Tracker’s favorite time and music.
In the corner behind her was a mammoth foot-powered potter’s wheel. Two of the room’s walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves, each shelf crowded with green pots of various sizes. Hence the need for a firing schedule. Tracker’s studio was the largest and most used section of the cabin. In truth, Tracker was so focused on the needs of her studio that she’d had to be goaded by her father into making the remainder of the cabin habitable.
She was the only girl in a family of men, and at age six she’d realized that her best weapon, a technique guaranteed to drive her father and brothers nuts, was to be stubborn. She was twenty-five now, stood five feet five and weighed one hundred and nine pounds, five of those pounds from her waist-length hair. Every inch and pound of her was stubborn. For months she’d been stubborn about her cabin. But this time George Charboneau lost patience with his daughter. After the spring walleye spearing season, George marshaled his four sons, and over Tracker’s protests interior walls went up, making the bathroom and bedroom areas private. The remainder of the cabin, the living room and kitchen, were left open. A door off the kitchen led into the workroom. George and sons went on to wall off a section of the workroom, creating a tiny mudroom with its own step-up porch. The mudroom was little more than a windowless cell with a bare lightbulb and a bench. Not only did the new addition keep excess snow and mud from being tromped in, it stopped precious heat from being sucked out whenever Tracker opened the door.
The front door, at the center of the cabin’s front wall and sheltered by a covered porch, was used only by visitors. The bedroom and bathroom were heated by freestanding electric heaters and the kitchen stove ran off propane. With the advent of the mudroom, those splits were stacked against the little porch and covered with a tarp to keep the wood dry. There wasn’t anything on the front porch now but a pair of rustic hand-hewn rocking chairs. As of last spring, the cabin had its own well and septic system. Fifty feet behind the cabin, there was yet another tarp covering firewood, and close to that a kiln, which looked all the world like a huge Hopi bread oven. Tracker used the kiln from the late spring until the first frost. Long winters were spent working the potter’s wheel or sculpting at the work counter.
Right after she finished her studies at the Minneapolis Art Institute her father began nagging her to come home. George Charboneau didn’t want his only daughter living in a big city all on her own. He’d stayed on the subject for weeks, calling her at all hours of the day and night. Still, for reasons of her own, Tracker hesitated. Then the matter was taken out of her hands when her landlord raised her rent out of her range. Still stubborn about returning to Red Cliff, she began looking for another apartment. The best places she could find at the price she could pay weren’t half as comfortable as the apartment she was being forced to leave, and the neighborhoods felt risky. The deciding factor came when she sat down with a pencil and paper and did the math. Any way she figured it, living back on the rez cut her expenses by more than half.
Financially defeated, Tracker went home.
The first few months of being home in Red Cliff were right up there with living in a fishbowl, she being the queen guppy. Too many people knew far too much about her life, which was discussed in full detail in the three gossip meccas: Buffalo Bay Store, Peterson’s Groceries, and (God save us) the Lanes. The last was so called because it had begun life as a bowling alley, then evolved into a bar/pool hall/ restaurant attached to the Isle Vista Casino. The evolution had everything to do with the fact that the waiabishkiwedjig (white tourists), eager to pour quarters into the casino slots, felt nonplussed about doing that when just next door—literally, as there is only a doorway between the casino and the Lanes—beer—drinking Shinabes could be seen walking around, every last man jack armed with a bowling ball. While such a scene was hardly Custer’s last view, nervousness being what it is and the lifeblood of the casino threatened, the Council voted and the Lanes was forever changed from a bowling alley into a bar/pool hall/restaurant.
What the Council could not do, nor indeed any power on earth, was do away with the infamous Mug Row, the stretch of bar under the overhang that sported privately owned beer mugs. Mug Row has always been, will always be, the official side of the bar for the commercial fishermen from around three P.M. until last call, making Mug Row the source for gossip and even for one or two insurrections. The last uprising, about a month prior to Tracker’s return, concerned a dummy Chippewa placed on a bench to advertise an antique shop in the suburb of Superior known as Alleouz.
