“Ah,” Cork said. He thought a moment. “How much are you willing to pay?”
“I assume you have a number in mind.”
“Make an offer.”
“All right,” Alex said. “Five hundred thousand dollars.”
Cork smiled. “What is it you’re trying to protect? Jubal’s name? The Jaeger name?” His eyes swung toward Camilla. “Or just protective brothers trying to stand between their sister and the bullies of the world? I don’t want your money.”
Camilla spoke up immediately. “I told them you wouldn’t accept something like this, Cork. They wouldn’t believe me. And honestly, I don’t care what people might say about Jubal and Winona Crane. I know the truth, and that’s what’s important to me.”
Alex said, “The truth? Hell, Camilla, the truth is that the guy’s been unfaithful to you for years with this woman.”
“We had an understanding about her.”
“Yeah, that Jubal could walk all over you and you wouldn’t say boo to him.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” Her anger was clearly mounting.
“Oh? I’d love to be enlightened. Because whenever I confronted Jubal with it, he just clammed up. Christ, the stink of guilt poured off him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Camilla shouted. “Jubal loved me.”
“Then why was he fucking another woman?”
“Because,” she said as the tears began, “I wasn’t enough. And I understood that. And I wanted Jubal anyway. And she was the price.” She wiped her cheeks with her knuckle.
Alex threw his arms up as if in disgust or surrender. “It doesn’t matter. If the press gets wind of her, they’ll fry him up and serve him to the public on a platter.”
“He’s dead,” Camilla said. “It can’t hurt him now.”
Nick said, “But it’ll hurt you, Camilla.” This was the first he’d spoken since Cork arrived, and it was a tender offering. “The shadow of Jubal will follow you, and people will think all kinds of things about you. They don’t know you.”
She smiled at her brother. “You don’t think I’m strong enough to endure that?”
“All these years, I’ve watched you take what Jubal offered you, and I couldn’t understand why you accepted so little when you deserved so much more. It’s not right that he should go on making your life miserable even after he’s dead.”
She stood up, walked to the liquor cabinet, put her hand against her brother’s cheek, and said, “The life I had with him was the life I chose, Nickie.”
“No, Dad and Alex chose it for you. You were the sacrifice on the altar of their political ambition.”
“Is that what you’ve thought all these years?”
“When we hunted together,” Nick said, “I sometimes put Jubal in my sights and thought about pulling the trigger, just to set you free.”
Her hand slid from his cheek, and she took a half step away. “You didn’t kill him, did you, Nickie?”
“Me?” He seemed genuinely surprised at the question. “No. But I won’t lie to you. I’m not sorry he’s dead.”
“I don’t want to hear that.” Camilla turned from him and walked away.
He watched her go, then took a long swallow from his glass.
An uncomfortable silence had fallen over the room, and into it Cork dropped this: “Is that why you tried to kill me, Nick? To protect your sister from more hurt?”
“Tried to kill you?” Nick gave a short laugh. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The slug through my windshield. I think you fired it.”
“Whoa, O’Connor, hold on a minute,” Alex said. “That’s a hell of an accusation.”
“Maybe so, but easily proven.” Cork walked to a window of the den that overlooked the driveway. He pulled a curtain back, so that Nick Jaeger’s Mercedes was visible on the drive. “Whoever it was who fired the shot left tire tracks at the scene. The sheriff’s people took impressions. My guess is that if I told them to check the tires on your SUV, Nick, they’d get a match.”
“There are lots of vehicles with those tires on them, I’m sure,” Nick said.
“Maybe so. But they also got an impression from the sole of an expensive hiking boot. If they secured a search warrant, I’d be willing to bet they’d find that boot and its mate somewhere among your things. So, I’m going to ask you again, is that why you tried to kill me?”
Nick didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all. He was like one of the animals he hunted, frozen in crosshairs. “If I’d wanted to kill you,” he finally said, “I would have shot you through the eye.”
“Jesus, Nick, just shut up,” Alex cried.
“You just wanted to scare me?” Cork said.
“Don’t say another word, you dumb ox,” Alex said.
“Fuck you, Alex. I’m not Jubal. I don’t have to listen to you.” To Cork, Nick said, “I didn’t want you asking any more questions that might end up hurting Camilla. I just wanted you to butt out.”
“No, Nickie, no,” Camilla said. “You didn’t.”
“Yeah, I did,” he told her. “Alex was just standing around doing nothing. I knew he didn’t care about you.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Alex fired at him.
“To you and Dad, all Camilla’s been is a way to get the Jaeger name firmly imprinted on American politics. You never cared if she was happy.”
“Oh, Nickie, I wasn’t unhappy.”
He gave her a look that Cork thought was full of a lifetime of love and concern. “I wanted more for you than that. You deserved more.”
“Oh, God,” Alex said and leaned against the mantel as if he needed support.
Camilla returned to her younger brother and stared deeply into his eyes. “You didn’t kill Jubal. Promise me that you didn’t kill Jubal.”
“I didn’t,” Nick said. “I swear to you. I was having brunch and Bloody Marys at Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis when Jubal was killed. I can prove that, if I need to.”
