Tamarack County

by William Kent Krueger

  “You look great,” he said, his mouth a little dry.

  “Are you gonna kiss me then or not?”

  There was no “or not” about it. He put his arms around her and pressed his body against hers and kissed her lips very hard.

  “Oooh,” she said, and drew back a little. “Not so rough.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Like this.” And she showed him what she liked. And, Jesus, did he like it, too.

  “The show’s in twenty minutes,” Stephen heard himself say, stupidly.

  “I don’t care if we miss it.” Her lips, as she whispered, brushed his cheek, and he heard himself reply, “The hell with it.”

  Five minutes later, they were prone on the sofa. His right hand was on her sweater where he could feel the thin material of her bra beneath, and beneath that the pliant palmful of flesh that was her breast. He’d never done this before, gone this far with a girl, and he was nearly breathless. His lips tingled. He had an erection that, under normal circumstances, would have embarrassed him no end. But he was in a wonderfully unfamiliar world of circumstance. He felt as if his brain was sizzling, as if it was meat on red-hot coals, and he couldn’t have thought clearly even if he’d wanted to. Which he definitely did not.

  Later, he would wonder, not without a measure of relief mixed with his disappointment, what would have happened if they hadn’t heard Dexter’s barking.

  Marlee’s body went instantly rigid, and in the terrible blink of an eye, her hands had positioned themselves to throw him off. “What was that?”

  “Just Dexter,” Stephen said. “Barking. It’s what dogs do.”

  He tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned her face so that his lips planted themselves on her cheek instead.

  “He’s going crazy out there.” Her body remained frozen, and her eyes darted across the ceiling and around the room as she listened intently.

  The barking went on, then stopped, then the clumsy mutt let out a yelp, and the barking stopped, for good this time.

  “There,” Stephen said. “Whatever it was that got him going, it’s gone.”

  “He sounded hurt. Didn’t he sound hurt?”

  Stephen didn’t want to agree. There was such a huge part of him so terribly reluctant to alter the way things were going. But Marlee was right. Dexter had sounded hurt. And then Dexter had gone silent, which didn’t bode well.

  He righted himself and removed his weight from Marlee’s body. She brought herself upright and got off the sofa. She went to the front door, and Stephen followed. She opened up to the cold night and called, “Dexter! Here, Dex! That’s a good boy! Time to come in!”

  They studied the snow outside, brightly illuminated by the yard light and cut with a lacework of prints left not only by Dexter but also by other creatures of the Northwoods. From where he stood, Stephen could easily identify deer, squirrel, and rabbit tracks.

  “He’s a good dog. He always comes when I call,” Marlee said. “Something’s wrong.”

  Stephen quickly went through all the reasonable possibilities he could think of. There were coyotes on the rez. Hell, there were coyotes everywhere these days. People lost cats and very small dogs to them all the time, but he didn’t think they’d attack a big dog like Dexter. He’d heard stories of recent cougar sightings in the Arrowhead of Minnesota. He thought a cougar, especially a hungry one, might go after a big dog, but if that had been the case, there would have been the noise of a hell of a fight instead of Dexter’s sudden silence. Bears? He’d seldom heard of a bear attacking a dog, and such an attack usually happened only if it involved a sow protecting her cubs. But it was too early for bears to be birthing and cold enough that they should have been deep in hibernation. And anyway, like the cougar possibility, a bear attack would involve a lot of noisy ruckus. In the end, he didn’t have a good explanation.

  “Dexter!” Marlee called again, and Stephen heard the panic in her voice.

  “I’ll go out and look for him,” he offered.

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  They put on their coats and gloves and stocking caps and left the house. The sky was black and full of stars, and a waxing quarter moon hung high above the western horizon. The temperature was well below freezing, and their boots squeaked on the snow as they walked. Stephen went to Jenny’s Forester and took a flashlight from the glove box.

  “His barking came from the lake,” Marlee said, which was also what Stephen thought.

