Edgewise (15 page)

The track that led to George Iron Walker's house had been thickly blanketed with freshly fallen snow, so that it was almost impossible to follow. Six or seven times Lily drove into the ditch that ran alongside it, or up on the verge, and the Rainier's suspension jarred and banged.

Off to her left the forest looked even more forbidding than the first time she had come here, with Shooks. She was beginning to regret that she had come here. Supposing she turned around, and said nothing, like Myron? Nobody would ever know how Jeff had been killed, or by whom. And didn't Jeff
deserve
to be punished, after he had sent those men from FLAME to burn her alive?

But she kept on driving. She couldn't behave like Jeff and Myron. It wasn't in her nature. Her father and mother had always brought her up to respect other people's lives, no matter who they were. She remembered her father paying for an old woman's groceries, when she discovered that she had lost her purse. Not only that: he had driven her all the way back to her home. “What did it cost me?” he had said to Lily afterward. “Eight dollars and fifteen minutes.”

Lily peered ahead of her with narrowed eyes. Her windshield wipers were whacking wildly from side to side but they could barely keep up with the rapidly falling snow. She couldn't yet see George Iron Walker's house, and she wondered if she might have taken a wrong fork. She seemed to remember that the forest had gradually risen up on a gradient on her left-hand side, yet it was still level, and the trees seemed to crowd together much more closely than they had before.

The Rainier jolted over a series of spine-jarring ridges, and Lily had to wrestle to keep it on the track. As she straightened it out, she thought she glimpsed something running through the forest, about fifty yards away—something large, and gray, and very fluid, like a wolf. She wiped the side window with her glove. She saw it again—only for an instant, but as it disappeared behind the trees it appeared to be rising up onto its hind legs.

For some reason she felt a deep sense of uncertainty. This wasn't natural, this place. It wasn't normal. She wasn't afraid of wolves, especially since Shooks had told her that wolves never attacked people. But what kind of wolf could stand up and run like a man?

She carried on driving, but every few seconds she glanced anxiously into the trees. Now the forest began to rise, and she realized that she was on the right track after all. The snow began to ease off, too, and she adjusted the windshield wipers to a less hysterical speed. She crested the hill, and there below her was George Iron Walker's house, with smoke pouring listlessly out of the chimney, and George Iron Walker's SUV parked outside.

As she drove slowly down the hill, though, she saw an explosion of snow burst out of the forest, off to her left. In the middle of the snow, barely visible, was some kind of animal, with hunched-up shoulders. It was black, although she thought she saw some brown brindling as well. She thought it might have been a bear, but it was running so fast that it had disappeared behind the back of the house before she had time to be sure.

She parked, and climbed down from her Rainier. This time, nobody came out to greet her.
Well,
she thought,
they didn't know that I was coming.
She mounted the front steps, keeping her eyes open for the “bear,” or whatever that animal had been. Wolves might hesitate to attack humans, but bears had no compunction at all.

In the middle of the door hung a tarnished brass knocker, with a face like a snarling wolf. She lifted it up, and was just about to knock when Hazawin opened the door. She was wrapped in a dark maroon blanket, and her hair, which had been tightly braided when Lily had last seen her, was flowing glossy and loose over her shoulders.

“Hello?” she said, her misted purple eyes staring at nothing at all. “Who is it?”

“It's Lily—Lily Blake. I'm sorry. I really should have called ahead, shouldn't I?”

“Don't worry about it, Lily. We're always pleased to have visitors. Why don't you come along in?”

Hazawin closed the door behind them and said, “How about something hot to drink?”

Lily looked around the living room. It was gloomy and cold. None of the table lamps was switched on, although Hazawin wouldn't have needed them. But the log fire had burned right down and a bitter draft was blowing down the chimney, stirring the ashes into little dancing ash-devils. Lily had the feeling that nobody had been in here for several hours.

“Is George here?” she asked.

“He won't be too long. He's been on the phone all day today. Casino business. Are you sure you won't have anything to drink?”

