Tamarack County: A Novel Part 9

A minute later, she replied, School. Play practice. Done @ 1. Drive?

No car, he texted back.

Got my moms.

Great. CU @ 1.

He'd just ended his message when the house phone rang, and he bounded from the sofa and jogged into the kitchen to answer.

"O'Connors' residence. This is Stephen."

"h.e.l.lo, Stephen. It's Hank Wellington, from Thunder Bay."

Henry Meloux's son. Stephen was instantly concerned.

"Is Henry okay?"

"He's fine. But he would like to talk to your father."

"My dad's not here right now."

Wellington spoke to someone on his end, then said into the phone to Stephen, "He'll talk to you."

"Great. Put him on."

"Boozhoo, Stephen. It is good to hear your voice."

"Henry? Is that you?"

"Let me check." A moment of silence. "Yes."

He could feel the old man smiling, could imagine his face cut by more lines than a tortoisesh.e.l.l.

"Is everything okay?" Stephen asked.

"Here," the old man said. "It is there that worries me."

"Everything's fine," Stephen said.

"That is strange," Meloux said. "Because I have been dreaming. The same dream three nights now."

Meloux fell silent, but Stephen didn't ask about the dream. He knew that when the old Mide was ready, he would tell him.

"Stephen, have you dreamed?"

"No, Henry. No vision dreams anyway."

Meloux said, "If you do, I want to know the dream. I want to know if it is my dream."

A long silence followed, and Stephen waited patiently for the old man to continue.

"I saw an evil thing," the old man finally said. "A majimanidoo."

Evil spirit, Stephen translated. Devil.

"This majimanidoo is always in the shadows. I cannot see it clearly."

Stephen almost blurted a question-What was this devil doing?-but he'd learned a long time ago to bridle his impulses when he was dealing with Henry Meloux, to trust that the old man was guiding him.

"What worries me, Stephen, is what this majimanidoo is up to. In my dream, it is always watching your house."

"Just watching?"

"Yes. But its heart is dark, Stephen, so black I cannot see into it, and I am afraid of what is there."

"Do you think we're in danger, Henry?"

"I do not know, Stephen."

Then Stephen had another thought. "Is it maybe someone we care about, Henry? Do you know the Daychilds, Marlee and Stella?"

"I know them," Meloux replied.

"Somebody killed their dog last night and cut off his head."

The old man's end of the line was silent a long time. "I will dream some more," he said at last. "Will you tell your father about this majimanidoo?"

"I will, Henry."

"And, Stephen?"

"Yes?"

"I want you to dream, too. Maybe you can see this evil clearer because you are there and you are young and you have the gift."

Stephen had visions sometimes, dream visions, but they always came unbidden. He didn't know if he could dream on demand.

"How do I do that, Henry?"

"When you go to sleep, clear your mind and leave it open. It will be an invitation."

"I'll try, Henry." He was about to say good-bye when he thought of something else. "Henry?"

"Yes?"

"Annie's home. She's having some trouble, personal problems, and she needs a place to be by herself to sort things out. I was thinking . . . well . . ."

"My door is always unlocked," the old man said.

"Migwech, Henry," he said, offering the old man an Ojibwe thank-you. "I'll let her know."

Stephen hung up and stood at the kitchen sink, staring at the faucet, not seeing the shards of broken sunlight that came off the stainless steel but seeing instead Dexter's s.h.a.ggy, headless body lying on white snow spattered with blood. The work of a madman or a majimanidoo.

"Who was that?"

He turned and found Anne crossing the kitchen toward the refrigerator. She was wearing a gray sweat suit and her feet were bare.

"Henry Meloux."

"I thought you said he was in Thunder Bay."

"He is. He wanted to talk to Dad."

She'd opened the refrigerator door, but now she stood looking at her brother with concern. "Is he all right?"

"Yes. He's been having dreams that worry him."

"What kind of dreams?"

"Seeing evil spirits here, watching our house."

"Coming from Henry Meloux, that's serious stuff. Does he know what it means?"

"He doesn't. But I'm thinking maybe it has to do with the Daychilds."

"Because of their dog?"

"Yeah."

Anne nodded, giving weight to the consideration, then she smiled. "And because you're stuck on Marlee?"

Stephen didn't bother to argue with that a.s.sessment of his relations.h.i.+p. He simply said, "Yeah, maybe."

Anne reached into the refrigerator and brought out a carton of yogurt. When she turned back to Stephen, he saw that a darkness had fallen across her face. "Or maybe," she said, not meeting his eyes, "it's a different kind of evil altogether."

He had no idea what that meant, but figured it came from whatever demon his sister had chosen to wrestle with alone. He remembered Meloux's offer. "Annie, Henry says it's okay if you want to use his place for a while."

She took a spoon from the drawer, opened her yogurt, tossed the lid into the garbage pail under the sink, started out of the kitchen, then turned back and said, "I'll go there tomorrow."

"After church?"

Anne thought about that and finally said, "I don't go to church anymore."

She left the room, left Stephen standing thunderstruck, left him suddenly afraid that the wall that stood between what was evil in the world and what was good had begun to crumble.

CHAPTER 14.

The investigation of Evelyn Carter's disappearance had pulled a number of deputies out of the office, leaving the sheriff's department shorthanded. As a result, Mary Lou Wolsey, who normally just worked dispatch, was also covering the contact desk. When she buzzed Cork through the secure door, she said, "In her office. She's expecting you."

