Trickster's Point co-11

by William Kent Krueger

  “Nothing to be sorry for, Camilla. Jubal always did what Jubal wanted. Not your fault.”

  “Hey,” Nick said suddenly. “So who killed Chet Carlson? And who killed Jubal?”

  Camilla finally lifted her eyes and looked at Cork. Everyone did.

  CHAPTER 42

  W hen Cork pulled into his driveway on Gooseberry Lane, the hour was late. The street was empty and the houses were dark. A light shone through his own kitchen window, and when he walked inside, the room was still redolent with the aroma of sweet baking. On the table sat a plate with chocolate chip cookies, and beside it lay a note.

  Comfort food, Dad.

  The handwriting was Stephen’s.

  He shed his coat and hung it on a peg near the door. He poured himself some milk, leaned against a counter, and drank slowly while he ate a couple of the cookies. He listened to the house, the beautiful quiet, and, for the first time in days, felt at ease.

  Trixie wandered in, tail wagging in a slow, sleepy way, and put her nose against the hand he lowered.

  “Hey, girl,” he said. “Keeping the place safe?”

  He rinsed out the glass in the sink and headed upstairs, where the kids had left the hallway light on for him. He stopped in the open doorway to his grandson’s room and stood watching Waaboo asleep in his crib. The little guy was dressed in footie pajamas patterned with tiny moose. He lay splayed on the mattress, arms and legs all akimbo. Cork walked to the crib, lifted the twisted blanket, and gently covered his grandson. When he turned back to the door, he found his daughter smiling from the hallway.

  “Within an hour, he’ll have kicked that blanket off again,” she whispered when he joined her.

  “Always moving,” Cork said. “Even in his sleep.”

  “You’re one to talk. Late night.”

  “And not over yet.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll be getting a couple of visitors soon.”

  “Should I make coffee?”

  “No. We’ll leave right away.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”

  She studied his face. “You look… peaceful. A good day?”

  “An enlightening day. Jenny, if you ever wonder what your life is all about, just pick up Waaboo and hold him. Everything you need to know, it’s all right there.”

  “And right here,” she said and leaned to him and kissed his cheek. Then she yawned.

  “Go back to bed,” he told her gently. “Everything’s okay now.”

  The knock at the back door came just as he returned to the kitchen. When he opened up, Marsha Dross stood on the doorstep beside a hulking Isaiah Broom.

  “Holter’s pissed as hell,” she said. “If he doesn’t have answers from you by the time the sun comes up, he says he’ll arrest you for obstruction.”

  “He’ll know everything by the time he pours his first cup of morning coffee,” Cork replied. “Promise.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Broom said.

  “You’re free, Isaiah.” Cork reached to his leather jacket hanging on the peg beside the door. “And you’re coming with me.”

  “Yeah?” Broom threw back, not happily. “Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The big Shinnob frowned, then lifted his broad nose. “Cookies?”

  Cork went to the table where the plate still held half a dozen. He picked up a couple and returned to the door.

  “For the road,” he said to Dross and handed her one. The other he gave to Isaiah Broom. “Let’s get going.”

  In the light that fell through the doorway, Cork saw Dross wince. She was taking a big chance, and he appreciated it. “I’ll be at your office by first light,” he promised.

  She took a bite of the cookie he’d given her and said, “I’ll be waiting.”

  He drove down the empty streets, through a town deep in its own dreaming. Snow spit from the sky, a few flakes, like moths fluttering in the headlights. For a long time, he drove in a silence that both he and Broom seemed comfortable with.

  “Traitor,” Cork said at last, breaking the silence.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you wrote on the arrow you shot into the door of Rainy’s cabin. Traitor. Why?”

  “Why traitor, or why the arrow?”

  “Both.”

  They’d left Aurora behind, and the dark had swallowed them. The only light came from the back splash of headlights and the glow of the dash. The big Shinnob sat silent and brooding in the night gloom, and was quiet for so long that Cork wasn’t sure he’d get a reply at all.

  “I made that arrow for Jubal Little,” Broom finally said. “I meant to shoot it into his heart myself. When I heard it was you who killed him, I figured I’d let you know that I understood.”

  “You could’ve just told me. I admit I was more than a little confused by that message.”

  Broom stared ahead where the thin scatter of snowflakes drifted white against the black asphalt of the highway. “I was drunk. Celebrating his death, I thought, but later I decided maybe I was just relieved that I didn’t have to go on hating him. I knew you’d be at Henry’s.” He swung his face toward Cork for an instant. “Rainy,” he said. Then he shrugged. “The decisions you make when you’re drunk usually aren’t your best.”

  Cork didn’t have to press him about the traitor part. That arrow had long ago been intended for Jubal Little. “When did you realize it was Willie who killed him?”

  Cork felt the huge body on the other side of the Land Rover tense up.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, you do, Isaiah. That’s why you gave yourself up. To protect Willie. He would never have let you take the blame, you know.”

