Iron Lake

by William Kent Krueger

  The judge’s house was almost dark, with only the flicker of a fireplace flame illuminating the living room curtains. With the last paper in hand, Paul threaded his way up the long walk between cedars laden with snow. He pulled the storm door open, plowing a little arc in the drift on the porch, and saw that the front door was slightly ajar. Cold air whistled into the house. As he reached out to draw the door closed, he heard the explosion from a heavy firearm discharged inside.

  He edged the door back open. “Judge Parrant?” he called. “Are you all right?” He hesitated a moment, then stepped in.

  Paul had been inside many times before at the judge’s request. He always hated it. The house was a vast two-story affair built of Minnesota sand-stone. The interior walls were dark oak, the windows leaded glass. A huge stone fireplace dominated the living room, and the walls there were hung with hunting trophies—the heads of deer and antelope and bear whose sightless eyes seemed to follow Paul whenever the judge asked him in.

  The house smelled of applewood smoke. The sudden pop of sap from a log burning in the fireplace made him jump.

  “Judge Parrant?” he tried again.

  He knew he should probably just leave and close the door behind him. But there had been the shot, and now he felt something in the stillness of the house from which he couldn’t turn, a kind of responsibility. As he stood with the door wide open at his back and the wind blowing through, he glanced down and watched tendrils of snow creep across the bare, polished floor and vine around his boots like something alive. He knew that a terrible thing had happened. He knew it absolutely.

  He might still have turned away and run if he hadn’t seen the blood. It was a dark glistening on the polished hardwood floor at the bottom of the staircase. He walked slowly ahead, knelt, touched the small dark puddle with his fingertips, confirmed the color of it by the firelight. There was a bloody trail leading down the hallway to his left.

  Pictures from the manual for his First Aid merit badge that showed arterial bleeding and how to apply direct pressure or a tourniquet came to his mind. He’d practiced these procedures a hundred times, but never really believing that he’d ever use them. He found himself hoping desperately the judge wasn’t badly hurt, and he panicked just a little at the thought that he might actually have to save a life.

  The blood led him to a closed door where a dim light crept underneath.

  “Judge Parrant?” he said cautiously, leaning close to the door.

  He was reluctant to barge in, but when he finally turned the knob and stood in the threshold, he found a study lined with shelves of books. Along the far wall was a desk of dark wood with a lamp on it. The lamp was switched on but didn’t give much light and the room was heavy with shadows. On the wall directly back of the desk hung a map of Minnesota. Red lines like red rivers ran down the map from red splashes like red lakes. Behind the desk lay an overturned chair, and near the chair lay the judge.

  Although fear reached way down inside him and made his legs go weak, he forced himself to move ahead. As he neared the desk and saw the judge more clearly, he forgot all about the procedures for a tourniquet. There was nowhere to put a tourniquet on a man who was missing most of his head.

  For a moment he couldn’t move. He felt paralyzed, unable to think as he stared down at the raw pieces of the judge’s brain, pink as chunks of fresh watermelon. Paul didn’t even move when he heard the sound at his back, the soft shutting of the door. Finally he managed to turn away from the dead man just in time to see the second thing that night his Scout training could never have prepared him for.

  2

  “CORK?” Molly said from the bed.

  He heard and he didn’t. Standing at the window with his hands poised at his zipper, Corcoran O’Connor watched drifts rise in the yard. His old red Bronco parked in the drive was already hub deep in powdery white. Farther down through the pines, the abandoned resort cabins by the lake were nearly invisible behind a gauzy curtain of blowing snow.

  “You’re not really thinking of going, are you, Cork?” Molly asked. “Not into that.”

  “What would folks say if I ended up snowbound here?”

  “The truth. That you were screwing Molly Nurmi, that shameless slut.”

  He turned to her, frowning. “Nobody calls you that.”

  “Not to my face, anyway.” She laughed when she saw his anger. “Oh, come on, Cork. I’ve lived with that most of my life. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Well, it bothers me.”

