Tamarack County: A Novel Read online

  She caught him looking and said, as if disappointed, “Like what you see?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. And he was. “You probably get stared at a lot.”

  “What bothers me is that there’s so much more to me. But guys who stare don’t care about that.”

  Cork had never thought of himself as that kind of guy, but here he was, caught dead to rights. It troubled him, and Stella must have seen that on his face.

  “It’s okay,” she said, her voice softened. “Forget it.” She snubbed out her cigarette, threw the butt into the snow of the yard, and said, “I’m cold. What say we go back inside before they worry about us?”

  Cork held the door for her and followed her into the house. “Time to go, Stephen,” he said.

  “I think I should stay,” Stephen replied. “At least until Stella can get someone else to come.”

  “I’d feel safer, Mom,” Marlee chimed in.

  Cork could see the look of pleasure that put on his son’s face.

  “Would it be all right, Cork?” Stella asked. “He can sleep on the sofa. And by tomorrow, I’ll have some family coverage.”

  What could he say? It made sense, yet it also worried him.

  “Okay, but any sign of trouble, you call me, understand?” he cautioned.

  “I understand,” Stephen said.

  “No heroics.”

  “Dad.”

  “All right. Give me the keys to Jenny’s Subaru. I’ll drive it home and leave you the Land Rover. I’ll need it first thing in the morning.”

  “Ten-four,” Stephen said. And he gave his dad the kind of smile he usually reserved for an equal and a friend.

  Outside, Cork started the Subaru, but he didn’t leave immediately. He sat for a little while thinking about Stephen and Marlee, and remembering the first girl he’d been crazy about. Her name had been Winona Crane, and although Cork had tried his best to win her, she’d given her heart instead to Cork’s best friend. In the end, nothing good had come of it. Cork had hoped that Stephen, when he fell in love, might have an easier, more normal, experience. But given the way things were shaping up at the moment, that prospect looked pretty bleak.

  CHAPTER 11

  On the way back to Aurora, Cork called Marsha Dross on his cell phone. She was still at the Judge’s house.

  “We’ve taken blood samples from the knife blade. They’re already on their way to the BCA lab in Bemidji. We also took prints from the knife handle and from the tubing and the gas cans. We dusted the whole garage basically. We’re also dusting her car.”

  “How’s the Judge?”

  “Rattled. Pissed.”

  “Worried about Evelyn?”

  “He’s making more of a stink about someone breaking into his house than about his wife still missing. I’m not sure how to read it. Does he not realize that things aren’t looking good for Mrs. Carter? Does he just not care? Or is he not surprised that she may not be coming back?”

  “Have you questioned him?”

  “Waiting for his lawyer. He’s old and mean as spit, but he’s not stupid. This man’s got the personality of a scorpion. How the hell did he stay on the bench so long?”

  “Connections. Political contributions. Entrenched cronyism. Voter apathy. Once judges are elected, they’re hard to unseat, even bad ones. He sat on the bench during a couple of high-profile cases, and that didn’t hurt him any either.”

  “Yeah, but one of those was Cecil LaPointe’s conviction.”

  A case that Cork knew well and that didn’t make him happy whenever he thought about it.

  “The LaPointe case didn’t come back to bite him in the ass until long after he’d retired,” he said. “Although it sure scuttled any kind of legal legacy he might have hoped to leave behind.”

  “Okay, tell me about the dog,” Dross said.

  “Brutal. Someone lured him with meat, then killed and decapitated him.”

  “Some kind of reprisal, you think?”

  “Stella Daychild claims she doesn’t know anyone who’s that angry with her, but it may be a customer she wasn’t nice enough to at the bar and who has a very mean and very vindictive streak in him.”

  “Christ, if that’s the case, I’ll nail his ass to the wall.”

  “You want this one?”

  “Does Daychild intend to file a complaint?”

  “At the moment, she doesn’t seem inclined.”