  They’d negotiated the southern end of Iron Lake and had started up the shoreline toward the reservation. Broom was like one of those wooden statues he carved so adroitly, massive and silent.

  Cork went on. “I talked with Willie earlier tonight. He’s going to turn himself in.”

  Broom twisted quickly, facing Cork. “No.” It was like a command.

  “It has to be done, Isaiah. Willie understands that.”

  “There’s no way he’s going to spend his life in jail. I won’t let him. And it’ll kill Winona.”

  Cork drew to a stop at the side of the road. “Isaiah, there’s something else you need to know. I wish…” He was suddenly at a loss for words. He’d delivered bad news, news of death, many times in his law enforcement career, and it had always knotted his gut. “Winona’s dead, Isaiah. She killed herself. That’s pretty much what drove Willie to kill Jubal.”

  Broom looked as if Cork had just done the same to him, put an arrow into his heart. He seemed stunned, deeply wounded, then he turned away, hid his face by staring out the window on his side of the Land Rover.

  “We’re going to see Willie,” Cork told him. “I figured you might want to talk to him alone before he turns himself in. Everything’ll get hard after that.”

  Broom kept his face to the window. “Drive,” he said.

  When they reached Willie Crane’s cabin, there was a light on inside and the Jeep was parked in front. They stood on the doorstep with snowflakes wetting their faces, but when Cork knocked, no one answered.

  “Willie?” he called. He tried the knob and pushed the cabin door open. “Willie, it’s Cork O’Connor. I’ve brought Isaiah with me.”

  “Was he expecting us?” Broom asked.

  “Not exactly. He wanted some time to get things ready before he turned himself in. I figured he’d be here.”

  But the cabin was empty. On the table where Willie ate his meals lay a sheet of paper printed with text, and at the bottom was Willie Crane’s signature. Cork picked it up and read it. A full explanation of the killing of Jubal Little. A signed confession. There was also a note to Cork on a separate sheet of paper. It said simply, “With Winona.”

  Broom read the confession and the note. He wa
lked to one of the windows overlooking the lake that backed the cabin. “There’s a fire on the shore,” he said, and he turned and quickly went outside.

  Cork followed, and they stumbled through the dark along the path where a couple of days earlier Willie had led Cork on a wild-goose chase in search of Winona. They came to the place in the lee of the great rock where the earlier fire had been kindled, and a more recent fire had also burned. The flames were slowly dying. Willie had been there but was gone.

  Broom turned to the black hole that was the lake. “Willie!” he cried desperately. “Willie!”

  Cork stood beside him, thinking how, long ago, Willie Crane had saved his good friend’s life. Thinking how Isaiah Broom, in trying to take the blame for Jubal’s murder, had done his best to repay that debt. Thinking, too, that, in their lives, Willie Crane and Isaiah Broom had been blessed by their great friendship. Thinking of Jubal Little, who’d done his best to have Cork killed. And thinking, finally, that for a big man with such huge ambition, Jubal had had a very small heart.

  “He’s gone, Isaiah,” Cork said.

  Broom turned to him, and the Shinnob’s cheeks were cut by streams of tears that glistened in the light of the dying fire. “Where?”

  “He told me that, when he died, he wanted to be left out there.” Cork nodded toward the deep forest that began on the far side of the lake. “He wanted to become a part of all that beauty. Wherever he is, he’s with Winona, and I doubt that we’ll find them.”

  The snow had begun falling in earnest, thick as ash from some all-consuming fire.

  “We should go,” Cork said.

  “I want to stay for a while.”

  “I have to leave, Isaiah.”

  “Then leave.”

  “Long walk home.”

  Isaiah Broom said, “I know.”

  EPILOGUE

  S now had fallen the night before, not deep, but enough to coat the ground. A hunter’s snow. As they came across Lake Nanaboozhoo, the sun was just rising, and the eastern sky, clear now, was a deep russet, the color of oak leaves in the fall. Above the distant shoreline, the top of Trickster’s Point caught the first light of day, and it reminded Cork of a finger dipped in old blood.

  The air was cool. A low white mist lay on the water, and the canoes glided through as if touching nothing but air. Cork had the stern, Rainy the bow. In the stern of the other canoe, Stephen dug his paddle into the lake easily and almost without sound. Up front, despite his age, Meloux kept pace just as smoothly.

  When they reached the far side, the whole upper half of Trickster’s Point was lit with morning sunlight, which by now had turned gold, and the tops of the trees looked bathed in honey. They pulled the canoes onto shore and tipped them and laid the paddles against the upturned hulls. Without a word, they began to thread their way through the trees, following the same path, more or less, that Cork and Jubal Little had followed only a week before. They said nothing to one another as they walked, and the only sound was the soft crush of their boot soles on the thin crust of snow.

  They broke from the trees, and Trickster’s Point rose above them, and for a moment, Cork’s heart beat faster, as he remembered all the death he’d been a part of there. But all that death was, in fact, the reason they’d come.

