Jenny let Waaboo run, if you could call it that, to Cork, who swept him up. The little boy’s black hair smelled of French fries.
“You timed it well,” Jenny said to him. “The last reporter got discouraged an hour ago and left. Ever since word got out about the search of our house this morning, we’ve been fighting them off like mosquitoes.”
“Sorry,” Cork said. “Did you call Leon Papakee?”
“Yes. He said he’d see what he could do.”
“Good.” That, at least, was a little relief. “Is Stephen inside?”
“Yeah. He and Judy are holding down the fort, such as it is.” She swept her hand across the empty lot. “The good thing about all the reporters, we sold a lot of burgers this afternoon.”
Waaboo squirmed in his arms, wanting to get down, and Cork released him. Waaboo toddled toward the lakeshore, but Jenny caught him before he’d gone far and picked him up. “Are you sticking around?”
“No. I’m meeting Ed Larson out on County Sixteen.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Yeah, take a look at this.” He walked her to the front of the Land Rover.
“Is that a bullet hole?” she asked, horrified.
“From a deer slug.”
“Somebody tried to shoot you?”
“Not necessarily, according to Agent Phil Holter. I may have shot my own windshield.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Because he’s covering all the possibilities, which include me being responsible for Jubal Little’s death and trying to make it look like I’m not.”
“He can’t believe that.”
Waaboo was straining to get free and making unhappy noises.
“I honestly don’t know what he believes. Look, Jenny, I want you to close up Sam’s Place. Close it up now, and go home. Shut the curtains and don’t open the door for anyone.”
She looked at the windshield. “Because one of those may come our way?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not taking any chances. And I’m going to give Cy Borkman a call, have him come over and hang out with you guys.”
Borkman had retired from the sheriff’s department a couple of years earlier, but he still moonlighted in private security. Cork was pretty sure that, when Cy knew the gravity of the situation, he’d give a hand in a heartbeat.
“Do you really think we’re in danger?”
Cork nodded toward Waaboo. “Do you want to take a chance?”
Jenny had been in that kind of danger before. Only a year earlier, she’d risked her life, faced down a cadre of crazy religious zealots armed to the teeth, in order to save the life of the child in her arms. In a sad way, it had armored her against just the sort of brutal potential that Cork was afraid she might be facing again. Her look went hard, and she put her cheek against her son’s head. “I understand.”
“I may be home late tonight, so don’t worry about me.”
Again, she eyed the hole left by the slug. “That’s probably not possible.”
* * *
Larson was at the bridge ahead of him, and he wasn’t alone. John Berglund, from the Border Patrol, was there, too. Both men stood at the base of the ridge from which Cork believed the shot through his windshield had been fired.
Cork shook Berglund’s hand and said, “Seeing a lot of you these days.”
“Back at you.”
“Is this what you do on your time off?”
Berglund smiled. “Been doing this pretty much since I was a Boy Scout. Lot of years now. Not much I like better than reading trail.”
“You guys ready?” Larson said.
“For what?” Cork asked.
Larson lifted a hand toward the top of the ridge. “Let’s see about that shooter.”
It was late afternoon. The sun was an emptying orange balloon caught in the branches of the trees. The temperature was dropping noticeably.
Berglund hesitated, eyeing the ridge, the sun, and finally the far side of the bridge Cork had been approaching when the shot was fired.
“How long ago did it happen?” he asked.
“A little over two hours,” Cork said.
“The sun would have been about there in the sky?” Berglund pointed to a spot about sixty degrees west of zenith.
“About,” Cork agreed.
“Glare on your windshield?”
“Yeah. Tough to see clearly.”
Berglund considered the ridge again. “Probably a blessing. You couldn’t see the shooter because of it, but the reflection off the windshield probably also made it tough for the shooter to see you clearly. Missed by a hair, Ed told me.”
“A little more than that, but close enough it scared the hell out of me.”
Berglund seemed satisfied. “All right, let’s go.”
They climbed the ridge, which was bare rock until very near the top, where scrub undergrowth had taken root among the crags. Above that, a stand of tenacious poplar saplings capped the rock outcrop. The men separated by a dozen feet and began to go over the ground carefully. The light was fading quickly, and Cork wasn’t sure they’d be able to see anything.
It was Berglund who said, “Over here.”
Cork and Larson joined him, and he pointed to a spot behind one of the larger saplings where there was an indentation in the thin topsoil.
“From a knee,” he said. “Somebody knelt here, probably in a firing position.” He walked away, toward the back of the ridge, his eyes reading the ground. “He left this way.”
Cork had always considered himself to be a pretty good tracker, but whatever the signs Berglund saw Cork was blind to.
He and Larson followed the Border Patrol agent down the backside of the ridge, where Ahsayma Creek ran. In the language of the Anishinaabeg, ahsayma meant “tobacco.” The creek was named for the color of the water, a tobacco-spit brown, the result of bog seepage, from which much of the flow had come. They trekked through a gully heavily lined with popple, and Cork finally saw tracks pressed into the leaves underfoot. The trail led back to the road, to a pull-off a quarter mile south of the bridge. In the soft earth there, they found tire indentations.
