Cork drove his Land Rover down the single paved road, which had been built at the behest and expense of Lester Bigby. The road ended near the lakeshore, where an area had been cleared and preliminary construction on some buildings had begun. There was no activity at the moment, had been none for some time, not since news of the possibility of nearby sulfide mining had become public.
Lester Bigby’s Karmann Ghia was parked in tall, dead grass ten yards from the lake. Bigby sat on a big slab of gray rock that jutted into the lake. Cork parked next to the little car, got out, and walked onto the slab. Bigby had his back to Cork and was staring at the lake. Cork crossed the flat rock, which was tilted at a slight angle toward the water. As soon as he came abreast of Bigby, Cork saw the firearm in Bigby’s right hand. Ruger, his mind told him without being prodded, 22 caliber.
“Beautiful, don’t you think?” Bigby said.
“Lovely,” Cork replied, not taking his eyes off the Ruger.
“You ski?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But a lot of people in Minnesota do. That slope over there would have held one of the best runs in the state.”
“Would have?”
“It’s not going to happen. Ever.” He nudged the barrel of the handgun in Cork’s direction. “Sit down.” An order, not an invitation.
Cork sat. The clouds hung heavy over the hills and the lake. There was a slight breeze across the water, a cool November wind that already presaged winter, and Cork felt the chill of it against his face. The other chill he felt came from the threat in Bigby’s hand.
“What are you going to leave your kids, O’Connor?”
“A lot of good memories, and Sam’s Place,” he said without hesitation.
Bigby nodded. “Me, I was going to leave my son this. Do you know what I have to leave him now? Nothing. I’ve lost everything.”
“Jubal’s dead. The polls are saying our governor will be re-elected. Champion of the environment.”
“As long as there’s money to be made in the ground up here, the risk will always be there. If it wasn’t Jubal Little, it would have been someone else. Those people, they always find a way to get what they want.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All my promised backers have pulled out. I put another mortgage on my house. The third. Sold all my stocks and bonds a while ago. Borrowed against my life insurance. None of it enough to save this dream. You want to know what I was doing on Saturday? I spent the day out here, planning for it to be my last day on earth. I was going to kill myself. I knew I couldn’t do it at home and have Emily and Lance find me there. I couldn’t do that to them. In the end, I couldn’t do it at all. Coward. Just like my father always said.”
“I don’t think so,” Cork offered.
“You don’t know me,” Bigby shot back with sudden viciousness.
“I know your father, and you’re nothing like him.”
“Is that so? You’re ready to believe I killed Jubal Little.” He looked at Cork with a kind of grim curiosity. “Why exactly do you think I would do that?”
“Because of the sulfide mining.”
“I’d kill myself over that, not someone else.”
“I also thought maybe it might have something to do with wanting your father’s approval. For some sons, that would be important enough to kill for.”
Bigby laughed, a bitter sound. “Christ, are you barking up the wrong tree. My father’s a cruel man. He was cruel to my mother. He was cruel to me. And he was cruel to Donner. I grew up knowing what people thought of my brother, but I loved him. He stood up to my father, stood between Buzz and my mother, between Buzz and me. When Donner died, there was no one to stand up for us. Hell, if I killed anybody it would be my old man.”
“I also thought maybe it was because of Donner.”
Bigby looked confused. “I don’t understand.”
“Your father blamed Jubal for Donner’s death.”
“He blamed you, too.”
“My point, more or less. By putting an arrow into Jubal Little and making it look like I did it, you’d kill two birds with one stone.”
“You give me more credit for planning than I’m capable of.”
“It’s been a tough investigation. Any port in a storm,” Cork said, putting a little smile on his face while still eyeing the barrel of the Ruger.
“You think it’s funny? You sent cops to my house. My wife was there, and my son, and I had to explain to them why the police came into our home. My family looked at me as if they didn’t know me. You have any idea how that feels?”
“Did you tell them about Saturday?”
“I haven’t told them anything about this mess. I don’t want my son thinking of me like I think of my father.”
“I’m sure you don’t have to worry about that, Lester.”
“For a man who’s clearly screwed up in his thinking, you seem awfully sure.”
Cork decided it was time to take the bull by the horns. “You told me you knew who killed Jubal Little. Is that true, or was it just a way to get me here? Are you planning on shooting me?”
Bigby studied the gun. “I’ve thought about it. Still thinking about it. And still thinking maybe I’ll shoot myself as well. Take us both out in a blaze of glory.”
“Let me tell you something, Lester. I lost my father when I was thirteen. No matter what mistakes he might have made in his life, I’d have forgiven him anything to have him alive and with me again. Think about Lance. Do you want him to see you as your father does, just a coward? And worse, a murderer? Or do you want him to think of you as a man who failed in a resort enterprise but picked himself up and went on?”
“Just shut up,” Bigby said.
