Tamarack County (3 page)

They went a quarter of a mile, then Dross had them turn back and regroup at the Buick. Azevedo and Pender were already there with no good news. The deputies joined the others, and everyone entered the woods to the north.

The wind was stronger now, and even in the protection among the trees, the snow moved like something alive. Cork found himself thinking about another search he’d been a part of many years earlier, when a young woman named Charlotte
Kane had gone out on a snowmobile on New Year’s Eve and never come back. The search had been hindered by a blizzard that had roared out of the Dakotas, and Cork had been caught in it, caught in a whiteout, and might have become lost himself except that he’d been guided by a presence that had remained hidden in the storm, something or someone he’d never been able to identify but who’d shown him the way. When Cork was a boy, an old friend named Sam Winter Moon had once told him that there were more things in the forest than a man could ever see with his eyes, more things than he could ever hope to understand. It was a piece of wisdom that, as a grown man, Cork believed absolutely.

Charlotte Kane’s body hadn’t been found until the snow had begun to melt the following spring. And it had been clear that a force of nature hadn’t claimed her. Charlotte Kane had been murdered.

As he made his way carefully through the woods with the full weight of the storm muscling against him, Cork said a silent prayer for Evelyn Carter, prayed that she’d be found, found soon and found alive.

They came to a clearing, where the wind, unhindered, lifted and blew the snow into an impenetrable wall. They paused before moving forward, regrouped so that no one was out of sight of anyone, and then they went ahead. They hadn’t gone far when Azevedo let out a shout.

“Found something!” came his voice above the wind.

They all moved his way. In the flood of the beams from the lights, they saw what the deputy had found. It was an elongated mounding of snow, but there was more to it than that. The dynamics of the wind had produced an oddity. The snow on the lee side had drifted, creating a smooth downslope, but on the windward side, a small section of what lay on the ground was blown nearly clear. Beneath the thin white of the snow layer that remained, they could see the red stain of blood, the blue-white marbling of flayed flesh, and the dark maroon of spilled entrails, all the result of recent, brutal evisceration.

C
ork arrived home well after midnight. Stephen was still up, sitting on the sofa in the living room, texting on his cell phone. Trixie was asleep at his feet. Cork stood in the kitchen doorway, exhausted and cold to the bone, staring at his son, who seemed oblivious to his presence.

“School day tomorrow,” Cork said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

Stephen looked up suddenly, caught by surprise. “Just a sec, Dad,” he said, finished his text message, and laid the phone down next to him on the sofa cushion.

“Marlee?” Cork asked.

Stephen looked chagrined. “Marlee.”

Stephen had been seeing a good deal of Marlee Daychild lately. Cork wasn’t certain what the status of their relationship actually was, but in Stephen’s parlance they were “just, you know, talking.”

“She has school tomorrow, too,” Cork said. “You both need your sleep.”

Stephen didn’t respond to that directly. He’d become adept lately at detouring a conversation when it wasn’t going in a way advantageous to him. He said, “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

The truth was that Cork wanted to talk with someone, it was already well past time for Stephen to be in bed, and a few more
minutes wouldn’t matter, so he said, “Let’s go into the kitchen. I need to eat something.”

Trixie roused herself, stretched, and trotted along behind them. She went directly to her water bowl near the side door and lapped awhile.

Cork went to the coffeemaker. The pot still held enough for one cup of cold brew. He got a mug from the cupboard, filled it from the pot, put it in the microwave to heat, then turned back to Stephen, who’d sat at the table with his cell phone in easy reach.

“So,” Cork said, leaning his butt against the counter and crossing his arms over his chest, “did Annie tell you why she’s leaving the sisters?”

Stephen’s eyes went wide, his whole face a momentary bloom of surprise. He recovered quickly and said, “What makes you think she’s leaving?”

“She’s home too early. She’s clearly in emotional distress. She won’t talk to me about it. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t kill anybody. Am I wrong?”

Stephen considered a moment. “I should let Annie tell you.”

“So I’m right,” Cork said. “Has she told you why?”

Stephen seemed to realize denial was useless. He shrugged. “She hasn’t told me or Jenny. She just said that she’s decided not to stay with the sisters. She’s pretty torn up about it. Don’t tell her I told you, okay?”