“OK . . . maybe a cup of that verbena tea?”

“Of course.”

Hazawin went into the kitchen while Lily sat down beside the fire and held out her hands toward the fading warmth of the last few embers. She had felt uncomfortable on her first visit, but this time she felt distinctly uneasy, although she couldn't have clearly explained why. This house had a feeling of unreality, out here in the middle of the forest, surrounded by wolves. It was like Grandma's house in Red Riding Hood, or a dream from which she couldn't wake up.

“Did John Shooks get in touch with you?” Lily called out.

“John Shooks? No.”

“I asked him to get in touch with you.”

At that moment, George Iron Walker appeared from the direction of the bedroom. His hair was wet as if he had been taking a shower, and he was buttoning up a red-and-black flannel shirt.

“Lily! Good of you to call by.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. His lips felt cold. He even had an aura of cold around him, as if he had just come into the house from outside.

“Sorry to drop in without notice,” said Lily. “I thought that John Shooks would have called you.”

“He probably tried, but I've been tying up the phone all day. Hey, look at this fire! Let's stack some logs on here!” He knelt down on the diamond-weave hearth rug and started to riddle the ashes.

Lily noticed that there were small scratches on the backs of his hands, like briar scratches. “Did you hear what happened?” she asked him. “Somebody broke into the offices of the Fathers' League Against Mothers' Evil, and killed one of them. Tore him apart.”

“Yes, I heard about that.”

“The police can't work out who did it. Apparently the door was locked.”

“Maybe it was one of their own. They're all psychos.”

Lily hesitated, and then she said, “I'm not stupid, George.”

“Did I say you were?”

“
You're
not stupid, either. You know why I'm here.”

George bowed his head for a moment, and then turned to look at her. “You want me to call off the Wendigo.”

“I didn't realize it was going to
kill
people. For God's sake, George. Those men from FLAME, they tried to kill me, but that doesn't give
me
the right to kill them—not without a trial, not without proper justice. And Jeff. My ex-husband. I don't want him hurt. Whatever he's done, he's still Tasha and Sammy's father.”

George carefully placed a log on the fire, and then balanced another one on top of it. “There is no way that I can call off the Wendigo, Lily. It's not like a bloodhound. Once it agrees to hunt for somebody, it will go on hunting them right to the ends of the earth, until it finds them.”

“Isn't there something that Hazawin can do . . . some kind of incantation? Some kind of spell?”

“Hazawin can call the Wendigo out of the woods, but once it's been summoned she can't control it. You made a deal, Lily—you made a deal with me and a deal with the Wendigo, and you can't go back on it now.”

Lily said, “Tell me something: what's really in this for you?”

“I don't understand what you mean. I was trying to help you to find your children—nothing more than that.”

“You wanted that spit of land from Mystery Lake. That's worth a quarter of a million dollars, at least. Yet when you helped Myron Burgenheim to find his children, all you asked for was a blanket from out of his store.”

George looked serious. “That was no ordinary blanket, Lily. That blanket was once wrapped around the shoulders of Oye-Kar-Mani-Vim, the trackmaker, and the greatest ever taker of Chippewa scalps. It means as much to the Mdewakanton as that spit of land.” He crumpled up a sheet of newspaper and tucked it under the logs. “I've spent my whole life trying to give my people the dignity and the independence that was taken away from them by the white man. That was why I fought so hard for that casino, so that they could have economic freedom. But it's not just about the present, and the future. It's about the past, too. I'm trying to bring together as many sacred artifacts as I can, and recover as many sacred places as possible, to give us our identity back.”

“You have to stop the Wendigo,” said Lily. “I don't care how you do it. I'll make sure that you still get the land at Mystery Lake, whatever.”

Hazawin came in with Lily's tea, and set it down beside her on the hearth. She turned toward her and said, “I'm sorry, Lily. If only there
was
some way of stopping it. But not even the most powerful of wonder-workers could do that.”

