Blood Hollow (Cork O'Connor)

by William Kent Krueger

He barely knew Tiffany, although he’d often seen her around Aurora over the years. She was Jenny’s age, but Jenny seldom mentioned her. She was a honey-haired young woman, pretty. She dressed well, dressed like money, as did her mother. When she got over looking startled, she looked irritated.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry, Tiffany. Didn’t mean to scare you. I came to talk to your father.”

  She glanced back into the house. “He’s … um … busy.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  “Who is it?” Lyla spoke from somewhere near the front door but out of sight.

  Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Mr. O’Connor. He wants to talk to Dad.”

  The door opened wider, and Lyla loomed behind her daughter.

  Lyla had once represented Minnesota in the Miss America pageant. She had long, blonde hair, long legs that were tanned even in winter, and long, beautifully manicured nails. She had a notoriously short temper, however. She was wearing a sunflower yellow sweater and Guess jeans, both of which hugged nicely the body that had been a substantial part of her ticket to Atlantic City.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked. It was clear that what she really wanted to do for Cork was shove him back out the front gate.

  “I’d just like a few minutes of Arne’s time.”

  “Friendly or official?”

  “I’d say it leans more toward official.”

  “My husband’s done for the day.”

  Cork wanted to advise her that for the sheriff there was never an end to a day.

  Arne stepped into view behind Lyla. “I’m here.”

  Soderberg wore khaki slacks and a dark blue polo shirt. He was dressed for relaxing, although his face looked as if he’d been doing anything but.

  “I’m gone,” Tiffany said. She slipped past Cork and hurried to the driveway where Lyla’s custom gold PT Cruiser was parked. The vehicle was a beauty, the only one like it in the county, and Lyla drove it everywhere.

  “Dinner at six-thirty,” Lyla called. “And don’t you dare put a ding in my car, young lady.”

  “Whatever,” Tiffany said with a flutter of her hand. She started the Cruiser, backed onto the street, and was gone.

  Lyla gave Cork a cold look. Before it melted, she saved a little of the chill for her husband. Then she vanished back inside the house.

  Arne came onto the porch and closed the door. “What is it, O’Connor?”

  “I talked with Dorothy Winter Moon a little while ago. She said your people showed up at her place first thing this morning looking for Solemn. I’m wondering what you want him for.”

  “We’d like to talk with him, that’s all.”

  “What about?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “I was just down at your office. Lid’s tight on everything there. Feels like something big. I’m wondering if you’ve got evidence you believe ties Solemn to Charlotte Kane’s death. Something from the autopsy?”

  Soderberg crossed his arms and leaned back against his door. He looked like he’d just dropped a million dollars into the bank. “You’ll find out when everyone else does. You have no special status here, O’Connor.”

  “It was just a friendly inquiry, Arne.”

  Soderberg straightened and reached for the door. “I’ve got a lot to do. I’ve given you all the time I’m going to.”

  “Do you think it was murder, Arne? And do you think it was Solemn Winter Moon?”

  Soderberg let go of the knob and swung back toward Cork. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think I’m going to be able to close the book on Charlotte Kane’s death very soon. And I don’t need your help, and I don’t want your interference.”

  8

  DOT AND SOLEMN WINTER MOON lived on the Iron Lake Reservation, on a newly paved road a few miles south and east of the little town of Alouette. For years, she and Solemn had lived in an old but well-maintained trailer with a ceramic deer poised on the narrow apron of lawn in front. The stiff, painted deer always baffled Cork, because Dot Winter Moon didn’t seem like a ceramic deer kind of woman. After the profits from the Chippewa Grand Casino began to be distributed among the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe, Dot replaced the trailer with a nice, two-bedroom rambler with cedar siding. She kept the deer.

  No one answered Cork’s knock. The bright blue Blazer that Dorothy Winter Moon drove was parked next to the house. Cork knocked again, harder, then he circled to the backyard, where a trail ran through a narrow stand of red pines toward the glimmer of a little lake that was called, by mapmakers dry of inspiration, Lake 27. From somewhere in that direction came the bark of a dog. Cork headed down the trail.

