by Chuck Logan
Hit me.
It wasn’t her sensuality that stayed with him. It was the credible way she plunked down her demands.
She meant a million bucks. Harry thought about it. A dollar sign, a one, and six zeros. And Bud, pickled in guilt about Chris, would probably roll over for it. So what kind of a risk did she have in mind?
Bud’s Jeep found its way to the front door of the Stanley Municipal Liquor Store and Harry was going two out of three falls with a powerful urge when the counterman flipped the closed sign on the door. He took the hint. Tie match for tonight. He drove up Highway 7.
The large manila envelope was tacked to the lodge door with a push pin. No writing on it, brand new, unsealed.
Harry placed it on the dining room table, went back out on the porch, and listened. Only the cold biting down and the cooling tick of the Jeep engine.
The envelope contained a yellowing page from the Duluth Times.
He glanced at the date on the folio as he smoothed out the folds in the faded newsprint. Six years old.
Damn.
A circle of red Magic Marker swirled around a photograph on the page. Jesse’s hair was shorter and she was more trim and tanned-looking and she wore a white party dress and held a bouquet of flowers. A tall rugged man in a tux stood next to her and their hands were joined around a champagne glass. They stood in the cockpit of a sailboat and the boat’s name danced in stylized white script across the transom.
Tyche.
Harry blinked and read the headline over the picture: KIDWELL
TIES THE KNOT BEFORE HE SAILS.
Tip Kidwell. He read the cutline: “Tip Kidwell toasts his solo round-the-world voyage with his new bride, the former Marie Bursac.
The couple were married on Kidwell’s 36-foot-sloop just before he sailed.”
Bursac? Her maiden name?
Kidwell had been a story. Harry’d made a map of the voyage 228 / CHUCK LOGAN
for the paper and updated it as Kidwell navigated the globe. He’d sailed back into the Duluth harbor a hometown hero. The big news twist came the next day. Kidwell had been killed in a confused shootout with Duluth police who had a warrant to search his boat for a load of cocaine. Their timing had been bad. A shipment of drugs was found in Duluth, but not on Kidwell’s boat, and a huge legal stink resulted in a lawsuit against the police department. Harry couldn’t remember.
Suddenly very sober in his thinking, he grabbed the phone and called Randall’s number in St. Paul.
“I wake you up?” Harry asked when Dorothy answered.
“No, I was reading. What’s happening?”
“Randall there?”
“Put him on a plane this morning. He’s gone to a conference in D.C. Harry? He’s been scratchy on the subject of you. Did you guys have words?”
“Ah, he was riding my ass about coming up here, I barked at him.
Forget that, listen. Remember Tip Kidwell?”
“Sure, I interviewed the pompous bastard.”
“You remember anything about his wife?”
“No. I didn’t work that end of the story.”
“I just came home here and there’s this envelope with a page from the Duluth paper six years old tacked to the door. Picture of Kidwell just before he sailed. Staged a wedding on the boat. Dorothy, he married the same lady Bud did. I’m sure of it. Name’s different, face is the same.”
Dorothy’s voice sat up, alert. “Really.”
“Whoever left it for me circled her face in red.”
Her voice perked up. “This is creepy, in an interesting way.”
“Somebody up here wants to tell me something.”
“You talk to Bud about it?”
“Not yet. Dorothy, are you still on speaking terms with that Minneapolis homicide cop with the blow-dry hair and the black Porsche?”
Aghast, Dorothy protested. “Harry, that was years ago.”
“But he’d trip all over his big gun to do you a favor, wouldn’t he?”
HUNTER’S MOON / 229
Her voice squirmed. “I don’t know. Randall did sort of scare him half to death.”
“Get something to write with.” Harry scrambled through the sheets of paper on the table, found Ginny’s note with Cox’s birth date.
“Do I have to?” Dorothy asked reluctantly.
“You have to. Pulling in my chits.”
“Okay. Ready,” said Dorothy.