“You might want to get people out here to get impressions, Ed. You got good tire tracks, and look here.” Berglund crouched and put his finger to the ground where the perfect imprint of a boot sole had been left. “Not a common-looking pattern,” he noted. “Might not be too hard to identify the brand.” He gazed back in the direction of the bridge. “This guy picked a pretty good spot to take a shot at you, and it was probably only the angle of the sun and the reflection off your windshield that saved you. If, in fact, he was trying to take you out. So he’s somebody who has a sense of what it takes to hunt. What do you think, Ed?”
“I think that’s a lot of conjecture, John, but I’ve got nothing better to offer. When we get these tire impressions evaluated and that boot imprint, we’ll know a hell of a lot more. And, Cork? I’ll tell Phil Holter he can let go of thinking you might have done this yourself. I’m looking forward to seeing the disappointed expression on his face.”
* * *
Cork filled his tank at the Food ’N Fuel in Allouette. It was getting late and he was hungry, so he grabbed a bowl of chicken wild rice soup and a cup of coffee at the Mocha Moose. He glanced at the headline on that day’s copy of the Duluth News Tribune, which had been left on one of the tables. The dam collapse was the lead. The death toll in Colorado was rising dramatically. The pictures of the towns in the canyon below the dam were devastating, all rubble and mud. Jubal Little was still front-page news, but his death, which was still officially being called a hunting accident, had taken a backseat to the greater loss. Cork wondered how Jubal would have felt about that.
He called home and talked with Jenny and then with Cy Borkman, who was breathing hard from wrestling with little Waaboo. “It’s under control here, Cork,” Cy told him, wheezing a bit. “No reporters. No visible threats. But I’m not leaving until I see you walk in the door.�
�
“Thanks, Cy. I owe you.”
“It’s what friends do,” Cy said.
A simple understanding, Cork thought, but one that Jubal Little had forgotten long ago.
He left the Mocha Moose. It was dark outside. The moon was up in the eastern sky, and the air was cool and damp enough that he could see the silver clouds his breath made when he exhaled. As he opened the door of his Land Rover, his cell phone rang.
“Hello, Cork. This is Camilla Little. I need your help. I want to talk to Winona Crane.”
CHAPTER 29
The Escalade was parked in front of the Tamarack County courthouse. When Cork pulled up behind it, Kenny Yates stepped from the driver’s side to meet him. The man was dressed in black and, under the streetlamp, looked like the kind of huge form that might emerge from the closet in a child’s nightmare.
“Couldn’t do this at Jubal’s place?” Cork asked.
“I just drive,” Yates said. “I don’t ask.”
He opened the back door, Camilla Little swung her long legs into the light on the street, and Yates offered his hand to help her out. She seemed unsteady, maybe a little drunk.
“Thank you, Kenny.”
“No problem.” Yates spoke in a voice that was gentle and assuring.
Cork walked her to the passenger side of his Land Rover and helped her in. As he came back around, he saw that Yates had moved forward to study the hole in the windshield.
“We heard about this,” Yates said.
Cork didn’t ask how they’d heard. He figured the Jaegers were probably keyed in to every aspect of the investigation, through one of Holter’s people or someone in the sheriff’s department. There weren’t many doors that money and political power couldn’t open.
“I told Mrs. Little that I’m real uncomfortable with this,” Yates said. “I’d like to follow you, if that’s all right.”
Cork shook his head. “Where we’re going, I’d rather go alone.”
Yates reached inside his leather jacket and drew out a small handgun, a Beretta Tomcat. He held it out toward Cork. “Jubal told me you don’t carry. I’d rather you did on this trip.”
Once again Cork gave his head a shake. “We’ll be fine.”
The pupils of Yates’s eyes were as dark as bullet holes. “Anything happens to her, I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
“That’ll make two of us,” Cork said.
“I’ll be waiting right here,” Yates told him.
“We may be a while.”
“I said I’ll be waiting.”
Cork got into his Land Rover and drove away.
Camilla stared ahead, offering him mostly profile, lit by streetlamps, in light, then in shadow. Her hands lay clasped on her lap in a way that made it clear to Cork how pensive she was. That and her silence. Which he didn’t mind. It was, after all, Winona Crane to whom she wanted to speak.
In his own mind, he remarked again on what a lovely woman she was, in a grand and stately way. She’d been raised in the political arena, trained in the etiquette of diplomacy and the nuance of statesmanship. She’d attended National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., along with the daughters of presidents and diplomats. For college she’d chosen Mills, and law school at Stanford, specializing in environmental issues. She’d been an attorney for the Nature Conservancy when she met Jubal Little at that cancer fund-raiser in Saint Paul. She had, as Jubal once told Cork, a brain, a body, and a beautifully broad view of the world. Which meant, apparently, that she understood about Winona Crane.
Jubal had also told Cork, on more than one occasion, that it was she who’d chosen him. Or more likely the Jaeger family who’d chosen him for her. He was big. He was handsome. He was articulate. He was Indian. And he was beloved. He was made to run for politics.
And the Jaegers were just the family to groom him for it.
