“Damn, that would be nice,” Dot said.
Rose glanced at Jo, saw the look of concern on her face, and suggested, “Why don’t you come into the kitchen with me, Dot. I could use the company.”
After the two women had left the room, Jo turned to Cork.
“Do you really think he’s at Meloux’s?”
“I hope so, but there’s one place I’m going to check first.”
“You think he’s gone to see Kane?”
“I do.”
“You’ll be careful?”
“Of course.”
Along the two blocks of the central business district everything except the Pinewood Broiler and the Perkins had closed for the night. There were still vehicles on the streets, kids on summer break with nothing better to do, tourists looking for a nightlife that didn’t exist in Aurora.
He turned onto North Point Road and drove past the Soderberg house, which appeared deserted. The moon was just rising, a yellow blister festering on the dark horizon.
No lights were on at the old Parrant estate either. He hoped that meant Fletcher Kane had gone to bed. When he was near enough to see things more clearly, however, his uneasiness crystallized into fear. Solemn’s black Ranger pickup sat in the circular drive.
Cork parked behind the Ranger and got out. In the light that leaked from the blistered moon, he saw that the truck was empty. A night wind came off the lake, rustling the tall bushes next to the house, scraping branches restlessly across the stone of the wall. Cork climbed the front steps onto the porch. He peered through a window where the curtains hadn’t been drawn completely, but he could see nothing inside. He knocked at the door. The only answer was the creak of a loose porch board as he stepped back to wait. He tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He opened it.
The smell of pot roast greeted him, a pleasant aroma that seemed out of place in that unwelcoming house.
“Fletcher!” he called. “Solemn!”
He took a hesitant step inside. For Cork, the move had the dreadful feel of inevitability, for he recalled far too well the night only three years earlier when he’d entered the Parrant estate in just this way, only to find that a shotgun blast had scattered most of the judge’s head across a wall. He waited for his eyes to adjust completely to the dark inside the house, then he walked ahead to the switch he knew was in the entryway. The lights came on, revealing nothing extraordinary. The living room was empty. In the dining room, the table was set for dinner, a big pot roast center stage. There was one dinner plate on the table, dirty. An opened bottle of red wine stood beside a stemmed glass that was half full. Cork went to the stairs and called up toward the second floor, “Fletcher! Solemn!”
He turned at last down the long hallway that led to the study, where the sight of violent death and the smell of spilled blood had awaited him before. His steps seemed loud in the silence of that house. He reached the study door, which was closed. He knocked, waited, then pushed the door open. Although the room beyond was dark, the trapped, foul smell told him everything. The stink of gunpowder, the stench of blood.
When he turned on the light, his worst fear became reality. The wall behind the big desk was stained with splattered blood and fragments of tissue and bone, still glistening. On the floor below, lay Fletcher Kane, all but his long, insectlike legs hidden by the bulk of the desk. His legs and the ugly blue barrel of a shotgun.
Sprawled on his stomach next to an overturned chair, dead center in the room lay Solemn, an island in a lake of his own blood.
Cork’s knees threatened to buckle and he steadied himself against the doorjamb.
He staggered forward, knowing that everything was useless, that with all his blood spilled onto the hardwood floor, Solemn was already dead. But it was what you did, what you were trained to do. He dialed 911, then knelt beside Solemn and numbly reached to check for a pulse.
The moment Cork’s fingers touched him, Solemn gave a small groan.
“Oh, Christ,” Cork said. He went down on his knees, knelt in the blood. Carefully, he rolled Solemn over. The shotgun blast had obliterated his T-shirt and made a pulpy mess of everything under it. Solemn opened his eyes, only the width of a whisker, but enough that Cork knew he was conscious.
“Cold,” Solemn said.
“Here.” Cork sat down, took him in his arms, and cradled him. “The paramedics are on the way. Hold on. Just hold on, son.”
Solemn looked up at him and tried to speak.
“Don’t talk.” Cork held him tenderly and whispered, “Please, God. Don’t let him die.”