  “I’m glad it does.” She pushed the hair from her eyes, dark red hair damp with sweat. “Stay, Cork. I’ll fire up the sauna. We can get hot and wet, roll in the snow, come back to bed, and make love again. How does that sound?”

  He finished zipping his pants, buckled his belt, and came away from the window. He went to the bed and took his red corduroy shirt from the corner post where it had been hastily draped. Slipping it on over his long johns, he slowly worked the buttons through. He bent and tugged on his socks. The cold floor had nearly frozen his feet. “Hand me a cigarette, will you?”

  Molly took one from Cork’s pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, lit it, and handed it to him. “They’ll kill you.”

  “What won’t anymore?” He glanced around the room, looking for his boots.

  “You seem distracted today.”

  “Do I? Sorry.”

  “Feeling a little guilty?”

  “Always.”

  “There’s no need to,” she said.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not Catholic.”

  “Come on. Relax here beside me a minute while you finish your cigarette.” She patted the bed at her side.

  He looked out the window. “I should get going. It’ll be hard enough getting back into town as it is.”

  Molly drew the blanket and sheet around her and pushed herself up against the headboard. She pulled her knees up to her breasts and hugged them as if she were cold. “Why are you always so concerned with what people say about you, Cork? It’s not as if you’re still the golden boy.”

  “I don’t care what people say.” He knelt and fished around under the bed for his boots. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” He found them and sat on the bed.

  “Your wife?” she asked innocently.

  Cork exhaled and shot her a cold look through the cloud of smoke.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  Molly took the Lucky Strike from his fingers and tapped the ash into a little tray shaped like a pair of red lips on the nightstand. She left the cigarette there while Cork concentrated on lacing his boots. She reached out and let her hand drift down the knobby ridge of his backbone. “What is it that you think we do here, you and me? I’ll tell you what I think it is. This is grace, Cork. This is one of those things that God, when He created it, said, ‘That’s good.’ ”

  Cork kept lacing his boots as if he didn’t hear, or if he heard, as if it didn’t matter.

  “Can I tell you something, Sheriff?”

  “I’m not the sheriff anymore,” he reminded her.

  “Can I tell you something,” she went on, “without you getting cold and stomping out?”

  “Do I get cold and stomp out?”

  “You get quiet and make excuses to leave.”

  “I won’t get quiet,” he promised.

  “Cork, I think you miss your family.”

  “I see my family all the time.”

  “This is different. This is Christmas. I really think you miss them more than you want to admit.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, standing up.

  “See, I’ve made you mad. You’re leaving.”

  “I’m not mad. I just finished tying my boots. And you know I have to leave.”

  “Why? What difference would it make if you stayed and people found out about us? It’s not as if you’re being unfaithful to a loving wife.”

  “It’s a small town and I’m not divorced. People would kick us around in their talk like a couple of soccer ba
lls. I don’t want my kids having to listen to that.”

  “Fine.” She slid down and pulled the covers tight around her. “Have it your way.”

  He picked up his cigarette, took a last drag, and ground out the ember on the red lips of the ashtray. He slipped the pack of Lucky Strikes into his shirt pocket. “Going to see me out?” he asked.

  “You know the way.”

  “Now who’s cold?”

  “Go screw yourself,” she said.

  “The world would be a dreary place, Molly, if that’s the way things worked.” He leaned down and gently kissed the top of her head.

  “Go on,” she said, pushing him away softly. But she smiled in spite of herself. “I’ll be right down.”

