William Krueger - Blood Hollow

“Hey there, Custer.” Cork put out a hand and roughed the dog’s long fur. “Where’s Dot?”

“Down here,” he heard her call from beyond the end of the trees.

He found her on a flat gray rock at the water’s edge. She sat cross-legged, smoking a cigarette and sipping a can of Molson. It was nearing evening. The day had cooled and she wore a jean jacket with DOT in letters made of brass studs across the back. Her side of the lake lay in shadow. Sunlight carved an arc across the water midway out, and everything beyond that was gold.

“Come ’ere, Custer,” she called. “Come to mama.”

The dog responded, bounded onto the rock, and lay down at her side.

“Jo tried calling,” Cork explained. “Didn’t get an answer.”

“Sorry.” Dot tapped her ash into a small tin can on the rock next to her. It didn’t have a label, but it looked to Cork to be an empty tuna can. It was full of butts. “Came out here to think.”

She puffed out smoke through a little part in her lips. “I’ve sure made a mess of things.”

“You think so?” Cork said.

She was looking across the lake where the gold and the shadow met. “Always wanting to do things my way. The hell with everybody else. Folks told me a long time ago Solemn needed professional help. I don’t know, maybe he could have used a father at least, but I didn’t want to bring in some shiftless son of a bitch just to play ball with him, you know?”

“He had the next best thing to a father. He had Sam.”

“He sure could’ve used Sam these last few years. Me, too.” She snuffed out her cigarette on the rock and added the butt to the others in the can. “You find out anything?”

“I’m pretty sure they want to talk to him about Charlotte. I’d guess there’s enough evidence to suggest her death wasn’t an accident.”

She finished her beer with a long swallow, set the can upright carefully on the rock, balled her hand into a fist, and crushed the can with a single blow.

“I don’t exactly know what they have,” Cork went on, “but they’re interested in Solemn. It doesn’t look good that he’s disappeared.”

Dot picked up a pack of Salem Lights that lay beside her on the rock. She pulled one out and lit it with a green, disposable Bic. She shook her head, scattering the smoke. “That’s not unusual for him. He gets into one of his moods, he leaves for a while. He comes back when he’s ready.”

“Any idea where he goes?”

She shrugged. “His business. I’ve never pushed him on it.”

“Arne Soderberg’s smug, so whatever it is they have, it must be pretty solid.”

She was quiet. At first, Cork thought she was looking at the lake again, but then he saw that her eyes were closed. Custer resettled himself, laid his head on his paws, and blinked at Cork.

“I’ve always been afraid that someday whatever it is that gets into him would get him into serious trouble. But this.” She hugged her legs, laid her forehead against them. “Christ.”

“If you hear from him, try to make him understand that it’s important to come in and talk to the sheriff. Jo will be happy to go with him.”

Dot lifted her head, nodded. “Thanks.”

He got up, and Custer jumped to his feet.

“No, you stay here,” Dot said to the dog. She put her arm around his neck and pulled him next to her.

Cork left her beside the lake, left her staring out at the water. As he walked away, he couldn’t help thinking of Fletcher Kane who, when Cork last left him, had been staring across his own lake of sorrow.

Cork headed through Alouette, along back roads, until he was well into the woods that edged the north boundary of the reservation. He slowed down and finally saw what he was looking for, a cut through the trees on the left side of the road, an old access. He pulled in and made his way carefully between the trunks of pines so close to the edge of the track that they threatened to scrape the paint off his Bronco. It was a quarter mile to the cabin.

Summers, Sam Winter Moon had lived in the back of the Quonset hut on Iron Lake so that he could run his burger stand. But early fall through late spring, he lived in his old cabin near the headwaters of Widow’s Creek. It was a small, rustic affair, a single room heated by an old, potbellied stove, no electricity or running water, and an outhouse. In the years after his father died, Cork had spent a lot of time there with Sam, learning much about himself from a man who was a patient teacher.

As Cork drew near, he saw a black Ford Ranger parked in front of the cabin.

Sunlight, low in the sky, broke through the pine trees and hit the cabin in bright splashes. Except for the incessant cawing of a crow somewhere in the high branches of the trees, and the gurgle from Widow’s Creek a dozen yards north, the woods were quiet. No one answered his knock, and Cork opened the door. He’d been inside only once since Sam died, and that was to retrieve an important item that Sam had bequeathed to him. A bear skin. Entering now, smelling the place-the old logs and the sooted stove, leather bindings and wool blankets-Cork traveled back instantly across more than three decades to his adolescence. He felt a great happiness inside him, thinking about Sam. The room was neatly kept, and Cork had a pretty good idea of why.

He stepped outside and found himself staring into the black maw of a shotgun barrel.

“What are you doing here?” Solemn Winter Moon said.

He was a little taller than Cork, wore jeans, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back, a green down vest. His long, black hair was pulled into a ponytail. Cork couldn’t help seeing behind his dark good looks and his distrusting eyes the face of the boy who’d fished for sunnies from the dock at Sam’s Place.

“Looking for you,” Cork said.

Solemn lowered the barrel of the shotgun. A grouse lay in the dirt at his feet, the feathers messed and bloodied by buckshot.

“Yeah? Why?”

“I was hoping to get to you before the police did.” Cork waited. “You don’t seem surprised, Solemn.”

“What do they want?” His question seemed more an afterthought.

“To talk about Charlotte Kane, I’d guess.”

“Ancient history.”

“It’s a current affair now. I think the sheriff believes someone killed her, and you may be the number one suspect on his list. Look, I’m here to help, not to take you in.”

Cork watched his eyes, looking for a sign of the fire that might signal some impulsive action. The kid seemed pissed, but not out of control.

“Why’d you take off?” Cork asked.

“It’s what I do sometimes.”

“Bad timing. Looks pretty suspicious.” The crow stopped cawing. The still of the evening wrapped around them, and Cork felt the goodness of the place. “Come here to think?”

Solemn didn’t answer.

“You can feel him out here, can’t you? I sure can.”

Cork looked for a crack in the front the kid put up, but Solemn remained hard.

“He saved my life once. Did you know that?”

No sign whether Solemn knew or not, whether he even cared.

“It was in the fall, a year after my father died. Sam asked me to help him build a bear trap, something he’d never tried before. We set it a mile or so down Widow’s Creek, near that meadow full of blueberries. You know the one?” Solemn gave no reply, but his face altered a bit, a splinter of acknowledgment. “The bear sprung the trap, but it was such a goddamned huge animal it got away. Sam went after it and took me with him. I’d never hunted a bear before. We tracked it for a day and a half. Finally we got into a rocky area where even Sam couldn’t track and we turned back. I remember that Sam was happy he wasn’t going to have to kill a creature as magnificent as we knew that bear was.