Tamarack County: A Novel

by William Kent Krueger

  Ray Jay had lived in terror for days, and then LaPointe was arrested and admitted he’d killed the woman and said nothing at all about Harmon and Ray Jay Wakemup having been there. Ray Jay didn’t know the why of it, but he was greatly relieved.

  He followed the story in the papers—it was all over the North Country news—and many of the things he read bothered him. What bothered him most was that, besides LaPointe’s own admission of guilt, the most damning evidence seemed to be the skin found under the dead woman’s fingernails, and the fact that LaPointe had scratches down his cheek. And the reason this bothered him so much was that Ray Jay remembered no scratches being there at all when he and his brother had picked Otter LaPointe up from the chair in the living room and dragged him into the bedroom and laid him out on the bed beside the woman who had seemed to be merely sleeping but, he’d come to understand, was already dead.

  And when he thought more about it, he realized that LaPointe had been sacked out in the living room chair in a stoned and drunken stupor when the woman had gone to the bathroom, naked, and then returned to the bedroom, after which the sound of Harmon’s laughter had been clear.

  And the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that it hadn’t been LaPointe who’d killed Karyn Bowen.

  He kept all this in his heart. He didn’t dare speak to Harmon, who was prone to fits of rage. And then LaPointe was convicted and sentenced to forty years, a lifetime, it seemed to Ray Jay, and the truth became like razor blades in his heart. He had to tell someone.

  He’d been raised Catholic, more or less—probably less than more—and hadn’t been to confession in forever. But having no one else to advise him, he went to confession at St. Agnes. Ray Jay spoke to the priest there in vagaries about knowing a terrible truth that might get him into trouble if he shared it. The priest tried to pry out of him the exact nature of this truth, but Ray Jay didn’t cough it up. In the end, the priest’s advice was to unburden himself. Until he did this, Ray Jay’s conscience wouldn’t give him rest and his soul would carry a stain.

  So, alone and more scared than he’d ever been, he went to the Tamarack County sheriff’s office and asked to speak to the only cop he knew, Cork O’Connor, who was a breed, a man with Ojibwe blood in him. But O’Connor wasn’t there, and the man who came out instead was big and red faced and smelled of cigars. He looked at Ray Jay in the way a lot of white people looked at Indians. He took Ray Jay back to his office and explained that he was the sheriff and whatever Ray Jay had to say to Deputy O’Connor could be said to him. So Ray Jay spilled his story. The sheriff listened and told him to wait and went outside for a very long time, and when he came back in, he brought with him two other men, neither of whom was Cork O’Connor. One man said he was Judge Carter, and he introduced the other as Sullivan Becker, the Tamarack County attorney. Judge Carter asked Ray Jay to repeat the story he’d told the sheriff, and Ray Jay did.

  Afterward, all the men went back out and left Ray Jay alone. He had to pee, and he sat uncomfortable and fidgeting. He’d become sorry, very sorry, that he’d said anything to anyone, and he knew that Harmon would kill him when he found out, and all he wanted to do was run away. Finally, the men returned. The judge stood in front of him and looked down, and Ray Jay thought that God, when he sent someone to hell, probably looked exactly like that. The judge told him that no one believed his story. The judge told him that if they did believe it, it would mean that Ray Jay would go to prison for the rest of his life. Did Ray Jay know what happened to boys who went to prison? They were sodomized. Did Ray Jay know what that meant? Ray Jay did, and Ray Jay didn’t want that to happen to him. The judge told him to go home and to say nothing to anyone about this, ever. If he did, the judge would see to it that Ray Jay ended up behind bars, bent over and with someone’s dick up his ass.

  Ray Jay never said a word of this, not to anyone, until, at thirty-six years of age, he entered AA and tried to make amends.

  When Corrine Heine made the whole thing public, a media circus had followed. Everyone associated with the case was interviewed, including Cork, who maintained he’d known nothing about Ray Jay’s story. Sheriff Roy Arneson had died of cancer several years earlier, so he couldn’t shed any light. Judge Ralph Carter denied everything, as did Sullivan Becker, who, at the urging of an old law school classmate, had moved to Florida not long after the LaPointe case and gone to work for the Dade County DA, where he made a name for himself prosecuting organized crime.

  The kicker was that LaPointe continued to insist that he had, in fact, committed the crime for which he’d been sentenced over twenty years earlier. When Heine vowed to get the case reviewed based on Ray Jay’s account, LaPointe would not agree to be a party to it, and he’d stayed in jail.

  After the story broke, Cork talked with Ray Jay Wakemup, who swore that every word of what he’d said was true. Cork had tried to see LaPointe, but the man was refusing visitors. In the end, as they always do, things settled down. The media moved on to other stories, and the questions surrounding the truth of Karyn Bowen’s death became subjects of idle speculation, mostly over beer in the taverns of Tamarack County.

