The Ravens (Minnesota Trilogy)

by Vidar Sundstøl

  “Wasn’t it dark?” asked Lance.

  “There was moonlight, almost a full moon, and slowly the sky got lighter. It was the middle of the summer, you know. First I went over to the cross, but he wasn’t there. I walked slowly, didn’t make a sound. And then . . . somewhere in the woods . . . suddenly I realized a naked man was standing only a few yards away from me.”

  “Georg Lofthus,” said Lance.

  “I hit him in the head before I even stopped to think. And when he lay on the ground, I kept pounding at his skull. It felt so good, Lance. You would never understand . . . finally to be totally . . . free. But later . . . it was like I came to my senses. And I saw that it wasn’t Diver lying on the ground. That was horrible! I thought what I’d done was wasted effort. That I’d killed a man without getting anything out of it. But when I went back to the parking lot, I suddenly knew how I was going to get that bastard after all. His car wasn’t locked, so I hid the bat under some junk inside.”

  “What about your clothes?” said Lance. “They must have been covered in blood.”

  “When I got home, I took a shower and put on clean clothes. Then I put the bloodstained clothes in a garbage bag and drove to the lake. It was before dawn, so I didn’t meet anyone on the way. On the north side of Lighthouse Point, I stuffed some rocks in the bag, tied it up, and threw it as far as I could into the water. It didn’t go very far. It’s probably still there.”

  Conclusive evidence, thought Lance.

  “After that, it was just a matter of driving home and waiting for them to come back,” said Tammy. “Chrissy ran straight up to her room. She looked awful after the beating she’d taken. It was obvious that Andy had hit her at the cabin too. And I was supposed to believe that she’d spent the night with a girlfriend in Duluth! Andy was upset and wanted to know if I’d heard the news. He told me a murder had been committed near Baraga’s Cross.”

  “What did you think when you heard I was the one who found the dead man?”

  “I couldn’t believe it. Things like that don’t happen. That’s what I thought. But it did happen.”

  “Yes, it did,” said Lance with a sigh.

  The phone on the end table next to the sofa started ringing.

  “I’ll take it upstairs,” said Tammy and stood up.

  Lance was surprised at how calmly she walked across the room, as if this was just an ordinary day in her life. Next he heard her running up the stairs, and then the phone stopped ringing. He wondered whether he should pick up the receiver and listen to the conversation, but decided that it didn’t really matter who she was talking to.

  As he sat there alone, he realized that the blood traces at the scene of the crime, which the authorities had said with a hundred percent certainty had to have come from a person of Native American origin, could have come from Chrissy’s bloody scarf, which Tammy wore wrapped around her hand when she killed Lofthus. Chrissy had the same Ojibwe ancestry as Lance and Andy, after all. Or Andy could have cut himself and bled when he bashed Lenny Diver’s car with the bat, or when he punched Chrissy. The blood could even have been Lenny’s, just as the police had assumed all along. A small cut on his hand would have been enough to leave blood on the bat when he picked it up. No matter who it belonged to, the blood had been carried into the woods by Tammy, either on the scarf or the bat, and left at the crime scene. The only person out of the four that the blood couldn’t have come from, was the murderer.

  At that moment he noticed how quiet it was upstairs. When he thought about it, he hadn’t heard Tammy’s voice for a while. Lance went over to the end table and cautiously lifted the phone. But all he heard was a dial tone.

  52

  SHE WAS SITTING ON THE BED with his gun beside her.

  “Tammy,” said Lance.

  As she raised the gun with a trembling hand and pointed it at her temple, he saw that she had something wrapped around her wrist. It took a couple of seconds before he realized she’d kept her daughter’s bloody scarf.

  “Tammy,” he said again, taking a step into the room.

  “Don’t move,” she shouted, fear in her voice.

  Lance froze in midstride and stood still as they stared at each other. Aside from Tammy’s shallow breathing, there wasn’t a sound in the house.

  “I don’t trust you,” she whispered. “You’re going to tell.”