Alex said, as if exhausted, “So what now, O’Connor?”
Camilla went to Cork and took his hands in hers. “Please, let it go. I know it was awful, but you weren’t hurt. Please, if you ever cared about Jubal and me, let it go.”
The green of her eyes reminded him of wet mint leaves. In her gaze, he saw desperation and hope and sincerity, and although it went against everything sensible and every instinct he’d ever acquired in his years as a cop, he said to her, “All right.” To Nick, he said, “I want to talk to you. Alone.”
Cork let Nick Jaeger go ahead. He picked up his jacket, slung it over his arm, and walked out the door, leaving in the room behind him a silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and the slide of ice in an emptied liquor glass.
In the hallway, at the front door, Nick stopped and turned to face him.
“Rhiannon,” Cork said.
Nick looked at him blankly.
“Did you fire that shot because of Rhiannon?”
Nick seemed genuinely confused. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cork had dealt with enough liars in his law enforcement career and in his life to know more often than not when he wasn’t being given the truth. As disappointed as he was, he thought Jaeger was being straight with him.
“All right,” he said. Then he leaned threateningly close. “I heard that you’re thinking of leaving Tamarack County tomorrow. See that you do. By first light would be good, don’t you think?”
Nick’s eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was swallowing something bitter, and his hand squeezed the glass he still held as if choking the life from it.
“And I’d like it if I never saw you here again.”
For a long moment, Nick didn’t move. At last he gave a nod, barely perceptible.
“Good. One last question,” Cork said. “How’d you know I’d be on the road and where to position yourself for that shot?”
Nick straightened himself, as if attempting to recover his dignity. “You’re not the onl
y one who knows how to stalk when he’s hunting.”
Cork let it go at that, stepped away from him, opened the door, and left the house.
Yates was waiting for him at the Escalade. “So?”
“One hell of a goofy family.”
“Tell me about it.” Yates made no move to get into the vehicle. “So?”
“Kenny, we’ll probably never know who fired that shot at me. I’m thinking maybe it was just a dumb-ass hunter who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“That’s the way it is, huh?”
“That’s the way it is. Mind taking me back to my car now?”
Yates opened the door. “My pleasure.”
CHAPTER 33
In November, a little over a year after he’d married Camilla Jaeger, Jubal Little came north to bow-hunt with Cork O’Connor. That’s what he told Camilla anyway. Cork knew it was for a different reason, and he knew because Jubal had asked him to help in the deception. As a married man with children, he normally would have had no part in helping a man deceive his wife in order to be with another woman. But this was different.
When Jubal married Camilla, it was a union of purpose. It reminded Cork of the royal marriages of old Europe, mergers for the consolidation of power. The Jaegers had political savvy and their name had political cachet. Jubal had the bearing, the looks, the image, the ambition. But he told Cork, in a drunken phone conversation shortly after the wedding, that he felt like a big empty ship gone off course. He made it clear he wasn’t fond of the Jaegers.
In that same drunken conversation, he told Cork, “All they want me to be is some kind of horse they can all ride to political glory on. They want it to be all about the Jaeger legacy. They want to pull the strings and have me do their dance.”
“What about Winona’s vision, you on the mountaintop?”
“Fuck her vision. And fuck the Jaegers. Fuck ’em all.”
“Does that go for Camilla?”
Jubal was quiet a long time. “She deserves better than me,” he finally said.
Better than Jubal Little? Cork thought, and he knew that his old friend was in trouble.
“Winona won’t answer my calls. And Willie won’t pass along my messages. I need to see her, Cork.”
“What do you want from me, Jubal?”
“Talk to her. Tell her I’ve got to see her. Tell her I’m dying.”
Coming from anyone else, that would have been hyperbole. But coming from the mouth of Jubal Little, it was serious.
“I’m not going to help you start something with her.”
“I don’t want to start anything, Cork. I want…” He’d fallen quiet again, but this time it was as if he’d lost his way.
“What do you want, Jubal?”
“Tell her I want to heal. Tell her I want to be strong again. Will you do that, Cork?”
And so Cork had been the intermediary, and Jubal Little had come north without his wife on the pretext of a bow hunt with his best friend from boyhood.
They had, in fact, gone bow hunting, for the first time since they’d parted ways after Jubal graduated from high school. Cork hunted every season, hunted in the old way Sam Winter Moon had taught him, often with Sam himself, who was still alive in those days. He was amazed at his old friend’s ability. Not only was Jubal still able to find and follow the track of a deer but he was also, even after all the years away from the hunt, a better shot with an arrow than Cork could ever hope to be.
But the bow hunt was only the cover. Jubal’s visit with Winona was the real point, and he sandwiched his time with Cork between his times with Winona. Cork had no idea what passed between them, though he could guess about part of it. In his own mind it was, as Henry Meloux had said long ago, that there were spiritual bonds connecting certain people, that they were two sides of the same leaf, two halves of a broken stone, and that it was not about love, as most people thought of that word, but about a wholeness that was there when the two parts came together.
