The Ravens (Minnesota Trilogy)

by Vidar Sundstøl

  But that was none of Lance Hansen’s business. He wasn’t on the clock. Officially he wasn’t even in the United States. With a certain reverence he raised his pint glass. This was no ordinary beer. During the two months he’d spent in Canada, he’d had to settle for Fort Garry Pale Ale, since that was the closest he could get to Starfire Pale Ale. But it was still a far cry from the original. This, on the other hand, was the original. He made sure that the bitter, reddish beer properly coated his taste buds before he allowed it to pass down his gullet. For a moment he was filled with pure joy. Oh, how he’d missed that taste! A moan of pleasure slipped out. The bartender looked in his direction and actually smiled. He probably thought he was dealing with an alcoholic cop who had just taken his first swallow of the beer he’d been yearning for all day. Lance laughed softly to himself as he sat in the dimly lit corner. “Welcome home,” he murmured.

  It occurred to him that he was, in fact, enjoying himself here in the Kozy, even though he figured that he wouldn’t feel as comfortable in a few hours when the regular clientele began filling the bar. But for the moment, it was perfect. Two young women came in and sat down at the table with the two Ojibwe men, if that was what they were. They began talking, but so quietly that he couldn’t make out what they said. Otherwise there was nothing going on in the place. The TV up near the ceiling was turned off, and the bartender wasn’t playing any music. Nothing happened. He almost felt like he was asleep, except that he was able to drink Starfire Pale Ale while he was sleeping.

  He closed his eyes. Instantly he saw the ravens flying up from the carcass on the road. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the four other customers were leaving. They stopped at the door to exchange a few words in low voices. A couple of them had cast brief glances at Lance. He felt uneasy at the thought that those people might be talking about him. Finally the men and one of the young women left. The other woman waited until the door had closed behind them. Then she walked through the bar and came over to Lance. He took a sip of his beer as he looked at her over the rim of the glass. She was younger than he’d thought, just a teenager, with a pretty face although it was much too pale. Only when she reached his table did he recognize her.

  “Lance?” she said, staring at him in disbelief.

  Andy Hansen’s daughter had gleaming black hair, and she wore a black coat that reached to her knees. Her lips were a dark red outlined in black, and black liner rimmed her eyes. She had on black lace-up boots.

  “Chrissy?”

  “What are you doing here, Uncle Lance?”

  He could tell how foolish his expression must be. Chrissy burst out laughing. She laughed so hard that she ended up squirming like a kid who needed to pee, and every time she looked at him, she started laughing again.

  “Okay, cut it out,” said Lance, annoyed.

  In a halfhearted attempt to apologize, she raised her hand, as if to signal that she’d try to get hold of herself. Lance noticed that her face remained deathly pale. Had she powdered her skin white?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must look like an idiot. But I didn’t recognize you either.”

  “You did look a little weird. It was just that I didn’t . . . I mean . . . Jesus! The Kozy?”

  She sat down at the table across from him.

  “Yeah. I know,” said Lance.

  “Is this where you usually hang out?”

  “No, are you crazy? Do you?”

  Chrissy ignored the question. “I thought you were in Norway.”

  He didn’t hesitate more than a second before coming up with an answer.

  “I’m working undercover,” he said.

  His niece’s expression indicated all too clearly that she didn’t believe a word of it.

  “But aren’t you a forest cop?” she exclaimed.

  “All right. Here’s the thing,” said Lance, pretending that he’d come to a big decision. “No one was supposed to find out. That’s partly why I came in here, because nobody I know would . . . Well, regardless, I’m on an undercover assignment.”

  He could hear how stupid that sounded. Chrissy ran the fingers of her left hand through her gleaming black hair as she gave her uncle a skeptical look. An exaggerated skepticism, thought Lance. As if she were acting in one of those sitcoms on TV in which everybody was young and had complicated, chaotic lives that could make you laugh yourself silly if you enjoyed that kind of thing, which Lance definitely did not. But that was how Chrissy was acting. He hadn’t noticed that sort of behavior from her before and wondered what it stemmed from. At the same time Lance sensed something unapproachable just below the surface. Was this something new?

  “An undercover assignment?” she repeated. “For the U.S. Forest Service?”

  “Of course not. I’m first and foremost a police officer, and I was the one who found the murdered tourist near Baraga’s Cross last summer. I’ve been involved in the investigation all along.”

  Chrissy still had strands of hair twined around her fingers, but she’d stopped moving her hand. Her eyes were big and shiny. Was she on the verge of tears? There was something else about her look, something different, but maybe it was simply the fact that she was no longer a child.

  “Does that mean they haven’t caught the killer, after all?” she asked in a low voice.

  “All I can tell you is that . . . there are a few, what you might call, unresolved issues in the case.”

  “Did they arrest the wrong man?”

  “That’s a possibility,” said Lance.

  “So is the trial going to be postponed?”

  “Listen to me, Chrissy. I’m not supposed to discuss any of these things with you. Do you understand that?”

  Chrissy nodded.

