The World of Cork O'Connor

by William Kent Krueger

His daughter turned her head to the sky and closed her eyes and lay on her back, so that her ears were below the surface and she could pretend not to hear him.

  “I just want to know one thing. And I know you can hear me.”

  “It starts with one thing,” she said with her eyes still closed. “It ends up everything. That’s how you operate.”

  “Old dog, old trick,” he said, waited a moment, then repeated, “So?”

  She righted herself, treaded water, and gave in. “All right, what do you want to know?”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  “That’s a complicated question.”

  “I think the question is fairly simple.”

  “Well, I can’t answer it.”

  “Because of you or him?”

  “It’s a decision we’re both involved in.”

  “You’d tell your mother,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t put me on the rack.”

  “Have I?”

  “You will if you don’t get an answer.”

  “I suppose you’ve talked to Aunt Rose.”

  She didn’t reply, but her silence itself gave him his answer.

  “But you won’t talk to me.”

  “There are things women understand, Dad.”

  “There are things fathers should be let in on. Look, I don’t know why you can’t give me a straightforward answer, and that’s what concerns me.”

  “There are issues we need to settle first.”

  “Children?”

  “Ah, children,” she said, as if she suddenly understood. “That’s why you brought me here to show me those pictographs. This is all about children, isn’t it?”

  “Not completely. But you indicated there are issues,” he said. “And I’m betting that’s one. He doesn’t want them, does he?”

  “Maybe it’s me who doesn’t.”

  “Is it?” Again, her silence was his answer. “You’ve been down this road before, Jenny.”

  “See? Right there.” She lifted her arm and pointed an accusing finger at him. Water dripped from the tip in crystal pearls. “That’s why I don’t talk to you.”

  “It was only an observation.”

  “It was a criticism, and you know it.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m finished swimming. Let’s go.”

  He’d blown it. In his imagining, the discussion had gone differently, had ended with them understanding each other, touching heart to heart in the way they used to when she was much younger. Instead he watched her breaststroke away from him to the dinghy, leaving him feeling stupid and treading water.

  They threaded their way out of the convoluted gathering of islands. Jenny sat rigid in the bow, fiercely giving him her back. As soon as they hit the open water of the main channel, he headed the dinghy again toward the southwest.

  When he saw the sky there, he was, for a moment, stunned breathless.

  “Dad?” Jenny said from the bow. She’d seen it, too, and she turned back to him, fear huge in her eyes.

  “Good God Almighty,” he whispered.

  Published 2012

  * * *

  Suspicion falls on Cork O’Connor when one of his arrows is responsible for the death of Jubal Little, the man sure to be Minnesota’s next governor. To clear his name, Cork must piece together the puzzle of the powerful and corrupt politician who was once his best friend.

  * * *

  CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

  JUBAL LITTLE: Former professional football player turned politician, boyhood friend of Cork O’Connor, and man enamored of power.

  CAMILLA LITTLE: Wealthy, long-suffering wife of Jubal Little.

  WINONA CRANE: A beautiful, mysterious Ojibwe woman whom Cork once loved.

  WILLIE CRANE: Winona Crane’s brother, a talented man undaunted by his lifelong struggle with cerebral palsy.

  JOHN BERGLUND: A savvy tracker for the U.S. Border Patrol.

  AN EXCERPT FROM TRICKSTER’S POINT

  The walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plain wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County.

  Although he wore no watch and there was nothing in the room that would have clued him about time, Cork knew it was late afternoon. Around five o’clock, more or less. Captain Ed Larson had removed his own watch, a standard procedure when questioning a suspect in the interview room. Timelessness was part of the protocol for keeping the subject focused only on what was happening inside the small box created by those four bare walls. This was Cork’s third round of questioning about the death of Jubal Little that day and was the most formal so far.

  The first interview had taken place at Trickster’s Point while the techs were processing the crime scene. It had been Sheriff Marsha Dross herself who’d asked the questions. Cork was pretty sure nobody really thought then that he’d killed Jubal Little. Marsha was just trying to get a good sense of what had gone down. It wasn’t until he told her that he’d sat for three hours while Jubal died that she gave him a look of incomprehension, then of suspicion.

  The second interview had been conducted an hour and a half later in her office back at the department. Ed Larson had been present for that one. He was in charge of major crimes investigation for Tamarack County. He’d let Marsha ask the questions—more of them this time and more probing—and had mostly observed. At the end of that round, he’d asked if Cork was hungry and would like something to eat or drink. Cork wanted nothing, but he said yes anyway.

  While the food was coming, they moved to the interview room, just Larson and Cork this time, but Cork knew that Dross would be watching on the monitor next door.

  Deputy Azevedo brought in the meal. He looked at Cork as if he didn’t know him at all, though they’d been acquainted for years.

  “On the table,” Larson told him, and the deputy set the tray down and left. “Go ahead and eat, Cork,” Larson said. “I just want to look over a few of my notes.”

