Perhaps I was slow to see the truth of it, the only pattern that made sense. I’ve trekked back and forth over the same ground hundreds of times since that night, trying to discern an alarum, a flare in the night which might have warned me … but hindsight is irrelevant. I don’t know if it should have occurred to me earlier or not; in any case, it hadn’t, not until I was north of Duluth and it was a dark-gray five o’clock in the morning. That was when I finally realized who had been killing these old men … I almost smiled at it. Not quite, but almost. It had a very pure, cold kind of beauty to it. It chilled me. I felt as if icy water were closing all around me, numbing and tightening off all feeling, all sensibility, all ideas of right and wrong. I had to get to Kim before something awful happened.
I left Archie’s car in the shelter of some high, ragged brush and picked my way along the wet, sandy path toward the miniature castle she’d shown me. The rain had stopped and a stiff breeze strafed the beach, whipping the whitecaps on the steel-gray lake. I trudged on, head down, hands pushed into pockets, the gun feeling cold and alive, like a docile reptile. I was out of breath when I slid across the wet stone shingle and reached the castle. There was a fire going under a pot of coffee and two cups were placed neatly on a flat rock.
I stood beside the wall, sheltering from the wind, and saw the bronze Mark IV above on the level of the narrow roadway. I could see them down past the edge of the rock slabs, standing on the beach looking out at the vicious, swirling lake. She wore Levi’s, her army jacket, and her hair was loose, blowing in the wind. Her arms were crossed across her chest and she strode slowly along the sand, gulls swooping around her, water advancing toward her. He walked beside her, watching the sand.
She was still alive and I felt a long sigh escape me, my body relaxing. I watched her pace slowly along the rock shelf, spray exploding as she moved. Fog banks a mile out were moving inland.
She looked up finally and saw me, walked toward me, across the seventy yards of rock and beach. He stood alone, watched her moving away. I took her in as she came nearer; the flat gaze of her eyes, the purposeful walk, the slender boyish body I’d never known. When she was near, I stepped forward and held her; her arms went around me, her face beside mine, her grip strong and lingering.
“You’re all right,” I said. “I was so afraid I’d be too late, you’d be dead and that would be all there was …” I heard her breathing, felt the rise and fall of her in my arms, “Oh, God, I love you,” I said. “I love you and I don’t know what to do about it …” My emotions were being turned inside and out. I felt raw, exposed, cheated, fooled, finished. I was in over my head, had been from the beginning, and now it was too late. I knew too much not to know all of it.
I kissed her and she finally pulled her head away, looking away toward where he stood, straight, far away with gray water beyond.
“I knew you’d come. I asked Billy to come wait with me,” she said, watching my eyes. “I knew you’d find me if I came here and waited … but I didn’t want to be alone.” She smiled, looked away, rubbed her nose in the wind. “You’re like an extra side of myself—I wish I knew what that meant, for better or worse … I knew I’d never be able to hide from you … or hide anything from you.” She took a few steps past me, turned at the entrance to the tiny castle. “I’ve made us coffee, Paul.” I followed her inside. She stripped off the army jacket. She wore a heavy blue oiled wool sweater and knelt by the fire, poured me a cup of steaming black coffee. I wanted her near me forever. It was all unspeakably sad. “Well,” she said, “is it time to talk it through?”
“Yes.” I sat down on the rock ledge so I could look down at her small, perfect face, watched as she pursed her lips and sipped the coffee. She was perfect. There was color in her cheek, a glitter in her eyes, her dark hair shone. “You might as well tell me the whole truth this time. They’re all dead now … You and I are the only ones left, kiddo. Two survivors. And him.” I nodded toward the lake.
“Is the killing over?” she asked.
“Oh, I think so. Unless you or I get it in the denouement. What do you think? Is it over?”
“We’ll see, I suppose. It’s like everything else in life. Game’s never over till the last man’s out. Isn’t that what you baseball fans say? Till the last man is out?”
I nodded. “Take me through it … You’ve never told me all you know, Kim. And I realized a couple of hours ago that you know it all. Don’t you?”