Oooh, Mug Row really went into a flap over that one, the bar talk coming thick and hard, clearer heads coming up with the plan to picket the shop while carrying placards reading FREE THE FAUX SKIN. But by then Tracker had come home, and as watching her trying to ignore the fact that David Lameraux still lived and breathed was even more interesting, the dummy was forgotten.
While Tracker’s life may have kept Mug Row amused, for her it was becoming so intolerable that the cabin her father and brothers were building for her on her land assignment was nothing more than walls and plastic sheeting over the windows when she moved in bags and potter’s wheel. She hadn’t cared that she’d have to wait for electricity, a well, and a septic tank. All she cared about was that the cabin was hidden away from the public eye. Ah, baby, that was bliss. But bliss invariably dissipated whenever she had to venture back into the mainstream.
On days like today.
“Damn!” She slammed the coffee mug down, tepid coffee sloshing onto the counter. Tracker didn’t notice. She was too busy battling her fears of seeing David as she pulled a packing container out from beneath the workbench. Mushy, stretched snoozing on the floor, raised his shaggy head. The dog watched her with the same big brown eyes that had once gazed so forlornly from the halfstarved puppy sitting shivering by the side of the road. Tracker had stopped the truck, got out, and called the poor little thing to her. Hesitantly it came, sides all caved in from hunger, thick coat matted with mud and jumping with fleas. She took the puppy home, fed it, and bathed it. The puppy who had once fit neatly inside her hands had grown up to be as big as a deer. He was also one smart dog—clever enough to recognize a Town Day. He knew to submit to the occasion with a whipped-dog whine and a submissive thumping of meaty tail against the floor.
Looking back over her shoulder Tracker frowned in irritation, her brows forming a V at the bridge of her nose. For some unknown reason, something else to annoy the breath out of her, Mushy was in full wretch mode. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Mushy’s tail immediately stopped. As his mistress stomped away, crescent rings of white showed beneath the sad eyes that followed her. Oh, this was a Town Day, all right. And until Town Day was over, there was precious little Mushy could do but flatten out on the floor and hang on like a stubborn drunk.
The Chicken Coop, a neighborhood in Red Cliff, earned its nickname after every house in the subdivision was churned out as a two-story cube with a clerestory. The repeated design was the brainchild of an architect hired by the HUD housing people. The architect had been young and cursed with the taste of paste—and not the good kind kindergartners love to eat by the handful. In one of the houses on Bear Paw Lane, David Lameraux, half asleep, rolled toward the bedside table, his hand flailing about until it located the small alarm clock. A final slap put an end to the offensive buzzing. Prying one eye open, he read the time: 6 A.M.
David had been living in the house for two years. He’d gotten it back in the good ole days when he’d thought he was going to be married. The engagement ended the day his beloved had gotten all hot about something, and when he asked her what was wrong, she’d said the most loathsome thing a woman can ever say to a man: “You know exactly what you did!”
No, he didn’t. He hadn’t then (which is why he’d asked), and he certainly didn’t now. Unwrapping himself from the tangle of sheets and electric blanket, David Lameraux staggered out of the bedroom, which other than the b
ed was furnished with cardboard boxes and a sheet covering the window. He clumped down the bare wood stairs and through the living room, which was decorated in Early Male: a big-screen TV, the latest sound system, wall-to-wall beige carpeting with wide brown footpaths, a Salvation Army couch, three deck chairs, an unfinished-plank-and-cinder-block bookshelf crammed with paperbacks (Elmer Kelton westerns and Stephen King thrillers), and more sheets posing as curtains on the windows.
Taking the brown pathway that cut a left through an open portal, David arrived in the kitchen. Yawning, he turned on the overhead light only to quickly blink against the sudden brightness. The sky outside the window over the sink was still as black as midnight and the rain hopping against the windowpane sent a chill that raised goose bumps all over his lean body, all six foot two inches of it. In an effort to bring a little warmth into his immediate world, he turned on the electric oven, rolling the temperature setting to 500 degrees. Next, he poured gummy sludge out of the Mr. Coffee pot into the sink, and from the swing basket he threw away some nasty-looking old grounds. The subsequent task involved rinsing and filling the pot with tap water and putting a new paper filter in the basket. He was scooping Maxwell House French Roast into the newly prepared basket when he began to smell something funny.