  He pulled a small notepad from the inside pocket of his sport coat. Larson always looked and dressed more like a college professor than a cop. He had gold wire-rim glasses and wore honest-to-God tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. He was nearing sixty, more than a half dozen years older than Cork, and still had an enviable head of hair that was a distinguished silver-black. He was already on the force when Cork first joined as a deputy more than twenty years before. They’d become friends, and Cork had a great deal of respect for him and his abilities. As soon as Cork was elected sheriff, he’d put Larson in charge of investigating major crimes.

  While Cork sat at the table and ate, Larson pretended to go over his notes. Cork knew that, in reality, Larson was more interested in his appetite, knew that people who’d committed a violent crime were often so troubled by what they’d done that they couldn’t eat. So Cork made as if he hadn’t had a bite of food in a month and rammed down every crumb of his cheeseburger and gulped every drop of coffee.

  “Thanks,” he said when he’d finished.

  Larson looked up from his notepad and, with his index finger, eased his glasses a quarter of an inch higher on the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture he sometimes made unconsciously when he was about to do something that was uncomfortable for him. “Cork, I know you know the drill. I�
�ve got to make sure that you understand your rights.”

  “Miranda,” Cork said.

  “Miranda,” Larson acknowledged and went through the litany.

  “It’s official then?” Cork said.

  “What’s official?”

  “I’m officially a suspect.”

  Larson squinted, a look of pain. “In my shoes, how would you see it?”

  “I’ve been in your shoes. And I know how I’d see it, Ed. If our situations were reversed, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you’d killed Jubal Little.”

  “Tell me why, if I were in your shoes, I would have waited three hours before trying to get him some help.”

  “I wasn’t trying to get him help. He was already dead when I left him.”

  “Okay, so why didn’t you go for help as soon as you understood the seriousness of the situation?”

  “I’ve told you. Jubal asked me to stay.”

  “Because he was afraid?”

  “Jubal?” Cork shook his head. “No, not Jubal. Never Jubal.”

  “You were his only hope of surviving, and yet he insisted that you stay. I don’t understand.”

  “He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die alone.”

  “You couldn’t have carried him out?”

  “He hurt whenever I tried to move him, hurt a lot. It was that broadhead arrow tip tearing him up inside. I didn’t want to give him any more pain. If I’d tried to carry him out, he would simply have died sooner.”

  “So you just sat there and watched him go?”

  “No. I listened to him. I think that was the main reason he didn’t want me to leave. He wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to. You know how politicians are.”

  Larson gave a startled look that quickly turned critical. “There’s nothing humorous in this situation, Cork.”

  “I’m not sure Jubal saw it that way. The last thing he did on this earth was smile, Ed.”

  He could see that Larson didn’t believe him. Probably he didn’t believe a lot of what Cork had said so far.

  “Did you have your cell phone with you?”

  Cork shook his head. “We were out there to get away from a world of phone calls. But even if I’d taken my cell phone, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “Why?”

  “Coverage is hit and miss up there. But around Trickster’s Point, especially, nothing gets through.”

  “And why’s that?”

  Cork shrugged. “Ask the Ojibwe, and they’d tell you it’s just Nanaboozhoo messing with you.”

  “Nanaboozhoo?”

  “The Trickster. That’s his territory.”

  Larson stared at him. His face reminded Cork of a ceramic doll with all the features painted on and none of them capable of moving. Larson looked down at his notes. “You had breakfast at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler before you headed out. You had a cheese omelet, and Jubal Little had cakes and eggs over easy. When you left, you both spent a few minutes standing out on the sidewalk, arguing.”

  Cork said, “Did you find Heidi or did she come looking for you?”

  He was talking about Heidi Steger, their waitress at the Broiler that morning.

  Larson didn’t answer but said instead, “What did you argue about?”

  “We didn’t argue. It was more like a heated discussion.”

  “What did you discuss, then, so heatedly?”

  “Politics, Ed. Just politics.”

  Larson maintained his ceramic doll face for a long moment, and Cork, in that same long moment, returned his steady gaze.

  “Okay,” Larson finally went on. “You said he talked a lot as he was dying. What did he talk about?”

  “First he talked about that arrow, whether to try to remove it. Jubal wanted to, I didn’t. Then I tried to leave to get help. Jubal wanted me to stay. After that, he talked about life. Or I should say his life. It was so Jubal of him, but understandable under the circumstances. He had a lot of regrets. Toward the end, he was in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he mostly rambled. It was hard to make much sense of anything.”

  “Did he say who’d shot him?”

  “He didn’t have to. We both knew who he believed it was.”

  “Who was that?”

  “He thought it was me.”

  “He thought you were trying to kill him?”

  “He thought I’d shot him by accident.” Which was the only lie Cork had told in any of the interviews that day.