  He walked along the hallway of the old log house, over Molly’s braided rugs, creaked his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Molly had fed him. Some sort of light brown sprout bread and lentil soup. Yogurt and strawberries for dessert. She drank Evian springwater, but she’d given Cork a Grain Belt. A few swallows were left in the bottle and he drank that down. The beer was still cool but had gone flat. He lifted his parka from the peg beside the back door and put it on, then settled his black watch cap over his ears. As he worked his gloves onto his hands, he glanced at a small plaque that hung on the wall. It was homemade, woodburned by Molly’s father long ago. It contained an old Finnish saying her father had roughly translated into English:

  Cold, thou son of Wind,

  Do not freeze my fingernails,

  Do not freeze my hands.

  Freeze though the water willows.

  Go chill the birch chunks.

  Like most magic charms of the people of Molly’s heritage, it suggested to the evil of the world—from hiccups to death—that it visit instead other things, such as the loom or the needle or the thicket or, in a pinch, one of the neighbors. When Cork turned around, he found Molly watching him from the doorway. She’d thrown on a red chenille bathrobe and pulled bright red wool socks on over her feet.

  “Will I see you at the Pinewood Broiler?” she asked.

  “You won’t be plowed out in time to get into town tomorrow.”

  “I’ll probably ski in.”

  “Waitressing means that much?”

  “This time of year the company does.”

  Cork went back and kissed her. “If I don’t see you, I’ll call.”

  “I won’t hold my breath.”

  He pushed out the back door onto the utility porch, then out completely into the hard cold and the snow. He waded to the Bronco, cleared the tailpipe and the driver’s door, scraped the ice from the windshield, and got in. He cranked the engine. Wiping where his breath had fogged the wind-shield, he saw Molly standing at the kitchen window, her arms locked across her breasts. The light was on at her back and filtered through her hair making it like wisps of red smoke. She was a beautiful woman, large-boned and strong, ten years younger than Cork, though she’d taken such good care of herself—didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t eat red meat—that she looked even younger. Cork was a dozen pounds overweight, smoked far too much, and was beginning to go a little bald on the crown of his head. What she saw in him, he had no idea.

  Women, he thought with a warm flare of gratitude. Go figure.

  He slipped the Bronco into four-wheel drive and began slowly to move through the first of the drifts toward the county road that would take him to the highway into town. As he headed off, he glanced back at the cabin window, prepared to wave, but Molly was no longer there.

  The state highway was no better than the county road through the woods from Molly’s. Except for the Bronco, not a thing moved in the white hillocks the wind had bulldozed across the asphalt. From the weather reports he’d heard, Cork was pretty sure it was like that from the Canadian border all the way across the Arrowhead of Minnesota into Wisconsin. He drove slowly, steadily, a little blindly. After twenty minutes, he came on a figure hunched in a red-plaid mackinaw and wading toward town. He slowed to a full stop, stepped out onto the running board and hollered, “Get in!”

  The figure, so bundled Cork couldn’t even see a face, slowly turned and came toward the Bronco. When they were both safely inside, Cork started once again for Aurora.

  “Hell of a day for a constitutional.” Cork peered into the slit between the wool muffler that came above the nose and the knitted cap that was pulled down to the eyebrows.

  The mittens were drawn off and Cork saw old veined hands stained with liver spots. The hands went to the muffler, whose ends were tucked securely inside the collar of the coat. As the muffler came loose, Cork recognized Henry Meloux, whom white people around Aurora sometimes called Mad Mel. Cork knew he was in fact one of the Midewiwin, an Anishinaabe medicine man, who lived by himself on a remote point around the northwest end of the lake. He must have been walking most of the day in the blizzard to have come so near town.

  “Shoot, Henry, what could be so important it would bring you out on a day like this?”

  Meloux stared beyond the wipers that shoved the snow into little heaps off to the sides of the wind-shield. “Snow, not snow, the day is the same to me.”

  “Noble philosophy, Henry, but one that could get you frozen to death.”

  “I seen more storms than you could imagine. And worse. I seen storms and other things.”

  Cork reached inside his parka for his pack of Lucky Strikes. “Cigarette, Henry?”

