Iron Lake co-1

by William Kent Krueger

  For a moment he couldn’t move. He felt paralyzed, unable to think as he stared down at the raw pieces of the judge’s brain, pink as chunks of fresh watermelon. Paul didn’t even move when he heard the sound at his back, the soft shutting of the door. Finally he managed to turn away from the dead man just in time to see the second thing that night his Scout training could never have prepared him for.

  2

  “Cork?” Molly said from the bed.

  He heard and he didn’t. Standing at the window with his hands poised at his zipper, Corcoran O’Connor watched drifts rise in the yard. His old red Bronco parked in the drive was already hub deep in powdery white. Farther down through the pines, the abandoned resort cabins by the lake were nearly invisible behind a gauzy curtain of blowing snow.

  “You’re not really thinking of going, are you, Cork?” Molly asked. “Not into that.”

  “What would folks say if I ended up snowbound here?”

  “The truth. That you were screwing Molly Nurmi, that shameless slut.”

  He turned to her, frowning. “Nobody calls you that.”

  “Not to my face, anyway.” She laughed when she saw his anger. “Oh, come on, Cork. I’ve lived with that most of my life. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Well, it bothers me.”

  “I’m glad it does.” She pushed the hair from her eyes, dark red hair damp with sweat. “Stay, Cork. I’ll fire up the sauna. We can get hot and wet, roll in the snow, come back to bed, and make love again. How does that sound?”

  He finished zipping his pants, buckled his belt, and came away from the window. He went to the bed and took his red corduroy shirt from the corner post where it had been hastily draped. Slipping it on over his long johns, he slowly worked the buttons through. He bent and tugged on his socks. The cold floor had nearly frozen his feet. “Hand me a cigarette, will you?”

  Molly took one from Cork’s pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, lit it, and handed it to him. “They’ll kill you.”

  “What won’t anymore?” He glanced around the room, looking for his boots.

  “You seem distracted today.”

  “Do I? Sorry.”

  “Feeling a little guilty?”

  “Always.”

  “There’s no need to,” she said.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not Catholic.”

  “Come on. Relax here beside me a minute while you finish your cigarette.” She patted the bed at her side.

  He looked out the window. “I should get going. It’ll be hard enough getting back into town as it is.”

  Molly drew the blanket and sheet around her and pushed herself up against the headboard. She pulled her knees up to her breasts and hugged them as if she were cold. “Why are you always so concerned with what people say about you, Cork? It’s not as if you’re still the golden boy.”

  “I don’t care what people say.” He knelt and fished around under the bed for his boots. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” He found them and sat on the bed.

  “Your wife?” she asked innocently.

  Cork exhaled and shot her a cold look through the cloud of smoke.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  Molly took the Lucky Strike from his fingers and tapped the ash into a little tray shaped like a pair of red lips on the nightstand. She left the cigarette there while Cork concentrated on lacing his boots. She reached out and let her hand drift down the knobby ridge of his backbone. “What is it that you think we do here, you and me? I’ll tell you what I think it is. This is grace, Cork. This is one of those things that God, when He created it, said, ‘That’s good.’ ”

  Cork kept lacing his boots as if he didn’t hear, or if he heard, as if it didn’t matter.

  “Can I tell you something, Sheriff?”

  “I’m not the sheriff anymore,” he reminded her.

  “Can I tell you something,” she went on, “without you getting cold and stomping out?”

  “Do I get cold and stomp out?”

  “You get quiet and make excuses to leave.”

  “I won’t get quiet,” he promised.

  “Cork, I think you miss your family.”

  “I see my family all the time.”

  “This is different. This is Christmas. I really think you miss them more than you want to admit.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, standing up.

  “See, I’ve made you mad. You’re leaving.”

  “I’m not mad. I just finished tying my boots. And you know I have to leave.”

  “Why? What difference would it make if you stayed and people found out about us? It’s not as if you’re being unfaithful to a loving wife.”

