Bledsoe stripped off his gloves and wrapped his hands around the warm cup. He closed his eyes to savor the coffee as it coursed down his throat. “Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Cork said.
“Lot of ground to cover.” Bledsoe handed the cup back and glanced north where the wilderness stretched all the way to Canada. “It’s a shame, nice girl like her, something like this.” He dug beneath his parka and brought out a pack of Chesterfields and Zippo lighter. He offered a cigarette to Cork, who declined. He lit up, took a deep breath, and exhaled a great white cloud of smoke and wet breath. He put his gloves back on and let the cigarette dangle from the corner of his mouth. Nodding toward the sky in the west, he said, “You hear what’s coming in? If that girl didn’t have bad luck, she’d have no luck at all.”
Cork heard the squawk of his radio and picked it up.
“Base to all units. It’s official. We’ve got us a blizzard on the doorstep. A real ass kicker, looks like. Come on in. Sheriff says he doesn’t want anyone else lost out there.”
Cork listened as one by one the other units acknowledged.
“Unit Three. Unit Four. Did you copy? Over.”
“This is Unit Three. Bledsoe’s with me. We copy, Patsy. But listen. I still haven’t checked Hat Lake. I’d like to have a quick look before I head back.”
“Negative, Cork. Sheriff says turn around now. He’s pulling in the dogs and air search, too. Weather service says it’s not a storm to mess with.”
“Is Wally there?”
“He won’t tell you anything different.”
“Put him on.”
Cork waited.
“Schanno, here. This better be good.”
Cork could see him, Sheriff Wally Schanno. Grim, harried. With a missing girl, a whale of a blizzard, and a recalcitrant ex-sheriff on his hands.
“I’m just shy of Hat Lake, Wally. I’m going to check it out before I turn back.”
“The hell you are. Have you taken a good look behind you?”
Glancing back to the west, toward the cloud bank that was now looming high above the tree line, Cork knew time was short.
“It would be a shame to come this far and not make it that last mile.”
“Bring yourself in. That’s an order.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t? Fire me? I’m a volunteer.”
“You want to stay on Search and Rescue, you’ll come back now. You read me, Unit Three?”
“Loud and clear, Sheriff.”
“Good. I expect to see you shortly. Base out.”
Schanno sounded weary deep down in his soul. Cork knew that the sheriff would turn away from the radio to face the family of the missing girl, having just reduced significantly the chances of finding her alive. For Cork, being out there in the cold and the snow with a blizzard at his back was infinitely preferable to what Sheriff Wally Schanno had to deal with. Once again, he was exceedingly glad that the badge he himself had once worn was now pinned to the chest of another man.
“Guess that about does it,” Oliver Bledsoe said.
“I’m going to check Hat Lake.”
“You heard the sheriff.”
“I’ve got to know, Ollie.”
Bledsoe nodded. “You want a hand?”
“No. You go on back. I won’t be more than half an hour behind you.”
“Schanno’ll skin you alive.”
“I’ll take my chances with Wally.”
Cork climbed onto the seat, kicked the engine over, and shot east in a roar of sparkling powder.
He hated snowmobiles. Hated the noise, a desecration of the silence of the deep woods that was to him a beauty so profound it felt sacred. Hated the kind of people snowmobiling brought, people who looked at the woods as they would an amusement park, just another diversion in the never-ending battle against boredom. Hated the ease with which the machines allowed access to a wilderness that could swallow the ignorant and unwary without a trace. The only value he could see in a snowmobile was that it allowed him, in a situation like this, to cover a large area quickly.
By the time he reached Hat Lake, the dark wall of cloud behind him stretched north and south from horizon to horizon, completely blotting out the late afternoon sun. The sight gave Cork chills that had nothing to do with the temperature. He found no sign of a snowmobile on the trail that circled the lake. Exactly what he’d suspected, but he wanted to be certain. The wind rose at his back. He watched ghosts of snow swirl up and pirouette across the lake ice. Except for the dancing snow and the trees as they bent to the rising wind, nothing moved. Not one flicker of life across the whole, frigid face of that land.
