Iron Lake (27 page)

C
ORK WAS UP
and out of Sam’s place early. The sun was still below the trees, the sky clear, a cold bright day at hand. He paused at Hardee’s to pick up a drive-through breakfast—a biscuit sandwich with sausage and egg, and a cup of steaming black coffee. Then he headed east out of Aurora, past the casino and, a mile farther, the turnoff to Sandy Parrant’s. Three miles beyond that he took a right, moving away from the lake along County Road 16. The road wove through marshland and a long stretch of hayfield, then Cork could see the big stand of balsam, birch, and tamarack that marked Harlan Lytton’s land. He turned up the narrow lane, which was streaked with red-orange sunlight and shadows.

It was dead quiet when he got out of the Bronco. He stood a moment, his breath clouding the air as he looked the cabin over. The shattered window had been boarded up. Across the doorway, Wally’s men had put the yellow-and-black tape warning “Crime Scene Do Not Cross.” Cork walked around the cabin. In back was a garage housing Lytton’s pickup and snowmobile. Just beyond that stood a large shed. Cork glanced into one of the dirty windows of the shed and could see it was where Lytton did his taxidermy work. Outside, a cord of split wood had been laid up neatly against one wall. The only other structure was an ancient outhouse, the boards gray, the nails loose, the whole thing leaning like a tired old drunk.

A bird fluttered onto a branch of a birch at the edge of the clearing where the cabin and other buildings stood. It caught Cork’s eye mostly because of the flash of color on its breast. A robin. Middle of winter and there was a robin still about, apparently plump and healthy.

Because of the stories of The People told him by his grandma Dilsey, Cork knew the robin was created in rather a sad way. A young man wandered from his tribe one spring to undergo
giigwishi
mowin,
the fasting that would bring him visions to guide him into manhood. After several days, the young man’s father came and urged his son to persist in the fasting. The young man obeyed. Several more days passed, and the father returned again to urge his son to continue the fast. Although the young man had seen all the visions he needed to prepare himself for his life as a man, he obeyed his father’s request. After a time, the father once more visited his son and found him painted red and lying at the foot of a tree, dying. The young man chastised his father for urging him to fast beyond his time. As the father watched, his son slowly rose upward, changing in the air with a flutter of feathers, and perched on a branch of the tree, having become a robin. To his father he said, “Whenever danger threatens any of the Anishinaabe, I will alert them with this call . . .
nin-don-wan-chee-gay,
I am warning.”

The robin was a good spirit,
manidoo,
that warned of danger or the nearness of enemies or of the approach of a
maji-manidoo,
evil spirit. Cork looked at the robin, out of place in that bitter winter landscape, and returned to the Bronco. He lifted his Winchester from the backseat, took several shells from the box of cartridges in his glove box, and loaded the rifle.

The front door of the cabin was locked. Cork walked around to the rear and found the back door locked as well. Using the butt of his rifle, he broke a pane in the bathroom window, undid the latch, and slid the window up. He put the rifle in first, then struggled through himself. Inside, everything was quiet. Outside, the robin had stopped its calling.

He stepped into the main room. He knew it had been thoroughly searched by Schanno’s men already, and he wasn’t exactly certain what he was looking for. He held the Winchester loosely in his left hand and walked carefully around the room. The boards over the window blocked much of the light, and the place was dark and had a lonely feel to it. Cork stood a moment staring down at the crusted blood on the floor where Lytton had died.

He walked the room slowly, tapping the boards on the wall and the floor with the butt of his rifle, listening for a hollow sound. He checked the Ben Franklin stove, the kindling box, all around the sink and the few appliances. He looked under the mattress on the bunk, then felt all over the mattress itself. He opened the door to the back room that Lytton had used as a darkroom. As nearly as he could tell, all the equipment was still there—cameras, enlarger, developing trays, chemicals. He opened the drawers, found odds and ends he’d seen when he was there before. The drawer that had held wildlife negatives was empty. Wally Schanno had probably taken them. Cork wondered if there’d been other kinds of negatives, more sinister than wildlife, mixed in. He looked in the biggest drawer, which had been completely empty the night Lytton was killed. At first, it still looked just as empty. But as he was about to shove it closed, he noticed the black edge of a negative pinched between the bottom and the back of the drawer. He tried to pull it free, but the negative was stuck. He took the drawer out and hit the bottom loose with his fist. The negative fell to the floor. It was actually a strip of negatives from photographs shot in a series. Cork held the strip up to the bulb and studied it carefully.

“I’ll be damned,” he whispered.

The negatives showed a man undressing in front of another man, who, in the final frame, embraced him. Who they were, Cork couldn’t tell from the negatives. But he was certain now that what he was looking for did exist.

The last room he checked was the bathroom; he found nothing there. He stood by the open window trying to think. The drawer had been empty the night Lytton died. He thought about the figure who’d shot at him and then run into the night. As clearly as he could recall, the silhouette had held nothing but a rifle in its arms. So it was probably Lytton who’d moved the negatives, maybe in response to the judge’s murder. And where would a man like Lytton hide them?

The stillness and Cork’s thinking were both disturbed by the sudden calling of the robin. Instinctively, Cork stepped away from the open window. He knelt and carefully peered through the frame, studying the clearing and the woods. Nothing moved. The bird left the birch tree with a startling flap of its wings and headed east toward the low morning sun. Cork listened in the quiet after the bird’s leaving, but there was nothing more to hear.

As he looked out the window, his eyes fell on the old outhouse. He suddenly thought, with a grim smile, that the kind of shit Lytton had hid belonged down an outhouse hole. He didn’t credit Lytton with enough sense of irony to have put the negatives there for that reason, but it might follow that he’d put them in a place where most people would be reluctant to look. Cork crawled out the window and walked to the outhouse.