  “The truth is that with Ed Larson gone I’m going to be stretched pretty thin while we sort out what’s happened to Evelyn Carter. Are you willing to hang in there with the Daychilds?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, Cork.”

  “But I also want to be kept apprised of what’s going on with your investigation of Evelyn’s disappearance.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  By the time he parked Jenny’s Forester in the garage on Gooseberry Lane, it was nearing eleven. Inside the house, he found the first floor deserted, though a couple of lights had been left on so he wouldn’t enter in the dark. Trixie greeted him at the kitchen door with a friendly woof, but when he flipped off the lights and headed upstairs, she returned to her dog bed near the patio door. The second-floor hallway was lit by a plug-in night-light shaped like a full moon with a pleasant, smiling face. In the night, when Waaboo woke and needed comfort, the soft light helped ensure that a sleepy Jenny—or sometimes Cork—didn’t stumble into a wall by mistake. He paused at the open door to his grandson’s room. The little guy was making noises, not happy ones, small whimpers. He’d twisted his sheet and blankets into a snarled heap, which he’d pushed against the wall. Cork stepped in, untangled the mess of bedding, and laid the covers over the child. As he was about to leave, Waaboo gave a sudden cry and sat up. He began sobbing.

  Cork quickly picked him up. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s okay. Grandpa’s here.”

  Waaboo wrapped his little arms around Cork’s neck. “Dream,” he said. “Bad dream.”

  “It’s over,” Cork told him. “All gone.”

  “Cared,” Waaboo said.

  “Scared of what?” Cork asked.

  “Monter. Eat me.”

  Cork said, “I won’t let any monster eat you, I promise.”

  It was clear that Waaboo was still upset, so Cork sat in the rocker in the corner near the window. His grandson lay against his chest, his head against Cork’s cheek, his little heart to Cork’s big heart. Cork rocked him gently, and in a few minutes, Waaboo was asleep again. Cork could have put him back to bed, but he liked the feel of the small body holding on to him.

  Above him, Cork heard Anne pacing in the attic room. The floorboards creaked where she walked, and he could follow her from one side of the room to the other. His middle child had never been a worrier. Her faith had made her strong. But clearly, she’d lost something—that faith?—and with it had gone her certainty. He wished he could hold her, as he held his grandson, and assure her that what she’d lost wasn’t lost forever, but she didn’t seem to want that from him. Didn’t seem to need that from him.

  Cork felt weary, tired from the events of the day, but tired in another way as well. His children were grown or, in Stephen’s case, almost grown. What they needed from him seemed only a thimbleful of what he’d once been asked to give. Long ago, looking toward the time when he might be free from all the demands made on a father, he’d thought it would be a relief, a great weight off his shoulders. But the truth was that it sometimes felt more like abandonment.

  Anne’s steps finally crossed the room to the set of narrow stairs that led down to the second floor. A moment later, she passed Waaboo’s door on her way to the bathroom. She caught sight of her father in the rocker, stopped, and gave him a questioning look.

  “He’s afraid of monsters,” he told her quietly.

  Anne stared a long time at her nephew, and in the dim drizzle from the night-light in the hallway, her face seemed inconsolably sad. She said, “Who isn’t?”

  CHAPTER 12
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  The next morning, Stephen came home early, as promised, to deliver the Land Rover his father had left at the Daychilds’. He looked tired. He said he’d stayed up half the night talking with Marlee, trying to get her calmed down enough so that she could sleep. Cork wondered if talking was the only technique his son had employed. Stephen offered to go with him back out to the rez, but Cork told him to get some sleep, and Stephen was fine with that. He helped Cork hook the trailer with its snowmobile to the hitch on the Land Rover, then dragged himself inside.

  On his way to the Daychilds’ home, Cork stopped at the sheriff’s department. Over coffee in her office, Dross told him what she knew.

