“That’s one of the possibilities.”
“Who?”
“A question the autopsy could help answer.”
Cork watched the glowing ember descend, and he heard the tiny squeal of the tobacco as Fletcher Kane ground out the cigar in an ashtray. A moment later, a small lamp came on.
Kane sat in a rocker. Over the years, he’d grown to resemble his father, a man of elongated proportions and bug eyes. He put Cork in mind of a giant grasshopper.
“I want to be alone, O’Connor.” When Cork didn’t move, Kane said, “You can tell Glory I’m fine.”
Cork walked to his Bronco, but he didn’t get in. He stood watching Valhalla, worried that it might yet go up in flames. In a few minutes, however, he saw Kane at a window, a tall, bent figure, staring down at the lake. Kane’s mouth moved, speaking words Cork couldn’t hear. Below him, as if in reply, the lake ice moaned.
7
Corcoran O’Connor was three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Ojibwe. Except for a few years in college, and as a cop in Chicago after that, he’d lived his whole life in the town of his birth. He’d been raised Catholic, baptized at St. Agnes, received his first communion and was confirmed there. He’d served as an altar boy, sung in the choir, spent his share of time in the confessional. Being Catholic had been important to him once. For several years, however, he’d refused to set foot in church, and didn’t give a hoot about the commandment of keeping the Sabbath holy.
On that April Sunday afternoon, Cork stood at the frozen edge of Iron Lake with Sam’s Place at his back. The sun was high, its warmth soaking into the earth, melting the ice that still held the deeper soil prisoner. The air was laced with a fragrance that augured spring. He’d come with his tools and with half a mind to work on the old Quonset hut, but he knew he wouldn’t disturb the peace of that afternoon. Even though he was at odds with God, he couldn’t ignore the fact that on such a day there was a sacred feeling to everything.
Part of it was the place itself, that small parcel of land Sam Winter Moon had deeded to Cork. It was bounded on the north by the Bear Paw Brewery and on the south by a copse of poplars that held the ruins of an old foundry. West lay the tracks of Burlington Northern and beyond that the streets on the outskirts of Aurora. East, below the sun and beneath a thinning layer of ice, lay the deep, clear water of Iron Lake. There may have been places more beautiful, but none in Cork’s thinking that were more special. Whenever he stood on that little stretch of shoreline, he could feel Sam Winter Moon’s spirit there.
Sam had been his father’s good friend. When Liam O’Connor died, shot dead in the line of duty as Tamarack County sheriff, Sam Winter Moon had stepped in and guided fourteen-year-old Corcoran O’Connor into manhood. Sam had done it without fanfare, as if the fatherless were the natural concern of every man. Summers in high school, Cork had worked at Sam’s Place, learning his way around the grill, the state laws governing cleanliness, the rules of simple bookkeeping. Suffusing all their time together was the spirit of Sam Winter Moon’s own manhood, a quiet strength couched within a gentle humor that was decidedly Ojibwe in its sensibility. In those days, despite the death of his father, Cork still practiced his Catholicism. The murder of Sam Winter Moon, a brutal killing for which Cork blamed both himself and God, had been the first of a series of tragedies that had hardened Cork’s heart against the spirit of his baptism and the church of his confirmation.
Still, on such a day as this, standing at the edge of Iron Lake with the sweet, distant breath of spring breaking over his face, Cork couldn’t help but feel gratitude. He remembered the words his Grandmother Dilsey, a full-blood Ojibwe, had once taught him. Great Spirit! We honor you this day, and we thank you for life and for all things. Mother Earth! We honor you this day, and we thank you for life and for all things. You are our mother. You feed us, you clothe us, you shelter us, and you comfort us. For this we thank you and honor you.
It seemed to Cork to cover things as well as any prayer of thanksgiving he’d ever heard.
The sound of an approaching car brought him around. Jo’s Toyota mounted the grade over the railroad tracks and pulled into the gravel parking lot. Jo wasn’t alone. Dorothy Winter Moon was with her.
In appearance, Dot Winter Moon reminded Cork a good deal of her uncle Sam Winter Moon. She was tall, solid, her hair black, but with a bit of red in it that came out in the proper light, like a second personality. She wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt with the sleeves cut away, and her arms were muscular.
When she was sixteen, Dot had left the Iron Lake Reservation and headed south to the Twin Cities. She came back four years later with a boy child, her maiden name, and no inclination to explain herself. She’d done her best raising her son, Solemn, but the early years had been tough going. She wasn’t very successful at holding on to a job, mainly because she was hardheaded, not particularly customer oriented, and didn’t believe in apologies. She didn’t ask for them, didn’t give them. She was scrupulously honest and forthright, however, and she expected the same of others. She finally found her niche working on a road crew for the county. The men on the crew gave her a hard time at first, a woman on male turf, but Dot gave as good as she got, and then some, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the boys. Eventually, she ended up driving an International dump truck spring through fall with a plow on the front in winter. She wasn’t a striking woman, but there were probably men who found her attractive, in a hard sort of way. She had a wide, sun-darkened face, a strong slender body, eyes that over the years had taken on a perpetual squint from working outside.
Cork put down his saw and smiled at the women. “Hey there, Dot. Been a while.”
“Cork.” Dot reached out and shook his hand so hard the bones grated.
“What’s up?”
“Cops been at my place,” Dot answered. “Looking for Solemn. Sons of bitches wouldn’t say why.”
“Was Solemn there?”
“Haven’t seen him for a couple of days. I told them that.”
“Has he been in any trouble lately?”
“Not that I know of.”
“They have a warrant?”
“No.”
“How many of them?”
“Three.”
Jo said, “My first thought was that since they’ve found Charlotte’s body, they’re just interviewing everyone who was at the party the night she disappeared.”
“Maybe,” Cork said. But he thought, not three of them.
“It would be good to know for sure,” Jo said.
“Did you call Arne?”
She nodded. “I tried. He wasn’t available. No one at the Department was able to offer me an explanation.”
“You’re sure you don’t have any idea what this might be about, Dot?”
For all her strength, Dorothy Winter Moon looked suddenly vulnerable.
If it hadn’t been for Sam Winter Moon, young Solemn would often have been left to fend for himself while his mother worked to make a living. Summers, Solemn hung out at Sam’s Place helping with the things that were within a small boy’s capability. He cleaned the grounds, swept the Quonset hut, Windexed the windows. When he wasn’t helping, he was fishing from the dock on Sam’s property or swimming in the lake. Whenever Cork stopped by to pass the time with his old friend Sam, Solemn was there, a thin boy, good-looking, who didn’t smile much but who loved to tell knock-knock jokes that Sam never failed to appreciate.
Still, there was a dark side to Solemn, even then. Sam knew it. There was something that came into the boy and filled him with anger, a hot, bubbling churn that put fire in his eyes and gave his movements a fast, jerky quality like bursts of flame. Eventually, Sam could tell when his great-nephew was ready to erupt. On those days, he sent young Solemn onto the lake in a rowboat to fish alone, and told him not to come back until he had a full stringer of sunnies. The solitude, the warm sun, maybe just the passage of time itself usually opened young Solemn up and let loose whatever it was that had entered him. By the time he came back and tied up at the dock, the dark look was gone, and the boy who loved Sam and loved knock-knock jokes was fully returned.