George lit the newspaper and the fire flared up. Hazawin knelt beside it, in the same way that she had been kneeling when Lily had first seen her. Lily sipped her tea, but it seemed to have an odd hay-like taste to it, and she could only drink half a mug. She was tempted to ask George about the wolves she had seen in the forest, but for some reason she decided that it would be more prudent if she didn't. It was completely irrational, but she felt that here, in this living room, she was sitting among wolves, even if the wolves had human form.

She stayed for less than twenty minutes. George told her more about the history of the Mdewakanton, and how they had lost their land. “The very name Mdewakanton tells who we are, and where we belong. ‘Mde' is ‘lake.' ‘Wakan' is ‘sacred mystery' and ‘otonwe' is ‘village.”

Lily looked toward the window. “Look, it's started snowing again. I'd better go.”

George took her out to her SUV. He opened the door for her, but before she could climb in he took hold of both of her hands. “I hope you don't feel that I've misled you in any way,” he told her.

“I think you could have explained more clearly that the Wendigo was going to tear people to pieces.”

“Listen to me: if you had died when those men came around to your house, do you think your Jeff would have wept for you?”

Lily pulled a face. “Probably not. Almost certainly not. But that still doesn't justify killing him.”

“Sometimes people dig their own graves, Lily.”

“Yes, well . . .” she said. She got into the driver's seat and started the engine. George stepped back. As he did so, she saw something in his face that gave her a tingling sensation in her hands. A momentary narrowing of his jaw, a smile that seemed to bare his teeth, and a stare that had no expression at all, the way an animal stares. But then he lifted his hand to wave, and he looked perfectly ordinary.

She watched him in her rearview mirror as she drove back up the rise. He didn't change. He didn't go down on all fours.
You're spooking yourself. You're letting your imagination run off with your sanity.
But all the same, the Wendigo was still out looking for Jeff and Tasha and Sammy, and now she knew that she had no way of stopping it.

That evening, Bennie came around with a large bunch of lilies wrapped in cellophane. He smelled strongly of Aramis aftershave. “I thought you might appreciate some company.”

“That's very sweet of you, Bennie, but I'm okay. I'm probably going to have an early night tonight.”

“Have you eaten?” he asked her, taking off his hat. “You should eat, you know. I thought we could go to Café Twenty-Eight for some of that crawfish tortellini.”

“Sorry, Bennie. I think I'll pass.”

Bennie rocked from one foot to the other, like a small boy who wanted to go to the bathroom but was too embarrassed to ask.

“Okay, then,” he said. “But I still think you need to keep your strength up.”

“Don't worry. I'll probably have a sandwich before I turn in. And, look, thanks for the flowers. They're gorgeous.”

Bennie retrieved his hat. He cleared his throat, and sniffed. “There's something I need to ask you,” he said.

“What's that, Bennie?”

“I know this is kind of premature. I mean you haven't got Tasha and Sammy back yet. But I'm sure you will.”

“I'm praying I will, Bennie.”

“Well, me too, Lil. Me too. With all of my heart. But what I need to ask you is: do you think there's any place for me in your affections? I mean, do you think there's any possibility of you and me being more than just friends?”

Lily could hardly believe that she had heard him right. She had survived a murderous attempt to burn her alive, her children had been missing for over three months, and still were, and he wanted to know if they could conceivably be lovers.

She was about to snap that he was totally unbelievable, and to get out of her house, and that she wouldn't go back to work for Concord if it was the last real-estate agency on the planet; but then she thought:
Mystery Lake. If I don't get that spit of land at Mystery Lake, I won't be able to pay George for the Wendigo
—and, as George had made clear, a deal is a deal.

She gave Bennie a tight, puckered smile. “Let's just wait and see, Bennie, shall we? Until I get Tasha and Sammy back—well, it's hard to make plans.”

“I just wanted you to know that I really care for you,” said Bennie. “Whatever you want, whenever you want it—you know where I am.”

“Yes, Bennie. I do. That's very kind of you.”

He gave her a clumsy kiss. “I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”