Tamarack County: A Novel Read online

  They ate dinner around the table in the dining room. It felt a lot like the old days, when the kids were younger and their mother was still alive, except that Anne was noticeably quiet. Nobody pressed her. After dinner, she and Jenny volunteered to do the dishes while Stephen finished his homework. Cork gave Waaboo a bath and got him ready for bed. He sat with his grandson on his lap in the rocking chair in Waaboo’s room and read The Very Hungry Caterpillar three times. Then Jenny stepped in and took it from there.

  Downstairs, Stephen and Anne were talking quietly at the kitchen table, the cookie jar between them and each with a tumbler of milk. They shut up when Cork came in, and he figured they were discussing whatever it was that had caused Anne to come home early and that she was reluctant—or maybe afraid—to tell him. Cork didn’t think of himself as an ogre, but he knew he could come on too strong sometimes. And the kids had always been close. So it didn’t surprise him that Anne would have confided in them already while she figured out how to spill to her father whatever it was that weighed on her. But that didn’t mean he liked being left out in the cold.

  “Can I join you?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Anne said. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  At last, Cork thought and reached for a chair.

  Before he could sit down, the phone on the kitchen counter rang. He answered it with “O’Connors.”

  “Cork, it’s Marsha Dross.”

  The Tamarack County sheriff.

  “Hey, Marsha, what’s up?”

  “I’m calling out Search and Rescue. We’ve got a woman missing in this storm.”

  “Who?”

  “Evelyn Carter. She was supposed to be home several hours ago. Didn’t show. A snowmobiler found her car abandoned over on the Old Babbitt Road. No sign of Evelyn. We’re going out looking.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He hung up and turned back to the kitchen table. “I’ve got to go.”

  “What’s up, Dad?” Stephen asked.

  “Evelyn Carter’s lost out there in that storm. The sheriff wants Search and Rescue on it.”

  And that’s when Cork understood that something was really wrong in Anne’s world. Because normally she would have been concerned about this woman they all knew and would have promised to pray for Evelyn’s safety and well-being. As it was, she simply stared at her father and looked greatly relieved to have him gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  There was a poem by Robert Frost, the only poet whose work Cork really got, which talked about the debate over whether the world would end in fire or in ice. In Minnesota, in late December, folks usually hoped for fire.

  It wasn’t end-of-the-world cold, not yet, but they were dressed for it, those who’d responded to the call from Sheriff Dross. They gathered five miles outside Aurora, on the Old Babbitt Road. It was rural, narrow, a winding track through alternating stands of thick pine and poplar. There were some good-size hills in the area, slopes of exposed rock almost as old as the earth itself. No illumination, not even starlight on that snow-blown night. It was like being locked inside a deep freeze, and if Evelyn Carter was out there somewhere, Cork didn’t hold out a lot of hope for her.

  Her car had been pulled to the side of the road, the keys still in the ignition. The gas gauge read empty. Dross had Deputy George Azevedo try to start the big Buick. Nothing. Bone dry. Why, on a night like that, Evelyn Carter had driven an automobile without sufficient fuel down a godforsaken road, no one at the scene had a clue. Nor did the Judge, who was at home but in communication with Dross. Where the Judge was concerned, communication usually meant listening to him rant, and Cork could tell from Dross’s end of her cell phone conversation and the expression on her face that the Judge was giving her an earful.

  She ended the call and stared at the Buick. “He says she filled it up yesterday and hasn’t driven it much since. At least, not as far as he knows. He’s got no idea why she would have driven out here.”

  “Lost?” Cliff Aichinger, a member of the S and R team, offered.

  “Maybe,” Dross said. “Or maybe confused. She’s almost seventy.”

  “Hell, that’s young,” Richard Lefebver, another team member, said. He was well into his sixties himself. “She’s still one sharp cookie.”

  “My uncle had a stroke last year,” Aichinger replied. “Didn’t show anything, but he started getting lost whenever he went outside the house. Couldn’t keep track of where he was. Young guy, too, only seventy-one.”

