The William Kent Krueger Collection #4

by William Kent Krueger

  Through his open window that night as he lay in bed, Cork heard his parents talking as they rocked in the porch swing. Although he couldn’t hear most of the words, he could tell from the tone of her voice that his mother was concerned. His father said something about Cork’s “raccoon eye” and sounded reassuring. Cork didn’t want them worrying about him. And the truth was that he believed there was nothing for them to be concerned about. Jubal Little had made certain of that. The problem was Cork couldn’t decide exactly how he felt about it, particularly when he recalled the look in Winona Crane’s eyes as she stared at her rescuer. He went to sleep that night hurting in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with his shiner.

  CHAPTER 3

  Although science said otherwise, Cork knew absolutely that the human heart was enormous. Inside that organ, which was only the size of a man’s fist, was enough room to fit everything a person could possibly love, and then some. Cork’s own heart held more treasures than he could easily name. But one that always stood in the forefront was Sam’s Place.

  The old Quonset hut sat on the shore of Iron Lake, at the end of a road that ran from the edge of the small town of Aurora across an open meadow and over a long, straight hillock topped by the railway bed of the Burlington Northern tracks. To the north stood the abandoned BearPaw Brewery. A hundred yards south grew a copse of poplar trees that surrounded the ruins of a small foundry built more than a century before. The meadow stretched nearly a quarter mile, and terminated at Grant Park. Except for Sam’s Place and the half acre around it, the land was held in trust by Tamarack County, given as a gift by a wealthy developer named Hugh Parmer, with the stipulation that all the undeveloped property be left in its natural state. Parmer had meant it as a memorial to Jo O’Connor, Cork’s beloved wife, who’d been gone from their lives three years now.

  When Cork pulled into the parking lot of Sam’s Place, there was only one other vehicle: the Subaru that belonged to his daughter Jenny. It was evening, and the sky was charcoal with overcast. The weather forecast was for snow flurries, and Cork, when he got out of his Land Rover, felt the cold kiss of a flake against his cheek. The sheriff’s department had kept and bagged as evidence his hunting jacket, which was stained with Jubal Little’s blood. Even though he was chilled, he stood awhile before going inside, staring down the shoreline of the lake into the gloom of descending night. Well beyond the poplars stood the tall pine trees of Grant Park, black now in the dim light, brooding sentries looking down on the place where he’d first met Jubal Little.

  In all that had occurred that day, Cork hadn’t allowed himself to feel the loss of the man who’d been his friend since boyhood. He’d been intent at first on simply comforting Jubal as he died. Then he’d been involved in explanations. Now, alone, he tried to understand how he felt. Frankly, he was confused. Jubal Little was an easy man to like, but anyone who’d been close to him knew that he was a difficult man to love. The reason was simple. In the end, in Jubal’s heart, there was room enough only for Jubal.

  “Dad?”

  Cork broke off his reverie and looked toward the Quonset hut, where his sixteen-year-old son, Stephen, stood in the open doorway, framed by the warm light from inside.

  “You okay?” Stephen called.

  “Yeah,” Cork replied. “I’ll be right in.”

  The Quonset hut had been erected during the Second World War, and when the war ended had sat idle for some time, until it was purchased by an Ojibwe named Sam Winter Moon. Sam had divided the structure into two parts. In the front, he’d cut serving windows and installed a propane grill, a deep-fry well, a walk-in freezer, an ice-milk machine, and a food prep area. In the back, which was separated by a wall that Sam had constructed himself, was a living area, complete with a small kitchen and a bathroom with a shower. In the summer, Sam lived in the hut and ran his burger operation. Over the years, he developed a following of both locals and returning tourists, for whom a visit to Tamarack County wouldn’t be complete without a stop at Sam’s Place. Summers in high school, Cork had worked for Sam, and much of what he knew about what it was to be a man he’d learned from this friend and mentor. On Sam’s death, the property had passed to Cork, who’d done his best to honor Sam Winter Moon’s legacy. Now Cork’s children were involved in the enterprise as well.