“Have your cop run Jason Emmet Cox, born January twenty-first, nineteen forty-one, through the computer. But mainly see if he can find somebody in the Duluth coppers who’ll give him the dirt on Kidwell, the bust, the shooting, all the stuff that didn’t get in the press.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Maybe the reason they didn’t have a grand jury…Dorothy, find the name of the cop who shot Kidwell. And what the widow wound up with.”
“Now there’s an ugly thought. I’ll get back to you.” Lowkey news-hound excitement made a tin rattle in her voice. She hung up.
“Tyche,” Harry said aloud. Tyche Fortuna—the bitch goddess of gamblers and mercenaries-was a realpolitik deity the ancient Greeks turned to after they lost their civilization. That dumb country-club prick Kidwell had the wit to name his sloop after Jesse.
Bud said what? She married a guy in Duluth and he died. Right, in a hail of police bullets.
Okay, so who left the clipping?
Karson. Had to be. Doing his backwoods Deep Throat routine.
A car horn blared in the drive. Harry jumped up and ran out the door and saw the now-familiar shadow dart past the pole barn.
He hadn’t locked the Jeep. Becky had turned on the lights. When he went to turn them off he saw the note pinned under the windshield wiper.
“Meet me up on Nanabozho Point in the morning. Early.”
230 / CHUCK LOGAN
39
Harry dressed in the predawn dark, made coffee, filled a Thermos, and packed it, along with two sandwiches, in his knapsack. He tossed in Bud’s fancy Zeiss binoculars, loaded the rifle, and tested the bindings on a pair of Bearpaw snowshoes.
Then he studied a Superior Hiking Trail map on the back of a Snowshoe Lodge brochure. Trails trickled through a long rectangle marked “privately owned” that started at the highway and stretched back over the top of the ridge. Bud’s property.
He wanted the dotted line that branched off from the lakeshore and meandered up the ridge to the overlook at the peak: Nanabozho Point.
Quiet as a shadow, Harry slipped into the greater shadow of the forest.
The muscle below his left shoulder blade twinged hot—the vulnerable place on his body he couldn’t touch. For years he’d superstitiously believed that a bullet orbited Detroit, waiting to land on that spot, and he could feel them out there, sniper eyes plucking at his clothing.
He followed the snowmobile trail and it was smooth going on the snow cushion over the hard pack the sleds had left. No need for the Bearpaws slung over his shoulder.
The moon sailed in Persian lamb clouds and spun spidery shadows. The shadows reminded him of Jesse.
Keep it simple. Stay alert.
He followed the snowmobile trail to the cross trail and squinted to make out the sign. An arrow pointed up to the point. Junction.
Always an apt place for an ambush. He slipped off the trail and found a spot in the pines. He cut a pile of boughs to make a nest 20 yards down a long moraine from the crossing.
He sat motionless and his hearing unplugged by stages until it seemed that he could hear the sun roll up the ridge to the east and disrobe the moon.
Up ahead somewhere, a deer started, then bounded through HUNTER’S MOON / 231
the undergrowth. Dry branches snapped. Then silence. Harry poised and cupped his hands to his ears.
The footfalls were soft at first. Too steady a rhythm for a deer.
They came from the north, along the snowmobile trail, and he picked up movement in the faint light.
Becky in jeans, his sweatshirt, Emery�
��s field jacket, a black watch cap, and running shoes. She loped gracefully along the trail, resting her forearms in a cradle formed by a pair of snow-pac boots tied by the laces and slung around her neck. She slowed to a walk at the trail junction. He could make out her hair in a ponytail and see the white puffs of her breath.
Dawn poked through the trees and a lattice of shadow crept across the snow and Becky raised a mittened hand. Her body arched alert.
Listening. Satisfied she was alone, she turned to face the sun and set her shoulders in resignation and plunged up the trail to the point.
Strange way to hide. Running the trail. Follow her? Better wait.
See if anybody was after her.
Two does wandered down the far side of the moraine, fat and idle as cartoon mice. Harry let them pass, then left his perch and followed Becky’s fresh footprints up the ridge.
From the corner of his eye he caught a smudge of red up the slope.
Hunter? He reached the spot where he’d seen the movement and found snowshoe tracks. Becky wasn’t carrying snowshoes. Her tracks were knee-deep in the snow and their shape was different. She’d changed to the boots. He strapped on his Bearpaws and started up the incline.