  “A possibility,” Dross said.

  “Does she have a cell phone?” Cork asked.

  “In her purse, which she left on the passenger seat in front.”

  “She didn’t call anyone?”

  “We checked it. The last call in or out was five-fifteen this evening, from her son in Albuquerque. He sent a photo of her grandson. Nothing after that.”

  They stood in a cluster a good fifty yards away from the abandoned vehicle. Dross didn’t want any of the S and R team any closer, at least for the moment. She had a couple of her deputies trying to find tracks that might have been buried under the new snowfall, and she didn’t want the searchers messing up the scene with their own boot prints. There were no homes along that particular stretch of road, no summer cabins, nothing to offer the hope of shelter to an old woman lost in a storm in a gasless car.

  “Any idea how long the Buick’s been here?” Cork asked.

  “Adam Beyer found it almost two hours ago. He was on his snowmobile, heading toward the Vermilion Spur trailhead, a quarter mile north. He said the snow on the hood was already a couple of inches thick, so the engine must have been cold for quite a while. If she’s wandering out there in the woods somewhere, she’s been lost a good three, maybe four hours now.”

  “Could be she just took off walking down the road looking for help,” Cork suggested.

  Dross shook her head. “I had Azevedo drive a fifteen-mile stretch. No sign of her. If she used most of a tank of gas and ended up out here in the middle of nowhere for no reason that anyone can discern, she’s probably disoriented, for some reason. Since she’s not on the road, my bet is that she’s stumbled into the woods or down a lane that she hoped might lead to a cabin.”

  “You pulling Gratz in on this?” Cork asked.

  Orville Gratz kept and trained search dogs. A number of agencies in the heavily forested North Country relied on him and the sensitive noses of his canines.

  “He went to Duluth to Christmas-shop. He’s on his way back now. He’ll come as soon as he can.”

  * * *

  The wind had picked up, and in the beams of the lanterns and flashlights, the snow had begun to dance in a way that, if the situation had been less serious, might have made Cork think of sugarplum fairies. As it was, he was reminded of wraiths.

  Lefebver said, “We should’ve brought our snowmobiles.”

  “If she’s in these woods,” Dross said, “she probably hasn’t gone far. And if she calls out, the racket of a snowmobile will drown her voice. I want this done on foot first.”

  Since Thanksgiving, plows had already mounded the snow a good three feet along the edges of the road. Beyond those ragged barriers, what lay on the ground would have reached above Evelyn Carter’s knees. In any of the deep swales common to the area, the drifted snow might easily have buried her up to her belly or chest. With the wind that had risen, if she’d fallen, the snow would have swallowed Evelyn Carter whole.

  Azevedo and Deputy Pender came back down the road from the Buick. When they got to Dross, Azevedo said, “Nothing.”

  “Whatever tracks there were, the snow’s filled them in and covered them,” Pender added.

  “Okay,” Dross said. “Let’s begin at the car.”

  There were a dozen involved in the search, most of them members of Tamarack County Search and Rescue. Dross had called the State Patrol, who’d promised a couple of troopers, but they hadn’t arrived yet. She assigned Azevedo and Pender to walking the Old Babbitt Road
, checking for any sign of Evelyn along the shoulders. The rest of the men put on their snowshoes, spaced themselves about fifty feet apart, and moved into the woods to the south. They all had good lanterns or powerful flashlights and went slowly, sweeping the areas ahead of and between them. Six inches of new snow had already fallen that evening, and it was still coming down hard. In the woods, the wind wasn’t so strong, but if Evelyn Carter had stumbled and just lain there, Cork knew she could easily have been covered. So he looked not only for the woman and for her tracks but also for any unusual contour of the snow that might indicate something beneath.

  They didn’t talk. As it was, the forest was alive with noises. The big wind ran through the pine trees and spruce and poplar with a sound like the rush of floodwater, and the branches creaked and groaned and scraped against one another, and it made Cork think of skeletons going at it in a free-for-all. He’d worn his down parka but kept the hood off his head so that he could hear better in case Evelyn tried to cry out.

