Iron Lake

by William Kent Krueger

  The robin was a good spirit, manidoo, that warned of danger or the nearness of enemies or of the approach of a maji-manidoo, evil spirit. Cork looked at the robin, out of place in that bitter winter landscape, and returned to the Bronco. He lifted his Winchester from the backseat, took several shells from the box of cartridges in his glove box, and loaded the rifle.

  The front door of the cabin was locked. Cork walked around to the rear and found the back door locked as well. Using the butt of his rifle, he broke a pane in the bathroom window, undid the latch, and slid the window up. He put the rifle in first, then struggled through himself. Inside, everything was quiet. Outside, the robin had stopped its calling.

  He stepped into the main room. He knew it had been thoroughly searched by Schanno’s men already, and he wasn’t exactly certain what he was looking for. He held the Winchester loosely in his left hand and walked carefully around the room. The boards over the window blocked much of the light, and the place was dark and had a lonely feel to it. Cork stood a moment staring down at the crusted blood on the floor where Lytton had died.

  He walked the room slowly, tapping the boards on the wall and the floor with the butt of his rifle, listening for a hollow sound. He checked the Ben Franklin stove, the kindling box, all around the sink and the few appliances. He looked under the mattress on the bunk, then felt all over the mattress itself. He opened the door to the back room that Lytton had used as a darkroom. As nearly as he could tell, all the equipment was still there—cameras, enlarger, developing trays, chemicals. He opened the drawers, found odds and ends he’d seen when he was there before. The drawer that had held wildlife negatives was empty. Wally Schanno had probably taken them. Cork wondered if there’d been other kinds of negatives, more sinister than wildlife, mixed in. He looked in the biggest drawer, which had been completely empty the night Lytton was killed. At first, it still looked just as empty. But as he was about to shove it closed, he noticed the black edge of a negative pinched between the bottom and the back of the drawer. He tried to pull it free, but the negative was stuck. He took the drawer out and hit the bottom loose with his fist. The negative fell to the floor. It was actually a strip of negatives from photographs shot in a series. Cork held the strip up to the bulb and studied it carefully.

  “I’ll be damned,” he whispered.

  The negatives showed a man undressing in front of another man, who, in the final frame, embraced him. Who they were, Cork couldn’t tell from the negatives. But he was certain now that what he was looking for did exist.

  The last room he checked was the bathroom; he found nothing there. He stood by the open window trying to think. The drawer had been empty the night Lytton died. He thought about the figure who’d shot at him and then run into the night. As clearly as he could recall, the silhouette had held nothing but a rifle in its arms. So it was probably Lytton who’d moved the negatives, maybe in response to the judge’s murder. And where would a man like Lytton hide them?

  The stillness and Cork’s thinking were both disturbed by the sudden calling of the robin. Instinctively, Cork stepped away from the open window. He knelt and carefully peered through the frame, studying the clearing and the woods. Nothing moved. The bird left the birch tree with a startling flap of its wings and headed east toward the low morning sun. Cork listened in the quiet after the bird’s leaving, but there was nothing more to hear.

  As he looked out the window, his eyes fell on the old outhouse. He suddenly thought, with a grim smile, that the kind of shit Lytton had hid belonged down an outhouse hole. He didn’t credit Lytton with enough sense of irony to have put the negatives there for that reason, but it might follow that he’d put them in a place where most people would be reluctant to look. Cork crawled out the window and walked to the outhouse.

  The door hung by a single rusted hinge. Snow had drifted against it, so that he couldn’t swing the door open. He leaned his rifle against the side of the outhouse, took the door in his gloved hands, and easily tore it from the remaining hinge. Snow had sifted through the cracks between the old gray boards and had accumulated a foot deep in the small square of the floor. There was a piece of rotting plywood over the hole in the seat and on top of that an old Sears catalog with the pages wrinkled and stuck together and chewed on by rodents. Cork knocked the catalog off and slid the board away. The darkness inside the hole yielded nothing. If Lytton had put something down there, he would have attached it in some way to be easily retrieved, but there was nothing like that. The maze of worm tunnels in the outline of the plywood indicated that the old board had been undisturbed for a good long time. Cork left the outhouse and stood a moment considering the two remaining structures—the garage and the taxidermy shed.

