Tamarack County (25 page)

“I’ll only dip a moment,” he told her.

He walked barefooted through the deep snow that lay between the sweat lodge and the lake, his body trailing steam in the frigid air. Not far to the east, a small stream fed into Iron Lake. It issued from the ground very near to the shoreline, ran only a short distance, and was called Half-Mile Creek. Because the stream maintained its temperature over that brief run, it didn’t freeze, even in the most bitter of winters. Where it spilled into the lake, there was always a half circle of open water twenty yards across.

The bottom was sandy there, the water crystal clear. When Stephen waded in, the cold of the lake gripped him, as if trying to squeeze the life from him. He plunged himself under and felt the cold wring from his body the lethargy caused by the heat in that first round of sweating. He drank the water, and a fine, refreshing chill ran all the way through him.

By the time he returned to the sweat lodge, he was shivering. Anne had placed the Grandfathers on the coals of the fire, and she had two warmed blankets waiting for him. She wrapped him in these and offered him dry wool socks for his feet and a wool cap, and they sat together in the afternoon sunlight and talked while the Grandfathers heated for the next round of sweating.

Anne said, “I’ve read of certain monks who mortify themselves daily by bathing in ice water.”

“Daily?” Stephen shook his head. “Whatever floats your boat. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“I don’t think I’m strong enough. I also think it’s misguided.”

“Why?”

“I think the divine is in the everyday.” She was silent a moment, staring into the fire, which popped and crackled and sent
hot sparks flying onto the snow, where they died in little hisses. With a tired sigh, she added, “And there’s enough pain just in living.”

The sun was low and directly behind Anne. Stephen had to squint whenever he looked directly at his sister. She sounded so defeated, so lost, that he felt his heart squeeze as if it had taken its own plunge in ice water.

“You seemed so happy when you left to join the order,” he said.

“I was. And mostly I’ve been happy. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I was happy when I was sure it was what I wanted.”

“But now there’s Skye.”

“And now I understand the full measure of what I might be giving up, Stephen.” She pulled a piece of loose bark from one of the logs they’d brought to feed the fire and tossed it into the flames, which consumed it greedily. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

“How would you feel if you gave it all up for her? Would that make you happy, Annie?”

“I don’t know.” She took a deep breath. “Probably not.”

“If she really loved you, wouldn’t she understand what she’s asking you to do?”

“She understands, Stephen. And she’s not being selfish in this. She wants me to be happy as much as you do.”

“And she thinks she’s the way.”

Anne looked up at the cloudless blue of the sky. “Maybe she is. Who knows?” She laughed and glanced at her brother. “Hell, maybe I should do a sweat. Maybe the answer would come to me.”

“Or maybe it’ll come to me,” Stephen said and offered her a smile. “Maybe I’ll get a twofer out of this one. I think the Grandfathers are ready.”

He lifted the stones with the tines of the pitchfork, and Anne brushed them clean of embers. He settled them one by one in
the pit in the center of the lodge. When they were all inside, he backed out, dropped the entrance flap, and turned to his sister. He found her eyeing a wooded island far out in the frozen lake.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I thought I saw something.”

“What kind of something?”

“An animal.”

“It’s the Northwoods. We have lots of animals here.”

“Actually, I thought it might be a person.”

“We have those, too,” Stephen said. He was chilling quickly. “I need to get inside the lodge, Annie. You might as well go back to the cabin.”

“Half an hour?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be back.” She leaned and kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”

Stephen shed the blankets he’d draped about himself, and Anne put them near the fire to heat. He gave her the wool cap and wool socks, and she set these next to the blankets, then she headed away. He took the pan of melted snow, which had been sitting at the edge of the fire, and crawled back into the sweat lodge. He’d left his tobacco pouch on the blanket inside. He took a pinch, sprinkled it over the Grandfathers in an offering, said a prayer to the Great Mystery, doused the stones with water, and let the steam rise up around him. Then he settled in to wait for what might come.

