Tamarack County (2 page)

He went to the kitchen counter, where there was still half a pot of hot coffee, and took a mug from the cupboard. As he poured, he studied his younger daughter.

When she was growing up, Anne had two dreams. One was to be the first female quarterback for the Fighting Irish. The other was to become a nun. She never played for Notre Dame, but as she sometimes put it, she was working hard to make the God squad. After early graduation from St. Ansgar College, she’d been accepted as a pre-affiliate by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an order well known for its activism in issues related to justice and peace. She’d spent six months working at St. Bonaventure, an Indian mission and school in Thoreau, New Mexico, while she prayed and meditated on her calling. Last summer, she’d been accepted for affiliation and had gone to San Jose, California, to have the experience of the religious
community located there and to learn more about the mission and spirit of the sisters as she continued to prepare for the novitiate. The whole O’Connor family was looking forward to seeing her at Christmas. And now here she was, early. But Cork wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

“Still take it black, Annie?”

She nodded, wordless, which was unlike her.

He brought her the mug, moved some papers to clear a space, and set it down. She just looked at it.

Anne had always reminded her father of a leather bootlace—lithe, slender, tough. That dream of hers to become a quarterback for Notre Dame? If she’d really wanted to pursue it, Cork knew absolutely that she’d have given it one hell of a good shot. She had red hair, which she’d begun keeping closely cropped. Every year, by summer’s end, her face was a field of freckles. She had light brown eyes that could be the softest things you’d ever gazed into or, when she was angry or fired up, could be hard as flint. At that moment, staring into her coffee mug, they just looked lost.

Cork took the chair he’d been sitting in before she arrived. “So,” he said. “They let you leave early? Time off for good behavior?”

Anne didn’t smile. She didn’t lift her eyes either, just shifted them to the papers that littered the table. “A case?”

He nodded, but didn’t explain. “Everything okay?” he asked instead.

Then he simply waited. One of the things Cork had learned in his days of interviewing suspects was that silence alone could often get what a dozen questions couldn’t.

Anne, apparently, knew the same thing. Probably she’d heard her father say it at the dinner table when she was a kid. Cork was always surprised to find that his children actually listened to what he said. She finally looked up at him. “I’m not ready to talk about it.”

When she was younger, he might have pushed her more, used his authority as her father to pry from her the secret of
whatever was clearly troubling her. But she was a grown woman now, twenty-three, and her life and the secrets that life held were her own. Although he couldn’t put aside his concern, he stuffed his questions away, at least for the moment.

He reached out and put his hand over hers. “It’s good to have you home.”

*  *  *

It was full dark by the time Jenny and Waaboo came home. Cork had begun to worry just a little because the snow, which had been falling lightly and intermittently during much of the day, had become an honest to God storm. He was at the house on Gooseberry Lane and had dinner going, chili, one of the things he knew how to make without much fear of disaster. As night had drawn on and the snowfall had become heavier, he’d found himself peering out the kitchen window more and more frequently. He was relieved when the lights of Jenny’s Subaru finally swung into the drive.

They came in a couple of minutes later, little Waaboo in the lead. He was almost two and a half years old, big and floppy-dog clumsy, always running everywhere full-bore, like a fullback. He wore a stocking cap and a thick, quilted coat, and little red sneakers. In just the time it had taken for him to walk from the garage to the house, he’d been covered with snow head to foot. He ran straight at Cork and almost knocked his grandfather over when he grabbed Cork’s legs in a hug.

“Baa-baa,” he said. He could, by then, have called Cork “Grandpa” if he’d wanted, but he liked Baa-baa, which, when he was younger, was all he could manage. His legal name was Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. His Ojibwe name was Waaboozoons, which meant little rabbit. Generally, the O’Connors simply called him Waaboo.

“Hey, big man.” Cork lifted him and could smell peanut butter and crackers on his breath.

Jenny was right behind him, closing the door against the storm. “Whoa,” she said, stamping snow onto the rug in front of the entryway. “It’s getting serious out there. This wasn’t in the forecast.”

“I was beginning to worry,” Cork told her and put Waaboo down.

“I thought about calling, but I didn’t want to pull over.” She shed her coat and hung it beside the door, then said, “Waaboo, come here, guy. Let’s get you out of those snowy things.”

