Cork opened the door, and a little bell tinkled, a fragile and incongruous sound considering what was represented by the merchandise inside. The place seemed empty, except for the presence of a cat that lay on the countertop next to the register. It was a Chinchilla Persian, an old feline with long fur the color of campfire smoke.
“Hey, Mattie.” Cork spoke softly to the cat. “Where’s the old man?”
“Old man?” The voice, indignant, came from the back room. A moment later, a guy with a square build and silver hair appeared, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. “This old man’ll be happy to kick your butt, you don’t speak more respectfully.”
“Morning, Dale,” Cork said.
Dale Basham came to the counter and stroked Mattie’s fur. “Wasn’t sure if I’d be seeing you again this season.”
“Why’s that?”
Basham shrugged. “Accident like the one up at Trickster’s Point with Jubal Little, I figured you might be thinking of hanging your bow up for good. I tell guys all the time, don’t shoot at the first thing that moves. You? I figured you knew better. Trained by Sam Winter Moon and all.”
“What exactly have you heard?”
Basham picked up the cat, who began to purr.
Basham and Mattie were an interesting pair. Basham was Oklahoma born, had been a pilot during the war in Vietnam, then flown for Northwest Airlines. When he’d retired as a commercial pilot, he’d moved north to open the Straight Arrow. He’d brought along Mattie, a cat that was now more than two decades old and famously loved by Dale Basham. In the last few years, Mattie’s heart had stopped five times, and Basham, using gentle CPR, had brought her back to life each time. On the surface, he might have appeared gruff—they’d called him Bash when he was in the service—but Cork figured any guy willing to do mouth-to-mouth on a feline couldn’t be all badass. Strange maybe, but certainly good-hearted.
“What have I heard?” Basham put the cat back on the counter, and Mattie sprawled out—loose limbed and eyes closed—in a way that made Cork think the animal had suffered another heart attack, and maybe he’d see Basham in action. But the cat’s purr box kept running. “Heard Jubal Little took an arrow in the heart. Hunting accident. Sheriff’s Department claims they’re still uncertain about some of the details. Got all that from the television and radio. Also heard, by way of the grapevine, that you were alone up there with him, and it was you who shot him.”
“That’s what folks are saying?”
“Enough of ’em that it got to me. Also heard they found some other fella dead up there, yeah? What’s that all about?”
“You want to know the truth, Dale, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. And maybe you can help me.”
“Me?”
“You’re the only retailer of archery equipment in these parts, so I figure most of us bow hunters buy from you.”
“Or the Internet. Christ, I hate to tell you how much business those damn online stores have cost me.”
“You know most of the good bow hunters in the area?”
“Lot of ’em.”
“Lester Bigby bow-hunts, doesn’t he?”
“Sure. Don’t know if he’s any good, but he buys here.”
“Buys materials to make his own arrows?”
“Nah. He usually buys RedHead carbons. He’s got himself a Bear Carnage, a top-of-the-line compound bow.”
“Thought you said you didn’t know if he was any good.”
“Having a big dick doesn’t guarantee a guy knows how to score. Got a lot of hunters come in, spend a shitload of money thinking the gear alone’ll do the trick. You shop garage sales a year later and you can pick that stuff of theirs up for a dime.”
“Have you seen Lester recently?”
“Came in just before season opener, bought that Bear Carnage I told you about.”
“What about Isaiah Broom?”
Basham shook his head. “Makes all his own gear. Arrows, bow, quiver. Hell, heard he fashions his bowstring out of elk sinew. Christ, I don’t know anybody who gets that into it. He’s good, I hear. Real good. Leastways, I never heard of him shooting anybody by accident.”
By accident. That was the key phrase. Jubal Little’s death had been no accident.
Cork decided not to try to change Basham’s understanding of what had occurred at Trickster’s Point. Until he knew who the real killer was, it would be useless to argue. And when the truth was finally known, argument would be unnecessary.
