Iron Lake

by William Kent Krueger

  He used his garage door opener and parked next to Jo’s blue Toyota Cressida. Her car had two bumper stickers. One said, “Sandy Parrant for U.S. Senate” and the other, in true political jingoism, said, “Just look at the candidates. The difference is aParrant.” The election was long over. Parrant had won. Cork thought it was high time Jo got rid of the bumper stickers.

  He made his way to the back door with Annie. Stepping into the kitchen, he was greeted by the aroma of baking ham.

  “Smells delicious, Rose,” Cork said. He hung his parka and cap on wall hooks beside the door.

  He could tell his sister-in-law was trying to be upset with him. She nodded in response to his complimentary greeting, then went to the oven, opened the door, and bent to check inside. She was wearing floral stretch pants that didn’t at all flatter her wide hips and thighs. She had on a baggy red sweater and old blue canvas slip-ons. Her hair was dull brown like road dust, and her fleshy arms were covered with freckles. She was nothing like her sister, Jo, in appearance or temperament, and if Cork hadn’t known better he’d have guessed that one of them had been adopted.

  “Sure miss your cooking.” Cork grinned.

  Rose smiled despite herself. But she set stern eyes on Annie, who was trying to slip through the kitchen unnoticed. “I was worried sick, Anne.”

  “I told you where I was going, Aunt Rose,” Anne argued politely. “But I guess you didn’t hear. You were reading that recipe for Christmas pudding.”

  “I was?” Rose glanced at a cookbook open on the kitchen table. “Still, you should have called when it got to be so late.”

  “My fault, Rose,” Cork said. “She was helping me with some chores.”

  “Well.” Rose considered Anne a moment more. “Go clean up. Dinner will be ready shortly. And you—” She turned to Cork with a scowl, then smiled. “Would you like to stay? There’s plenty of food.”

  “Where’s Jo?”

  “Down the hall in her office. She’d like to talk with you.”

  “I might not be welcome for dinner after.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Rose said. “Just let me know and I’ll have Jenny set another place.” She turned back to the stove, picked up a wooden spoon, and began stirring something in the saucepan.

  In the living room, Cork found his five-year-old son, Stevie, on his belly playing with Legos. The television was on, tuned to cartoons. Stevie rolled over at his father’s approach and shouted, “Daddy!”

  Cork knelt down. “What’s up, buddy?”

  Stevie held out a Lego creation, something like a house. “Jail,” he said.

  “Good one, too,” Cork told him. “Who’s it for?”

  Stevie’s eyes turned devilish. “You.”

  “Hmmmm. Am I the sheriff of this jail?”

  Stevie shook his head.

  “I’m the crook? Well then, let me show you what they put me in for.”

  He wrestled with his son awhile. “You’re getting too tough for an old man like me,” he finally said.

  “Feel.” Stevie flexed his skinny arm. Cork felt mostly bone but made a face full of admiration. Stevie turned his attention back to cartoons.

  Jenny, Cork’s fourteen-year-old daughter, came into the room from the hallway. She gave her father only a glance before she curled up on the sofa with a book in her lap. He could tell by the way she looked at him that she was reflecting some of her mother’s mood. The whole house seemed suffused with the quiet cold of Jo’s anger.

  “Hi, kiddo. Where’s your mother?”

  “In her office, working. She’s waiting to talk with you.”

  He looked at the book in her lap. “What’s that?”

  “Mrs. Cavanaugh asked me to do a reading for the Christmas program next week.”

  “What reading?”

  “Whatever I want. A poem, I think. I’m going to read something by Sylvia Plath.”

  “Didn’t she kill herself?”

  “She was a very intelligent woman.”

  “What poem?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Cork sat down beside his daughter. She edged away. “Have you discussed this with Mrs. Cavanaugh?”

  “She said the choice was mine.”

  “Sylvia Plath. That doesn’t sound very Christmasy. Maybe we should talk about it,” Cork suggested.

