Tamarack County (12 page)

“What do I do?” Marlee asked. Her voice was taut, and Stephen saw her grip tighten on the steering wheel.

“Just hold it steady. We’ll be in Allouette in ten minutes.”

Stephen kept himself turned, his eyes on the truck, which had drawn to within a dozen yards of Marlee’s rear bumper. Sunlight hit the truck’s windshield in a way that created a glare, and he couldn’t see the driver.

“There’s a straightaway coming up,” Marlee said, a little desperately. “Maybe I should slow down. Maybe he just wants to pass.”

“Okay,” Stephen said. “Just a little, just to see what he does.”

They came to a long, rare stretch of straight road. Marlee eased up on the accelerator, and the needle of the speedometer crept downward. The truck slowed, too, maintaining its dozen yards of separation.

“Shit,” Marlee said.

The next thing Stephen knew, she had hit the gas and he was thrown back against the seat as the 4Runner shot ahead.

“Easy, Marlee,” he said. “There’s ice on these roads.”

But she didn’t seem to hear him. Her foot pressed harder on the accelerator, and the speedometer needle rocketed.

“Jesus, Marlee, slow down.”

“You want him to kill us?” she said, her voice rising.

“If he doesn’t, you will. Slow down.”

But it was too late. Directly ahead of them was a hard curve to the right. Marlee tried to turn the wheel, but the pavement was slick with packed snow frozen hard into a glazed coating. The 4Runner swung sideways and kept going, off the road and into a growth of dead reeds that bordered the lake. When it hit the drag of the reeds, the car flipped, and Stephen saw the world spin. He heard Marlee scream, and her scream mixed with the screaming of metal against ice, and the vehicle was sliding over the frozen surface of Iron Lake. Shards flew against his face, and he didn’t know if it was window glass or grated ice. He closed his eyes, and in a moment, everything
stopped, and all Stephen heard then was a terrible, terrible silence.

His thinking cleared slowly. When it did, he understood that the 4Runner lay on its side. The driver’s door was against the ice and the window glass was gone. Stephen was held in place by his seat belt; otherwise he’d have been lying on top of Marlee. He saw that her eyes were closed, and she wasn’t moving.

“Marlee?”

He started to unfasten his seat belt but realized he needed to brace himself first so that he wouldn’t tumble onto her. He settled into a more upright position, firmed his leg against the heater console, grabbed the door handle with his right hand, and with his left, clicked his belt free. He eased himself down so that he knelt against the ice through the empty window of the driver’s door and leaned over Marlee. He touched her gently.

“Marlee?”

She didn’t respond, but he could see that she was still breathing. That was a great relief.

Then he heard a sound that reminded him at first of the high-pitched whine laser weapons made in some sci-fi movies. It was like the 4Runner was the mothership, and laser beams shot out in all directions.

He knew what it really was, and adrenaline coursed into his bloodstream.

“Marlee,” he said, desperately. “Marlee, we’ve got to get out of here.”

Through the empty window under his knee, he saw the spiderweb begin to form across the ice. He reached for Marlee’s seat belt lock and managed to free it a moment before the ice gave. The vehicle tilted forward. The front end, weighted by the engine, dipped into the water first. Somewhere in his frenzied thinking Stephen understood that he shouldn’t move Marlee, that he might do her great harm, but with the gray water already eating the hood he had no other choice.

He wrapped his arms around her and tried to lift. For a
slender woman, she seemed to weigh a ton. He succeeded in getting her into a sitting position, more or less, then looked upward at the blue sky on the other side of the passenger window, which was still intact, and realized that, with the engine off, he had no way to lower the glass. He let Marlee slump a moment, reached up, and tried to unlock the door, but the lock seemed jammed. He braced himself and tried to force the door open, pushing upward with all his strength. Useless. He felt the wet, icy grip of the lake on his boots. He glanced down and saw that Marlee was sitting in water that already covered her legs. He looked up at the window glass, formed a fist with his gloved right hand, drew back, and gave the punch everything he had. The window shattered in a rain of shards. Stephen knocked out the jagged edges. By the time he bent again to Marlee, the water had reached her chest. Her clothing was soaked, and that made her even heavier. He hooked his hands under her arms and tried to haul her up. He’d never lifted anything so heavy.