  “It’s a small town and I’m not divorced. People would kick us around in their talk like a couple of soccer balls. I don’t want my kids having to listen to that.”

  “Fine.” She slid down and pulled the covers tight around her. “Have it your way.”

  He picked up his cigarette, took a last drag, and ground out the ember on the red lips of the ashtray. He slipped the pack of Lucky Strikes into his shirt pocket. “Going to see me out?” he asked.

  “You know the way.”

  “Now who’s cold?”

  “Go screw yourself,” she said.

  “The world would be a dreary place, Molly, if that’s the way things worked.” He leaned down and gently kissed the top of her head.

  “Go on,” she said, pushing him away softly. But she smiled in spite of herself. “I’ll be right down.”

  He walked along the hallway of the old log house, over Molly’s braided rugs, creaked his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Molly had fed him. Some sort of light brown sprout bread and lentil soup. Yogurt and strawberries for dessert. She drank Evian springwater, but she’d given Cork a Grain Belt. A few swallows were left in the bottle and he drank that down. The beer was still cool but had gone flat. He lifted his parka from the peg beside the back door and put it on, then settled his black watch cap over his ears. As he worked his gloves onto his hands, he glanced at a small plaque that hung on the wall. It was homemade, woodburned by Molly’s father long ago. It contained an old Finnish saying her father had roughly translated into English:

  Cold, thou son of Wind,

  Do not freeze my fingernails,

  Do not freeze my hands.

  Freeze though the water willows.

  Go chill the birch chunks.

  Like most magic charms of the people of Molly’s heritage, it suggested to the evil of the world-from hiccups to death-that it visit instead other things, such as the loom or the needle or the thicket or, in a pinch, one of the neighbors. When Cork turned around, he found Molly watching him from the doorway. She’d thrown on a red chenille bathrobe and pulled bright red wool socks on over her feet.

  “Will I see you at the Pinewood Broiler?” she asked.

  “You won’t be plowed out in time to get into town tomorrow.”

  “I’ll probably ski in.”

  “Waitressing means that much?”

  “This time of year the company does.”

  Cork went back and kissed her. “If I don’t see you, I’ll call.”

  “I won’t hold my breath.”

  He pushed out the back door onto the utility porch, then out completely into the hard cold and the snow. He waded to the Bronco, cleared the tailpipe and the driver’s door, scraped the ice from the windshield, and got in. He cranked the engine. Wiping where his breath had fogged the wind-shield, he saw Molly standing at the kitchen window, her arms locked across her breasts. The light was on at her back and filtered through her hair making it like wisps of red smoke. She was a beautiful woman, large-boned and strong, ten years younger than Cork, though she’d taken such good care of herself-didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t eat red meat-that she looked even younger. Cork was a dozen pounds overweight, smoked far too much, and was beginning to go a little bald on the crown of his head. What she saw in him, he had no idea.

  Wome
n, he thought with a warm flare of gratitude. Go figure.

  He slipped the Bronco into four-wheel drive and began slowly to move through the first of the drifts toward the county road that would take him to the highway into town. As he headed off, he glanced back at the cabin window, prepared to wave, but Molly was no longer there.

  The state highway was no better than the county road through the woods from Molly’s. Except for the Bronco, not a thing moved in the white hillocks the wind had bulldozed across the asphalt. From the weather reports he’d heard, Cork was pretty sure it was like that from the Canadian border all the way across the Arrowhead of Minnesota into Wisconsin. He drove slowly, steadily, a little blindly. After twenty minutes, he came on a figure hunched in a red-plaid mackinaw and wading toward town. He slowed to a full stop, stepped out onto the running board and hollered, “Get in!”

  The figure, so bundled Cork couldn’t even see a face, slowly turned and came toward the Bronco. When they were both safely inside, Cork started once again for Aurora.

  “Hell of a day for a constitutional.” Cork peered into the slit between the wool muffler that came above the nose and the knitted cap that was pulled down to the eyebrows.

