“Home by four. Cemetery visit, then your mother’s birthday party.” His father spotted something and said, “Excuse me, boys.”
Cork saw that Duncan MacDermid had left the church and was walking toward his car, a huge black Cadillac Eldorado next to which his father had parked the cruiser. Not at all a coincidence, Cork figured.
“A moment of your time, Duncan?” Cork’s father said.
MacDermid halted but clearly seemed put out. “What is it?”
The sheriff reached into the pocket of his khaki pants and brought out something, which he held out in the palm of his hand, flashing silver in the morning sunlight. “Is this your lighter?”
MacDermid studied it a moment, then said, “Why, yes. Where’d you find it?”
“I didn’t. It was turned in. I thought from the initials it was probably yours.”
“A birthday gift from Mary Margaret. I didn’t even realize it was missing. Who found it?”
“That would be Oscar Manydeeds.”
“Manydeeds?” MacDermid’s surprise was obvious on his face. “Where?”
“I’d like to talk to you this afternoon. Perhaps at your house?”
MacDermid’s eyes dropped toward the flashing of silver in Liam O’Connor’s palm. “Something to do with my lighter?”
“More or less.”
MacDermid glanced around. Other parishioners were drifting toward the parking lot. “All right.”
“Would two o’clock do?”
“That would be fine.”
Mrs. MacDermid, who’d paused to speak with Father Cam, finally joined them. “Good morning, Liam. I understand it’s Colleen’s birthday today. Will you pass along my good wishes?”
“I will, Mary Margaret.”
“May I have my lighter?” MacDermid said.
“I’d like to hold on to it for a bit, Duncan. I’ll explain this afternoon.”
“At two, then.” MacDermid opened the passenger door for his wife.
Cork’s father’s eyes tracked the big car as if it were a buck in his rifle sight. He finally broke his gaze. “Four o’clock, Cork. Don’t forget.” He got into his cruiser and headed away.
“What’s up with the lighter?” Jorge asked.
Cork shrugged, as if he had no idea, and said, “It’s hot. What do you say we go for a swim in the lake today?”
CHAPTER 19
Liam O’Connor’s Irish ancestors came to America during the great potato famine. When he was a child, stories of the callous hearts of English landlords had been fuel for the tirades of his male relatives, policemen all, whenever they gathered to drink, which was often. Liam didn’t inherit hard drinking from those men, but their bitterness toward people with money and power was deeply embedded in his heart.
Duncan MacDermid had money, and Glengarrow, his grand estate on the shore of Iron Lake, was as near to a castle as you could find in the North Country of Minnesota. It had been built by Duncan MacDermid’s grandfather, Andrew MacDermid, who’d opened the North Star Mine in 1886. The property took up a whole stretch of shoreline just north of Aurora, a long curve that gave a grand view of the town, which was still greatly influenced by the MacDermid family. In the halcyon days of iron mining, North Star owned the small abodes that housed its workers’ families and ran the store where they spent their scrip. There had been other mining barons on the Iron Range, but the MacDermid name was among the most prominent. To the mining families who lived under the thumb of MacDermid rule, it was a name they hated.
Liam entered the estate grounds, a large, cleared area carpeted with grass and dotted with gardens, drove past the old carriage house, and parked in the circular drive in front of the great stone fortress. He stepped into the shade of the portico and was about to knock when the door opened and Mary Margaret MacDermid stepped out.
“Hello, Liam.”
She was lovely but the kind of woman Liam thought of as fragile. She was at least a dozen years younger than her husband. Liam had heard that she was the only child of a once prominent Boston family who’d lost its fortune in the Great Depression. Duncan MacDermid, so the story went, had been in Boston for business and had spotted her playing the piano, hired as entertainment for a social gathering to which he’d been invited. Her beauty, her breeding, and her musical talent had won his heart. It was a pretty story, but as with all stories, Liam suspected there was more to it. Colleen had told him that once, when she and Mary Margaret had worked together on a fundraising bazaar for St. Agnes, she’d mentioned that story. Mary Margaret’s response had been “I dreamed of being a concert pianist. Now I play only for Duncan.”
