Purgatory Ridge (15 page)

Charlie Warren was the traditional chief of the Iron Lake Ojibwe, and his voice had always been important in the affairs of the People. He was in his seventies and his health had been failing and lately he’d retired from most politics on the rez. He was a man who often did not sleep at night, and who did not like to be alone with his sleeplessness. What would such a man be doing at Lindstrom’s mill when the bomb went off?

When he put it together that way, Cork thought he might have the answer.

He stopped at the Pinewood Broiler and borrowed Johnny Pap’s phone book to look up an address. Then he drove out to a small clapboard house near the Burlington Northern tracks northwest of town. Stevie slept so soundly that Cork decided not to wake him. He got out of the Bronco quietly and followed the cracked, weedy sidewalk to the front door. The house was mostly dark. Through the blinds, Cork could see a lighted television screen in the front room, and he could hear through the opened window the sound of a
baseball game. He pushed the button for the doorbell, but nothing rang inside. He knocked. A moment later the porch light flicked on. Harold Loomis, the night watchman at Lindstrom’s mill, appeared at the door.

“Evening, Harold,” Cork said.

Loomis was a thin man. He was dressed in an undershirt and plaid shorts. He had a full shock of white hair and a nose like a lightbulb that had been screwed into his face. He held a glass filled with amber liquid and ice, and his lightbulb of a nose was pretty well lit.

“What can I do for you, Cork?” He pushed the screen door open.

“I just need an answer to a couple of questions.”

“Sure. If I can give ‘em.”

“You like playing checkers?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever play with Charlie Warren?”

Loomis blinked at him.

“I was just thinking,” Cork went on, “that you and Charlie had a few things in common. Besides checkers. You served in the Korean War, right?”

“What of it?”

“So did Charlie.”

“Lots of guys did.”

“Not so many around here.”

Loomis stared at Cork. His eyes were watery and rimmed with red. It could have been from what was in the glass. Or lack of sleep. Or maybe even from grieving.

“Was Charlie Warren your friend, Harold?” Loomis tried to maintain his stare, but he finally broke and looked down at the glass in his hand.

“Because if he was, they’re saying your friend was
responsible for the destruction out at Lindstrom’s, that he botched things, Harold, and he killed himself with his own bomb.”

“Charlie’s dead. What difference does it make what anybody says about him now?”

“He was playing checkers with you that night, wasn’t he? Maybe sharing a drink. Talking over old times. Exchanging war stories. Helping the night get by for both of you. I’m guessing neither of you wanted folks to know. You had a job to worry about, and maybe Charlie figured it wouldn’t look so good, him hanging out at Lindstrom’s, what with all the hullaballoo over logging right now. You know, Harold, it’s pretty understandable.”

Loomis stared at the ice melting into his whiskey.

“I’ll bet it got lonely out there at night.”

Loomis stepped out and let the door swing closed behind him. He walked to the porch railing, took a long drink from his glass, swirled the ice, drank again. He looked out at the night, and when he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “We served in the same unit. After the war, coming home, we never had much to do with one another. Charlie, he had all that business out on the reservation. Me, I went back to my own life. But you get old, Cork. People you got anything in common with pass on. You get lonely. Charlie and me, we bumped into one another sometimes at the VFW. Got to talking about old times. Korea, you know. I liked him. Didn’t matter he was Indian. Didn’t matter to him I was white. Yeah, at the end, he was my friend.”

“He didn’t have anything to do with the bomb. He was just there to play checkers.”

Loomis nodded. “He always left before the guys
started showing up for first shift. The other night, I had my rounds to make. We were in the middle of a game. Charlie stayed in the shed while I headed out. I was on the other side of the mill when it happened.” Tears piled up along the rims of his eyes. “I couldn’t do anything. Honest to God, there was nothing I could do.” He shook his head. “They find out about Charlie, I’m out of a job, Cork. I got no pension. I got no way to pay my bills.”

“I have to tell somebody, Harold. I have to tell Wally Schanno. I’m sorry.” Cork felt bad, but there was no way around it. “Look, it doesn’t have to be done tonight. And I’ll see if Schanno can do something about keeping the details confidential. I can’t promise anything.”