  He walked to the shed, where the cord of split balsam lay stacked neatly against the wall. There was a strong padlock on the door. Cork went to the Bronco and brought back his ice spud. Although the padlock was good, the wood on the doorframe of the shed was cracked and weathered. In only a couple of minutes, he had the plate of the lock fixture pried loose, screws and all. Inside, the smell was confusing, like a combination meat locker and paint store, the raw odor of blood and flesh mingled with the harsh smell of shellac and turpentine. The glass eyes of a stuffed red fox studied Cork from one of the shelves on the walls. The pelt of an otter had been stretched on a tanning board. A big tin labeled “Arsenic” sat on the floor.

  On a worktable beneath a pegboard full of cutting tools lay Lytton’s dog, Jack the Ripper. Cork stepped closer and looked the dog over. Blood crusted the raw wounds in its neck torn open by the bullet from Cork’s Winchester. The dog’s eyes were closed, the limbs stiff from the hard cold inside the shed. Cork felt an unaccountable sadness as he considered the possibility that Lytton had brought the dog there with the idea of stuffing Jack, of keeping company with his sole friend forever.

  He looked through the drawers and cupboards of the shed. He opened the tin of arsenic but didn’t find the kind of poison he was looking for there. Outside, the robin had returned to the birch tree and for such a small bird was raising quite a ruckus. The smell in the shed, the residual odors of chronic death, had begun to get to Cork. He felt a little ill. He was just about to leave when he took a last look at Jack the Ripper and noticed something that he’d overlooked before. In the gray fur of the dog’s underside, a faint but definite line ran from the chest to the genitals. Cork stepped closer and smoothed away the fur. An incision had been made in the dog’s flesh and carefully sewn back together. Cork reached for a hacksaw that hung on the pegboard and began to saw across the belly of the carcass. It was a little like cutting into green, unkilned wood. The blade had penetrated an inch or so when it snagged. Cork tugged hard and the teeth came out full of soft black threads. From the pegboard, Cork took a knife with a six-inch serrated blade and began to cut along the original incision perpendicular to the cut he’d made with the hacksaw, so that in a few minutes he was able to pull back four flaps of frozen flesh. All of the internal organs had been removed—heart, lungs, liver, stomach, intestines—and a black canvas bag had been shoved into the cavity that remained. The bag was stuck to the inside of the carcass, glued to the rib cage by frozen blood. Cork carefully worked the bag away from the body and lifted it free. He stepped outside the shed into the bright morning light, set the bag in the snow, and opened it. Inside was a second bag, large and made of clear plastic. And inside the plastic were strips of negatives jumbled together like a nest of black snakes.

  The crunch of a boot on snow made him turn. He stared into two eyes glaring from behind a ski mask, then the morning exploded.

  For a moment the light in his right eye seemed as bright and hot as if he were staring at the sun. The searing heat was followed by sparks of fiery color, and Cork was dreaming about the bear in the flaming red sumac and he heard gunshots and thought Sam Winter Moon must be firing at the bear, and then his eyes were open and he was staring at the piercing blue sky and his head hurt like hell. He rolled to his side. A pa
ir of legs in old denim rose above him. He reached out, but the legs slipped away and began to run. The black bag was still beside him along with a slender balsam log stained with blood. Cork felt his forehead above his right eye. The lump was huge and his hand came away bloody. He struggled to his feet, stumbled into the shed, and grabbed his Winchester. Outside again, he hefted the black bag over his shoulder and began to lope after the figure who’d already disappeared into the woods. The tracks were easy to follow in the snow. Cork tried to push himself to run faster, but his breath was coming short and an iron fist was pounding at his brain. Every few moments the light flashed across his eyes in a way that made him afraid he was going to faint.

