“Are you kidding? It hurt like hell. But I wasn’t alone out there.”
“The spirit of the woods?” Bo smiled when he said this.
Young O’Connor looked at him steadily. “The spirit of all things. It’s all connected.”
In this, Bo heard wisdom, the kind he might have expected from the old Mide, and although it would be a long time before he fully accepted that there were mysteries which could never be solved, in that moment, in that intimate circle around the fire, he was willing to embrace the truth of Stephen O’Connor’s words.
“What happens from here?” Rainy asked.
Dross said, “It’ll be complicated, I’m sure. There are still a lot of missing pieces. It’s clear that much of what’s gone on was manipulated from high up.”
“They’ll get nothing from Gerard or his people,” Bo said.
“But the truth will come out, yes?” Rainy looked to him with hope.
Bo spoke carefully. “There will be a lot of smoke. There will be a lot of accusations designed to misdirect, obfuscate, confuse. There will be a lot of finger-pointing that will get no one anywhere. It’s how our government operates when all the disparate heads are trying to cover their asses. It’s never about getting to the truth.”
“The many-headed monster of Waaboo’s nightmare,” Jenny said. She ran her hand gently over her son’s cheek. “Maybe you’re not the only one who has visions, Stephen.”
“But we know the truth,” Sarah LeDuc insisted. “We can speak out.”
“Who takes the word of an Indian seriously?” English said bitterly.
“Marsha knows the truth,” Stephen said.
“I’ll do what I can,” the sheriff promised, then, after a pause, added with a dour note, “But they’ve taken all the evidence.”
“What about Winston’s camera and laptop?”
Bo said, “By the time the sun is up, Quaker’s people will have confiscated that, too.”
“There’s your cell phone,” Cork pointed out. “You used it to send the photo to your Pentagon friend.”
Bo shook his head, which still hurt from the beating he’d taken when Gerard tried to get information from him. “They grabbed that when they nabbed me at the crossroads.”
“They can’t just make Wannamaker’s body disappear,” English said.
“He was a dangerous, wanted man, a domestic terrorist. They caught him. He tried to run. They shot him.” Bo shrugged. “Who knows? In the end, Gerard might end up the hero of this story.”
“They beat you,” Jenny said.
“That’s my story. Did any of you see it happen?”
“You sound like one of them,” Sarah LeDuc said.
“Believe me, I’m not, Sarah. But I know how they work.”
“They can’t just cover all of this up.”
“They’ve done it before,” Bo told her. “This won’t be one of Gerard’s finer moments, but whenever you try to pin him down, he’s like an eel. And he’ll get all kinds of protection from above.” He threw a stick into the fire, watched it burn. “Doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, the truth about our government, any government for that matter, is that protecting its citizens is never its first priority. Its first priority is protecting itself.”
Around the fire, the mood had taken a sour turn. It was the old man, Meloux, who lifted their spirits.
“This is not a time for heavy hearts,” the Mide said. “Death was our shadow, but that shadow is gone. Justice? We will pray this comes with the light of day. In this moment, here and now, we celebrate the spirit of what is good in each of us and in those friends who stood with us in the dark and chased away death’s shadow.” He lifted his eyes to the night sky. “We give thanks to the Creator and we pray that in the battle between love and fear, which is always raging in the human heart, love will triumph.” He lowered his eyes and, one by one, fixed each of them around the fire with his steady gaze. When he came to Bo, he smiled. “Love will win,” he said gently, as if the words were meant for Bo especially. “In the end, love always wins.”
CHAPTER 49
* * *
The memorial service for Olympia McCarthy and her family was held in the Twin Cities at the Cathedral of St. Paul on a rainy autumn afternoon. The broadcast was carried live on all the local network stations. The governor was there and other politicians. A number of the senator’s colleagues from D.C. had flown in to attend. The huge sanctuary was packed, every pew filled shoulder to shoulder. During the service, the governor spoke. He praised the work of the FBI and never mentioned Gerard’s name when speaking of the death of Cole Wannamaker, a man he called a wild-eyed, misdirected fanatic. Gerard’s name, in fact, had never come up in any of the journalistic accounts of what occurred in Tamarack County. Wannamaker’s death was always attributed to very nonspecific “U.S. security personnel.”