  Deputies Azevedo and Pender had spent the night running the prints they’d taken from the Judge’s garage and his wife’s car. There were lots of prints on the big Buick, but only one set matched those on the knife blade, the rubber tubing, and the gas cans. That one set belonged to the Judge. It would be natural, of course, to expect the Judge’s prints to be all over the things he owned, so that in itself wasn’t necessarily telling. What was telling, Dross said, was the interview she’d conducted with Ralph Carter once his attorney had arrived.

  “He totally clammed up, Cork. Except for ‘I don’t know,’ I couldn’t get a word out of him. Did he have any idea why his wife might have gone to Saint Paul on Tuesday? Any idea why she didn’t tell him? Any idea why, in fact, she’d lied to him about it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Broken record.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know.”

  “That’s the thing. He’s not a good liar. It was all over his face and in his body language. There’s a lot he’s not telling.”

  “Any word from the BCA lab on that blood sample you sent them?”

  “I called Simon Rutledge, asked him to put a stat on it. He’s seeing what he can do. It’ll be a while.”

  “In the meantime?”

  “If someone really did empty the tank on the car Evelyn Carter was driving, I’d like to understand how they got the cans out of and back into the garage.” She sipped her coffee and said, as if offhand, “Of course, if it was the Judge, that wouldn’t have been a problem.”

  “You ask him where he was the evening his wife went missing?”

  “I did. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and told me, and I quote, ‘I got one car, woman, and my wife was driving it that night. Where the hell do you think I was?’ I asked him if there was any way he could prove that, and his lawyer—”

  “Abramson?”

  “Yeah, Al Abramson.”

  “A good man.”

  “And a good lawyer. He said it sounded very much like the kind of question one might ask a suspect. Was the Judge a suspect? And if so, what, in my mind, made him so?”

  “Did you tell him you thought the Judge was feeding you a lot of bullshit and that in itself was reason enough?”

  She smiled. Although she wore no makeup, she was still, in her straightforward way, attractive. She was wearing her uniform, something she rarely did. He figured she was going to do a lot of official investigating that day and wanted the force of her authority evident.

  “So, where do you go from here?” he asked.

  She looked at her watch. “The Judge’s daughter arrived this morning. I’ve already spoken with her on the phone and asked if she’d mind coming in today so that I could talk to her about her mother and our investigation.”

  “She said yes?”

  “In a heartbeat. She seems a good deal more worried about Evelyn than her father is.”

  The mug Dross had given him was almost empty. Cork stared at the last mouthful, which was full of grounds. “I believe Ralph’s the kind of man who, given the right circumstances, might kill his wife, but we come back to motive.” He gave her a questioning look, to which she offered only a shrug in reply. “We also have the issue of how that feeble old goat would even be able to manage siphoning the gas tank and hauling around the heavy cans.”

  “Maybe he had help.”

  “Who?”

  She said in a voice that was a very good imitation of the Judge, “I don’t know.”

  Cork laughed and stood up. “After you’ve talked to Justine, will you let me know what you found out, if anything?”

  “All right. And you’ll let me know how your snowmobile expedition goes, okay?”

  * * *

  He drove to the reservation of the Iron Lake Ojibwe and parked at the deserted marina. He backed the snowmobile off the trailer and headed out onto the frozen lake toward the Loons, a little more than a mile distant. The sun off the snow was a blinding hammer, and Cork wore his tinted goggles against the glare. The temperature was double digits below zero and expected to rise only a few degrees that day. It was pretty typical weather in the North Country in the dead of winter, and Cork loved it. He loved how the deep cold cleaned the air and how everything he looked at seemed more clearly defined. In summer, the heat and the humidity that often accompanied it made things seem to melt into one another like the images of an oil painting in which the colors had run. In winter, a cold winter especially, each thing brought into being by God or the Great Mystery or Kitchimanidoo or whatever you chose to call the force of creation stood out separately from every other thing in an almost mystical way. Half a mile out, he looked toward the shoreline southeast and found the break in the birch trees that marked the trail to the Daychilds’ old prefab home. Half a minute later, he was following the tracks that he and whoever had killed the dog had left going to and from the Loons the night before. He quickly arrived at the place where the dog killer’s snowmobile had come and gone, and he set his Bearcat into that track and followed southwest toward the open lake and Aurora.

