Edgewise (29 page)

“What tone of voice?”

“It's a very particular tone of voice that suspects use when they've decided that they need to make a clean breast of things. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that that you're a suspect. But you do have something to tell me, don't you?”

She led him into the kitchen and took a blue china mug from the dresser. “I need your help, Nathan.”

He stood in the doorway. He still hadn't taken off his long gray overcoat. “Okay,” he said.

“What I'm going to tell you now—you probably won't believe a word of it; but then again you might, because it makes sense of everything that's happened, even if it doesn't make sense in itself.”

Special Agent Kellogg waited and said nothing.

Lily said, “I thought maybe I could deal with this myself, but I can't, and I'm scared out of my mind.” She started to pour coffee out of the percolator, but then her eyes filled up with tears and her hand started to shake and she had to put the percolator down on the table.
Stop,
she told herself.
Just stop it.

Special Agent Kellogg came around and laid his hand on her shoulder. “Think you'd better sit down, Lily, and tell me all about it.” He pulled out a chair for her and she sat down.

“I'm so stupid. I'm so damned stupid. And crying's not going to make things any better.”

“Come on, Lily. Get it off your chest. What's been going on?”

She told him, haltingly, about the Wendigo. She told him everything. He sat next to her, holding one of her hands, but he didn't nod and he didn't interrupt and he didn't ask her any questions until she had finished.

“That's it,” she said. “I have about ten hours left to find the land title, or else find a way to destroy the Wendigo. One or the other. And I don't think I can do either.”

Special Agent Kellogg said, “That was you, then, last night, that forest fire out at Black Crow Valley? You and John Shooks?”

“I feel terrible. I feel like I killed him myself.”

“Well, yes. But I wouldn't shed too many tears for good old John Shooks. In aggregate, I would say that more people in the Twin Cities wanted Shooks dead than wanted him alive.”

“Do you believe me?” asked Lily.

“What—about the Wendigo? Like you said, it makes sense of everything that's happened even if
it
doesn't make any sense. I don't know. I don't believe in spirits and ghosts, but then again, what else could possibly rip people to pieces and fly through the air with their guts trailing behind them? And what else could squash an SUV like a Coke can, right in the middle of the highway?”

“I feel so guilty,” said Lily. “If it hadn't been for me, none of those people would have died. And I still don't know what's happened to poor little William.”

Special Agent Kellogg finished the last cold dregs of his coffee. Then he leaned back in his chair and said, “Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that I
do
believe you.”

“It's all true, Nathan. I swear it. Unless I'm going stark staring mad and I've been hallucinating.”

“Well—I saw the bodies for myself, Lily. I saw your sister's SUV. Those weren't hallucinations. Those were real. Now, maybe there's an alternative explanation as to how those people were killed, and how that vehicle was crushed, but right now we don't have one. So until somebody can prove different, I'm prepared to work on the assumption that there really
is
a Wendigo.”

Lily was so relieved that she didn't know what to say to him.

Special Agent Kellogg squeezed her arm. “I'll help you. Okay?”

“Thank you. Really, Nathan, you don't know what this means to me.”

“Hey, I've always tried to keep an open mind. Dick Rylance says I should have been assigned to the
X-Files.
I warn you, though: I'll have to fly solo on this one. Dick's a skeptic, to say the least. He won't even believe that a fire's hot until he's shoved his hand in it to make sure, so I don't think he'd be too willing to go looking for Native American forest spirits—not until he's been shown some concrete evidence.

“As for my division chief—he'd send me straight off for a psych evaluation.” He paused, and then he added, “Maybe he'd be doing the right thing, too. Maybe you and I, we're both nuts.”

“Nathan, that thing was in my bedroom last night and it was real.”

“Okay, don't get upset. Like I say, I'm prepared to accept for the time being that you're telling me the truth. What we have to do as a matter of urgency is devise a plan for getting you out of this bind—whether we persuade George Iron Walker to relinquish his claim to that piece of land, or we zap the Wendigo, or whether we think up some other way.”

“Bennie told me that he had a copy of the land-title certificate. Apparently the land used to belong to the federal government. Maybe we could persuade somebody in the government to put a block on planning approval, so that Philip Kraussman wouldn't want it any more.”

“I don't know . . . it could work, but you've only got ten hours, right? And you know how long it takes to get a response out of any government department. Months, usually.”

“Then we'll have to destroy the Wendigo, won't we?”

“It looks like it. But if we're going to do that, we need to
find
it first—or lure it out of hiding, the way that John Shooks lured it out. And we need a really effective way of catching it when we do. That wasn't a bad idea, laying a loop of towing cable under the snow, but from what you've told me, the Wendigo is super-quick. If we don't manage to lasso it the first time, you and me are going to be Wendigo chow.”

“Can you think of any other ways of catching it?”

Special Agent Kellogg gave another cough, and nodded. “Back at division we have handheld catching nets. They use compressed gas to shoot out a net which entraps a suspect completely.”

“A
net?
Is that going to be strong enough?”

“I should think so. They're made of high-molecule fiber. You can't even cut your way out of them with a knife.”

He checked his watch, even though the kitchen clock was right in front of him. “Listen—I'll go back to Washington Avenue and pick a couple up. I'll requisition some high-powered ordnance too.”

“So what can I do?”

“You stay here and try to think of a way to bring the Wendigo out of the woods, so that we can snag it.” He stood up, and coughed again.

Lily said, “You don't know how much I appreciate this. I was so scared that you weren't going to believe me.”

“It's a riff on the old Sherlock Holmes thing, isn't it? ‘When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth—even if that's damn near impossible, too.' ”

Lily almost managed a smile. She was still deeply frightened, but at least she felt that she wasn't alone any more.