  He swung around a thicket and saw the figure seventy yards ahead struggling in a clump of vines. Cork’s eyes were still too unfocused to make out details, but it appeared that whoever it was had become entangled in blackberry brambles. Cork dropped to one knee and let the bag fall to the snow. He worked the lever of the Winchester and put a round into the breech. As he lifted the rifle to his shoulder and tried to sight, the light flashed across his vision. He rubbed his right eye with his knuckle and took aim again dead center in the back of the struggling figure. A moment before he squeezed off the round, he shifted his sight to the trunk of a tamarack a few yards to the left of the blackberry brambles. The tamarack exploded in a shower of bark. The figure jerked free of the thorns and scrambled away. Cork stayed on his knee a minute, leaning on the Winchester for support. He couldn’t have picked himself up to give chase even if he’d wanted to. Further away through the trees, he heard a snowmobile kick over and scoot off. Slowly he got up and moved to the blackberry brambles. A rifle lay fallen deep in the snarl of thorny vines. He left it there for a moment, intending to fish it out on his way back. With the bag and his own rifle in hand, he followed the footprints until he came to a place where clearly the snowmobile had circled and headed away.

  Cork sat down feeling heavy and tired and so tortured by his body that he could barely think. But he didn’t have to think to know whose snowmobile it was that had been there. A big black oil stain marked the spot where the machine had been parked. Only one machine he knew of leaked oil that badly. It was called Lazarus.

  33

  CORK LET HIMSELF INTO MOLLY’S CABIN with the key under the back steps. After he hung his coat by the back door, he went upstairs and took four Advil from the container in the bathroom cabinet. He hurt all over. There was a large, blood-oozing, purple lump on his forehead and a headache that made him see white. His ribs felt as if Parrant had just given them another healthy beating. He’d torn the stitches in his hand.

  He wanted to look carefully through the contents of the black bag, but he knew in his present condition he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. He had to lie down for a while. He looked for a place to hide the bag and finally made room under the logs in the woodbox next to the fireplace. Then he made his way upstairs and lay down on Molly’s bed and promptly went to sleep.

  When he woke, he smelled wood smoke. He sat up, pleased to find that the headache was gone although the lump on his head was still tender and so were his ribs. There was blood on the sheets from his hand and the ooze from the lump on his forehead had stained the pillowcase, but he was no longer bleeding. Outside Molly’s bedroom window, the sky was nearly dark. Cork realized he’d slept for hours.

  Downstairs he found Molly sitting in the main room, reading. A blaze in the fireplace made the corners of the room flicker with shadow. Cork hesitated near the kitchen door, where the tantalizing aroma of potato soup was strong. Molly sat in her easy chair, in the small circle of lamplight. She wore jeans and a red wool sweater and red wool socks. Her red hair was done in a long braid that hung loosely over her shoulder. She glanced up and eyed Cork, who stood uncertainly in the quivering light on the far side of the room.

  “Smells good,” he said.

  Molly closed her book, marking her place with a playing card, the ace of spades. Cork saw she was reading The Road Less Traveled. She folded her hands on the book and waited for an explanation.

  “I need you,” he said. “I haven’t been able to breathe since I left you. I need you, Molly. As much as I need air.”

  “Cork,” she whispered, and rose from the chair.

  He stepped toward her, into the stronger light of the lamp.

  When she saw his forehead, her face mirrored his hurt. “Oh, Cork, what happened?”

  “A log. I don’t for the life of me know why they call fir a softwood.”

  Molly reached up and touched the lump.

  “Ouch!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s not bleeding, but I think I should put something on it. Maybe ice.”

  “It’s fine.” He looked down uneasily at the braided rug under his stockinged feet. “I’m sorry, Molly. I’m sorry for everything.”