“Marlee,” he croaked. “You’ve gotta help me.”

But Marlee, though not dead, was dead to the world.

He saw the edge of the broken surface ice creeping up the windshield, a line three inches thick. Above it was blue sky, below it gray death. As the vehicle tilted ever more forward and downward, Marlee’s weight shifted with it, and Stephen’s stance, precarious at best, shifted as well. He tried to resettle himself, to find firm footing in the rising water, but his boots kept slipping from under him. He managed to keep Marlee’s head above water, but it took all his strength, every ounce of it just for that.

He understood, in a moment that came to him with absolute clarity and a kind of high-voltage shock, that he could not save her. He still might be able to save himself by climbing out the window he’d broken, but in order to do that, he would have to abandon Marlee.

He wrapped his left arm around her body and held her up as best he could. With his right hand, he lifted her chin to keep it
above the rising waterline. The cold rose around them both, like painful concrete, paralyzing him.

“I’m sorry, Marlee,” he said and realized that he was crying.

Still, he didn’t let go.

He felt hands cup themselves under his arms, and heard a gruff voice command, “Hang on to her, boy.”

Then he was being lifted, and Marlee with him, because he did as he was told and held fast to her. He was pulled out through the window into the icy air and sunlight that gave no heat.

“You grab him, Wes. I got the girl.”

Stephen felt Marlee being tugged away from him, but he didn’t release his grip.

“Boy, you want to kill us all you keep ahold of her. Otherwise let go, and we’ll all get out of this alive.”

Stephen let go. He was pulled—dragged really—off the tilting 4Runner and across a couple of dozen feet of solid ice.

“She alive?” he heard the gruff voice say.

“Breathing,” came the reply, a voice nearly as rugged.

“Let’s get ’em into the truck, or this cold’ll kill ’em for sure. Can you stand, boy?”

Stephen nodded and felt himself yanked to his feet. He stayed upright, although with some difficulty, and watched two big men—hell, they were gorillas—pick up Marlee and carry her off the ice toward a black crew-cab pickup parked at the edge of the lake. He stumbled after them. They laid Marlee on the backseat and covered her with a green wool blanket.

“Call 911, Wes,” said the man whose voice Stephen had heard first. He spoke through a brown beard stained with tobacco juice. “Tell ’em we’ll meet ’em at the junction with Highway One. Tell ’em five minutes.”

“Squeeze in, kid,” the man named Wes said. He nodded toward the backseat where Marlee lay. “It’s warm in the truck.” Then he whipped a cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and punched in three numbers.

A
ccording to Wes and Randy Studemeyer, they were on their way back from visiting a friend on the rez, Jackie LeTourneau. They said they’d come around the bend and had seen the vehicle on the ice. It was already starting to break through when they pulled to the side of the road and did “what, hell, anybody’d do.” No, they hadn’t seen the green, mud-spattered pickup that Stephen had said was the cause of Marlee’s panicked driving. When they arrived, the road was empty.

Cork knew the Studemeyer brothers and figured it was likely that their visit to the Iron Lake Reservation had nothing to do with LeTourneau and everything to do with ice fishing in an area of the lake reserved, through treaty rights, solely for use by the Ojibwe. But he didn’t bother challenging their story. He was just immensely grateful that the guys who’d come upon the scene had been two men whose genes had possibly been mixed with the DNA of mountain gorillas, two men who didn’t think twice about putting themselves at risk doing something that Cork wasn’t sure “hell, anybody’d do,” two bushy-faced men who, from the icy maw of the hungry lake, had plucked alive his son and Marlee Daychild. He told them that as long as there was a bar in town that tapped a keg, the beer was on him. He’d make sure every barkeep in Aurora knew this.

Sheriff Marsha Dross also questioned the Studemeyer brothers and also chose not to challenge their story of the reason for their visit to the rez. She let them go with her personal thanks, and the two men left the Aurora Community Hospital, heading, Cork figured, to a local saloon to take him up on his offer.

Stephen sat in the waiting area of the emergency room. Stella Daychild sat beside him. They both looked beat to hell. Stephen’s hand was wrapped in gauze. In shattering the window, he hadn’t broken anything, but there’d been some laceration and bruising. He’d been given pain medication, but Cork could tell that the injury still hurt him pretty bad, although Stephen said nothing about it.