"Thanks, Mary Lou."

Although the sheriff's office had been occupied by three other people since Cork had left the uniform behind, it was still a little surreal to him whenever he walked into the room that had been his for many years. The truth was he didn't much miss being sheriff-the politics had been nothing but a headache-but he often missed wearing a badge. Dross had redone the place as soon as she'd taken over the position and had managed to make the room feel somehow more welcoming without losing the professional atmosphere. It had to do with the color she'd chosen for the walls, maybe, a placid hue that reminded Cork of soft desert sand. Or the photographs she'd hung, very personal. Or maybe the plants that she managed to keep looking enviably healthy. There were still file cabinets, and her computer, and bookshelves full of law enforcement manuals and volumes of regulations, but she'd made it a room where, Cork figured, she could spend a lot of time without feeling the onerous grind of the wheels of justice.

Dross sat at her desk. Justine Belsen, the daughter of Evelyn and Ralph Carter, sat in a chair near one of the windows. Through the panes behind her, the snow and glaring sunlight framed her in a harsh brilliance. Justine was tall and, in Cork's opinion, cadaverously thin. She was blond, her hair cut in a flip that brushed against her neck whenever she moved her head. She'd grown up in Aurora; he knew her, but not well. She was a few years younger than he, and they'd run in different circles. He'd graduated from Aurora High the year she'd entered as a freshman, and when he came back with his family to take a job as a sheriff's deputy, she was married and living in New York City. Over the years, he'd seen her occasionally at St. Agnes when she was home for a visit and attended church with her parents, but aside from perfunctory greetings, they'd had little to say to each other. Now here she was, a woman of fifty, who looked whittled down by life to not much more than a matchstick.

"h.e.l.lo, Cork," she said dryly when he walked in.

"h.e.l.lo, Justine. It's been a while." He shed his coat, draped it over the back of the office's unoccupied chair, took a moment to shake her hand, then sat down.

"I don't come back to Aurora much these days," Justine said. "I wish I didn't have to be here now."

"I'm sorry about the circ.u.mstances," he offered.

"Thank you."

Dross said, "I've told Justine that we've pretty much exhausted our search of the area where we found her mother's car and that our investigation has taken a turn toward possible foul play in her mother's disappearance."

Cork glanced at Justine. She'd had a couple of days already to deal with the fact that her mother was missing, but he could see from the muscles tensed across the bone of her face that this new turn of events had been especially hard on her.

"Would you mind telling Cork what you told me?" Dross said.

Justine looked at him, frowning just a little, the hollows in her cheeks deepening. "I thought you weren't in law enforcement anymore."

"He's a licensed private investigator now, and he's agreed to consult on this case," Dross told her, saying it quickly but casually, as if it was quite an ordinary occurrence in the Tamarack County Sheriff's Department.

Justine gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, a little gesture of whatever. She said, "My mother was seriously considering leaving my father."

"Why?" Cork asked. Although knowing the kind of man the Judge had always been, he understood that it was, in a way, a silly question. "I mean, why now?"

Justine rubbed one hand over the other, her long fingers idly feeling the prominent knuckles. "I've been trying to get her to leave him for years. Devout Catholic that she is, she believes that a marriage is forever. Fine, I've always told her. You don't have to divorce him. Just leave. But she's spent her life under his thumb. It's hard for her to change."

"So why has she been thinking of leaving now?"

"It really began when all that c.r.a.p came out about the LaPointe case years ago. I think it drove home to her what a morally corrupt man my father really is. That's something I've known all my life, but Mom has always made excuses for him."

She was talking about a situation that had come to light nearly two years earlier. A man named Cecil LaPointe was serving a forty-year sentence in Minnesota's Stillwater Prison for the killing of a young woman twenty years earlier. LaPointe was a s.h.i.+nn.o.b, an Ojibwe, living in Tamarack County. He'd been tried and sentenced in the court of Judge Ralph Carter. It had been a brief but sensational trial. The evidence against LaPointe had been overwhelming. In the end, the deliberation of the jury-all white males-had been swift, LaPointe had been found guilty, and Judge Carter had delivered a sentence of forty years' imprisonment, the maximum allowable under Minnesota law.

But nearly two years ago, Ray Jay Wakemup, who'd been little more than a kid at the time of the trial, had come forward with information about the crime, information that had been withheld from the jury and that cast significant doubt on LaPointe's guilt. Ray Jay claimed that while the trial was under way, he'd shared this information with Judge Ralph Carter and also with the prosecution and the sheriff's department. Yet none of those officers of the court or officers of the law had bothered to share the information with the defense.

"When it became public that Dad had been a part of all that-I don't know what you'd call it, conspiracy against justice, maybe-I phoned Mom. She was terribly upset. I told her to come out and visit, and we could talk it over. It took her a year-she had to work up the courage to tell him she was going on her own-but she finally did last October. When she left to return to Aurora after her visit, I thought she was pretty well set in her decision. But once she got here, well, Dad can be formidable. She was afraid of him, plain and simple, afraid to stand up to him. I had offered to come out, to be with her when she told him. Actually, I begged her to let me come out, and we would tell him together. She agreed to it, tentatively, but asked me to wait until after the holidays. It seemed to her an awful thing to do to him over Christmas."