Published 2005
* * *
Back in uniform as the sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork O’Connor is devastated when a sniper’s bullet meant for him fells one of his deputies instead. Bent on tracking down the shooter, he pays little attention as his own wife becomes the target of another man’s attentions. Structurally, this is the most experimental novel in my series, and is the first of a two-book story arc, which is completed in Copper River, the book that follows.
* * *
CHARACTERS INTRODUCED
DINA WILLNER: An attractive and dangerous security consultant from Chicago, hired to help solve a murder in Tamarack County.
MARSHA DROSS: The first female deputy sheriff in Tamarack County.
LOUIS JACOBY: A wealthy, connected man from Chicago, whose youngest son is murdered in Tamarack County.
BEN JACOBY: Louis’s elder son, a mysterious figure whose past is intermingled with Cork’s in unpleasant ways.
BYRON ST. ONGE (STONE): A man for whom killing is second nature.
AN EXCERPT FROM MERCY FALLS
She woke naked on the bed, in a room she didn’t recognize, her mind as clear of memory as the sky outside her window was of clouds. A huge pillow that smelled faintly of lavender cradled her head. She was too warm and drew back the covers so that she lay exposed on the white sheet like a delicacy on a china plate.
She tried to sit up, far too quickly, and the room spun. A minute later, she tried again, this time rising gradually until she could see the whole of the great bedroom. The bed itself was a four-poster with a canopy. The armoire a few feet distant was the color of maple syrup and carved with ornate scrolling. On the walls, in elegant, gilt-edged frames, hung oil paintings of Mediterranean scenes, mostly with boats and angry, blue-black seas. The magnificent red of the Persian rug matched the thick drapes drawn back to let in the morning light. None of this was familiar to her. But there was one detail that struck a welcome chord: an explosion of daisies in a yellow vase on the vanity. Daisies, she remembered, had always been her favorite flowers.
A clean, white terry cloth robe had been neatly laid out at the foot of the bed, but she ignored it. She walked to the daisies and touched one of the blossoms. Something about the fragility of the petals touched her in return and made her sad in a way that felt like grieving.
For whom? she wondered, trying to nudge aside the veil that, at the moment, hung between her perception and all her understanding. Then a thought occurred to her. The birds. Maybe that was it. She was grieving for all the dead birds.
Her eyes lifted to the vanity mirror. In the reflection there, she saw the bruises on her body. One on her left breast above her nipple, another on the inside of her right thigh, oval-shaped, both of them, looking very much like the blue ghosts of tooth marks.
As she reached down and gingerly touched the tender skin, she heard firecrackers go off outside her window, two of them. Only two? she thought. What kind of celebration was that?
She put on the robe, went to the door, and opened it. Stepping out, she found herself in a long hallway with closed doors on either side, her only companions several tall standing plants that were spaced between the rooms like mute guardians. At each end of the hall, leaded windows with beveled glass let in enough daylight to give the emptiness a sense of benign well-being that she somehow knew was false. She crept do
wn the hallway, listening for the slightest sound, feeling the deep nap of the carpet crush under the soles of her bare feet. At last she reached a staircase that wound to the lower level. She followed the lazy spiral unsteadily, her hand holding to the railing for balance, leaving moist fingerprints on the polished wood that vanished a moment after her passing.
She stood at the bottom of the stairway, uncertain which way to turn. To her right, a large room with a baby grand piano at its center, a brick fireplace, a sofa and loveseat of chocolate brown leather. To her left, a dining room with a huge crystal chandelier and a table large enough for a banquet. Sunlight from a long window cleaved the table, and in the bright gleam sat another vase full of daisies. Drawn by the smell of freshly brewed coffee, she moved through the dining room to the opened door of the kitchen beyond.
A carafe of orange juice sat on the counter near the sink, and next to it a glass, poured and waiting. The smell of the coffee came from a French-press coffeemaker that sat on a large butcher-block island. An empty cup and saucer had been placed on the block, as if she were expected. A book lay there, too, opened to a page that began, I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly in the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams.
