The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “Of course,” Archie said, “I remember Bill. It’s been a long time and Paul tells me you’ve made good use of the years—it’s good to see you again.” They shook hands.

  “It sure beats hell out of the last time I saw you,” Billy said. “I think I was riding my lawn mower.” There was a thick irony in his voice but no hostility. He had come on business and he brushed past us, went into the main room, where he hung his jacket across the back of a chair, and went to warm himself by the fire. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and old Levi’s. With his horn-rims and the gray-flecked hair he was a strikingly handsome man, a fact which had passed me by earlier.

  “This is going to take a little time, gentlemen,” he said abruptly, rubbing his hands together, “and I’ve got to get back to Jasper tonight. I don’t want to leave my daughter alone all night. I think you both better sit down … I’m going to need room to pace around. Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a couch and we sat down expectantly.

  “What has this got to do with the murders?” I asked.

  He looked at me impatiently. “This is bound to go a lot faster if you hold back on the questions, all right? It’s pretty damned self-explanatory but when I’m done, you can have me fill in the gaps …” I nodded and he began pacing, speaking as he went.

  “When you came up to Jasper with all that bullshit about wanting to write a newspaper story, I figured something funny was going on—didn’t require a genius. You dragged the Norway Creek connection in, my ex-wife, and then that business about Rita Hook’s disappearance, that got me pretty good and I wondered how much you really knew …

  “You know how it is when you’ve got a guilty secret you’re carrying around? You figure everybody’s watching you, everybody knows … well, that’s the way I’ve felt for the last couple years. I have had that kind of secret, a deathbed bequest. I’ve had to live with, not knowing what the hell to do about it. I knew something I had no business knowing but it had all happened so long ago I just sat there being mocked by it … no one would care about it anymore and a lot of people might be hurt very badly. Why not let the past stay dead, right? Well, that’s what I decided to do … but Kim was involved in it, in a horrible way, and that kept eating at me. I hold her in very high regard, she was the injured party in our marriage … anyway, I finally got in touch with her about six months after I came into possession of the true story, that’d be toward the end of 1972, the winter of ’72-’73.” He had come back to stand staring at us. Rain lashed at the windows and cold winds shuffled along the floor.

  “I had to tell Kim that Rita Hook wasn’t her aunt at all, but her mother. And her father was unknown.” He took a deep breath. “And I had to tell her that there was a very good chance that Larry Blankenship was her brother … that they had both been born to Rita Hook …” He waited for us to react I looked at Archie, holding my breath.

  “You mean to say,” Archie said slowly, “you told Kim all this in 1972? Almost two years ago?”

  “That’s right. I went to Minneapolis and told her.”

  “And how did she take it?”

  “She was shocked, of course, but she didn’t accept it completely. She said she would do some checking of her own. She was that way. She always figured she knew the better way to handle a thing … I’m not saying she was wrong, either.”

  I said, “How did you ever find this out? We already know it, we discovered it a few days ago … but we really had to dig it out. Did you?”

  “No. Running Buck told me just before he died. It was the summer of ’72 and he was hanging on by a thread and he had this story weighing very heavily on him. He didn’t want to die with it on his conscience and I was the only person he had to tell … that wasn’t all, not by a hell of a way. The part about Kim, that was just an angle, he didn’t give a damn about that really, one way or the other …” His eyes flickered in the firelight like doorways to centuries that were long out of reach. His mouth was set in a grim line. “No, he told me the whole story of what happened at the lodge on the night of December 16, 1944.”

  24

  THE WINTER OF 1944 HAD begun early in Grande Rouge and there had been almost a foot of snow on the ground by mid-December. The cold had come blowing off the lake and the nights froze deep and hard. Willie Running Buck was spending the evening working in Ted Hook’s outbuilding, tinkering over odd bits of carpentry and plumbing, a potbellied wood-burning stove sending out dry warmth with the wind fit to be tied outside, sleet rattling on the door. An old Motorola table-model radio was contributing Inner Sanctum. It was a good winter night.