  “The choice is mine,” his daughter said emphatically.

  Jenny was becoming more like Jo all the time. Even at fourteen her face already had the same tooserious shadowing. She was small, precocious, and full of radical energy. Her eyes were like her mother’s, too. A cold blue-white. But there were many things Jenny had done to make sure she was not like her mother. Jo had marvelous taste in her dress, yet Jenny chose to wear clothing bought at secondhand stores—old dresses and combat boots and ratty sweaters. With the help of a friend, she’d pierced each of her ears in two places, and she kept discussing the possibility of putting at least one hole in her nose. She streaked her hair with purple and sometimes wore it in short spikes that looked as if she’d grabbed hold of a live power line. She had given up smiling in favor of an attitude of disgust or sometimes simply ennui that was exaggerated by the sleepy look from her full-lidded eyes, part of the genetic Ojibwe legacy of her father.

  “Guess I’d better see what your mother wants, huh?”

  “Guess you’d better,” Jenny agreed.

  “Wish me luck,” he said.

  “Luck,” she offered him dourly.

  He found Jo at her desk in her office bent over papers. The room was walled with law books and smelled of leather bindings. Jo looked up as he came in. Her eyes seemed big and startled, but as soon as she took off her thick glasses, they resumed their usual deceptively languid calm.

  “We were worried about Anne.”

  “My fault,” Cork said. “She was helping me with some things.”

  “What things?”

  “Am I under oath, counselor?”

  “I’m just wondering if this was a mutual plan or one of Annie’s spur-of-the-moment inspirations.”

  “Why don’t you ask Annie? She’ll tell you the truth.”

  “I’m asking you. Because if it was something you knew about, I wish you’d have checked with me first.”

  “There’s no court order dictating I have to do that.”

  “Maybe there should be.”

  She pushed away from the desk, stood, and turned her back to Cork. She stared out the window at the backyard, where the snow flew around the trunk of the maple tree and piled up against the lilac hedge. Her hands were clasped tightly behind her.

  “I think it’s time we began discussing a divorce.”

  “Annie was just telling me how she prays for us to get back together.”

  “Cork, we have to help them see things as they are.”

  “If I always knew how things are, I suppose I’d do that.”

  She turned back. “You know, it’s funny. Last year I could have sworn a divorce was exactly what you wanted.”

  “I never said that.”

  “No,” she agreed. “But you also didn’t object when I asked you to leave the house.” She faced the window again, studying the storm outside.

  “It was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” When she didn’t reply, he walked slowly to her desk, then carefully came around and stood beside her. “Maybe it’s time you and I stopped thinking so much about what we want and thought a little more about the kids.”

  She swung around angrily and threw her glasses on the desk. “You think I don’t worry about them? I work long hours to make sure the bills are paid and Annie gets her braces and Jenny might not have to work her way through college. I don’t get any help from you on that.”

  “I wasn’t talking about finances,” he countered coldly. He walked away and stood staring at the rows of legal books, tomes that attempted to spell out justice, something he no longer believed in. He fought against the hopeless, cornered feeling they gave him.

&nb
sp; “Look, we can’t go on the way we’ve been going,” Jo said. “It’s not good for anybody, especially the children.”

  “And a divorce would be better?”

  “Cleaner.”

  “Like antiseptic.”

  “It’s what’s best for everybody. I think deep down you know that, Cork.”

  They were both quiet. The wind rattled the window, and from beyond the door came the sound of the television in the living room.

  Cork put his hands deep in his pockets and balled them uselessly into fists. “Fine.”

  “When?” Jo pressed him.

  “Whenever you want.”

  She put her glasses back on and looked down at the papers on her desk. “After Christmas will be fine. You’ll want to get yourself an attorney. I can give you some recommendations if you’d like.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” he replied.

  There was a knock at the door. Rose peaked in. “Dinner’s ready,” she said, looking them both over tentatively.

  “I’ve been invited,” Cork told Jo.