They were doing a CT scan of Marlee’s head. She’d regained consciousness in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. She had feeling everywhere—mostly pain—and could move all her fingers and toes, but the ER doctor, a young Egyptian-looking gentleman named Moussa, wanted to be certain there hadn’t been a serious brain injury. Stephen hadn’t been allowed to see her yet, and he sat staring at the hospital floor tiles, idly rubbing his bandaged right hand with his good left hand. His father had brought him a dry change of clothing—jeans, a red T-shirt, a hooded black sweatshirt, clean underwear, socks, a pair of beat-up Reeboks. He’d also brought Stephen’s old leather jacket, which wasn’t as warm as the parka that had been soaked in the lake, but it was better than nothing.

Dross dragged a blue vinyl waiting room chair close to Stella and sat down.

“It appears that whoever killed your dog may be intent on doing more serious harm, Ms. Daychild.”

Stella said quietly, “Duh.”

“Does the description of the truck that followed your daughter and Stephen ring any bells for you? Does it sound familiar at all?”

Stella laid her head back against the waiting room wall. “An
old mud-spattered pickup. Jesus, that sounds like most of the trucks on the rez.”

“Stephen says it was pale green,” Cork told her.

Stella’s eyes lit up. “Green? A green pickup? Like the one that followed me to the rez?”

Dross said, “Tell me about that.”

Stella repeated the story she’d told Cork, of the man with the mole on his cheek and the crazy look in his eyes and the truck that had tailed her a month earlier.

“But nothing’s happened in the meantime?” Dross said.

“Yeah. Dexter got his head cut off.”

“I mean nothing specifically connecting you with the man at the casino or the green pickup.”

Stella said, “Not until today.”

Dross shifted her attention to Stephen for a moment. “And you didn’t get a license plate number?”

Stephen squeezed his lips together, a gesture, Cork knew, of frustration with himself. “No. But that’s because the front plate was blocked by a plow blade.”

“And you didn’t get a good look at the person who was driving?”

Stephen shook his head. “The sun on the windshield was kind of blinding.”

“You didn’t see it before you got onto County Sixteen, heading toward Allouette?”

Stephen hesitated a fraction of a second, and Cork wondered what that pause, though barely noticeable, was all about. “No,” Stephen said.

“Is it possible,” Dross began, “that what happened with your dog wasn’t about you, Ms. Daychild, but about Marlee?”

“What do you mean?”

“Teenagers’ emotions run high. Has Marlee recently broken off a relationship with someone?”

“No. At least, not that I know of.” She looked at Stephen. “Has she?”

Stephen considered a moment, a deeply serious look on his face. Finally he shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

“Why would someone have followed me if this was about Marlee all along?”

The waiting room door opened, and a nurse stepped in. She glanced around the room. Whoever she was seeking, it wasn’t one of them. She turned and left.

“Stephen, I want you to think over very carefully what I’m about to say. All right?” Dross said.

“Sure.”

“Are you certain the truck was actually following you? That that was the intention of the driver? And even if it was, was the accident actually caused by anything the driver did? Did the driver take aggressive action to make Marlee go off the road onto the ice?”

Stephen seemed to do as she asked, mulled over her questions awhile before offering anything in response. When he did, he said, “The truck was following us. I know that for sure. Marlee slowed down to let it pass, but it wouldn’t.” His eyes spent another few seconds crawling the wall on the other side of the room, then skated across the floor. “But did it cause the accident? I guess I’d have to say we went off the road because Marlee freaked and hit the gas and right after that we skidded on road ice.”

“What difference does it make?” Stella said. “The creep was on her tail. And when the kids went off the road, what does he do? He gets the hell out of there, leaves them to drown in the lake. Looks pretty cut and dried to me.”

“I know it looks that way,” Dross said. “I’m just trying to examine the incident from every possible angle, so that we don’t overlook anything.”

“Right,” Stella said without conviction.

Dross said, “Cork, could I talk to you outside?”

He’d been standing, leaning against the wall. Now he pushed himself away and walked ahead of the sheriff through the door and into the hallway.