  “The only reason I’m telling you about this is because you . . . well, you saw me. It’s absolutely essential that nobody finds out I’m here. All right?”

  “Okay.”

  “If anyone hears about this . . . I can’t go into detail about what might happen, but we’re talking about a murder case, a life sentence and everything, right?”

  His niece nodded. She still had her fingers stuck in her dyed black hair, as if there were so many thoughts swirling through her brain that it had completely forgotten about her hand. Her other hand was lying passively on the table. Lance reached across to grab her hand as he stared into her eyes.

  “You can’t tell anybody,” he said urgently, keeping his voice low. “But if you do, keep in mind that you’d be breaking the law and you could end up in court. Do you hear me?”

  He added the latter comment on impulse, based on the simple fact that Chrissy was here, in the Kozy Bar, where most of the regulars wanted nothing to do with the police.

  “Jesus! Let go. I won’t say anything,” she replied, pulling her hand away.

  There was something in the tone of her voice—partly indignant, partly resigned—that gave Lance a feeling that she was used to such things. Used to being grabbed and spoken to in such a harsh manner.

  “By the way, what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Just came in to talk to a few people.”

  “Do you realize what kind of place this is?”

  She gave him a withering look, as if what he’d just said was too lame to warrant a comment. Another example of the overacting that she’d displayed before, as if she had a repertoire of set facial expressions for every emotion: resignation, astonishment, despair, surprise, and so on.

  “Don’t you have school tomorrow?” asked Lance.

  “Sure.”

  “But how are you going to get back to Two Harbors?”

  “Drive, of course.”

  “You borrowed a car?”

  “Yeah. The Freestar.”

  “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  “No. And they don’t know that you’re here, either,” she said defiantly.

  “You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?”

  “What the hell, Uncle Lance? Why don’t you just chill! Besides
, I’ve got to go. They’re waiting for me.”

  “So you’re not going home?”

  Chrissy took her cell out of her pocket and glanced at the display.

  “It’s five forty-five,” she said. “Don’t you think I can stay up a little later?”

  “As long as you make it to school in the morning, I guess.”

  “Man, what’s wrong with you?”

  Abruptly she stood up, ready to leave.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you like that.”

  She gave him a conciliatory smile. Lance noticed again that there was something odd about the look in her eyes, something that hadn’t been there before. But he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  7

  THE NEXT DAY he was driving aimlessly through the streets of Duluth when he caught sight of the redbrick building that housed the Great Lakes Aquarium. The building drew his attention in an inexplicable way, luring and enticing him, as if promising that it contained something he needed.

  After he bought a ticket and hung his jacket in the cloakroom, he stood in the middle of the huge hall, his mind blank as he looked around. The few other visitors who were present only served to make the place seem emptier; both their bodies and their voices seemed to disappear inside the space. Outside the windows on the east wall the white icy expanse stretched out until it met the blue sky at a razor-sharp divide. Only the small, dark figures of the ice fishermen broke the perfect barrenness out there.

  The aquarium’s three huge fish tanks rose vertically through the central part of the building, looking rather like giant test tubes filled with water and fish. Consequently, the middle of the building was open all the way up to the glass roof high overhead. In these tanks the fish swam in various layers through the water, clearly distributed according to the depth that each species preferred. At the very bottom were several sturgeon—big, prehistoric-looking fish, maybe five feet long.

  Lance closed his eyes for a moment and listened. The whole aquarium was pervaded by the steady, bubbling sound of oxygen being pumped into the various tanks. The sound vaguely reminded him of being underwater. It was the lake that had lured and enticed him. Because the lake was inside here too, in the bubbling from the tanks, in a silvery fish flapping its tail fin in the light shining through the glass roof, and in the sensation that he was underwater. Lance knew that the moment he opened his eyes, he would see the lake’s frozen nothingness stretching out toward the horizon.

  When he did open his eyes, he felt a flicker of fear pass through his brain, and instantly began moving away from the center of the big, vaulted space.

  There were no other visitors in the room with the model of the Great Lakes. Gratefully Lance sank down onto a chair at the western end and let his gaze wander over the huge display table, many square feet in size. On exhibit was an exact model of America’s five Great Lakes and the surrounding terrain. The cities were marked by tiny houses and bridges. The old Aerial Bridge in Duluth, which was the town’s most prominent landmark, was not depicted to scale; instead, it was larger than the tallest buildings. If Lance leaned forward and stretched out his arm, he would be able to touch it, but he didn’t like the thought of touching his own world from above, as if he were some sort of giant in a comic book. A freighter was also included in the display, no doubt loaded with taconite. He could have picked it up between his thumb and forefinger to lift it high above the lake with water pouring in a steady stream off the hull, and then he could have tossed it against the mountain ridge, where it would have crushed a countless number of old wooden houses along with the people inside. Suddenly everyone who was outside would be craning their necks to stare in terror at the giant looming overhead in the sky. His hand alone was larger than the biggest building in town. The streets of his childhood would be filled with the sounds of panic. But wasn’t there something familiar about that enormous face? It was so big and round and reached so high into the sky that it almost looked like the sun. Sooner or later someone would shout: It’s Lance Hansen! Look how big he is! Yes, and how horrible, someone would add. Look how he’s destroying our whole world. Why is he doing that?