  He nudged the flashlight switch with his thumb, and they followed the beam onto the dark of a trail that led toward the lake. He could see Dexter’s tracks, big galumphing paw prints amid lots of kicked-up snow. There were older tracks as well, also made by Dexter, an indication that this was a favorite route for the mutt.

  Marlee called to the dog as they walked, but still received no answer. The yard light behind them became a dim glimmer among the bare branches of the birch that crowded the shore of Iron Lake. The trail tunneled deeper into a darkness that was both night and forest. There was no wind and no sound except for that generated by the two of them: the squeaking snow, the sizzle of their synthetic outerwear, the huff of their breathing, and Marlee’s increasingly desperate calls.

  They came to the lakeshore, where the trees opened onto the great flat white of the frozen water. Far out, several small black humps stood silhouetted against the hoary expanse, islands the Ojibwe called Maangwag, the Loons. Far to the southwest, a tangerine glow rose in the sky, as if from a huge fire. And that, Stephen understood, was the electric haze above Aurora. Nearer at hand were the tracks of Dexter bounding out onto the lake, and for a moment, another possible explanation came to Stephen: Dexter had somehow fallen through the ice. Marlee had taken a few steps ahead, following where Dexter had gone, and Stephen reached out and grabbed her arm.

  “Wait!” he said, harshly enough that Marlee turned on him in anger.

  “Let go of me!” She pulled from his grip.

  “The ice,” Stephen tried to explain.

  But Marlee was already marching ahead, calling “Dex! Dex!”

  “He might have gone through the ice,” Stephen called to her, hesitating at the shoreline.

  “That’s stupid. The ice is . . .” She stopped speaking.

  Then Marlee screamed.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ted Green, who was generally referred to as Father Ted by the members of his congregation, opened the front door of the Carter home to Cork and Marsha Dross. He was in his early thirties, tall and slender, with the kind of clean, almost boyish face that made you more than willing to open your heart to him and dump in his lap a whole litany of your worst transgressions. He stepped back to let them in.

  “Who is it?” came a harsh old voice from another room.

  “You’re a saint, Ted,” Cork said to the priest.

  “He can be a trial,” Green replied with a patient smile.

  “You told him we were coming?” Dross asked.

  “Yes, and I told him I wasn’t sure why. Is there anything new on Evelyn?”

  “I’m hoping the Judge can help us with that.”

  “Help you with what?” The Judge stood in the hallway, staring at them as if he were still on the bench and just about to deliver a sentence. For a man with the personality of a bulldozer, he was remarkably small. His face, which had probably been handsome about the time men first walked on the moon, had become an ellipse of dry, wrinkled flesh with two dark eyes peering out like cloves stuck in a desiccated orange. He wore a dressing gown with an ascot, and on his feet were sheepskin slippers. He carried a lit pipe, which he waved about as he talked, spreading an aromatic haze around him in a kind of perverted mimic of Catholic ritual.

  “You find Evelyn?” he demanded.

  “No, Judge,” Dross said.

  “Then what are you doing wasting time here? Get out there and find my wife.”

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions that might help us do that,” Dross replied.

 
“Hell, I already told you everything I know.”

  The priest said gently, “They can’t help you if you don’t let them.”

  The Judge ignored him and shot at Cork, “What are you doing here?”

  “Just trying to give a hand, Ralph.” Because he’d never particularly liked how the man operated on the bench, Cork refused to call him by his old title.

  “You got that private eye license now, don’t you? You charging me for this?”

  “On the house, Ralph,” Cork said.

  “Could we sit down?” Dross asked, though it was more a directive than a question.

  “In there,” the priest replied, indicating the doorway that led to the den.

  They took off their coats, and the Judge eyed Dross up and down and said, “You always look so tarted-up on the job?”

  “I was having dinner out,” Dross told him. She held up her coat. “Where shall I put this?”

  “Hell, drape it on the newel post,” he said and walked ahead of them into the den.

