Most fortunate was that, from the beginning, Tamarack County Judge Randalyn Nickelsen had overseen Waaboo’s welfare. She’d known Cork and his family forever, and when she understood the whole story of what they’d all risked for the child, she’d done her best to expedite the adoption process. She’d signed the county’s petition for protective services for Waaboo and had placed him temporarily in Jenny’s care. She saw to it that the requisite home study was completed with due haste and, in the end, had been the one to grant Jenny’s petition for adoption. Within two months of her return to Tamarack County, Jenny had, legally, become a mother.
The Sunday before the gathering on Crow Point, the child had been baptized at St. Agnes in Aurora. In the christening, Father Green had used the boy’s legal name, Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. The Naming Ceremony on Crow Point was an important Ojibwe ritual, one that would complete the process of bringing the baby into a family that embraced and celebrated its mixed heritage.
The only egregious absence at the gathering was that of Noah Smalldog, who’d been killed in the exchange of gunfire on Oak Island. The O’Connors and Rose and Mal had been present at his burial on Windigo Island and had watched as the Ojibwe there put tobacco between his fingers and placed a spirit dish in the coffin and closed the lid and lowered it into the earth. Now, on this overcast November day, as she gathered with the others around Meloux’s fire ring, Rose couldn’t help thinking about the observation Amos Powassin had made weeks earlier amid all the destruction on Lake of the Woods. He’d said that in everything good was the potential for evil, and in everything evil the potential for good. She had known Noah Smalldog for only a very short time. He’d held a knife to her throat and drawn her blood, and she’d been certain that he would have killed her without hesitation if doing so would have served his purpose. He was a man filled with anger, who had no use for chimooks, yet he’d willingly sacrificed himself for her and the others. And she thought about the terrible storm that had begun it all, the derecho. It had been a great destroyer, but it had also, in the end, been responsible for beautiful little Waaboo entering their lives. And last, she thought about Abigail Hornett and the Church of the Seven Trumpets, who’d taken the words of a man of peace and found in them justification for horrible violence.
It was just as Amos Powassin had said: Kitchimanidoo, the Great Creator, God—they were all different names for the same thing, which was creation in all its aspects and all its possibility.
The smoke from Meloux’s fire smelled of sage and cedar. A hush fell over those gathered on Crow Point, and the old Mide began the ceremony, offering tobacco to the four corners of the sky, speaking in each direction the Ojibwe name of Jenny’s boy: Waaboozoons.
In a whisper, Rainy explained to Rose and Mal and Tom Kretsch that the Naming Ceremony honored First Man, who’d named everything in this world. Speaking the child’s name in the four directions allowed the spirit world to recognize this new person and accept him.
When that was done, Meloux addressed the gathering. His words were Ojibwe, and Rainy gave her companions a rough translation of what he said:
“I am an old man. In my life, I have been asked to name many children. The names have always come to me after fasting and dreaming, which is the old way. This child’s name came in another way. A strange way. Maybe it is the new way. It was delivered to Silver Fox, Stephen O’Connor, in a diner in Koochiching”—which Rainy explained was the Ojibwe name for International Falls—”and he has told me that there was, most definitely, no fasting involved.” Meloux grinned at Stephen, and those gathered around the fire laughed.
Meloux grew solemn again. “In the beginning of the journey of this child, or any child, is the understanding that each foot will fall into a different track. Happiness on one side, sadness on the other. Pleasure and pain. Wisdom and folly. With each step, this child will learn that there is in him the possibility of great good and also great evil. It is a serious matter, guiding this child along the path of right living.
“Jennifer O’Connor.” Meloux now spoke in English. “Will you instruct Waaboozoons in ninoododadiwin, which is the way of harmony, the path between the two worlds of possibility—good and evil—created by the Great Mystery?”
“I will do my best,” Jenny promised.
“Have you chosen we-ehs for Waaboozoons?”
We-ehs, Rainy explained, were like godparents, responsible for the child’s upbringing in many ways.
“I have,” Jenny said. “Anne O’Connor and Stephen O’Connor.”
Meloux nodded, as if satisfied.
Jenny handed her baby to Anne, who kissed the child and said, “Waaboozoons.” She handed the baby to Stephen, who did the same and then returned Waaboo to his mother.
“This child,” Meloux said to the whole gathering, “this little rabbit, came into the world and survives because of the great sacrifice of others. But he owes them no debt. In his time, in his turn, he, too, will be asked to sacrifice. We live by the grace of Kitchimanidoo and the goodness of one human being toward another. That is all I have to say.”