  He stepped into the Quonset hut and found Stephen entertaining Waaboo, Cork’s grandson, who was nearly two.

  “Where’s Jenny?” Cork asked.

  Stephen nodded toward the door in the room’s back wall. “Closing up,” he said. “I offered, but she told me she’d do it if I kept this little guy occupied.”

  Waaboo was not the child’s legal name. Legally, he was Aaron Smalldog O’Connor, but his Ojibwe name was Waaboozoons, which meant “little rabbit,” and he was called Waaboo, for short. He was a wonder of a child, whose Ojibwe blood was apparent in his black hair and dark eyes, in the shading of his skin and the bone structure of his face. He bore a clear scar on his upper lip where surgery had closed a terrible cleft, a genetic defect. He was not Jenny’s by birth, but in her heart, in the hearts of all the O’Connors, he took up a great deal of real estate.

  Waaboo smiled when he saw Cork, and he said, “Baa-baa,” which was his word for “Grandpapa.”

  Cork lifted his grandson and swung him around, much to Waaboo’s delight.

  “You’re home early,” Stephen said.

  “You haven’t heard?” Cork put Waaboo down, and the child toddled toward a big stuffed toy bear that lay on the floor.

  “Heard what?”

  Cork was relieved that word of Jubal Little hadn’t spread. Dross and her people had, for the moment, done a good job of containment. But it wouldn’t last long. Something like this, it would go public quickly, and the jackals of the media would quickly gather to feed.

  “Jubal Little’s dead,” Cork said.

  “What? How?”

  “Someone killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The door to Sam’s Place opened, and Jenny came in, bringing with her the smell of deep-fry. She was twenty-five, a willowy young woman with white-blond hair, ice blue eyes, and a face in which the cares of motherhood were just beginning to etch a few faint lines. She’d become a parent through extraordinary circumstances that had involved the brutal death of the child’s birth mother. Jenny’s intervention had saved Waaboo’s life, and little Waaboo had, in a way, saved hers. She’d been trained as a journalist but had chosen to put her career on hold while she adjusted to these new circumstances. At the moment, she helped manage Sam’s Place, wrote short stories, and devoted the rest of her time to Waaboo.

  “Thought we weren’t going to see you tonight,” she said, heading toward her son, who’d wrapped his arms around the big bear and had rolled the stuffed animal on top of him. “Thought you and our next governor were going to hang out and do manly things together.”

  “Jubal Little’s dead,” Stephen told her.

  She stopped in bending to lift her son and shot her father a startled look. “How?”

  Cork explained what had happened.

  “You sat there for three hours while he died?” Jenny had the same look that Cork had seen on Dross’s face and Larson’s, a look void of comprehension. “Why didn’t you go get help?”

  He was tired of explaining, and he said, “At the time, staying with Jubal seemed best.”

  “Was it an accident?” Stephen asked.

  Cork shook his head.

  Jenny said, “Why so sure?”

  “Because what the sheriff’s people don’t know but will figure out pretty soon is that the arrow that killed him may well have been one of mine.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I make my own arrows, Jenny. My fletching pattern is unique. When I saw the fletching on the arrow in Jubal’s heart, I knew where it came from. Or where it was supposed to look like it came from.”

  “Somebody’s what—trying to frame you?” Stephe
n asked.

  “That’s sure how it looks.”

  “Does the sheriff think you did it?”

  “At the moment, I’m the only suspect on the horizon.”

  Jenny said, “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “I called Leon Papakee. He got there in the middle of my interview with Ed Larson. I’m afraid he was a little late for damage control.”

  “You let them question you without a lawyer?” Jenny seemed astonished.

  “I know,” Cork said. “It’s strange how, when you’re on the other side of things, you’re not as smart as you think you’ll be.” He shrugged. “Maybe I was still a little in shock, I don’t know. I said more than I should have, and unless I can figure out who fired that arrow, I’ll probably regret it.”