When she had finished telling me the story, she stood up and stepped outside. There was a yellow haze in the sky over the lake and the breeze was warmer. I smelled the lake and the wet sand and the beach grass. She looked back at me, took a deep breath, and strolled back down toward the water’s edge. I stared after her, then sank back down beside the fire, filled my cup with the coffee’s dregs, and went outside. The sun was struggling to burn a hole through the fog. I saw my shadow on the castle wall and leaned there, watching her get smaller. My hand wasn’t shaking and I wasn’t breathing hard. I wondered if Billy was still there, waiting. It didn’t make any difference anymore.
She knew the whole story and laid it out for me with the kind of precision that was her custom. She had put it together herself. It was, like everyone else’s theory, perfect.
In 1931 the hunting and fishing club had been formed and the lodge near Grande Rouge had been built. That same year Rita married Ted Hook, bar owner and disabled veteran of the Great War, many years her senior. During the winter of 1931-1932 the club hired Rita Hook to run their lodge for them, do the cooking, keep it shipshape and attended year round. At the same time, she struck a bargain with the well-reared young blades from Minneapolis: She would serve as a ready and willing sexual partner for the entire group; it was a package deal for the enterprising Mrs. Hook, for which she was paid the handsome sum of one thousand dollars per month.
Late in 1932 Rita Hook gave birth to a son, Robert, and it was assumed that Ted Hook, not so frail as he appeared, was the father. In fact, Kim later learned, the father was a member of the group, though it was quite impossible to say which member. The group, as far as Rita’s services were concerned, consisted of Timothy Dierker, James Crocker, Father Martin Boyle, Jonathan Goode, Hubbard Anthony, and Carver Maxvill.
Eight years passed and life in Grande Rouge proceeded nicely. Rita was saving her money, laying countless plans, toying with the thoughts of her future as if they were moving-picture scenarios; a small-town girl who knew there was a great world and was doing what she could to reach it. But in 1940 she discovered she was again pregnant, a victim of either urgency or carelessness. She had no idea which one might be the father but knew that Ted could not be taken in again: Their sexual relationship, pitiful as it had been in the best of times, had ended not long after the birth of little Robert.
Always quick with a scheme, she concealed her own pregnancy, telling Ted that her sister in Chicago, who was not particularly robust, was pregnant by her sailor husband, who was off at sea as usual. Since she was alone and puny, she had written to ask Rita to visit her until the baby was born. Ted Hook didn’t really care one way or the other. Rita went. She lived with her sister, who wasn’t pregnant but was alone, and had her second child, a girl called Shirley. Rita brought the girl back to Grande Rouge, relating the sad events of her sister Patricia’s death in childbirth. It never occurred to anyone in Grande Rouge that something might be amiss. Chicago was awfully far away and, besides, who was there to care?
The members of the club accepted Rita’s request for an increase in her monthly check. After all, she had had two children by them and had been useful; she had retained her looks and her sexual performance remained quite unlike anything they were likely to find at home. But by 1944, with Robert twelve and Shirley four, Rita Hook had begun to feel that it was now or never. The years were gathering a weight of their own. If she wanted to escape, she would have to do it. The club members by then had grown prosperous and prominent. They could, she surmised, afford one final payoff and a good
-bye kiss.
She arranged for them all to visit the lodge the night of December 16, 1944. Without precisely threatening them, she flexed her muscles a bit, made sure they understood that attendance was mandatory. With Running Buck to drive her and watch the goings-on, she went to the lodge that dreadful night. She trusted Running Buck: He was mute when it came to blabbing white people’s affairs. She trusted him; she had told him most of the truth of her relationship with the club members, secure in the knowledge that he would never tell. She had needed to tell someone …
Her suggestion of a final payoff had not gone over well with her employers. She had moved on to overt blackmail threats. General Goode snapped, chased her out into the snow with a gun in his hand. Carver Maxvill had tried to intervene, to protect her. General Goode shot and killed them both and the entire group joined in burying the bodies in the ice cave. Running Buck never told what he had seen. The two orphans, Robert and Shirley, were clearly too much for Ted Hook. He arranged, in the aftermath of his wife’s “disappearance” (she was never found—neither was Maxvill; the investigation at the lodge was cursory, without evidence of foul play), for the children to go to an orphanage, the Sacred Heart, in Duluth. They moved on to new homes. Robert becomes Larry Blankenship in Bemidji and Shirley becomes Kim Roderick in Duluth. With the power of their positions and Martin Boyle’s Catholic connections, the club keeps track of their two children. A sense of duty which in the end was the proof that sealed their unhappy fates. The year was 1945.