  He was upwind of the lake, and upwind also of Dot’s big dog Custer. Custer was a golden retriever, as dumb a mutt as Cork had ever seen. And far too friendly to be of any use to Dot for protection. The dog came bounding up the trail from the lake and pranced around Cork playfully with his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a pink salmon fillet.

  “Hey there, Custer.” Cork put out a hand and roughed the dog’s long fur. “Where’s Dot?”

  “Down here,” he heard her call from beyond the end of the trees.

  He found her on a flat gray rock at the water’s edge. She sat cross-legged, smoking a cigarette and sipping a can of Molson. It was nearing evening. The day had cooled and she wore a jean jacket with DOT in letters made of brass studs across the back. Her side of the lake lay in shadow. Sunlight carved an arc across the water midway out, and everything beyond that was gold.

  “Come ’ere, Custer,” she called. “Come to mama.”

  The dog responded, bounded onto the rock, and lay down at her side.

  “Jo tried calling,” Cork explained. “Didn’t get an answer.”

  “Sorry.” Dot tapped her ash into a small tin can on the rock next to her. It didn’t have a label, but it looked to Cork to be an empty tuna can. It was full of butts. “Came out here to think.”

  She puffed out smoke through a little part in her lips. “I’ve sure made a mess of things.”

  “You think so?” Cork said.

  She was looking across the lake where the gold and the shadow met. “Always wanting to do things my way. The hell with everybody else. Folks told me a long time ago Solemn needed professional help. I don’t know, maybe he could have used a father at least, but I didn’t want to bring in some shiftless son of a bitch just to play ball with him, you know?”

  “He had the next best thing to a father. He had Sam.”

  “He sure could’ve used Sam these last few years. Me, too.” She snuffed out her cigarette on the rock and added the butt to the others in the can. “You find out anything?”

  “I’m pretty sure they want to talk to him about Charlotte. I’d guess there’s enough evidence to suggest her death wasn’t an accident.”

  She finished her beer with a long swallow, set the can upright carefully on the rock, balled her hand into a fist, and crushed the can with a single blow.

  “I don’t exactly know what they have,” Cork went on, “but they’re interested in Solemn. It doesn’t look good that he’s disappeared.”

  Dot picked up a pack of Salem Lights that lay beside her on the rock. She pulled one out and lit it with a green, disposable Bic. She shook her head, scattering the smoke. “That’s not unusual for him. He gets into one of his moods, he leaves for a while. He comes back when he’s ready.”

  “Any idea where he goes?”

  She shrugged. “His business. I’ve never pushed him on it.”

  “Arne Soderberg’s smug, so whatever it is they have, it must be pretty solid.”

  She was quiet. At first, Cork thought she was looking at the lake again, but then he saw that her eyes were closed. Custer resettled himself, laid his head on his paws, and blinked at Cork.

  “I’ve always been afraid that someday whatever it is that gets into him would get him into serious trouble. But this.” She hugged her legs, laid her forehead against them. “Christ.”

  “If you h
ear from him, try to make him understand that it’s important to come in and talk to the sheriff. Jo will be happy to go with him.”

  Dot lifted her head, nodded. “Thanks.”

  He got up, and Custer jumped to his feet.

  “No, you stay here,” Dot said to the dog. She put her arm around his neck and pulled him next to her.

  Cork left her beside the lake, left her staring out at the water. As he walked away, he couldn’t help thinking of Fletcher Kane who, when Cork last left him, had been staring across his own lake of sorrow.

  Cork headed through Alouette, along back roads, until he was well into the woods that edged the north boundary of the reservation. He slowed down and finally saw what he was looking for, a cut through the trees on the left side of the road, an old access. He pulled in and made his way carefully between the trunks of pines so close to the edge of the track that they threatened to scrape the paint off his Bronco. It was a quarter mile to the cabin.

