Blood Hollow (Cork O'Connor)

by William Kent Krueger

  Jo was already in bed. She had an open folder on her lap, a legal file. She wore a long, yellow sleep shirt that Jenny had given her for Christmas. Across the front in black letters was printed LAWYERS DO IT IN COURT. In Cork’s eyes, she was a beautiful woman, his wife, and he looked at her with appreciation, as if he’d almost lost her but now here she was, a gift.

  Jo looked up from her reading. “Is Stevie asleep?”

  Cork nodded.

  “Rose called. She’s fine.”

  “At least the lines are still up,” Cork said. “That’s something.”

  “You look exhausted. Why don’t you call it a night?”

  “Not sure I can sleep.”

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “I don’t know what there is to say.” He stood at the end of their bed. “Schanno’s calling in a cadaver dog. Not that it will do any good. Way too cold. He just wants to be certain in his own mind, and the Kanes’, that he’s tried everything. If Charlotte Kane’s out there, she’ll be frozen under that snow until the spring melt.” Cork hesitated, then said what was on his mind. “I wanted to ask Mal Thorne something today. I wanted to ask him why his God lets things like this happen.”

  “His God?”

  “His idea of God. Doesn’t he preach a loving God every Sunday?” Cork didn’t know for sure, because church was a place where he’d refused to set foot for the last three years.

  Jo gave him a look that seemed full of compassion, not censure. “Do you really want to argue theology right now?”

  She was right. It wasn’t God he was angry with.

  “I’m going to walk a little,” he said.

  “I’ll be here.”

  He headed downstairs and found Jenny standing at the living room window. He glanced where she looked and he was startled by her dark reflection in the glass. For the briefest instant, he saw again the shape of the wraith that had appeared to him on the ice of Fisheye Lake, a form that was both real and not real, that he’d sensed was Charlotte and yet was not Charlotte. Had they connected, two souls lost in a frigid hell?

  “ ‘Rage against the dying of the light,’ ” Jenny said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s from a poem by Dylan Thomas.”

  Jenny was an honors English student and an avid reader. She dreamed of being a great writer someday. She had a knack for remembering passages and seemed to have an appropriate literary reference for any occasion. Cork studied her reflected face, pale and serious in the window.

  “Will you find her?” she asked.

  He didn’t like the way she’d phrased her question, as if the responsibility for saving Charlotte Kane were his personally. He wanted to tell her that he’d done his best. That they all had. That it was no one’s fault.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Across the street, John O’Loughlin came out of his house and trudged to where his Caravan sat buried against the curb. He cleared the door on the driver’s side, stepped in, and started the engine. Then he got out and scraped his windows. Finally, he tried to ease the vehicle forward. The tires just spun. O’Loughlin got out again, pulled a shovel from the back of the van, and dug at the snow in front of the wheels. Cork couldn’t imagine what would take a man out into a storm like that. He considered bundling up and going over to give a hand, but he knew that even if O’Loughlin made it out of the drift in front of his house, he’d just get stuck somewhere else. In a couple of minutes, Cork’s neighbor gave up and went back inside.

  “Do you know her well?” he asked.

  Jenny shook her head. “I used to talk to her a little at church, but she hasn’t come for a long time.”

  “How about school?”

  “She’s a senior. We hang out in different crowds. She’s rich. Pretty. You know.”

  “She’s always seemed very nice. Quiet. Smart, I hear. Very smart.” Though how smart was it to ride a snowmobile alone into the wilderness in the dead of night?

  “Smart, yeah, but she’s been kind of out of control for a while,” Jenny said. “Partying a lot, running with Solemn Winter Moon.”

  “Solemn,” Cork said. He knew the kid well. Ojibwe, good-looking, troubled. An enticing guide for a young woman who wanted a quick walk on the wild side.

  “There’s something else,” Jenny began, then hesitated.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “It’s just that …” She bit her lip and weighed the wisdom of proceeding.

  Cork waited.