  The old man took one; so did Cork. But before Cork could light up the old man sniffed at the air inside the Bronco. He gave Cork a grin full of teeth remarkably good in a man so ancient. “You smell like the good, deep part of a woman.”

  “I think that wind’s frozen your nose, Henry,” Cork told him.

  “No.” The old man kept on grinning at him. “It’s a good day for a man to be inside.” Meloux laughed softly. “Understand?”

  The old man lit his cigarette with the lighter Cork offered and grew quiet again. They had come to the edge of Aurora. They passed the big new corrugated fence of Johannsen’s salvage yard, put up when the Chippewa Grand Casino was being built so that the gutted frames and rusting wreckage of the junkyard wouldn’t sully the image of the town. A little farther on was the Iron Lake Best Western, brand-new, with 150 rooms and an indoor swimming pool with a Jacuzzi and sauna. The big marquee out front welcomed gamblers and informed them that Lyle Porter was playing piano in the Kitchi-Gami Room eight to midnight. The parking lot was nearly full. Next to the Best Western stood a new Perkins restaurant and across the road a glittery twelve-pump Food-N-Fuel gas station.

  On the streets of Aurora not much moved except a few pickups with wide traction tires. The shops had closed early and most of the windows of the small downtown were dark. For the most part, it looked as if the town’s 3,752 citizens had simply crawled inside to wait out the storm.

  The old man had been quiet a long time, smoking the Lucky Strike reflectively. Finally Cork asked, “What brings you into town on a day like this, Henry?”

  The old man said, “I seen it.”

  “What?” Cork asked. “What did you see?”

  The old man looked straight ahead. “It jumped over my cabin two nights ago, headed northwest, going toward the storm before the storm come in. I seen the black where it ran through the sky and covered the stars.”

  “Seen what?” Cork asked again.

  “I heard it, too. Heard it calling names.”

  From the way Meloux’s voice dropped to nearly nothing, Cork figured that was bad. “Heard what calling names?”

  But the old man clammed up on the subject. “I can walk now,” he said.

  “You’re not thinking of going back to your place before the roads are cleared.”

  “I walked here a long time before there were roads.”

  “That was a couple of centuries ago, Henry.”

  The old man took one last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. “Thank you, Sheriff O’Connor.”

  “Christ, I�
�m not the sheriff anymore.”

  Meloux put on his mittens, opened his door, and stepped out. “The smell of you alone has been worth the time.” He grinned once again, then shut the door.

  Cork watched him tuck the ends of his muffler into his mackinaw and turn toward the lake, toward the glittery dome invisible behind the storm where everyone who came to Aurora these days was headed, where the bright neon of the huge new casino blazed night and day, and where, even in the worst of weather, the doors were always ready to swing wide in a warm, smoky welcome promising easy fortune.

  When Meloux was gone, vanished in the white, Cork smiled to himself and said the name of the thing the old man had dared not utter.

  “Windigo.”

  3

  STU GRANTHAM STOOD before a large framed photograph of Split Rock Lighthouse that hung on the wall of the law office of Nancy Jo O’Connor. He clasped his hands behind his back as he stared at the famous landmark on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He’d been that way for nearly a minute—thoughtful, silent, unmoving—and Jo simply let him be. She had him cornered. She knew it, and if he thought about it awhile, he’d know it, too, and they could get on with things.

  A tapping at the door and Fran, Jo’s secretary, peeked in. “Jo, I’m sorry. I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but the state patrol’s just closed Highway 1. I heard it on the radio.”

  Jo glanced out her window. The parking lot of the Aurora Professional Building was nearly empty. Her blue Toyota Cressida was covered with snow and hung with icicles and looked like some kind of Arctic beast hunkered down to wait out the storm. Beyond that the world was white and nothing moved in the sea of snow.

  “Thanks, Fran,” Jo said. “Why don’t you go on home before you get stuck here.”

  “What about you?” Fran asked. She glanced at Grantham, who seemed oblivious to the news she’d brought.