Senator Arnold Jaeger desperately wanted a son to follow in his political footsteps. Except for the unfortunate legacy of his time aboard the USS Cole—a face that could have scared a badger—Alex Jaeger, with his military credentials, his political savvy, and his deep hunger to be a player in that world, would have been the perfect choice. His brother, Nick, wasn’t an option. He’d rather have been hunting polar bear or musk ox in Canada’s Northwest Territories than beating the bushes for votes in a congressional district. And Camilla, for all her intelligence, beauty, and legal knowledge, lacked an element that her father considered essential in being ultimately successful in the national political arena: a penis. Jubal had told Cork that Jaeger was fond of saying, “There will never be, in my lifetime, a woman elected to the White House. It’s unfair, yes, but it’s the truth. No matter how liberal they say they are, most voters, in the end, believe it takes balls to run this country.” So when his daughter began to be seen with Jubal Little, Senator Jaeger put a bull’s-eye on Jubal’s back and, in the end, bagged the man who would carry forward the Jaeger political flag.
Jubal won his first election—U.S. representative from the district that included Tamarack County, in which he maintained his official residence—by a landslide. He bought a luxurious town house in Georgetown. Camilla was usually in D.C., where she had a huge circle of friends from her childhood, or in the Twin Cities, where she had family. When Jubal came north to Tamarack County, unless he was campaigning, he came alone. It was always put out officially that he was up north to relax, to fish, to hunt, to enjoy the solitude of the great Northwoods. The truth, which Cork and very few others knew, was that, more often than not, he came because of Winona Crane.
“Does she know I’m coming?” Camilla asked.
“I called her brother. He relayed the message. Sure you want to do this?”
She looked ahead, into the dark of the long road to the rez. “I have to do this.”
* * *
Willie Crane’s cabin was lit from inside. Cork parked, the cabin door opened, and Willie stood silhouetted against the light. When Cork escorted Camilla to him, Willie said, with as much graciousness as his twisted speech would allow, “Boozhoo, Mrs. Little.” Bz’yooMizLil.
“Boozhoo,” she replied naturally. “Thank you for allowing me to come.”
Willie stepped back and let them in.
Every time Cork visited Willie Crane he was struck nearly dumb with wonder at the beauty of the photographs that hung on the walls. The wildlife shots were particularly amazing. Willie, with his clumsy gait, had somehow managed to photograph animals who spooked if you were within a mile of them and you breathed too hard. He caught them in poses so relaxed and so integrally a part of their surroundings that they might have existed in a world where humans or other predators never intruded. And maybe, in a way, that was true, at least as far as humans were concerned, because Willie Crane went deep in the Northwoods, far from any roads, to do much of his shooting. Cork figured that, in order to move such a distance and to do it quietly enough that he didn’t scare away the animal life, Willie had to walk agonizingly slow. But he also figured that, if Willie’s life had taught him anything, it was probably the virtue of patience.
Camilla scanned the cabin, and Cork could tell she was uncomfortable. Or maybe just nervous at the prospect of finally meeting the woman her husband had loved all his life.
“Is she here?” Camilla asked.
“No.”
“But she’s coming?”
“I told her,” Willie replied. “She said she would think about it.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait.” He went toward the refrigerator. “Can I offer you something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Beer, Cork?”
“Sure, thanks.”
Willie took out two bottles of Leinie’s Original, unscrewed the caps, and handed a bottle to Cork.
“Migwech,” Cork said.
“I heard your windshield took a bullet,” Willie said.
“A deer slug actually.”
“Careless hunter?”
“Y
eah.” Cork let it go at that.
Willie clearly wasn’t interested in pursuing the topic. He looked at Camilla Little with great interest and said, “I always knew this day would come. And I guess I knew that Jubal would have to be dead first.”
Which was Cork’s sentiment exactly.
* * *
The week before his wedding, Jubal Little came north. He came quietly, and Cork might not have even known he was in town except for Willie Crane.
When Winona returned to the reservation after her rescue from the McMurphys, she kept mostly to herself. Whenever he encountered her, Cork found a woman who’d grown beautiful in a distant way and who eyed him as if he were on the far side of some secret knowledge that was hers alone and who spoke to him as if he were very young in his understanding of the world and she very old. The Shinnobs on the rez talked about her as if she were some kind of witch.
Because Jubal came north a lot, Cork often saw his old friend, although they didn’t connect in the former way. The powerful friendship of youth was mostly memory, but a good one still, and one they both respectfully acknowledged.
The powerful connection between Jubal and Winona did not diminish over the years, but it was a relationship kept deep in the shadows. A small town and the rez, especially, were difficult places to keep secrets. Even so, if Cork hadn’t already known the whole history of Jubal and Winona—two halves of a broken stone—he’d have suspected nothing. When he heard about Jubal’s engagement, it made him wonder. It also made him a little angry: What about Winona? But it was, after all, none of his business. Until early one summer morning when he received a desperate call from Willie Crane.
He was a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He’d worked late the night before, a fatal accident on Highway 1 because of an unusually thick fog, and then the paperwork after. He was groggy but woke up quickly when Willie explained the situation.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he promised.
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