On his way out, Cork stopped at the front desk to sign out. He used the opportunity to check the register pages where visitors had logged in and out over the weekend. He didn’t see Lester Bigby’s name there at all.
The young attendant was on the phone. Cork hung around until she’d finished her call, then he asked, “Does everyone sign in and out?”
“Not always. Sometimes family who visit a lot just go to their relative’s room without stopping here.”
“Does Buzz Bigby’s family visit often?”
“Oh yeah. Especially his son.”
“Do you know if he visited on Saturday?”
“I didn’t work this weekend, so I couldn’t say.”
“Anybody here who might be able to say?”
“I really don’t know.” She said it in such a way that Cork understood she probably did but was not going to tell him. A professional thing, he figured, resident privacy or something. He didn’t push it.
As he left, the eyes of the ladies in the open area followed him, as if they were watching the passage of an exotic bird.
Cork pulled up to the curb in front of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler and parked behind the car that Lester Bigby often drove, a mint-condition 1965 Karmann Ghia. He found it interesting that Bigby preferred the same kind of vehicle his brother, Donner, had driven before he died.
Inside, Cork found Bigby sitting in the same booth that, according to Heidi Steger, he’d occupied when Cork and Jubal breakfasted there on the day Jubal died. There was an empty plate in front of him, and he was reading a newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Compared to both his father and his brother, Lester Bigby was small and, in his face, more resembled the fine-boned features that, Cork recalled, had made Mrs. Bigby so lovely and yet so sad. In his mid-forties, he was mostly bald, with only a narrow strip of dull brown hair circling his skull like a dead laurel wreath. He didn’t notice Cork approaching.
“Mind if I join you?” Cork said.
Bigby looked up from his paper. “I prefer to eat alone.”
“Looks to me like you’ve finished eating.” Cork slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.
Bigby carefully folded his paper and set it aside.
Cork laid his arms on the table and leaned forward. “We’ve never liked each other, Lester.”
“That’s not something I lose any sleep over.”
“In a town like Aurora, it’s hard to avoid folks, but somehow we seem to do a pretty good job of it.”
“Believe me, I don’t go out of my way, O’Connor.”
“I think I can truthfully say the same. But there it is. I’ve been wondering why.”
“You looked me up just to tell me that?”
“That’s not the reason. It’s just something that came to me.”
“What’s the reason then?”
“I’ve been thinking about your resort on Crown Lake.”
“What about it?”
“You’re pretty heavily invested in it, I imagine. All that land, the cost of construction.”
“So?”
“Sulfide mining,” Cork said. And he saw from the look in Bigby’s eyes that he’d struck home.
Cork had grown up in the Arrowhead of Minnesota, the northeasternmost section of the state, where some of the most beautiful wilderness in the entire nation lay next to the richest ore deposits imaginable. Historically, this unfortunate positioning had resulted in the decimation of a great deal of the pristine Northwoods by iron mining. The sacrifice of that land had made possible the industrial growth of the rest of the United States in the late 1800s and well into the twentieth century, but the deep open-pit mines of the Iron Range were wounds that would never heal.
The mines had begun closing in the late 1960s, and the Arrowhead suffered one economic blow after another. Businesses folded. Range towns became ghost towns. But in recent years, there’d been a great deal of renewed interest in the mineral resources of the area. The demand for the raw materials to make steel in China and India had spurred a resurgence of mining in the open pits. Perhaps more important, there was intense interest in creating additional operations that would mine the deposits of base metals-copper-nickel and platinum. These precious ores had been discovered long ago in the Arrowhead but, until recently, were too difficult and costly to get at. New advances in mining technology, however, promised cheaper, better methods of extraction, and global mining concerns were clamoring for a shot at the riches that still lay beneath the wilderness of the Arrowhead. The proposals for these new mines had set factions in the North Country at war.
Because the metals were contained in sulfide ore, the technique for extracting them was called sulfide mining. Environmentalists claimed the mining of this ore would create mountains of sulfide tailings that were exposed to the elements. When sulfide mixes with air and water, the result is sulfuric acid, which would inevitably leach into the groundwater, polluting the pristine lakes and streams of the region. This had already been the case in other areas where sulfide mining had been allowed, and a lot of folks in the Arrowhead believed that looming on the horizon was yet another instance of the earth suffering horribly for the benefit of industry.
On the other side of the coin, the new mines represented the possibility of a rebound in the depressed economy of the region. This meant jobs in an area where, for too long, they’d been far too rare, and also much-needed tax revenues for the state as a whole. Because the mining companies were full of assurances that the new technologies would allow safe, nonpolluting extraction-they had all kinds of reports and charts to prove it-a great many people in the Arrowhead, and in Minnesota in general, welcomed the prospect.
In his gubernatorial campaign, Jubal Little had talked about the need for sacrifice in order to make Minnesota self-sustaining. He’d strongly supported opening the North Country to additional mining. He never spoke of this as sacrifice but couched it in terms of responsibility and risk. It would be his responsibility as governor to ensure that mine companies kept their promises. And what small risk there might be to the Arrowhead was outweighed by the great benefit to the state as a whole. This was in direct contrast to the position of the incumbent, a man of liberal leanings who’d made environmental protection one of his top priorities but who’d been ineffectual in all his efforts to revitalize the state’s stagnating economy.