It was a steep goddamn trail and the sign of wandering hunters fell away as he climbed. Only animal tracks. Rabbit. Deer mostly.
Piles of their black braided shit. Through breaks in the pine and birch he saw the lodge illuminated by the fading yard lights. Headlights on Highway 7 made semaphore flashes between the trees.
The granite shoulders of the ridge increasingly jutted from the snow cover and a cloud of mist rolled in from the lake. Trees floated, twisting from the crannies with tangled roots swept bare by the wind. Troll country.
232 / CHUCK LOGAN
His snowshoes slid on rock and he took them off and tied them to the backpack. The tracks disappeared on a windswept escarpment.
Climbing now, rifle slung across his back, he needed both hands to pull himself up the massive bluff of fissured granite that rose above him in a hood of mist.
A weathered sign tilted on a tree and pointed up the rock face: CAUTION, HAZARDOUS AREA. CHILDREN SHOULD BE KEPT IN HAND.
He cocked his head to a crisp arrhythmic rattle from above. Not rock or wood or metal. The click of bone on bone.
Alert, he scrambled up the rock and sweat ran in his eyes and the snowshoes and rifle lurched on his back. The face broadened out and a dome of furrowed granite spread before him with a foot trail sketched into the rock that led to the promontory. He scaled the last fold of rock and passed through a pygmy pine jungle with a soft moss floor. The layered mist parted. Good. He could see.
The rattle was louder now. He unslung his rifle and approached cautiously and the trees ended and the Big Water did its endless float to the horizon. Far below, Stanley was a pastel watercolor that turned off its night lights one by one.
A tortured birch grew from a tangle of roots in a rock cranny on the apex of the point and the rattle came from a pair of deer antlers tied together and hung over a branch.
Spokes of sunlight thrust through the clouds and raced over the granite-barnacled backbone of the ridge as daylight soaked up the slumbering mist and Harry’s eyes followed the racing edge of dawn.
A visual slap—the evergreen spine of the ridge collapsed into a im-mense concave shadow.
The Stanley open pit. Hidden, except from up here.
His calves trembling from the climb, Harry took off his pack, set his rifle and snowshoes aside, and opened his Thermos. With a cup of coffee, he found a seat on the gnarled roots.
He lit a cigarette and watched the magic slowly seep out of the dawn. Then he took out the binoculars and scanned the terrain below.
HUNTER’S MOON / 233
Something.
He dropped the binoculars and reached for his rifle.
His hand grabbed empty air.
Sheriff Emery stood three feet away holding the rifle, inspecting it. Harry lurched up suddenly and spilled hot coffee on his wrist.
No sound of his approach. Only the sigh of the wind in the pines below and the rattle of the antlers. No Jerry for a chaperone today.
Emery was bareheaded and his dark hair was longer when it wasn’t combed back. He wore the red Mackinaw with the black band striping the sleeves and the hem and his jeans were tucked into the top of worn, greasy leather boots with thick, upturned moccasin toes. A scoped .30-06 hung from his shoulder with a pair of slender snowshoes that gleamed wet yellow.
Emery took a step forward and Harry backed up defensively, then, realizing he had a sheer drop of thin air a foot to his rear, he stood his ground.
Emery’s hand came forward, returning the weapon. “That’s an old gun you got there, Harry Griffin,” he said, friendly enough, as if he’d left the words they’d exchanged at the lodge down below with the load of his life.
Harry squinted around the rock bluff. “Where…?”
“Heard you coming up the trail. Thought you might be a deer.
You, ah, got another smoke?”
Harry held out his pack. Emery selected a cigarette and tore off the filter and lit it from Harry’s lighter. His hands, cupped around the flame, were ruddy olive brown, powerful and thickly veined in the thin sunlight. He nodded at the antlers. “Leave these horns up here. When the wind’s right, can sound like two bucks going at it.
Once in a while it draws in a big guy.” His face was tight and clear-eyed as he scanned the surrounding country.
“I saw Becky on the snowmobile trail,” said Harry.