  The mittens were drawn off and Cork saw old veined hands stained with liver spots. The hands went to the muffler, whose ends were tucked securely inside the collar of the coat. As the muffler came loose, Cork recognized Henry Meloux, whom white people around Aurora sometimes called Mad Mel. Cork knew he was in fact one of the Midewiwin, an Anishinaabe medicine man, who lived by himself on a remote point around the northwest end of the lake. He must have been walking most of the day in the blizzard to have come so near town.

  “Shoot, Henry, what could be so important it would bring you out on a day like this?”

  Meloux stared beyond the wipers that shoved the snow into little heaps off to the sides of the wind-shield. “Snow, not snow, the day is the same to me.”

  “Noble philosophy, Henry, but one that could get you frozen to death.”

  “I seen more storms than you could imagine. And worse. I seen storms and other things.”

  Cork reached inside his parka for his pack of Lucky Strikes. “Cigarette, Henry?”

  The old man took one; so did Cork. But before Cork could light up the old man sniffed at the air inside the Bronco. He gave Cork a grin full of teeth remarkably good in a man so ancient. “You smell like the good, deep part of a woman.”

  “I think that wind’s frozen your nose, Henry,” Cork told him.

  “No.” The old man kept on grinning at him. “It’s a good day for a man to be inside.” Meloux laughed softly. “Understand?”

  The old man lit his cigarette with the lighter Cork offered and grew quiet again. They had come to the edge of Aurora. They passed the big new corrugated fence of Johannsen’s salvage yard, put up when the Chippewa Grand Casino was being built so that the gutted frames and rusting wreckage of the junkyard wouldn’t sully the image of the town. A little farther on was the Iron Lake Best Western, brand-new, with 150 rooms and an indoor swimming pool with a Jacuzzi and sauna. The big marquee out front welcomed gamblers and informed them that Lyle Porter was playing piano in the Kitchi-Gami Room eight to midnight. The parking lot was nearly full. Next to the Best Western stood a new Perkins restaurant and across the road a glittery twelve-pump Food-N-Fuel gas station.

  On the streets of Aurora not much moved except a few pickups with wide traction tires. The shops had closed early and most of the windows of the small downtown were dark. For the most part, it looked as if the town’s 3,752 citizens had simply crawled inside to wait out the storm.

  The old man had been quiet a long time, smoking the Lucky Strike reflectively. Finally Cork asked, “What brings you into town on a day like this, Henry?”

  The old man said, “I seen it.”

  “What?” Cork asked. “What did you see?”

  The old man looked straight ahead. “It jumped over my cabin two nights ago, headed northwest, going toward the storm before the storm come in. I seen the black where it ran through the sky and covered the stars.”

  “Seen what?” Cork asked again.

  “I heard it, too. Heard it calling names.”

  From the way Meloux’s voice dropped to nearly nothing, Cork figured that was bad. “Heard what calling names?”

  But the old man clammed up on the subject. “I can walk now,” he said.

  “You’re not thinking of going back to your place before the roads are cleared.”

  “I walked here a long time before there were roads.”

  “That was a couple of centuries ago, Henry.”

  The old man took one last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. “Thank you, Sheriff O’Connor.”

  “Christ, I’m not the sheriff anymore.”

  Meloux put on his mittens, opened his door, and stepped out. “The smell of you alone has been worth the time.” He grinned once again, then shut the door.

  Cork watched him tuck the ends of his muffler into his mackinaw and turn toward the lake, toward the glittery dome invisible behind the storm where everyone who came to Aurora these days was headed, where the bright neon of the huge new casino blazed night and day, and where, even in the worst of weather, the doors were always ready to swing wide in a warm, smoky welcome promising easy fortune.

  When Meloux was gone, vanished in the white, Cork smiled to himself and said the name of the thing the old man had dared not utter.

  “Windigo.”