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “You meant to shoot him with that arrow?”

  Cork refrained from smiling at the obvious and shallow trap and told him once again, “It wasn’t me who shot Jubal.”

  “Who then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Hear anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “So, as far as you know, you were both alone out there?”

  “Clearly not. Whoever shot that arrow was out there with us.”

  In the beginning, Larson had positioned his chair near to Cork, making the interrogation a more intimate affair, just between the two of them. Between friends, maybe. Now he backed off a couple of feet and asked, rather indifferently, “Do you consider yourself a good bow hunter, Cork?”

  “Fair to middling.”

  “When you hunt, you’re a purist, right? You do still-stalking. No deer blind. You actually track the animal on foot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m guessing you’d have to be tuned in to all the sounds around you, wouldn’t you? Reading all the signs?”

  Cork understood the thrust of Larson’s questions. If there was someone else at Trickster’s Point with them, why didn’t Cork know it?

  “Must take incredible stealth,” Larson said.

  “That all depends on what you’re after,” Cork replied.

  “You were after white-tail deer, weren’t you?”

  Cork said, “Ed, what I was really after is something you can’t understand, and if I say it, you’ll misconstrue my meaning.”

  “I’ll do my best to understand.” He promised with such earnest appeal that Cork knew he was telling the truth.

  So Cork offered his own truth in return. He said, “I was hunting Jubal Little.”

  Published 2013

  * * *

  The sins of the father are visited on the son as a vengeful man sets out to make Cork O’Connor—or someone he loves dearly—pay the penalty for a wrong done long ago.

  * * *

  CHARACTERS INTRODUCED

  MARLEE DAYCHILD: A vivacious Ojibwe teenager and eager girlfriend of Stephen O’Connor.

  STELLA DAYCHILD: Marlee Daychild’s mother, a wisewoman who’s wrestled hard times and come out on top, more or less.

  SKYE EDWARDS: A wealthy friend of Annie O’Connor from California, who has more than a passing interest in the O’Connor family.

  RAY JAY WAKEMUP: A troubled member of the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe.

  CECIL LAPOINTE: An incarcerated Ojibwe who channels a Native spirit called White Eagle.

  RALPH CARTER: A cantankerous, retired county judge, the kind of man who might murder in a fit of rage.

  AN EXCERPT FROM TAMARACK COUNTY

  Like many men and women who’ve worn a badge for a good part of their lives, Corcoran Liam O’Connor was cursed. Twice cursed, in reality. Cursed with memory and cursed with imagination.

  In his early years, Cork had worked for the Chicago PD, the South Side. Then he’d spent a couple of decades in the khaki uniform of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, first as a deputy and finally as sheriff. He’d seen the aftermath of head-on collisions, of carelessness or drunkenness around farm or lumbering equipment, of bar fights with broken bottles and long-bladed knives, of suicide and murder in every manner. And so the first curse: he remembered much, and much of his memory was colored in blood.

  The second curse came mostly
from the first. Whenever he heard about a violent incident, he inevitably imagined the details.

  And so, when he finally understood the truth of what happened to Evelyn Carter, he couldn’t keep himself from envisioning how her final moments must have gone. This is what, in his mind’s eye, he saw:

  It was seven o’clock in the evening, ten days before Christmas. The streets of Aurora, Minnesota, were little valleys between walls of plowed snow. It was snowing again, lightly at that moment, a soft covering that promised to give a clean face to everything. The shops were lit with holiday lights and Christmas trees and Santa figures and angels. There were people on the sidewalks, carrying bags and bundles, gifts for under the trees. They knew one another, most of them, and their greetings were sincere good wishes for the season.

  Evelyn Carter was among them. She was small, not quite seventy. All her life she’d been a good-looking woman and had taken good care of herself, so she was attractive still. She wore an expensive coat trimmed with fox fur, purchased when she’d visited her daughter in New York City in October. On her head was a warm gray bucket hat made of rabbit’s fur. In her left hand, she gripped a shopping bag filled with little gifts, stocking stuffers. A cell phone was cradled in the gloved palm of her right hand, and she stood on the sidewalk, looking at a photo of her grandson dressed as a shepherd for the church pageant this coming Sunday. When the door of Lilah Buell’s Sweet Shoppe opened at her back, the smell of cinnamon and cider ghosted around her, and she smiled in the wash of the good spirits that seemed to her a beacon of hope in an otherwise dark winter season.

  Her big black Buick was parked on Oak Street, and by the time she reached it and set her shopping bag in the passenger seat, she was tired. Evelyn had a good but troubled heart. She carried nitroglycerin pills in a tiny bottle in her purse. She was feeling some uncomfortable pressure in her chest, and when she’d finally seated herself behind the wheel, she sat for a moment, letting a nitro pill dissolve under her tongue. She hadn’t yet started the engine, and as she sat, the windows gradually fogged from her slow, heavy breathing.