Whatever it was, when Jubal headed south again, Cork could see a healthy difference. It was shortly thereafter that Jubal entered the political arena. He returned to Tamarack County as frequently as possible, always without Camilla-unless he was campaigning-using the excuse of a fishing excursion or simply the need to reconnect with his North Country roots. Until the outing at Trickster’s Point, which had its own purpose, Cork never again allowed Jubal to use a bow hunt as one of his excuses. He refused to be a party to a continuing lie. But whatever it was that Winona gave him in their time together, it was like an elixir that filled Jubal with vigor.
It was different for Winona. She often disappeared after Jubal left, and when Cork saw her next, she looked withered and drawn. Despite his marriage to a woman he loved deeply, Cork still had a special place in his heart for his first love. He sometimes despised Jubal for all he took from Winona.
Meloux had once told Cork this about healing: “Sometimes the connection runs one way. You pour your own energy into the sick one, and when it is done, you are empty. It is not always like that, but sometimes. So you have to be careful, because some spirits are so hungry they will devour you.”
Cork understood only too well that Jubal Little was one of those spirits who, if you allowed him to, would consume you.
He thought about all this as he drove from his confrontation with the Jaegers directly to the Iron Lake Reservation. He stopped at Willie Crane’s cabin, but no one was there. He headed toward Allouette and knocked at Winona’s front door but received no answer. When he reached the town, he found the Iron Lake Center for Native Art open and Willie Crane inside.
Half of the center was devoted to showing the work of contemporary Indian artists. The other half, which Winona was largely responsible for, was a museum of Ojibwe cultural artifacts. There were beaded bandolier bags, cradleboards, flutes, drums, pipes, moose-hide moccasins, figures carved of wood, baskets woven of reeds or made from birch bark, the shells of snapping turtles used as war shields, ash bows, deer-hide quivers, arrows, and other ornate implements of warfare. Over the past twenty years, Winona had patiently accumulated a wealth of items that showcased Ojibwe ingenuity, spiritual sensibility, and artistic appreciation.
Willie was behind a display case of Ojibwe jewelry and smaller artifacts, and he looked up with surprise when Cork entered, as if, despite the Open sign on the door, he really wasn’t prepared for visitors.
“What do you want?” he said. Waouwan?
“ Boozhoo to you, too, Willie.”
Cork crossed the old wood floor to the counter, which Willie stayed behind as if it were a protective wall.
“You heard about Isaiah?” he asked.
“Of course,” Willie answered.
“You really think he killed Jubal?”
“Why would he say so if he didn’t?”
“I can think of a lot of reasons, and your sister’s at the top of the list.”
Willie bent and rearranged two items in the case. “I don’t understand.”
“I think that, given the right set of circumstances, Isaiah could have killed Jubal Little, but I don’t think he did. I think he’s covering for Winona.”
“You’re crazy,” Willie said, still fiddling in the case. The words of his denial had no energy.
Cork said, “Know what Jubal and your sister talked about their last night together, Willie?”
“How would I know something like that?”
“Because I think Winona told you everything. For want of a better word, I think you’ve always been her confessor.”
Willie finally stood up straight. His face was tawny and tight, and reminded Cork of deer hide stretched for drying.
“Cork, if you ever cared about Winona and Jubal, you’ll stop asking questions.”
“What I care about most right now is the truth.”
“You talk like it’s something you could just wrap your hand around.” Willie’s eyes were hard and dark and shiny and tired. But they weren’t empty. Something flickered in t
hem, and Cork couldn’t tell whether it was fear or anger. “You know the story of the blind men and the elephant? I think that’s the reality of truth. What you understand depends mostly on the perspective you bring to it.”
“How about you tell me your own perspective, and we’ll see what I understand?”
Willie shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”
“Okay, how about I tell you something I believe to be the truth, and then you can give me your perspective? One of the things Jubal confessed to me when he was dying was that he’d said good-bye to Winona forever. He told her it was their last night together. He was cutting her loose.”
“You see,” Willie said. “Right there. You’re holding only a small part of the elephant.”
“Jubal kissed her off, after all these years and all she’d done for him. She was pissed. Anybody would be. But the question is, was she pissed enough to kill him?”
“Hurt isn’t always followed by anger, Cork.”
“No? What followed Winona’s hurt?”
“Acceptance.”
“How very understanding of her.”
“Jubal was going on the path he was born to, and she always knew that he would have to go alone.”
“But he wasn’t going to be alone, Willie. His wife was going to be there beside him. Not your sister. In the eyes of the world, Camilla Little would always be the woman behind the great man. A bitter pill to have to swallow.”
Willie’s jaw worked in a way that made Cork wonder if he was trying to get words out of his twisted mouth or struggling to keep them in.
“Jubal used people, Willie. He used me, and he used Camilla and the Jaegers, and he used the Ojibwe. I don’t claim to understand the whole dynamic of what was between Winona and him, but what I saw was your sister giving and Jubal taking, and so I can’t help but believe that, in the end, he just used her, too.”
“She believed that helping Jubal was the path she was born to.”
To Cork, it sounded as if Willie was trying to defend the indefensible.
“It wasn’t the one I was born to,” Cork said, “or anyone else, but Jubal sure as hell thought it was so. He walked on all of us to get to that mountaintop of his.”
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