CHAPTER 25
Lester Bigby was a wealthy man. When he was twenty-two and just out of college, he’d taken over his father’s logging operation, which had, by then, fallen on hard times, mostly because Buzz Bigby had come to prefer drinking to running his business. Lester turned the situation around and, when things were looking good again, sold the operation and invested the money in stocks. He chose wisely and did well, and then began doing the same for other people in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota. He’d established a good reputation as an investment counselor and had built a solid clientele. A couple of years earlier, he’d created the Crown Lake Development Company and had purchased a very large tract of land southwest of Aurora that included its own pristine lake, one of the very few in the area without any cabin homes already on the shoreline. Last spring, he’d begun construction of a luxury resort, but building had been halted in midsummer. Jubal Little was a large part of the reason.
Lester had built himself an ostentatious house on North Point Road, just outside the town limits. If there hadn’t already been a number of outrageously ostentatious places on the point, his would have stood out magnificently. As it was, it became just another in a line of homes that, in Cork’s opinion, had no place in what should have been the natural and simple beauty of the shoreline of Iron Lake.
He pulled into the drive, a ribbon of blacktop that curved through a lot of lawn and landscaped garden and stopped at the portico in front. Noon wasn’t far off. The sky was clear blue, and the sun was bright, and the grass sparkled with the wetness of the last few days. Cork got out and was about to ring the bell when the door opened suddenly. Lester Bigby’s wife, Emily, stood there, clearly startled to find Cork blocking her way.
“Oh!” she said and took a step back.
“Sorry, Emily,” Cork said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just about to punch the doorbell.”
She put a hand to her breast, as if stilling a wildly beating heart. “It’s all right,” she said. “I just . . . It’s all right.”
Like her husband, she was small, in her late thirties or early forties, attractive, with dark brown hair, long and nicely styled. She dressed well, expensively but not showy, and because Jo, who’d served with her for several years on the library board, had spoken well of her, Cork was inclined to like her.
“I’m looking for Lester. I tried his office in town, but he’s not there. I was just wondering if he might be home.”
“No, he’s not,” she said, still a little breathy from the fright.
“Know where I might find him?”
She glanced at her watch. “Have you tried the Broiler? He likes to lunch there.”
The garage door opened, and a black Mercedes backed out. Cork saw the Bigbys’ son, Lance, at the wheel of the sedan. He was Stephen’s age, a big kid who reminded Cork uncomfortably of Donner. The genetic linkage to his dead uncle was clear in the massive build of his upper body, and whenever Cork looked at the kid’s face, he saw the face of another kid, dead for more than thirty years. But Lance’s resemblance to Donner ended there. He wasn’t an athlete; he was a musician. Violin. And Stephen liked him. That said a lot.
“I read in the Sentinel that Lance played with All-State Orchestra in the Twin Cities last Saturday,” Cork said casually. “How’d it go?”
“Fine,” she said. “They were wonderful.”
“So, you were there?”
“Of course.”
“Was Lester with you?”
“No.”
“Oh? Why n
ot?”
“He told me he wanted to spend the day with his father.” She’d answered immediately and without guile, but her face suddenly clouded. “Why do you ask?”
Instead of answering, Cork glanced at the Mercedes. “I’m keeping you.”
“I really do have to go,” she said. “Lance has a doctor’s appointment.”
Cork smiled in parting. “I’ll pull out so I’m not blocking your way.”
* * *
He stopped at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler. Lester Bigby wasn’t there, and so far, Johnny Papp hadn’t seen him that day. But it was still early, so maybe Cork wanted to wait? Cork thanked Johnny and said he might be back.
His next stop was The Greenbrier, an assisted-living facility in a newer section on the north side of town. It was a two-story redbrick building of recent construction, with nicely landscaped grounds full of squat evergreens and some young willows. There was also a little man-made pond, the kind that in summer might hold goldfish. In anticipation of winter, the pond had been drained, and the bottom was lined with the dark residue of rotting leaves. Because it was a secure building, Cork had to buzz for the door to be opened to him.