Alone in his condo in St. Paul, Bo watched the service on the television. Every so often the camera angle shifted to the cathedral’s front pew, where Olympia McCarthy’s father sat, along with other members of the family. With them was the most illustrious of the memorial’s attendees: former President Clay Dixon. His wife, the lovely former First Lady, sat at his side. The media had made much of the fact that Olympia McCarthy and Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon had been college roommates and lifelong best friends, and how, after the tragedy, the former First Lady had been with the senator’s family constantly, offering her support. She didn’t speak at the service, but Bo could still hear her voice, the sound of her soft breathing, like wind across tall grass. He thought about how she’d kept their conversations from her husband, so that, should things go south, he could claim plausible deniability. He wondered what she intended to do with the photo he’d sent her from his cell phone, moments after he’d sent that same photo to the man he’d believed was his friend in the Pentagon. It had been his last communication with her before Gerard nabbed him and beat him and prepared to stage another massacre. Bo never told Cork O’Connor or his family about that final communication. He didn’t want to raise their hopes only to have them dashed on the rocks of some necessary political cover-up.
When the service had finished, under an awning erected outside the cathedral to protect the podium from the rain, former President Clay Dixon, as promised, addressed the media. He was flanked by his wife and by Olympia McCarthy’s father. In a surprise move, he opened his remarks by displaying a photograph, which he said had been taken by a young Native American atop Desolation Mountain the day Olympia McCarthy died.
* * *
Cork sat with Rainy in front of the television in the house on Gooseberry Lane. They’d watched the service, had heard all the lauding of a woman who, in the end, had sacrificed everything in her fight for the ideals she believed in. They’d both shared their story with reporters, but they’d never seen any of the truths they told make it into print.
Waaboo and Jenny came from the kitchen, bringing coffee and cookies.
“A little something to brighten a dark day,” Jenny said.
Waaboo settled himself on the sofa next to his grandfather. He lay his head against Cork’s shoulder. “I miss Trixie, Baa-baa.”
“She died trying to protect us. A good death.”
“Do dogs go to heaven?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“They’re not people.”
“Do you think only people are in heaven?”
Waaboo took a bite of the chocolate chip cookie in his hand. “I guess I’ll find out someday.”
Cork put his arm around his grandson. “That day is far, far away, little guy.”
On the television, the service had finished and former President Clay Dixon was stepping up to a microphone under a canvas awning that dripped rain, preparing to speak.
“Just for once,” Jenny said, “I’d like to hear a politician say something meaningful and true.”
“Give the man a chance,” Cork said and reached for a cookie.
* * *
It was n
ight and Stephen was alone with the old Mide. They sat before a fire burning in the stone ring at the edge of Iron Lake. The sky had spit rain all day, and there was still a brooding overcast, so that the only light came from the dance of flames in the fire ring.
“He told the truth,” Stephen reported. “In front of television cameras, he showed the photograph Winston Goodsky took, and he told what happened up here.”
With a nod of approval, the old man said, “Debwewin.” Which, Stephen knew, meant “truth” in the language of his people. “One of the gifts of the Seven Grandfathers.” Then the old man said, “I hear that you have befriended Winston Goodsky.” He nodded in approval. “He is a young man who will need guidance and a friend.”
“He knows his grandfather’s death isn’t far away and he’s afraid of what will come after that. It’s important for him to know he won’t be alone.”
Small drops of rain hit lightly on Stephen’s face. He had come to the old man with a heavy heart and he hadn’t spoken yet the real truth that brought him. He summoned all his strength of spirit. “Henry,” he said. “I had the vision again.”
The old man waited. The fire popped. Embers flew like glowing bits of a shattered dream toward the black night sky.
“This time I found the courage to look at the great, terrible thing at my back. It had nothing to do with what happened on Desolation Mountain.”
The old man turned his face to Stephen, his skin cut by the lines from a century of erosion, his eyes like ancient stones. “And what did you see?”
Stephen looked long and deep at this man who had taught him so much about life, whose spirit was the truest he had ever known.
He said at last the words, which nearly broke his heart: “I saw you dead.”
Henry’s smile was comforting. His old hand when he placed it over Stephen’s was more warming than the fire. He let silent moments pass before he spoke in the soft voice of acceptance, “I know.”
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William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of seventeen previous Cork O’Connor novels, including Sulfur Springs and Manitou Canyon, as well as the novel Ordinary Grace, winner of the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family. Visit his website at williamkentkrueger.com.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krueger, William Kent, author.
Title: Desolation mountain : a novel / William Kent Krueger.
Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2018. | Series: Cork O’Connor mystery series ; 17
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017327 (print) | LCCN 2018021101 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501147487 (eBook) | ISBN 9781501147463 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501147470 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: O’Connor, Cork (Fictitious character)--Fiction. | Private investigators--Minnesota--Fiction. | Ojibwa Indians--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / General. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fict
ion.
Classification: LCC PS3561.R766 (ebook) | LCC PS3561.R766 D47 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017327
ISBN 978-1-5011-4746-3
ISBN 978-1-5011-4748-7 (ebook)
Desolation Mountain Page 27