seem bothered by suddenly being alone. Of course, Bear doesn’t share his feelings very often, even with me. Living with my father was a walk in the park compared to living with Bear’s dad. Bear’s dad beat him constantly, though he never bitched about it. But I saw the bruises in the locker room, everyone did. And they weren’t from football, believe me. It left some deep scars inside him, though he’d never admit it.
Bear never works out, so he isn’t cut like me, he doesn’t have the six-pack abs I’m so proud of. In fact, he’s developing a decent-sized gut. But he’s still the strongest man I’ve ever known. I saw him pick up the front end of a car off a guy out on Route 7 last year just as I got to the accident scene. He did it by himself and the paramedics said the guy would have died if he hadn’t. They were right behind me and they saw him do it, too.
No one in town believes my story about Bear lifting the car off the guy, but he doesn’t seem to care. He hasn’t tried to get the paramedics or the guy he saved to back up my story, so it’s turned into one of those north-country legends. It just makes him happy that the guy sent him a Christmas card with a picture of all his grandchildren sitting around him on his sofa. He told me he looked at that card for a long time on Christmas Day after he found the “Dear Bear” note from Karen. He’s never cared much about getting credit for things. He just wants to help whoever needs it.
Bear has dirty blond hair he wears long over his collar in the back, a curly, unkempt beard, a long, thin nose, and hazel eyes. He’s a sloppy eater, so it seems like his uniform always has food stains on it even if he’s just picked it up from the cleaners. He used to be a big hunter and fisherman, but a few years ago, instead of trekking into the woods to shoot a deer or snag a trout, he started watching football. Now he’s a big fan of the University of Wisconsin and the Green Bay Packers. The morning after a Badger or Packer game you can tell if they won by his mood. Bear’s a pretty simple man. Cheeseburgers, fries, vodka, and a Badger or a Packer game and he’s pretty happy.
Bear and I were teammates on Wabash County High’s football team because Dakota County’s always been too small to have its own high school. So we had to ride the bus fifteen miles west toward Superior every morning. I was the tailback of the team and Bear was the fullback. He blocked for me, pulverizing linebackers into submission so I could gain all those yards, score all those touchdowns, and get all the glory, and we were state champs our senior year. In fact, the press in the area tabbed us one of the greatest Wisconsin high school football teams of the decade. I got a lot of ink, even more than the quarterback, but Bear’s name hardly ever made it into the newspapers.
I wouldn’t have gained half those yards or scored half those touchdowns with an average fullback blocking for me, but none of the reporters cared about Bear’s blocking. I always asked them to give him some ink but they rarely did. Despite hardly ever getting his name in the papers, he never showed me any bitterness, never showed he was jealous of me or resented me in any way for my star status. He just gave me a bone-crushing hug the day I got a football scholarship to the University of Minnesota. Bear’s always been the best friend a guy could have.
I pull to a stop at mile marker fifty-one on Route 7. There’s a public picnic area here that marks the start of a narrow, winding trail that leads off into the woods toward Silver Wolf Rapids. Silver Wolf Rapids is a gorgeous stretch of white water on the Granite River, which is the next major river east of the Boulder. Silver Wolf lies at the end of a lonely, six-mile hike. During the winter hardly anyone goes back there. But this morning Mrs. Erickson picked up a report that there was suspicious activity in the area last night.
Bear pulls up alongside me in his Cherokee as I haul my ass out of mine. He uses the SUV I drove before I got my new one a few months ago. I told him he could keep the dakota county sheriff letters on the sides if he wanted to, but he sanded them off. He said it wasn’t right for him to keep them on there because he wasn’t the sheriff and the other deputies might get mad. That’s the kind of person Bear is. He doesn’t put on airs for anyone, including himself.
“Morning, Professor,” he calls as he climbs out of the truck and heads toward me.
“Morning.”