Not funny ha-ha. Funny God-awful.
His eyes flashed wide as he remembered (too late) that he’d stashed an extra large pizza in the oven, what? Three, four days ago? He dropped the coffee scoop, dry grounds creating more chaos on the already cluttered counter, and dashed for the oven. Opening the oven door was a big mistake. Huge. The stink of baking cardboard and old pizza pervaded every corner of the small kitchen before he had time to slam the door again.
David was someone meant to be married because on his own, the boy was pitiful. His whole trouble was, the woman he wanted to be married to wouldn’t even speak to him except during the three times she’d had to work for him, helping locate idiot tourist deer hunters who’d gotten themselves lost. She’d had to talk to him then, oh yes indeedy, because he was the chief of the rez police. As a tracker paid by the Council, she’d had to take orders directly from him. David could be a malicious little sod when he wanted to be, and to get back at her for that “You know exactly what you did!” he’d been as insufferable as he could possibly be. But did any of this petty revenge heal his wounded pride?
Nope.
Two
Wednesday, May 5, 7:45 A.M.
Thelma Frenchette was distraught. Always the first to arrive at work, Thelma, a woman in her fifties, took mothering her coworkers very seriously. Especially the young women, who if they weren’t watched were likely to slack off. Young women today, eh? But just at the moment, thoughts of lackadaisical twenty-somethings had been zapped right out of her mind. In fact, lucid thoughts of any stripe were impossible. Because Thelma was in such a daze, her balance wasn’t what it should be, and she braced her hands against the corridor walls as she slowly made her way down the hallway bisecting the warren of offices.
“My God,” she breathed, repeating the words like a mantra as she moved unsteadily onward. “My God, my God, my God.” She finally arrived in the reception area, a triangular zone central to the building. Stumbling now because she no longer had walls for support, she barely made it to the desk, which was situated behind a glass barrier. She looked like a relieved rummy as she collapsed in the desk chair. She sat there for a full minute, glazed eyes staring beyond the portraits of past Tribal Chairmans displayed on the paneled wall facing the reception desk. For several minutes her mind refused to budge beyond the thought He can’t be dead.
But he was. No human being, not even Judah Boiseneau, could lose that much blood—and all over the brand-new carpeting!—and still be alive. The office coffeemaker, directly behind her on the shelf above the built-in filing cabinets, began to gurgle, the boiling water emptying from the maker’s cistern into the glass decanter. The hiss of the steam and the gurgle were ordinary noises that at any other time Thelma would have heard without noticing. In this situation the sounds were enough to send her jerking straight up in the swivel chair. After the violent start she knew she could no longer endure being all alone in the empty building with a tchibai, a dead person.
Thelma snatched up the receiver, then punched nine for an outside line. She watched her fingers dial the first phone number that came to mind. Thelma had been a widow for ten years, shunning any thoughts of ever remarrying—mainly because she reveled in being a Frenchette, a certified member of Red Cliff’s most predominant family. People in trouble always called family first, right? Yes, definitely. And as Thelma was definitely in trouble, she turned to the family member able to do her the most good.
The instant she heard his voice a smidgen of the fog inside her brain lifted. But not enough. Thelma Frenchette, big-deal career woman, was coming off like a nine-year-old whimpering to Daddy about bullies on the playground. Seconds later her brother-in-law shouted, “For God’s sake, Thelma, call the cops! I’ll be there as soon as I can get my damn pants on.”
Thelma pushed the button for another extension, cutting her brother-in-law off, and dialed nine yet again, then the number for the police. After four rings, Elliott Raven, the police dispatcher and lone body in the cop shop, picked up. Words tumbled out of Thelma.