  “I had a class with her last term. Creative writing, one of my English electives. Mostly we wrote poetry. We read some of it aloud in class, but a lot of it we didn’t. We kept these poetry journals that we only shared with the teacher and a poetry partner. Charlotte was my poetry partner. I saw what she didn’t share with the class. What she read out loud was fine and all, but what she wrote in her journal was really different. Way better than anything else any of us wrote. But very dark.”

  “Dark how?”

  “You know that artist Hieronymus Bosch?”

  “The guy who paints those weird nightmare things, right?”

  “Yeah. That was Charlotte’s poetry. Really beautiful, you know, but scary.” She looked at her father, her blue eyes troubled. “She went out in the middle of the night, right? Alone?”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “Dad, a lot of her poetry was about death and suicide.”

  “I don’t think that’s such an unusual fascination for a teenager, Jen.”

  “There was one I remember all about resurrection and death.”

  “She’s Catholic. Death and resurrection, that’s pretty much what it’s all about.”

  “No, she looked at it the other way around. Resurrection, then death. It was this poem about Lazarus, about how Jesus, when he raised Lazarus from the dead, didn’t do the guy any favors. Lazarus had gone through death once, and now he was just going to have to go through it again. In the poem, he’s really pissed off. It ended something like,

  ‘Death take my hand and lead me to that dark bed

  From which I neither rise,

  Nor remember,

  Nor dream,

  Nor dread.’ ”

  The wind let loose a fist that slammed against the house, and the whole structure quivered.

  “Dad, you don’t think she might be, like, trying to kill herself?”

  He put his arm around her. “I’d hate to think so.”

  They watched the storm a while together, then Jenny said, “I’m going to bed.”

  Cork kissed the crown of her hair. “ ’Night, sweetheart.”

  He called John O’Loughlin to find out if there were some emergency, and if so, some way he could help. O’Loughlin said it wasn’t an emergency, really. He was completely out of coffee, and the idea of facing a morning of shoveling without a cup of java was frightening. Cork said he always had a pot ready by six, and told his neighbor to come on over.

  He started toward the front door to secure it for the night. But he imagined Charlotte Kane struggling to get in out of the cold only to find every door locked against her. He couldn’t bring himself to throw the bolt.

  Jo was waiting for him in the bedroom, her book closed on the nightstand. Cork put on his flannel pajamas and slipped under the covers beside her. She put a hand softly on his chest. “Are you all right?”

  Cork stared up at the ceiling, as Stevie had done earlier. “I saw something out there today.” He told her about his experience in the whiteout.

  “If it was so vague, why do you think it was Charlotte?”

  “Crazy, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I felt it was Charlotte, that’s all. At the same time, it wasn’t. She was different somehow.”

  “One of the manidoog taking her shape?” She was speaking of the spirits the Ojibwe, whose blood ran through Cork’s veins, believed resided in the forests, and she was not speaking lightly.

  “I just can’t help feeling sh
e was trying …” He thought about it. “It’s hard to explain, but I think she reached out somehow, you know?”

  “You believe she’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Jo studied his profile. Cork could feel her eyes on him.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” she said.

  “Yeah.” Cork took a deep breath. “Children do stupid things, Jo. Dangerous things. Even the best of them. Sometimes I wonder if we really know our children.”

  “We know them, Cork.”

  “It could be Jenny out there. Or Annie. God knows we’ve had our share of close calls. I think about Fletcher and Glory, what they’ve got to face, and the truth is, I’m so damned relieved it’s not us. Isn’t that awful?”

  “I’d say it’s only human.” She kissed his forehead lightly. “You’re a good man. You’ve done your best. We all have. So much is out of our hands, out of anyone’s hands.” She reached to the lamp on the nightstand and turned out the light. Then she put her arms around her husband. “Sleep,” she told him. “Just sleep now. You’ve earned it.”

  He believed he’d no more earned his sleep than Fletcher and his sister had earned their worry. But his own children were safe in bed. And his wife’s warm arms cradled him. And although these were things that every day he took for granted, that night they felt like the rarest of treasures.

  “Sleep,” Jo whispered. “Sleep.”

  And Cork decided he could.