  They went a quarter of a mile, then Dross had them turn back and regroup at the Buick. Azevedo and Pender were already there with no good news. The deputies joined the others, and everyone entered the woods to the north.

  The wind was stronger now, and even in the protection among the trees, the snow moved like something alive. Cork found himself thinking about another search he’d been a part of many years earlier, when a young woman named Charlotte Kane had gone out on a snowmobile on New Year’s Eve and never come back. The search had been hindered by a blizzard that had roared out of the Dakotas, and Cork had been caught in it, caught in a whiteout, and might have become lost himself except that he’d been guided by a presence that had remained hidden in the storm, something or someone he’d never been able to identify but who’d shown him the way. When Cork was a boy, an old friend named Sam Winter Moon had once told him that there were more things in the forest than a man could ever see with his eyes, more things than he could ever hope to understand. It was a piece of wisdom that, as a grown man, Cork believed absolutely.

  Charlotte Kane’s body hadn’t been found until the snow had begun to melt the following spring. And it had been clear that a force of nature hadn’t claimed her. Charlotte Kane had been murdered.

  As he made his way carefully through the woods with the full weight of the storm muscling against him, Cork said a silent prayer for Evelyn Carter, prayed that she’d be found, found soon and found alive.

  They came to a clearing, where the wind, unhindered, lifted and blew the snow into an impenetrable wall. They paused before moving forward, regrouped so that no one was out of sight of anyone, and then they went ahead. They hadn’t gone far when Azevedo let out a shout.

  “Found something!” came his voice above the wind.

  They all moved his way. In the flood of the beams from the lights, they saw what the deputy had found. It was an elongated mounding of snow, but there was more to it than that. The dynamics of the wind had produced an oddity. The snow on the lee side had drifted, creating a smooth downslope, but on the windward side, a small section of what lay on the ground was blown nearly clear. Beneath the thin white of the snow layer that remained, they could see the red stain of blood, the blue-white marbling of flayed flesh, and the dark maroon of spilled entrails, all the result of recent, brutal evisceration.

  CHAPTER 4

  Cork arrived home well after midnight. Stephen was still up, sitting on the sofa in the living room, texting on his cell phone. Trixie was asleep at his feet. Cork stood in the kitchen doorway, exhausted and cold to the bone, staring at his son, who seemed oblivious to his presence.

  “School day tomorrow,” Cork said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  Stephen looked up suddenly, caught by surprise. “Just a sec, Dad,” he said, finished his text message, and laid the phone down next to him on the sofa cushion.

  “Marlee?” Cork asked.

  Stephen looked chagrined. “Marlee.”

  Stephen had been seeing a good deal of Marlee Daychild lately. Cork wasn’t certain what the status of their relationship actually was, but in Stephen’s parlance they were “just, you know, talking.”

  “She has school tomorrow, too,” Cork said. “You both need your sleep.”

  Stephen didn’t respond to that directly. He’d become adept lately at detouring a conversation when it wasn’t going in a way advantageous to him. He said, “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

  The truth was that Cork wanted to talk with someone, it was already well past time for Stephen to be in bed, and a few more minutes wouldn’t matter, so he said, “Let’s go into the kitchen. I need to eat something.”

  Trixie roused herself, stretched, and trotted along behind them. She went directly to her water bowl near the side door and lapped awhile.

  Cork went to the coffeemaker. The pot still held enough for one cup of cold brew. He got a mug from the cupboard, filled it from the pot, put it in the microwave to heat, then turned back to Stephen, who’d sat at the table with his cell phone in easy reach.

  “So,” Cork said, leaning his butt against the counter and crossing his arms over his chest, “did Annie tell you why she’s leaving the sisters?”

  Stephen’s eyes went wide, his whole face a momentary bloom of surprise. He recovered quickly and said, “What makes you think she’s leaving?”

  “She’s home too early. She’s clearly in emotional distress. She won’t talk to me about it. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t kill anybody. Am I wrong?”

