Iron Lake

by William Kent Krueger

  Parrant shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Cork said.

  “Yeah.” Parrant gave him a brief smile of thanks. But he was a man way on the other side of something terrible, and the look in his eyes came from far, far away.

  7

  TRADITIONALLY THE ANISHINAABE were a quiet people. Before the whites came, they lived in the silence of great woods and more often than not, the voices they heard were not human. The wind spoke. The water sang. All sound had purpose. When an Anishinaabe approached the wigwam of another, he respectfully made noise to announce his coming. Thunder, therefore, was the respectful way of the storm in announcing its approach. Spirit and purpose in all things. For all creation, respect.

  The storm that bent the pine trees and the tamaracks, that drove the snow plows from the roads and froze and snapped the power lines was not an angry spirit. In its passage, it created chaos not because of anger but because it was so vast and powerful and those things it touched, especially those things human, were so small in comparison. In a way, it was like the bear that Cork had once hunted with Sam Winter Moon, huge and oblivious. If the storm, in fact, was responsible for the disappearance of the boy, Cork knew it was not a thing done maliciously. In his experience, only people acted out of pure malice.

  When he finally reached Darla’s house, the porch light was on and he saw an ancient Kawasaki snowmobile parked near the steps. As he approached the machine, he knew without actually seeing that under the engine oil was staining the snow. He knew it because the machine belonged to Father Tom Griffin and was the oldest of its kind in Tamarack County. It always leaked oil.

  He rang the bell, and a moment later Darla opened the door.

  “Cork,” she said, and gave him a nervous look and stepped back.

  The priest was beside her out of sight for a moment, but Cork could see his shadow on the wall, a tall, lanky silhouette. Then Tom Griffin stepped into view, a steadfast smile on his lips and a huge black patch over his left eye.

  “Evening, Cork,” the priest said, and reached out to shake hands. He had a strong grip that he used gracefully to guide Cork out of the storm and into the house.

  Tom Griffin was dressed in black and wearing his cleric’s collar, an unusual thing for the man. Except for formal occasions and when performing the formally religious duties of his position, the priest preferred to wear blue jeans and flannel shirts and hiking boots. He had come to Aurora a year and a half earlier to help the aging Father Kelsey manage St. Agnes and to minister to the Catholic parishioners who lived on the Iron Lake Reservation. He was nearing forty, a man of enormous goodwill and energy. In summer he could be seen cutting along the back roads of the reservation on a huge, old Kawasaki motorcycle. In winter, he generally used the Kawasaki snowmobile. As a result, he was affectionately known on the reservation as St. Kawasaki.

  “I’m glad you called somebody, Darla,” Cork told her.

  “You didn’t find him,” Darla said.

  “Maybe you should sit down.”

  “What is it?”

  Cork looked to the priest for help.

  “Maybe we should all sit down,” Tom Griffin suggested.

  He led the way into the living room and sat on the arm of the sofa. Darla sat beside him. Cork settled on the radiator, reluctant to wet the furniture with the drip of the melting snow off his coat.

  “Judge Parrant is dead,” Cork told them.

  “The judge?” the priest said. “How?”

  “It looks as if he killed himself. The sheriff’s there now. We couldn’t find any indication that Paul had been there, so this probably hasn’t got a thing to do with him.”

  “I know that,” Darla said.

  Cork looked at the priest, then back at Darla. “What’s going on?”

  “I was out at the reservation this morning. We buried Vernon Blackwater, you know,” the priest said.

  “So?”

  “Word on the reservation is that Joe John is back.”

  “Has anybody talked to him?” Cork asked.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Not even Wanda?”

  “I was out there a little while ago. She hasn’t seen him or spoken to him, but she’s sure he’s around.”

  “He’s got Paul?”

  “Paul’s gone, Joe John’s back. I’d say that’s hardly coincidence, wouldn’t you?”

  Cork felt relieved. At least it was Joe John. Not the storm or something worse. “The sheriff will want to know that,” he said.