  Stephen had dark almond eyes, the eyes of his Ojibwe ancestors, and they were hard with concern. “What are you going to do, Dad?”

  “I need some time to think, and I need a little advice. I’m heading out to talk to Henry Meloux. Look, I don’t think things will blow up tonight, but if they do, we’ll be getting calls at the house. Don’t talk to anyone, okay?”

  “Sure,” Jenny said. “We’ll see you later tonight?”

  “Morning, more likely,” Cork said.

  To which Jenny smiled. “While you’re out there, say hello to Rainy for us.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Cork drove north out of Aurora, along the shoreline of Iron Lake. Dark had fallen completely. At the edges of the headlight glare, the trees—pine and spruce and birch and poplar—were like stark walls hemming him in. Although he’d tried his best to hide it from his children, he was worried. Not only had someone killed Jubal Little but they’d also done their best to make it look as if Cork was guilty of the crime. The evidence was slight at the moment, and nothing that would convict him, if it came to that, but he had no idea how carefully the murder had been planned and what other evidence might have been created or planted that would point his way.

  After several miles, he turned off the main highway onto a gravel county road, which he followed until he came to a double-trunk birch tree off to the right. The tree marked the beginning of the long trail that led to Crow Point, where Meloux’s cabin stood. Cork parked his Land Rover, pulled a flashlight from his glove box, got out, and locked the doors. If there’d been any kind of decent moon, he could have seen his way without the flashlight, but the overcast was solid and the night pitch black, and he flipped the switch and followed the bright, slender beam into the woods.

  The hike was less than two miles, much of it through the Superior National Forest, on a footpath worn over the years by the feet of many who, like Cork, sought out the old man for advice and healing. Henry Meloux was a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. Although in his nineties, he was a tough old bird full of wisdom, compassion, humor, honesty, and, very often, gas. Cork had been in the old man’s company when Meloux let loose farts that could have felled a moose.

  Cork had been along the footpath hundreds of times in his life, and it was always a journey he made with a great deal of expectation. Meloux knew things. He understood the complexities and conundrums of the human heart. He had his finger on the pulse of all that occurred on the rez. He knew about the natural world, what healed and what harmed. And he was in touch with the realm that could not be seen with the eye, the realm of the manidoog, or spirits, who dwelled in the vast forests of the great Northwoods.

  What exactly Cork hoped to receive from Meloux on this trip, he couldn’t say. But in the past, whatever the old man offered had almost always turned out to be pretty much what Cork needed. And that was one of the reasons he was making his way through the woods on that dark night.

  The other reason was Rainy Bisonette.

  Rainy was Meloux’s great-niece, a public health nurse who’d come to Crow Point more than a year earlier to care for the old man during a mysterious illness. She’d come hoping as well to learn the secrets of healing that had been revealed to Meloux across his lifetime. She was headstrong, and she and Cork had had a rough time of it at first. That had changed. These days, Rainy was usually the reason Cork made this journey.

  The air smelled of late fall, the wet-earth odor of leaves decomposing. This time of year always reminded Cork of death, and not just because winter was hard on the horizon. Autumn was the season in which his father and, much later, his wife had been lost to him, both taken through violence. Now, in this same season, Jubal Little was gone and, like the others, gone violently.

  Cork was deep in thought and thoughtlessly following the beam of the flashlight when he became aware of a tingling at the nape of his neck and along his spine. He snapped back into the moment and had the overwhelming sense that he was being tracked. Someone was following him, or perhaps pacing him on one side of the trail or the other. He couldn’t say why he felt this. Had he heard the tiny, bonelike crack of a foot snapping a twig on the ground, or the sound of a body sliding through brush? He stopped and swung the light into the woods all around, then shot it down the path behind him. Nothing. He listened intently, but that, too, proved useless.

  He wondered if his imagination was running wild, if he was simply being paranoid. On the other hand, someone that day had tracked him and Jubal in the woods without either of them knowing. Someone had been able to commit murder and slip away without being seen or heard. Was this person right now watching Cork from some dark vantage? Was another arrow, soundless in its flight, about to hit its mark?