  Stephen considered a moment. “I should let Annie tell you.”

  “So I’m right,” Cork said. “Has she told you why?”

  Stephen seemed to realize denial was useless. He shrugged. “She hasn’t told me or Jenny. She just said that she’s decided not to stay with the sisters. She’s pretty torn up about it. Don’t tell her I told you, okay?”

  “We’re good,” Cork said.

  The microwave beeped. Cork took out the hot mug, grabbed the cookie jar from the counter, and brought these things to the table. He lifted the lid of the jar, pulled out two chocolate chip cookies, and slid one across the table to his son.

  Stephen took the cookie and repeated his earlier question. “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

  Before Cork could answer, Jenny stepped into the kitchen. She wore a white chenille robe and fluffy white slippers, and her hair was mussed from sleep.

  “Thought I heard you guys,” she said.

  She came to the table and sat down next to Stephen. Cork plucked a cookie from the jar and handed it to her.

  “Any coffee left?” she asked with a yawn.

  “I killed the pot,” Cork said.

  From the kitchen doorway, Anne said, “I could make another.”

  Cork let out a dramatic sigh. “Doesn’t anybody in this house ever sleep?”

  “Waaboo,” Jenny said. “He sleeps like a dream.”

  “Anybody else hungry?” Stephen piped up.

  Cork said, “The truth is I’m famished.”

  “I’ll make us some eggs,” Anne offered and went to the refrigerator. “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

  Cork took a sip of his coffee, then lowered his mug. He meant to set it gently on the tabletop, but the cold and fatigue weighed heavily on all his muscles, and the mug went down with a startling bang.

  “Sorry,” he said. “No, we didn’t. All we found was a yearling deer that looked like it had been brought down by wolves. No sign at all of Evelyn.”

  “Will they try with rescue dogs?” Jenny asked.

  “Already did. Gratz brought out two of his best. They picked up nothing.”

  “No scent?”

  “That’s right. Nothing at all leading away from her car.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “The conditions were difficult, lots of wind, so that might have been the reason,” Cork said. “But Gratz insists his air dogs are good enough that shouldn’t be a problem. So the only thing that seems to make sense is somebody stopped and pick
ed her up.”

  Jenny said, “In which case, she’d be home by now.”

  “That would be the assumption. But clearly incorrect. When Marsha called an end to the search tonight, Evelyn still hadn’t come home. The Judge was pretty insistent that we keep looking.”

  “Will you?”

  “We’d still be out there right now, but the storm’s officially a blizzard. We lost Able Breen for a while, and when we finally found him, Marsha didn’t want to risk losing anybody else. We’ll go out again first thing in the morning, but the storm will have covered up everything by then. We’ve already searched the most logical areas, so I don’t know where else we’ll sweep.”

  “What about a helicopter or something?” Stephen suggested.

  Which was how he and Cork had searched for Stephen’s mother when she, too, had gone missing in a snowstorm. In the end, the helicopter hadn’t made any difference.

  “That’s a good idea, and Marsha’s already on it,” Cork told him. “The Forest Service is loaning us one of their Bells and also a De Havilland Beaver. They’ll join us tomorrow, provided this storm has broken.”

  Jenny propped an elbow on the tabletop and rested her chin on her fist. She frowned. “Was Evelyn’s car stuck in the snow?”

  He shook his head. “Out of gas.”

  “On the Old Babbitt Road? What was she doing out there on a night like this?”

  “Question of the day. And it gets even curiouser,” Cork said. “She filled up her tank yesterday and, according to the Judge, hasn’t really gone anywhere since. That Buick of hers probably holds twenty gallons.”

  “So she covered a lot of ground tonight,” Jenny said.

  “It certainly appears that way. One speculation is that she was disoriented for some reason. Just drove and drove until the gas was gone.”

  Stephen said, “Disoriented why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a stroke or something.”

  “Prescription drugs?” Jenny offered. “Some kind of bad reaction?”

  “Possibly,” Cork said.

  “Where all did you search?” Stephen asked.