William Krueger - Tamarack County

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.”

“Thanks, Marsha.”

Cork turned to the questioning faces of his daughters and began the long explanation.

That night, Henry Meloux returned to Tamarack County.

Cork, Anne, and Skye were still at the Aurora Community Hospital, waiting for the doctors to make a decision about when to operate on Stephen, who had not yet regained consciousness. Jenny had taken Waaboo home and put him to bed. Marsha Dross had given Deputy Reese Weber the job of standing guard at the O’Connor house, while she and the rest of the department tried to find Walter Frogg.

Soon after Cork had arrived at the hospital, one of the physicians, a doctor who said he was a hospitalist, had come to the waiting room. He’d shown Cork an X-ray of Stephen’s spine and explained that two bullets had entered Cork’s son. One had passed completely through his body, doing minimal damage.

“I was concerned that a bowel might have been nicked as the bullet traversed,” the hospitalist had said, “but the CT scan showed no fluid leakage. So at the moment, I believe that, in terms of that wound, we’re dealing with nothing that routine surgery won’t repair. The other bullet, however, apparently ricocheted off one of Stephen’s ribs and has become lodged in his spinal column. Here.” The doctor had pointed to a place on the X-ray. “Between the L-four and L-five vertebrae.”

Cork could see clearly the white bone image of the lumbar vertebrae and, nested between them, the small shape of the bullet, like a tick feeding on his son’s backbone. To remove the bullet, the doctor had explained, required more expertise than anyone at the community hospital possessed. He’d made arrangements to have Stephen airlifted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, which was a good Level II trauma center and where there were excellent surgeons who could perform this procedure. The hospitalist also told him that, in removing Stephen from the water and administering CPR, Deputy Pender may have exacerbated the situation, lodged the bullet more precariously against Stephen’s spinal cord.