He looked away, stared across the lake, which was long and narrow. At the far end, clouds darker than before had begun to mount over the trees that lined the shore. Snow clouds, Cork thought. A darkness that was the reflection of what was coming from the west slid toward them across the water as if it was something huge and alive and hungry.
“Fuck it,” Bigby finally said and heaved the Ruger far out into the lake.
For a long time after that, he didn’t move. Nor did Cork. They both stared at the water, which rolled under the breeze, as if disturbed by the breath of what was coming, the cold exhalation of some great, invisible spirit.
Bigby spoke. “Now let me tell you something, O’Connor. I hate bow hunting. I always have. I hate the idea of killing a living thing just because I can.”
“Why do you do it then?”
“It used to be because I had to. My father made me. Then it was because my friends bow-hunted. Now I do it sometimes with clients. But you want to know the real reason? Because from the time I was small, I had this wonderful fantasy. Every time I was out, I fantasized putting an arrow in my father’s heart. When I go out now, I usually go alone because I love the quiet and the solitude. If you’d really done your homework, you’d know that I never come back with a deer. But I still have that fantasy about putting an arrow through Buzz Bigby’s heart.” He leveled a cold, dark look on Cork. “I remember watching you choke my father in the parking lot in front of the Black Duck. I was sitting in the truck. The cab smelled like spilled beer. It always did. I remember you suddenly stopped, otherwise you might have killed my old man that day.”
Cork remembered, too.
Bigby got up from the rock. “Stand up,” he said.
Cork rose and faced him. Without warning, Bigby swung. Cork turned instinctively, but not quickly enough to avoid the blow completely. Bigby’s fist caught him squarely in the left ear, and Cork stumbled and fell back onto the rock. Bigby stood over him, rubbing the sore knuckles of his right hand.
“That’s for bringing me and my family into all this crap. You have a knack, O’Connor, for doing what you think is right, but in the end, it’s all wrong. My old man should’ve died that day, saved all of us a lot of grief. But you screwed up. You want to know who killed Jubal Little? I’ll tell you. It
was some guy who actually knew how to get things done right.”
Bigby headed back to his Karmann Ghia. From where he sat on the rock with his ear ringing, Cork watched as the man pulled away, drove up the solitary road, and was lost in the trees.
CHAPTER 37
A side from the cowboy cookie he’d had in Allouette, Cork had eaten nothing that day since the biscuits he’d shared in the morning with Rainy and Henry. It was a little after two o’clock when he drove away from Crown Lake, and he was famished. He was also sliding into a despondent place. He seemed no closer to understanding who’d killed Jubal than he’d been during those three long hours while he watched the man die. He still had no idea who the hell Rhiannon was or what she might have to do with Jubal’s death. And he was kicking himself for having dragged Lester Bigby, an innocent man, into the mess. His ear ached from the blow Bigby had landed, but he figured it was a pain he deserved. The weather was no help. As he made his way toward Aurora, snow began to spit against his windshield. He thought after he got food in his stomach, he might rebound a little, so he headed home.
If he was looking for sympathy there, he didn’t find it. He found Stephen in a rotten mood.
In the instructions he’d left on the kitchen table that morning, he’d given Stephen permission to stay home from school another day. He’d indicated they should all stay close to the house, and not open Sam’s Place until he okayed it. When he pulled into the drive, he saw Stephen playing with Waaboo and Trixie in the backyard. His grandson didn’t notice him; Waaboo was too busy trying to catch on his tongue the flakes drifting out of the sky, a precipitation not nearly heavy enough yet to be called a snowfall. But Stephen saw Cork and gave him a long, hard look.
Jenny was in the kitchen, working on her laptop.
“They should be inside,” Cork snapped. “I left instructions.”
Jenny slid the sheet he’d left across the table where he could see it. “Your instructions were to stay close to home. They’re in the backyard. Can’t get much closer to home.”
“I meant-” Cork began.
“We’re not mind readers,” Jenny shot back.
“Sorry,” Cork said. “Bad day. Where’s Cy?”
“He went to Pflugleman’s to get some NyQuil. He’s coming down with a cold, he thinks. He promised to be right back.”
From the refrigerator, Cork pulled a plate of cold fried chicken and a bottle of Leinie’s. He grabbed a napkin from the holder on the counter and sat at the table with Jenny. “What are you working on?”
“Another short story.”
“When are you going to start a novel?”
“When I’m ready.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”
Jenny closed her laptop. “That’s okay. Just a little testy. I feel like I’m caged in here. Any progress?”
“Not much.” Cork took a bite of a chicken leg and through the window watched Waaboo and Stephen lick snowflakes from the air. “What’s his story?” Cork asked. “When I drove up, he looked at me like I was a rat bringing the plague.”
“He’s pissed at you.”
“Me? Why?”
Jenny shrugged. “Ask him.”
Cork waited until he’d eaten before he went out to face his son. Jenny walked with him, scooped up Waaboo, and said, “We’ll be inside, playing with a ball or something.”