“He’s waiting for you in the guest cottage, above the boathouse.” She lifted a hand carefully, as if following a stage direction, and pointed toward the lake.
“Thanks, Mary Margaret.” Before leaving, he said, “A question for you. Did you know Big John Manydeeds?”
Her face didn’t change, didn’t show surprise or consternation, just held to a look as placid as a doll’s face. “Not at all.”
He crossed the well-manicured lawn, weaving among islands of flowers, and followed a path of crushed limestone to the guest cottage, which stood among a grove of birch trees at the edge of the lake. Although the MacDermids deemed it a guest cottage, it was nearly as large as Liam’s home on Gooseberry Lane. The boathouse was at lake level, and above it was the cottage. Liam mounted the stairs to the door. He used the brass knocker, got no response, and used it again with the same result. He employed his fist the next time, hard and constant, and at last the door opened.
Duncan MacDermid had been drinking. His slightly unfocused eyes and the way he stood, like an old fence post slowly losing its grounding, would have been indication enough, but he also held a glass of amber liquid on the rocks.
“Sheriff,” he said. “I was just relaxing on the deck. Shall we?”
Liam entered and was reminded again that “cottage” had a different meaning for the MacDermids. It was like stepping into the lobby of some grand hotel where the furniture was so luxurious that the idea of actually sitting on it seemed like criminal trespass. MacDermid made his way through the living room area and as he passed the bar, paused, turned back to Liam, and said, “Care for something to drink?”
“No, thanks, Duncan. On duty.”
MacDermid shrugged and led the way through French doors onto a broad deck that overlooked the lake and dock, where his huge motor launch sat moored, along with a small sailboat, the kind Liam had heard called a Sunfish. MacDermid plopped down in a white wicker chair whose back fanned out around him like the spread of a peacock’s tail. He set his drink on a wicker table next to his chair, where a smoking cigar sat in an ashtray with gold edging. He held his hand out toward another wicker chair, indicating Liam should sit there. It was a much smaller chair than MacDermid’s, with a simpler design. The deck—the whole cottage, for that matter—had a stunning view of the lake, which was sapphire at the moment, the same color as the cloudless sky.
“Million-dollar view,” Liam said.
MacDermid took up the cigar he’d been smoking, inhaled deeply, and shot a cloud toward Liam. “My father had this guesthouse constructed, a place to get away and relax, you know?”
“To get away from business? Or other things?” Liam’s eyes darted north, where the great house stood seventy yards distant.
MacDermid didn’t reply, simply puffed on his cigar and said, “I remember sitting here with him before I left for the war. He was in this very chair, drinking his whiskey”—he held up his glass—“and smoking a fine Cuban. I remember he kept his gaze on the town over there, telling me how proud he was that I was in uniform, but that he was even prouder of the fact that the ore from our mine was going to help us beat those Axis bastards. And it was true, O’Connor. America couldn’t have done it without us.”
“You were in the service, Duncan?”
“Graduated from Annapolis. Served five years, four of them in the war.”
“I was a
paratrooper,” Liam said. Normally, he didn’t like to talk about the war, but he thought the connection might open MacDermid up a bit.
But the man said no more about it. Instead, he stared across the water, where Aurora lay neatly along the shoreline, a half mile distant. “My family built this town. That was another thing my father was proud of.”
Built it on the back of other men’s labor, Liam thought. The words were almost on his tongue, but he reined them in.
“So, Sheriff,” MacDermid said, holding out his hand. “I’d appreciate the return of my lighter.”
“When did you miss it?”
“As I told you this morning, I didn’t know it was gone. A gift from my wife, a silly gift. I never use it. I only smoke cigars, and any connoisseur knows that you never light a cigar with anything but a wooden match. So, may I have it back?”
“I’m afraid I can’t give it to you yet, Duncan.”