C
ecil LaPointe was sitting up in bed in the prison infirmary. Cork hadn’t seen him in more than twenty years, not since the man had been convicted of the murder of Karyn Bowen, sentenced, and transported downstate to Stillwater. What Cork remembered from that time was a young man of average height, raven hair, a handsome Indian face—high cheekbones, prominent nose, irises the color of cherrywood—who’d accepted his punishment with all the emotion of an ice sculpture. The man in the prison infirmary was hollowed, old before his time, his face full of gray shallows, his limbs thin and brittle looking. He breathed with difficulty and with an audible wheeze. Still, there was something in his eyes that was not like his body, a fullness of concentration in the way he watched Cork and Dross and the warden as they entered, something that spoke of a strength not tied to his failing flesh.

“It’s been a long time, Cork,” LaPointe said.

He extended his hand, and Cork came to his bedside and took it. LaPointe’s skin was parchment thin.

“Otter,” Cork said. He hadn’t meant to use that old moniker, but for some reason it seemed right.

LaPointe smiled. “I haven’t been called that in years. I always liked the name. Back then, I thought it fit pretty well.”

“Thank you for seeing us,” Cork said.

“When the warden explained your situation to me, I couldn’t say no.” His eyes moved to Dross. “You’re the sheriff up there now?”

“Marsha Dross,” she said and shook the hand he offered.

“A female sheriff,” he said with an approving nod. “Tamarack County has clearly become enlightened. I’d ask you to sit down, but as you can see, our space here is a little limited. Also, I tire easily, so we’d best do this as quickly as possible.”

Cork said, “Mesothelioma, we’ve been told.”

LaPointe nodded. “My father worked in the Thetford mines in Canada. Asbestos. He brought home that poison on his clothing every night. Our house was filled with it. He died fifteen years ago. I’ll be joining him soon enough. But you’re here to talk about other things.”

“You know about what’s happened in Tamarack County?”

“I’ve been told that Evelyn is missing and that a bloodied knife has been found in the garage of her home. Her home and the Judge’s.”

Cork was surprised that when LaPointe spoke that last name there was no enmity in it.

LaPointe asked, “Do you believe the Judge has harmed her?”

“That’s a possibility,” Dross replied. “But other things have occurred that make me think something else may be going on.”

She explained to LaPointe all the pertinent recent events in Tamarack County. The man listened intently, his brown eyes tired but filled, Cork thought, with genuine concern.

When Dross finished, LaPointe asked, “How can I help you?”

Cork said, “Otter, tell us about Evelyn Carter.”

“We were lovers,” the man replied without any hesitation. “Briefly. It happened just before I began seeing Karyn Bowen.”

“How did it come about?”

“The same way it came about with Karyn. Evelyn brought her car into the garage to be repaired. She may have been fifty, but let me tell you, she looked good behind the wheel. I talked with her, fixed the car, offered her some advice, and tossed her a
line. I was a brash kid. I did that a lot in those days. She caught it, and things developed from there. She was such a lonely woman, and I took advantage of that. Still, it was nice for a while, for both of us.”

“The Judge knew?” Dross asked.

“I didn’t think so. Not then.”

“I spoke with the Judge’s daughter,” Dross said. “She told me that, in fact, her father did know about her mother’s affair.”

“When I saw Evelyn a few days ago, she told me the same thing.”

He coughed, coughed a bit more, then lapsed into a fit of coughing. He held a white washcloth to his mouth and, at the end of the spasm, folded in it whatever his lungs had expelled. He took a long time to get his breath back and to continue.

“Are you all right, Cecil?” the warden asked.

He nodded, managed a faint smile, and said, “Evelyn told me that was why she cut off the affair so abruptly and without ever giving me any idea that the end was coming. She stopped calling, stopped coming by the truck stop. I saw her occasionally after that, maybe driving down the street, but she never looked at me. I figured she’d had the fling with an exotic Indian and was done. When she visited me last week, it was to apologize for having wronged me. She said she was getting ready to leave her husband, to leave Minnesota for good, and she wanted to make amends.”

“Wronged you how?”

“For giving the Judge reason to want me here.” He indicated the infirmary and, by extension, the prison.

“And reason to ensure that Ray Jay Wakemup never told anyone else the truth about that night with Karyn Bowen,” Dross said.

