by Joe Gores
On the drive north, Minnesota 169 reminded him of the Alcan Highway with its flanking muskegs on the way to Fairbanks. A flat landscape broken by dark green evergreens growing thicker with every passing mile. To his right lay the vast expanse of Lake Mille Lacs. It was a clear day: blue water and bright sun, fishermen in motor-boats trolling for walleyes, or plug-casting along the lake’s weedy edges for northern pike and pickerel.
During the winter, the frozen lake would be dotted with ice-fishermen’s shacks on runners, smoke coming from their stovepipes. Kids, as he and his buddies had done in Alaska, would be making ice rinks by shovelling away the snow, piling up backpacks at either end to make impromptu goals for afterschool hockey games.
Portage. Three bars. Two churches. Cafe, Italian restaurant, pizza joint, shops, supermarket, drug store, hardware store, bank, three-story granite City Hall and sheriff’s office on the town square. Wilmot’s General Store with handmade crepe-paper Easter cutouts fading in the windows. The Chateau Theater with FOR RENT FOR PARTIES OR MEETINGS on the marquee in black capital letters that once had spelled out current movie titles.
Thorne drove through on Main Street to the Bide-A-Wee, one of the town’s two motels, asked for the furthest corner room from habit, said he’d be one night, maybe two. The wide-hipped woman checking him in had faded blue eyes and a stingy chin and the midwest twang most Minnesotans didn’t even know they had.
‘You’ve got your pick right now, but there’s good walleye fishing all summer long, so from Memorial Day on we’ll be full as a tick right on through Labor Day. During deer season, full up on weekends. The bucks run big up in these parts.’
‘I’ll remember,’ promised Thorne. ‘Where’s good to eat?’
‘Breakfast, the Good Eats Cafe. Alfred’s, that’s a nice steakhouse a couple of miles out of town near the airport. And there’s the Pizza Palace and Dominic’s Italian.’
He dumped his overnighter on the bed and walked into town. The local branch office of Marquette Bank had the ground floor of a two-story red brick building on Oak and Main.
Arlie Carlson, the bank manager, was in his forties, a stocky man with graying blond air. False front teeth and faint scars beside his shrewd blue eyes suggested he had played hockey in the days before protective masks. Thorne flashed his temporary FBI credentials, and was led into an inner office. Carlson closed the door. They could see the tellers and customers through the interior window. Carlson’s high tenor voice didn’t go with his build or his hockey scars.
‘Special agents were up here from Minneapolis last November, asking some pretty pointed questions about Halden Corwin. Never did say what it was all about…’
‘Sorry, I wasn’t involved in the original investigation.’
Carlson’s blue eyes said he didn’t believe a word of it. Thorne took out a notebook and consulted a page that from across the desk Carlson couldn’t see was blank.
‘I understand that Corwin sold his cabin before he left.’
‘To his best friend, Whitby Hernild, the local doctor in these parts. I guess you can demand to know the selling price and I guess I’d have to tell you, but…’ His eyes hardened. ‘It’s confidential bank information and we always protect our customers.’
Thorne winked. ‘Need-to-know – just like the Bureau. But can you confirm that Corwin left town right after the sale?’
‘Sure can. Next day.’
Thorne made a check-mark on his blank notebook page.
‘Is there anything else that you might have learned since we were here in November?’
Carlson started to shake his head, then frowned. ‘Wait a minute. When we sent out the tax documents in mid-February, we found that Doc Hernild had never transferred title.’
‘Doesn’t sound too important.’ Thorne stood up. Carlson was on his feet, hand out, affable now that Thorne was leaving.
The April afternoon sun was hot; on impulse, Thorne turned in at Dutch’s Tavern. He needed to think about what Carlson had let drop at the very end of the interview. Only two drinkers at the bar, heavy, hard farmers in bib overalls, holding glasses of draft Hamms in calloused hands. They turned in unison when Thorne entered, then turned back to their conversation.