  Meloux had brought his bandolier bag, an ancient accoutrement made of ornately beaded deerskin. At the base of the great monolith, he slid the bag from his shoulder, opened it, and drew out a small leather pouch filled with tobacco.

  “Stephen,” he said and held the tobacco pouch toward Cork’s son.

  Stephen seemed surprised and pleased. He took it, loosened the drawstring, and dipped his thumb and index finger inside. He pulled out a pinch of tobacco and offered it to the East, the first of the four grandfathers. Then he turned clockwise and made an offering to each of the other grandfathers: South, West, and North. He let a pinch fall to the ground where he stood, as an offering to Mother Earth, and finally tossed a bit in the air as an offering to the Great Spirit above.

  Meloux took back the pouch and returned it to his bandolier bag. Next he pulled out four sage bundles tied with hemp threads, which he’d prepared by lantern light that morning in his cabin while it was still dark outside. He gave a bundle to each of them and kept one for himself. From the bag, he took four shallow clay bowls painted with designs in ocher, and gave them out. After that, he carefully drew out four black turkey feathers, each quill wrapped in soft leather binding, and handed them around.

  The old Mide sat down on the snow, and the others sat with him. He set his clay bowl on the ground, untied his small bundle, and mounded the dried sage in the center of the shallow cupping. He took a box of kitchen matches from his bandolier bag and put flame to the dried sage, which began to smolder. He held his hands in the smoke to cleanse them, then used his feather to blow smoke gently across his heart and his head. He wafted smoke across each of the others in turn.

  He sang a prayer in Ojibwe, which Rainy and Stephen both clearly understood, but Cork, whose own knowledge of the language remained rudimentary at best, heard only the rise and fall of the gentle invocation.

  Then Meloux spoke in English. “All life is one weaving, one design by the hand of the Creator, the Great Mystery. All life is connected, thread by thread. When one thread is cut, the others weaken.”

  He lifted his bowl and, with his feather, encouraged the smoke across Cork.

  “We are here to help this man heal.”

  He turned toward the towering monolith beside him, and the smoke that rose from the smoldering sage drifted against the face of the rock.

  “We are here to help this place heal,” Meloux said.

  He nodded to the others, and they loosed their bundles into their own bowls. They lit the sage and stood with Meloux.

  “Stephen, you come with me.” The old Mide nodded to the north. “Rainy, you and Corcoran O’Connor go that way.” He indicated south.

  “And do what, Henry?” Cork asked.

  “Pray.”

  “What prayer?”

  “Whatever is in your heart. There are no right words, and there are no wrong words.”

  Rainy and Cork began to circle to the south. They used the feathers Meloux had given them to keep the sage embers burning and to draft the smoke against the gray stone and diffuse it into the air around them. They spoke quietly to themselves. Cork couldn’t hear Rainy’s words, but his own prayer was brief and sincere: “Give peace to this place and peace to my heart.”

  They all met halfway round and stood at the spot where, over the course of three hours, Jubal Little’s life had trickled away. The sage had burned to ash. They tipped their clay bowls, and the ashes fell and lay like faint shadows on the white snow. Cork looked across the jumble of broken talus between Trickster’s Point and the ridge slope where Willie Crane had hidden himself and had fired the fatal arrow. Above it, among the aspens that capped the top of the ridge, was the place where Willie had killed the chimook and, in doing so, had saved Cork’s life.

  “Coincidence,” Cork said. “I never believed in it much until now.”

  “Nanaboozhoo,” Meloux told him, as if that explained everything.

  “The trickster,” Rainy said, “who delights in confounding our ambitions and expectations.”

  “When I was a kid, I envied Jubal everything he’d been given,” Cork said.

  “And now?” Rainy asked.

  “Now?” Cork put his arm around her. “I feel like the richest of men.”

  The sun had risen fully, and the great stone tower was ablaze with the morning light, as if, in addition to the smudging, it was being purified with fire.

  “Anything more?” Stephen asked Meloux.

  “Yes,” the old man replied. “You send us off from this place with a prayer.”

  Which clearly caught Stephen by surprise. But Cork’s son composed himself and thought for a long moment. And this is what he said. O Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds And whose breath gives
life to everyone, Hear me. I come to you as one of your many children; I am weak. I am small. I need your wisdom and your strength. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever Behold the red and purple sunsets. Make my hand respect the things you have made, And make my ears sharp so I may hear your voice. Make me wise, so that I may understand what you Have taught my people and The lessons you have hidden in each leaf and each rock. I ask for wisdom and strength, Not to be superior to my brothers, but to be able To fight my greatest enemy, myself. Make me ever ready to come before you with Clean hands and a straight eye, So as life fades away as a fading sunset, My spirit may come to you without shame.

  It was not an original prayer. Cork had heard it many times before, but he was impressed and pleased that his son knew it by heart.

  Meloux smiled and nodded and said, “It is done.”

  He collected the clay bowls, returned them to his bandolier bag, and together they walked back toward the blue lake and the rising sun.

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