Cork added, “And reason to make certain the parole board never set you free.”

“At first,” LaPointe said. “Then being released became unnecessary.”

“Why?” Cork asked.

“White Eagle began to speak to me. I found my life, found it here behind stone walls and iron bars. For the first time I could ever remember, I felt free. What White Eagle helped me understand is that freedom has nothing to do with walls or bars or chains. It isn’t out there. It’s here.” He raised his hand and touched his forehead. “And it’s here.” His hand went to his heart. “I came to see that I had purpose, and it was to help those who, like me, would spend their lives looking up at the same small patch of sky every day. With White Eagle’s guidance, I’ve tried to offer another way of responding to life in prison, this prison or any other.”

“Prisons not made of stone, you mean,” Gilman said.

“See?” LaPointe indicated the warden with a gentle wave of his hand. “You sow the seeds of truth, and you never know where they’ll take root.”

Cork said, “So you’re fine with life here. That’s why you’ve continued to insist that you were guilty of killing Karyn Bowen, even after Wakemup came forward with the truth?”

“No one will ever know the truth of that night, Cork. If I didn’t kill that young woman myself, I was certainly guilty of bringing her into the situation. And think about this. If a general turns and runs in the heat of battle, what does that say to those he’s led? I have so little time left it doesn’t matter to me where I spend it. But it would matter to those who remain behind, incarcerated, and who believe in what I say, who’ve found hope in what I’ve passed on from White Eagle. I don’t want my case revisited. I don’t need the kind of freedom a court might offer me.”

Dross said, “I’m wondering if the incidents in Tamarack County may be because one of those who believe in you has taken it into his head to avenge you. Is that possible?”

LaPointe looked at her, his brown eyes unblinking. “The spirit of a man long dead speaks to me. Who am I to say something’s impossible? But I’ll say this. If someone has taken to
heart what I try to teach, then the kinds of things going on in Tamarack County shouldn’t be part of their actions. I teach acceptance, not revenge. I teach peace, not violence. But I don’t control what goes on in the White Eagle Societies all over the country. I never had a part in creating them. They’re on their own in how they interpret my teachings and how they respond.” This last was spoken with great difficulty. He seemed exhausted and laid his head back against his pillow.

“I think you have what you came for,” the warden said. “It’s probably best we let Cecil rest.”

“Thank you,” Dross said to LaPointe.

Cork took the man’s hand, preparing to leave. “Thank you, Otter. I’m sorry for the part I played in putting you here. I simply didn’t know the truth.”

“To blame you for anything would be pointless,” LaPointe replied. “Our lives are shaped as they were always meant to be, and everyone we meet has a hand in that work. What you did, you were always meant to do. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here, and it’s been a good place for me. So I thank you.”

Cork tried to let go of LaPointe’s hand, but the dying man refused to release his grip. Instead, he said, “It seems to me that, in the end, there are very few reasons to kill. The strongest, I think, is love, because it can be twisted in ways unimaginable. There’s a man who believes he loves me. A man whose heart is very twisted.”

A
sweat was about many things: cleansing, healing, connecting, understanding, accepting. To unfamiliar eyes, it might seem a simple ritual; it was anything but. A good sweat demanded a respect for the nature of the process, which required patience, focus, endurance, and vulnerability. A good sweat could be cathartic and enlightening. A great sweat could be transcendent.

Stephen hoped for a good, enlightening sweat. What he received was, in its way, transcendent.

He’d chanted prayers, sweated until the blanket under him had become drenched, lost track of time, gone into a darkness not of his own making, and had emerged, at last, in a landscape that was alien to his experience. It was a barren, unnatural place, not constructed of earth or even of stone but of concrete. There were no trees, no flowers, no grass, nothing underfoot but black asphalt and nothing rising around him but gray walls. Above was an empty sky, not just cloudless but bereft of spirit, and that patch of sky was confined within a false horizon created by the gray walls. The air was not the air of Tamarack County, which even in winter, was fragrant with the perfume of pine. What Stephen breathed was the foul odor of pain, fear, distrust, loneliness, and anger. Especially anger.