Tamarack County (27 page)

The sound annoyed the stranger. He glanced away from Stephen and lifted his free hand, waved it at the bird, and hollered, “Shoo! Get outta here!”

The bird didn’t move. Nor did Stephen.

“Tell you what,” the stranger said. “You go on down to the lake right now and there’s no reason your sister has to be a part of this. No reason she has to be harmed. So long as you do as I say, this stays between you and me. You’ve got my word.”

Stephen hadn’t thought about Anne. Whatever the stranger planned to do, Stephen wanted his sister left out of it.

“You’ve got no time to think about it, kid,” the man said. “Do as I say or I’ll shoot you dead right here, then I’ll shoot your sister. The choice is yours.”

When it was put that way, Stephen didn’t have a choice. He said, “All right.”

They walked together, Stephen in front and the stranger at his back. The angle of the sun made their shadows seem to walk with them, mute witnesses to an execution. The crow went on with his cawing, a long, bitter complaint, and Stephen wondered if that was going to be the last sound he would hear in this life. He was grateful that he wasn’t afraid and he thought that probably this was the point of the visions, to prepare him for death at the hands of this
majimanidoo,
this angry stranger.

His body had begun to shiver violently. He’d been out of the lodge a long time. The muscles of his feet were starting to cramp from the cold. His brain was becoming thick, his thinking a little fuzzy. A sign of hypothermia, he understood. When he reached the edge of the open water, he hesitated.

“Go on in,” the stranger said.

“And then what?” Stephen’s voice came out cracked and stuttering, the result of the cold, which was eating into him, into his muscle, his brain. He kept his eyes on the silvery surface of the open water.

“I won’t shoot you, if that’s what you’re wondering,” the stranger said.

“You want me to freeze to death?”

“I need this to look like an accident. It’ll be quick, I imagine. And I’m told it’s warm at the end. You get in there now, before your sister comes back.”

Which was the leverage the stranger held.

Stephen waded in. The first time, his skin and body had been superheated in the sweat, and that had been a brief buffer against the cold of the water. This time his body had cooled, and
the lake became a huge hand that squeezed him and gave pain everywhere it touched. He could barely catch his breath, and it felt as if his heart might explode, but he kept moving.

When he was up to his waist, he turned. He was going to say something, wasn’t he? To the stranger? He couldn’t remember what. His overlong exposure to the cold air and now to the icy water was making his thinking slushy. The stranger stood on the shoreline, watching. Over his shoulder on the branch of the bare aspen tree, the crow also watched.

And behind them both, up where the meadow would be green in summer and full of wildflowers, Anne watched, too.

Stephen heard her call his name. And he saw the stranger turn toward her, the gun in his hand.

Stephen summoned all the strength and clarity left to him and shouted, “Run, Annie! Run!”

The stranger spun back to him, the gun barrel leveled.

Although Stephen felt immediately the hammer blows of the bullets as they hit his chest, he never heard the shots.

W
hen Stephen didn’t answer his cell phone, Cork tried calling Anne. She didn’t answer either. Next he tried Jenny at home. No luck there. He finally got a response when he called Jenny’s cell phone. She picked up almost immediately.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“Where are you?”

“At the Pinewood Broiler. Waaboo, Skye, and I are having a little afternoon snack here.”

“Have you heard from Annie or Stephen?”

“No. What’s going on?”

“Nothing, I hope. But as quickly as possible I want all of you together at home, okay? Marsha’s sending a deputy to meet you there.”

“And you say nothing’s going on?”

“I think someone may be trying to harm Stephen, and if he can’t get at Stephen, I’m afraid he might go for you or Annie or even Waaboo.”

“Who is he?”

“I’ll explain everything when I’m there with you. Right now, you need to get yourself and Waaboo home, is that clear?”

“We’re on our way, Dad.”

“Marsha and I are heading back to Tamarack County. It’ll take us maybe three hours. In the meantime, if you hear from Annie or Stephen, make them understand they’ve got to get home, too. Okay?”

“I’ve got it. Can Marsha send a deputy out to Crow Point?”

“She already has. Take care of yourself, kiddo, and my grandson.”

“That’s a big ten-four, Dad.”