  Then Rita Hook had come knocking with a burr under her saddle. She had to go out to the lodge. She wasn’t drunk but she’d been drinking; she was full of hundred-proof courage, as if she’d been getting herself ready for something. She wanted Willie to drive her in the pickup truck and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. He didn’t want to go; he’d miss his radio shows, for one thing, and the heater in the truck wasn’t worth a damn. But there was no point in arguing.

  The drive had taken almost an hour. The temperature was rising unexpectedly and the sleet got wetter and wetter, weighing down the wipers and piling up on the windows, causing him to stop several times and wipe it off with his gloved hand and the arm of his plaid mackinaw. Rita had been nervous, laughing without reason, smoking incessantly, filling the cab of the truck and making Willie cough. She talked constantly, thinking out loud, some of it making sense and some not.

  She’d been preoccupied with money, telling Willie that her ship had really come in this time, that everything was going to be all right after she got through the evening. She went on about what she was going to do, how she was going to get the hell out of Grande Rouge and, once the war was over, she was going to do some traveling. And buy some pretty clothes. See the world and have a good time. Her ship had really come in this time.

  Willie was only half listening, mostly because his attention was locked on the road, which seemed to slip and slide beneath the truck—but also because he was an Indian and he’d learned you could say or do anything in front of an Indian, they weren’t like real people. Not up in that neck of the woods. He nodded and grunted from time to time and Rita just rattled on, finally produced a bottle of bourbon from her bag and took a swig, smacking her lips. Willie remembered that, the smell of the bourbon mixing with the cigarette smoke. It was making him sick to his stomach and when he had to get out to take care of the mush on the windshield, he did so thankfully, gulping the cold, moist air.

  They finally turned off the highway and the tire chains rattled and dug into the snow and gravel. The sleet and rain hung like a wall before them and he edged the truck slowly into the narrow path among the trees. It wasn’t until then that Rita began talking directly to him and the slur dropped away from her words. It didn’t make much sense to him but she clutched his arm and forced him to pay attention.

  She said that she wasn’t there to check the pipes and the bottled gas, as she’d originally claimed. She was in fact going to the lodge to meet the members of the club; she rattled off the names, checking them off on her fingers. He knew some of the names; he knew the members of the club by sight but their names were of no account to him. They were white men, they were rich, they were from the Cities; beyond that there was nothing he needed to know about any of them. Rita didn’t go any further into why she was meeting them. Willie figured they were giving her money—why was none of his business. He didn’t care. White men had their ways and he didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

  He didn’t much care for his role in the evening’s activities, however. Her plan was for him to pull the truck up beside the lodge and move off into the thick shrubbery about fifty yards in front of and above the building, where he could see quite clearly but would be hidden from view. When the meeting ended and her visitors left, he would come down and drive her home. It was simple. She even had him walk around the clearing, feeling his way in the darkness—so that there would
be no telltale tracks across the rapidly disintegrating expanse of snow. He went because she told him to, because he worked for Ted Hook and she was Ted Hook’s wife, but he didn’t see the point of it, any of it.

  Rita went into the lodge and he saw lights go on. He brushed the snow from a rock and sat down, the earflaps of his cap pulled down, huddled behind the windbreak of fir and evergreen. Icicles dripped in the darkness and the wind howled in the trees upland. Sleet and rain blew across the clearing. He was cold. He missed his radio and the aromatic smell of the wood fire but he waited.

  After half an hour he heard the first car on the narrow road, saw the fingers of fight hooking around the corner as it slid slowly toward the lodge. Two over-coated men got out and hurried, dark shapes, hats pulled low against the night, hands in deep pockets, into the lodge. Smoke was curling up from the chimney, the wind taking it once it reached the proper height and whipping it angrily. Fifteen minutes later another large car, a LaSalle of some years, pulled up behind the other and two men slogged through the slush, up the stairs, and inside. Finally, not long afterward, the third car, with two men, arrived and emptied. Six men in all and Willie waited shivering, nose running, fingers numb.