  Logs were burning in the big fireplace, and the room smelled pleasantly of woodsmoke. The den was clearly the Judge’s domain. An enormous variety of hunting trophies hung on the walls—the heads of a pronghorn, a mountain sheep, a bison, a prize buck, and some animal so alien to the North Country that Cork had no idea what it might be. Most of these, he understood, the Judge had bagged over the years at a private game preserve in Texas that charged an arm and a leg for the privilege of shooting the wild game they stocked. In one corner hung a mount that was a splay of tom turkey feathers with the beard hanging down like a scalp and, near it, another that held a stuffed northern pike that could’ve swallowed Jonah. Cork was a hunter and fisherman, but he wasn’t a believer in trophies. What you shot or what you reeled in and didn’t release, you ate. Any part of the animal that was inedible to you, you fed back to the forest, where it would be feasted on by the creatures the Great Mystery had created for that purpose.

  The Judge sat in a huge wing chair that made him seem like a small monarch on a big throne. Dross and the priest sat on the sofa. Cork chose to stand.

  “Judge,” Dross began without any small talk, “can you tell me where Evelyn was on Tuesday?”

  “Tuesday?” He seemed offended to have been asked to remember. “Hell, I don’t recall.”

  “Does anyone besides Evelyn drive your car?”

  “Not unless one of the kids is visiting. And that doesn’t happen much.”

  “So no one except Evelyn drives the car? You’re sure about that?”

  “Christ, woman, it’s my car. I know who drives it.”

  “Okay, Judge. Think for a moment. Was Evelyn gone at all on Tuesday?”

  The Judge squinted awhile, and Cork thought he was looking in one of those foul corners of his brain for a nasty retort, but he finally replied, “Yeah, on Tuesday, she was at St. Agnes most of the day, working with the women’s guild to wrap up a bunch of presents to hand out to poor kids or something.”

  Dross glanced at the priest, who from the expression on his face, was clearly surprised by the Judge’s response.

  “What time did she leave and when did she return?” Dross asked.

  The Judge said, “Before breakfast and was back in time to fix me some dinner.”

  “So maybe seven a.m. to six p.m.?”

  “About that.”

  “Judge, we looked at your wife’s credit card charges, just to be certain you weren’t mistaken about the gas tank being filled on Wednesday. We noticed that she’d also filled up the day before at a SuperAmerica in Saint Paul.”

  “Saint Paul?” The Judge shook his head furiously. “No, there’s some kind of mistake.”

  “We’ll check that out, but assuming it’s correct, do you have any idea why your wife would have been in the Twin Cities?”

  “She wasn’t anywhere near the Twin Cities. Like I just told you, she spent the day at church.”

  “Okay, assuming that’s true, who had access to your car and could have made the trip instead? And along that same line, who could have bought gas using your wife’s credit card?”

  “No one. I’m telling you it’s a mistake. She was the only one driving my car, and she was at St. Agnes all day.”

  Dross said, “Father Green?”

  “Several women were there wrapping Christmas gifts for the children at St. Joseph’s Home, but Evelyn wasn’t among them,” the priest said. “At least, I didn’t see her myself.”

  The Judge waved a withered old hand in dismissal. “She was there. You just missed her.”

  “How can you be so certain?” Dross asked.

  “Cuz she told me she was there. That woman knows not to lie to me.”

  Cork was listening, but he was also slowly walking the room, studying the decor. He’d lived among firearms and weapons most of his life, but except for the inventory of a gun shop or a police station, he’d seldom seen such a large collection of weaponry in a single room. The Judge had two mahogany gun cabinets, one that held ten rifles and the other eight shotguns. In addition, he had a smaller wall-mounted cabinet that displayed a variety of handguns. He was also a collector of knives, and two beautifully carved cherrywood boxes with glass fronts lay on tables on either side of the fireplace.

  “You restless?” the Judge finally asked him.

  “Just interested in your collections,” Cork replied. “You have some fine-looking pieces here.”