*  *  *

They were an hour north of the Twin Cities. Cork hadn’t said a word for a very long time. Finally Dross said, “I know you. You’re beating yourself up. In silence.”

Cork looked out the window at the frozen landscape. “I should have seen the connections.”

“They’re pretty obscure, Cork.”

“You saw them.”

“Not all of them. I didn’t see the connection to you. And you were innocent in the whole affair; there’s no reason you should have seen it either. And there’s another thing, Cork.”

He waited.

She gave him a quick, sidelong glance. “You’ve been emotionally involved in this one. It might be that you just couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

Which gave him no comfort at all.

His cell phone rang. He checked the display. The call was coming from the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.

“O’Connor,” he answered.

“This is Azevedo,” the deputy on the other end said. “Cork, there’s been some trouble up on Crow Point.”

“Stephen?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What’s going on, George?”

Azevedo hesitated, let a beat filled with ominous silence pass, then said, “He’s been shot.”

Cork’s mouth went instantly dry and the breath went out of him. For a moment, he felt as if he was suffocating. His heart thumped deep in his chest and blood pulsed through his temples and a voice screamed in his head,
God, no!

“Give me all of it.” He spoke calmly even as he tried to prepare himself for the worst.

“He’s alive, Cork. He’s been taken to the ER at Aurora Community Hospital. He’s still unconscious and his condition is critical.” Again, Azevedo was silent and Cork had the sense that there was more bad to come. “When Pender pulled him from the water, Stephen wasn’t breathing.”

“From the water?”

“He was shot twice, but what stopped his breathing was the drowning.”

“Drowning?”

Azevedo went on, quickly now. “The ER doctor says the drowning was actually a good thing. Stephen’s whole system shut down, and the intense cold kept more damage from being done. Pender revived him, and the EMTs did good preliminary treatment of his wounds. He still has one of the bullets in him, and the doctors are trying to decide when it might be safe to take it out.”

“Annie,” Cork said. “What about Annie?”

“She’s okay. She was the one who put in the 911 call. But whoever it was that attacked Stephen went after your daughter, too.”

“Was she hurt?”

“Not at all. She scared him off. According to what she’s told me, she shot at the guy, and he ran.”

“Shot at him? With what?”

“She’ll tell you the whole story when you get here. Is the sheriff with you?”

Dross had been casting Cork all kinds of questioning looks but had said nothing while she concentrated on driving.

“She’s with me,” Cork said. “Behind the wheel right now.”

“Tell her to come straight to the hospital. I’ll meet you both there. And if anything changes, Cork, I’ll let you know.”

“Jenny and my grandson?”

“They’re all right. Deputy Weber’s escorting them to the hospital right now.”

“Thanks, George. Thanks a million.”

“See you soon.” With that, Azevedo ended the call.

“Hit your lights and siren, Marsha,” Cork said. “We need to get to Tamarack County.
Now
.”

*  *  *

They were all in the Intensive Care waiting area—Jenny, Waaboo, Skye. And Anne. Cork had never seen her looking so hollow, so frail, so afraid. In the O’Connor family, Anne was the iron rod of faith. She’d seen killing before, been in the middle of a brutal attack in the hallways of her high school. Even in the face of that incomprehensible slaughter, she’d held to her faith. But whatever had been so solid in her before, so powerful, seemed to have melted away. Cork took his daughter in his arms, and she laid her head against his chest and wept and wept.

When she was finally able to talk, she told him about Stephen’s sweat, about the unsuccessful rounds of trying to bring a vision, about the man who’d seemed to materialize from nowhere, and about the shooting.

“Then he came for me.” At this point, Anne stopped and broke down again.

“That’s okay,” Cork said. “Take your time.”

She wiped at her tears. “I ran, Dad. I ran like a coward.”

“If you hadn’t run, you and Stephen might not be here now,” Cork pointed out gently. “It was the wise thing to do.”

She shook her head violently. “I didn’t do it because it was wise. I did it because I was afraid.”

“You’re human, Annie.”

“The worst kind of human.”

Cork wanted to draw her away from useless recrimination. He said, “Deputy Azevedo told me you shot at the guy. How’d you manage that?”

