The Ravens (Minnesota Trilogy)

by Vidar Sundstøl

  17

  WHEN HE WOKE UP, Lance thought at first that he’d dreamed something, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Bewildered, he sat up in bed and looked around. The bedroom didn’t seem familiar, as if he’d gone into the wrong house and fallen asleep in someone else’s bed. Then he remembered: the white pickup. But that was no dream. His heart began pounding at a hollow, uncomfortable gallop. He got up and pulled open the curtains. The dazzling light stung his eyes.

  The clock radio on the nightstand said it was 10:41.

  He put on his bathrobe and slippers and then shuffled out to the kitchen and switched on the coffeemaker. The house had warmed up since the heaters had all been going full-blast for hours, but the rooms still had an abandoned air about them, as if they hadn’t quite woken up from a long slumber.

  Carrying his coffee cup, he went into the living room and sat down in his favorite chair. There he sat, squinting at the intense glitter coming off the snowy landscape outside the big picture window. Cars were soundlessly rushing past on the road below. His own Jeep Cherokee was parked in front of the red building that housed his cousin Rick’s hardware store. The road up to his home had been newly plowed. His cousin must have done it while Lance was asleep.

  He took a few sips of the piping-hot coffee and felt an inkling of well-being start to emerge, but then he happened to think of those two men again.

  “If you don’t, you’ll be cursed for all eternity. You and your whole family.”

  Only now did the full consequences of what had happened dawn on Lance. Someone had threatened his family. Sick with worry, he got up and hurried down to the basement, where the ice-cold air nearly took his breath away. He unlocked the gun cabinet and took out his service pistol and some ammunition. Then he relocked the cabinet and ran back upstairs. For a moment he paused in the hallway, not sure what to do. Too many thoughts were lined up inside his head, like cars in rush-hour traffic, unable to move forward. Finally he put the gun and bullets on the little table in the hall and then went into the bathroom to take a shower.

  THE CRUSH OF THOUGHTS had not diminished when he came out. He picked up his gun but then caught sight of himself in the mirror: a stark-naked, overweight man holding a gun in his hand. It was not a pretty sight, so he put the gun down and went into the bedroom where he got dressed without paying any attention to what he put on. When he sensed that he was fully clothed, he rushed back to the hall and again picked up the gun and ammunition. A quick glance in the mirror as he filled the magazine showed a man wearing heavy woolen socks, suit trousers, and a mossy green sweater that appeared to be on backward.

  As he slammed the magazine into place, he heard the sound of a car coming up the hill toward the house. He cocked the gun; a bullet slid into the chamber. Then he checked to make sure the safety was on before he tucked the pistol into his waistband in front and pulled the loose sweater over it.

  The car had stopped outside, but the engine was still running, and he hadn’t yet heard any car door open or close. He paused in the cramped front entryway to listen, but all he heard was the sound of the engine idling outside.

  Lance turned the lock and opened the door.

  Andy was sitting in his white Chevy Blazer only a few yards away. The two brothers hadn’t seen each other since that Sunday in November when Andy, who was standing on the bare rock near Baraga’s Cross, turned around and saw Lance taking aim at him. And later, the shot in the dark, when Lance’s rifle unexpectedly fired—although for Andy it must have seemed like a deliberate attempt to kill him. So here he now sat, right out front, with a hint of a smile on his face. Or was it a sneer? Lance felt the pressure of the gun against his stomach. He tried to think rationally, but couldn’t do it. He merely stared at his brother, who stared back with that same little sneer on his lips. It was as if the world had suddenly become real again, boiled down to its purest form, and they knew it. They both did.

  Calmly Andy raised his index finger and pointed it at his brother standing in the doorway. Lance waited for him to pull the trigger, as if firing an imaginary gun, but that didn’t happen. Andy simply lowered his finger and drove out of the yard, down the hill to the highway.

  THE FIRST THING Lance did after his brother’s brief visit was phone Chrissy. His niece was probably in the middle of a class at school, but he hoped that she’d call him back during a free moment when she saw that he was trying to get hold of her.

  She picked up after a couple of rings.

  “Hello?” she said tentatively.

  “Chrissy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Lance.”

  “Huh?”

  “Uncle Lance.”

  “Oh.”

  He could hear music thudding in the background.

  “Are you at school?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Again?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Is this about the murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know anything except what I already told you.”

  “But I do.”

  “Oh.”

  “When are you done with school?”

  “Er . . . now.”

  “Could I pick you up at the gas station again?”

  “But aren’t you back from vacation? Officially, I mean?”

  “So you heard about that, huh?”

  “Grandma called.”

  “Right. Well, I’m back, but what I’m working on is still secret. In fact, it’s even more secret. You didn’t tell anyone that you’d seen me, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Good. Shall we say that I’ll pick you up in two hours?”

  THE LAKE was there the whole time. Occasionally it would disappear behind a stretch of woods, but soon it reappeared, endless and white in the dazzling sunshine under the blue sky. For the first time in ages he was able to drive along Highway 61 in broad daylight, and in spite of the difficult situation in which he found himself, Lance felt a sense of liberation, as if he’d returned to life after living a shadowy existence for more than two months. He felt with every fiber of his being that it was here he belonged, on the North Shore of Lake Superior, and nothing could make him leave again.

