Iron Lake

5

DARLA OPENED THE DOOR even before Cork had a chance to knock. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, and tears had left a trail through her face powder down both cheeks.

“It’s Joe John, Cork,” she said. “I know it’s Joe John.”

Darla worked at the casino in public relations and was still dressed for the office in a dark blue blazer and skirt, a cream-colored blouse. There was gold around her neck and on her wrists.

Cork stepped in out of the cold and wiped melting snowflakes from his face. “What makes you think so, Darla?”

“Because it’s just like him to drop off the face of the earth for two months, then pull this kind of stunt. It’s just the kind of thing he’d do on a drunk.” She took his coat and brushed the snow onto a mat in the hallway, then hung the coat in the closet there. Cork slipped off his boots and left them on the mat.

He’d known Darla LeBeau since high school, when she was a cheerleader with long blonde hair, nice legs, and a lot for a boy to notice under her sweater. In her sophomore year, she began going steady with Joe John LeBeau. Joe John was a fullblooded Anishinaabe bussed in from the Iron Lake Reservation ten miles outside Aurora. Dating someone from the reservation would have caused Darla a lot of trouble, but Joe John was different. Joe John was a celebrity, a basketball player of amazing ability. The St. Paul Pioneer Press had dubbed him the next Jim Thorpe, and he’d been heavily recruited by colleges all over the Midwest. He accepted a basketball scholarship to Indiana, but just before he was to begin his second year, as he was crossing a street in Bloomington, an old woman who failed to stop her big Cadillac at a red light ran him down. His right leg was shattered from his ankle bone to his hip, and although it was reconstructed, he always walked with a limp after that. With no hope of playing basketball again, he came home to Aurora. Shortly after that, he and Darla were married.

“You probably should have called the sheriff, Darla.”

“I didn’t want to get Joe John in trouble. I just want Paul home safely.”

“Have you tried calling Paul’s friends?”

“I’ve called everywhere I can think. His friends, my folks, the neighbors. I even called Pizza Hut because sometimes he’ll play video games there after he’s finished his routes.”

“Nobody saw him?”

“Nobody. I’ve got coffee. Want some?”

“Thanks.”

He followed Darla to the kitchen.

“You’re sure he went to deliver his papers?” Cork asked.

“He left a note on the refrigerator telling me where he was going. He’s so good that way.”

Cork sat on a stool in her spotless kitchen. He’d sat here with Joe John many times after he brought him home from a drunk. Joe John wasn’t a mean drunk. Mostly he was nostalgic. Very often Cork would find him on the basketball court in Knudsen Park shooting hoops. Even drunk, he had a nice touch. Or sometimes Joe John would disappear for a while, usually no more than a week or two, and he would come back sobered up and contrite and full of assurances that he was through with the bottle forever.

A lot of the whites in Aurora were quite happy to see Joe John fail. Indians, they said with great satisfaction. Drunks. It didn’t matter that Joe John had given Aurora some shining moments, that the signs posted at the town limits proclaiming “Home of the Warriors, State Basketball Champions” were entirely due to Joe John’s talent, and that Joe John had suffered a significant disappointment through no fault of his own. That he was Indian explained it all.

Joe John had tried many times to beat the booze. It was his sister, Wanda Manydeeds, who finally helped him. Like Henry Meloux, she was one of the Midewiwin, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. She convinced Joe John to let Henry Meloux treat him in the old way. She could have treated Joe John herself, but the Midewiwin never ministered to their own relations. The treatment was something neither Meloux nor she nor Joe John would talk about, but it seemed to work. For over a year, Joe John had been sober. He had begun a business of his own, a janitorial service, contracting to clean offices in Aurora. It was a good business. Things seemed to be going well.

Then, two months ago, Joe John up and vanished, leaving his truck smashed into a tree on County Road C and the cab reeking of whiskey. He’d simply walked away from the accident and never come back.

“Have you heard from Joe John lately?” Cork asked.

“Not a word.” Her hand trembled as she poured out his coffee. “I was always afraid something like this would happen. Joe John hated it here, Cork. When he was drunk, he used to talk about how he’d take Paul away someday, somewhere where nobody knew who he was and wouldn’t make fun of Paul for being the son of a drunk Indian.” She looked at her trembling hand and put the pot down.

“You told me on the phone he’s been gone about five hours. How do you know?”

“In his note he said it was two o’clock when he left. I don’t know why he thought he had to deliver on a day like today. Nobody would care if the paper wasn’t delivered today. People would understand.” Her shoulders sagged wearily. “I make good money at the casino. He doesn’t have to deliver papers at all. I think he just wants to show people he’s not like his father.”

“How have things been between you and Paul lately?”

“What do you mean?”

“Any tension, arguments?”

“You mean, did Paul run away?” she said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t think he would either,” Cork reassured her. “It’s just one of the possibilities we have to consider.” He sipped his coffee. “Has he talked about his father lately? Maybe said something about wanting to find him? I’m only asking because I know how it feels to lose your father at that age. I know I would have done anything to bring him back.”

“No, nothing. He’s been quieter lately, but I just figure it’s his age.”

“Have you called Wanda? If Joe John’s back, she’d know.”

“I tried. The lines must be down.”

Cork thought for a moment. The refrigerator clicked on and the bottles rattled inside it. The wind howled past the kitchen window in the breakfast nook.

“Okay, we know he left the house. Do we know if he actually started his route? Or finished?”

“No.”

“Do you know what route he follows, who his customers are?”

“No,” Darla said, shaking her head with exasperation. “No.”

Cork reached out and touched her hand across the counter. “That’s all right, Darla. There’s no reason you should. Does Paul keep any kind of record of his customers?”

