Cork turned from the window and walked the length of the waiting room. Jenny and Anne had gone down to the cafeteria for some breakfast, and he was alone. There was a framed painting on one of the walls, a surreal watercolor of Duluth harbor, with the lift bridge represented by a swash of black.
“If your speculation about his motive is correct, that he wanted to take away what was of greatest value to his victims,” Cork said, thinking it through out loud, “then he needed to know his target. That’s why he spent time with the Carters. When he had what he wanted, an understanding that Evelyn was pretty much all that stood between her husband and the locked unit of a nursing home, he was done with the ruse. But he needed to be sure that he separated himself from any connection with the Carters and whatever action he eventually took. So he waited. He’s a man with a long prison history, a man used to patience. In the meantime, he found out all he could about Ray Jay and about me, and figured how to make us pay.”
Dross said, “When he discovers that he didn’t succeed in taking Stephen out of your life, he might try again, Cork. Or he might try something with Anne or Jenny or Waaboo.”
Cork stared at the black splash that represented the bridge. “Then we have to find him,” he said. “We have to find him now.”
* * *
Warden Gilman took his call right away. When Cork explained what he needed, she said she’d have it for him as soon as possible. The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department had kept her fully informed about Stephen’s situation, and she asked how it was going. He told her they were still operating.
His daughters returned. Breakfast seemed to have refreshed them. They told their father that he should eat, too, and if anything occurred, they’d let him know. He was hungry, and he was tired, and he took their advice.
He’d just stepped from the elevator on his way to the cafeteria when his cell phone rang. It was Gilman.
“Aside from his attorney, Frogg had only one visitor in all the time he was here,” Gilman told him. “His mother. She visited him two or three times a year. Her name is Alva Brickman.”
“You have her address?”
“Yes. And a telephone number. Do you have something to write with?”
* * *
Dr. Buckley walked into the waiting room a little before ten a.m. She looked weary but wore a smile. She told them that the surgery had gone well, that they’d removed the bullet and had repaired the damage done by it and the other round. Stephen had tolerated the procedure well. He was in post-op. When he came out from under the anesthesia, he would be taken to his room, and they could see him then.
“His legs?” Cork asked.
“We’ll have to wait until he’s fully conscious, then we’ll see,” Dr. Buckley said. “In cases of spinal shock, it can take several weeks for feeling to return to the affected extremities. In your son’s case, I think there’s every reason to be hopeful.”
Cork thanked her and, at that moment, thought she was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen.
It was another forty-five minutes before Stephen was taken to a private room and his family was allowed to be with him. He lay in the bed on his side, looking pale and still a little woozy. The braces that had held him rigid had been removed, and he watched his father and sisters as they came. He didn’t smile.
Anne and Jenny both kissed him, then Cork stepped up next to the bed. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “How’re you doing, guy?”
Stephen stared up at him. His eyes, the dark eyes of his Anishinaabe ancestors, held steady and were unreadable. “Tired,” he said. Then he said, “Legs. Still can’t feel them.”
“The doctor says it will take time for the feeling to come back into them. She says that’s normal.” Cork tried to sound confident and comforting, as much for himself as for Stephen.
Stephen thought about that, then gave the slightest of nods.
“I have to leave for a little while, guy. But your sisters will be here with you.”
“Meloux?” Stephen asked.
“I’ll send him in.”
Stephen’s eyes drifted closed and Cork thought he’d gone to sleep. He started to turn away. Then Stephen mumbled something Cork didn’t quite hear. He bent nearer and said, “What was that?”
Stephen whispered, and this time Cork heard. In the next moment, Stephen was asleep.
“What did he say?” Anne asked.
“Minobii-niibaa-anama’e-giizhigad,” Cork said.
“What does that mean?”
Cork understood the words, but had no idea what they meant coming from his son in that particular moment. He said, “Your brother just wished us a merry Christmas.”
CHAPTER 40
Alva Brickman lived in a small, run-down rambler that had, maybe twenty years earlier, been painted bright yellow. It was now the color of a faintly urine-stained sheet. There were no Christmas lights in the windows, and the sidewalk and narrow driveway hadn’t been shoveled for a couple of snowfalls at least. It sat back from the street behind two wild evergreens. The front steps were almost swallowed by a tangle of some type of ornamental shrubbery. As Cork sat looking at it from his Land Rover, it seemed to him the kind of place that on Halloween only the bravest kid would visit.
He’d driven an hour and a half from Duluth to the address in the small town of Aitkin, which Warden Gilman had given him over the phone earlier that day. He hadn’t called before he came, figuring if the woman was home, he didn’t want to tip his hand, and if she wasn’t, he’d wait. If her son had taken up residence there, Cork for sure didn’t want Frogg to know a visitor was about to come calling. He studied the house. The blinds were up and the curtains drawn back, maybe to open the rooms to whatever warmth the sun might deliver through the window glass. There was an attached garage, but the deep snow in the drive told him no one had moved a vehicle in or out for some time.
He left his Land Rover and walked in the impressions made in the deep snow by a set of boots that led directly to the mailbox beside the front door. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dereliction of a homeowner’s duty, Cork thought with admiration for mail carriers everywhere. He tried the bell; no one answered. He knocked. Same result. He stepped into a drift to the left of the door, waded to the front window, and peered through his reflection into the dark interior. A living room, done in either antiques or thrift store acquisitions. No sign of an occupant. He made his way to the garage and peeked through a dirty window. Inside sat a Ford Escort, mostly a dull red but with one white panel over the front wheel well. Lots of crap piled along the walls in what appeared to be no particular order.
Cork returned to the street, glanced at the neighboring home on the right, a place as different from the Brickman spook house as you could get. He spotted a woman standing at the front picture window, a cup in her hand, watching him. He crossed to her property, where the sidewalks were cleaned and salted. He headed toward the door, on which hung an evergreen Christmas wreath decorated with a bright red bow. The door opened even before he began to climb the steps.
“Looking for Alva?” the woman asked.
She had white hair, carefully coiffed, and Cork put her at maybe seventy. Her makeup had been tastefully applied. She wore a bright yellow sweater, which hung on her loosely because she was too slender, in what seemed an unhealthy way. There seemed an unnatural hollowness to her face as well. Some kind of illness, Cork figured.
“Yes,” he said. “Do you know when she may be home?”
“Some of us might hope never. But that would be too optimistic and terribly uncharitable. She owns the Second Look Thrift Shop, a block north of the stoplight. Christmastime, she stays open late.”