  Shadows moved across the yellow windows but all he could hear was the wind. He was wet and cold and tired. Another hour must have passed; he had dozed off and on. What woke him was the slamming of the front door as it was thrown open and banged against the wall. A woman’s piercing shriek filled the clearing and yellow light cut across the porch. Rita was standing silhouetted in the doorway, feet apart, half turned toward the night. She had screamed at someone inside and Willie had no idea what was happening. He heard a deep, commanding voice shout not to let her get away …

  Suddenly she turned to face Willie as if she were searching for him and made a stumbling dash down the steps, fell into the snow as she reached the bottom. As she struggled to her feet, the men filled the doorway, a confusion of voices, like hounds in pursuit of a fox. On her feet she threaded her way between the cars, slipping and falling, reaching for a running board to pull herself back up. They came behind her, one man falling heavily on the stairs and swearing. They all moved slowly, hampered by the lack of footing.

  As she reached the clearing, only a dark form from where a frightened Willie crouched, she stopped as if she knew there was no place to hide. She turned back to face them. A man in a camel-hair coat broke away from the group and went to her, spun clumsily to face them, hands up, shouting something, waving at them, No, no, no … and the commanding voice yelled at the others to get out of the way, stepped forward, and with a terrible roar and flash, arm stretched to its full length, shot the man in the camel coat, who fell sideways to his knees, holding his head, then toppled over in the snow. By the time he was still Rita had turned and begun to run again. She got five sliding steps before the roar and flash exploded twice more, slamming her forward, face down into the snow.

  Willie said that when the noise died, there was a silence more complete than any he’d ever known. The men stood stock-still for an endless time as he watched, a fist across his mouth to keep him quiet. Finally, the rain pelting down on them, they moved closer to the man who’d done the shooting, then on toward the two bodies, bending down. The man in the camel-hair coat was turned over, limp, a mound of clothing in the dark. Rita Hook lay flat; they turned her over, knelt staring at her. Willie didn’t move. He didn’t want to die.

  In the end, after a certain amount of jabbering among themselves, they carted the two bodies around to the back of the lodge. The largest man carried the body of Rita Hook over his shoulder. Willie was drawn to the ghastly procession; he moved among the trees, keeping them in view as he skirted the ridge of firs, hidden. They trekked up the path toward the ice cave, the last man, the roly-poly one, who had fallen on the stairway, bearing a large packing case from the woodshed. He fell again and someone laughed harshly, the sound carrying over the wind and rain.

  Willie wasn’t more than a hundred feet above them, rain streaming down his face and soaking his coat, when they reached the entrance to the cave. By flashlight, their faces pale and dripping, they pried back the side of the large case, which screeched as the wires were bent, until it lay open, a huge, square coffin. Willie saw that it had once held a gas range.

  They were breathing hard. Willie recognized them but forgot to put names to them. One was the priest—he remembered him—the fat one who carried the case.

  They stood resting for a moment, lighting cigarettes, stepping under the cave’s overhang, out of Willie’s sight, leaving the two bodies and the crate out in the rain. They were talking but he couldn’t catch any words. The red tip of a cigarette arced through the rain and disappeared in the snow. They lifted the two bodies and put them in the case, awkwardly crammed together beyond pain or humiliation. Then they closed the lid and wired it shut. With much groaning and swearing, they pulled and pushed it into the cave. Ten minutes later they straggled back out and went quickly down the path to the lodge. “Damned good riddance,” one of them said, “both of them.” Other voices chimed in. It was agreed.

  Willie made his way back to his original outpost and sat back down on the stone, wondering at the behavior of these men. He wasn’t really saddened: Rita was no favorite of his, neither were the men. They were simply white, another race, strange and inexplicable in their ways. But, as he sat and waited for the men to leave, he knew he’d better keep his mouth shut or he’d be up on a murder charge. He thought about that for a time as the rain beat down steadily. The snow in the clearing was washing away, turning to mud.

