William Krueger: Tamarack County

Too late, she saw, in the glare of the headlights, the flash of the knife arcing upward to meet her. The blade, large and sharp and made for gutting deer, sliced easily through her fox-fur-trimmed coat and lodged deep in her belly, where the ice-cold steel quickly warmed. And although she was probably too stunned to speak, maybe with a final bewilderment in a life that she’d never really understood anyway, she looked into the face she knew well and asked herself the unanswerable question: Why?

That Christmas, Anne O’Connor came home early.

Cork was working in his office in the back of Sam’s Place, his burger joint housed in a Quonset hut on the edge of Aurora, along the shoreline of Iron Lake. She walked in unannounced. When he heard the door open, he figured it was Jenny bringing Waaboo to see his grandfather, or maybe Stephen, although it was too early for his son to be out of school yet. Anne standing there surprised him.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, rising from the table where he had documents scattered. “Didn’t expect you for another week.”

She was shouldering a backpack, and her hair and dark blue peacoat were dusted with snow. She smiled as Cork came to her, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that told him she was happy. He hugged her, felt the chill of that December day on her coat and hair and face.

With her still in his arms, he asked, “How’d you get here?”

“I walked from Pflugleman’s.” Which was the drugstore that doubled as a bus depot in Aurora.

“You should have called.”

“I tried home. No answer,” she said.

He felt her wanting to pull free, and he let her go.

“Jenny and Waaboo are in Duluth for the afternoon,” he told her. “Christmas shopping. They should be home anytime now. You could have called me here.”

She let the pack slide from her shoulder to the floor of the old Quonset hut. “I’ve been on a bus for two days. It felt good to walk.”

“Take your coat off,” he said. “Sit down. Would you like some coffee?”

“Thanks, Dad.”

She hung her peacoat on one of the wall pegs near the door and took a chair at the table.

The Quonset hut was divided into two parts. The front housed Sam’s Place, which he operated from the first of May until mid-November, more or less, and from which he served the best burgers in the North Country. The back was a kind of living area and office space for his work as a private investigator. It had a little kitchen, a bathroom, a table with chairs, a couch that made into a bed for those nights when he worked late. On a small desk in one of the corners, he kept a computer with an Internet connection.

He went to the kitchen counter, where there was still half a pot of hot coffee, and took a mug from the cupboard. As he poured, he studied his younger daughter.

When she was growing up, Anne had two dreams. One was to be the first female quarterback for the Fighting Irish. The other was to become a nun. She never played for Notre Dame, but as she sometimes put it, she was working hard to make the God squad. After early graduation from St. Ansgar College, she’d been accepted as a pre-affiliate by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an order well known for its activism in issues related to justice and peace. She’d spent six months working at St. Bonaventure, an Indian mission and school in Thoreau, New Mexico, while she prayed and meditated on her calling. Last summer, she’d been accepted for affiliation and had gone to San Jose, California, to have the experience of the religious community located there and to learn more about the mission and spirit of the sisters as she continued to prepare for the novitiate. The whole O’Connor family was looking forward to seeing her at Christmas. And now here she was, early. But Cork wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

“Still take it black, Annie?”

She nodded, wordless, which was unlike her.

He brought her the mug, moved some papers to clear a space, and set it down. She just looked at it.

Anne had always reminded her father of a leather bootlace-lithe, slender, tough. That dream of hers to become a quarterback for Notre Dame? If she’d really wanted to pursue it, Cork knew absolutely that she’d have given it one hell of a good shot. She had red hair, which she’d begun keeping closely cropped. Every year, by summer’s end, her face was a field of freckles. She had light brown eyes that could be the softest things you’d ever gazed into or, when she was angry or fired up, could be hard as flint. At that moment, staring into her coffee mug, they just looked lost.

Cork took the chair he’d been sitting in before she arrived. “So,” he said. “They let you leave early? Time off for good behavior?”

Anne didn’t smile. She didn’t lift her eyes either, just shifted them to the papers that littered the table. “A case?”

He nodded, but didn’t explain. “Everything okay?” he asked instead.

Then he simply waited. One of the things Cork had learned in his days of interviewing suspects was that silence alone could often get what a dozen questions couldn’t.

Anne, apparently, knew the same thing. Probably she’d heard her father say it at the dinner table when she was a kid. Cork was always surprised to find that his children actually listened to what he said. She finally looked up at him. “I’m not ready to talk about it.”

When she was younger, he might have pushed her more, used his authority as her father to pry from her the secret of whatever was clearly troubling her. But she was a grown woman now, twenty-three, and her life and the secrets that life held were her own. Although he couldn’t put aside his concern, he stuffed his questions away, at least for the moment.

He reached out and put his hand over hers. “It’s good to have you home.”

* * *

It was full dark by the time Jenny and Waaboo came home. Cork had begun to worry just a little because the snow, which had been falling lightly and intermittently during much of the day, had become an honest to God storm. He was at the house on Gooseberry Lane and had dinner going, chili, one of the things he knew how to make without much fear of disaster. As night had drawn on and the snowfall had become heavier, he’d found himself peering out the kitchen window more and more frequently. He was relieved when the lights of Jenny’s Subaru finally swung into the drive.

They came in a couple of minutes later, little Waaboo in the lead. He was almost two and a half years old, big and floppy-dog clumsy, always running everywhere full-bore, like a fullback. He wore a stocking cap and a thick, quilted coat, and little red sneakers. In just the time it had taken for him to walk from the garage to the house, he’d been covered with snow head to foot. He ran straight at Cork and almost knocked his grandfather over when he grabbed Cork’s legs in a hug.

“Baa-baa,” he said. He could, by then, have called Cork “Grandpa” if he’d wanted, but he liked Baa-baa, which, when he was younger, was all he could manage. His legal name was Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. His Ojibwe name was Waaboozoons, which meant little rabbit. Generally, the O’Connors simply called him Waaboo.

“Hey, big man.” Cork lifted him and could smell peanut butter and crackers on his breath.

Jenny was right behind him, closing the door against the storm. “Whoa,” she said, stamping snow onto the rug in front of the entryway. “It’s getting serious out there. This wasn’t in the forecast.”

“I was beginning to worry,” Cork told her and put Waaboo down.

“I thought about calling, but I didn’t want to pull over.” She shed her coat and hung it beside the door, then said, “Waaboo, come here, guy. Let’s get you out of those snowy things.”