William Krueger - Purgatory Ridge

Cork shook his head. They could use a good lawyer.

As if the thought had conjured her, Jo pulled up in her Toyota and stopped.

“Cork, what are you doing out here?”

He didn’t have a good answer for that one.

“Playing sheriff,” she said finally, unhappily.

“Playing?”

“You know what I mean.” She got out and stood beside him under the shade of an oak. The heat rose from the hood of her car in shimmering sheets, evidence that she’d been driving quite a bit. Her eyes shifted toward what Cork was watching, the kid talking to the television reporter. “Someone ought to be advising these people,” she said. “If they’re not careful, they’ll end up doing more harm than good.”

“Where have you been?” Cork asked.

“I wanted to talk with Charlie Warren’s daughter, try to get some idea what possible reason there could have been for him to be at the mill.”

Cork felt relieved. And ashamed. “How’s she doing?”

“Holding up.”

“Was she able to tell you anything?”

“Apparently, Charlie had become pretty secretive of late. Gone nights. Back around daybreak. No explanation. He was a little old for it to have been a woman, I think.”

Cork leaned back against the rough bark of the oak. “It’s hard to believe Charlie would be involved in the kind of thing that happened at the mill.”

Jo watched as the kid finished the interview and shook hands with the reporter. “Schanno’s people and the BCA agents turned up just as I was leaving. Warrants to search for evidence.”

“They find anything?”

“No.” She glanced to her right. “Speak of the devil.”

A dark blue Bonneville approached them from the same direction Jo had come. As it pulled abreast, Cork could see Agent Earl at the wheel. Earl had been looking at the tent city, but as he passed, he turned his eyes on Cork and Jo. Recognition registered in them, but little else. Because Jo represented the Ojibwe, she was probably, in his estimation, part of the problem. And Cork? More than likely he was just a man who flipped burgers and had no business investigating anything. The car moved on, slowly traveling to the other end of town, then south toward the edge of the reservation.

Cork stood in the shade, very close to Jo, but not looking at her. He wanted to say something, something simple that would sum up what he felt, an equation factored from love and fear and darker things he could not name. But nothing simple came to him.

“Where to now?” he asked.

“Back to the office. You?”

“Sam’s Place. Give the girls a break. They’ve been handling things by themselves a lot lately.”

“See you tonight,” she said.

“Not until late.”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“Jenny said you’re both going to the library to hear Grace Fitzgerald read.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

“Stevie’ll help me close up Sam’s Place. We’ll see you after the reading.”

“Fine.”

They kissed. Dryly. Jo got back into her Toyota and headed south.

Cork stepped out under the glaring sun. He realized he’d forgotten his promise to George LeDuc to tell her to stop by. He watched her car pass the store and disappear into the distance, wavy at first in the heat rising up from the pavement, then melting away altogether, as if it-and all it contained-were made of nothing but ice.

FOR TWO HOURS, standing on the flying bridge, LePere headed the Anne Marie south by southeast at a steady eighteen knots. The lake was calm, the passage smooth. He made for the Apostle Islands, which lay on the water in the distance like blue whales sunning. To the Anishinaabe people, many of the islands were sacred, homes of manidoog, spirits of the lake. To John LePere, they were gravestones marking the place where Billy and twenty-seven other good men had died.

Wesley Bridger snoozed in the cockpit on the stern deck. He wore sunglasses and had put on an old canvas hat for protection against the sun. LePere worried a little about Bridger. The man had been drunk on whiskey the night before. For a dive as deep as the one they would make that day, it was best to abstain from drinking alcohol for a good thirty-six hours beforehand. But Bridger knew that. He’d been the instructor who certified LePere.

Wesley Bridger was the closest thing John LePere had to a friend, and LePere owed him in a lot of ways. The man had come into his life the summer before. Their first connection was a mutual fondness for boilermakers.

LePere had been sitting in the casino bar after he’d completed his shift. He was on his second boilermaker when Bridger took the stool next to him.

“Hey, bartender, drinks for everybody, on me,” he called.

The bartender had paused in wiping a glass and looked unimpressed. “Everybody’s him,” he said, indicating LePere.

“Then give him what he wants.”

“Boilermaker,” the bartender said without bothering to ask LePere.

“Give me the same.” He stuck out his hand. “Name’s Bridger-Wes Bridger. And I just won me twenty thousand dollars.”

LePere shook his hand but not with enthusiasm. A free drink was good; conversation wasn’t. Bridger did all the talking. How he’d just hit town. Killing time now. Loved to gamble; did okay. Did LePere know any friendly women.

By the fourth boilermaker, LePere found his own tongue had slipped its rein. Before the evening was out, he’d told Bridger his life story, the whole tragic tale of the sinking of the Alfred M. Teasdale.

A couple of nights later, Bridger plopped on the stool beside him again. “Hey, Chief, what’s shaking?” He slapped down an old copy of a magazine called The Great Lakes Journal, a slick publication with lots of photographs, and he turned to a page that showed a photo of LePere, younger by ten years, standing at the wheel of a Grand Banks trawler. The title of the article was “My Brother’s Seeker.” It was about how John Sailor LePere sailed Lake Superior in his spare time trying to locate the wreck of the Teasdale, hoping to find his brother’s body in that coffin of a ship, hoping to give Billy a decent burial.

“You really thought your brother’s body might still be there?”

LePere slowly spun his whiskey glass. “Doesn’t matter what I thought. I gave it up.”

“In favor of booze?”

“I just want to forget it, okay.”

“But you can’t, can you, Chief? Still have nightmares, I’ll bet. Can’t hold a job or maintain a relationship. Am I right?”

LePere tossed down a shot of Wild Turkey and followed it with a long draw on a chaser of Leinenkugel.

“Ever heard of PTSD, Chief?”

“What is that? Something makes your car run better?”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder. A lot of Vietnam vets suffer from it. But I understand it can happen as a result of almost any traumatic event. Like watching your brother and your shipmates drown.”

“So my nightmares have a name. Big deal.”

“Chief, why do you figure that boat went down?”

“Forget it.”

“You think it went down just because it was an old bucket, right? Maybe missing a few rivets. A tragic accident just waiting to happen. Maybe that’s what the shipping company bastards wanted you to think. You and the insurance company.”

LePere had his beer glass almost to his lips, but he stopped and looked straight at Wesley Bridger. “I gotta go.” He put his beer down and started to slide off the stool.

“What if it was murder, Chief? Cold-blooded, well-planned murder.”

LePere’s chest suddenly felt constricted and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. He swung back and leaned on the bar.

“‘Nother boilermaker here,” Bridger called to the bartender.