  APRIL

  4

  WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD and wild, before he settled down to study law, Oliver Bledsoe cut off half his right foot. He did it with a McCullough chain saw. He was employed at the time on one of Hutch Gunnar’s logging crews operating out of Babbitt, hired to limb and buck, which meant that he carefully walked the felled trees, trimming off their branches and cutting the trunks into sections to be hauled to the mill. In those days, he often showed up for work nursing a hangover. That morning, he showed up drunk. It was late autumn, and a light snow had fallen the night before. A hunter’s snow. Bledsoe, as he mounted the first downed tree, was amazed at the dreamy beauty of the woods around him. He was amazed, too, at his own agility as he scampered down the trunk, cutting to the right and to the left, swinging his McCullough nimbly as if he were some kind of dancer in some kind of dream. So deeply enraptured was he, and numbed from the alcohol, that he didn’t feel at all the cut of the chain saw as it sliced through the steel toe of his Wolverine boots. He didn’t even realize he’d carved off a good chunk of his own flesh and bone until he saw his blood staining the sheet of snow on the ground below him.

  The accident turned out to be a wake-up call for Bledsoe, who exchanged his chain saw for a stack of law books and became a damn fine lawyer.

  Although he liked to claim he’d cut off half his foot, in truth, it was maybe a tenth—his two smallest toes and a couple of inches north of that. And while he always made it known to his opponents on the basketball court that they were playing against a cripple, he still had the best outside jump shot Cork O’Connor had ever seen.

  Cork and Bledsoe sat in the men’s steam room of the Aurora YMCA. Father Mal Thorne was with them, and Randy Gooding, too. They were part of the team officially known as the St. Agnes Saints, but usually they referred to themselves as the Old Martyrs, because on Saturday mornings during basketball season, week after week in the name of the church, they sacrificed themselves on the court. Although Cork’s faith had lapsed, playing with the Old Martyrs was one of the few ties he maintained with St. Agnes. It was something he did for his body; his soul was not an issue. He enjoyed the company of the men, liked how the games brought them together in an easy fellowship. Afterward, the team generally gathered in the steam room to let the wet heat melt the ache out of their weary muscles.

  “More steam?” Mal Thorne asked. He got up from his bench and poured a bit of cool water from a bucket over the thermal mechanism mounted on the wall.

  Father Mal Thorne’s nose followed a crooked line. It had been broken more times than he could remember during his Golden Gloves boxing days, and later when he was the middleweight intramural champ at Notre Dame. A thin braid of scar tissue crowned his left eyebrow, but there were also two long scars across his chest clearly unrelated to boxing. How they’d happened, no one knew. The priest refused to talk about it. As a cop, Cork had seen a lot of men in holding cells or on their way to prison with similar scars, usually the result of a knife slash. He knew that Mal had run a homeless shelter on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, a tough territory. He’d heard rumors that the scars had been delivered by hoodlums trying to rob the shelter and that Mal had used his pugilist’s skills to dis-abuse them of the notion. Cork had never pushed the priest for an explanation. A man’s past was his own affair, and he dealt with his scars in his own way. Mal Thorne wasn’t tall, but he was fast and aggressive, and a natural leader on the court, so usually he played point guard.

  The wall vents began to hiss hot vapor, and Mal sat down.

  “Heard you on the radio yesterday, Cork, tearing into Randy’s boss,” Bledsoe said.

  He was talking about Sheriff Arne Soderberg who’d taken over the office from Wally Schanno in January.

  “Tearing into Arne Soderberg?” Mal laughed. “I’d have loved to hear that. What did you do, Cork?”

  It had been during Olaf Gregerson’s weekly call-in radio program All Around Aurora. Sheriff Soderberg was the guest. He’d spent most of the initial interview crowing about his accomplishments in just the few weeks he’d been in office. Once the phone line opened up for calls, Cork seized the opportunity to call and point out some of the cold realities that underlay the sheriff’s glowing assertions.

  “I’ll tell you what he did,” Bledsoe said. “Old Arne claims that in the couple months he’s been sheriff, crime in Tamarack County has declined thirty percent over the preceding seven-month period.”

