Tamarack County

  “The painkillers,” Stella explained. “She’ll be dead to the world for hours.”

  Stella wore a tight black sweater and tight indigo jeans. The whole evening, Cork had had trouble keeping his eyes off her, which made him uncomfortable on two counts. First of all, he didn’t think of himself as a guy who ogled women; and second, there was Rainy. He didn’t know what was going on with him, exactly, though loneliness was a part of it. Hormones, too, probably. And could it be, he wondered, that he was looking for a little salve to ease the sting of what felt to him like abandonment by Rainy?

  Stella wasn’t oblivious to his interest. Carrying the dinner plates to the kitchen, she smiled back when she caught him eyeing her.

  Cork did his best to keep things professional, and once Marlee was asleep, he turned the conversation to the issues at hand.

  “How has Ray Jay been since all that hullabaloo about the Cecil LaPointe case?” he asked.

  Stella shrugged. “The truth is I don’t see much of him. We didn’t grow up close. He keeps to himself. If he didn’t have Dexter, he . . .” She hesitated, decided not to complete that thought. “I guess the answer is that, as far as I could see, he was fine.”

  “No threats that you know of?”

  “If I knew about them, I would have told you by now.” She was about to sip from her coffee mug when she seemed to understand the thrust of his questioning. “You think someone killed Dexter because of what Ray Jay did twenty years ago?”

  “Everything happens for a reason. When it’s an extraordinary sort of happening, you’re willing to look at extraordinary reasons. The LaPointe case may be an old one, but two years ago it got a new twist. So it’s something to think about.”

  “Who’d even care?”

  “Cecil LaPointe, for one.”

  “But he says he did it. He killed that girl. And he says he’s okay with being in prison for it.”

  “What a man says isn’t always the truth. In my experience, it’s what he does that counts.”

  “You think he killed Dexter? Because of what Ray Jay did twenty years ago?”

  “It’s the only connection that I can see at the moment.”

  “But Cecil LaPointe is still in prison.”

  “So obviously it wasn’t him. If he’s behind it, he had some help.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you, something I learned today from Carson Manydeeds. He’s pretty sure he saw the guy who left Dexter’s head in Ray Jay’s apartment. He didn’t get a clear look at him but did see that he was driving a pickup.”

  Her eyes shot fire. “A green pickup?”

  “Carson couldn’t say. What I do know about LaPointe is that he’s got no family here. His mother was from White Earth and his father was a Cree from somewhere in Canada. Quebec, I think. He had dual citizenship, as I recall.”

  “Indians have trucks, and we’re less than a day’s drive from White Earth,” Stella pointed out.

  “Okay, it’s possible this guy is some relation. But I remember that during the entire trial, LaPointe never had any family in the courtroom. The man you saw at the casino bar, the one you think followed you to the rez, did he look like a Shinnob?”

  She shook her head. “But a lot of Shinnobs I know don’t look Indian at all.” She thought a moment. “Can you talk to Cecil LaPointe?”

  “I tried two years ago, when all hell was breaking loose over Ray Jay’s confession. He wouldn’t see me. Wouldn’t see anyone.”

  “But if he is responsible, why? Why would he say he’s guilty and then try to get back at Ray Jay?”

  “Do you think Ray Jay lied when he told his version of what happened that night?” Cork asked.

  “Well, no. But Ray Jay never said he saw who killed the girl, only that he suspected it was Harmon.”

  “Do you think your older brother was capable of murder?”

  Stella frowned, and a small dimple appeared between her brows as she considered the question. “I remember when Harmon was drinking he sometimes went into uncontrollable rages. And from what Ray Jay said, it sounds like there was plenty of drinking going on. And other things.”

  “Did you know Cecil LaPointe?”

  “No. But I have a feeling I know White Eagle.”

  She got up, went down the hallway, and came back with a book in her hand, which she laid on the table near Cork. The title was The Wisdom of White Eagle. Cork knew the book well. It had been written nearly a decade earlier by Cecil LaPointe, who claimed that he channeled a spirit named White Eagle. The book was an examination of the spiritual path as elucidated by that spirit. It had created a kind of sensation when it came out—a book about the freedom of the soul written by a man incarcerated, for all intents and purposes, for the rest of his life, and based on wisdom handed down from another plane of existence. White Eagle Societies had sprung up all over the country, cutting across cultural boundaries. They’d been especially popular among prison populations. The man Cork had known as Otter LaPointe had become a guru of sorts.

  “Have you read this?” Stella asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think the man who wrote this is a murderer?”

  “If you believe LaPointe, he didn’t write it. He simply transcribed it.”

  Stella rolled her eyes. “You sound like a lawyer.”

  “Life changes us,” Cork said. “LaPointe’s probably not the same man he was twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still capable of murder.”

  “And I thought I was cynical,” she said.

  “It’s not cynicism. It’s healthy skepticism.”