  “I know.” She touched his cheek. “Let’s talk about that later. Right now I’ll get some hot soup into you.”

  Cork put his arms around her waist. “I don’t deserve you,” he said. “I never did.”

  “You’ve got a lot of time to work on it,” she answered.

  After they’d eaten, Molly went out to lay a fire in the sauna.

  “It’s a beautiful night out there,” she said when she swept back in. “Let’s go, Cork.”

  The moon was rising, turning the vast flat of the lake a ghostly blue-white. A few isolated pinpoints of light marked the far shore, but Cork felt as if the night belonged to Molly and him alone. They stepped into the small dressing room of the sauna. Molly had lighted a Coleman lantern and turned it low. The heat from the stove just beyond the inner door made the temperature in the room pleasant. Molly eased off his coat, then removed her own. She undid the buttons of his shirt and kissed his chest.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said.

  Cork lifted the bottom of her sweater, and she raised her arms to let him slide it off her. She wore no bra. He gently touched her breasts with his palms, then bent and kissed them. Her skin was moist and smelled faintly of the smoke from laying the fire. Cork appreciated the scent.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he said.

  He kissed her fingers, every one. She pulled her hands away and moved them to the brass button of her jeans. Cork watched her hands as they opened the jeans with a soft sizzle of the zipper. She eased the jeans past her hips, her thighs, her calves, until they were a puddle of denim at her feet. She pulled them off and kicked them free. Reaching back, she undid her braid, and shook out her red hair. The room seemed terribly warm to Cork.

  “I don’t deserve this,” he said.

  “What life gives us, good or bad, we seldom deserve.” She took a blanket that had been folded on a bench behind her and arranged it on the floor. She knelt on it and watched as he undressed to his red-plaid flannel boxers. She laughed. “New?”

  “They’re warm.” He shrugged.

  Then Molly saw something that made her give a little cry.

  He looked down at the deep bruising over his ribs. “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? Come here.”

  He stepped near her on the blanket. She put her lips to the bruise. “Better?” she asked.

  “Much,” he said.

  She stood and pressed her breasts against him and gave him a long kiss. Then she slipped her fingers into the elastic of his flannel boxers and began to draw them down. Looking at him through a whisp of her red hair, she promised, “I’ll be gentle.”

  “Not too,” he replied hoarsely.

  “You didn’t see who hit you?” Molly asked.

  Cork shook his head. “It happened too fast.”

  “I don’t understand. If they were after the bag, why didn’t they just take it?”

  “That’s something I don’t understand either,” Cork said.

  Molly stepped down from the high seat in the sauna, took a dipper from a bucket, and threw water over the hot stones. The water
hissed and steam shot up into the air, and Cork felt the sweat pour from him. It felt good to sweat so freely. Cleansing. Molly sat back down beside him.

  “Unless,” she said.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless they managed to take what they wanted while you were unconscious.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” Cork said.

  “How long were you out?”

  “I don’t know. Not long, I think.” He wiped his face with his hands, then ran his fingers through his hair, which was as wet as if he were in the shower. “There’s something else, though. When I was out, I dreamed I heard a couple of gunshots. And when I found the rifle in the blackberry bramble, I could tell it had just been fired.”

  “At you?”

  Cork made a show of feeling himself. “No new holes.”

  “Shooting at who, then?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’ll all be clearer once I’ve had a look in that bag.”

  “Do you think the oil stain in the snow means it’s Tom Griffin?”

  “I’ll definitely have a talk with St. Kawasaki.”

  “But you don’t really want it to be him, do you?”

  Cork glanced at her. Her face ran with sweat. Her red hair clung to her flushed cheeks.

  “You want it to be Sandy Parrant,” she said.

  “Yes,” Cork admitted. “I want it to be Parrant.”

  “I’m worried,” she told him, and touched his shoulder. “I wonder what knowing the kinds of secrets that are in that bag might do to a person. Not just you. Anyone. I wonder if Wally Schanno didn’t have the right idea.”