“Why not?”
“There are still some questions surrounding the death of Big John Manydeeds. As you know, his body was found at Lightning Strike. The same place where your lighter was found.”
“At Lightning Strike? And by this Oscar Manydeeds, you said? An Indian with the same last name as that dead man. A relative, I presume.”
“Brother.”
“My guess is that he stole it, or someone did, and it ended up in his hands.”
“How would he have stolen it? Has he been here?”
“Probably not him then, but maybe one of my employees. My groundskeeper or housekeeper or cook or the woman who takes care of my mother.”
“Are any of them Ojibwe?”
“I don’t hire Indians.”
“You have something against the Ojibwe?”
MacDermid set his cigar in the ashtray, focused his eyes on Liam as well as he was able to at that point, and said, “I know you married an Indian woman, so you probably think you have to believe differently. But the truth, O’Connor, and every white person here knows it, is that you can’t trust an Indian.”
“Did you have something against Big John? Something more personal than just hating Indians in general?”
“I didn’t even know the man.”
“Have you ever been to Lightning Strike?”
“Sure. Anyone who’s lived here has gone out to Lightning Strike at one time or another. But I haven’t been there since I was a Boy Scout.”
“You’re fond of Four Roses.”
MacDermid seemed caught off guard by the sudden switch in the direction of the conversation.
“I noticed the bottle sitting on your bar when we passed it. That’s what you’re drinking now?”
“It was a favorite of my father. I learned to drink it early. It may not be the best whiskey on the market, but I have a certain nostalgic connection with it.” He took up his cigar again, puffed twice, then said, “When do I get my lighter back?”
“Just as soon as I’ve closed my investigation.”
“Indians kill themselves all the time, O’Connor. There’s nothing unusual about that.”
“Duncan—” Liam began, sudden anger burning in his chest. But he caught himself and held his tongue. “Thank you for your time.”
“I trust you can see yourself out, Sheriff. I’m going to go right on enjoying my whiskey, my cigar, and this million-dollar view, as you put it, of my town.”
CHAPTER 20
As he’d promised, Cork was home by four. His mother’s birthday celebration didn’t begin immediately, however. There was another part to this annual ritual, one that his mother insisted on although it always made her cry.
The cemetery lay at the south end of Aurora. In the afternoon heat, Cork, his parents, and Grandma Dilsey gathered around two small markers set in the grass. On the first was etched simply Baby O’Connor, April 3, 1952. The inscription on the other read Baby O’Connor, July 21, 1954.
Cork had been the firstborn, but after him, there’d been two miscarriages. And after that, there’d been no other pregnancies. When he’d asked his mother about this, she’d been circumspect, but also upset, Cork could tell, so he hadn’t pushed the question. It was Grandma Dilsey who’d supplied the answer.
“Do you know what a vasectomy is, Corkie?” she’d asked in response to his question.
He was nine years old and he didn’t.
“It’s a kind of operation a man can have that will keep him from making babies. Your father had a vasectomy.”
“Why? Didn’t he want more kids?”
“When you were born, we almost lost your mother.”
Which was news to Cork. “What happened?”
“Sometimes a woman bleeds, bleeds a lot. Colleen almost died before the doctors were finally able to stop the bleeding. It scared us all horribly.”
“So, Dad got that operation?”
“Not right away. Your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Then she miscarried her next child. When she miscarried the child after that, it was on her birthday and quite late in her pregnancy, and there were extraordinary complications I won’t go into. But that nearly killed her, too. So, over your mother’s profound objections, your father had the surgery. It’s a touchy subject between them, Corkie. I wouldn’t bring it up again.”
And he hadn’t.
Each marker had a little vase, and into each vase, Cork’s mother put a bright bouquet of flowers. She stood looking down at the two small rectangles of gray granite, and Cork saw, as he had in years before, tears gather in her eyes and spill down her cheeks.
His father, Cork noticed, stood a bit back, and as always on these visits, the look on his face was one Cork was not able to decipher.