“We’re good,” Cork said.

The microwave beeped. Cork took out the hot mug, grabbed the cookie jar from the counter, and brought these things to the table. He lifted the lid of the jar, pulled out two chocolate chip cookies, and slid one across the table to his son.

Stephen took the cookie and repeated his earlier question. “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

Before Cork could answer, Jenny stepped into the kitchen. She wore a white chenille robe and fluffy white slippers, and her hair was mussed from sleep.

“Thought I heard you guys,” she said.

She came to the table and sat down next to Stephen. Cork plucked a cookie from the jar and handed it to her.

“Any coffee left?” she asked with a yawn.

“I killed the pot,” Cork said.

From the kitchen doorway, Anne said, “I could make another.”

Cork let out a dramatic sigh. “Doesn’t anybody in this house ever sleep?”

“Waaboo,” Jenny said. “He sleeps like a dream.”

“Anybody else hungry?” Stephen piped up.

Cork said, “The truth is I’m famished.”

“I’ll make us some eggs,” Anne offered and went to the refrigerator. “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

Cork took a sip of his coffee, then lowered his mug. He meant to set it gently on the tabletop, but the cold and fatigue weighed heavily on all his muscles, and the mug went down with a startling bang.

“Sorry,” he said. “No, we didn’t. All we found was a yearling deer that looked like it had been brought down by wolves. No sign at all of Evelyn.”

“Will they try with rescue dogs?” Jenny asked.

“Already did. Gratz brought out two of his best. They picked up nothing.”

“No scent?”

“That’s right. Nothing at all leading away from her car.”

“What does it mean?”

“The conditions were difficult, lots of wind, so that might have been the reason,” Cork said. “But Gratz insists his air dogs are good enough that shouldn’t be a problem. So the only thing that seems to make sense is somebody stopped and picked her up.”

Jenny said, “In which case, she’d be home by now.”

“That would be the assumption. But clearly incorrect. When Marsha called an end to the search tonight, Evelyn still hadn’t come home. The Judge was pretty insistent that we keep looking.”

“Will you?”

“We’d still be out there right now, but the storm’s officially a blizzard. We lost Able Breen for a while, and when we finally found him, Marsha didn’t want to risk losing anybody else. We’ll go out again first thing in the morning, but the storm will have covered up everything by then. We’ve already searched the most logical areas, so I don’t know where else we’ll sweep.”

“What about a helicopter or something?” Stephen suggested.

Which was how he and Cork had searched for Stephen’s mother when she, too, had gone missing in a snowstorm. In the end, the helicopter hadn’t made any difference.

“That’s a good idea, and Marsha’s already on it,” Cork told him. “The Forest Service is loaning us one of their Bells and also a De Havilland Beaver. They’ll join us tomorrow, provided this storm has broken.”

Jenny propped an elbow on the tabletop and rested her chin on her fist. She frowned. “Was Evelyn’s car stuck in the snow?”

He shook his head. “Out of gas.”

“On the Old Babbitt Road? What was she doing out there on a night like this?”

“Question of the day. And it gets even curiouser,” Cork said. “She filled up her tank yesterday and, according to the Judge, hasn’t really gone anywhere since. That Buick of hers probably holds twenty gallons.”

“So she covered a lot of ground tonight,” Jenny said.

“It certainly appears that way. One speculation is that she was disoriented for some reason. Just drove and drove until the gas was gone.”

Stephen said, “Disoriented why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a stroke or something.”

“Prescription drugs?” Jenny offered. “Some kind of bad reaction?”

“Possibly,” Cork said.

“Where all did you search?” Stephen asked.

Anne had the eggs going in a frying pan, along with several
precooked link sausages. The smell intensified Cork’s hunger to the point of distraction. He was dead tired and didn’t want to go over all the details of the failed search again, so he said, “Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay? I’m bushed.”

Stephen’s cell phone chimed.

Jenny gave him a playful nudge with her elbow. “Marlee?”

“Tell her good night,” Cork said firmly.