  3

  Stu Grantham stood before a large framed photograph of Split Rock Lighthouse that hung on the wall of the law office of Nancy Jo O’Connor. He clasped his hands behind his back as he stared at the famous landmark on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He’d been that way for nearly a minute-thoughtful, silent, unmoving-and Jo simply let him be. She had him cornered. She knew it, and if he thought about it awhile, he’d know it, too, and they could get on with things.

  A tapping at the door and Fran, Jo’s secretary, peeked in. “Jo, I’m sorry. I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but the state patrol’s just closed Highway 1. I heard it on the radio.”

  Jo glanced out her window. The parking lot of the Aurora Professional Building was nearly empty. Her blue Toyota Cressida was covered with snow and hung with icicles and looked like some kind of Arctic beast hunkered down to wait out the storm. Beyond that the world was white and nothing moved in the sea of snow.

  “Thanks, Fran,” Jo said. “Why don’t you go on home before you get stuck here.”

  “What about you?” Fran asked. She glanced at Grantham, who seemed oblivious to the news she’d brought.

  “I’ll finish here with Stuart and be right behind you.”

  Fran stepped toward her and handed her several pages from a phone memo pad. “I held your calls as you asked. Here are the messages.”

  “Thanks. Drive carefully.”

  “You, too.”

  Jo scanned the phone messages. One from Frank Monroe at the department of natural resources. Call him about the Rust Creek variance for the casino. Two from Judge Robert Parrant. Simply call him. One from Dorothea Hayes about the easement for the new pulp mill. One from Sandy Parrant. No message.

  Stu Grantham walked silently to the small table where Jo kept a stainless steel coffee server and several mugs, poured himself some coffee, and sat down. Grantham was a realtor by profession and head of the county board of commissioners by choice of the electorate. In his late fifties, he was white-haired and still handsome. Talc softened his cheeks. He smelled of musk aftershave. Jo wondered if he’d shaved just before coming. Men sometimes did that for her, believing it might make a difference.

  Jo was a rigorously slender woman. She had hair so blonde it was almost white and eyes blue-white like glacial ice. She’d been separated from her husband, Cork, for several months. Some men, Grantham apparently among them, saw that as an opportunity.

  “What is it with you, Jo?” Grantham finally ask
ed. “Whenever I try to use your services, you’re always going on how you’re so busy you can’t hardly see straight. But here you are still taking on the cases of these-” He stopped himself abruptly.

  “These what, Stu?”

  “You know. These pro bono Indian cases. They’ve got the casino now. Let ‘em hire their own damn attorneys.”

  “The casino is owned by the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe. Louise Willette is Lakota. She gets nothing from the casino profits. She has to work hard for what the county pays her. What she doesn’t need is the constant harassment of her coworkers.”

  “For Christ sake, Jo, she’s the only woman on a road crew of men. What does she expect? These guys can’t watch every word that comes out of their mouths.”

  “When it applies to my client, or to women in general, they’d better.” Jo put down the phone messages and folded her hands patiently on her desktop. “Look, Stu, I could easily have started an action against the county. The evidence is overwhelming. But I brought it to you first because I’d like to save you and the rest of the board a lot of embarrassment. My client is willing to settle this quietly. Come election time next November, I’m sure you’ll be glad Louise and I didn’t splash this across the headlines of the Sentinel.”

  “Doing me a favor.” Grantham grinned, showing an incisor outlined in silver. He set his coffee mug on the desk and began to twirl a heavy, gold Aurora High class ring on his finger. Class of ’52 or ’53, Jo guessed. Aurora good ol’ boy. “Know what I’m thinking?” Grantham said. “I’m thinking Wanda Manydeeds put her up to this.”

  “Nobody put her up to anything. But, yes, it was Wanda who told Louise to see me. And why shouldn’t she? I’m the best attorney in Aurora.”

  “Ever since you and that Manydeeds got together, Tamarack County hasn’t been the same,” Grantham lamented.

  “And amen to that.”

  Jo kept her reply amiable. She’d handled Stu Grantham and others like him since she’d first hung her shingle in Aurora nearly a decade before. But it hadn’t been easy.