He took a stool near a fishbowl full of hard-boiled eggs with a hand-lettered sign, ‘Toofer a buck.’ The thick-bodied bartender was sprinkling salt in draft beer glasses, sloshing them in hot soapy water, then setting them upside down on a rubber mat to drain. He had bright blue eyes and a heavy jaw; his thinning blond hair was going silver and was parted down the very center of his square Teutonic head. Obviously Dutch himself. He came down toward Thorne automatically drying his hands on a wet-grayed apron.
‘What’ll it be there, mister?’
‘Draft beer. And…’ He picked a hard-boiled egg out of the bowl, tapped it on the stick hard enough to crack the shell.
‘You betcha.’
Hernild had bought the cabin off Corwin and Corwin had left town the next day. Okay, getting shot had ended his life as a recluse in the big woods, he needed traveling money, so the quick sale to his best friend made sense. But why had Hernild never registered the transfer of title? He was paying property taxes on a cabin that on the books still belonged to Corwin.
Down the bar, Dutch had drawn the beer, was slushing away the head with a wooden tongue-depressor, then topping it again from the spigot. He returned to set down the wet-beaded glass. Thorne raised it in salute.
‘You cut the clouds off ’em, my friend.’
‘Two other bars here in town, local folks wouldn’t let me get away with a short fill.’ He leaned heavy forearms on the mahogany. ‘Just passing through?’
‘Looking for a cabin I could maybe rent for the summer.’ Thorne took a bite of egg, sipped beer. ‘The bank said the local doctor had one for rent.’
‘Doc Hernild. But I heard he rented it out a month back.’
A month. March. Just about the time Corwin had disappeared after ditching Franklin and Greene in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. Thorne feigned disappointment, then brightened his face.
‘Hey, maybe it’s short term.’
‘Maybe. You can find the doc down at the river end of Hemlock, can’t miss his place. Real old-timey private practice, even does house calls. He’s got a little clinic where he treats patients right there at the house, flies his own plane. A couple of times he flew into the deep woods and landed on country roads to pick up injured hunters.’
Hernild’s clinic was a one-story wood frame add-on in front of a two-story white frame house with green shutters. The house overlooked the river through a stand of just-leafing willows. On the clinic door was a brass plaque:
WHITBY HERNILD, MD. Underneath in smaller letters was, Nine—Five, Monday—Friday and beneath that in smaller letters still, Ring Bell for Emergencies.
Just-budding, not yet fragrant lilac bushes flanked the walk. The reception room was deserted, but a tall handsome blonde with her hair done up in a bun at the back of her head came through the door behind the desk.
‘Hi. I’m Ingrid, Dr. Hernild’s nurse-receptionist.’ She was very Nordic, strong-bodied and large-boned, with big white teeth. A grin lit up her face. ‘His wife, too. Unless this is an emergency I’d like to take a little history first…’
‘No emergency. Not even a patient.’ He opened his FBI credentials, showed badge and commission card. She made a little face when she saw them.
‘You guys again? You know everything we know about Hal.’
Whitby Hernild was a lanky-legged heron of a man, also Scandinavian, six-foot-six and skinny, as pleasantly ugly as his wife was pleasantly attractive. Together they made a striking pair. He was wearing a white doctor’s smock over street clothes.
Ingrid went away, they faced one another in a room with a chair, a stool, a counter with a sink, cabinets, and a table covered with fresh white tucked-in sheets.
‘What can I tell you that Arlie Carlson couldn’t?’
‘Arlie
sent up a smoke signal, huh?’ Thorne took out his notebook. ‘Carlson couldn’t give me details of Corwin’s injuries in that hunting accident.’
‘Extensive. Varied.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Thorne good-naturedly.
Hernild stared at him with glacial blue eyes.
‘Nowdays you probably could force me to tell you anyway, so okay, he was hit three times. Left knee, left hand, chest. The knee shot carried away the inferior genicular branch of the popliteal artery and vein, the biceps femoris tendon, part of the gastrocnemius muscle, and part of the head of the fibula. That the sort of thing you need, Agent Thorne?’
‘Why the hard-on? I’m just doing my job here.’
‘And I’m just a doctor doing his. I hate to invade any patient’s privacy no matter who’s asking.’