  As a forest cop Lance Hansen had approximately the same relationship to his service pistol as to his uniform—it was something he put on each day before he went to work. It was part of his uniform, in fact. A few times he’d used it to put injured animals out of their misery, but that was all. Right now the gun was in the glove compartment of his own car, ready to be used in self-defense, if necessary.

  He was not a free man.

  CHRISSY AND LANCE said very little to each other on the drive to Duluth. He assumed that was where she’d want to go. Or maybe to the Twin Cities, but that was too far. She seemed sullen and withdrawn, as if preoccupied with something else entirely. Lance wondered why she’d even agreed to meet him.

  “The Kozy?” he asked, teasing her as they drove into the city.

  “God, no,” groaned his niece.

  “How about Fitger’s?”

  “Okay.”

  They parked and went inside the big brick building that still housed the legendary Fitger’s Brewhouse, although on a smaller scale than in the past, when it had been one of the largest in the region. These days it was a restaurant, yet it still had its own brewery that produced many of the types of beer available locally.

  Lance and Chrissy found a table in a dark corner at the back of the pub, which was already more than half full.

  “What’ll you have?” he asked her.

  “What are you going to have?”

  “A beer.”

  “Then I’ll have one too,” she said.

  He didn’t bother to reply, just stared at her, as if she still hadn’t answered his question.

  “Okay, a Diet Sprite,” she said with a sigh. “I’m going to the restroom.”

  Lance ordered he
r soda and a pint of Starfire Pale Ale for himself. Then he took them back to the table and sat down. He sipped the beer as he looked around the pub. Even though the place was fairly new, it looked as if it had been there since before World War II. Tons of supposedly old knickknacks and advertising posters adorned the walls, which appeared to be gray with smoke, even though it was unlikely that a single cigarette had ever been lit on the premises. Lance was impressed by how authentic the whole place looked.

  When Chrissy came back, she seemed in a better mood.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about this time?” she said with interest as she leaned forward across the table.

  “Yesterday I was stopped by two guys who threatened me.”

  “Threatened you?”

  She opened her eyes wide, feigning one of those exaggerated looks of surprise that she favored.

  “They said that I could save Lenny Diver, and that if I didn’t, my whole family and I would be cursed for all eternity, or something like that.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Do you have any idea who they could be? It seems like you know people from more walks of life than most of the other family members do. Everything you tell me will be confidential, just between the two of us.”

  “The only people I know in Grand Portage are Mary and Jimmy.”

  “But when I saw you at the Kozy, you were with a girl and two guys who looked like they were Ojibwe.”

  “Oh, them. No, Suzy was the one who knew them. I’d never seen them before.”

  “What about the guys from the party at your cabin? The ones who saw the bloodstained man with the bat? Do you think they know Lenny Diver?”

  “I doubt it. I think they’re from somewhere on the Range,” said Chrissy. “But what did those men mean when they said you could save Lenny Diver?”

  Lance hesitated.

  “It’s a long story, and I’ve never told it to anyone before. It actually started thirty years ago, here in Duluth. But for my part, it began last summer, on the night before the Norwegian tourist was killed. I’d gone to visit Inga. I was on my way home when I saw a guy I know driving down Baraga Cross Road.”

  “Who was it?” asked Chrissy.

  “Nobody you know. Apparently he didn’t recognize me, but he has a very distinctive appearance, so it’s impossible to mistake him for anyone else. I didn’t give it much thought, although it seemed a little strange for him to be driving down to Baraga’s Cross that late. It was around ten at night. The next day I found the body of the Norwegian only about a hundred yards away from the parking lot, and later in the day, when the news of the murder reached the media and everyone and his brother had heard about it, I saw that same guy again. He made a point of telling me that he’d spent the whole night at his cabin over by . . . well, I don’t remember where he said it was. But he said he hadn’t been anywhere near the lake and Baraga’s Cross. And I knew that was a lie.”

  Lance paused to take a big gulp of his Starfire Pale.

  “So you think he’s the one who did it?” asked Chrissy cautiously.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But it sounds a bit vague, don’t you think?”

  “Weren’t you the one who said that a man covered in blood and holding a baseball bat was seen outside Finland on that night?” said Lance.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “A middle-aged white guy with an old junker for a car?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, the guy I’m talking about drives an old beater. I’m a hundred percent sure that he was driving down toward the cross at about ten that night, and for some reason he decided to lie about it and claim he was somewhere else.”

  “That does sound suspicious,” Chrissy admitted. “But why would he kill a Norwegian tourist?”

  “I think I know that too,” said Lance. “Remember I said that this story actually started here in town almost thirty years ago?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was a senior in high school. Your father was a sophomore. And the man I think is the murderer was a junior along with Clayton Miller.”

  “Clayton Miller? What does he have to do with all this?”