Where Solemn found the strength, Cork didn’t know. The young man’s hand slowly rose, touched Cork’s chest over his heart, held there a moment, then dropped to the floor where it hit with a hollow sound.
Solemn Winter Moon was gone.
“Oh, Solemn, Solemn,” Cork said. He laid his cheek against the young man’s blood-matted hair, and before he knew it, he was weeping deeply, grieving as he would have for a son.
42
CORK SAT ON THE FRONT STEPS, in the glaring wash of colors from the cruisers’ blinking lights, drinking coffee Cy Borkmann had poured from the Thermos he always kept in his cruiser. The steps were broad, and the crime scene team had no trouble moving past him, in and out of the house. He was grateful for the coffee. The bitter taste of it was something familiar, grounding. Even so, he felt as if he’d taken a long fall and had left an important part of himself behind.
With Solemn dying in his arms, he’d said a desperate prayer, but it had done no good. Maybe if he’d believed, if he’d been sure of God the way Solemn had, it would have made all the difference.
It was ridiculous thinking, he knew. The kind of thinking that sprang from guilt and grief. From believing that he hadn’t done enough to protect Solemn. From realizing too late how much he’d cared. He drank his coffee, and he remembered the small boy with fierce, dark eyes who’d loved fishing and Sam Winter Moon’s jokes. He wanted to block from his memory the feel of Solemn limp in his arms, the sight of his chest shredded by buckshot, the helplessness that had led to a prayer unanswered.
Gooding came out and Borkmann followed him.
“Finished?” Cork asked.
“We’re just about to bag the bodies.” Borkmann heaved a sigh that sounded like the wheeze of a tired draft horse. “You take a good look at things before you called us?”
“Good enough, I guess.”
“Notice the top of Kane’s desk?”
“I didn’t look that good, Cy.”
“Nice cherry wood, but scratched up pretty bad. New scratches. Gooding, here, thinks they’re from the recoil of the shotgun. I think he’s right. I think Kane laid the barrel across the desk and pointed it directly at Winter Moon where he sat. The kid had to know what was coming. I don’t see any way Kane could have sprung the shotgun on him sudden, a piece that big.” He held off for a moment, as if waiting for Gooding or Cork to offer another theory. When they didn’t he said, “Murder-suicide is what I’d say.”
A cruiser door slammed, and Pender came up the walk.
“Dross just radioed. She finished interviewing Olga Swenson.”
Borkmann glanced at Deputy Gooding and nodded approval. Immediately after they’d arrived at the house, Gooding had recommended to the acting sheriff that, despite the late hour, he dispatch someone immediately to talk to Kane’s housekeeper.
Pender looked at his notes. “According to Ms. Swenson, she had dinner on the table at eight o’clock, which was a little later than usual, but she said Kane’d been keeping odd hours. After the food was out, she left. Didn’t stick around for any compliments on her cooking. I guess the drill was that Dr. Kane bused his own dishes. As far as she knows, Kane was alone in the house. She also said that he still insisted on her fixing a big family meal even though he wasn’t eating much these days. Getting pretty lax in all his personal habits, too. Sounds like he was definitely on the edge. Dross’ll give you a full report back at the office.”
“Eight o’c
lock,” Borkmann said. “And what time did you get here, Cork?”
“Ten-forty-five.”
“All right.” Borkmann tipped back the brim of his hat. “Looks like, Dr. Kane made a pretty good dent in that pot roast on the dining room table. And that bottle of wine is better than half empty, so he took some time to mellow out good. Let’s assume he started eating right after the housekeeper left, and took his time stuffing his face. Maybe half an hour. Now from what you say, Cork, Winter Moon left his mother’s place around twenty hundred hours. If he came straight here, he’d have arrived at about twenty-thirty hours, just about the time Kane was finishing his meal, sipping on that last glass of wine. Winter Moon comes in. They palaver, end up in the study with the shotgun between them. I’m guessing time of death is going to be around twenty-one hundred hours. It’s a miracle he was still alive when you got here, Cork.”