Jubal’s argument about exploiting Minnesota’s mineral potential was the same kind of argument he’d made about the casinos. Responsibility and risk.
Politically, Jubal characterized himself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative. But his politics had mattered a good deal less than his image. He was tall and good-looking. Confident, charming, self-assured. He could be winningly self-effacing. But more than anything else, he offered the image of a man who, like a great frontier scout, knew the way ahead was fraught with danger, but if you followed him, he’d absolutely get you to the promised land. In all the darkness of economic uncertainty, he offered voters the hope of light, and they flew to him like moths.
Not Cork. And not the Ojibwe. And not, he knew, Lester Bigby.
“As I understand it, Lester, construction of that resort of yours ground to a halt last summer. All because Jubal Little pledged to open the area to sulfide mining if he was elected. Crown Lake is just a few miles downstream from the site where that Canadian company intends to begin mining as soon as they get approval, which Jubal’s election would pretty much have assured. You stood to lose a lot of money.”
“I’ve lost money before,” Bigby said.
“This would have been on a huge scale. And probably a lot of other folks you talked into investing in your company stood to lose their shirts, too.”
“And your point is?”
“Somebody killed Jubal Little, killed him before he had a chance to make good on his campaign promises. I’m just thinking you had a lot of reason to want him dead.”
Bigby seemed actually amused at this thought. He smiled and said, “Jesus, you think
I killed Little?”
“You bow-hunt. You’ve got yourself a good Bear Carnage as I understand it.”
Bigby saw that Cork wasn’t joking, and the smile dropped from his lips. “You really think I killed Jubal Little.”
“I think you had good reason to want him dead.”
“Wanting somebody dead and killing him are at two different ends of the stick, O’Connor. Are you saying that everybody you want dead you’ve killed?”
“Where were you on Saturday, Lester?”
Bigby opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. “Hell, I don’t have to tell you.”
“You’ll have to tell the sheriff.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a hunter with a fine new compound bow, and you have a pretty good reason to have wanted Little dead, and your wife believes you were visiting your father, and your father says you weren’t. At the very least, you have some explaining to do. And if the sheriff questions you about all this, word is going to spread, and whether you like it or not, people are going to start talking about you and wondering. I just thought I might be able to save you and your family some embarrassment.”
“You talked to my wife and my father?” Bigby’s fine-featured face took on a stern look that was somehow still delicate.
“I spent some time with both of them earlier today.”
“You drag my family into this, O’Connor, and I’ll destroy you.”
“Your family doesn’t have to be dragged in, Lester. All you have to do is tell me where you were on Saturday.”
“Who the hell are you to be asking me questions?” He’d raised his voice above the general hubbub of the Broiler, and other voices grew quiet; eyes swung his way. Bigby noticed and spoke more softly. “You’re not the law around here anymore. Just who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m the guy somebody’s trying to frame for Jubal Little’s death, and I’m not just going to sit around and let that happen, Lester. Where were you Saturday?”
“You don’t know me at all, O’Connor. I’d never kill anybody over money.”
Cork leaned closer and said, “Maybe it wasn’t just about money.”
Bigby’s eyes once again gave him away, and Cork knew he’d touched a nerve. Bigby sat up a little straighter and brought out a confused look, but he was a beat too late. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your father’s always blamed Jubal and me for your brother’s death.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“In some people, that kind of wound never heals. You know, when I was sheriff, I never encountered your father without him making some comment about how I couldn’t hide behind a badge forever. We both knew exactly what he was talking about.”
“And yet here you are,” Bigby said. “Alive and well.”
“Yeah, here I am the prime suspect in Jubal Little’s death. Exactly the kind of situation that would warm the cockles of your father’s heart.” Cork sat back. “You love your father, Lester?”
“I’m not going to answer that, or any more of your questions.”
“See, I think he would be a hard man to love. But I also think that one thing we seek most as men is the approval of our fathers. It seems to me that goes a long way to explaining everything from why Alexander the Great felt compelled to conquer the world to why George W. Bush led us into Iraq. And maybe it even explains why the son of Buzz Bigby would kill Jubal Little.”
“That’s such bullshit.”
“Is it? Easy enough to disprove. Just tell me where you were on Saturday.”
“Fuck you.”
Cork made ready to leave. “I’ll give you a while to think about it, Lester. But if I haven’t heard from you by the end of the day, next time you’re questioned, it’ll be by the badges investigating Jubal Little’s death.”
Cork walked away. But he couldn’t help feeling a tingle in his back, as if the point of an arrow was about to bury itself there.
CHAPTER 26
W hen Cork left Lester Bigby, he drove directly to the Iron Lake Reservation. The afternoon had turned remarkably warm, especially considering the spitting snow and sleet of only a couple of days earlier. The sky was the soft blue of a baby blanket, and the sun, already well past its zenith, put a fire to everything so that the forest and the lake and even the pavement of the road itself seemed to pulsate with electric vitality.