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s been following me. Peeking in windows at the lodge.”
234 / CHUCK LOGAN
Emery nodded. “She can be like that. Sneaky.”
Harry refilled the Thermos cup and offered it to Emery. “’Fraid it’s just coffee,” he said.
Emery didn’t comment. He sipped the cup. “Good,” he said. They smoked in silence for a moment.
Harry gestured toward the gigantic open pit that broke the back of the ridge. “Sure wrecks the nature walk.”
“Yeah,” said Emery, “My dad said he took a coupla battleships out of that hole in the ground.” He flicked the coal from his cigarette and field stripped the paper. Then he kneaded the remains between his fingers, raised his hand, sniffed it, and let the wind carry the brown strings off his fingers. He was different up here, his energy straighter.
“You were a cop in Duluth, weren’t you?” said Harry.
Emery’s tobacco eyes passed slowly over Harry’s face. “Let me ask the questions.” He handed the cup back. “Fact is, not a good idea to ask too many questions of people you meet up here in these woods. You might not like the answers you get.” said Emery.
He left like smoke, without a sound.
Harry sat back down with his rifle firmly across his knees and drank another cup of coffee and smoked another cigarette. The only sound was the click click click of the antlers swaying over his head.
“He gone?” Becky called out.
“Got me,” said Harry. All he saw was trees and sky.
“He has this way of just showing up that can give you the creeps.”
Her voice came from over the lip of the drop. By holding on to the tree roots, he could lean out and see her six feet below, sitting on a concave shelf of rock. She stood up and dusted off the seat of her jeans. “Got any food?” she asked.
“Sandwich.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Ham and cheese.”
She climbed up, took his hand, and swung up beside him. She stood with her hands thrust deep into the baggy pockets HUNTER’S MOON / 235
of the field jacket. Her running shoes were tied together and thrown around her neck. When she pulled off her sweaty wool cap, he smelled an outdoors broth of body odor and unwashed clothing.
She squatted on the thick tree root and devoured the sandwich and washed it down with coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be in school
?” he asked.
“I’ve learned all I’m going to learn in that school. I’d rather watch all the grown-ups. That’s real school.”
“So, you learn anything lately?”
“Uh-huh. You were out with Mom,” she accused with food in her mouth.
“There’s food on your upper lip,” said Harry.
She wiped at her face with her sleeve. “You fuck her again?” she asked.
“Watch your mouth.”
She grinned at him. “Bet you did, fuck her. If I was home I could tell cause she gets this dreamy full-like glaze on her eyes. Sorta like a python I saw on National Geographic after it slowly squeezed a baby pig to death and swallowed it. Women are supposed to glow, aren’t they? Not Mom. She just swells up a little. Men are Mom’s food of choice.”
Harry ignored her. After an interval, he asked, “Emery follow you up here?”
“Yeah. He’s never far away.”
“He watching us now?”
“Probably.” She hugged herself. “Maybe he wants to see if you’ll throw me off this cliff.”
Her nimble eyes tingled with secrets and budding beauty under a layer of dirt and Harry cautioned himself, mindful her IQ was way ahead of her teenage emotions.
“Somebody left something pinned to my door last night,” he said.
“Uh-huh. I read it.”
“See who left it?”
“Dumbass Don Karson. Who else.”
“So, tell me about Tip Kidwell.”
236 / CHUCK LOGAN
She yawned with cosmic teenage boredom. “Kidwell was a jerk.
Mom always marries jerks.”
Again, the sensation of eyes plucking at him. Somebody was watching them. Harry could feel the crosshairs of a high-powered scope crawl on his neck.
“Why’s Emery trying to catch you?”
“Figures I know something.”
“Do you know something?”
“Yup,” she grinned nervously. “He could figure it out if he wasn’t drinking.” She hugged herself and shivered. “It’s all so obvious.”
“So just go tell him, or tell me.”
“Can’t. Not yet. I’ll let him catch me when the time’s right, like I let you catch me by the lodge,” she announced. Boldness flared in her eyes. Too much. She didn’t know how to adjust the flame. For the first time, she resembled her mother.