“Elliott? Perry told me to call because, I, you know, get in first and I was doing, you know, what I always do, checking around, making sure everything was okay while I waited for the coffee. But I found …”
Thelma’s mind went blank. Her lips continued to move, and vaguely, she heard her own voice. She could only trust that the sounds she made were intelligible to Elliott’s attentive ear. Actually, the police station was only across the way. Instead of using the phone, all she really had to do was stick her head out the front door and yell. But yelling wasn’t professional. Her brother-in-law was a very professional person. He used to be in marketing for IBM. Now he was the Tribal Chairman. Thelma basked in Perry’s reflected glory and patterned her demeanor after his remote, businesslike manner.
“Thel?” Elliott Raven yelled in her ear.
Thelma snapped back into the moment. Realizing that she probably hadn’t spoken for a while, she opened her mouth, but more words refused to come.
“Thel?”
Thelma Frenchette began to sob.
After receiving the call, Elliott Raven, tall, lanky, and hovering somewhere in his sixties, found himself too busy to dwell on incidentals. The percolator stood idle as he radioed two patrol officers, managing to catch them just before they went for breakfast. Then he telephoned David’s house and got no answer. Elliott then tried raising David on the com line.
David wasn’t in the patrol car. As Elliott’s voice squeaked through the radio receiver, David was standing inside Buffalo Bay Store, Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, laughing and slapping with three morning regulars, all of them having a go at the store’s owner about the iffy condition of the Baked Fresh bear claws.
“Well, of course they was baked fresh,” Ned Girard was saying. “What the hell kind of fool bakes stale?”
“If youse boys don’t like my sign, youse can go screw yourselves.”
“Don’t go all cranky.” David laughed. “We’re not worried about how they were baked. We’d just like to know how long they’ve been sitting since then.”
“Well, that I forget,” the owner conceded. “Besides, I only make pastry signs. You want a goodies calendar, call Hugh Hefner. Now, you want a bear claw or not?”
“Yeah,” David said, rooting in his faded jeans pocket for additional change. Because he hadn’t been to the Laundromat in a week, he was reduced to his last cop shirt. The shirt was tucked into fairly clean jeans. Because he was wearing jeans, he of course had on cowboy boots. On his head was his favorite baseball cap, emblazoned with the insignia of the Duluth Superior Dukes. A hard-core fan of the minor league, David wore the cap with everything. Even the black suit he’d worn to his cousin’s funeral, at which h
e’d been a pallbearer. “Scrape off some of that fuzzy green stuff and give me one.”
“But, Davey,” Ned Girard joked, “the green fuzz is the best part.”
“You ought to know,” another regular hooted. “You’ve had two.”
David was feeling a bit better about the morning as he climbed into the car. That emotion bit the dust when he finally heard his dispatcher.
“David? You even got your radio on?”
Lifting the handset from the dashboard console, David keyed the mike. “I have now.”
“Where the hell are you? I’ve been callin’ an’ callin’.”
“Don’t nag, Elliott,” David said. As he waited to pull out of the parking lot, two school buses went by on Highway 13, followed by five cars heading for the town of Bayfield. “I stopped in at Buffalo for coffee and now I’m waiting out the rush-minute traffic.”
Elliott went a tad nuts.
David keyed the mike again. “Elliott, if this is official, take a deep breath and do the numbers.”
Able to pull out now and going in the opposite direction of the former traffic, he listened as Elliott loudly paged through the lists of codes. Even though Elliott Raven had been a dispatcher for over two years, he still couldn’t remember the call numbers. The dispatcher’s pluses were that he’d never called in sick, was willing to work overtime without pay, and was the only human able to manage the department’s old-fashioned percolator. David pressed his booted foot against the accelerator, and his patrol car picked up speed as it traveled along Blueberry Road. Elliott cursed as he fruitlessly searched the codebook. David knew then that even though the storm had lessened and the sun was poking holes in the lowering clouds, the warming spring day would not be properly appreciated. Something had his dispatcher all aflutter. And whatever was fluttering the normally laid-back Elliott had to be a pure-o-tee doozy.
Murder on the Red Cliff Rez Page 2