He calls me Professor because I’m one of the few non–River Family people in Dakota County who went to college. I went but I didn’t graduate. It was clear to me on the first day of practice my freshman year I’d never play much football for the University of Minnesota. There were too many players who were a lot more talented than me on the team. It hit me hard that our Wabash High football team was pretty good for our Single A League, but that we weren’t one of the greatest teams of the decade. That the stories were just a bunch of hype designed to sell newspapers and generate ad revenue.
After two years at the university and the loss of my football scholarship, I dropped out and joined the Minneapolis City Police Force. My biggest disappointment in leaving school wasn’t that I couldn’t play football anymore. It was that I couldn’t take the English classes I’d loaded my schedule with. I liked English. I liked reading the classics the most, then writing about them. Just like my father did. I still read a lot, especially when it snows. I like sitting in front of the fireplace in my big easy chair and losing myself inside another world. Even if Vivian’s sitting on the couch a few feet over, it still seems like she’s a thousand miles away.
Bear joined the Dakota County Police Force right after school and he’s never had another job. Technically, he didn’t graduate from Wabash High, but some people in town pulled some strings to make it look like he did so he could join the force. Officially, the Dakota County force requires all officers to have at least a high school diploma.
“How you doing?” Bear asks as he saunters up to me.
He’s munching on a Milky Way Bar he probably grabbed on his way out of the Kro-Bar from the rack beside the old NCR manual cash register. He was sitting there eating his cheeseburger and fries breakfast when I called to tell him to come out here. I wonder if he paid for the Milky Way. He’s an honest guy but he’s not above taking advantage of being a cop.
“I’m doing all right, Billy.” I’m probably the only one in Bruner who doesn’t call him Bear, and he appreciates that. He likes his nickname fine, but it’s the fact that I call him something else that’s important to him. “Were you by yourself when I called?”
“Nah, me and Davy was having breakfast together. He comes in while I was sitting there and sits right down next to me without even asking if he could. Kind of ticked me off.”
Davy Johnson is another one of my deputies. He’s a local boy who’s only ever been out of Wisconsin to go to the Mall of America in the Twin Cities with his wife and three kids. Davy’s thirty-two and he’s locked into his life but he seems all right with that. “It’s not me and Davy,” I say loudly, “it’s Davy and I.” I don’t know why but sometimes I correct Bear’s grammar. I tell myself it’s to help him improve, but I’m not sure he really wants to improve. Like Davy, he seems comfortable with who he is. “And it’s were having breakfast, not was.”
Bear stuffs the rest of the chocolate bar in his mouth and shakes his head as a couple of crumbs fall. “The Professor,” he mumbles, chuckling. “So when you called, where was you at?”
“Don’t end a sentence with a preposition, Billy.” He butchered the conjugation of the verb again but I don’t bother mentioning that.
He nods as he swallows what’s left in his mouth. “Okay, where was you at, asshole?” He breaks into a wide grin, as if he’d been
practicing this exchange all the way out here and it worked exactly as he’d hoped it would. Like the whole thing was a setup.
I grin back. I love the guy, I really do. He might as well be my brother. “I was leaving the house.”
“Oh, yeah? How’s Viv?”
Bear always asks about Vivian, and it’s not as though he’s just being polite. I think he actually likes her, and I think she likes him, too. He’s the one local in all of Dakota County she seems to tolerate. It’s this strange surface affection they have for each other. Maybe it goes deeper than the surface, I don’t know, maybe I’m being naive. I shake that thought out of my head right away. Bear would never do that to me, he’s too good a person. I would have said the same thing about Vivian until a few years ago, until we found out that she couldn’t have children. Now I’m not sure. Not being able to have children seems to have driven a stake through the heart of our relationship.
“Well, you know,” I hedge.
His ears perk up. “Trouble in paradise last night?”
He can tell by my tone there was. “Yeah, paradise.”
“What about this morning? Was she still in her mood?”
“No, she was out of it. We had an okay conversation before I left.”
