“At the Pinewood Broiler. Waaboo, Skye, and I are having a little afternoon snack here.”
“Have you heard from Annie or Stephen?”
“No. What’s going on?”
“Nothing, I hope. But as quickly as possible I want all of you together at home, okay? Marsha’s sending a deputy to meet you there.”
“And you say nothing’s going on?”
“I think someone may be trying to harm Stephen, and if he can’t get at Stephen, I’m afraid he might go for you or Annie or even Waaboo.”
“Who is he?”
“I’ll explain everything when I’m there with you. Right now, you need to get yourself and Waaboo home, is that clear?”
“We’re on our way, Dad.”
“Marsha and I are heading back to Tamarack County. It’ll take us maybe three hours. In the meantime, if you hear from Annie or Stephen, make them understand they’ve got to get home, too. Okay?”
“I’ve got it. Can Marsha send a deputy out to Crow Point?”
“She already has. Take care of yourself, kiddo, and my grandson.”
“That’s a big ten-four, Dad.”
* * *
They were an hour north of the Twin Cities. Cork hadn’t said a word for a very long time. Finally Dross said, “I know you. You’re beating yourself up. In silence.”
Cork looked out the window at the frozen landscape. “I should have seen the connections.”
“They’re pretty obscure, Cork.”
“You saw them.”
“Not all of them. I didn’t see the connection to you. And you were innocent in the whole affair; there’s no reason you should have seen it either. And there’s another thing, Cork.”
He waited.
She gave him a quick, sidelong glance. “You’ve been emotionally involved in this one. It might be that you just couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”
Which gave him no comfort at all.
His cell phone rang. He checked the display. The call was coming from the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.
“O’Connor,” he answered.
“This is Azevedo,” the deputy on the other end said. “Cork, there’s been some trouble up on Crow Point.”
“Stephen?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What’s going on, George?”
Azevedo hesitated, let a beat filled with ominous silence pass, then said, “He’s been shot.”
Cork’s mouth went instantly dry and the breath went out of him. For a moment, he felt as if he was suffocating. His heart thumped deep in his chest and blood pulsed through his temples and a voice screamed in his head, God, no!
“Give me all of it.” He spoke calmly even as he tried to prepare himself for the worst.
“He’s alive, Cork. He’s been taken to the ER at Aurora Community Hospital. He’s still unconscious and his condition is critical.” Again, Azevedo was silent and Cork had the sense that there was more bad to come. “When Pender pulled him from the water, Stephen wasn’t breathing.”
“From the water?”
“He was shot twice, but what stopped his breathing was the drowning.”
“Drowning?”
Azevedo went on, quickly now. “The ER doctor says the drowning was actually a good thing. Stephen’s whole system shut down, and the intense cold kept more damage from being done. Pender revived him, and the EMTs did good preliminary treatment of his wounds. He still has one of the bullets in him, and the doctors are trying to decide when it might be safe to take it out.”
“Annie,” Cork said. “What about Annie?”
“She’s okay. She was the one who put in the 911 call. But whoever it was that attacked Stephen went after your daughter, too.”
“Was she hurt?”
“Not at all. She scared him off. According to what she’s told me, she shot at the guy, and he ran.”
“Shot at him? With what?”
“She’ll tell you the whole story when you get here. Is the sheriff with you?”
Dross had been casting Cork all kinds of questioning looks but had said nothing while she concentrated on driving.
“She’s with me,” Cork said. “Behind the wheel right now.”
“Tell her to come straight to the hospital. I’ll meet you both there. And if anything changes, Cork, I’ll let you know.”
“Jenny and my grandson?”
“They’re all right. Deputy Weber’s escorting them to the hospital right now.”
“Thanks, George. Thanks a million.”
“See you soon.” With that, Azevedo ended the call.
“Hit your lights and siren, Marsha,” Cork said. “We need to get to Tamarack County. Now.”
