Lance shrugged. “Things are great,” he said.
It had been more than six months since he’d last spoken to his brother. The fact that Andy had dropped by now to find out how he was doing could mean only one thing. His younger brother always behaved in a concerned and brotherly fashion when he wanted something from Lance. It had always been that way. He wondered what it was this time, but at the moment the only thing he could think of was the image of the dead man. That naked male body with his skull bashed in. And the row of white teeth in the midst of all that red.
“A murder, huh?” said Andy.
Lance mumbled a reply. The two of them were standing next to the wall as conversations continued to swirl all around them.
“I heard about it on the radio on my way down from the cabin,” his brother went on. “They said the dead man was found by a forest cop, so I put two and two together. I’ve been out at the cabin since yesterday afternoon. Went out in the boat and fished until midnight. Nice and quiet, didn’t see a soul up there. It’s so unreal to think that a murder was committed near the lake. Do they know who did it, or anything?”
“How should I know?” replied Lance. “I’ve got nothing to do with the investigation.”
“No, I guess not,” said Andy. “So you’re okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.” He was beginning to feel stressed with his brother in the room. That gaunt, pinched face of his. The feeling that he wanted something. “Of course I am,” he repeated.
“Well, I’d better head home now,” said Andy. “I just wanted to check on how my brother was doing.”
He said this loud enough for everyone to hear.
As Andy turned to go, Richie Smith, who was in charge of road construction and maintenance, had a word with him about a logging job he’d recently contracted to do. Something about which roads he could use. Andy Hansen was one of the most frequently hired logging contractors in this part of the Superior National Forest.
As Andy was leaving, he ran into Sparky Redmeyer in the doorway. The two men nodded to each other. Then Redmeyer asked if he could speak to Lance.
He went out into the hall with Redmeyer. Andy had stopped halfway up the stairs. He smiled at them, giving no sign of continuing on his way.
“See you later, Andy,” said Redmeyer in a loud, rude voice. Andy reluctantly went up the stairs and disappeared.
“What is it?” asked Lance.
“A message from the FBI. They just arrived. They want to talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Where?”
“At Bluefin Bay. That’s where they’re staying during the investigation. I’m supposed to be their chauffeur and local guide. They want you to come by before eleven.”
4
THE HOUSE WAS ABOVE THE HIGHWAY, at the end of the road on a small hill. Lance stood at the living room window, looking out. Down the road was a big wooden building painted red. That was Isak Hansen’s hardware store, the only one between Two Harbors and Grand Marais. There you could buy everything from nuts and bolts to down jackets and work boots to refrigerators and slalom skis.
About a hundred yards below the road was the lake. It filled most of the view, but it was rare that Lance actually looked at it. The lake was just there, much like snow was there in the wintertime.
He’d already been standing at the window for quite a while. He’d seen his cousin, Rick Hansen, lock up the shop and drive off. Rick was the son of Eddy Hansen, who was the brother of Lance’s father, Oscar.
They were both dead now, Eddy and Oscar. The hardware dealer and the policeman, sons of the carpenter Isak Hansen, who had emigrated from Norway in 1929. By the time Isak retired in 1974, he had not only built a successful hardware business, he was also responsible for an impressive number of houses that were constructed in the area after his arrival. From Grand Marais in the north to Duluth in the south, there were many houses along the North Shore that Lance’s grandfather had built. Houses in which people continued to live out their lives. All sorts of people. Good and not so good. And some who were downright bad.
It was a splendid legacy to have left behind. There was something decent and respectable about it, Lance thought. Isak had built houses for people to live in, and a hardware store where they could buy nuts and bolts.
And here stood his grandson on a summer evening approximately eighty years after Isak came to America. A truly fine summer evening. The traffic was bumper to bumper down on Highway 61. Folks were on their way back south, headed for the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. He wondered how many of those people had heard about the murder by now. Personally he couldn’t bear to hear any more about it, so he’d switched off the radio and TV.
He still hadn’t started shaking.
That was something he’d noticed when he phoned the sheriff to ask for backup. I’m not shaking, he’d thought in surprise as he looked at his hands. All day long he’d prepared himself for the shaking to begin. Some sort of reaction had to set in, he’d thought.
Again he pictured the shattered skull and the row of gleaming white teeth.
Several times afterward, while he was in the parking lot along with the Cook County police, he’d had a strong urge to go back into the birch woods to have another look at the corpse. He’d been on the verge of asking Eggum for permission to do just that, but realized how odd the request would sound. He couldn’t exactly tell the sheriff that he felt as if the terrible sight in there belonged to him, Lance Hansen, and not to anyone else. Or that he had a certain proprietary right, which was diminished every time someone else looked at the dead man and wrote down something in a black notebook, or took photographs of the corpse.
He didn’t know why he was thinking like this. He stood at the window, waiting for his body to start shaking. It just didn’t seem right for him to go to bed, as if nothing had happened. To wake up in the morning and leave for work as usual, stopping by the Bluefin Bay Resort to answer a few questions. After that, would the whole thing be over?