  “All right,” Jo agreed, not happily.

  Near the end of dinner, the telephone rang. Rose answered it. She held the phone against her ample bosom and said, “It’s for you, Cork. It’s Darla LeBeau.”

  “Darla?” Cork got up from the table and took the phone. “Hi, Darla. What’s up?” He listened and his face grew serious. “I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s a responsible boy.” He listened again. “Look, how about if I come over? No, it’s no trouble.”

  “What’s no trouble?” Rose asked as soon as he hung up.

  “Paul LeBeau went off this afternoon to deliver his newspapers and hasn’t come back. He’s been gone almost five hours.”

  “You don’t think he’s still out there in the snow somewhere?” Rose asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Cork said. “Even if he was struggling, he could easily knock on a door. Anybody in Aurora would let him in. Darla’s afraid Joe John’s come back and taken him.”

  Rose shook her head. “I don’t think Joe John would do something like that. Do you, Cork?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “He’d kidnap his own son?” Rose looked astonished.

  “Jesus, Aunt Rose, it happens all the time,” Jenny said.

  “Don’t swear,” Anne told her sister.

  “Jesus Christ.” Jenny smiled cruelly.

  “Jenny!” Rose said.

  “Jenny’s right,” Cork broke in. “Most common form of kidnapping. The truth is, if a kid’s going to be taken, I’d rather he was grabbed by someone who’s doing it out of love.”

  “That’s not love, Cork,” Jo said.

  “It might be to Joe John.” Cork started for the kitchen.

  “You don’t mind going?” Rose asked.

  “No,” he said over his shoulder. And it was absolutely true. It had been a long time since anyone needed him this way, and if felt pretty damn good.

  5

  DARLA OPENED THE DOOR even before Cork had a chance to knock. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, and tears had left a trail through her face powder down both cheeks.

  “It’s Joe John, Cork,” she said. “I know it’s Joe John.”

  Darla worked at the casino in public relations and was still dressed for the office in a dark blue blazer and skirt, a cream-colored blouse. There was gold around her neck and on her wrists.

  Cork stepped in out of the cold and wiped melting snowflakes from his face. “What makes you think so, Darla?”

  “Because it’s just like him to drop off the face of the earth for two months, then pull this kind of stunt. It’s just the kind of thing he’d do on a drunk.” She took his coat and brushed the snow onto a mat in the hallway, then hung the coat in the closet there. Cork slipped off his boots and left them on the mat.

  He’d known Darla LeBeau since high school, when she was a cheerleader with long blonde hair, nice legs, and a lot for a boy to notice under her sweater. In her sophomore year, she began going steady with Joe John LeBeau. Joe John was a fullblooded Anishinaabe bussed in from the Iron Lake Reservation ten miles outside Aurora. Dating someone from the reservation would have caused Darla a lot of trouble, but Joe John was different. Joe John was a celebrity, a basketball player of amazing ability. The St. Paul Pioneer Press had dubbed him the next Jim Thorpe, and he’d been heavily recruited by colleges all over the Midwest. He accepted a basketball scholarship to Indiana, but just before he was to begin his second year, as he was crossing a street in Bloomington, an old woman who failed to stop her big Cadillac at a red light ran him down. His right leg was shattered from his ankle bone to his hip, and although it was reconstructed, he always walked with a limp after that. With no hope of playing basketball again, he came home to Aurora. Shortly after that, he and Darla were married.

  “You probably should have called the sheriff, Darla.”

  “I didn’t want to get Joe John in trouble. I just want Paul home safely.”

  “Have you tried calling Paul’s friends?”

  “I’ve called everywhere I can think. His friends, my folks, the neighbors. I even called Pizza Hut because sometimes he’ll play video games there after he’s finished his routes.”

  “Nobody saw him?”

  “Nobody. I’ve got coffee. Want some?”

  “Thanks.”

  He followed Darla to the kitchen.

  “You’re sure he went to deliver his papers?” Cork asked.

