The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  I twisted a sheet of newspaper, lit it, and thrust it up the chimney to see if the flue was clear. The smoke sucked quickly upward, drops of rain spattering my hand. I built a fire in the long charred grate and watched it roar. It was a comfortable, large room. A 1937 copy of Esquire lay on an end table. I opened some of the windows, heard the rain in the trees.

  There was canned food in the kitchen, a set of plain dishes, assorted scotches, bourbons, gins, mixes, brandies. Dishes stood in a rubber rack where they’d been placed to drain. A copy of a Minneapolis newspaper from a month before lay on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Maybe that was why the place didn’t seem echoing and cold and deserted. It was never left unattended for long.

  The fire took the chill out of my bones and left me half hypnotized. I watched the flames lashing the dry logs for what seemed like a long time, my conscious mind utterly blacked out. When I snapped out of it thunder was rolling overhead and rain was drumming steadily in the gutters beneath the eaves. I got stiffly up, went back to the kitchen, opened a can of Folgers coffee, filled a glass percolator with water, put coffee in the basket, and set it on the gas stove. I went out on the front porch to wait for the coffee, stood listening to the rain and the wind and the thunder. It was so dark I couldn’t see the trees. In Minneapolis the sky would be pink with the lights. It never got this dark in Minneapolis; the night both lured and frightened me.

  I drank coffee and brandy by the fire, eyes closed, wondering what Kim was doing. Last night seemed a long time ago to me, but I summoned her up again, called her into my mind’s eye. I was very tired and my mind wandered. Was Ma Dierker getting herself pulled back together? Did she realize what a mission she’d sent me on? Her hatred for Kim had started the whole thing. It was like falling down a mine shaft, waiting for the splash you were going to make at the bottom. Waiting. Waiting. It was too dark to see the bottom, you didn’t know where you were, but the farther you fell, the more certain you were that it was down there, waiting for you.

  10

  I WOKE UP TO THE earthy smell of a wet morning and the evocative aroma of freshly perking coffee. It took me a minute to square myself with my surrounding. I’d fallen asleep on, a couch before the fireplace, where the coals had died, and I came to, groggy and stiff. Where the hell was the coffee smell coming from? I staggered up and rubbed my eyes, smoothed out some of the wrinkles.

  “Good morning. Have I been making too much noise?”

  It was Kim Roderick, standing in the front hallway, wiping her hands on a dish towel, smiling cheerily. Her teeth shone white in an uncharacteristic smile.

  “Ah, no, I smelled coffee—look, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Don’t look so fierce. Are you angry? I hate people who drop in unexpectedly … But I guess I thought you wouldn’t mind, I thought you might be pleased …” Her smile had turned quizzical, almost hurt, surprisingly vulnerable. She waited expectantly. A cold breeze flapped through the open windows.

  “No, give me a second and I’ll be pleased,” I said. “I feel it coming on already, a definite sensation of pleasure. No other name for it.” I yawned. “But you take me by surprise, madam. I did not expect to wake to find you in my kitchen …” I followed her to the kitchen, where she had a plate of sweet rolls and coffee cups at hand.

  “I told you I came from a little town up north—Grande Rouge happens to be it. I came up to visit my father. I told you I was going out of town for the weekend …” She poured coffee and dripped cream into mine. “It just turns out we were going the same place.” She was smiling again, making very precise little moves around the big kitchen. She wore faded Levi’s, a checked blue-and-white shirt underneath a baggy old blue sweater. I excused myself and ducked into the bathroom. When I came back she was perched on a counter sipping coffee with a rim of confectioner’s sugar on her lip.

  “But how did you know I was here?” I said.

  “He told me—my father. You talked to him yesterday.”

  “I did? The cop? The town cop. He’s your father?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s all … there wasn’t anyone else—”

  “Ted Hook,” she said, peering at me over the old green cup.

  “Ted Hook!” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice. “My God, he’s eighty or so …”

  “Oh, please, don’t look so startled,” she said, her mouth making a tiny move, as if to say it would all be explained if I’d only give it time. “Look at it this way, you’ve been curious about my past, haven’t you? Now events—and my own inclinations, which I haven’t tried to explain to myself—are conspiring in your favor, you’re going to find out where this peculiar woman has come from, what her secrets are.”