  At the time, Cork had spent a good many restless nights considering his own culpability in all this. What he understood was that Ray Jay had not actually seen who committed the murder, and his perceptions, impaired by drugs, probably couldn’t be trusted. There was LaPointe’s continued insistence that justice had, in fact, been meted out correctly. And finally there was Roy Arneson, damn him, who’d left Cork totally in the dark about Ray Jay’s confession. Were it not for all these factors, Cork might yet have been plagued with guilt. But after a while he, too, let go of constantly mulling over the questions about that ancient case.

  Eventually, the whole affair had faded away, even in the barrooms of Tamarack County.

  Now someone had killed Ray Jay Wakemup’s dog and left his head as . . . what? There’d been nothing to indicate the reason, no note except “Welcome Home, Ray Jay!” Yet, as he drove toward Allouette to make sure of the Daychilds’ safety that night, Cork began to wonder if someone was finally calling Ray Jay to account for the sins of the past, sins still unforgiven.

  CHAPTER 24

  When the doorbell rang, Stephen didn’t respond immediately. He thought, This is what it’s like here. Colder than you could ever imagine. Hope you enjoy it, Skye.

  The bell rang again, and from upstairs, Jenny called, “Stephen, get the door.”

  He crossed the living room in no hurry, took hold of the doorknob, but gave himself another few seconds before opening up.

  Skye Edwards stood in the light from the porch lamp, smiling at him out of the oval frame her parka hood created around her face. In one hand, she carried a big plastic bag with “Four Seasons” printed in elegant script across the side.

  “Hi,” Stephen said, with no great enthusiasm. He stood aside so that she could enter.

  She brought the cold. It not only came in the air that entered with her but poured off her clothing. She made a brrrrr sound and stamped her feet and said, “Oh, God, I think my toes are going to fall off.” She flipped the parka off her head. “Boozhoo, Stephen. Did I say that right?”

  “Close enough,” Stephen replied.

  She shed her parka and glanced around. “Where should I put this?”

  “I’ll take it.” He nodded toward her boots, which had carried in snow on their soles. “Leave those on the mat by the door.” He hung the parka in the closet in the hallway.

  Skye put down the plastic bag she carried, knelt and undid her laces. “Where’s Jenny?”

  “Putting Waaboo down.”

  “Oh, I’d hoped I could spend some time with him.”

  “Past his bedtime already.”

  “Next time,” she said brightly and put her boots together on the mat. “Would you give this to him when he’s awake?” She reached into the bag she’d brought and lifted out a stuffed orangutan two feet tall. “I picked it up in the gift shop at the hot
el. I hope he likes stuffed animals.”

  “I’ll give it to him,” Stephen said.

  He figured he should invite her into the living room, but instead he stood more or less blocking her entrance to the rest of the house. She kept on smiling, and her eyes went past him, taking in the living room and dining room.

  “You have a lovely home here,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t have anything to do with that. I was kind of born into it.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  Jenny came down the stairs. “Hello, Skye.”

  The two women embraced warmly, and Stephen felt something go hard in him, like a fist.

  “Annie’s told me so much about you, I almost feel like we’re sisters,” Skye said, holding both of Jenny’s hands in her own.

  “Do you have siblings?”

  “A mean, older stepsister straight out of Cinderella. And a brother who’s nowhere near as nice as Stephen.” She threw him an easy smile.

  “Come in, won’t you?” Jenny invited and led the way into the living room. “Can we get you something to drink? Beer, wine, soda?”

  “Red wine?”

  “We have merlot.”

  “Perfect.”

  Jenny looked at the stuffed orangutan in Stephen’s hands. “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

  Skye answered, “I brought it. A present for Waaboo. I hope it’s okay.”

  Jenny laughed. “It’s perfect. Thank you. I’ll give it to him when he’s awake in the morning.” She took the orangutan from Stephen and said to him, “You know where the wine is. And could you pour a glass for me, too? And one for yourself, if you’d like.”

  “Not of legal age yet,” Stephen pointed out dourly.

  “Special occasion,” Jenny replied. “And just one glass. But only if you’d like.”

  What he’d like, he thought, was to get drunk, something he’d never done before. He went to the kitchen, got out three wineglasses and the bottle, already opened, and poured wine for them all. When he came back to the living room, Jenny and Skye were on the sofa, laughing together.

  “Before she wanted to be a nun, she was dead set on becoming the first female quarterback for Notre Dame,” Jenny said.

  “On the softball field, I’ve never seen a better pitching arm. She’s amazing. Thanks, Stephen.” Skye took the glass he offered. “What about you?” she asked Jenny. “Do you play softball?”

  “Annie and Stephen got all the athletic genes.”

  Skye watched Stephen slump into an easy chair. “You play sports, Stephen?”

  “I run.”

  “Cross-country,” Jenny said. “He’s good.”

  Skye said, “Annie’s a runner, too. I admire the endurance it takes. Me, I like fast action.”

  Stephen hated this, the pointlessness of this kind of conversation. He wanted to say, “Why? Why Annie?” No, he wanted to shout it. And he wanted to shout, “Get out of Annie’s life and leave her alone!” Instead, he sat and sulked while the two women carried on like old friends.