  “Whatever.” She slid the book away, so there was nothing between them, and she leaned toward him, leaned very near. “If what you’re thinking is true, there’s something I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why me and Marlee and Dexter? Why not just wait until Ray Jay gets out of jail and do something to him then?”

  It was a good question, one for which Cork didn’t have an answer, and he told her so. She looked scared, and he reached across the table, took her hands in his, and said, “It’s going to be all right, Stella. I promise I’ll make sure that you’re safe until this is all finished.”

  She gazed at his hands folded over hers, and when she looked up at him next, she’d changed, changed so subtly and in so many ways that Cork couldn’t have put a finger on any one specifically, but he felt the difference as surely as he might have sensed a shift in the air that told him new weather was about to appear on the horizon.

  “Do you trust intuitions?” she asked.

  “I don’t discount them,” he answered.

  “Good, because I have a feeling about something.”

  His mouth had gone a little dry. “What?”

  “That you didn’t come here just to protect Marlee and me.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No.” She looked deeply into his eyes, and her voice became velvet. “My intuition tells me that you came here looking for something.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Are you lonely sometimes, Cork?”

  “Sometimes. Isn’t everybody?” It was a coy response, because he knew what she meant, knew exactly. And so he said, “You think I’m looking for company on a cold, lonely night? You think that’s really why I came?”

  “I hope that’s part of it.”

  She was right. If he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t been thinking about Stella since that lost moment the night before, he’d be a liar. The truth was that he did feel alone and empty these days, and it seemed to him forever since anyone had made him feel wanted.

  Stella stood and came around the table and took his hands and drew him up from his chair. The look in her eyes, animal and knowing, made him ache in the deepest part of himself. “Come to my bedroom, Cork. You won’t feel lonely there, I promise.”

  He glanced toward the living room sofa. “What about Marlee?”

 
“Those painkillers put her out for hours.”

  The television was still on, showing a commercial that involved a woman working in her garden. The camera suddenly focused on her hands, and Cork had a fleeting image of Rainy Bisonette. Not all of Rainy, only her hands, callused and filled with the flowers and plants she used in making her medicines and teas.

  “Don’t worry about Rainy,” Stella said, as if she’d read his thought.

  He turned his face back to her. She put her palm, impossibly soft, against his cheek, and from the delicate skin of her wrist came the same scent he’d smelled the night before in that moment he’d been certain would never come again, the scent of some exotic flower he could almost name.

  “This isn’t about anything except tonight, I promise,” she whispered.

  She kissed him, and afterward, for a long time that night, in the delicious dark of her bedroom, he was lost.

  CHAPTER 26

  Stephen lay in bed, listening to the sounds the old house made as it settled around him into night. Nothing in the world was static. No matter how firm or rock-solid a thing seemed, it was always in motion, always changing, because that was the nature of creation. Nothing came from nothing. Everything came from something that had been before. At the heart of an acorn were the atoms of the tree from which it had dropped, and those same atoms had been in the soil of the earth before the oak had drawn them into itself, and before that they’d been in the water that had fallen from the sky, and long, long before that, they’d been a part of the beginning of the universe. The acorn, the oak tree, the sky, the earth, the stars, the universe, all woven into the same vast fabric of creation, all connected, all part of the Great Mystery.

  He knew this. So why did he feel so separate that night, so alien, so alone? He thought he understood the reason. He was still angry with Skye Edwards for intruding on Anne’s life, for tempting his sister from her destined path, one Anne hadn’t simply chosen but had been born to. Hadn’t she? Been born to it in the way his father had been born ogichidaa, destined to stand between his people and evil, and Jenny nakomis, full of a nurturing spirit, and he himself mide, meant to be a healer? Wasn’t the way they fit into the design of creation already decided before they were born, long before they were even conceived?

  He’d been staring up at the ceiling, at the pattern of shadows cast there by the streetlamp outside shining through his window, a spiderweb formed by the bare branches of the elm in the front yard. Now he closed his eyes. Maybe, he thought, no path was meant to be a simple one. Maybe that was part of the journey. Maybe you were meant to stumble, even to stray. Maybe there was something to be learned in being lost. If so, he hoped he was learning, because he sure felt lost.

  Sleep came to him finally, as it always did, and as sometimes happened, a vision came with it. Not a pleasant one.

  Stephen flew. He often flew in his dreams, usually with a measure of control. Those were wonderful dreams. This was different. He’d been picked up like fluff from a cottonwood and carried into the night sky, borne on the wind. Usually he gave himself over to flight in a dream, but this time he fought it, because he had a sense that where he was going was a fearful place. He struggled, battled against the current pushing him. Useless. And then he found himself caught in the branches of a tree, and he knew the tree. It was the elm in the front yard. And now the wind was trying to pull him away, but he held tightly to a limb. The wind grew stronger, and his fingers began to lose their grip. And that’s when he saw the figure under the elm, dark in the night, watching the house on Gooseberry Lane. He was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, a fear that made him go weak, and just before he let go of the limb, he saw the figure turn its face upward, and the eyes in that face were like coals of a fire, and Stephen felt their glare burn two painful holes in the skin of his chest. He lost his grip on the tree limb, lost his hold on the dream, and he came out of it with a cry and dripping with sweat.