‘And here I thought it was maybe because he was shot three times. That’s a deer-hunter very persistent in his mistake.’
Hernild shrugged. ‘He was semaphoring his arms to show the hunter that he was a man, not a whitetail buck. It didn’t work.’ He pointed to the little finger and ring finger of his own left hand. ‘The second shot carried away the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand, counting from the thumb.’
‘Okay. In English this time, how bad was the knee wound?’
‘Bad enough. It was a long process. We put a drain in Hal’s leg, and removed it gradually as the tissue knit and the possibility of infection lessened. Because the head of the fibula was fractured, we had to insert the tendon just below the damaged area. Which means Hal now walks with a limp – his left leg is slightly shorter.’
Ingrid thrust in her blonde head.
‘Whit, you’ve got patients waiting…’
‘Just one little minute more,’ said Thorne quickly. She made a face at him and withdrew. ‘And the chest wound?’
‘Ah, the chest wound.’ Hernild didn’t seem worried about waiting patients. ‘The bullet fragmented the seventh rib, but glanced off rather than penetrated. Before the cold stopped it, couple of hundred cc’s of bleeding, mostly internal. He had an open fracture, with splintered ends of rib bone driven out through the skin and also into the chest cavity.’
‘But not into the lungs themselves?’
Hernild gave him a sharp, appraising look.
‘No, but Hal was afraid that a cough, even a deep breath, could collapse his lungs by compressing them with outside air being drawn in through the open chest wound.’
Thorne mused, ‘He needed a compress, a bandage, something to make the chest reasonably airtight…’
‘One of his mittens, fastened with his belt.’ Thorne realized he had gotten Hernild’s attention with his informed musings. ‘Crawled a thousand feet to his cabin, crawled inside, used his bow – he’d been bow-hunting a big whitetail buck when he was hit – to knock the phone to the floor. He dialled 911.’
‘He saved his own life,’ said Thorne, almost in admiration.
Again, that look. Hernild said, ‘It healed clean, without infection, but it left him with what we call “splinting.” The inability to take a really deep breath because of pain in the chest wall.’
‘How do I get to Corwin’s cabin and why didn’t you—’
‘I’ve got patients waiting. If you have some more questions, come back at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’
16
Corwin hiked back toward his cabin, his rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm, muzzle angled up and away from him. He was ready. He paused, went into an awkward half-crouch over a dug-up meat cache beside the trail. A fox, for sure.
He had a sudden vivid memory of the first time Nisa had visited him at the cabin after Hernild had released him from the clinic. He had taken her tramping through the still snowy woods to show her the first fox she had ever seen in the wild. The memory of that moment was filled with incredible sweetness, like biting into a honeycomb.
Then, too, he had squatted beside the path, pointing out the tracks. A gray: thicker tail, smaller pads but bigger toes than a red. Then he took her to the fox’s den in the base of a dead oak tree, showed her the tuft of reddish-gray fox fur caught on a bit of protruding bark at the mouth of the hole. Pointed out scattered bits of bone, a patch of down-soft rabbit fur, three bright wood duck feathers.
Then he put his lips against the back of his hand and sucked sharply to mimic the thin squeaking of a mouse. A sharp nose was suddenly raised against the leafless hardwood boles on a small rise at the far end of the burn. The fox, lying up on his backtrail, gray brush over paws, all senses alert.
And Nisa, eyes shining, hair sleek and shiny as the fox’s pelt, exclaimed in sheer delight, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’
Nisa. Dead. The thought thumped his chest like a heart attack. What had he done? He tried to cling to the fox memory. Couldn’t. He virtually fled back up the burn to the cabin, cleaned his rifle, added a log to the embers of the fire, and fired up his laptop to send Hernild the message that he would be leaving in two days. But waiting was an e-mail from Hernild:
Another one. Different from the others. This one is good.
He wants to see the cabin. I stalled him until morning, but he is watching me.
It just hurried Corwin’s departure by a day. He sent:
Thanks. Forewarned is forearmed. I’m off tomorrow..