* * *
They were all in the Intensive Care waiting area—Jenny, Waaboo, Skye. And Anne. Cork had never seen her looking so hollow, so frail, so afraid. In the O’Connor family, Anne was the iron rod of faith. She’d seen killing before, been in the middle of a brutal attack in the hallways of her high school. Even in the face of that incomprehensible slaughter, she’d held to her faith. But whatever had been so solid in her before, so powerful, seemed to have melted away. Cork took his daughter in his arms, and she laid her head against his chest and wept and wept.
When she was finally able to talk, she told him about Stephen’s sweat, about the unsuccessful rounds of trying to bring a vision, about the man who’d seemed to materialize from nowhere, and about the shooting.
“Then he came for me.” At this point, Anne stopped and broke down again.
“That’s okay,” Cork said. “Take your time.”
She wiped at her tears. “I ran, Dad. I ran like a coward.”
“If you hadn’t run, you and Stephen might not be here now,” Cork pointed out gently. “It was the wise thing to do.”
She shook her head violently. “I didn’t do it because it was wise. I did it because I was afraid.”
“You’re human, Annie.”
“The worst kind of human.”
Cork wanted to draw her away from useless recrimination. He said, “Deputy Azevedo told me you shot at the guy. How’d you manage that?”
“I knew it wouldn’t do any good to go back to Rainy’s place. There wasn’t anything there that would help me. I remembered that Henry keeps his old Remington hung on the wall of his cabin. I just hoped he hadn’t taken it with him when he left for Thunder Bay. So I ran to Henry’s cabin, and there was his rifle.”
“See?” Cork said. “You kept your head. You must have remembered where Henry stores his shells.”
She nodded. “In the carved wooden box in his cupboard. So I grabbed the Remington, dug out some rounds from the box, fed them into the magazine, and stepped into the doorway. When that guy was thirty yards away, I fired.”
“At him?” Although Anne, in her youth, had never had any interest in hunting, she’d been a pretty good competitive skeet shooter. If she’d fired at the stranger from such close range, unless she’d been completely rattled, she should have dropped him.
“Over his head,” she replied. “To scare him.”
“It worked, apparently.”
“Yeah. He ran.”
“And if he hadn’t run?”
Anne shook her head. “Maybe I would have shot him. I don’t know.”
“What did you do then?”
She told him she watched the man head back to the lake and cross the ice to an island off the point. He got onto a snowmobile and zipped back toward Aurora. Then she hurried to Rainy’s cabin, called 911 on her cell phone, and ran down to the open water on Iron Lake. Stephen wasn’t anywhere in sight. She went into the water, trying to find him, but he was gone. And the water was so bitter cold that she couldn’t stand it for long.
That’s when Deputy Duane Pender, who’d been sent by Marsha Dross, showed up in his Cherokee. He’d reached Crow Point following the packed snowmobile trails Stephen had left in his comings and goings. Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department dispatch had been i
n contact with him, so he already knew the situation. Anne pointed him toward the open water, and to keep her from freezing, he told her to stay by the fire that she and Stephen had built to heat the Grandfathers. He moved along the shoreline quickly, searching from dry ground, then went out onto the ice and edged his way along the perimeter of the open water. He finally spotted Stephen’s body, most of which had drifted just under the edge of the ice shelf. He had no choice but to go in, which he did, and he pulled Stephen to shore. Stephen wasn’t breathing.
“I asked him if Stephen was dead,” Anne said. “He told me no one is dead until they’re warm and dead. He said we had to get Stephen breathing again but we also needed to keep him cold.”
Good man, Cork thought. Because keeping Stephen cold until he was in a hospital increased the chances of mitigating the damage, from both the wounds and the drowning.
“Even standing next to the fire, I was freezing,” Anne went on. “I knew Duane had to be freezing, too, but he went ahead and began CPR there at the lakeshore. A couple of minutes later the EMTs arrived and took it from there. They put Stephen in the back of the ambulance, and Duane and I followed them.”