He turned around. The living room was neat and tidy in an impersonal, almost sterile kind of way. There were no pillows or blankets on the dark leather sofa, nor on the recliner or the easy chair with the floral upholstery. The latest issue of TV Guide was the only thing on the coffee table. A few kids’ movies were stacked up on the floor next to the TV and DVD player. On the dining table stood a green plant that might easily be mistaken for real, and a plate holding two oranges and an apple.
A row of framed photographs hung on the light-colored paneling on the walls. One of them was a bigger version of the picture in his old Jeep. A dark-haired boy, maybe seven years old, with a big smile that showed he was missing his front teeth. In another photo Lance was seated on a snowmobile in a glittering winter landscape, and on his lap sat the same boy, although younger, maybe four. Both were bundled up like Arctic explorers, and they were smiling at the photographer. A third picture showed the little boy alone. He was proudly holding up a fish the size of a grown man’s index finger. His eyes glowed red from the flash. Only a few long, pale reeds stuck out of the darkness surrounding him.
Lance went out to the hall and paused for a moment under a photo of him and his brother kneeling on either side of a big buck lying dead in the marsh, with a river in the background. Each held a rifle in one hand and had wrapped the fingers of the other hand around one of the eight points of the antlers.
He went into his home office where the desk was covered with so much paperwork that not a single clear space was visible. Unlike the living room, here the walls held only one photograph. It was an old black-and-white picture of thirty or forty people, both adults and children, who had obviously posed for the photograph on the deck of a large ship. In the background on the right, smoke was pouring out of a big stack. In the lower right-hand corner someone had written in black ink: “Duluth, October 3, 1902.”
One wall of the room was covered from floor to ceiling with shelves holding b
inders, books, and file folders. This was the archive collection belonging to the Cook County Historical Society. Lance had been a member since he was a teenager, and he was still head of the organization. At least in name, although strictly speaking there was no longer any need for anyone to head the group. The only other active member was a teacher from Grand Marais High School who had moved to Minneapolis three years ago. There were still three or four people who paid the modest annual dues, but the last time Lance had called a meeting, no one showed up. Formally the Cook County Historical Society still existed, and it was listed in the phone book, with Lance Hansen’s phone number. Nowadays he had in his possession all of the society’s archival materials, which had largely been accumulated by Olga Soderberg, a teacher who had devoted her adult life to preserving the brief history of Cook County for posterity. She was the one who had founded the historical society. When she died in 1980, there was never any doubt as to who would take over. By then young Lance had already become Soderberg’s favorite.
Now he was a forty-six-year-old divorced cop.
And he needed to write a report about the murder. Previously, the most dramatic cases he’d ever been part of involved a couple of labs producing methamphetamine. That sort of thing could be dangerous, of course, but both times everything had gone just fine.
He started with the day before, when he’d received word that somebody had pitched a tent near Baraga’s Cross. He also wrote down a brief summary of what had prevented him from checking out the complaint at once. But soon his thoughts returned to the question that Mike Jones had asked in the parking lot. When was the last time a murder had been committed in Cook County? He thought about it but couldn’t come up with anything. Was it really possible that not a single murder had occurred here since 1874, when Cook County was established? At least he couldn’t recall having read or heard mention of any such thing. But what about before Cook County was established, when the area was still part of Lake County? Or even further back in time, before Minnesota became a state in 1858? Lance was aware that the wilderness the Scandinavians had encountered when they arrived here at the end of the nineteenth century had already been exploited commercially by white men for the previous two hundred years or so. But the heyday of the fur trade was long over by the time the first Norwegians and Swedes built their primitive log cabins in the area. Practically the only things remaining from the French voyageurs were the portages that led from one body of water to another, or to circumvent waterfalls and rapids, where they’d been forced to carry their canoes and cargoes of provisions and precious pelts. Murders must have occurred among such men. And among the Ojibwe Indians. But there were no written sources from so far back in time. Cook County got its first newspaper in 1891, and there were police reports and court documents back to 1881, but from earlier eras the sources were few and not at all reliable.
By now Lance had completely forgotten about writing his report. He got up and went over to the archives. Taking up one whole shelf were numerous binders containing printouts from microfilms of old newspapers. The collection included most issues of the Grand Marais Pioneer, which was published from 1891 until 1895, as well as every single issue of its successor, the Cook County Herald. Sometime between the world wars the name was changed to the Cook County News-Herald. It was still published every Friday, and Lance always read the paper with great interest. The archive also contained a large collection of police reports and court documents from the period 1881 to 1930, which Olga Soderberg had gone through and then copied when the police department cleared out its files before moving out of the old courthouse in Grand Marais in 1974.
There were also private diaries in the collection, including one belonging to Lance’s own family—the so-called French diary, or “Nanette’s diary.” It was from his mother’s side of the family. They had lived in the United States since 1888, when Lance’s great-grandfather, Knut Olson from Tofte on the island of Halsnøy, had come to the North Shore. That was where he settled, at the place that was today called Tofte. Back then the only inhabitants were the Ojibwe. He soon married a French Canadian woman, and they had nine children, one of whom would father Lance’s mother.