The Greenbrier was warm and quiet inside. Just beyond the front door was a large open area, carpeted, where four ladies, grown thin and fragile with age but dressed almost formally, sat facing one another in the armchairs that had been placed about. Cork couldn’t tell if they’d been talking and had stopped to observe him when he came in or if they’d simply been sitting in silence for a while, waiting for something—anything—to happen. Above cheeks rosy with rouge and softened with powder, their eyes followed him keenly. The attendant at the front desk was young, maybe twenty, fresh-faced, and pretty. Her face lost some of its freshness as soon as Cork inquired after Clarence Bigby.
“Buzz? You’ll find him in the community room. He’s always there after lunch.”
“Is he alone?”
“Whenever Mr. Bigby’s in the community room, he has it to himself.”
Cork got her meaning. Some people mellowed with age. Not Buzz Bigby.
Cork was about to walk away when the attendant said, “You’ll need to sign in.”
She nodded toward a register book at one end of the desk. It was open, and a pen was attached by a thin chain. Cork signed and jotted down the time, noting that there hadn’t been many visitors before him that day. But it was Monday. Weekends were probably more likely times for families to come calling.
The big flat-panel television was on, tuned to ESPN, the volume turned up loud. Bigby sat slouched in an easy chair, facing the screen but not really looking at it. His eyes seemed to be focused on something well above the television. Next to Bigby’s easy chair sat a small oxygen tank on rollers, feeding him through a tube that hung over his ears and plugged into his nose. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and wrinkled khakis, and wore slippers on his feet. His white hair was wild, as if windblown, though there wasn’t even a whisper of a breeze in the room. When Cork was a kid, Bigby had been a great pillar of muscle and bone. Now he seemed only a huddle of wrinkled flesh.
“Buzz?”
Bigby’s eyes moved but not his head, as if Cork wasn’t worth the effort of his full attention. “What do you want?” He spoke in a wheeze.
“To talk.”
“I got nothing to say to you.”
The remote control for the television was on a coffee table within reach of Bigby. Cork walked to the table, picked up the remote, and hit the Mute button. The room dropped into quiet. Cork grabbed an empty armchair and positioned it so that he sat between Bigby and the television. “You were always a son of a bitch, Buzz, and pretty proud of it.”
“So?”
“You carry a grudge better than any man I ever knew. And one thing I know about you absolutely is that you hated Jubal Little.”
Bigby made a sound that might have been meant as a laugh but came out like air from a punctured tire. “I feel that way about a lot of people, you included.”
“Never pull any punches, do you? Tell me, Buzz, does Lester visit you here very often?”
“That boy don’t come to see me like he should. Ungrateful little bastard.”
“Did he visit you last Saturday?”
“Hell, no.” Bigby’s steel blue eyes suddenly went wary, and he said, “What’s it to you?”
“Did you hear what happened to Jubal Little?”
“Dead. Dumb-ass hunting accident.”
“I was with him. Some folks think I might have had a hand in his death.”
“You were the dumb-ass that shot him?” A vicious little smile crept across his lips. “There’s a God in heaven.”
An old woman came into the room, using a walker. Her face held a look of happy anticipation, but when she saw Buzz Bigby in the easy chair, she stopped abruptly, and the happy look died. She carefully maneuvered her walker in a U-turn and left.
“You were the one who taught Lester to bow-hunt, right?” Cork asked.
“Tried. Christ, he couldn’t draw a bowstring to save his soul. Spindly little arms of his.”
“He’s got himself a new compound bow now. A Bear Carnage, top of the line. You didn’t know that?”
“Like I said, that boy don’t visit me like he should. Little snot.”
“I thought he was here on Saturday.”
“I told you not two minutes ago he wasn’t.” Bigby shifted and sat up. It wasn’t only his eyes that seemed on the alert now. His whole body, collapsed as it was, had tensed. “Or maybe he was. That was a couple of days ago. Sometimes I forget things.”
Forget the slight of an ungrateful son? Cork thought not.