  When they came out at last, there were hurried good-byes, engines turning over, headlamps snapping on, the large automobiles backing and turning, churning the clearing, splashing mud. Once they were gone, Willie ventured down and stood in the rain where Rita Hook had fallen.

  He drove slowly back to Grande Rouge. He went to Ted Hook’s place, told him that Rita had decided to stay the night, and bought a bottle of apple brandy. Ted groused that that was Rita all over and he hoped the children didn’t wake up too early, he was weak and needed his sleep.

  It was not his custom but Willie drank himself to sleep. The rain drummed overhead all night.

  The fire jumped and spit behind Billy and when he finished, there was a clap of thunder. A prolonged flash of lightning illuminated the clearing outside with an icy white glare. It was raining hard. We all looked, we all saw the spot where Carver Maxvill and Rita Hook had died, where the club had made sure they were dead. Billy turned and went to the window, where he stood with his hands jammed into his pockets. He scowled at us.

  “That’s the story Running Buck told me. Two days later he was dead and I was the only one who knew … well, what the hell was I going to do? It had been almost thirty years, the word of a dead Indian, and the investigation—Jesus, that was quite an investigation … but I suppose the rain had washed everything away and they weren’t looked for clues in a murder case—the investigation hadn’t turned up anything to make anybody suspicious.” He threw up his hands and came back toward us. “But it festered in my mind, two people had been shot down in cold blood and nobody had ever been charged with the crime … hell, nobody knew there’d even been a crime! That was one thing … and Willie had also told me about Kim and her brother—Rita got a little high one other time and confided that little bit of news to Willie … never told him who the father was. So that ate at me. For about six months. Then I figured I had to tell Kim …”

  I was wrapped in my usual confusion, which was deeper than usual. If Kim had known the story of her mother’s real identity, the incestuous nature of her marriage, then why had she gone through the Bernhardt routine when we told her our conclusions? The hysteria had been real enough. I had felt the impact of shock pass through me on its way from her. But why? To what end?

  “And you told your former wife of the double murder of her mother and Carver Maxvill? He’s obviously the other victim—no one else disappeared
that night. Kim knew the whole story?” Archie smoothed his way through the questions.

  “Everything. Why not? It was all so remote.”

  “How did she take it?” Archie asked again.

  “I couldn’t tell, I never could tell what was going on in her mind … She just listened to me, didn’t say much, took it all very quietly. She had her doubts, as I said … She made us a pot of coffee and we talked all afternoon and when I left, she gave me a kiss and that was that. I knew she was thinking it over but I had no idea what she thought.” He leaned against the mantel and watched the fire for a moment. “She’s a thinker. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d tried to verify the story some way. But I don’t know.”

  Why had she gone to the trouble of doing the number on us? Had it been our conclusion that Carver Maxvill had been her father? Then she’d have realized that both her father and mother were dead. Archie and I hadn’t known Carver was dead, nor Rita … that made a kind of sense.

  “Now I read about the members of the club getting killed,” Billy said, “and you come snooping around with questions about what happened at the lodge that night, like maybe Running Buck might have told me something … Well, hell, at first I figured you actually knew what had happened and were trying it on me to see if I knew. Then I decided I was being paranoid, that I had to take the chance and tell you.” He sighed. “That’s why I’ve got a gun in my pocket. If one of you is the killer and wants me out of the way, you’re bound for one hell of a problem …”

  Archie shook his head. “No, it’s not us. And it’s not the man we thought it was, either. That’s the peculiar part of it. We had the wrong man in mind … though I’m sure he was the father of Larry and Kim. That’s why he had to die, because he was Rita’s lover and tried to protect her from the others …”

  The weather was getting worse. It was past ten o’clock. The wind ripped a screen off one of the windows and branches scraped against the house. In the dim light it was easy to think these were ghosts among us.