Larry Blankenship never returned to Grande Rouge. He had no interest in learning of his father’s life or in what had happened to little Shirley. He rejected his past, blacked it out; at twelve he had been wounded too deeply by his “father’s” refusal to keep him. He washed his hands of the whole thing. He became Larry Blankenship.
But Kim, or Shirley, had retained a relationship with Ted Hook. By 1956, when she was sixteen, she was visiting him regularly in the summer, helping out in the roadhouse/motel Ted had built with the $150,000 Rita had saved from her monthly checks. Again, in another time and place, that $150,000 might have led to involved, finally incriminating investigations … but not in Grande Rouge. Ted had blinked hard and gotten his hands on the money. He had lived in Grande Rouge a long time. He knew the right people. He got the money.
While working in the restaurant, Kim at sixteen met Running Buck’s putative nephew, Billy Whitefoot, a handsome Indian boy with nice manners and a gentle way about him. Nature, as it will, took its course. During the summer of 1957 they became lovers. In 1958, having graduated from high school in Duluth, Kim went to Minneapolis and applied for a job at the Norway Creek Club, the city’s most impressive old-line country club. Why Norway Creek? Because she had come briefly to know the members of the hunting and fishing club during the summers she’d worked at Ted’s. Though she couldn’t have known it then, they had sent money for her expenses to the Rodericks in Duluth, explaining their generosity in terms of concern for the unfortunate child of a devoted servant who had run off leaving her children and ailing husband to fend for themselves. Kim did, of course, know who the men were when she met them in Grande Rouge at Ted’s. They spoke highly of “poor” Rita, expressed regret about her disappearance, and seemed nice … that was her word. Nice. She knew them only fleetingly but, yes, they were nice well-to-do men.
Which was what brought her to Norway Creek in 1958. They were the only people she knew in Minneapolis but they were enough. In eighteen years, the first eighteen years of her life, she’d gotten to Minneapolis. Her mother had never made it. Each generation, she learned, betters itself. She was trying. But the city frightened her.
To combat the fear of being alone in the city, she urged Billy Whitefoot to come to Norway Creek as well. Her friends at Norway Creek, the nice gentlemen from the lodge, made sure that Billy was hired as a groundkeeper and general maintenance man. The nice gentlemen never realized that Billy had been close to Running Buck and if they had, it would have made no difference. They had no way of knowing that Running Buck had been watching the night they committed two murders.
It was 1959. Kim Roderick married the Indian boy, who was one year her senior. She was pregnant. Their daughter was born in I960 and by that time she realized that the marriage had been a terrible mistake. She had seen some of what life could provide and Billy, so far as she could tell, wasn’t part of it. Realizing her disinterest, he began drinking and finally left Norway Creek more or less in disgrace. He took his child with him and fled back to the north, where he was safe, where he could think and recover from Kim Roderick, who was moving on, perfecting her tennis game, catching the eye of a well-off gentleman who had been a peripheral member of the hunting and fishing club—sufficiently peripheral that he knew nothing of the arrangement the other members had with Rita Hook, that Kim was the club’s daughter … His name was Ole Kronstrom. He was a partner of Tim Dierker, who was a core club member, and his wife, Helga, didn’t understand him. He befriended Kim; he enjoyed her company; he didn’t really care what others thought of him or of his behavior—and he liked the girl. He asked nothing of her. He cared for her. He began to believe he loved her. She began to believe she loved him. Ole Kronstrom was a replacement for her father and her husband, and he was the first substantial, solid human being she had ever known. As a friend.