  In a few minutes, the pizza arrived. Stephen had the dining room table already set, and Jenny had thrown a tossed salad together before she put Waaboo to bed. They ate, and Jenny and Skye drank more wine, and Stephen brooded.

  “Always this quiet, Stephen?” Skye finally asked.

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere, mostly because Stephen had been off for a while in his own head, having a stern imaginary conversation with this intruder from California.

  Skye put down the wineglass she was holding and turned her whole self toward him. “Or is there something you’d like to talk about?”

  It was so pointed an opening that he knew exactly what she meant. And although he’d been primed all evening for a confrontation, he said, “Nothing.”

  Jenny said, “Stephen, it’s okay to talk about it.”

  “In fact,” Skye said, “I wish you would. It’s easier if everything’s on the table.”

  “There’s nothing easy about this,” Stephen shot back. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Someone who loves your sister very much.”

  “Annie’s a . . . a . . .”

  “A woman?”

  “A nun!”

  “Not yet, she isn’t, Stephen,” Skye said gently.

  “Not ever, if you have your way.”

  “You must be pretty strong in your faith to care so much about Annie’s vocation.”

  “It’s not about my faith. It’s about what we’re called to do. Annie was called a long time ago. She’s known since she was a little kid that she’d be a nun.”

  “Or the first female quarterback for Notre Dame,” Skye said. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “This isn’t about her being a lesbian,” Stephen said. “Honest to God, that doesn’t matter to me. She could prefer polar bears for all I care. The thing is that when you’re called to a higher purpose, you don’t just turn your back when the first temptation comes along.”

  Skye folded her napkin and set it beside her plate. She seemed to be considering her words carefully. “Stephen, I don’t think of myself as just some temptation.” She leaned nearer. “Is there a young woman you like a lot? Someone very special to you?”

  Stephen thought instantly of Marlee and was ashamed that with the same thought came the image of those haunting breasts.

  “I can see there is,” Skye said. “What if some guy made a play for her, tried to take her away from you? What would you do?”

  “God’s not just some guy.”

  “I’m not religious, Stephen, so to me that’s exactly who he is. And not just some guy, but a myth. Annie, on the other hand, is very real to me, and I love her with all my heart.”

  “Then you won’t try to interfere with what she’s doing out at Crow Point.”

  “What is she doing, Stephen?”

  Jenny, who’d been quiet in this long exchange, said, “I can tell you that, Skye. We had a long talk today. She’s struggling, struggling like she never has before. She’s told you about the school shooting here?”

  “School shooting?”

  “It was headline news five years ago. When Annie was a senior, her best friend was killed by a kid on a rampage at our high school. He was going to kill Annie, too, but God intervened. At least, that’s how Annie has always seen it. That experience turned her from trying to be a quarterback at Notre Dame to spending her life in the service of others, and doing it as a nun.”

  “You didn’t know?” Stephen said, making his voice purposely incredulous. “And you’re supposed to be so close to her.”

  “It was an important turning point in her life,” Jenny went on. “The important turning point. And she’s never doubted her journey since. Until now.”

  Skye sat back, looking a little stunned. “I didn’t know.” But only a moment later, a defiant fire came into her eyes. “But I do know about your aunt Rose and her husband, Mal. Annie’s told me they’re very happy together, and that they don’t feel guilty at all that he left the priesthood to marry her. She said they both figure God had a different vocation in mind for them. So why not for her?”

  Jenny said, “I can’t answer that. Only Annie can. I think Stephen’s point is that it’s a consideration maybe best done alone.”

  “And I’m an interference?”

  “A distraction,” Jenny said.

  Skye said, “I think I’d better go,” and she stood up.

  “There’s dessert,” Jenny offered.

  Skye looked at them both, and although Stephen didn’t care for her presence, he wasn’t blind to the struggle he could see on her face. “I’ve never been in love like this before. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but if I decide I can’t let Annie go, I’ll do everything I can to keep her. And, Stephen, if that makes me a monster in your eyes, we’ll both just have to live with that.”

  Jenny saw her to the door, and Stephen heard them exchange words, but too quietly for him to make them out. When S
kye had gone, Jenny came back to the table and sat down. “In the end, Stephen, it’s Annie’s life. And you and me and Dad, we have no more right to interfere with her decision than Skye does. I think her question to you was valid, and one you ought to think about.”

  “What question?”

  “How would you feel if someone tried to take Marlee away?”

  But Stephen already knew the answer to that. Someone had tried it, someone in a green, mud-spattered pickup. And, afterward, all Stephen had wanted to do was shoot the bastard dead.

  CHAPTER 25

  For dinner, Stella Daychild heated up a couple of cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, made some grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta, and opened a bag of Old Dutch potato chips. For dessert, she offered Oreo cookies and vanilla ice cream, but Cork passed on that and settled for a cup of strong black coffee.

  Marlee ate with them but seemed tired through the whole meal and said very little. When it was over, she laid herself down on the sofa, turned on the television, and was soon sound asleep.