Gooding had been conspicuously quiet. He leaned against one of the big stone pillars of the porch and stared down at his feet. Every once in a while, he shook his head, as if he were having a conversation with himself.
“Dot Winter Moon still at your house, Cork?” Borkmann asked.
“Probably. She thinks I went out to Henry Meloux’s place. She’s waiting for me to come back with word about Solemn.”
Borkmann looked like he had bad indigestion. “Guess I better head on over and break the news.”
“I’ll do it, Cy.”
“Part of the job, whether I like it or not.”
“I think it’ll be easier coming from me.”
Gooding said, “It wouldn’t be good for her to see you like that, all covered in blood.”
“I’ll stop by Sam’s Place and clean up. I keep a change of clothing there.”
Borkmann said, “All right. But come on down to the office afterward. We’ll get a formal statement from you there, okay?”
“Fine.”
Borkmann went back into the house. Gooding stayed a minute longer.
“Dorothy Winter Moon called the office this evening,” he said. “I took the call. I went out to Sam Winter Moon’s old cabin first. I should have come here, Cork. I might have stopped this.”
“You didn’t know, Randy.”
Gooding looked down at a Bible in his hand. “This was in the living room. It’s the one Winter Moon had with him in jail. I thought maybe his mother might want it.” He gave it to Cork. “We don’t see any way that it’s relevant to the investigation.”
Gooding turned away and returned to his duties inside the house.
Cork stared at the book. A small, New American Bible, white cover. A simple thing, really, but weighty enough in Solemn’s thinking that he’d brought it to the scene of his death.
Why had Solemn come here? Did he hope he could ease Kane’s suffering, take away his hate? Did he really believe that he could offer the peace he himself had found in Blood Hollow? If so, Cork wished he could think of it as something courageous, but in his grief, he could only think how tragic and useless a gesture it had been.
He lifted himself from the steps and started toward home, carrying the burden of the news that would destroy Dorothy Winter Moon’s world.
43
SOLEMN’S WAKE LASTED TWO DAYS. It was held on the rez, in the community center in Alouette, with friends and relatives of Dorothy Winter Moon taking turns sitting with the body. The evening Cork paid his respects, he ran into George LeDuc, Eddie Kingbird, and old Waldo Pike standing outside the building, smoking.
“Boozhoo,” LeDuc said in greeting.
“Boozhoo,” Cork said to them all.
“Look at that.” Kingbird grinned. “Just in time for the food.”
Pike said, “Stick around awhile, Cork. Rhonda Fox is gonna sing. She don’t sing good, but she knows the old songs. Not many left who do.”
Waldo Pike had white hair, plenty of it. He stood with a slight stoop, not from infirmity, but from back muscles overdeveloped across a lifetime of wielding an ax and a chain saw, cutting timber for a living.
Cork said, “I’ll stick around.”
“Your grandmother used to sing,” Pike said.
“Yes.”
“I heard her once when I was a young man. It was when Virgil Lafleur passed on. Singers came from all over. A lot of people looked up to Virgil, came to pay their respects. Some all the way from Turtle Mountain. Your grandmother’s singing, that was something.”
Waldo Pike fell silent and smoked awhile. Cork waited respectfully. Pike was an elder who talked on Indian time, comfortable with long silences, and Cork didn’t want to show disrespect by leaving before he’d finished saying all he had to say.
“I’m hungry,” the old man finally said. “How about we eat?”
Inside, the largest of the meeting rooms had been set up for the visitation. The casket was situated in front of a window with a view of the playground behind the community center. Flowers and cards had been laid out on tables on either side. Folding chairs stood in a half dozen rows before the casket. Along the sides of the room, small tables had been arranged, with a few chairs at each so that visitors could sit and eat. The food, a potluck affair, had been placed on several long tables at the back. Among the other aromas Cork’s nose picked up were the good smells of fry bread, wild rice stew, and Tater Tot hot dish.
A couple of dozen people were in the room, some just getting into the food line, others sitting in the folding chairs, listening to Chet Gabriel, who stood at a microphone to the right of the casket. Gabriel was a poet of sorts, and he was reciting from a sheet of notebook paper he held in his hand. Cork knew most of those present, most of them Iron Lake band.