  Summers, Sam Winter Moon had lived in the back of the Quonset hut on Iron Lake so that he could run his burger stand. But early fall through late spring, he lived in his old cabin near the headwaters of Widow’s Creek. It was a small, rustic affair, a single room heated by an old, potbellied stove, no electricity or running water, and an outhouse. In the years after his father died, Cork had spent a lot of time there with Sam, learning much about himself from a man who was a patient teacher.

  As Cork drew near, he saw a black Ford Ranger parked in front of the cabin.

  Sunlight, low in the sky, broke through the pine trees and hit the cabin in bright splashes. Except for the incessant cawing of a crow somewhere in the high branches of the trees, and the gurgle from Widow’s Creek a dozen yards north, the woods were quiet. No one answered his knock, and Cork opened the door. He’d been inside only once since Sam died, and that was to retrieve an important item that Sam had bequeathed to him. A bear skin. Entering now, smelling the place—the old logs and the sooted stove, leather bindings and wool blankets—Cork traveled back instantly across more than three decades to his adolescence. He felt a great happiness inside him, thinking about Sam. The room was neatly kept, and Cork had a pretty good idea of why.

  He stepped outside and found himself staring into the black maw of a shotgun barrel.

  “What are you doing here?” Solemn Winter Moon said.

  He was a little taller than Cork, wore jeans, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back, a green down vest. His long, black hair was pulled into a ponytail. Cork couldn’t help seeing behind his dark good looks and his distrusting eyes the face of the boy who’d fished for sunnies from the dock at Sam’s Place.

  “Looking for you,” Cork said.

  Solemn lowered the barrel of the shotgun. A grouse lay in the dirt at his feet, the feathers messed and bloodied by buckshot.

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “I was hoping to get to you before the police did.” Cork waited. “You don’t seem surprised, Solemn.”

  “What do they want?” His question seemed more an afterthought.

  “To talk about Charlotte Kane, I’d guess.”

  “Ancient history.”

  “It’s a current affair now. I think the sheriff believes someone killed her, and you may be the number one suspect on his list. Look, I’m here to help, not to take you in.”

  Cork watched his eyes, looking for a sign of the fire that might signal some impulsive action. The kid seemed pissed, but not out of control.

  “Why’d you take off?” Cork asked.

  “It’s what I do sometimes.”

  “Bad timing. Looks pretty suspicious.” The crow stopped cawing. The still of the evening wrapped around them, and Cork felt the goodness of the place. “Come here to think?”

  Solemn didn’t answer.

  “You can feel him out here, can’t you? I sure can.”

  Cork looked for a crack in the front the kid put up, but Solemn remained hard.

  “He saved my life once. Did you know that?”

  No sign whether Solemn knew or not, whether he even cared.

  “It was in the fall, a year after my father died. Sam asked me to help him build a bear trap, something he’d never tried before. We set it a mile or so down Widow’s Creek, near that meadow full of blueberries. You know the one?” Solemn gave no reply, but his face altered a bit, a splinter of acknowledgment. “The bear sprung the trap, but it was such a goddamned huge animal it got away. Sam went after it and took me with him. I’d never hunted a bear before. We tracked it for a day and a half. Finally we got into a rocky area where even Sam couldn’t track and we turned back. I remember that Sam was happy he wasn’t going to have to kill a creature as magnificent as we knew that bear was.

  “Toward evening, coming back, we hit a thick patch of sumac, bloodred stuff. We’d passed it earlier. This time Sam sensed something. He told me to wait, and he headed into the sumac. I waited, like he said. Then I heard a rustling in all those red leaves. I thought Sam was coming back. But it wasn’t him. The biggest black bear I’ve ever seen charged out, coming right at me. It had circled. Bears sometimes do that. I was paralyzed. Couldn’t move. That huge bear reared up on its hind legs, claws longer than my fingers. I was sure it was going to rip me apart.

  “Then Sam shot it. At first, nothing happened. Finally the bear wavered, stumbled back, fell. It tried to get up, defend itself, but it couldn’t. Sam came out of the sumac, spoke to the bear, something in Ojibwe I didn’t understand. And he finished the kill. I could tell it made him sad to do it.”