  “A lot of money tied up in my guns,” the Judge said proudly.

  “And your knives, too.” Cork leaned over one of the boxes. “You have some beautiful old Barlows here. And a mighty fine-looking Green River.”

  “You know knives?” the Judge asked.

  “I know a bit,” Cork said. He turned to the Judge. “You’ve got an empty space. Looks like one of your knives is missing.”

  The Judge seemed perturbed. He put his pipe down, rose from his chair, and crossed the room to where Cork stood. “Hell’s bells,” he said with what appeared to be genuine alarm. “I’ve been robbed.”

  What was missing, he told them, was a bowie knife with an ivory handle and a Damascus steel blade. It had been made by J. R. Cook and had cost him nearly a thousand dollars. Although the gun cases were all secured, the boxes that held his knife collection had no locks. He didn’t remember when he’d last looked at them.

  “Who would have had access?” Dross asked.

  “Besides me, that would be Evelyn. And Irene, the woman who cleans.”

  “Ralph,” the priest said quietly. “Irene Simek no longer works for you. Evelyn told me at church on Sunday that she was hoping to be able to find someone to replace her soon.”

  “Well, there you go. That woman took it just to spite me because I told her she smelled like a garbage pail that needed emptying. I’d talk to her if I was you.”

  “We’ll do that,” Dross said. “But let’s consider other possibilities. Do you ever have visitors, Judge?”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “People say we live too far out.”

  “Do you lock your doors at night and when you’re gone?”

  “My doors are always locked.”

  Cork said, “Mind if I have a look around for any sign of a break-in?”

  “You’re not charging me, you said,” the Judge reminded him.

  “Just consider it being neighborly,” Cork said, though he wasn’t certain if the Judge understood that term at all.

  He checked the windows and external doors on the first level of the house and found no sign that any had been jimmied. He reported this to the others, then asked, “Do you keep an extra house key somewhere, Ralph?”

  “In the garage, on a nail by the door to the kitchen.”

  “Be right back,” Cork said.

  He went through the kitchen to the garage door, which was secured with a dead bolt. He flipped the dead bolt open and stepped into the attached garage. It was insulated and much warmer than the subzero temperatures outside. He found the nail the Judge h
ad mentioned, hammered into the doorframe, and hanging from it was a key, which Cork presumed was the extra house key. He didn’t return to the others immediately but spent a few minutes in the garage, poking about, because that was pretty much the kind of thing he’d been doing for most of his adult life, in and out of uniform. The Carters had only one vehicle, apparently, because the Buick was still in the custody of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department and the garage was empty. At one end, a face cord of cut wood stood stacked against the wall, probably the supply that fed the fire in the Judge’s den. There was a worktable, and above it a big square of Peg-Board from which hand tools hung. Standing upright in a large ceramic urn in one corner were gardening tools—rake, shovel, hoe, and the like. There was a big plastic garbage bin on rollers, a power mower, and a gas-powered electric generator, backup, Cork figured, in the event the Judge lost power, which was not an uncommon occurrence in rural Tamarack County. He checked the windows and also the door that opened onto the backyard and found no sign of forced entry.

  He stood a moment, looking the garage over for anything that made his eyes pause. They settled on two ten-gallon gas cans that stood next to the generator. He crossed the garage and lifted them. One was full, the other just over half. A few paces away stood a tall storage cabinet. He strolled to it and opened the doors. Inside were four shelves, filled with containers of oil and brake fluid and power-steering fluid. There were containers of pesticides, garden fertilizers, weed killer. There were terra-cotta pots and a couple of bags of potting soil. What surprised Cork, however, was that the overwhelming odor emanating from the cabinet was the smell of gasoline. The odor seemed to be coming from a few feet of rubber tubing coiled on the top shelf. He leaned close and confirmed this. Then something almost hidden behind the tubing caught his eye. He slid the coil to the left a few inches and spent a long moment staring at what was revealed.