Dorothy Winter Moon was at one of the side tables. She wore a dress, plain blue. Cork couldn’t ever recall seeing her in anything so feminine. When she was alone for a moment, he walked to her.
“Evening, Dot.”
“Hi, Cork. Thanks for coming.” Despite the dress and the circumstances, she seemed strong as ever.
“Jo will be here in a bit. She had a late meeting with a client.” He glanced around. “Lot of folks.”
“It’s nice,” she said. “Thanks, Cork.”
“What for?”
“Doing all you did. Solemn thought a lot of you.”
“I wish I could have done more.”
“You couldn’t have saved him, if that’s what you mean. He knew what he was doing. He had his reasons.”
Cork was sure it helped her to think so, and so he said nothing. Others came to the table to speak with Dot, and Cork left her to them.
When the poet finished to polite applause, Cork went to the casket, which was open. Solemn lay on a bed of white satin, dressed in the kind of dark suit Cork had never seen him wear, his arms uncomfortably stiff at his sides. A new shirt and tie covered his chest, but Cork knew the violation hidden beneath the thin cotton fabric. Solemn’s face was a work of cosmetic art, given color with rouge and powder, like a wax figure in a museum. Whatever Solemn Winter Moon had actually been, reluctant saint or madman, this dressed and painted body was a million miles removed from that. Henry Meloux would have said that Solemn was already far along in his journey on the Path of Souls. Mal Thorne probably believed that Solemn had taken his place in purgatory, awaiting the day his sins would be purged and he could enter heaven. Cork had no idea where the spirit of Solemn now resided.
“I used to think he was a shame to the Ojibwe.”
Cork half-turned. Oliver Bledsoe stood beside him, staring down into the casket.
“Now?” Cork asked.
“Now I think The People will remember him with great respect.” He turned from the body. “Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Outside.”
On one of the tables that flanked the casket was a small dish full of cigarettes, and beside the dish sat a box of wooden kitchen matches. Cork took a cigarette and a match. Bledsoe did the same. Outside, they lit up. Cork had quit smoking a couple of years earlier. The cigarettes were part of the An
ishinaabe reverence toward tobacco, biindaakoojige, and the old belief that the smoke carried prayers to the creator, Kitchimanidoo.
Bledsoe said, “I heard the sheriff’s department is dropping the investigation of Charlotte Kane’s murder. I heard that unofficially they’re still pinning it on Solemn.”
“Yeah.”
“You think that’s what happened? Solemn did it?”
“No,” Cork said.
“Leaving it that way, it’s not good,” Bledsoe said. “Indian kid kills a white girl. You know how often that’ll be thrown at us around here?”
“I know.”
Bledsoe smoked for a while. People kept arriving, nodding or waving as they went inside.
Bledsoe said, “I talked with the tribal council. They want to hire you to clear Solemn’s name.”
Cork watched the cigarette smoke drift upward toward a clear, cornflower sky.
“All right,” he said.
“Good.”
“I was going to do it anyway, you know.”
Bledsoe laughed quietly. “That’s what George LeDuc said.”
“That’s why he’s chairman of the tribal council.”
Inside the building, a woman began to sing. The notes weren’t pure, but the words were Ojibwe.
“Rhonda Fox,” Cork said.
“Going back inside?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
The day Solemn Winter Moon was buried, a sun dog appeared in the sky. Not many people had ever witnessed this phenomenon, a rare occurrence in which sunlight, refracted off ice crystals in the atmosphere, created the illusion of a second sun. Cork had seen it only once, and then in winter, and had no idea why it was called a sun dog. He and Jo and the others who’d gathered for the burial stood at the graveside in the cemetery behind the old mission building deep in the reservation, staring east, marveling at the two suns in the morning heaven. The sun dog stayed until the casket was lowered, and the dark mouth that was the open grave had swallowed the body of Solemn Winter Moon. Then, as those who’d gathered to pay their final respects silently scattered, the false sun faded away.