They ate the eggs Anne had scrambled and the sausage and talked about Christmas and Christmases past, and by the time they turned out the lights and went to bed, it was very late. Cork was exhausted. It had been an unusual night, Anne mysteriously home too early and a good woman mysteriously gone, but as he settled gratefully into bed, with all his children gathered around him in his house once again, he found himself unusually happy.

T
hey regrouped at sunrise in the parking lot of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Every man who’d been there the night before was there again, and more. A number of women showed up, too, because Evelyn Carter had been well liked in Aurora, and also deeply pitied for having lived her life under the loveless eye of a man like the Judge. While they drank steaming coffee from thermoses and talked among themselves, there were some grumbled speculations that Evelyn might simply have had enough of the old bastard and given herself over to a frigid and purposeful end.

The sky was searing blue, wiped absolutely clean of clouds. In the heavens, there was no hint of the weather that had battered the North Country for much of the night. The storm had moved south and east and was creating havoc all across Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan. But with the clear sky had come plummeting temperatures. In Tamarack County, the predicted high for the day was one below.

Those who owned them had hauled their snowmobiles on trailers, anticipating that the dangerous temperature and the deepened snow and the long time lapse since Evelyn’s disappearance all added up to the need for a wider and more mechanized approach to the search. Sheriff Marsha Dross had a different idea. She thanked everyone for coming but directed those who
were not officially a part of the Sheriff’s Department or Tamarack County Search and Rescue to return to their homes. They went but not happily. Then she explained her thinking and her intent to those who remained.

The Old Babbitt Road had been plowed regularly since the snows began weeks earlier and was like a little canyon walled on both sides by three-foot mounds of snow. It would have taken a significant effort to mount one of those walls and walk off into the woods. Unless Evelyn Carter intended to lose herself that way, it made more sense, despite the fact that Gratz’s dogs had found no scent, that she’d left the car and followed the road. How far she might have been able to walk in the storm was anyone’s guess. So their plan was to search the road in both directions, looking for any sign of the woman—a dropped article of clothing perhaps, or a mounding that stood out against the regular contour of the snowbanks and that might indicate a body beneath. Four snowmobiles would work in each direction, two on the road and two along the shoulders beyond the banked snow. The helicopter and the De Havilland Beaver provided by the Forest Service would fly a grid around the area of her car, then up the road and back down, keeping low and searching for anything farther afield. Gratz had brought several dogs, one of them a cadaver dog, and would be working the area as well.

Cork had never been fond of snowmobiles. He understood their attraction, but he believed anything that made that much noise in the woods didn’t belong there. Still, he owned one, a Bearcat 570, which he’d finally purchased for two reasons. The first was for his volunteer work with Tamarack County Search and Rescue. The second was to be able to get quickly out to the cabin of his good friend, the very aged Ojibwe Henry Meloux, should Henry need help in the long winter months.

Gratz, Dross, and Azevedo went ahead to the place where Evelyn Carter’s car had been found. Gratz didn’t want a lot of people around to confuse the scents while his dogs tried once again to pick up any trail Evelyn might have left. The others split into two
teams and headed toward opposite ends of the Old Babbitt Road. Cork was with the group that would come in from the north. They began at a crossroad nearly ten miles from the parked car and slowly made their way south. Cork took the shoulder on the far side of the snowbank that edged the west side of the road. The storm had dropped nearly a foot of snow, and sunlight came off that clean white powder in a blinding glare. He wore tinted goggles. He had on a ski mask, Klim snowmobile pants, a Canada Goose down parka, mitts made of moose leather with wool liners, two layers of socks, and good Sorel boots, and after an hour he was still cold everywhere. As the snowmobile cut over the rugged terrain and broke through drifts, he thought Search and Rescue would be lucky to find Evelyn at all, and if they did, what they would bring back to Aurora would be her frozen corpse.

They checked every branch off the road, most of which were narrow lanes that led to private cabins or small resorts, all of them closed for the winter. They found no sign of Evelyn, no indication at any of the buildings that she’d managed to make it that far and had tried to break in for shelter. They reached her car a few minutes behind the group who’d come from the south. That bunch had also arrived empty-handed. The chopper and plane had spotted nothing, and the dogs, once again, had picked up no scent. Gratz had walked his cadaver dog, a German shepherd named Violet, along the road a couple of miles in both directions, to no avail.