So it was Knut Olson’s French Canadian wife, Nanette, who had left the diary. Occasionally Lance would be overcome with emotion as he held the diary in his hands, even though he’d never read a word of it, for the simple reason that he didn’t know French. He couldn’t be certain, but he assumed that no one except his great-grandmother had ever read the diary. Presumably the Olsons had spoken some form of English to each other. It seemed unlikely that Knut Olson from Halsnøy in Norway would have spoken French. And maybe that had been an added incentive for Nanette to keep a diary, since she knew that no one could read what she wrote. Her mother tongue provided a sort of refuge for her, deep in the wilderness. Maybe that’s how it was, thought Lance.
But Nanette’s diary probably couldn’t answer his question about any past murders in Cook County. He knew that plenty of people had died sudden, brutal deaths up here. From mining accidents, gunshot wounds, drownings. But murder?
At the same time, almost as if it were happening in a different part of his brain, he was thinking that it wasn’t normal to be so obsessed with this particular subject. I should be focusing on the report, he thought sensibly. I should be helping the FBI solve the case as quickly as possible. Yet that didn’t stop him from searching the shelves.
Finally he pulled out two thick binders and dumped them onto the desk. One of them was labeled The Pioneer 1891–93, and the other The Pioneer 1894–95. The labels were written in Olga Soderberg’s old-fashioned schoolmarm script. The files inside the binders were photocopies from microfilm housed in the library of the University of Minnesota in Duluth.
Lance opened the first binder and began leafing through the pages.
As was the practice among small country newspapers of that era, most of the column space in the Grand Marais Pioneer was taken up with syndicated stories in the vein of “romantic serials,” as well as travel descriptions from exotic climes. But there were also notices announcing religious meetings, firefighting exercises for the volunteer fire brigade, meetings of the homemakers’ club, and the arrival and departure of the steamship Dixon.
He quickly paged through the material. Occasionally he would stop to read one of the few and always extremely brief news reports. For instance, on June 26, 1891: Mr. McNamara from South Dakota, who suffers from unusually bad hay fever, arrived in Grand Marais on board the “Dixon” this week to continue the tradition he established many years ago of spending a couple of months here during the summer.
The first inklings of today’s tourism, thought Lance.
Or on October 28 of the same year: We have acquired two new shops this week, as a result of the government’s annual payments to the Indians. The peddlers arrived in Grand Marais from Two Harbors on Tuesday evening with a large supply of dry goods, which they hope to get rid of at exorbitant prices.
At last, as he was making his way through the 1892 issues, Lance came upon something that caught his interest. Specifically from April 3. Under the headline “Where is Swamper?,” he read the following: Swamper Caribou, the well-known Indian from Grand Marais, has been missing for more than two weeks now. It was Swamper’s brother, Joe Caribou, who reported this during a visit to the Pioneer’s offices. All of the Ojibwe in the area are very upset by his disappearance, since Swamper Caribou is so highly regarded by the tribe, and it would surprise us to hear anyone disagree when we say that we white folks hold him in the same high regard. According to his brother, Swamper Caribou disappeared from his hunting cabin near the mouth of the Cross River at the time of the last full moon, meaning in the early morning hours of March 16. The Pioneer joins Joe Caribou in wishing fervently that his brother will soon reappear and prove to be in the same good health as always.
Lance had heard about Swamper Caribou, a medicine man who sometimes also helped the whites in Grand M
arais, since back then it could take days before a proper doctor was able to make the trip from Duluth. He knew the Ojibwe told many ghost stories about the medicine man’s spirit, which was apparently still roaming restlessly around the lake, because swamper Caribou had never been seen again. At least not in the flesh.
He could very well have been murdered, thought Lance. Although the Indian could just as easily have died as the result of some sort of accident. He could have drowned, with his body vanishing into the lake. Or he could have been accidentally shot. But in theory, at least, he could have been murdered.
Lance continued to go through the 1892 issues of the Grand Marais Pioneer, scanning more announcements about church services and firefighting exercises and the arrival and departure of the steamship Dixon. He nearly missed the brief notice from September 2.
Corpse discovered, it said, almost hidden at the bottom of the page. Last week a body was found in the lake, not far from the mouth of the Manitou River. Due to the sorry state of the remains, it was impossible to determine the man’s identity.
That was all.
Lance thought it was unbelievable that the missing swamper Caribou wasn’t mentioned, since it seemed entirely plausible that the body of the medicine man had now been found. How far was it from the mouth of the Cross River, where he disappeared, to the mouth of the Manitou River? Maybe ten miles. Couldn’t the current have carried a body that far in six months’ time? It seemed possible.
So why wasn’t swamper Caribou mentioned? It was difficult to answer that question, since the article provided very little information. Maybe it was the body of a white man, and the editor of the Grand Marais Pioneer, who wrote these news articles himself, had taken it for granted that his readers would know this. But it said that “the sorry state of the remains” made it impossible to identify the dead man. Presumably they could tell from the clothing that it was a man, but otherwise they were unable to say who he was. So why not come to the logical conclusion that it might be the body of the medicine man, since he hadn’t been found? In the article about Swamper, the editor had sounded as though he personally liked the missing Indian. Could the second article have been written by a different editor?
The Land of Dreams (Minnesota Trilogy) Page 3