He barreled back to her. She caught him up and, as she removed the outer layers, said, “Where’s Stephen?”

“Took Trixie for a walk. With Annie.”

“Anne? She’s home?”

Cork went back to the stove to stir the chili.

“Wonderful,” she said. When her father didn’t immediately agree, she looked up from unzipping Waaboo’s coat. “Isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t want to talk about it yet. To me anyway. I’m sure you’ll know what’s up before I do.”

They ate dinner around the table in the dining room. It felt a lot like the old days, when the kids were younger and their mother was still alive, except that Anne was noticeably quiet. Nobody pressed her. After dinner, she and Jenny volunteered to do the dishes while Stephen finished his homework. Cork gave Waaboo a bath and got him ready for bed. He sat with his grandson on his lap in the rocking chair in Waaboo’s room and read
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
three times. Then Jenny stepped in and took it from there.

Downstairs, Stephen and Anne were talking quietly at the kitchen table, the cookie jar between them and each with a tumbler of milk. They shut up when Cork came in, and he figured they were discussing whatever it was that had caused Anne to come home early and that she was reluctant—or maybe afraid—to tell him. Cork didn’t think of himself as an ogre, but he knew he could come on too strong sometimes. And the kids had always been close. So it didn’t surprise him that Anne would have
confided in them already while she figured out how to spill to her father whatever it was that weighed on her. But that didn’t mean he liked being left out in the cold.

“Can I join you?” he asked.

“Sure,” Anne said. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

At last,
Cork thought and reached for a chair.

Before he could sit down, the phone on the kitchen counter rang. He answered it with “O’Connors.”

“Cork, it’s Marsha Dross.”

The Tamarack County sheriff.

“Hey, Marsha, what’s up?”

“I’m calling out Search and Rescue. We’ve got a woman missing in this storm.”

“Who?”

“Evelyn Carter. She was supposed to be home several hours ago. Didn’t show. A snowmobiler found her car abandoned over on the Old Babbitt Road. No sign of Evelyn. We’re going out looking.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He hung up and turned back to the kitchen table. “I’ve got to go.”

“What’s up, Dad?” Stephen asked.

“Evelyn Carter’s lost out there in that storm. The sheriff wants Search and Rescue on it.”

And that’s when Cork understood that something was really wrong in Anne’s world. Because normally she would have been concerned about this woman they all knew and would have promised to pray for Evelyn’s safety and well-being. As it was, she simply stared at her father and looked greatly relieved to have him gone.

T
here was a poem by Robert Frost, the only poet whose work Cork really got, which talked about the debate over whether the world would end in fire or in ice. In Minnesota, in late December, folks usually hoped for fire.

It wasn’t end-of-the-world cold, not yet, but they were dressed for it, those who’d responded to the call from Sheriff Dross. They gathered five miles outside Aurora, on the Old Babbitt Road. It was rural, narrow, a winding track through alternating stands of thick pine and poplar. There were some good-size hills in the area, slopes of exposed rock almost as old as the earth itself. No illumination, not even starlight on that snow-blown night. It was like being locked inside a deep freeze, and if Evelyn Carter was out there somewhere, Cork didn’t hold out a lot of hope for her.

Her car had been pulled to the side of the road, the keys still in the ignition. The gas gauge read empty. Dross had Deputy George Azevedo try to start the big Buick. Nothing. Bone dry. Why, on a night like that, Evelyn Carter had driven an automobile without sufficient fuel down a godforsaken road, no one at the scene had a clue. Nor did the Judge, who was at home but in communication with Dross. Where the Judge was concerned, communication usually meant listening to him rant, and Cork could tell from Dross’s end of her cell phone conversation
and the expression on her face that the Judge was giving her an earful.

She ended the call and stared at the Buick. “He says she filled it up yesterday and hasn’t driven it much since. At least, not as far as he knows. He’s got no idea why she would have driven out here.”

“Lost?” Cliff Aichinger, a member of the S and R team, offered.

“Maybe,” Dross said. “Or maybe confused. She’s almost seventy.”

“Hell, that’s young,” Richard Lefebver, another team member, said. He was well into his sixties himself. “She’s still one sharp cookie.”