He ate, then stowed everything he would need in Janet’s 1990 4-Runner, hid it three miles away in a thick stand of spruce on the other side of the creek. He would leave before dawn.
A fingernail crescent of new moon gave scant light, but he knew every tree, every bush, every turn in the trail on the way back. This cabin, before he was shot, had been his home since Terry’s senseless death. He had come back to it after King’s Canyon because they had already searched for him here. Walking softly through the dark-shadowed woods, hearing the questing whoo, whoo, whoo-whoo of a great horned owl, he found himself intensely curious about the new FBI man.
Different from the others. This one is good.
Who was he? How old? What did he look like? How did he move? How clever in the woods? How observant of sign? No man could match Corwin here on his home ground, no matter how good he was, but still… was this the questing beast of his nightmares?
At 7:45 in the morning, even fortified with eggs and bacon and hashbrowns and toast, Thorne yawned as he pushed the buzzer on the door of Hernild’s clinic. He had been in his car a half mile down the road until three a.m. Hernild had gone nowhere. Thorne hadn’t really expected him to, but he had learned to be methodical and cover all contingencies when on the hunt.
Hernild opened the door himself, crisp in his doctor’s whites, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand. Ingrid was not in evidence. Hernild raised the cup in a question.
‘No thanks. I just had breakfast.’
Hernild nodded and leaned his butt against the edge of the reception desk. He extended a sheet of paper.
‘I drew you a map of the way to Hal’s cabin. In winter you’d need four-wheel, but this time of year you can make it.’
Thorne studied the sketch. Corwin’s cabin, deep in the woods, was a simple rectangle. A dotted line marked the logging-trace in to it from the quarter-section gravel road.
‘Isolated.’
‘Hal built it himself. Cut down the trees, peeled the logs – therapy after Terry’s death. He sliced his leg with an axe and drove to my clinic one-handed, holding it closed with the other hand so he wouldn’t bleed to death. That’s how we met.’
‘How did he make a living during his years here?’
‘Trapping, hunting – after the shooting all that stopped.’
‘Why didn’t you transfer the title to yourself after you paid Corwin for the cabin?’
‘He needed money to get away from all of the associations this area evoked after he was wounded.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘Hal Corwin is my best friend. If he ever wants the cabin back, it’s here for him. Meanwhile, I rent it out to cover the taxes. There’s someone living there now, in fact.
I hope you won’t bother him unduly.’
Thorne nodded. ‘Sure not. Are you in touch with Corwin?’
Hernild hulked over him, suddenly hostile. ‘What do you idiots think Hal has done?’ It was a good intimidation tactic, just being used on the wrong man: Thorne never backed down from anyone. ‘Why can’t you leave the poor bastard in peace?’
Thorne thought: Because the poor bastard is planning to assassinate the president of the United States. He said: ‘You know Corwin spent several years as a paid mercenary in some of the world’s nastiest civil wars…’
‘Maybe. But whatever Hal did before Terry was killed, he left it all behind when he came up here. After he was shot he couldn’t even kill animals any more.’
‘Still,’ said Thorne, deliberately provocative, ‘there are some questions about the deaths of his daughter and her husband we believe he could help us with.’
‘His daughter? If I read you right, you bastard, and I think I do, he adored his daughter. For Chrissake, after he was shot, she tried to help him find whoever had done it.’
Which was news to Thorne. He felt as if the trail had just become more twisted, more convoluted: she helped him look, but Corwin still blew her away and beat off on her body. At least he now had a chance to ask the question he’d been leading up to.
‘What if Mather was the one who shot him? Deliberately?’
‘That’s crazy. Crazy! After Hal and Nisa patched things up between them, Damon came up here a time or two with her. That was it. Good God, man, he and Mather barely knew each other…’ He stopped, his long, almost ascetic face totally devoid of emotion. ‘I have to go make house-calls.’
It was a real old-timey log cabin like the maple syrup tins that Vermont Country Store still sold out of its nostalgia catalogue. Peaked roof with hand-hewn shingles, peeled log walls. Built to last, perhaps a lifetime. A lot of effort for a man working alone.
