William Krueger: Tamarack County

“Yeah. Annie volunteered to make it.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

Jenny finished putting the coffee together, flipped the brew switch, and sat at the table with her brother. In a lot of respects, she reminded him of their mother. She looked like her, for one thing. The same almost white blond hair and glacier blue eyes. Their mother had been an attorney, driven in many ways, and Jenny, though gentler about it, was like that, too. Because their father was often distracted by a case, she’d more or less taken charge of Sam’s Place during its months of operation, and even after they’d shuttered the serving windows of the old Quonset hut at the end of the season, she was still making plans for renovations in the spring and concocting schemes for attracting additional business. But she’d graduated from college with a degree in journalism, and her real dream was to be a writer. Winters were good for her and for feeding that ambition, because there weren’t so many demands on her time. Although raising Waaboo was her greatest joy, every spare moment she could steal for herself was devoted to her scribbling. Her brother believed in her, believed that one day she would realize her ambition. But that was something Stephen hoped for everyone who dreamed.

“Has she talked to you?” Jenny asked.

“About why she’s leaving the sisters? Not a word. You?”

“No.”

“It must be pretty bad. Maybe she stole the Pope’s rosary or something.”

Before Jenny could reply, the door opened and their father came in. The sun had set, and the light outside had turned a cold steel blue. The bitter chill of the day poured off him, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees. He looked beat, but he smiled at them as he shrugged out of his parka.

“Smells good in here. Mac and cheese?”

Stephen closed his laptop and slid it to the side. “Yep.”

Cork hung the parka beside the door and began to unlace his boots. “Good work, guy.”

“Annie’s work,” Stephen said.

His father kicked off his boots. “Probably good to put her back into the rotation. But this doesn’t let you off the hook in the future, buddy.”

“That’s a big ten-four, Dad.”

He unsnapped his snowmobile bibs, slipped them off, and folded them and laid them over his boots on the floor. “Where is she?”

“In her room.”

Although it wasn’t really her room. Her room had been turned into the nursery for Waaboo. Anne was staying in the attic, which had been converted into a bedroom long ago when their aunt Rose had lived with them and had been like a second mother. Rose was married and living in Evanston, Illinois, and now the attic served as the official guest room.

Stephen’s father stood with his eyes turned upward. “Has she said anything?”

“About why?” Stephen asked.

“Yeah.”

“Nope.”

His father breathed deeply and gave a nod. “Okay. Everything in its time, I guess.”

Jenny said, “Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

Their father shook his head. “Not a sign of her.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s certainly not good. Beyond that, I don’t know. Listen, I won’t be joining you for dinner. I’m meeting Marsha at the Four Seasons.”

“Cop talk?” Jenny asked.

“She’s under a lot of stress. I’m hoping she’ll relax a little, and maybe together we can figure another way of looking at this situation. Maybe there’s something we haven’t thought of. Anyway, I’m going upstairs to clean up.”

“Quietly,” Jenny cautioned. “Waaboo’s napping. He played his little heart out this afternoon.”

Their father left the kitchen. When he was well out of earshot, Stephen said quietly, “Marsha?”

“Don’t read anything into it,” Jenny said. “Your hormones may be raging, but Dad? He just loves cop talk and a good steak.”

Marsha Dross wore jeans and a rust-colored turtleneck. At forty-two, she was more than a decade younger than Cork, and there were already a few noticeable lines on her face-a furrow between her brows when she was deep in thought or frowning, crow’s-feet when she squinted at the sun, two wrinkles that were like parentheses around her mouth when she smiled. Her eyes were dark, a blue that was almost black. She was nearly Cork’s height, and her hair, in its color, was very similar to his, though much thicker. For years, she’d worn it short, so that from a distance, in uniform, she might have been mistaken for Cork. Because of this similarity in appearance, she’d once taken a bullet meant for him, a wound that had nearly killed her and had ended any hope she might have of ever bearing a child. She liked a good steak, single-malt scotch, and once upon a time, line dancing. As far as Cork knew, she didn’t dance anymore.

When Cork arrived at the Four Seasons, she was already into a scotch. She’d been seated at a table near a window that overlooked the marina behind the hotel. There were no masts to see, only the empty moorings. Far out on the frozen lake stood a little village of ice fishing houses. Although the shanties themselves were lost in the dark, Cork could see tiny squares of light from the lantern glow through the windows of those that were occupied.

“Better?” he asked as he sat and nodded toward her glass of scotch.

“I still need a steak in me,” she said.

As soon as Cork sat down, a waitress approached, a redhead whose once sharp curves had been softened by the years. “Hey, Cork. How are you?”

“Tired and hungry, Julie. You could start me off with a Leinie’s Dark.”

“Coming right up. You doing okay, Marsha?”

“Fine, Julie. Thanks.”

They spent a few minutes on small talk. She said she’d heard Anne was home. Cork said yes, and it was good to have her. That was all he said, and he knew that because he didn’t elaborate Marsha would let the subject drop. She did. He asked about her father, whom he knew, though not well, a retired cop living in Rochester. She told him he was fine but bored, then she went quiet and her eyes drifted across the dining room, which because it was a Friday evening, was quite full. Cork knew where her head was.

“Can’t let her go, even for a few minutes,” he said.

“Who?” she asked.

“Evelyn Carter.”

She shrugged. “I keep going over things.”

“What things?”

She settled into her seat, hands locked around her scotch glass, and leaned toward him. “Yesterday, Father Green told me that he’d talked to her in town earlier that evening and had seen her leave for home. He said she looked very tired. So, I keep turning over the possibility that something went wrong physically, a stroke that affected her thinking, and that she wandered off into the woods.”

“A reasonable possibility.”

“Like you said out there today, why didn’t the dogs pick up her trail?”

“They’re not infallible, especially in the conditions they’ve had to work in.”

“In which case, we won’t find her until the snow melts in the spring, and then only by luck.”

“But you’re thinking that’s not it,” Cork said.

“There are only two possibilities. She’s out there or she isn’t.”

“And you’re thinking she isn’t.”

She said, as if it irritated her no end, “I keep coming back to the possibility of an abduction.”

“Did Azevedo come up with anything on Charles Devine?”

“Devine’s still in the supermax at Oak Park Heights.”

“So you think it could be someone else, someone who just stumbled onto Evelyn out on the Old Babbitt Road and for the hell of it picked her up and-what?”

“Not all people like Devine are behind bars.”