  He heard the familiar scraping sound of a plow moving past. Outside it was just another boring Tuesday in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The kind of day almost nobody remembers afterward, but Lance Hansen would remember it for the rest of his life.

  “Who was on the phone?” he asked in an attempt to talk her back from the edge.

  “The school. They don’t know where she is. Every time the phone rings, I’m afraid she . . .”

  “If you kill yourself, Lenny Diver will be the only one she has left,” he said.

  Looking into Tammy’s eyes, he could see she was slowly coming back from that void where she’d gone. Shaking, she put down the gun. Finally he could move, and in three long strides he reached the bed and picked up the weapon. At that instant she collapsed onto the floor, and there she stayed, soundlessly shaking all over.

  Lance sat down next to her. He suddenly felt completely drained of all strength. He sat there for a long time, listening to the normal everyday life going on outside the four walls of this house, as he stroked Tammy’s hair and thought about all the years in prison that lay ahead of her.

  Epilogue

  ON A SATURDAY IN LATE MAY, Lance Hansen parked his old Jeep Cherokee in the lot near Baraga’s Cross. Next to him sat Jimmy, holding the old dream catcher that Lance had been given by Willy Dupree.

  “Are you ready?” asked Lance.

  Jimmy nodded solemnly.

  Hand in hand they headed across the deserted parking lot. When they came to the path that led to the cross, they had to walk single file, and Lance let his son go first. Since Jimmy was holding the dream catcher out in front of him on the palms of his hands, he moved slowly through the woods, but Lance thought that was appropriate. It was as if the boy were carrying a gift or an offering.

  “Should I give it to you now?” Jimmy asked as they emerged from the woods and saw the lake in front of them.

  “You can wait a bit,” said Lance.

  He put his hand on the back of his son’s slender neck, and then they walked the last stretch over to Baraga’s Cross. Lance leaned against the cold granite and looked out at Lake Superior. He thought about that morning when he found the body of Georg Lofthus. Since then he’d lost a large part of his family. Inga was dead, Tammy was in prison, and Andy would never speak to him again. Down in Minneapolis, Chrissy was in a treatment program for young drug addicts. He’d been afraid that she would be drawn to Lenny Diver again once he was a free man, but that hadn’t happened. Maybe she’d finally understood how serious things were when she realized that her mother, out of sheer desperation, had tried to kill her boyfriend. But she’d chosen to keep the brown-tinted contact lenses—her Ojibwe eyes. When Lance went to visit his niece, he couldn’t help noticing that something had changed between them. Even though Chrissy understood that Tammy had to pay for the murder she’d committed, her uncle would always be the man who had sent her mother to prison.

  Yet the most important thing was that he could stand here with his son, without feeling any shame about what he’d done, and without having to lie anymore. On the way here from Grand Portage, he’d told Jimmy about Swamper Caribou, who might have been killed at this very spot long ago. The boy had listened, wide-eyed and happy at being initiated into something that clearly belonged to the grown-up world.

  “Okay, you can give it to me now,” said Lance.

  Jimmy handed him the dream catcher, and together they walked over to the edge of the rocks, where Lance squatted down.

  “We’re doing this to restore balance to things,” he said.

  For one last lingering moment he held the sacred object in his hands before he placed i
t on the water. Swamper Caribou’s old dream catcher floated as light as a cork. Lance thought it looked like a funeral wreath as it bobbed up and down on the rippling waves.

  Vidar Sundstøl is the acclaimed Norwegian author of seven novels, including the Minnesota Trilogy, written after he and his wife lived for two years in Two Harbors, Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. The Land of Dreams (Minnesota, 2013), the first novel in the trilogy, was awarded the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel of the year in 2008 and was nominated for the Glass Key for best Scandinavian crime novel of the year. The Land of Dreams was ranked by Dagbladet as one of the top twenty-five Norwegian crime novels, and the Minnesota Trilogy has been translated into seven languages.

  Tiina Nunnally is an award-winning translator of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish literature. Her many translations include Sigrid Undset’s first novel, Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal (Minnesota, 2014). Her translation of Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. She was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her efforts on behalf of Norwegian literature in the United States.