  “The sheriff?” Darla looked unhappy.

  “He’s sending a man over here.”

  “I don’t want any trouble,” she said.

  “It’s Joe John,” the priest told Cork. “Can’t we do this without the law coming into it?”

  “It’s out of my hands now,” Cork explained. He stood up. “It’s late. I’d best get going. I’ll stay in touch. And let me know if I can help in any way.”

  “Thanks, Cork.” Darla managed a smile.

  “Let me see you out,” the priest said.

  As he put on his gloves at the door, Cork asked, “Lots of folks at Vernon Blackwater’s burial?”

  “Most of the reservation. He was an important man.”

  “He was a son of a bitch,” Cork said, drawing his cap out of his coat pocket.

  “He was that, too,” the priest agreed.

  “You were there when he died, weren’t you? Gave him last rites?”

  “I did.”

  Cork tugged the cap down over his ears. “Heard his final confession?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s something I would’ve given my left nut to hear.”

  “I’d think twice before giving away body parts, Cork,” the priest said with a smile and a quick gesture toward the patch over his eye.

  Before he reached for the door, Cork asked the priest quietly, “Can I talk with you soon?”

  “About what?”

  “I haven’t been in church in over a year.”

  “Finally worried about your soul?”

  “Please,” Cork said.

  “Of course we can talk. When?”

  “Tomorrow. Late afternoon maybe. Say five o’clock?”

  “Make it six,” the priest suggested. “My office.”

  “I’ll be there,” Cork promised.

  * * *

  In the brief time Cork was inside, his Bronco had become snow-covered again. He started the engine, then stepped out to brush the windows clean. The wind blew so hard the snow came at him levelly out of the darkness and he squinted against the flakes that the wind made bitterly piercing. It was late. The only light he could see came from Darla’s house. Across the street was a stand of tall birch and aspen where the wind screamed through and the bare branches rubbed together with a crying sound. Suddenly Cork stopped. Turning, he scanned the darkness at his back and listened to the crying of the trees.

  “Who’s there?” he yelled.

  He got no answer. Near him nothing moved but the snow. He couldn’t see a thing in the swaying trees.

  “Is anybody there?” he tried again.

  No voice answered except the bitter howl of the wind. Cork finished clearing the snow and got into his Bronco. As an afterthought he locked the doors. He waited a moment before driving away, trying one last time to see if anything moved among the trees.

  Because he could have sworn someone there had called his name.

  8

  NEXT MORNING, Cork rose in the dark, stumbled to the kitchen and started coffee dripping in the Mr. Coffee. He showered, shaved, and dressed. Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a cup of coffee and looked out the window. Over the lake, the sky in the east was just turning a faint, powdery blue. He put on his coat, went to the back room, scooped a quarter bucket of corn from the sack, and made his way down to the shore of the lake.

  In the night, the storm had moved east beyond Lake Superior and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Its passing left the sky clear and with
a few stars still shining. The snow lay smooth and deep, cast in the pale blue-gray light of early morning. The air was so still the white smoke from the chimneys in town rose up straight as birch trunks. Cork loved the painful cold of the morning, the brittle new snow beneath his boots, the breathless clarity of the sky. He loved Aurora deeply in such moments.

  The geese were on the water. He was glad to see that they’d made it through the storm. They honked and paddled nearer when they saw him, but they wouldn’t come all the way to shore. He kicked a big circle in the snow, clearing it, as he had done with Anne, down to the frozen ground underneath. He shook the grain out of the bucket. After he’d stepped well away, the geese came quickly.

  The sun still wasn’t up when he left the cabin, but a big bubble of yellow light showed where, in half an hour, it would rise over the bare trees on the far side of the lake.

  At Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, Cork found Johnny Pap out front shoveling snow. Johnny was first-generation Greek. His real name was John Papasconstantinou, but his father had shortened it when he arrived in the States. He was fifty, stout, a man of great but nervous energy.