Around twelve-thirty
P.M
. she made Tasha and Sammy some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and poured them two glasses of milk. Tasha was upstairs reading, but Sammy was out in the front of the house, sliding on the snowmobile trail with his friend Josh from across the street.

Except that, when Lily opened the front door, she couldn't see Sammy or Josh anywhere. She shielded her eyes against the glare from the ice and looked up the street, but, apart from old Mr. Harkins clearing his driveway, it was deserted.

She tippy-toed in her slippers as far as the sidewalk, so that she could see the other way. And it was then that she felt the salty taste of shock in her mouth.

Sammy was standing about twenty-five yards away, in his bright-blue windbreaker and his purple woolly hat. He was talking to a tall man in a black-leather jacket—a man with dark sunglasses and silver chains and feathers around his neck: George Iron Walker.

She stalked up to them. “What the hell are
you
doing here?” she demanded.

“I'm talking to your boy,” said George Iron Walker. “Where's the harm in that?”

“Sammy—go indoors,” said Lily.

“But, Mom—”

“I said go indoors, this instant!”

Sammy reluctantly walked back to the house, and went inside.

“I was only passing the time of day, Lily,” said George Iron Walker, taking off his sunglasses. His eyes were like stones.

“You stay away from my children. Haven't you caused my family enough grief already?”

“I'm sorry, Lily—but, like I said before: you were the one who set these events in motion.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I came to pay you a visit, to see how things were progressing. Do you have the land title yet? No? Are you likely to lay your hands on it before sundown?”

“Look,” Lily began. But then she suddenly thought:
The land title. Bennie has a copy of it, in his office.
And she thought something else, too: if the Mdewakanton had been tricked out of their land once, maybe they could be tricked out of it again. Long enough to buy her a few moments of vaulable time, anyhow.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I'll have it.”

“You don't sound too sure of that.”

“Don't you worry. I'm going to collect it this afternoon.”

George Iron Walker looked impressed. “That's wonderful. I don't know how you managed it, but I'm very pleased. I didn't want this business to end badly, you know. I never did.”

“It's already ended badly. Will I get little William back?”

“I promise you. And when I make a promise, Lily, I keep it.”

“Is he safe?”

“Oh, he's safe. Where he is, he's doing nothing but dreaming.”

“You're a bastard, George.”

“No, Lily, I'm not. I'm only trying to make things right.”

“Turning back the clock two hundred years: that doesn't make things right. Killing innocent people: that doesn't make things right.”

“Tell that to the thirty-eight Mdewakanton men who were hanged at Mankato. Tell that to the fifty-five women and children who were shot down like dogs at Blood Hill.”

It was then that she glimpsed a silvery flicker of light on the opposite side of the street. If she hadn't known about the Wendigo, she would have thought it was nothing more than a chance reflection from a passing automobile. But she saw the snow flurry up, as if a sudden wind had caught it, and she heard the faintest hissing sound.

“It's here, isn't it?” she said.

George Iron Walker turned to look across the street, and then he said, “Yes. It just wants to make sure that everything's settled the way it should be.”

“Where do you want me to meet you?” Lily asked him.

“Mystery Lake—where else? Any time before sundown. I'll be there.”

“And the Wendigo?”

“Like I said, it just wants to make sure that everything's settled the way it should be.”

Lily turned her back on him and walked back to the house without saying anything more. Her heart was thumping, but she was beginning to work out the rudiments of a plan. The most important thing she had learned from George Iron Walker was that the Wendigo was going to be there, at Mystery Lake, when she was supposed to hand over the land title. The spit of land was very narrow—only a few yards wide—which meant that she and Nathan Kellogg would have a fair chance of setting up their mirrors in such a way that they would catch the Wendigo's image, no matter if it turned edgewise or not.

Everything was going to depend on timing, and speed, and more luck than it took to win the lottery six weeks running. But at least she didn't feel so helpless any more.

Back in the kitchen, Tasha and Sammy were eating their sandwiches.

“Who was that man?” asked Sammy. “He's nice.”

“He's not nice at all. He's the man who raised up the Wendigo for me. He's the man who wants that piece of land.”

“He was nice to
me
. He asked me if I knew who used to live here, before they built all these houses.”

“Oh, yes? And who did live here?”

“The Beaver People. He said it was a long, long time ago, when beavers could talk and people could understand them. They all lived together and everybody was happy.”

“It's just a story, Sammy.”

“How do you know?”

Lily hesitated. Then she said, “As a matter of fact, I
don't
know. Maybe he's right. Maybe beavers
could
talk. Maybe there really
was
a time when everybody was happy.”

Bennie swung around in his revolving chair and said, “Lil! This is a surprise!”

“I was passing—thought I'd call in to see you.”

“You're looking good. In fact you're looking terrific. Your hair's growing, huh?”

Lily ran her hand through the soft blond down on top of her head. “Nowhere near fast enough. I can't wait for it to grow long enough to curl it.”

“How about a coffee, or a drink, maybe? I was going to lunch in about ten minutes; do you want to join me?”

“Tempting, but I don't really have the time. I wanted to talk to you about that Mystery Lake thing, that's all.”

“Lil—you don't know how sorry I am about that. I didn't think you would ever speak to me again.”

Lily sat down on the opposite side of his desk. “Don't be silly, Bennie. We're friends, aren't we? We'll always be friends.”

“A little more than friends, I like to hope. You can't blame a fellow for wishful thinking, can you?”

“Of course not. That little spit of land—you said that used to belong to the federal government.

“That's right. It was kind of complicated. Something to do with the Cession Treaty of 1863 . . . For some reason the land on the northwest side of Mystery Lake stayed in Federal ownership, and nobody realized it until Kraussman Developments came to buy it up. Are you sure you don't have time for lunch? I was going to Ping's for Szechuan.”