“My uncle had a stroke last year,” Aichinger replied. “Didn’t show anything, but he started getting lost whenever he went outside the house. Couldn’t keep track of where he was. Young guy, too, only seventy-one.”

“A possibility,” Dross said.

“Does she have a cell phone?” Cork asked.

“In her purse, which she left on the passenger seat in front.”

“She didn’t call anyone?”

“We checked it. The last call in or out was five-fifteen this evening, from her son in Albuquerque. He sent a photo of her grandson. Nothing after that.”

They stood in a cluster a good fifty yards away from the abandoned vehicle. Dross didn’t want any of the S and R team any closer, at least for the moment. She had a couple of her deputies trying to find tracks that might have been buried under the new snowfall, and she didn’t want the searchers messing up the scene with their own boot prints. There were no homes along that particular stretch of road, no summer cabins, nothing to offer the hope of shelter to an old woman lost in a storm in a gasless car.

“Any idea how long the Buick’s been here?” Cork asked.

“Adam Beyer found it almost two hours ago. He was on his snowmobile, heading toward the Vermilion Spur trailhead, a quarter mile north. He said the snow on the hood was already a
couple of inches thick, so the engine must have been cold for quite a while. If she’s wandering out there in the woods somewhere, she’s been lost a good three, maybe four hours now.”

“Could be she just took off walking down the road looking for help,” Cork suggested.

Dross shook her head. “I had Azevedo drive a fifteen-mile stretch. No sign of her. If she used most of a tank of gas and ended up out here in the middle of nowhere for no reason that anyone can discern, she’s probably disoriented, for some reason. Since she’s not on the road, my bet is that she’s stumbled into the woods or down a lane that she hoped might lead to a cabin.”

“You pulling Gratz in on this?” Cork asked.

Orville Gratz kept and trained search dogs. A number of agencies in the heavily forested North Country relied on him and the sensitive noses of his canines.

“He went to Duluth to Christmas-shop. He’s on his way back now. He’ll come as soon as he can.”

*  *  *

The wind had picked up, and in the beams of the lanterns and flashlights, the snow had begun to dance in a way that, if the situation had been less serious, might have made Cork think of sugarplum fairies. As it was, he was reminded of wraiths.

Lefebver said, “We should’ve brought our snowmobiles.”

“If she’s in these woods,” Dross said, “she probably hasn’t gone far. And if she calls out, the racket of a snowmobile will drown her voice. I want this done on foot first.”

Since Thanksgiving, plows had already mounded the snow a good three feet along the edges of the road. Beyond those ragged barriers, what lay on the ground would have reached above Evelyn Carter’s knees. In any of the deep swales common to the area, the drifted snow might easily have buried her up to her belly or chest. With the wind that had risen, if she’d fallen, the snow would have swallowed Evelyn Carter whole.

Azevedo and Deputy Pender came back down the road from the Buick. When they got to Dross, Azevedo said, “Nothing.”

“Whatever tracks there were, the snow’s filled them in and covered them,” Pender added.

“Okay,” Dross said. “Let’s begin at the car.”

There were a dozen involved in the search, most of them members of Tamarack County Search and Rescue. Dross had called the State Patrol, who’d promised a couple of troopers, but they hadn’t arrived yet. She assigned Azevedo and Pender to walking the Old Babbitt Road, checking for any sign of Evelyn along the shoulders. The rest of the men put on their snowshoes, spaced themselves about fifty feet apart, and moved into the woods to the south. They all had good lanterns or powerful flashlights and went slowly, sweeping the areas ahead of and between them. Six inches of new snow had already fallen that evening, and it was still coming down hard. In the woods, the wind wasn’t so strong, but if Evelyn Carter had stumbled and just lain there, Cork knew she could easily have been covered. So he looked not only for the woman and for her tracks but also for any unusual contour of the snow that might indicate something beneath.

They didn’t talk. As it was, the forest was alive with noises. The big wind ran through the pine trees and spruce and poplar with a sound like the rush of floodwater, and the branches creaked and groaned and scraped against one another, and it made Cork think of skeletons going at it in a free-for-all. He’d worn his down parka but kept the hood off his head so that he could hear better in case Evelyn tried to cry out.