Loomis stared down at the old boards of his porch. He seemed dazed. The effect of the whiskey. And a lot more.

“Thanks for your help, Harold.”

Loomis looked at him and a question seemed to surface from somewhere deep in his consciousness. “Why do you care about any of this? You’re not the sheriff anymore.”

“‘Night, Harold.”

Cork left him standing in his doorway, the question unanswered.

J
OHN
L
E
P
ERE LEFT HIS SMALL CABIN
and walked through pools of moonlight scattered among the trees that separated his place from the big log home on the other side of Grace Cove. He crossed the dry bed of Blueberry Creek
that was the property line, then followed the curve of the cove until he came to a narrow sand beach, white in the moonlight. The beach was not a natural feature of the shoreline there. Lindstrom had had it constructed the year before when the log home was built. LePere carefully skirted the sand so that he would leave no tracks. He often trespassed this way. For years, when his was the only dwelling on the cove, he’d walked the shoreline unrestrained by concerns about boundary lines. Although he actually owned only a small parcel of the land, over the years he’d come to think of the cove as his. It was wrong thinking, he knew, but inhabiting the place alone for more than a decade had made it so. Then Lindstrom had come, changed the look of everything. LePere resented the man, his wealth, and his thoughtless trespass on LePere’s life.

He moved onto the grass of the wide lawn, a lake of silver under the full moon, and he slipped into the shadow of a spruce. From the darkness there, he watched the house.

Lights were on in several rooms, upstairs and down. Occasionally, a light would switch off in one room and switch on in another as if someone inside were moving about. It was an illusion. No one was home. LePere had learned over time that the lights were simply part of the rich man’s security system.

He left the shadow of the spruce and headed to the dock. The boards were new and firm, the posts thick and well anchored so that the dock didn’t move at all under his weight. It had been built to withstand a hurricane, although Grace Cove was so well protected the surface was generally smooth as glass. LePere ran his hand along the lifeline of the sailboat tied up there, the
one called
Amazing Grace
. The 28-foot Grampian sloop, a boat for big water, was a little large and ostentatious for Iron Lake, LePere thought. He’d seen Lindstrom take the sloop out on occasion. The rich man looked soft, but he was a good sailor. Even alone, he handled the boat well. At first, Lindstrom had taken his wife and the boy with him, but he’d barked orders impatiently, until one day the boy stood on the dock and refused to go. LePere had witnessed the scene through his field glasses. Now the boy went out only in the dinghy and only with his mother. The woman was a good sailor, too, firm with the boy, but patient. Except for the cold darkness inside him, LePere might have allowed himself to admire her style.

When he’d first learned who his neighbors on the cove were to be, he’d considered it ironic. Now he considered it destiny. Although he fully realized the Fitzgerald woman was not to blame for the sins of her father, he understood—in the way of a man who knew firsthand that life was anything but just—that if ever there were to be retribution, it would fall to her to pay.

He stepped onto the sloop. The mast gleamed in the moonlight like a clean, white bone. He liked the idea that with every step he was further violating Lindstrom’s territory. For a moment, he considered breaking something small, just to leave a sign of his presence, to let the rich man wonder, but he held himself back. Although it would be hard to connect him to any vandalism, they would look his way. On that isolated cove, he was all there was for them to see.

Headlights flashed, blasting among the pine trees that lined the private road to the cove. LePere didn’t
move. It would be the woman and the boy. Lindstrom would come home later. He worked long hours. Barely ever were they all together as a family. He would come after the woman had gone to bed and the lights were out in her room. LePere figured that as man and wife, they seldom connected. There was something about the unhappiness the situation suggested that pleased him in a bitter way. The people who had everything were no happier than he.

LePere heard the garage door lift at the approach of the car. He saw the headlights swallowed and heard the garage door close. Silence returned to the cove.