A sudden, hopeful look lit her face. “He has a receipt book he uses when he collects for the papers every month.”

“Good. Let’s have a look.”

“I’ll get it,” she said.

Cork didn’t see any reason yet to be worried about Paul’s safety. Aurora was a small place and children didn’t just disappear. Probably Joe John was responsible, too ashamed to face Darla but anxious to see his son, particularly as it was the Christmas season. Cork also knew from experience that more often than not when teenagers vanished, they left of their own accord.

Darla LeBeau returned with a dark blue receipt book and handed it to Cork. Paul kept good records, and from the order of the addresses, which began on Center Street and followed one another geographically out to the last address on North Point Road, Cork figured Paul probably collected from his customers in the same order he delivered their papers.

“What are you going to do?” Darla asked.

“I’ll start by calling a few of his customers, find out if the papers were delivered, and maybe when. That will give us a little more to go on than we have now. And you never know. Someone might have seen something.”

He began with the last address in the receipt book. Judge Robert Parrant. The line was fuzzy and Cork didn’t even get a ring at the other end. He moved back through the receipt book, making half a dozen more calls. North of the tracks, nothing connected. South, everyone who answered had received a paper, although no one had actually seen anything of Paul.

“Seems to be a problem with the lines to the north,” Cork told Darla. “I wish I’d been able to get through to the judge. That would tell me if Paul had actually finished his route.”

Darla brightened a moment. “Sometimes Paul stops there a while. The judge seems to like him. Tells him stories and things. Paul hates it, but I’ve told him to be polite.”

“I suppose it’s possible Paul’s stranded there and because of the problem with the telephone lines, he has no way of letting you know. Maybe I ought to head over to the judge’s house. At least I’d be able to tell if Paul finished delivering his papers.”

“I want to go with you,” Darla said.

Cork shook his head. “You need to stay here by the phone just in case Paul calls. I’m sure he’s fine, Darla. He’s a good, responsible kid who knows how to take care of himself, okay?”

“What if he’s not there?”

“Then he’s somewhere else and he’s okay and we’ll find him,” Cork assured her. At the front door, Cork said, “Call someone. It isn’t good for you to be here alone. Call someone you can talk to. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She put her hand on Cork’s arm. “Find him, Cork. Please.”

The judge’s estate wasn’t easy to reach. The plows hadn’t touched any of the outlying roads yet, and Cork went slowly, with the front bumper of the Bronco nosing through drifts. The estate occupied the whole tip of the finger of land called North Point. The house itself was a huge stone affair, more than a century old, surrounded by gardens in summer and a sea of snow in winter. In its way it was like the man who owned it. Isolated.

The judge had once been a powerful figure in the politics of Minnesota. The scion of a family grown rich from clear-cutting the great white pines of the North Woods, he viewed himself as a rugged individualist and stubbornly clung to the view, as had those Parrants before him, that a man became what he made of himself. Only the hand of God—not an interfering government—should direct men’s destinies. In the Iron Range, an area noted for its independent, unpredictable, and generally cantankerous population, his message was well received.

His personal influence had reached its zenith more than two decades earlier when he made a nearly successful bid for the governor’s mansion. Five days before the election, with the judge carrying a slight edge in the polls, the St. Paul Pioneer Press published photographs of him leaving a motel room in the company of the wife of the chair of the party’s central committee. Minnesota may have been liberal in its politics, but it was pretty Lutheran in its morality. The judge lost by a landslide.

He retired from the state political arena after that, but he still maintained his influence in the Iron Range. Except for the election of Cork as sheriff, which the judge had opposed, no one in Tamarack County was elected without the judge’s benediction.

As sheriff, Cork had occasionally found it necessary to call on the judge at his estate on North Point Road. But it was never a duty with any pleasure in it.

Cork parked on the long circular drive and waded through the snow to the front door. No one answered the bell. He took off his glove and knocked hard. He tried to look through the windows downstairs, but the curtains were drawn and melted snow had turned to ice plastered across the windows. He went back to the Bronco, grabbed a flashlight, and worked his way around to the back of the house. Stepping onto the big terrace, he rubbed a spot clear on the sliding glass door. The curtains were only partially drawn, and through the gap Cork could see a glass of wine sitting on the coffee table in the living room, a little thread of gray smoke curling up from the ashes of the fireplace, but no sign of the judge.

The wind pushed snow across the open ground in a tide that seemed liquid as water. Cork made his way to the garage, cleared a small side window, and poked the flashlight beam through. Both of the judge’s vehicles—a black Lincoln Mark IV and a new red Ford pickup—were parked inside. He trudged back toward the front door and kicked around the snow in the big entryway, looking for a paper. Finally he tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He swung it open and stepped in.

“Judge Parrant?” he called. “Judge, it’s Corcoran O’Connor!”

He felt uneasy being in the house uninvited. No search warrant. Criminal trespass. Things he still cared about. He knew there was no justification for entering this way. Except a boy who should have been home and wasn’t.

“Judge?” he called again, moving into the living room.

There were still embers in the fireplace. The wineglass on the coffee table was less than half full. The upstairs was dark. The only other light came from a room down the hall. Cork headed that way.

The door was well ajar, but gave only a partial view of what looked like the judge’s study, a room full of books. Cork pushed the door open all the way. At first he didn’t see the judge. He saw the big desk, the map of Minnesota on the wall behind it, and the splatters of blood that ran down the map like red rivers. He put his gloves back on and stepped around the desk. The force of the blast had thrown the judge over in his chair and the shotgun lay fallen beside him. Cork didn’t look long at the body. He’d seen men dead this way before, but it was never easy. And the raw smell of so much blood was something you never forgot.