  Long before the details of the far shoreline became clear to him, he could see smoke from the chimneys of town rising straight into the air like erect white feathers pressed against the powdery blue sky. As he drew nearer, a small village of ice fishing houses appeared on the lake. He figured the track of the dog killer’s snowmobile would head through that gathering and be lost among the maze of tracks left by other snowmobiles. To his surprise, however, the killer’s track veered north and stayed well clear of the fishing shanties. Cork wondered if the killer had been concerned about being seen and identified, even in the dead of night. He followed the track easily for a few more minutes, drawing very near to the western shore of Iron Lake a couple of miles north of town. There the killer had entered an area crisscrossed by dozens of other snowmobiles, and the track became impossible to follow. But that area in itself was interesting, because it was near the mouth of the White Iron River. Although it was not the safest route, the broad river was often used by snowmobilers to access the lake. The system of snowmobile trails in Tamarack County was like a spiderweb with threads reaching into every corner of the county, even the most remote. Many of those threads crossed the White Iron River. Whoever had killed the Daychilds’ dog could have come from just about anywhere.

  It didn’t leave Cork with much except that he was almost certain the killer was, as Stella Daychild had said, a chimook. And because the killer had come a distance and gone out of his way to avoid being seen, the killing of the dog had not been just a random act of violence. Someone wanted to punish the Daychilds or to send them a terrible and frightening message. Cork thought about the guy Stella had described, the one she believed had followed her to the rez from the casino, the man with a mole like a fly on his cheek. She’d said that just his look had been enough to make her nervous. Whoever he was, was he the kind of man who, for whatever reason, would behead a dog that was too trusting for its own good?

  But in the way he’d trained himself to think over a lifetime of looking beyond the obvious, Cork wondered if it was something else. Maybe Stella Daychild knew more than she was telling. Maybe, in fact, she’d made up the man from the casino because he would deflect Cork from poking his nose somewhere she didn’t want it poked. People had played him that way before. So as much as he wanted to tru
st that the Daychilds had been up front with him, he held in the back of his mind a measure of healthy doubt.

  He turned his snowmobile, intending to head back to Allouette, but, instead of going there directly, veered far to the north. He traveled at an even thirty-five miles an hour, cutting across frozen, open lake, weaving between islands, and after fifteen minutes, he’d reached his destination.

  Crow Point was a finger of land fringed with aspen trees. Most of it was meadowland, with two cabins set in the wild grass near the end of the point. One cabin belonged to Henry Meloux, the ancient Ojibwe Mide, who had been to Cork a mentor, a spiritual adviser, a surrogate father, and always a friend. The other cabin belonged to Rainy Bisonette, Meloux’s great-niece, a public nurse who’d come two years earlier to help the old man through illness. She’d stayed on beyond that time of need, both because she hoped to learn Meloux’s secrets of healing and because she and Cork had fallen in love. On Crow Point, there was neither electricity nor running water. It was a tough existence, but Rainy, like her great-uncle, had found that the benefits outweighed the difficulties.

  Cork guided his snowmobile to a stop in front of Rainy’s cabin and killed the engine. Wood, cut and split for burning, stood neatly stacked against the cabin’s south wall. The woodpile wore a covering of snow that made it look like a great animal, humped and hibernating in the cabin’s lee. Snow lay drifted three feet deep against the door.

  He remembered the day Rainy and Meloux had left Crow Point. They’d gone together, near the end of October. Cork had ridden his Bearcat out to help haul baggage to Rainy’s truck, which was parked at the nearest access, a gravel county road a mile and a half east. Nearly a foot of snow already lay on the ground.

  “No lock,” he’d said, looking at the door Rainy had just closed behind her.

  “Uncle Henry says that locks are like fear. They’re an invitation to violation. An open door is a different kind of invitation.”