Tamarack County

CHAPTER 3

There was a poem by Robert Frost, the only poet whose work Cork really got, which talked about the debate over whether the world would end in fire or in ice. In Minnesota, in late December, folks usually hoped for fire.

It wasn’t end-of-the-world cold, not yet, but they were dressed for it, those who’d responded to the call from Sheriff Dross. They gathered five miles outside Aurora, on the Old Babbitt Road. It was rural, narrow, a winding track through alternating stands of thick pine and poplar. There were some good-size hills in the area, slopes of exposed rock almost as old as the earth itself. No illumination, not even starlight on that snow-blown night. It was like being locked inside a deep freeze, and if Evelyn Carter was out there somewhere, Cork didn’t hold out a lot of hope for her.

Her car had been pulled to the side of the road, the keys still in the ignition. The gas gauge read empty. Dross had Deputy George Azevedo try to start the big Buick. Nothing. Bone dry. Why, on a night like that, Evelyn Carter had driven an automobile without sufficient fuel down a godforsaken road, no one at the scene had a clue. Nor did the Judge, who was at home but in communication with Dross. Where the Judge was concerned, communication usually meant listening to him rant, and Cork could tell from Dross’s end of her cell phone conversation and the expression on her face that the Judge was giving her an earful.

She ended the call and stared at the Buick. “He says she filled it up yesterday and hasn’t driven it much since. At least, not as far as he knows. He’s got no idea why she would have driven out here.”

“Lost?” Cliff Aichinger, a member of the S and R team, offered.

“Maybe,” Dross said. “Or maybe confused. She’s almost seventy.”

“Hell, that’s young,” Richard Lefebver, another team member, said. He was well into his sixties himself. “She’s still one sharp cookie.”

“My uncle had a stroke last year,” Aichinger replied. “Didn’t show anything, but he started getting lost whenever he went outside the house. Couldn’t keep track of where he was. Young guy, too, only seventy-one.”

“A possibility,” Dross said.

“Does she have a cell phone?” Cork asked.

“In her purse, which she left on the passenger seat in front.”

“She didn’t call anyone?”

“We checked it. The last call in or out was five-fifteen this evening, from her son in Albuquerque. He sent a photo of her grandson. Nothing after that.”

They stood in a cluster a good fifty yards away from the abandoned vehicle. Dross didn’t want any of the S and R team any closer, at least for the moment. She had a couple of her deputies trying to find tracks that might have been buried under the new snowfall, and she didn’t want the searchers messing up the scene with their own boot prints. There were no homes along that particular stretch of road, no summer cabins, nothing to offer the hope of shelter to an old woman lost in a storm in a gasless car.

“Any idea how long the Buick’s been here?” Cork asked.

“Adam Beyer found it almost two hours ago. He was on his snowmobile, heading toward the Vermilion Spur trailhead, a quarter mile north. He said the snow on the hood was already a couple of inches thick, so the engine must have been cold for quite a while. If she’s wandering out there in the woods somewhere, she’s been lost a good three, maybe four hours now.”

“Could be she just took off walking down the road looking for help,” Cork suggested.

Dross shook her head. “I had Azevedo drive a fifteen-mile stretch. No sign of her. If she used most of a tank of gas and ended up out here in the middle of nowhere for no reason that anyone can discern, she’s probably disoriented, for some reason. Since she’s not on the road, my bet is that she’s stumbled into the woods or down a lane that she hoped might lead to a cabin.”

“You pulling Gratz in on this?” Cork asked.

Orville Gratz kept and trained search dogs. A number of agencies in the heavily forested North Country relied on him and the sensitive noses of his canines.

“He went to Duluth to Christmas-shop. He’s on his way back now. He’ll come as soon as he can.”

* * *

The wind had picked up, and in the beams of the lanterns and flashlights, the snow had begun to dance in a way that, if the situation had been less serious, might have made Cork think of sugarplum fairies. As it was, he was reminded of wraiths.