Lights went on, purposefully now. LePere tracked them through the house, up the stairs, to the bedrooms. He saw the boy pass a window. Hung on the wall visible through the window was a poster LePere had long ago identified with his binoculars as Bart Simpson on a skateboard. A couple of minutes later, the boy passed again wearing boxers and a T-shirt. A light went on in the room LePere always suspected was the bathroom, stayed on long enough for the boy to brush his teeth, then went off. When next the boy appeared in his room, he was followed by his mother. She would stay a while, LePere knew. Probably she read to the boy, because she often carried a book. LePere figured it was the kind of thing he would have done, too, if he had a son.

By the time the woman left the room, the moon had risen high, almost directly overhead. LePere’s shadow puddled around his feet. He was tired, thinking of heading home. But he stayed, watching the room he knew to be hers, waiting for her to prepare for bed. Often, they didn’t even bother to draw their blinds.

Grace Cove was so isolated and they seemed so secure in their privacy. Who was there to see them? He liked watching the woman as she settled into bed, propped her pillow, opened her book. All of it alone. Her husband had his own bedroom, on the other side of the house. In those rare times they were home together at night, he sometimes came and sat on her bed. They talked a while, but LePere had never seen them kiss. Sometimes after her husband had gone, the woman stared out the window in a way that reminded LePere of how he himself sometimes gazed across Lake Superior from Purgatory Ridge, looking for things that had existed long ago but had long ago been lost.

He was caught off guard when the door to the first-floor deck opened and the woman stood silhouetted in the light from within. She closed the door, descended the deck stairs, and came across the lawn toward the dock. He looked around him on the boat for a place to hide and finally crouched in the shadow of the cockpit, hoping desperately the woman would not board.

She passed the
Amazing Grace
and walked to the very end of the dock. LePere eased himself up and watched her. She stood with her back to him, looking over the water. Through the gap in the pines that flanked either side of the entrance to the cove, Aurora was visible, a scattering of lights far across a deep, black emptiness.

In the moon’s silver light, she began to undress.

She kicked off her shoes, undid the buttons of her blouse, and let the garment fall to her feet. Her hands slid up her back between the sharp bones of her shoulder blades and below the fall of her yellow hair. She worked free the hooks of her bra, slipped the
straps down her arms, and dropped the large lacy cups atop her blouse. Her hands disappeared in front of her, working at her waist. She tugged down her slacks, stepped out of them easily, and dropped them in the pile with her other things. She was left in panties whose color LePere could not tell by moonlight, but the fabric had a sheen to it, as if what covered that most secret part of her body had been cut from ice. With her thumbs, she hooked the elastic of the waistband and drew off the last of her clothing. She stood naked at the end of the dock, her hair and skin and shadowed clefts all poised above dark water. She raised her arms, dipped her body, and sprang from the dock, cutting the surface of the lake with barely a splash. As the woman breaststroked out into the cove, LePere left the cockpit, leaped the railing, and loped along the dock back to land. He made for the spruce where he’d hidden before, and he let the shadow suck him in. He glanced back to see if the woman had spied him. She lay on her back, gazing up at the moon, her body outlined in ripples of black and silver.

She didn’t know John LePere was watching. She probably didn’t even know he existed. And she could not possibly have known why, as he stared at her from the darkness, he unconsciously balled his hands into tight, bloodless fists as if he clenched in them something he was determined to hold on to, something invisible to anyone but him.

J
O WAS AWAKE
long after Cork lay sleeping beside her. She watched moonlight gather on the windowsill and spill into the room. The minutes of the alarm clock on the nightstand crept by like a procession of condemned men. At midnight, she slid from the bed and stood at the window, staring into the night. The branches and leaves of the big maple in the front yard shattered the light from the street lamp in a disturbing way, and the quiet of the night felt suffocating. She went to the rocker in the corner and sat down. When Stevie was a baby, Jo had spent many nights rocking him there. Cork had taken his turns, too, losing sleep as they dealt with ear infections, upset tummies, and nightmares. She didn’t miss those sleepless nights, but she grieved their simplicity, when the comfort of holding was all it took to set things right. She wanted to do that now. Just hold Cork, and have him hold her, and in that simple way make everything all right.