Under the old-nickel sky, they filed through the rocks and returned to the meadow, and the feasting began.
Rose lingered near Meloux’s cabin, watching her family and the guests celebrate. Jenny stood in the meadow holding Waaboo, with Anne and Stephen beside her, all of them beaming. Cork and Rainy Bisonette walked together, involved in a lively conversation, and Cork was smiling, as if the happiest of men. Rose knew Jo would have been fine with all of this. The Great Empty that had come with her sister’s death would never quite be filled, but all around it lay the possibility of peace for those she’d left behind.
Mal came to her with a filled plate in his hand.
“Happy?” he asked.
“Immensely,” she answered.
He scanned the gathering. “You’ve got a great family, Rose, wonderful children.”
“I know.”
He smiled and looked up at the thick clouds and said, as if caught by surprise, “A beautiful day.”
“A beautiful life,” she replied.
And she kissed him, boundless in her appreciation and her love.
“Kent Krueger is the real deal.” —Mystery Scene
“One of the modern masters of the craft.” —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for William Kent Krueger and his New York Times bestseller
TRICKSTER’S POINT
“Although there is plenty of excitement in this plot, Krueger is moving deeper into psychological territory with each book in this series.”
—St. Paul Pioneer Press
“While the murder mystery is an essential element of the novel, more important is the look at the relationships of the various characters to each other and to the locale.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Krueger has crafted a strong and memorable series that never fails to surpass itself with each installment. Trickster’s Point continues that tradition, containing some of Krueger’s best prose to date in what is perhaps his strongest, most intriguing novel yet.”
—Bookreporter
“Unlike many series, Cork and company age and evolve with each book. Time does not stand still, and we share in the triumphs and tragedies of Cork. We watch his children grow up and, in some cases, move away. That constant change makes these novels all the more compelling.”
—Crimespree Magazine
“An absorbing plot and a rewarding read.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Krueger’s intimate knowledge of Minnesota’s northern reaches and respect for Native American life, ancient and modern, provide an intricate setting for this gem of a mystery.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In addition to having a plot as cunningly treacherous as Trickster’s Point itself, Krueger’s latest mystery has that elegiac tone that’s perfectly suited to O’Connor’s character and to the harsh landscape where he lives and works.”
—Booklist
CONTE
NTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Reviews
About the Author
Reader’s Companion
For Joanna MacKenzie and Alec MacDonald, two of my brightest guiding stars
To Live and Die in Minnesota
Minnesota is a state of mythic storytelling. Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Paul Bunyan and Babe. In a more modern vein, the stories of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, of course, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales. I’m sure that a lot of readers assume I’ve set the Cork O’Connor series in Minnesota simply because I live here. True, but only a small part of a much larger picture. In the course of my life, I’ve made my home in some stunningly beautiful areas: Oregon, northern California, Colorado. I’ve tried to write stories nestled in these places, but the inspiration hasn’t been there for me, not in the way I feel when I write a novel grounded solidly in Minnesota. And here’s the reason in two words: conflict and heart.
What is it that drives great stories? Conflict. Think Romeo and Juliet. The engine at the heart of that timeless tragedy is the conflict between two families, the Montagues and the Capulets. In Moby Dick, it’s Ahab’s relentless battle against the great white whale. In To Kill A Mockingbird, social justice is pitted against racial prejudice in the Depression-era South. Conflict, conflict, conflict. When, at just over forty years of age, I decided to try my hand at writing a mystery, I turned my sights to the North Country of Minnesota, because all I saw was conflict. There was the age-old abrasion of the Ojibwe culture rubbing against the culture of the white intruders, and before that it was the Lakota being pushed out by the Ojibwe through bloody battle. There was the land itself, a rugged topography of old rock, immense forests, deep lakes, fast streams, and vast areas of isolation. On top of all this, there were the infamous bitter winters of Minnesota, looming, in the imagination of most Americans, as large as Paul Bunyan and as deadly as the cannibal monster of Ojibwe myth, the Windigo. In a nutshell, Minnesota is a land that, from its beginning, has been steeped in conflict.
But I couldn’t write about this place if my heart wasn’t wholly invested in it, and that’s probably the most important reason for the setting I’ve chosen.
I’m not native to Minnesota. I came here at the age of thirty so that my wife could attend the University of Minnesota’s law school. Before that, I was a gypsy kid. Growing up, I lived in ten different towns in eight different states. I never had a place I truly thought of as home. The moment I set foot in Minnesota, however, I knew I’d finally found my home. I fell in love with this state and its people, and I understood from very early on that, when I knuckled down and became serious about my writing, whatever I created would be, in some way, a tribute to this adopted homeland of mine.