  “Not true?” Mal said.

  “Probably true,” Cork put in. “What I pointed out was simply that every winter, after the summer tourists and the fall color gawkers have gone, crime in Tamarack County drops, and after the fishing opener in the spring and all the tourists come back, the crime rate climbs back up. Arne’s taking credit for a pattern we’ve seen for years.”

  “That was only the beginning,” Bledsoe said. “Cork took him to task for laying off officers and cutting programs in order to look good financially to the electorate when he runs for the state legislature, which everybody knows is his next move.”

  Gooding said, “He came back from the radio station ready to draw blood, and he took a bite out of anyone in the department who looked cross-eyed at him. Thanks a lot, Cork.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I mean it. Thanks a lot. Somebody needed to say those things.”

  Gooding, who sat next to Cork, stood up and began to stretch. His body was lithe and unmarred. That didn’t mean he had no scars. Cork knew that the wounds people carried didn’t always show on the skin. He was younger than the others, not quite thirty. Before coming to Aurora, he’d been with the FBI, assigned to the Milwaukee field office. He’d told Cork he left because the job turned out to be all paperwork, that he was a small-town boy at heart, and that he liked the idea of serving folks who would know him as a person, not just a badge. He was religious, very Catholic, a little pious maybe, but these days Cork tended to think that of almost anyone who attended church regularly. He sang in the St. Agnes choir and headed the youth program, where the kids adored him. He’d struck up a particularly good friendship with Annie, Cork’s middle child, because at one time he’d been in the seminary, and Annie, for as long as anyone could remember, had dreamed of being a nun. Annie insisted that she connected with him on a spiritual level, but it probably didn’t hurt that he was drop-dead gorgeous. An affable man, still a bachelor, he was considered a catch in Aurora, but so far as Cork knew he was seeing no one. He was the tallest of the Old Martyrs, and he played center.

  Cork felt
his own scars were insignificant, two bullet holes, an entrance wound the size of a dime on his right shoulder and a slightly larger exit wound on his back just below his right scapula. The bullet had shattered bone and loosed a flood of blood and had almost killed him, but unless someone pointed them out, he usually forgot about them.

  Mal Thorne said, “You don’t think much of our new sheriff, Cork?”

  Sweat dripped from the end of Cork’s nose. He sat naked on a towel, his back against the tiles of the steam room wall. The other men were all hazy figures through the hot fog. “For him the job’s about politics, not law enforcement.”

  “Ever regret your decision not to run?”

  “Not for a minute,” Cork said.

  The door of the steam room opened. Cool air sifted in.

  “Gooding? Deputy Gooding? You in there?”

  “Yo, Pender. What’s up?” Gooding said.

  “Sheriff wants you,” Pender called back.

  “Hey, man. It’s my day off.”

  “He says get your ass to the office now.”

  “Is there overtime in it?”

  “Close the damn door, Pender,” Bledsoe said. “You’re letting the North Pole in.”

  “Not until I see Deputy Gooding stepping out.”

  “Talk to him, Randy. It’s getting cold in here. I just saw a penguin waddle by.”

  “I’m coming, Pender. Close the door.”

  Gooding stood up, and the steam swirled as he moved.

  “Think I’m done, too,” Cork said. He got up from the cedar bench. “Who do we play next week?”

  “Team from the casino,” Bledsoe said. “The Five Card Studs.”

  In the locker room, Randy Gooding and Deputy Duane Pender stood huddled in a corner near the showers. Gooding nodded a couple of times and finally said, “I’ll be out of here in ten.” Pender strode quickly out. Gooding went straight to his locker without bothering to shower.

  When Soderberg became sheriff, he reorganized the department, cutting out the specialized units that Cork and Wally Schanno had created to focus on particular areas of crime prevention and investigation. That had pissed off a number of veteran officers, including Captain Ed Larson, who’d headed major crimes investigation for years and who, along with several others, had resigned. Now Gooding, because of his FBI training, generally handled the responsibility of investigating serious crimes, but he had no special rank or title and got no extra pay for it. He did it, he said, because he loved the work, something Cork understood.