The sliding glass door that overlooked the veranda was drawn back, letting in the morning air, and she walked across the cool black and white kitchen tiles to the doorway. From there, she could see the back of the estate with its pool set into the lawn like a piece of cut turquoise. Beyond was the blue-gray sweep of a great body of water that collided at the horizon with a cornflower sky. Beside the pool stood a man in a yellow windbreaker with the hood pulled up. Although she couldn’t see his face, there was something familiar in his stance. She stepped outside, not bothering to slide the door closed behind her.
It was a chilly morning. The cold marble of the veranda made her feet ache, but she paid no attention, because something else had caught her eye. A crimson billow staining the blue water. She descended the steps and followed a limestone walk to the apron of the pool.
The body lay on the bottom, except for the arms, which floated free, lifted slightly as if in supplication. The swimming trunks were white, the skin tanned. She couldn’t see the wounds, only the blood that leaked from somewhere underneath, gradually tinting the turquoise water a deep rose.
The standing man turned his head slowly, as if it were difficult, painful even, for him to look away from death. The sun was at his back, his face shadowed, a gun in his hand.
She recognized him, and the thought of what he’d just done pulled her heart out of her chest.
“Oh, Cork, no,” she whispered.
When he heard his name, his hard, dark eyes grew soft. Corcoran O’Connor stared at his wife, at her clean robe, her bare feet, her hair still mussed from a night she barely remembered.
“Jo,” he said, “I came to bring you home.”
Published 2006
* * *
The novel that completes the story begun in Mercy Falls. Wounded and hiding out in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Cork O’Connor must evade the hired killers still on his trail while trying to solve the mystery of a murdered adolescent runaway. I consider this the first novel in which I set out to explore deeply a social issue important to me—the question of what happens to the children we close our doors against, who become homeless and, eventually, the targets of the worst kinds of predators.
* * *
CHARACTERS INTRODUCED
JEWELL DUBOIS: Cork O’Connor’s cousin, a veterinarian and widow living with her son in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
REN DUBOIS: Jewell’s fourteen-year-old son.
CHARLENE (CHARLIE) MILLER: A tomboy who leads a troubled life and is Ren’s best friend.
NED HODDER: Constable of Bodine, Michigan, a man who writes poetry and guards well the dark secrets of his little town.
AN EXCERPT FROM COPPER RIVER
Henry Meloux, the old Ojibwe Mide, might tell the story this way.
He might begin by saying that the earth is alive, that all things on it—water, air, plants, rocks, even dead trees—have spirit. In the absence of wind, the grass still trembles. On days when the clouds are dense as gray wool, flowers still understand how to track the sun. Trees, when they bend, whisper to one another. In such a community of spirits, nothing goes unnoticed. Would not the forest, therefore, know that a child is about to die?
She is fourteen years, nine months, twenty-seven days old. She has never had a period, never had a boyfriend, never even had a real date. She has never eaten in a restaurant more formal than McDonald’s. She has never seen a city larger than Marquette, Michigan.
She cannot remember a night when she wasn’t awakened by nightmares, some dreamed, many horribly real. She cannot remember a day she was happy, although she has always been hopeful that she might find happiness, discover it like a diamond in the dust at her feet. Through all the horror of her life, she has, miraculously, held to that someone waits for her and worries, a place she has never been.
Until now.
Now, though she is only fourteen, she is about to die. And she knows it.
Somewhere among the trees below her, the man she calls Scorpio is coming for her.
She cringes behind a pile of brush in the middle of a clear-cut hillside studded with stumps like gravestones. The morning sun has just climbed above the tops of the poplar trees that outline the clearing. The chill bite of autumn is in the air. From where she crouches high on the hill, she can see the gleam of Lake Superior miles to the north. The great inland sea beckons, and she imagines sailing away on all that empty blue, alone on a boat taking her toward a place where someone waits for her and worries, a place she has never been.