The writer Tony Hillerman, author of the marvelous Navajo Tribal Police series, which is set in the Four Corners area of the Southwest and deals significantly with the culture of the Dinee, had a profound effect on the decisions I’ve made regarding my own Cork O’Connor series. I had the great good fortune of hearing his editor, Eamon Dolan, speak at a mystery conference many years ago. During the course of his remarks, Dolan told his audience that Americans liked to read “domestica exotica,” which was a term he’d coined. What he meant was that Americans enjoy reading about a setting within the confines of the continental United States, ergo, domestica, but they prefer to be introduced to a place that’s more or less unknown to them and that, as a result, has an exotic flavor.
In my own stories, I try very hard to give readers a sensual journey. I want them to feel as if they’ve been to the North Country, felt the bite of a bitter winter wind or breathed the piney scent of an evergreen forest or plunged into the bracing, pristine water of a wilderness lake. I want them to love Minnesota as much as I do.
I’m not alone in putting my feelings about this remarkable state on paper. Some of the best mystery writers in the country are my neighbors, and they, too, set their work here—John Sanford, Ellen Hart, Pete Hauptman, Mary Logue, David Housewright, Brian Freeman, Jess Lourey, to name just a few. I’m often asked why Minnesota breeds so many fine authors in the genre. Cabin fever always comes readily to mind, but there’s a more realistic reason. It’s a state that inspires fine writing in general, and our mystery writers are simply a subset of that great whole.
In my fiction, setting is the foundation for almost everything. Character is built on it. Motivations arise from it. Death visits because of it. To read a Cork O’Connor novel is, in a way, to understand what it is to live and die in Minnesota.
PROLOGUE
The dying don’t easily become the dead.
Even with an arrow in his heart, Jubal Little took three hours to die. Politician that he was, most of that time he couldn’t stop talking. At first, he talked about the arrow. Not how it got there—he believed he knew the answer to that—but arguing with Cork over whether to try to pull it out or push it through. Corcoran O’Connor did neither. Then he talked about the past, a long and convoluted rambling punctuated by moments of astonishing self-awareness. He admitted he’d made mistakes. He told Cork things he swore he’d never told anyone else, told them in a way that made Cork feel uncomfortably like Jubal’s confessor. Finally he talked about what lay ahead. He wasn’t afraid to die, he said. And he said that he understood the situation, understood why Cork had put that arrow in his heart.
He died sitting up, his back against hard rock, his big body gray in the long shadow cast by the imposing monolith known as Trickster’s Point. If the political polls were correct, in just a few days Jubal Little would have won a landslide victory as the new governor of Minnesota. Cork had known Jubal Little all his life and, for some of those years, had thought of him as a best friend. Even so, he’d planned to mark his ballot for another man on election day. Partly it was because Jubal wanted different things for Minnesota and the North Country and the Ojibwe than Cork wanted. But mostly it was because Jubal Little was absolutely capable of murder, and Cork O’Connor was the only one who knew it.
CHAPTER 1
The walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plain wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own te
nure as sheriff of Tamarack County.
Although he wore no watch and there was nothing in the room that would have clued him about time, Cork knew it was late afternoon. Around five o’clock, more or less. Captain Ed Larson had removed his own watch, a standard procedure when questioning a suspect in the interview room. Timelessness was part of the protocol for keeping the subject focused only on what was happening inside the small box created by those four bare walls. This was Cork’s third round of questioning about the death of Jubal Little that day and was the most formal so far.
The first interview had taken place at Trickster’s Point while the techs were processing the crime scene. It had been Sheriff Marsha Dross herself who’d asked the questions. Cork was pretty sure nobody really thought then that he’d killed Jubal Little. Marsha was just trying to get a good sense of what had gone down. It wasn’t until he told her that he’d sat for three hours while Jubal died that she gave him a look of incomprehension, then of suspicion.
The second interview had been conducted an hour and a half later in her office back at the department. Ed Larson had been present for that one. He was in charge of major crimes investigation for Tamarack County. He’d let Marsha ask the questions—more of them this time and more probing—and had mostly observed. At the end of that round, he’d asked if Cork was hungry and would like something to eat or drink. Cork wanted nothing, but he said yes anyway.
While the food was coming, they moved to the interview room, just Larson and Cork this time, but Cork knew that Dross would be watching on the monitor next door.
Deputy Azevedo brought in the meal. He looked at Cork as if he didn’t know him at all, though they’d been acquainted for years.
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