The door hung by a single rusted hinge. Snow had drifted against it, so that he couldn’t swing the door open. He leaned his rifle against the side of the outhouse, took the door in his gloved hands, and easily tore it from the remaining hinge. Snow had sifted through the cracks between the old gray boards and had accumulated a foot deep in the small square of the floor. There was a piece of rotting plywood over the hole in the seat and on top of that an old Sears catalog with the pages wrinkled and stuck together and chewed on by rodents. Cork knocked the catalog off and slid the board away. The darkness inside the hole yielded nothing. If Lytton had put something down there, he would have attached it in some way to be easily retrieved, but there was nothing like that. The maze of worm tunnels in the outline of the plywood indicated that the old board had been undisturbed for a good long time. Cork left the outhouse and stood a moment considering the two remaining structures—the garage and the taxidermy shed.

He walked to the shed, where the cord of split balsam lay stacked neatly against the wall. There was a strong padlock on the door. Cork went to the Bronco and brought back his ice spud. Although the padlock was good, the wood on the doorframe of the shed was cracked and weathered. In only a couple of minutes, he had the plate of the lock fixture pried loose, screws and all. Inside, the smell was confusing, like a combination meat locker and paint store, the raw odor of blood and flesh mingled with the harsh smell of shellac and turpentine. The glass eyes of a stuffed red fox studied Cork from one of the shelves on the walls. The pelt of an otter had been stretched on a tanning board. A big tin labeled “Arsenic” sat on the floor.

On a worktable beneath a pegboard full of cutting tools lay Lytton’s dog, Jack the Ripper. Cork stepped closer and looked the dog over. Blood crusted the raw wounds in its neck torn open by the bullet from Cork’s Winchester. The dog’s eyes were closed, the limbs stiff from the hard cold inside the shed. Cork felt an unaccountable sadness as he considered the possibility that Lytton had brought the dog there with the idea of stuffing Jack, of keeping company with his sole friend forever.

He looked through the drawers and cupboards of the shed. He opened the tin of arsenic but didn’t find the kind of poison he was looking for there. Outside, the robin had returned to the birch tree and for such a small bird was raising quite a ruckus. The smell in the shed, the residual odors of chronic death, had begun to get to Cork. He felt a little ill. He was just about to leave when he took a last look at Jack the Ripper and noticed something that he’d overlooked before. In the gray fur of the dog’s underside, a faint but definite line ran from the chest to the genitals. Cork stepped closer and smoothed away the fur. An incision had been made in the dog’s flesh and carefully sewn back together. Cork reached for a hacksaw that hung on the pegboard and began to saw across the belly of the carcass. It was a little like cutting into green, unkilned wood. The blade had penetrated an inch or so when it snagged. Cork tugged hard and the teeth came out full of soft black threads. From the pegboard, Cork took a knife with a six-inch serrated blade and began to cut along the original incision perpendicular to the cut he’d made with the hacksaw, so that in a few minutes he was able to pull back four flaps of frozen flesh. All of the internal organs had been removed—heart, lungs, liver, stomach, intestines—and a black canvas bag had been shoved into the cavity that remained. The bag was stuck to the inside of the carcass, glued to the rib cage by frozen blood. Cork carefully worked the bag away from the body and lifted it free. He stepped outside the shed into the bright morning light, set the bag in the snow, and opened it. Inside was a second bag, large and made of clear plastic. And inside the plastic were strips of negatives jumbled together like a nest of black snakes.

The crunch of a boot on snow made him turn. He stared into two eyes glaring from behind a ski mask, then the morning exploded.

For a moment the light in his right eye seemed as bright and hot as if he were staring at the sun. The searing heat was followed by sparks of fiery color, and Cork was dreaming about the bear in the flaming red sumac and he heard gunshots and thought Sam Winter Moon must be firing at the bear, and then his eyes were open and he was staring at the piercing blue sky and his head hurt like hell. He rolled to his side. A pair of legs in old denim rose above him. He reached out, but the legs slipped away and began to run. The black bag was still beside him along with a slender balsam log stained with blood. Cork felt his forehead above his right eye. The lump was huge and his hand came away bloody. He struggled to his feet, stumbled into the shed, and grabbed his Winchester. Outside again, he hefted the black bag over his shoulder and began to lope after the figure who’d already disappeared into the woods. The tracks were easy to follow in the snow. Cork tried to push himself to run faster, but his breath was coming short and an iron fist was pounding at his brain. Every few moments the light flashed across his eyes in a way that made him afraid he was going to faint.

He swung around a thicket and saw the figure seventy yards ahead struggling in a clump of vines. Cork’s eyes were still too unfocused to make out details, but it appeared that whoever it was had become entangled in blackberry brambles. Cork dropped to one knee and let the bag fall to the snow. He worked the lever of the Winchester and put a round into the breech. As he lifted the rifle to his shoulder and tried to sight, the light flashed across his vision. He rubbed his right eye with his knuckle and took aim again dead center in the back of the struggling figure. A moment before he squeezed off the round, he shifted his sight to the trunk of a tamarack a few yards to the left of the blackberry brambles. The tamarack exploded in a shower of bark. The figure jerked free of the thorns and scrambled away. Cork stayed on his knee a minute, leaning on the Winchester for support. He couldn’t have picked himself up to give chase even if he’d wanted to. Further away through the trees, he heard a snowmobile kick over and scoot off. Slowly he got up and moved to the blackberry brambles. A rifle lay fallen deep in the snarl of thorny vines. He left it there for a moment, intending to fish it out on his way back. With the bag and his own rifle in hand, he followed the footprints until he came to a place where clearly the snowmobile had circled and headed away.