He pulled into Allouette and saw Isaiah Broom’s pickup parked next to Willie Crane’s Jeep in front of the Iron Lake Center for Native Art. The door to the establishment was just opening, and both men were coming out. Cork drove past them and watched as they ambled down to the Mocha Moose and went inside. He made a U-turn and parked on the street across from the coffee shop. Broom and Crane stood at the counter while Sarah LeDuc made them something to drink, then they sat at a table near the front window, leaned toward each other, and appeared to talk in the way of intimate friends.
The roads that led to friendship were, Cork knew, as numerous as those in a Rand McNally atlas, but the underlying construct was always the same: a true sharing of self with another, a deep and vulnerable trusting. In the case of Isaiah Broom and Willie Crane, the friendship had begun in childhood, a connection between two boys painfully awkward in their own ways and filled with a terrible sense of isolation. Willie’s situation was obvious, his difficult gait and tortured speech. Isaiah Broom’s problems were less so but, in their way, just as challenging. His father had never been around, and his mother had dropped out of the picture when Isaiah was still a small child. Like Willie and Winona Crane, he’d been taken care of by a laundry list of relatives. He was a big kid, but unlike Jubal Little, whose size and physical ability were proportionally equal, Isaiah Broom was hopelessly uncoordinated. He lived in a body that seemed beyond his control, and perhaps even his comprehension. Cork had seen him sit for long periods of time staring at his big, meaty limbs as if they totally confounded him. Willie Crane, on the other hand, seemed determined to rise above the limitations of the body he’d been given, and although every word he spoke was a struggle and every step he took a battle, he faced the challenge of his life with the heart of a warrior. Probably more than anyone else on the Iron Lake Reservation, he understood what the clumsy, bearish Isaiah Broom was up against.
But maybe most important in their relationship was the fact that, when they were kids, Willie Crane had saved Isaiah Broom’s life. It had happened this way.
It was early summer. They were fishing on Iron Lake, in an old aluminum rowboat Broom had borrowed from one of his uncles. They’d rowed out a good half mile from shore and cast their lines off an island called Gull, where legend had it, a monster muskie dubbed Old Flint liked to feed. They were eleven years old. Broom had the bulk of a kid several years older. Willie was small and slender, but strong because he exercised constantly to compensate for his weak, sometimes spastic, left side. They’d been out maybe an hour when the storm came up. It blew in from nowhere, a huge, angry bluster, wind and rain and lightning that shoved the lake into a rage of whitecaps. They tried to make it back to the old dock in Allouette, each boy bent over an oar, pulling for dear life, but the boat began taking on water, wave after wave, and the vessel grew more sluggish and their arms more tired as the waterline crept toward the tops of the gunwales.
They were still fifty yards out when the boat swamped completely, and they took to the water. They swam for shore. That is, Willie swam for shore. Broom didn’t know how to swim. He flailed, arms like great tree limbs beating the water, throwing up sprays of desperate white in the troughs between the waves. Willie went back for him. Broom reached out, grasping wildly in his panic, but Willie stayed away. The oars from the boat had lifted from their locks and were easily riding the wild undulations of the lake. Willie latched on to one of them and shoved it toward his friend. Broom grabbed it, and Willie shouted for him to hold on. He swam them both near enough to shore that his feet found bottom, but by then Broom had taken in so much water an
d was so exhausted that the oar slipped from his hands and his body slid below the surface. Willie dived after him, wrapped his hands around fistfuls of Broom’s T-shirt, and dragged him to solid ground. He dropped him in the wash of the waves and saw that the boy’s chest had ceased to rise and fall. He cocked Broom’s head back, locked his lips against Broom’s blue lips, and breathed life back into his friend.
It was a remarkable story, but when the Aurora Sentinel reported the incident, a lot of white folks in Tamarack County refused to believe it, refused to accept that the Indian kid they sometimes spotted limping down Center Street, and who was incomprehensible when he tried to talk, could have performed such a physical feat. But Cork believed it. He believed it because he knew the heart within Willie Crane, and he believed it because he knew that friendship, true friendship, was the stuff of miracles.
Cork got out of his Land Rover and headed into the Mocha Moose. Except for Broom and Crane and Sarah LeDuc, the coffee shop was empty. There was music playing over the sound system, and Cork recognized the flute work of Bill Miller. Sarah smiled from behind the counter and greeted Cork with “Boozhoo.”
“ Boozhoo, Sarah. Quiet today,” he said.
“Monday afternoon. Always quiet. Can I get you something?”
“A small dark roast.”
“Regular or decaf?”
“Regular. Never understood the point of drinking coffee without caffeine in it. Like drinking nonalcoholic beer.”
Broom and Crane had been talking before he came in, but with his appearance, they’d lapsed into a watchful silence.
Cork got his coffee and paid. Then he strolled to the table where the two men sat. “I was just on my way over to your place, Isaiah. Mind if I sit down?”
“Heard the cops tossed your house this morning,” Broom said.
Though uninvited, Cork pulled a chair from another table and joined the men. “They were respectful,” he said.
“Find what they were looking for?”
“You’ll have to ask them, Isaiah. I left before they finished.”
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