Lefebver said, “We should’ve brought our snowmobiles.”

“If she’s in these woods,” Dross said, “she probably hasn’t gone far. And if she calls out, the racket of a snowmobile will drown her voice. I want this done on foot first.”

Since Thanksgiving, plows had already mounded the snow a good three feet along the edges of the road. Beyond those ragged barriers, what lay on the ground would have reached above Evelyn Carter’s knees. In any of the deep swales common to the area, the drifted snow might easily have buried her up to her belly or chest. With the wind that had risen, if she’d fallen, the snow would have swallowed Evelyn Carter whole.

Azevedo and Deputy Pender came back down the road from the Buick. When they got to Dross, Azevedo said, “Nothing.”

“Whatever tracks there were, the snow’s filled them in and covered them,” Pender added.

“Okay,” Dross said. “Let’s begin at the car.”

There were a dozen involved in the search, most of them members of Tamarack County Search and Rescue. Dross had called the State Patrol, who’d promised a couple of troopers, but they hadn’t arrived yet. She assigned Azevedo and Pender to walking the Old Babbitt Road, checking for any sign of Evelyn along the shoulders. The rest of the men put on their snowshoes, spaced themselves about fifty feet apart, and moved into the woods to the south. They all had good lanterns or powerful flashlights and went slowly, sweeping the areas ahead of and between them. Six inches of new snow had already fallen that evening, and it was still coming down hard. In the woods, the wind wasn’t so strong, but if Evelyn Carter had stumbled and just lain there, Cork knew she could easily have been covered. So he looked not only for the woman and for her tracks but also for any unusual contour of the snow that might indicate something beneath.

They didn’t talk. As it was, the forest was alive with noises. The big wind ran through the pine trees and spruce and poplar with a sound like the rush of floodwater, and the branches creaked and groaned and scraped against one another, and it made Cork think of skeletons going at it in a free-for-all. He’d worn his down parka but kept the hood off his head so that he could hear better in case Evelyn tried to cry out.

They went a quarter of a mile, then Dross had them turn back and regroup at the Buick. Azevedo and Pender were already there with no good news. The deputies joined the others, and everyone entered the woods to the north.

The wind was stronger now, and even in the protection among the trees, the snow moved like something alive. Cork found himself thinking about another search he’d been a part of many years earlier, when a young woman named Charlotte Kane had gone out on a snowmobile on New Year’s Eve and never come back. The search had been hindered by a blizzard that had roared out of the Dakotas, and Cork had been caught in it, caught in a whiteout, and might have become lost himself except that he’d been guided by a presence that had remained hidden in the storm, something or someone he’d never been able to identify but who’d shown him the way. When Cork was a boy, an old friend named Sam Winter Moon had once told him that there were more things in the forest than a man could ever see with his eyes, more things than he could ever hope to understand. It was a piece of wisdom that, as a grown man, Cork believed absolutely.

Charlotte Kane’s body hadn’t been found until the snow had begun to melt the following spring. And it had been clear that a force of nature hadn’t claimed her. Charlotte Kane had been murdered.

As he made his way carefully through the woods with the full weight of the storm muscling against him, Cork said a silent prayer for Evelyn Carter, prayed that she’d be found, found soon and found alive.

They came to a clearing, where the wind, unhindered, lifted and blew the snow into an impenetrable wall. They paused before moving forward, regrouped so that no one was out of sight of anyone, and then they went ahead. They hadn’t gone far when Azevedo let out a shout.

“Found something!” came his voice above the wind.

They all moved his way. In the flood of the beams from the lights, they saw what the deputy had found. It was an elongated mounding of snow, but there was more to it than that. The dynamics of the wind had produced an oddity. The snow on the lee side had drifted, creating a smooth downslope, but on the windward side, a small section of what lay on the ground was blown nearly clear. Beneath the thin white of the snow layer that remained, they could see the red stain of blood, the blue-white marbling of flayed flesh, and the dark maroon of spilled entrails, all the result of recent, brutal evisceration.