  “Winter’s here, that’s for sure,” Johnny observed. “Knew it had to happen.”

  “Coffee ready yet?” Cork asked.

  “Molly’s doing it now. Ski’d in from her place. Got here before me even.” Johnny leaned on his snow shovel. “Wish Maria was like that,” he said, speaking of his wife. “Takes a couple sticks of dynamite to get her out of bed most mornings.” He wiped the drip from his nose and eyed Cork man to man. “Wish she was like Molly in a lot of ways, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ll see you inside,” Cork said, and left Johnny to his shoveling.

  Except for Molly, the place was empty.

  “Well, well.” Molly smiled, glancing up from the big stainless steel coffeemaker. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “Anybody ever tell you you look mighty good in the morning?”

  “Not for a long time.” She leaned across the counter to where Cork sat on a stool. “Thought about you all night,” she said.

  “Long night?”

  “It went on forever.”

  “Try reading a book next time. It’s what I do.”

  “I knitted. I’m working on a Christmas present for you. Something for cold nights.”

  “Wool condom?”

  Molly laughed, poured him a cup of coffee, and slid it across the counter. Then she turned to the kitchen. She fixed him bacon and eggs and wheat toast. By the time he’d finished eating, the place had begun to fill with men. The Broiler was a popular stopover for people on their way to work. The clientele were regulars, men mostly who ordered the same breakfast every day, said the same things day in and day out. They worked at the brewery or the sawmill or for the highway department. Or they were shop owners killing time before they headed to the task of clearing the walks in front of their stores. Johnny had taken over the cooking. Two other waitresses had arrived, but it was Molly who caught everyone’s eye. She moved quickly and efficiently from table to table, booth to booth, slipping easily among men who eyed her just as keenly as Cork did. He liked how she cocked a fist on her hip and said something hard and funny to the ones who made passes, and there were a lot of them. He liked the combination of her plain good looks, her efficiency, and her elusiveness there in a place where men hungered around her in a lot of ways. She was a woman who knew how to take care of herself.

  At the register, he spoke to her quietly. “Got it on good authority there’s an ex-law enforcement officer heading out your way later. Maybe that civic minded ex-officer could give you a lift.”

  “Wouldn’t accept anything from an ex-officer of the law. But I’m a definite pushover for any man who knows how to flip a burger. Is there a charge for this ride?”

  “That’s negotiable.”

  “Then you’ve got me over a barrel,” she admitted with a smile.

  Cork lifted his eyebrow. “Now, that sounds interesting.”

  9

  ON THE STATE HIGHWAY just beyond the limits of Aurora stood a big marquee, a neon bow that shot a neon arrow in the direction of a newly paved road through a stand of white pines. “Chippewa Grand Casino,” the marquee proclaimed; “¼ Mile To A Jackpot Of Good Times And Good Food.”

  Growing up in Aurora, Cork had often traveled the road through the white pines. The road was gravel then and the pines part of a large county park. At that time the quarter mile led to a ball field and a huge picnic area shaded by maples and a long stretch of beach on the lake. A year ago the land had been sold to the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe so they could build a gambling casino. Under federal law, property purchased by a tribal entity became tribal land, exempt from the prohibition against gaming that constrained non–Native American landholders. Initially there had been a good deal of objection to the sale. Rust River, a good trout stream, ran through the land. Trout fisherman and conservationists questioned whether the stream would be ruined. Construction of the casino was to be bankrolled by a loan from Great North Development, and Sandy Parrant did a bangup job of assuring everyone that not only the quality of the trout fishing, but the beauty of the land itself would be preserved. He’d kept his promise. The white pines and the stream had been untouched. The ball field had become the casino parking lot. Only the maples of the shaded picnic area were razed and in their place rose the copper dome of the casino.