He stood and said, “Thanks for your time, Buzz.”
“And you, thanks for nothing. Give me that remote before you go.”
On his way out, Cork stopped at the front desk to sign out. He used the opportunity to check the register pages where visitors had logged in and out over the weekend. He didn’t see Lester Bigby’s name there at all.
The young attendant was on the phone. Cork hung around until she’d finished her call, then he asked, “Does everyone sign in and out?”
“Not always. Sometimes family who visit a lot just go to their relative’s room without stopping here.”
“Does Buzz Bigby’s family visit often?”
“Oh yeah. Especially his son.”
“Do you know if he visited on Saturday?”
“I didn’t work this weekend, so I couldn’t say.”
“Anybody here who might be able to say?”
“I really don’t know.” She said it in such a way that Cork understood she probably did but was not going to tell him. A professional thing, he figured, resident privacy or something. He didn’t push it.
As he left, the eyes of the ladies in the open area followed him, as if they were watching the passage of an exotic bird.
* * *
Cork pulled up to the curb in front of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler and parked behind the car that Lester Bigby often drove, a mint-condition 1965 Karmann Ghia. He found it interesting that Bigby preferred the same kind of vehicle his brother, Donner, had driven before he died.
Inside, Cork found Bigby sitting in the same booth that, according to Heidi Steger, he’d occupied when Cork and Jubal breakfasted there on the day Jubal died. There was an empty plate in front of him, and he was reading a newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Compared to both his father and his brother, Lester Bigby was small and, in his face, more resembled the fine-boned features that, Cork recalled, had made Mrs. Bigby so lovely and yet so sad. In his mid-forties, he was mostly bald, with only a narrow strip of dull brown hair circling his skull like a dead laurel wreath. He didn’t notice Cork approaching.
“Mind if I join you?” Cork said.
Bigby looked up from his paper. “I prefer to eat alone.”
“Looks to me like you’ve finished eating.” Cork slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.
Bigby carefully folde
d his paper and set it aside.
Cork laid his arms on the table and leaned forward. “We’ve never liked each other, Lester.”
“That’s not something I lose any sleep over.”
“In a town like Aurora, it’s hard to avoid folks, but somehow we seem to do a pretty good job of it.”
“Believe me, I don’t go out of my way, O’Connor.”
“I think I can truthfully say the same. But there it is. I’ve been wondering why.”
“You looked me up just to tell me that?”
“That’s not the reason. It’s just something that came to me.”
“What’s the reason then?”
“I’ve been thinking about your resort on Crown Lake.”
“What about it?”
“You’re pretty heavily invested in it, I imagine. All that land, the cost of construction.”
“So?”
“Sulfide mining,” Cork said. And he saw from the look in Bigby’s eyes that he’d struck home.
Cork had grown up in the Arrowhead of Minnesota, the northeasternmost section of the state, where some of the most beautiful wilderness in the entire nation lay next to the richest ore deposits imaginable. Historically, this unfortunate positioning had resulted in the decimation of a great deal of the pristine Northwoods by iron mining. The sacrifice of that land had made possible the industrial growth of the rest of the United States in the late 1800s and well into the twentieth century, but the deep open-pit mines of the Iron Range were wounds that would never heal.
The mines had begun closing in the late 1960s, and the Arrowhead suffered one economic blow after another. Businesses folded. Range towns became ghost towns. But in recent years, there’d been a great deal of renewed interest in the mineral resources of the area. The demand for the raw materials to make steel in China and India had spurred a resurgence of mining in the open pits. Perhaps more important, there was intense interest in creating additional operations that would mine the deposits of base metals—copper-nickel and platinum. These precious ores had been discovered long ago in the Arrowhead but, until recently, were too difficult and costly to get at. New advances in mining technology, however, promised cheaper, better methods of extraction, and global mining concerns were clamoring for a shot at the riches that still lay beneath the wilderness of the Arrowhead. The proposals for these new mines had set factions in the North Country at war.
The William Kent Krueger Collection #4 Page 84