“Still in your wet clothes?” Cork asked.
“Yeah. But Duane had blankets in his Cherokee and he turned the heater up to blast furnace and it was nice and warm. After I got here, Jenny brought me dry things from home.” She plucked at the big red wool sweater she wore.
“Why didn’t you or Stephen answer when I called your cell phones?”
“We had them turned off. Stephen insisted on it when he got ready for his sweat. I didn’t turn it back on until I called 911, and then, I don’t know, I must’ve lost it when I went into the water after Stephen because it’s gone now.”
Waaboo sat with Skye, who was entertaining him by giving voice to Bart, which was the name Waaboo had bestowed on the stuffed orangutan Skye had brought him as a gift. That left Jenny free to talk with Cork and Anne.
“They’ve been working on Stephen since we got here, so we haven’t been able to see him,” Jenny told Cork. “As far as we know, he’s still unconscious. They told us that they have to get him stabilized before they can operate and take the bullet out of him.”
Deputy Azevedo had met them at the hospital, and he and Marsha Dross had been standing nearby while they listened to Anne’s story.
Dross said, “Annie, did you get a good look at the shooter?”
“Yes.”
Dross turned to Azevedo. “Get me a recent mug shot of Walter Frogg.”
Azevedo nodded and left.
“Walter Frogg?” Anne asked.
Cork said, “The man we think is behind all this craziness.”
“I never heard of him,” Anne said. “Why would he want to hurt Stephen?”
Dross slipped her coat on and said, “Cork, you explain. I’m going back to the department and get my guys rolling on locating Frogg.”
“Thanks, Marsha.”
Cork turned to the questioning faces of his daughters and began the long explanation.
CHAPTER 37
That night, Henry Meloux returned to Tamarack County.
Cork, Anne, and Skye were still at the Aurora Community Hospital, waiting for the doctors to make a decision about when to operate on Stephen, who had not yet regained consciousness. Jenny had taken Waaboo home and put him to bed. Marsha Dross had given Deputy Reese Weber the job of standing guard at the O’Connor house, while she and the rest of the department tried to find Walter Frogg.
Soon after Cork had arrived at the hospital, one of the physicians, a doctor who said he was a hospitalist, had come to the waiting room. He’d shown Cork an X-ray of Stephen’s spine and explained that two bullets had entered Cork’s son. One had passed completely through his body, doing minimal damage.
“I was concerned that a bowel might have been nicked as the bullet traversed,” the hospitalist had said, “but the CT scan showed no fluid leakage. So at the moment, I believe that, in terms of that wound, we’re dealing with nothing that routine surgery won’t repair. The other bullet, however, apparently ricocheted off one of Stephen’s ribs and has become lodged in his spinal column. Here.” The doctor had pointed to a place on the X-ray. “Between the L-four and L-five vertebrae.”
Cork could see clearly the white bone image of the lumbar vertebrae and, nested between them, the small shape of the bullet, like a tick feeding on his son’s backbone. To remove the bullet, the doctor had explained, required more expertise than anyone at the community hospital possessed. He’d made arrangements to have Stephen airlifted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, which was a good Level II trauma center and where there were excellent surgeons who could perform this procedure. The hospitalist also told him that, in removing Stephen from the water and administering CPR, Deputy Pender may have exacerbated the situation, lodged the bullet more precariously against Stephen’s spinal cord.
This was information Cork knew he would do his best to keep from Pender.
He’d asked about the damage that may already have been done to Stephen’s spinal cord.
“It’s hard to say. We’ll know more when he regains consciousness and we talk to him. At the moment, I’m most concerned about reducing the swelling around his spinal column. That and dealing with his hemodynamic instability.”
“What’s that?”
“Basically, acute circulatory failure. His body has experienced enormous shocks. The bullets, the icy water, the drowning. His heart and his entire vascular system aren’t pushing blood along in the way they typically would, the way they need to for him to maintain normal body functioning.”
“You said, ‘when he regains consciousness.’ When will that be?”