  I nodded a trifle dumbly.

  “Maybe it’s my fate, that you should find out about me. In any case, it’s a small world, everyone knows that, and everyone has to come from somewhere. This place is where I come from, at least partly, this is one of the things I’ve spent my life trying to get away from—but here you are and I’m beginning to think there’s no escaping you.” She frowned at me. “Oh, you should have seen me when Ted told me you’d been here—my God, I was positively frothing. Not even up here could I get away from your poking and digging. But then I calmed down, he told me what you’d had to say, and my paranoia cooled somewhat—I decided you weren’t out to get me, that you had no idea I’d come from Grande Rouge. So, I decided a surprise visit might be fun.” She caught my eye for an instant, looked quickly away. “And I could prove to myself that I’m not afraid of you … that was a factor, too.”

  “I don’t see myself as someone threatening you.” I took a bite of cherry Danish. “It’s all in your mind.”

  “Granted.” She sighed, then straightened her shoulders, as if getting a grip on herself again. “So,” she resumed, “Grande Rouge is a place I’ve tried to forget.”

  “Why? It’s not such a bad place—”

  “Memories, some bad memories. It represents what I don’t want, lots of people feel that way about the place they come from. And it’s a country of the mind, too, isn’t it? Where we come from.” She gave a small nervous laugh, self-deprecating.

  “Well, it’s one of those things, I guess. Subjective. But Ted said he had a son, not a daughter—”

  “That’s right, actually—just a bit of shorthand on my part. I think of Ted as my father, simply because I didn’t have one. Ted’s my uncle, my aunt’s husband.” She nodded at my expression of curiosity. “Right, Rita Hook was my aunt. Whoever my father was, he was only a biological entity, not a human being—I suppose my mother knew who he was. But she couldn’t have told me anyway. She died when she gave birth to me.” She was getting it out quickly, precisely, making it absolutely clear so she wouldn’t have to go over it all again. “This was all in Chicago, of course, and my mother’s sister, Rita, took me back home, here, to Grande Rouge. It all sounds complex in the telling, but it’s not, not really.”

  “So Rita brought you up … Funny, all the connections. Coincidence,” I mused, my mind slowing down to cope.

  “Coincidence is another name for fate, isn’t it? But, no, Rita didn’t bring me up. I hardly knew her … I was four years old when she went off.” She went on evenly, controlled, retaining her good temper in the face of what had to be a painful subject. “It’s peculiar, the way everybody kept sort of leaving me—my mother dying, my aunt going away, no father at all … then there was poor old Ted, so sick, just an invalid, and he seemed so remote from me, like a great-grandfather of some kind, he didn’t know what to make of us children … my brother and me.” She shook her head, shaking off the inaccuracy. “No, not my brother. He was my cousin … my God, I get so confused when I talk about all this, on those very rare occasions when I do talk about it.” She smiled, transparently seeking understanding, and I was having my own problems relating this Kim to the Kim I’d seen previously.

  “I can understand your problem,” I said. “It is confusing. But
why didn’t you just tell me straight out when I wanted to know? It was inevitable that I’d finally discover your connection—God knows it’s slight enough—your connection to the hunting and fishing club. Hell, I’m determined about things like that and once I got on to Rita I’d have come to you—”

  “Oh, come on, Paul! That’s not true at all … there was surely no certainty that you’d lead back to me, none at all …”

  “But what do you have to hide?”

  “Hide? Nothing to hide.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose, wiped crumbs from her mouth. Her dark eyebrows pulled together, almost meeting at the smallpox medallion. “But it’s not my favorite topic of conversation, as I’ve told you. Don’t be so dense! And, anyway, how could I possibly know that you’d turn out to be a maniac? That you’d just keep digging at it?”

  I laughed, warming to her. She wasn’t remote. Her face knit together and she glared at me. “Bullshit!” she shouted at my laughter.