  “He left a note on the refrigerator telling me where he was going. He’s so good that way.”

  Cork sat on a stool in her spotless kitchen. He’d sat here with Joe John many times after he brought him home from a drunk. Joe John wasn’t a mean drunk. Mostly he was nostalgic. Very often Cork would find him on the basketball court in Knudsen Park shooting hoops. Even drunk, he had a nice touch. Or sometimes Joe John would disappear for a while, usually no more than a week or two, and he would come back sobered up and contrite and full of assurances that he was through with the bottle forever.

  A lot of the whites in Aurora were quite happy to see Joe John fail. Indians, they said with great satisfaction. Drunks. It didn’t matter that Joe John had given Aurora some shining moments, that the signs posted at the town limits proclaiming “Home of the Warriors, State Basketball Champions” were entirely due to Joe John’s talent, and that Joe John had suffered a significant disappointment through no fault of his own. That he was Indian explained it all.

  Joe John had tried many times to beat the booze. It was his sister, Wanda Manydeeds, who finally helped him. Like Henry Meloux, she was one of the Midewiwin, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. She convinced Joe John to let Henry Meloux treat him in the old way. She could have treated Joe John herself, but the Midewiwin never ministered to their own relations. The treatment was something neither Meloux nor she nor Joe John would talk about, but it seemed to work. For over a year, Joe John had been sober. He had begun a business of his own, a janitorial service, contracting to clean offices in Aurora. It was a good business. Things seemed to be going well.

  Then, two months ago, Joe John up and vanished, leaving his truck smashed into a tree on County Road C and the cab reeking of whiskey. He’d simply walked away from the accident and never come back.

  “Have you heard from Joe John lately?” Cork asked.

  “Not a word.” Her hand trembled as she poured out his coffee. “I was always afraid something like this would happen. Joe John hated it here, Cork. When he was drunk, he used to talk about how he’d take Paul away someday, somewhere where nobody knew who he was and wouldn’t make fun of Paul for being the son of a drunk Indian.” She looked at her trembling hand and put the pot down.

  “You told me on the phone he’s been gone about five hours. How do you know?”

  “In his note he said it was two o’clock when he left. I don’t know why he thought he had to deliver on a day like today. Nobody would care if the paper wasn’t delivered today. People would und
erstand.” Her shoulders sagged wearily. “I make good money at the casino. He doesn’t have to deliver papers at all. I think he just wants to show people he’s not like his father.”

  “How have things been between you and Paul lately?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any tension, arguments?”

  “You mean, did Paul run away?” she said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t think he would either,” Cork reassured her. “It’s just one of the possibilities we have to consider.” He sipped his coffee. “Has he talked about his father lately? Maybe said something about wanting to find him? I’m only asking because I know how it feels to lose your father at that age. I know I would have done anything to bring him back.”

  “No, nothing. He’s been quieter lately, but I just figure it’s his age.”

  “Have you called Wanda? If Joe John’s back, she’d know.”

  “I tried. The lines must be down.”

  Cork thought for a moment. The refrigerator clicked on and the bottles rattled inside it. The wind howled past the kitchen window in the breakfast nook.

  “Okay, we know he left the house. Do we know if he actually started his route? Or finished?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what route he follows, who his customers are?”

  “No,” Darla said, shaking her head with exasperation. “No.”

  Cork reached out and touched her hand across the counter. “That’s all right, Darla. There’s no reason you should. Does Paul keep any kind of record of his customers?”

  A sudden, hopeful look lit her face. “He has a receipt book he uses when he collects for the papers every month.”

  “Good. Let’s have a look.”

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  Cork didn’t see any reason yet to be worried about Paul’s safety. Aurora was a small place and children didn’t just disappear. Probably Joe John was responsible, too ashamed to face Darla but anxious to see his son, particularly as it was the Christmas season. Cork also knew from experience that more often than not when teenagers vanished, they left of their own accord.