I didn’t have a conversation with Vivian before I left this morning. She took off from the house last night around eight and didn’t come home. But it wasn’t like she ran off right after I holstered the gun, then helped her to her feet as I apologized to her over and over. I told her I didn’t know what had come over me, and I really didn’t. I was just so mad. I literally had to peel Cindy off me out at the estate to get out of the mansion and get to my truck, but Vivian still assumed I was guilty of cheating as soon as I walked in the door to our house. So I paid the price even though I’m completely innocent, even though all I did was my job. I resisted the temptation of a beautiful woman who was telling me she’d give me anything I wanted and that there’d be no strings attached, but I was still crucified for it even though I didn’t do it. I just wish I could find out who told Vivian that Cindy was in town.
After I finished apologizing, she heated up the lasagna in the microwave and fixed a nice side-salad to go along with it. I woke up from a nap in front of the television in the living room around eight and that’s when I realized she was gone. I’m pretty sure she went to her cousin Heather’s house, which is down in Gatlin. Gatlin’s south and east of Bruner on Loon Lake. It’s a tiny town of three hundred people about ten miles the other side of Hayward, set on the banks of the state’s tenth-largest inland lake. Vivian’s been spending the night down there a lot lately, at least two nights a week. Unfortunately, I can’t be sure she went there. Heather and I got into it during Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago about something I can’t even remember now and she hasn’t spoken to me since. According to Vivian, Heather wouldn’t take a call from me if her life depended on it. Neither would her husband, Marty. Marty and I always liked each other, but he can’t go against his wife. He has to live in the same house with Heather, so that’s just the way it is. I completely understand.
“Viv must be pissed off that Cindy’s in town without smiling Jack Harrison,” Bear says. “Which leaves her all alone out there at the Prescott estate waiting for you.”
I’m searching the sky as Bear makes his crack. It’s dark gray. The weather people aren’t calling for snow—they’re predicting a clear day—but it sure looks like we’re going to get some powder. Smells like it, too. You know, that pleasant, faint scent of smoke. My eyes flicker to Bear’s. “How would Vivian know Cindy was in town without Jack?” Bear knows Cindy’s in town because it was his turn to make rounds at the estates last night. I called him while I was following her home yesterday to tell him she was at the estate so he wouldn’t be surprised to see the place lighted up.
Bear shrugs. “She’s got ESP. We both know that.”
A big truck roars past, heading for the lumber mill with a cargo of logs, and I watch it until it disappears around the bend. Maybe it isn’t ESP at all. Maybe I should just be more concerned with Vivian and Bear’s relationship than I am. “Uh huh.” I nod toward the trailhead. “Come on, let’s go.” I take one more sip of the coffee I picked up at Ike and Sara’s, then toss the Styrofoam cup in a trash can as we pass a snow-covered picnic table.
As we reach the trailhead, Bear points at all the footprints in the snow. “Jesus, it looks like somebody had a convention out here last night. I was up here last week and there was only one set of snowshoe tracks heading in. Think it’s the cult?”
For the last few months there’s been a rumor going around that we have a cult of devil worshipers in Dakota County, but there’s never been any proof of it. Not that I’ve seen anyway. “There’s no cult.” It’s the first time I’ve heard Bear mention anything about it and I don’t like it. I make a mental note to say something at our Monday afternoon meeting—if the storm doesn’t cancel the meeting—so all of my deputies are clear about where I am on the matter. So they’re clear on the force’s official position on the matter. “Understand?”
“Well, old Mel Hopkins had a goat stolen last week,” Bear volunteers as we move along the trail and the pine forest closes in around us.
It gets quiet in here very fast. The trees seems to absorb all sounds. “So what?”
“He thinks the cult took it because they wanted to sacrifice it.”
Mel Hopkins is the only person in Dakota County other than me who has a home on the east side of 681. It’s a fifty-acre farm with a picturesque red barn, a corn crib, and a few big fields cleared out of the woods. He mostly manages dairy cattle but he has a few other kinds of animals hanging around the barnyard, too. Like most farmers do. Mel’s place is south of mine, a little farther down the road from where Cindy had her run-in with those guys from Hayward.