  “Bullshit nothing … You’re right. How could you have known? I’d forgotten I’m a maniac. Out to get you.” I stood up without giving it a thought, compelled by the chauvinistic realization that she was awfully pretty when she was mad. One look from her, knowing what I had in mind, that I was going to touch her, stopped me short.

  “I don’t know what it is,” she murmured, “but you do worm it out of me, don’t you?” She paused and put her hands flat on the width of her thighs, her feet drumming on the cabinet door beneath her. Her ankles flashed tan. “Nobody, not a soul I know now, except Ole, of course, knows all this old stuff about me, the archaeology, the prehistory of my life. And, really, why should they? It’s my life, my business … I’m a different person now.” She slid down off the counter and went to stand by the kitchen’s screen door. Rain pattered softly on leaves.

  “But why isn’t your name Hook, Kim Hook? Where does Roderick come into it?”

  “Foster home,” she said, back to me, voice monotonic, getting it over with; but she must have known this would happen when she made the choice to come to the lodge—she must have. “We went into an orphanage in Duluth after my mother—after Rita, I mean Rita, my aunt—went away and Ted didn’t know how he’d be able to take care of us. Then I went into a foster home. I took their name.” She hugged herself in the doorway, standing straight, legs apart as if to brace herself.

  “And your cousin, the boy—Ted’s son—what happened to him?” I poured some fresh coffee and bit into another Danish.

  “He was older. He went to a different home, I never saw him again … I wouldn’t have known him any way, would I? I don’t think Ted ever saw him again either. He was older, Ted’s told me the boy resented being taken away from his home … he lost his mother, his father, his home. He never came back to visit Ted, held it all against Ted …”

  Later we went back into the front room and I threw fresh logs on the last night’s ashes, lit some newspapers beneath them. We sat down close to the fresh, snapping warmth, me on the couch, Kim on the floor, clasping her knees, staring into the flames. The cold dampness in the air penetrated to the bone. I wondered if she were sorry she’d come. I hoped not but that didn’t keep me from pursuing my own hares across the long fields of her past.

  “But you didn’t hold it against Ted? You came back, you stayed in touch even though you were hell-bent on escaping from the past …”

  “Sure, why not? I never felt Ted had been unfair to us. He was a sick man. I was too young to hold it against him and when I was older I realized it hadn’t been Ted’s fault … it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Then, when I was older, in my teens, I began to come back to visit Ted on my own, came back to live in the summer, work in the restaurant … He’s not a bad man. Life has played some nasty jokes on Ted, sometimes he’s confused, but he’s not bad.”

  “When did you drive up?”

  “Late last night. I wasn’t sure I was going to stop and see him so I didn’t tell him I was coming … I might have just driven on through and gone up to Thunder Bay, sometimes I don’t want to see anyone … I need to be alone at times.” She shifted her weight and glanced at me over her shoulder, smiled quickly, nervously. “As it turned out, I decided to see Ted—”

  “Are you sorry you stopped?” She looked back again, more tentative than she’d been the other times I’d seen her. Maybe it was the effect of the place, the memories. She shook her head, no.

  “I had breakfast with him this morning. He gets up at five thirty or six, says he doesn’t need sleep anymore. He told me you’d been there last night …” She turned to face me, dark-blue eyes shining, searching my face. “I’m not impulsive, you know, but coming out here was an impulse … I wanted to see the place.” She swallowed, sighed. “I thought you might be here. I was sure you’d be here, wasn’t I?”

  The fire crackled. I looked down at her in the quiet. My heart fluttered nervously. I felt very young. Her thick dark hair was pulled tightly back in pigtails, the tanned skin stretched tight across her bone structure. Her head was small and delicate and the lines of age etched only faintly, the merest hint of what the distant future might hold.

  “Did you know the club members then, when you were a kid? Did you know who they were when you went to Norway Creek … or was that a coincidence? Fate?”