  Through the window at the other end of the room Lance could see the ice fishermen sitting next to the holes in the ice, waiting for something to bite. Their lines reached down into the depths, and no one knew what they might catch.

  One time he had stood at the deepest spot in the lake, 1,332 feet below the surface, and felt the marrow in his joints start to freeze. During the nearly eight years that had passed since he’d had that dream, Lance had never awakened with even a scrap of a dream in his head. Not even with a feeling that he might have dreamed something but had simply forgotten what it was. For him, sleep was merely a big nothingness into which he disappeared every night. As he sat there studying the model of the five Great Lakes, and as the ice fishermen jigged their lines in the westernmost part of the real Lake Superior, Lance felt his inability to dream like a nutritional deficiency that was eating him up from the inside.

  Lance got up, leaning his hands on the edge of the big display table and bending forward over Lake Superior. Even the rivers that emptied into the lake were depicted. There he saw the Temperance River, where he’d parked his car before starting the last drive of the deer hunt. And there the Cross River entered the lake. A tiny cross marked the place where Father Frederic Baraga had miraculously survived a storm in August 1846 when he was on his way to Grand Portage to help the Ojibwe who were suffering from smallpox. It was near Baraga’s Cross that Lance had discovered the murdered body of Georg Lofthus. And it was there that he’d lain on his back a few months ago and listened to Andy topple backward into the underbrush after the shot was fired. Only a few inches farther along the shoreline was the Grand Portage Indian Reservation, marked by a canoe floating on the water. The canoe was as big as the freighter that was docked in Duluth, and when Lance leaned closer, he saw a man sitting in the canoe, holding on to a tiny paddle. That’s Willy, he thought. He didn’t know where the thought came from, but once it took hold, he couldn’t get rid of it. Down there, paddling the canoe, was his former father-in-law Willy Dupree. Lance thought about the Ojibwe relationship to dreams and how it had always governed their lives. He leaned even closer to the canoe and the tiny man sitting inside. Willy couldn’t see the gigantic face hovering above him, but Lance hoped that he would somehow sense it was there.

  “Help Lance dream again,” whispered the face.

  8

  AFTER TAKING a long and complicated route through the snow-covered forests and along icy waters, Lance pulled up in front of Willy Dupree’s house in the Grand Portage Indian Reservation. It was almost midnight, but for safety’s sake, he parked behind the garage so his car couldn’t be seen from the road.

  He felt a great warmth flood his chest when Willy opened the door.

  “Come in,” said the old man.

  More than two months had passed since the last time Lance was here. That was back in November, and he and Andy had finished the first day of their deer hunt. What happened on the second day hadn’t yet taken place. No ice storm, no shot fired in the dark, or the sound of Andy falling backward with icicles clinking all around. But as Lance took off his coat in the hall, he remembered that he’d had blood on his hands. He’d hit a cat as he was driving out to see Willy, and he’d been forced to kill it with a wrench. And the more he’d struck the poor animal, the more pleasure it had given him. His hands had been spattered with blood, and there were also drops on his face, like dark freckles on his nose and cheeks. Willy had pointed this out to him, but not until Lance was about to leave. During his entire visit the old man had sat there looking at the blood on his hands and face without saying a word or asking any questions.

  When they were each settled in an easy chair, Lance dutifully ate one of the cookies that Mary was always baking, a painful reminder of the normal life he’d once lived. Then Willy clasped his hands over his stomach and gave his ex-son-in-law a sol
emn look.

  “You might as well tell me the whole story, don’t you think?” he said.

  On the phone Lance had merely said that he wasn’t in Norway but in Ely, and that he needed to talk to Willy.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then tell me what you can.”

  “Okay. So, I’ll start with the obvious. I’m not in Norway. I didn’t go there at all. And if I know myself, I’ll never go there. Instead, I’ve been in Kenora, in Canada, and I spent two months there, lying in bed in a hotel room, watching TV. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I came back here to the States. Right now I’m staying in Ely.”

  “But aren’t you working anymore?”

  “I’ve got tons of vacation days saved up. I could practically take off a whole year, if I wanted to.”

  “So you’re actually on vacation?” asked Willy.

  “Sort of.”

  “But why? Why the whole story about Norway? Jimmy got postcards from there. What exactly are you doing?”

  “That’s what I can’t tell you. You just have to trust me, the way I trust you. You can’t tell anyone about this, not even Jimmy. You’re the only one I can trust, Willy.”

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “I’m part Indian,” said Lance.

  Except for the ticking of the clock on the wall, the room was utterly silent. Lance stared at the two old photographs hanging on the wall over the sofa. A man and a woman with white hair and sunken, toothless mouths in furrowed Indian faces. Under them hung a dream catcher that was gray with age. Several minutes passed as neither Lance nor Willy spoke.