  Solemn cradled the shotgun in a hunter’s safe stance, barrel toward the earth. He looked at the place where the barrel pointed.

  “I loved him, too, Solemn. Almost like he was my father. And he’d tell you what I’m telling you. Talk to the sheriff. Jo says she’ll go with you if you’d like. The choice is yours.”

  Cork turned and started away.

  “You going to tell anyone?” Solemn called after him.

  “No.”

  “Not even my mother?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to. Okay if I tell her you’re fine?”

  Solemn thought about it. “Yeah.”

  Cork paused before he got into his Bronco. “In everything we remember, Sam’s still alive. In every decision we make, he’s still with us. But you know that. It’s why you come here.”

  The light was fading as Cork pulled away. Solemn was still standing in front of the cabin, his figure darkening along with the day, his shotgun pointed at nothing. The truth was Cork hated leaving him alone that way. But there was nothing more he could do. Solemn Winter Moon was no longer a boy.

  9

  CORK CAME HOME TO DISASTER. Rose was leaving. She had a suitcase packed and sitting beside the front door. The children were gathered around her, looking at her with sad eyes.

  “You’re going somewhere?” Cork said.

  Rose opened her purse to double-check the contents. “Ellie Gruber called. Her sister broke a hip. Ellie’s going to stay with her for a while to help out. She asked me if I’d be willing to take care of things at the rectory until she’s back.”

  “A broken hip,” Cork said. “That could be quite a while.”

  “It could be.”

  Rose didn’t seem concerned, but to Cork—and to the children, judging by their faces—it felt as if the O’Connors were being orphaned.

  “Where’s Jo?”

  Rose snapped her purse shut. “Working late. Don’t worry. Meat loaf and potatoes are in the oven. Green beans are on the stove. A list of meals for the week is posted on the fridge. You girls know your way around the kitchen, and I expect you to help take care of things while I’m gone. And, Stephen, there’s plenty you can do, too.”

  Rose wore a green print dress, a plain thing that gave little definition to her plump body. Her dust-colored hair was brushed but, as always, still looking a little ruffled. She wore no makeup. She wasn’t a woman particularly beautiful to the eye, but to anyone who knew her, her beaut
y was obvious in many ways.

  She looked at the children, at the funereal expressions they wore, and she laughed. “For goodness’ sake, I’m not dead. I’m just going over to the rectory at St. Agnes. You’ll do fine.”

  In the gloom of the gathering dark outside, Father Mal Thorne pulled up to the curb in his yellow Nova, parked, and walked to the house. Rose opened the door to him.

  “Evening, Cork. Kids,” Mal said. “Thanks for doing this, Rose.”

  “No problem, Father.”

  “Honestly, I don’t think it’s necessary, but Mrs. Gruber, you know how she is.”

  “Ellie’s absolutely right. You can’t take care of everything, especially with Father Kelsey to consider.”

  Mal was only one of the priests who lived at the rectory. Father Kelsey was the other, a man long past the age when he should have retired. In serving the parish in Aurora and the mission on the Iron Lake Reservation, most responsibilities fell to Mal.

  “I appreciate this.” He glanced at the faces of the children. “And I appreciate what you’re all giving up, too.”

  Jo’s Toyota swung into the driveway and stopped quickly. Jo got out and hurried to the house.

  “Oh, good. I didn’t miss you.” She hugged her sister. “You take good care of the Fathers.”

  “And you take care of things here.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Jo said.

  Rose hugged and kissed each of the children and Cork, then said to the priest, “We’d best be off. Have you eaten?”

  He picked up her suitcase. “I figured we could scrounge something from the refrigerator.”

  “Nonsense. I’m sure Ellie has the shelves well stocked. I’ll put together a decent meal.” She turned back at the opened door. “Bye, dears.”

  The children lifted limp hands in farewell.

  Jo closed the door and laughed when she saw the look on their faces. “My God, you’d think she was going to the other side of the world. Come on, let’s get dinner on the table.”

  As the children headed toward the kitchen, Jo turned to Cork. “Did you talk with Dot?”