  “Jesus, Cork,” he said out loud. “Get hold of yourself.”

  In the wet, heavy air of the enormous dark, his voice sounded weak, offering him little comfort.

  He was relieved when he finally broke from the trees and saw, across the open meadow on Crow Point, the welcoming lantern light that shone through the windows of Meloux’s cabin. A cold wind had come up, and it ran through the pines at his back with a sound like the rush of floodwater. He was a dozen yards into the meadow when he heard the voice, and he spun, swinging the flashlight beam as if it were a saber hacking at the dark. As before, it illuminated nothing but forest.

  Cork called out, “Who’s there?” knowing, even as he spoke, that it was useless. If it was only his imagination, no one was there to reply. And if someone had actually tracked him this far, why would they reveal themselves now? Yet he was certain he’d heard someone speak.

  He retreated from the wall of forest and turned his back to the trees only when he was fifty yards away, a distance that, especially in the dark, would challenge even the best of bow hunters. He jogged the rest of the way and didn’t feel entirely safe until Meloux’s door was opened to him.

  * * *

  Rainy Bisonette was a lovely woman, though not pretty in a fashionable way. She never wore makeup or tried to hide the gray streak in her long, black hair. Her hands were callused and her nails clipped short. Rather than lithe or willowy, she looked strong. Cork thought of her as substantial, although he would never have said so out loud because it didn’t sound at all complimentary. In his own mind, what it meant was that Rainy, in her intelligence, her compassion, her humor, her enjoyment of life, was pretty much everything a man could ask for, and a great deal more. He thought himself lucky to have found her.

  Rainy put together coffee in a blue enamel pot. She set it on the iron cookstove at the center of the cabin’s single room. While it brewed, she gave Cork a big piece of corn bread left over from dinner, buttered and topped with blackberry jam that she’d made herself, and that he gratefully devoured.

  The room was simply furnished, mostly with things Meloux had made over the years. A table and three chairs of birchwood. A bunk with a thin mattress whose ticking was straw mixed with dried herbs that the old Mide chose for their fragrance and their particular power. A sink with a hand pump, and above it a few cupboards. The walls were hung with items that harked back across all the years of Meloux’s life—a toboggan, a deer-prong pipe, snowshoes whose frames were made of white ash and whose bindings wer
e leather, a gun rack that held an old Remington. There was also, tacked to the wall, a page from an old Skelly gas calendar, July 1957, with a photo of a fine-figured woman in very tight shorts bending over the engine of a Packard to check the oil. It had been there as long as Cork had been coming to Meloux’s cabin. What it meant to the old man, why he’d held on to it all these years, Cork had no idea. It was just another of the mysteries, large and small, that were Meloux.

  Meloux sat at the old birchwood table. In his youth, he’d stood nearly six feet tall, but he was smaller now, or looked it. His hair hung long and white over his bony shoulders. His face was like a parched desert floor, sunbaked and fractured by countless lines. His eyes were enigmas. They were dark brown, and there was in them the look of ancient wisdom; yet at the same time they seemed to hold an impish glint, suggesting that the old man, at any moment now, was going to spring on you an unexpected and delightful surprise. He’d brought out one of his pipes, this one a simple thing decades old, carved from a small stone block that had been quarried at Pipestone in southwestern Minnesota. From a leather pouch he took a pinch of tobacco, sprinkled a bit on the tabletop as an offering to the spirits, filled the pipe bowl, and they smoked together in silence. Cork was eager to speak with his old friend, but he was also cognizant of tradition and waited patiently until, at last, Meloux said, “Wiisigamaiingan.”

  Which was the Ojibwe name Meloux had long ago given to Jubal Little. It meant “coyote.”

  “You’ve already heard?” Cork said. He looked to Rainy, who’d given no indication she knew about the trouble that day. Then he said with understanding, “The rez telegraph.”

  Rainy said, “Isaiah Broom came to tell us.”

  “News he didn’t mind bringing, I’m sure,” Cork said.