Her divorce from Billy Whitefoot was final in 1961. She was twenty-one and she was being looked after by Ole Kronstrom. She played tennis, she led a life of relative leisure; he was giving her time to find herself, an old-fashioned notion but not particularly unwise. It made them both happy. Ole’s pals at Norway Creek, without letting him hear the slightest whisper, found it mildly amusing—that Ole had fallen for their daughter. Of course, they completely misjudged the relationship, assuming it reflected their own inclinations.
Kim Roderick was happy. And she remained happy when she met a new man who had gone to work for Tim Dierker, a promising salesman of thirty, Larry Blankenship. Tim had given him the job with the approval of his fellow club members: After all, Larry was their son. They had even made it known to Larry, obliquely, of course, that there was a position at Dierker’s firm. They were still managing lives, still controlling, chuckling over their power and the means they possessed to assuage their collective guilt. They were taking care of Rita’s children. They were pretty good damn fellows, after all. They’d just been pushed a wee bit too far that night so long ago …
But they were unhappy, indeed, when it became obvious that Kim Roderick’s relationship with Ole Kronstrom was not what it seemed. It did not preclude her becoming involved with Larry Blankenship; involved quickly became too mild a term. Larry and Kim fell in love. The club members didn’t like it. Tim Dierker was horrified. Brother and sister, it was beyond accepting on any level, but when he put it to his fellows, they clucked, admitted it was an unhappy turn, but not quite so ghastly as it might appear. After all, while they had the same mother there was no proof at all they had the same father. And having murdered two people, including their mother, they were hardly well advised to develop excessive squeamishness over what was nothing more than the possibility of incest. Total incest, that was.
Dierker was an old-line moralist. The killings had eaten away at his heart, soul, and entrails for years; he had subscribed to the gestures they’d made toward the children in the intervening years with devout enthusiasm. Relief. Now they were failing to stop another moral horror. And try as he might, Tim failed to stop the marriage; he hadn’t the courage to deal with the truth in the face of his friends’ determination that he remain quiet. Quite logically they believed that to open up the brother/sister business again might run them a terrible risk. The chances of a disaster were too great. Dierker buckled. Brother and sister were married. It was 1964.
In 1966 Kim Blankenship gave birth to a child with congenital brain damage. Ole Kronstrom, always her reliable, trusted friend, saw her through it. Larry, weak and willing and eager to please and an inveterate loser, very nearl
y suffered a nervous breakdown. He considered the child a result of his own inadequacy. It was the sort of judgment which defined his nature. Kim was twenty-six.
Her marriage to Larry ground along, now together, now apart, half functioning but never successful. His mental condition veered this way and that. He left Dierker’s firm, tried to find himself in a series of dead-end jobs, grew smaller and smaller in his own eyes. And in his wife’s, as well. She grew increasingly dependent on Ole. She went to the University of Minnesota, she developed her natural intelligence, gloried in the newly glimpsed complexities of life and the mind. She took herself too seriously at first; she was not unlike anyone else who discovers in himself the existence of a brain. It is a wonderful discovery. And Ole let her flourish.
She lived apart from Larry most of the time, the exceptions being his desperate attempts at reconciliation. She appeared for these sorrowful occasions but she could not truly lend herself to them. They failed. Larry diminished further still.
It was 1972 and Kim Blankenship was thirty-two years old. Larry Blankenship was forty. She was inevitably moving toward a final dissolution of their marriage. She was living on Ole Kronstrom’s money; Larry was scraping by as best he could. The marriage was dead. Then, far away in Grande Rouge, Running Buck took to his deathbed and told his secrets to young Billy, who was now thirty-three, with a doctorate and a noteworthy career in sociology and Indian affairs and personal friendships with Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Marlon Brando. The old man spilled the whole thing, everything Rita had ever told him—the sexual relationship with the club members, the two children by them, everything. And the story of the night of December 16, 1944.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 42