“I knew it wouldn’t do any good to go back to Rainy’s place. There wasn’t anything there that would help me. I remembered that Henry keeps his old Remington hung on the wall of his cabin. I just hoped he hadn’t taken it with him when he left for Thunder Bay. So I ran to Henry’s cabin, and there was his rifle.”

“See?” Cork said. “You kept your head. You must have remembered where Henry stores his shells.”

She nodded. “In the carved wooden box in his cupboard. So I grabbed the Remington, dug out some rounds from the box, fed them into the magazine, and stepped into the doorway. When that guy was thirty yards away, I fired.”

“At him?” Although Anne, in her youth, had never had any interest in hunting, she’d been a pretty good competitive skeet shooter. If she’d fired at the stranger from such close range, unless she’d been completely rattled, she should have dropped him.

“Over his head,” she replied. “To scare him.”

“It worked, apparently.”

“Yeah. He ran.”

“And if he hadn’t run?”

Anne shook her head. “Maybe I would have shot him. I don’t know.”

“What did you do then?”

She told him she watched the man head back to the lake and cross the ice to an island off the point. He got onto a snowmobile and zipped back toward Aurora. Then she hurried to Rainy’s cabin, called 911 on her cell phone, and ran down to the open water on Iron Lake. Stephen wasn’t anywhere in sight. She went
into the water, trying to find him, but he was gone. And the water was so bitter cold that she couldn’t stand it for long.

That’s when Deputy Duane Pender, who’d been sent by Marsha Dross, showed up in his Cherokee. He’d reached Crow Point following the packed snowmobile trails Stephen had left in his comings and goings. Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department dispatch had been in contact with him, so he already knew the situation. Anne pointed him toward the open water, and to keep her from freezing, he told her to stay by the fire that she and Stephen had built to heat the Grandfathers. He moved along the shoreline quickly, searching from dry ground, then went out onto the ice and edged his way along the perimeter of the open water. He finally spotted Stephen’s body, most of which had drifted just under the edge of the ice shelf. He had no choice but to go in, which he did, and he pulled Stephen to shore. Stephen wasn’t breathing.

“I asked him if Stephen was dead,” Anne said. “He told me no one is dead until they’re warm and dead. He said we had to get Stephen breathing again but we also needed to keep him cold.”

Good man,
Cork thought. Because keeping Stephen cold until he was in a hospital increased the chances of mitigating the damage, from both the wounds and the drowning.

“Even standing next to the fire, I was freezing,” Anne went on. “I knew Duane had to be freezing, too, but he went ahead and began CPR there at the lakeshore. A couple of minutes later the EMTs arrived and took it from there. They put Stephen in the back of the ambulance, and Duane and I followed them.”

“Still in your wet clothes?” Cork asked.

“Yeah. But Duane had blankets in his Cherokee and he turned the heater up to blast furnace and it was nice and warm. After I got here, Jenny brought me dry things from home.” She plucked at the big red wool sweater she wore.

“Why didn’t you or Stephen answer when I called your cell phones?”

“We had them turned off. Stephen insisted on it when he got ready for his sweat. I didn’t turn it back on until I called 911, and then, I don’t know, I must’ve lost it when I went into the water after Stephen because it’s gone now.”

Waaboo sat with Skye, who was entertaining him by giving voice to Bart, which was the name Waaboo had bestowed on the stuffed orangutan Skye had brought him as a gift. That left Jenny free to talk with Cork and Anne.

“They’ve been working on Stephen since we got here, so we haven’t been able to see him,” Jenny told Cork. “As far as we know, he’s still unconscious. They told us that they have to get him stabilized before they can operate and take the bullet out of him.”

Deputy Azevedo had met them at the hospital, and he and Marsha Dross had been standing nearby while they listened to Anne’s story.

Dross said, “Annie, did you get a good look at the shooter?”

“Yes.”

Dross turned to Azevedo. “Get me a recent mug shot of Walter Frogg.”

Azevedo nodded and left.

“Walter Frogg?” Anne asked.

Cork said, “The man we think is behind all this craziness.”

“I never heard of him,” Anne said. “Why would he want to hurt Stephen?”

Dross slipped her coat on and said, “Cork, you explain. I’m going back to the department and get my guys rolling on locating Frogg.”