William Krueger: Tamarack County

“You didn’t hear anything along with the barking? Or after? A snowmobile maybe?”

“Nothing.”

Marlee was crying again, very softly. Stephen turned from his father, went back to her on the sofa, and put his arm around her.

“It’ll be okay,” he said gently.

“No, it won’t,” she said. “It will never be all right.”

“I’m going to have a look,” his father said.

“I’ll go with you.”

Stephen started to get up, but Marlee grabbed his arm. “I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“And I don’t want to be alone either.”

Stephen looked to his father, who said, “Why don’t you stay here? How do I find the dog?”

“In back, there’s a trail through the trees to the lake. Just follow our tracks. Thanks, Dad.”

His father opened the door, then turned back. “Keep this locked.”

Alone again with Marlee, Stephen thought, not for the first time, how the night had not gone at all as he’d imagined. He was glad his father had come, but he was also, to his own surprise, resentful. He wished he’d had the presence of mind, the experience, the knowledge to have handled this on his own. He wondered how he must look in Marlee’s eyes, running to his father for help.

But she laid her head on his shoulder and whispered, “Thank you,” and Stephen felt better, felt necessary.

* * *

Cork found the trail and followed it west toward Iron Lake. He’d taken the Maglite from his Land Rover and had no trouble seeing his way. The sky was clear, with a vast splatter of stars, and the quarter moon perched among the bare branches of the birch trees like a silver vulture. Except for Cork’s footsteps crunching through the snow cover, the night was quiet. Far away in the direction of Allouette, the largest town on the Iron Lake Reservation, he could hear the whine of a snowmobile, which reminded him of the irritating buzz of a mosquito.

He broke from the trees, and the beam of his Maglite followed the clear line of tracks left by Marlee and Stephen and, before them, the dog. The tracks headed directly onto the lake ice, which in some places, the wind had blown clean of snow and in others had piled it in drifts, like a capricious child. Winter had already been long and the temperatures so consistently in the single digits or lower that he didn’t worry about breaking through the ice.

Ten yards out from the shoreline, he found the dog. It was a large animal, shaggy, with cocoa-colored spots on a dirty white background. Its paws were big as dust mitts. Its head was missing. The snow and ice all around it were splashed with its blood. Cork knelt and studied the body. He found no wounds, except for the amputation, which had been a ragged, hurried job. In the way of his thinking, of his imagining as a result of a lifetime of criminal investigation, he tried to reconstruct how it happened. The barking: the dog had seen its killer. The quiet: the dog had been placated. The yelp: the dog had been attacked, most probably its throat cut. The silence: the dog was dead and was being decapitated. Cork wondered about the placation. He scoured the area with his flashlight beam and discovered a raw steak half-buried under kicked-up snow. He searched in an arc and didn’t find what he was looking for next, which was the dog’s head. He did find two sets of tracks, one leading in to shore from farther out on the lake, and the other returning along that same line. He followed the tracks.

They led him to the closest of the cluster of small islands known to the Ojibwe as Maangwag and to the white population as the Loons. Same name, different languages. The tracks ended at a spot where a snowmobile had been parked. Whoever rode the machine had climbed back onto it, spun it in a tight arc, and headed southwest, toward the glow on the horizon that rose from the town of Aurora.

* * *

When Cork returned, Stephen stood to meet him and asked, “You found him?”

“Yeah,” Cork said.

“Aren’t dogs supposed to be, like, suspicious of strangers?” Marlee said, not really speaking to anyone.

“Assuming it was a stranger,” Cork said. “Whoever it was, they used a piece of steak to entice Dexter.”

“Probably wouldn’t have mattered,” she said, hopelessly. “That big, dumb dog, he was just so friendly with everyone. Why would anyone do something like that?”

“I don’t know, Marlee. Have you called your mom?”

She nodded. “They had to get someone to cover for her. She said she’d be here as soon as she could.”

“That was a good question Marlee asked,” Stephen said. “Why would someone do something like that?”

Cork could have told him about sick people like Charles Devine, but he chose instead to say, “The world is full of human beings you won’t understand. They’ll do things you find outrageous, repugnant, incomprehensible. But you know, Stephen, it’s been my experience that, more often than not, in their own twisted minds, they see themselves as the good guys.”

They heard a vehicle drive up and park. A moment later the door opened, and Stella Daychild came in. She threw off her quilted parka and let it fall on the floor by the door. She went immediately to her daughter on the couch and put her arms around Marlee and held her tightly.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s been an awful night, Mom.” Once again, Marlee was shedding tears.

“I know, I know.”

“Mom, they killed Dexter.”

“Shhh,” Stella said. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” She looked up at Cork. “Thanks for being here.” Then her eyes shifted to Stephen. “And thank you, Stephen.”

Cork’s son shrugged. “You’re welcome, Stella.”

Stella? Cork thought. Not Mrs. Daychild?

Marlee drew away from her mother and wiped her eyes. “What are we going to do? How do we tell Uncle Ray Jay?”

“We’ll figure that out. Let’s just take this one step at a time. I need a cigarette, sweetheart. Cork and I are going to step outside while I smoke. Okay?”

Marlee nodded and looked at Stephen. “Will you sit with me?”

Stephen seemed more than happy to oblige.

From the smell of the house, Cork figured Stella Daychild wasn’t averse to smoking inside. Maybe she did need a cigarette, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t the point of asking him to join her on the front porch. They both donned their parkas and stepped outside. Stella dug a pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket along with a Bic lighter. She tapped out a cigarette, put it between her lips, flicked a flame, inhaled, and sent a great plume of smoke toward the stars. She held the pack out to Cork, but he declined with a shake of his head.

Although he didn’t know all the details, he knew that Stella Daychild had not had an easy life. But unlike many women who’d had it tough, she didn’t seem to have the broken, jagged edges that, in Cork’s experience, so often came with the territory of abandonment and adversity. She’d been a beauty when she was young, and she was lovely still. She had the broad face and high cheeks of the Ojibwe. Her skin was the color of honey on wheat bread, her hair as dark as a raven’s wing and worn long. She’d been born and raised on the rez, by parents who were addicted to alcohol and seemed to love the bottle more than they did their children. She and her two brothers had been taken and placed in foster homes, a series of them. Stella had eventually been adopted by one of the families but had grown up wild. At sixteen, she’d run away and headed to the Twin Cities. This part of her life, Cork knew nothing about. When the Chippewa Grand Casino had opened south of Aurora, Stella, who was in her mid-twenties by then, returned to the rez a single mother with two young children. She came because there was work at the casino and because she wanted to reconnect with her relations and her roots and to raise her children in Tamarack County. That was ten years ago. She’d worked steadily at the casino, and it seemed to Cork that she’d done a pretty good job where her children were concerned. Her son, Hector, was making her proud as a Marine. And because Marlee had been employed at Sam’s Place the previous summer, Cork knew that she was smart and responsible, and he liked her. He didn’t mind at all that she and Stephen “were talking.”