“Christ,” I mutter.
“What’s wrong, Professor?”
“I don’t want people getting all hyped up about some cult when there’s nothing to get hyped up about. Everybody’s been cooped up inside all winter and they’re itching for something juicy to sink their teeth into. Damn it, they’ll be sleeping with their shotguns if they think people are stealing livestock. They’ll shoot at anything that moves at this point.” I glance back at Bear. “You know how people get in February. We don’t need that, Billy.”
Bear nods. “Yeah, I hear you. Cabin fever usually does set in about now. Any other county sheriffs heard about a cult up here?”
I haven’t asked around and I’m embarrassed that I left that stone unturned. “Call around when you get back to the precinct, will you?”
“Sure.”
I stop short. We’ve gone less than a quarter of a mile into the forest and the footprints are breaking away from the path and leading off into a dense pocket of trees. I point in the direction they’re headed. “This way.”
A hundred feet off the path three deer burst out from behind some thick brush, surprising both of us. We stumble backward and grin nervously at each other as they bound away with their white tails pointed at the sky, embarrassed at how startled we were. It’s eerie back here, eerie enough to put two experienced police officers on edge. I’m glad I’ve got my gun. Bear is, too. I can tell.
The footprints end at what’s left of a bonfire that’s encircled by large stones. The circle is ten feet in diameter, but the snow is melted for another twenty feet outside the stones and the branches above the area are seared black. I move inside the stones, squat down, and poke around with a stick. I hit something hard right away and scrape at the ashes until it emerges. I reach down, slip my finger through one of the holes, and pull it up. It’s a skull. There’s still charred flesh and hair on it.
“That’s Mel Hopkins’s goat,” Bear says quietly.
I hate to admit it but he’s probably right. A goat skull is pretty easy to identify by the horns and this sure looks like one. Then I spot something else and drop the skull. I brush away the ashes from the object and a chill
runs up my spine. It’s a steak knife, one I think I recognize.
My cell phone rings as I’m staring at the blade. I pull out the phone and check the number. It’s Cindy.
5
I CAN’T BELIEVE I’m barreling south down 681 to help Cindy again, but she swore it was an emergency—again. This time it’s a burst pipe on the second floor of the mansion and she doesn’t know how to turn off the torrent or who else to call. She was frantic because she said there was water going everywhere.
Fortunately, Vivian was supposed to be at work at the Bruner Washette by nine o’clock this morning. It’s after ten now so she shouldn’t see me flash by the house this time. If she does, last night will seem like a lovefest when I get home this evening.
As I turned left at the lone stoplight in town a few minutes ago, I peered down the block at the spots in front of the washette where Vivian usually parks. I didn’t see her rusty old Toyota sitting there, but that’s not the end of the story. Sometimes she parks in the back, because the owner, Charlie Wagner, is hung over and feeling mean and makes her park back there because he says he wants his customers to be able to use the spots on the street right in front of the washette—even though those spots are rarely all taken. Vivian doesn’t like parking behind the store, because it’s dark and lonely back there when she leaves in the winter and it scares her, but sometimes she doesn’t have a choice. Cabin fever gets to everyone around here long about this time of the winter. Charlie’s no exception.
I tried calling Heather’s house last night to see if Vivian was around, because I thought there was a chance Marty might pick up and I could reason with him, but I got no answer. Heather and Marty don’t make much money but apparently it’s enough to have Caller ID. I didn’t bother trying Vivian’s cell phone. I knew she wouldn’t answer.
Once I’m past Mickey’s campground, I jam the accelerator to the floor and quickly hit seventy. Just as the forecasters predicted, it’s turning into one of the few crystal-clear days we’ll have up here all winter and I’m forced to squint. I’m driving directly into the sun’s blazing rays, directly into the southern fire. I’m donning my sunglasses when I spot a vehicle ahead of me through the glare. It’s a van, a blue van, and it looks familiar.