  As Cork drove down the road through the pines, he thought, as he often did, of the lines of a poem whose title he couldn’t recall: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” The casino was ninety thousand square feet of pure white brick, glass, and glinting copper. It sat in the clearing with a great apron of parking lot in front of it. Behind was a beautifully sculptured landscape where the trout stream ran unspoiled. Through the trees, the broad flat white of the lake was visible. The parking lot had already been plowed and dozens of cars were parked. Snow lay several inches deep on many of them, indicating they’d been there all night. Although it was possible people had been trapped by the storm, it was just as possible they would have been there all night anyway. Gambling, Cork had come to understand, affected some people in an odd way. Not unlike fishing. Fisherman would drive their pickups and four-wheelers out onto thin ice risking their necks just to catch a damn fish. Some gamblers took the same kind of chance at a blackjack table.

  Although the casino was well lit inside, it seemed dark compared with the incredible brightness of the snowy morning. There didn’t seem to be much action, but the day was young.

  Cork caught sight of Ernie Meloux, old Henry Meloux’s nephew, crossing the floor between empty blackjack tables, heading toward the Boundary Waters coffee shop. Cork followed and joined him just as Ernie was bending to a cup of coffee at the counter.

  “Hey, Ernie, what’s up?”

  Ernie nodded toward his coffee. “Getting a jump start on the day. How’s it going, Cork?”

  “No complaints.”

  Ernie was a small, square man, tightly built, with a mist of gray just beginning to surface through his short black hair. He sipped his coffee and played with a small strip of silver metal the size of an address label that he spun around on the countertop.

  “Seen your uncle lately?” Cork asked.

  “Last night. Came in here just like he’d stepped off a bus instead of walking through that damn storm. He’s a hoot, Uncle Henry is.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I gave him a ride back to Crow Point on my snowmobile after I was finished here. You know, I believe he wouldn’t’ve thought anything about hoofing it back.”

  “I gave him a lift into town. He was talking about seeing a Windigo. He say anything to you about that?”

  “Windigo?” Ernie gave the metal strip a spin with his finger. It went round and round like a top. “Didn’t say a thing. Just bummed a cigarette and asked where Russell Blackwater was.”

  “He came all the way here in the middle of that
storm just to talk to Russ?”

  Ernie shrugged. “I gave up trying to figure that old man a long time ago. Maybe you should talk to Russell.” Ernie jabbed a thumb toward the far side of the coffee shop, where Blackwater sat alone reading a newspaper.

  “Maybe I will.” Cork nodded at the little strip of metal Ernie was fidgeting with. “What’ve you got there?”

  “This?” Ernie picked it up and looked at it with mock admiration. “This is what I spend most of my time doing. Putting these little doohickeys on all the equipment that comes in.”

  Cork took it and looked carefully at the word embossed in black across the metal. GameTech. “Why?”

  “Got me,” Ernie replied. “But they pay me damn near fifteen bucks an hour to do it. A whole sight better’n pumping gas out at the Tomahawk Truck Plaza.”

  “Fifteen bucks an hour?” Cork whistled. “Need an assistant?”

  “To put these things on?” He took back the GameTech strip, put it on the counter, and set it spinning again. “Windigo, huh? My uncle really thought he saw one?”

  “Seemed to.”

  “If he says he did, he did.” Ernie glanced at his watch, picked up the metal strip, and stood up. “Time to get to work. Got a box of these suckers calling my name. Merry Christmas, Cork.”

  “Same to you.”

  When Ernie had gone, Cork considered Russell Blackwater. In his late thirties, tall, powerfully built, Blackwater was a striking man but far from handsome. When Blackwater had been a young militant member of AIM, his nose had been broken during a violent confrontation in the Minneapolis office of the BIA and it had never been set. Consequently, it looked like the nose of an inept prize fighter, squashed and crooked. He also bore a long scar across his left temple, the legacy of a knife fight he never spoke about. But the aspect of Blackwater’s appearance that Cork always found least appealing was his eyes. They were dark and calculating, what Sam Winter Moon had once called “hungry hunter’s eyes.” Russ Blackwater was a man Cork had never trusted.