“I can’t say, Mr. O’Connor. We’ll have to wait and see.”
They’d finally been allowed into Stephen’s room in the ICU. Skye sat with Anne, holding her hand. Anne’s eyes had often been closed, perhaps in prayer, though Cork couldn’t say for sure. He didn’t know where his younger daughter stood on the question of her faith at the moment. Him, he’d gone through a whole litany of silent supplications. Stephen hadn’t moved the entire time. Partly, this was because he’d been fitted with braces that immobilized him in order to prevent any movement that might contribute to spinal cord damage. But it was also because he still hadn’t regained consciousness. He lay hooked to a big monitoring device. An IV drip tube ran from a packet of clear liquid to a needle inserted in his left arm. Taped into the crook of his right arm was another needle, capped, through which necessary drugs and medications could be easily administered.
At one point, Skye said, “Does anyone want coffee?”
Cork told her yes, and thanked her. Anne shook her head.
When Skye left, Cork said, “She’s a good friend, Annie.”
“Friend?” Anne looked at him, so tired that all the emotion seemed wrung out of her. “She’s more than that, Dad. We’re in love.”
Cork finally understood the secret, which, he figured, everyone except him had known almost from the beginning of Anne’s homecoming. Perhaps it should have felt more momentous, but it simply made him sad. What he wanted for Anne, what any parent wants for his child, was for her to be happy. Yet loving Skye and Skye loving her only seemed to have made Anne uncertain and conflicted and afraid. It had sent her running from the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, sent her running home.
“I like her,” Cork said. Then he said, “Do you know what you’ll do, Annie? Stay with the sisters or go with Skye?”
She bent forward in her chair, as if a great weight lay on her back. The hospital window was behind her, black night beyond the glass. “I’ve offered myself to God,” she said. “I’ve promised that if Stephen lives, I’ll give my life back to the Church.”
“You really believe God deals that way?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. I’ve never been so confused. There are moments when I wonder if this isn’t God’s way of punishing me.”
�
��God would use Stephen to take out his anger at you? Oh, Annie.”
He’d been sitting a dozen feet away. He got up from his chair, crossed the hospital room, and sat down next to Anne. He put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders, drew her to him, and laid his cheek against her hair. He understood exactly why she would bargain with God. If he thought it was possible, he’d have struck any deal necessary—with God or the Devil—to make sure Stephen didn’t die. If there were a way, he’d have crawled into that hospital bed himself and traded places with his son.
“When you left to be with the sisters, I remember how happy you were.” His breath, as he whispered, made her hair ripple as if in a gentle breeze. “I’d love to see you that happy again. I don’t care whether it’s with Skye or with the sisters.”
Skye returned with coffee in two disposable cups. Cork kissed the top of his daughter’s head and gave Skye back her place next to Anne.
* * *
It was late, and the hospital had become a quiet place. Anne and Skye had gone back to the waiting area, where the chairs were more comfortable and where there was a couch in case one of them wanted to lie down and sleep a bit. Cork had been sitting alone, going over and over in his mind LaPointe’s story, trying to come to terms with his own part in what was almost certainly the conviction of an innocent man, trying to wrap his understanding around the place LaPointe had come to, which despite all the walls that surrounded him, was, he claimed, exactly the place he preferred to be. How many people at the end of their lives could say with true conviction that concrete walls and iron bars didn’t, in fact, a prison make? The only man besides LaPointe that Cork could imagine responding in this same way was Henry Meloux.
And no sooner had he thought this than Meloux appeared. Cork had his head down and didn’t realize the Mide had come into the ICU room until he felt the old man’s hand on his shoulder and heard the familiar voice say quietly, “Boozhoo, Corcoran O’Connor.”
Cork looked up from the white linoleum and found Meloux’s face, a thousand wrinkles the color of wet creek sand, set with eyes as dark as pecan shells and soft with compassion.
“Henry?” He didn’t try to hide his surprise.
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