  “Stephen?” It was Jenny, calling from his doorway. “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer immediately but spent a moment grounding himself in the reality of his bedroom.

  “Yeah,” he finally said. “Bad dream is all.”

  Jenny came and sat beside him. “A vision?” She was well acquainted with Stephen’s gift, and she asked this seriously.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Not a good one sounds like.”

  He slid himself up and put his back against the wall at the head of his bed. “A scary one.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “I want to think about it first.”

  Jenny wore a yellow sleep shirt. In the last year, she’d let her hair grow long, and it lay almost white over her shoulders, even in the dark of Stephen’s bedroom. As often happened when he was with Jenny these days, he was reminded of their mother.

  She said, “When you were a kid, you used to have horrible nightmares. You believed in monsters. I remember Dad used to come in here, and you’d both go hunting for them. Under the bed, in the closet.”

  “Never found any,” he said. “Not then.”

  “I hope you don’t ever.”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “All right. See you in the morning.”

  She walked out, and he was alone again.

  Waking up didn’t take away the fear, the urgency, or what Stephen felt was the reality of the dream. He threw back the covers, got out of bed, and went to his window. He looked at the front yard, at the big elm with its mass of bare limbs and its great sturdy trunk. But what he looked at particularly was the shadow the tree cast across the snow as a result of the streetlamp at the curb. It was in that shadow that he’d seen the figure with the ember eyes. He thought about the vision Meloux had related over the telephone the day before. Had they both seen the same majimanidoo, the same devil? He saw nothing now, and he saw no tracks in the snow that someone—human or otherwise—would have left had they been there. He also thought about what Jenny had said. That she hoped he didn’t meet any monsters, ever.

  Yet he had a sense that this was somehow the point of the dream, the vision. It had been eerily similar to the one Meloux described, and Stephen had a powerful feeling that a confrontation was looming. With whom or with what, he couldn’t get a handle on. At the moment, he was like the cottonwood fluff in the wind. He needed to bring the vision to him in a different way, bring it in a way in which he could participate actively. Despite his fear, he needed to face the devil. And he believed he knew exactly how to do that.

  CHAPTER 27

  The ring tone of his cell phone woke him. The room was dark, he was sleepy, and he fumbled for several moments before he finally had the device in his hands.

  “O’Con—,” he began but stopped because his voice was hoarse, both from just waking and from the dry air blown by the furnace of the Daychilds’ place. He cleared his throat. “O’Connor,” he said.

  “Cork, it’s Marsha Dross. Is it convenient for you to come to my office?”

  “When?”

  “Now, if possible.”

  He looked toward a window, saw no light at all in the sky outside.

  “It’s important,” Dross said.

  He wondered what time it was, but he’d put his watch in the pocket of his shirt, which he’d folded and laid on the floor at the foot of the sofa. He grabbed his shirt and began to dig.

  Dross said, “I think I might have a handle on Evelyn Carter. I think her disappearance might be connected with the death of Wakemup’s dog.”

  That brought him fully awake. He found his watch and saw that it was six-fifteen. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  In the night, Stella had wakened Marlee and guided her, barely conscious, to the girl’s bedroom. Then she’d given Cork a blanket and pillow, kissed him a long, final time, and he’d bedded down on the sofa, so that if Marlee woke and came looking, it wo
uld appear that he’d been there all night. He didn’t like this kind of deception, but he wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of Marlee knowing—even guessing at—what had occurred between her mother and him. At some point, he’d have to analyze all of this, figure where he stood, emotionally and morally. He didn’t think of himself as the kind of guy who went looking for a one-night stand. Especially if it involved the mother of the girlfriend of his son. Which was a thought that, just in itself, was hopelessly complicated.

  Stella must have heard his cell phone. When he stood up, he found her in the hallway, watching him, her hands in the pockets of her robe.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Not even breakfast first?”

  “It’s business.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.” Then she smiled, letting him know it was in jest. “Go.”

  “The call was from Marsha Dross. She thinks she’s onto something that might help explain what happened to Dexter.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll know after I’ve talked with her.”

  “You’ll let me know, too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Cork had worn his pants to bed, and his T-shirt. He finished dressing, gathered his loose things, and stuffed them into his gym bag. While he did this, Stella got his parka. They stood together at the front door. This near to her, he could smell that she’d just gargled and could see that she’d run a quick brush through her hair and had put on lipstick. Just for him? Cork felt awkward, unsure what the protocol of parting dictated.

  Stella seemed just as much at sea. She gave him his parka, then looked down at her hands, empty now, and said quietly, “About last night.”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t . . . I’m not usually . . . It’s just been a long time.”

  “That’s okay. It was a lovely night.”

  “Was it?” She lifted her eyes, dark and happy, to his. “For me, too.”

  “Thank you, Stella.” He leaned to her and gently kissed her lips.