  “No, not a coincidence. I knew who they were, vaguely. I’d met them when they came to have a drink or dinner at Ted’s. They would come in once in a while, visit with Ted, because of Rita, the fact that she’d worked for them before she went away, and they were nice, well-behaved men … they’d say hello to me, ask me how school was coming, whatever middle-aged men say to young girls … So, when I finally made the break and went to Minneapolis, I went to the Norway Creek Club—after all, it was the only angle I had, the only connection I had. I called Mr. Dierker and he helped me out. With a word or two to the right people …”

  “Did you meet Ole back then?”

  “No,” she said, “he wasn’t in the group by then … I met him later, at Norway Creek.”

  “I’d have thought by the time you were a teenager you’d have had plenty of financial backing from Ted. I mean, he was in pretty good shape once Rita disappeared, leaving all that money. You could have done anything you wanted, gone to school …”

  She shook her head, lips pursed. “You don’t know me, or didn’t know me then. I never let Ted give me any money. It wasn’t mine and I think I always had the funny feeling that Rita might turn up one day and want her money … It was hers, Paul, however she got it. And since no one ever knew where she went, why mightn’t she come back? Seemed quite possible to me.”

  “Do you still think she’s coming back?”

  “I suppose not,” she sighed, “but then, you never know. She might. Stranger things have happened.”

  “Yes,” I said, “they have, indeed. Coming back from the dead is nothing anymore.”

  “And who says she’s dead? Nobody knows. It’s a mystery.” A smile twinkled up at me. She’d gotten through the interrogation. I could feel her relief. “It was a matter of pride, Paul. I didn’t want the money. Even then I was beginning to realize that it was important for me to make it on my own, do things my own way.” She stood up. “Th-th-that’s all, folks,” she said.

  Together we explored the lodge, an unremarkable but intensely comfortable place, and went outside, where the rain had slackened to a fine mist. The trees dripped and the grass was fat, spongy underfoot. The water beaded up on the oily sweater I wore; she had on a beat-up old khaki windbreaker that was threadbare and bleached clean. We followed a path cut back through the beginning of forest, angling upward past slick rocks and mossy, damp tree trunks. Ahead, a hundred yards from the lodge, a cave yawned like a moist, toothless mouth. The path was almost overgrown, hadn’t been walked on in a long time. Standing at the opening, you could feel a stark chill, like the blast of winter from inside the earth’s hollow.

  “It’s the ice cave,” I said. “I’ve heard my father mention it. Sometimes when the i
ce wasn’t delivered in the old days, they’d keep beer up here. It’s a natural ice cave, year round—look, you can see your breath. Even out here—”

  “I don’t like it,” she said, a shiver jostling her voice. “I have claustrophobia, it’s terrible. And the cold … come on, let’s go back … I didn’t know it was up here, let’s go, Paul.” There was a fabric of panic in her voice, irrational, skirting terror. She was pulling at my arm.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay. We’ll go back.”

  She looked away quickly but I saw her eyes, wide, frightened. I put my arm around her shoulders, instinctively pulled her toward me, a protective gesture, and felt her take a deep breath. Then she pulled away and shook her head with a faint smile. “I’m all right. Really. Just a phobia, everyone has one.” Her hand brushed my, arm, but her mouth was tense; her hand fluttered, moved away. “Don’t worry,” she said, brightly forcing it. “I’ve brought a picnic lunch … I know a good place. I bet you’ll like it.” She was fine again but something had happened back there; I was seeing all sorts of things she’d not shown me before. The view of her past with all its attendant vulnerability acted like a relaxant on me, made me drop my own mask a bit, something I hadn’t done in a very long time. I wondered which one of us had more to fear, more to hide, back there in the corners of our minds.

  She drove the Mark IV, a brown bag of groceries in the backseat. We wound all the way back to town, then swept north along the lakeshore for a few miles, past Ted’s, past a scattering of isolated cabins, then down a rutted gravel road toward the lake. Light rain, almost like surf spray, glazed the windshield, and I could smell the water and the wet sand. She pulled off between clumps of gorse rooted in the sand and rock and I followed her down a narrow, natural stairway of rock slab. Driftwood, worm-eaten and smooth as marble, lay everywhere and I was winded when she stopped, gestured at a point of rock and land ahead of us.