Waaboo tried to slither loose, calling “Baa-baa.” He reached desperately toward his grandfather, but Jenny held him tightly and, though he protested with little cries, carried him into the house, calling after her, “Come on, Trixie. Come on inside, girl.”
Cork stood with Stephen in the empty backyard. In the young man’s stiffness and the shove of his hands deep in his jeans pockets and the way he averted his face, Cork could see his son’s anger. He thought he could even feel the heat of it radiating across the space of cold air that lay between them. They didn’t look at each other but stared at the sky as if the dull grayness was hypnotizing.
“Is there something you’d like to say to me?” Cork asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact.”
“I’m listening.”
“Just butt out of things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just stop doing what you do, Dad.”
“What is it I do?”
Stephen turned to him, his dark eyes blazing. “You leave early. You come home late. In between, people shoot at you.”
And sometimes hit me with a sucker punch, Cork thought, though there was no way he’d say that out loud. Not at that moment anyway.
“You like to hunt,” Stephen said, his voice pitched and rasping with anger. “I don’t get it, but I get that it’s something important to you, so I let it slide.”
When Stephen was young, Cork had hoped to share with him the experience of hunting, as his own father and Sam Winter Moon had shared it with him. But from early on, it was clear that Stephen had no interest. In fact, it was clear that Stephen abhorred the whole idea of killing something for the sport of it. Cork tried to explain that hunting played an important role in control of wild game populations and that, for him, there was a spiritual element to it, threaded far back in the culture of the Ojibwe and probably in the psyche of human beings, but Stephen never bought it. Cork hadn’t forced his son to participate, and he and Stephen had reached the mutual understanding that it was a subject on which they would probably never see eye to eye.
Stephen continued his tirade. “But when you let yourself become the thing that’s hunted, Jesus, I just don’t get that.”
“Let myself? Stephen, I had no idea someone was going to take a shot at me.”
The fire in his son’s eyes flared to brilliance, as if Cork had only added more fuel. “What about after that? You could have stayed home, where it’s safe, like you ordered us to do. But no, there you are, running all over God knows where by yourself, still a target, and maybe next time whoever’s shooting at you won’t miss.”
“Stephen, I know who shot at me.”
That clearly caught him by surprise. “You do?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“I pretty much promised to keep that to myself. A deal I made with the guy who pulled the trigger. His side of the bargain was that he wouldn’t do it again. And that he’d leave Tamarack County for good.”
“You believed him?”
“Yeah, I believed him.”
“Why’d he shoot at you?”
“To scare me. To protect someone he loves.”
Stephen drilled his father with a penetrating glare. “There,” he said. “That’s the point. Someone he loves.” He turned away, and Cork watched the snowflakes drift between them. “You should be thinking more about the people you love. At Trickster’s Point, someone was ready to kill you, but that doesn’t seem to matter to you. You just keep doing what you do. And me and Jenny, we’re just sitting around waiting for the time we get a call and some stupid voice on the other end of the line tells us you’re dead.”
Which was pretty much how the news had been delivered when Stephen’s mother was killed.
Cork didn’t say anything for a while, simply stared where his son stared, upward at a sky as gray as a tombstone.
“I don’t look for trouble, Stephen. Honest to God, I don’t just go looking for it.” He shrugged. “ Ogichidaa. What can I say?”
Anyone else might have looked at Cork as if he were crazy or full of hubris, but Stephen’s own perception of the world was very much colored by his love of what was Ojibwe in his blood and in his life, and rather than disbelief, he eyed his father with disappointment.
“But why you, Dad?”
“I don’t know. I just know it’s true. I know it here.” Cork tapped his heart.
“So am I supposed to be, like, proud of you or something?”
“No. Well, yes, but not because of that. It’s who I am, same as you were born a spirit meant to heal. I admire that in you. Me, I’m a guy who seems to step into th
e fire again and again, and it’s not because I’m stupid or insensitive to the danger or to what it would mean to you if I got myself killed. It’s just who I am. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s simply something I accept.”
Stephen didn’t reply. He stood motionless as snowflakes settled on his shoulders, held a moment, and melted away. Then suddenly he turned to his father, and there were tears in his eyes. “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you to leave me, ever.”
And now there were tears in Cork’s eyes as well. “I won’t. I promise.”
He took Stephen in his arms, his son who was on the edge of manhood, with all the weight and uncertainty and responsibility that meant, and held him, knowing there was no way he could make a promise like that but wishing, at the moment, with all his heart, that it was true.
As they turned together to head back into the house, a car pulled into the drive and parked next to Cork’s Land Rover. Leon Papakee got out and watched Cork and Stephen come to greet him.
“Boozhoo,” Papakee called.
“What’s up, Leon?” Cork said.
“Hey, Stephen. Good to see you.” Papakee shook Stephen’s hand. “You’re almost as tall as your old man now.”
“And still growing,” Cork said.
“I just left the sheriff’s department,” Papakee said. “They’ve finished interviewing Isaiah Broom, for the time being anyway.”
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