* * *
By the time she opened her gifts that evening, his mother had brightened, and she claimed to love, love, love the book Cork had given her. Grandma Dilsey’s gift was a beaded change purse—she’d done the beading herself—which pleased her daughter immensely. Liam O’Connor’s gift to his wife was Wind Song dusting powder and perfume, and a cashmere sweater, which Grandma Dilsey declared perfectly matched her daughter’s eyes.
It was seven o’clock when the festivities ended, and Cork said he was going out for a while. He promised to be home by ten, his usual summer curfew.
He biked to Jorge’s place on the MacDermids’ property. On Sunday nights, he and his friend had a standing date with a game of Risk. Jorge already had the board set up in his bedroom, and the two boys settled down immediately to some serious battling. They’d been at it awhile, Cork stockpiling armies in South America and preparing for an invasion of Jorge’s stronghold in Africa, when the sound of sobs beyond the closed bedroom door made them pause in their playing.
“Your mom?” Cork whispered.
Jorge shook his head. The two boys left the game, crept to the door, and cracked it open. Through the narrow gap, Cork saw Jorge’s mother sitting at the kitchen table with another woman, who was sobbing uncontrollably, her face in her hands. When she lifted her head, Cork saw that it was Mrs. MacDermid, and he saw, too, the large bruise that spread out from her left eye.
“I don’t know what to do, Carla.”
“You have family?” Jorge’s mother asked.
“Not really. No one I could turn to.”
“But you cannot stay with him. Not after this.”
“If I leave him, I’ll have nothing. He would divorce me.”
“He would have to give you something.”
“Adultery, Carla. Everyone, everything would be on his side. He would give me nothing. Any court would back him up.”
“A woman can begin with nothing and still make something.”
“A strong woman, maybe.”
“You must tell someone about this. And you cannot go back into that house.”
“It’s okay. He’s been sleeping in the cottage since we had the big blowup, drinking himself blind every night.”
“His mother, maybe she can help you.”
“When he’s like this, even his mother has no control over hi
m. Today’s been the worst. He started as soon as we got home from church.” Mrs. MacDermid looked away and stared out the kitchen window, where the last rays of the day streamed through and painted her face in pale orange light. “I lied, Carla. I denied him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The sheriff asked me about Big John. I said I didn’t know him. How could I do that? I’m such a coward.”
“You must think of yourself now,” Carla said.
The screen door banged open, and Duncan MacDermid staggered in, his face glistening with sweat. His eyes were wild. In his right hand, he held a bottle of liquor, nearly empty.
“You,” he said, pointing a finger at his wife. “Come with me.”
“She is staying here tonight,” Carla said. She stood up and put herself between MacDermid and his wife.
“I don’t think so.” He glared at Jorge’s mother, then at Mrs. MacDermid. “What do you think, Mary Margaret?”
The woman raised her eyes to Jorge’s mother and said, “I’m going with him. It will be all right.”
“Leave the bottle, Mr. MacDermid,” Jorge’s mother said. “It won’t help.”
“Do as she asks, Duncan,” Mrs. MacDermid pleaded. “You’ve had enough.”
The man lifted the bottle to the light. It was still a quarter full. “All right,” he said, then threw the bottle to the floor, shattering it into a hundred pieces. “It’s left. Come,” he said, reaching out his empty hand toward his wife.
Mrs. MacDermid rose slowly. “I’ll be okay, Carla,” she said.
They walked out into the late evening light together, hand in hand, Mary Margaret MacDermid holding her head high, as if nothing at all had occurred.
Jorge left his bedroom and Cork followed. Jorge’s mother stood looking where Mrs. MacDermid had gone. “Dios te proteja,” she whispered. She turned when she realized the two boys were standing there.
“You heard?”
Jorge nodded.
“You must say nothing to anyone, do you understand?”
Without being asked, Jorge fetched a broom and dustpan from the kitchen closet.
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