  “Nothing really, and yet he has everything to do with it,” Lance said. “As I was saying, they were in the same class, and the guy . . . let’s just call him the ‘murderer’ . . . he was gay. It’s not easy to talk about this, Chrissy. I’m very old-fashioned, but the murderer was in love with Clayton Miller, who was a very special kid.”

  “Special in what way?” Chrissy interrupted him.

  “He knitted his own scarves.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes, he did. So of course everyone thought he was kind of strange. They all thought he was gay.”

  “But Clayton Miller has a wife and kids,” said Chrissy.

  “I know. They were wrong. It was the murderer who was gay, but of course he thought Miller was too. Everybody did. And one day the murderer wrote a note to Clayton. I don’t know what it said, but maybe it was some sort of declaration of love. And Clayton Miller, who was not gay, laughed at what he’d written. And then the murderer attacked him. He knocked him down and kicked him as he lay on the ground. Punctured his lung. Kicked out his teeth. And then he went to get a baseball bat and came back to Miller, who was lying on the ground defenseless. But someone else showed up. An older boy. And he took the bat away. It was an extremely violent assault. I have no doubt that it would have ended in murder if the older boy hadn’t stopped it.”

  “Was that what you wanted to talk to Clayton Miller about?” asked Chrissy.

  “Yes. I wanted to ask him what could have provoked such anger. And that’s what he told me. But he refused to say what the murderer had written in the note. Did you know that the murdered Norwegian and his traveling companion were both gay?”

  Chrissy raised a hand to her mouth in surprise.

  “Lenny Diver has consistently maintained that he spent the night of the murder with a woman he met in a bar in Grand Marais. But he was so drunk he can’t recall what her name was. It sounded like a pretty implausible explanation, but what if it’s true? If that’s the case, then he was also drunk enough that the killer could have planted his fingerprints on the baseball bat and then hidden the bat in his car. And that’s what I think happened. The murderer just happened to come upon Lenny Diver. It must have seemed like a gift from heaven. Maybe the killer found him sleeping it off in his car the next day.”

  “My God,” whispered Chrissy.

  “But there’s more,” Lance went on. “Only a few days before the tourist was killed, this man that I’m calling the murderer was seen with the two Norwegians in a bar. They spent several hours together. These two gay guys and a middle-aged man who was also homosexual but who had spent his whole life in the closet. He has a wife and child, you see. But deep inside . . .”

  “And so he got laughed at again?” said Chrissy.

  “Something like that. And with the same result, except that this time no one came to take the baseball bat away.”

  Lance tried to hide a sob by taking a big gulp of beer, but it didn’t work. This was the first time he’d ever put his thoughts about Andy into words.

  “Are you feeling bad about this?” his niece asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Is it because you know the murderer well, or something?”

  “Not anymore, but I used to know him a long time ago,” replied Lance.

  “And you haven’t told this to anyone?”

  “As I said, I know who the man is. I know who his wife is. And his daughter. He has a daughter your age. But last night my family and I were threatened. And if those two guys are friends of Diver’s, I have to say that I understand where they’re coming from, even though I don’t know how they could know about all this. Regardless, that doesn’t change anything. I can’t put my family in danger. Not Jimmy . . .”

  “Does that mean you want me to testify?” she asked, her voice quavering.

  Lance
nodded. Suddenly Chrissy’s shoulders began to shake. She was crying silently, but Lance couldn’t bear the thought of creating a scene in the crowded pub.

  “Pull yourself together,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.”

  “But I do want to,” she said, her voice thick with tears. Her big dark eyes had lost any trace of childishness.

  At that moment a thought occurred to Lance.

  “You have brown eyes!” he exclaimed.

  A smile appeared on Chrissy’s tear-stained face.

  “Is this the first time you’ve noticed?”

  AS THEY DROVE NORTH, she started crying again, but since they were alone, Lance didn’t try to stop her.

  He thought about what he’d told her about the “murderer.” How could he even think that Andy was gay? But there was no way around it—all indications led to the same conclusion. What a tragedy this whole thing was. His family’s insistent silence had destroyed everything. Their whole world was based on the simple fact that certain things were just not discussed, under any circumstances. There were no rules designating which subjects were taboo, but everyone who belonged to the same world as Lance knew intuitively what topics to avoid. The fact that nobody had talked about what Andy did to Clayton Miller came under the big category of taboo topics. This tragedy might have been avoided if the members of the Hansen family had been a different sort of people.

  “Brown eyes suit you,” he told his niece, who had stopped crying.

  “Thanks,” she murmured.

  “And it makes sense, since you’re Ojibwe.”

  Chrissy didn’t say a word, but out of the corner of his eye Lance saw her mouth open, and her face turned even paler than before, only to flush a bright red, all in a matter of seconds. She started gasping for breath, and for a moment he thought she was having some sort of seizure, but then she regained control. Partially, at least. Her voice shook when she spoke.

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of your great-great-grandmothers was Ojibwe,” he explained.

  As soon as he said that, it was as if something let go inside her.

  “Is that true?” She looked at him with an eager glint in her brown eyes.