She shivers violently. Before fleeing, she grabbed a thin brown blanket, which she wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet are bare, gone numb in the long, cold night. They bleed, wounded during her flight through the woods, but she no longer feels any pain. They’ve become stones at the end of her ankles.
In the trees far below, a dog barks, cracking the morning calm. The girl focuses on a place two hundred yards distant where, half an hour earlier, she’d emerged from the forest and started to climb the logged-over hillside. An hour after dawn, Scorpio’s dog had begun baying. When she heard the hungry sound, she knew he’d got hold of her scent. What little hope she’d held to melted instantly. After that, it was a frantic run trying to stay ahead.
Scorpio steps from the shadow of the trees. He’s like a whip, thin and cruel and electric in the sunlight. She can see the glint off the blue barrel of the rifle he cradles. Snatch, his black-and-tan German shepherd, pads before him, nose to the earth, tracking her through the graveyard of stumps. Scorpio scans the hillside above. She thinks she can see him smile, a gash of white.
There is no sense in hiding now. In a few minutes, Scorpio will be on her. Grasshopper quick, she pops from the blind of brush and sprints toward the hilltop. Her senseless feet thud against the hard earth. She lets the blanket fall to the ground, leaves it behind her. Starved for sunlight, the skin of her face and arms looks bleached. Beneath her thin, dirty T-shirt her breasts are barely formed, but the small, fleshy mounds rise and fall dramatically as she sucks air in desperate gasps. Behind her, the dog begins a furious barking. He has seen the prey.
She crests the hill and comes to a dead end. Before her the ground falls away, a sheer drop two hundred feet to a river that’s a rush of white water between jagged rocks. There is no place left to run. She casts a frenzied eye back. Scorpio lopes toward her with Snatch in the lead. To her left and right, there is only the ragged lip of the cut across the hill.
Only one way for her to go now: down.
The face of the cliff below is a rugged profile offering handholds and small ledges. There are also tufts of brush that cling tenaciously to the stone, rooted in tiny fissures. She spies a shelf ten feet below, barely wider than her foot, but it is enough.
She kneels and lowers herself over the edge. Clinging to the brush and the rough knobs of stone that punctuate the cliff, she begins her descent.
The rock scrapes her skin, leaves her arms bleeding. Her toes stretch for a foothold but, numbed, feel almost nothing. Weakened by an ordeal that has gone on longer than she can remember, her strength threatens to fail her, but she does not give up. She has never given up. Whatever the horror in front of her, she has always faced it and pushed ahead. This moment is no different. She wills a place to stand. Her feet find support, a few inches of flat rock on which she eases herself down.
“Come on, sweet thing. Come on back up.”
Scorpio’s voice is reasonable, almost comforting. She lifts her face. He’s smiling, bone-white teeth between thin, bloodless lips. Beside him, the dog snarls and snaps, foam dripping from his purple gums.
“Hush!” Scorpio orders. “Sit.”
Snatch obeys.
“Come on, now. Time to end this foolishness.”
He lays down his rifle, bends low, and offers his hand.
In the quiet while she considers, she presses herself to the cliff where the stone still holds the cold of night. She can hear far below the hiss and roiling of the white water.
“We’ll go back to the cabin,” Scorpio says. “Have a little breakfast. Bet you’re hungry. Now, doesn’t that sound better than running over these woods, ruining those pretty little feet, freezing your ass off?”
He bends lower. His outstretched hand pushes nearer, a hand that has offered only humiliation and pain. On his wrist is a tattoo, a large black scorpion, the reason for the name she has given him in her thinking. She eyes his hairy knuckles, then looks into his face, which at the moment appears deceptively human.
“Think about it. You find a place to perch on that cliff, then what? It’s not so bad out here right now. Sun’s up, air’s calm. But tonight it’ll be close to freezing. That means you, too. You want to freeze to death? Hell, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll just leave old Snatch here to make sure you don’t climb back up, go get me some rope, and come down there to get you. But I guarantee if I have to do that, I won’t be in a forgiving mood. So what do you say?”