The sheriff picked up her rifle and slung the strap over her shoulder. They left the ruins, walked out of the trees, and paused together on the jogging path.
“Where are you parked?” Cork asked.
“In town. Didn’t want anyone making my vehicle.”
“Want a ride?”
“I’ll hoof it, thanks.” Dross looked toward the lights on the far side of the empty field. “When you had the job, Cork, did you ever wonder if you were doing the right thing?”
“When didn’t I?”
“Yeah.” She smiled, but even in the dim light, Cork could see how weary the gesture was.
They separated, heading in different directions, both stumbling in the dark.
TWENTY-FIVE
Wednesday morning Cork was up at first light and at the house on Gooseberry Lane before anyone was stirring. He shook Annie gently awake and asked if she wanted to run with him. In ten minutes, she was dressed and ready to go. They jogged to Grant Park to warm up, stretched there, then began the real business. They followed the shoreline of Iron Lake past the old ironworks and Sam’s Place, turned inland, and headed up to North Point. They turned around at the end of the peninsula in front of the old Parrant estate, then backtracked to Oak Street, headed west to the high school, and finally home. It wasn’t a long run, only eight miles.
Five years earlier, Cork had entered his first marathon. Eighteen months ago he’d taken a bullet in his left thigh. He wasn’t a young man. Rebounding fully took him longer than he’d expected. He was back in the rhythm now and glad of it. Annie, who was in marvelous shape, could have danced rings around him while they ran, but she held back. He appreciated that she seemed to enjoy his company.
The sun was well above the trees, the day warming up nicely when they walked into the kitchen. Jo was pouring herself a cup of freshly brewed coffee. A box of Froot Loops stood on the kitchen table near a bowl that was empty except for a spoonful of milk and a few soggy cereal bits. Cork grabbed a glass from the cupboard and went to the sink to run himself a cold drink of water.
“Thanks for the run, Dad,” Annie said.
“Anytime.”
She went up to shower, and Cork took a mug from the cupboard and filled it with coffee. “Where’s Stevie?”
“Upstairs running a comb through his hair. He’s not exactly happy about going back to school today.” She dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster. “And you’re not exactly not going to the Kingbird funeral today. Whatever that means.”
“What it means is that I’ll be observing, but not close enough to be observed.”
“You’ll be out on the rez, then. Alone?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Do me a favor, will you? Call me when you go and call me again as soon as you’re back in cell phone range, just to let me know you’re okay.”
“I will, I promise.” He finished his coffee and ran water in the cup to rinse it out. “I’ll be home for dinner.”
The toast popped up, but Jo ignored it. She moved close to him and took his face in her hands. “I know it must seem sometimes that I want you to change, but I don’t, Cork. I love who you are. It’s just that it’s so hard worrying about you.”
“I wish I could tell you to stop worrying.”
“Like asking me not to breathe.” She kissed him and let him go. “Take care of yourself, cowboy.”
The funeral was scheduled for noon. Two hours before it began, Cork was on the ridge above the old mission, his Bronco parked out of sight among the trees below. He had his Leitz binoculars and, just in case, his Remington. He was dressed in sage-colored jeans and a green flannel shirt. He wore a dun-colored ball cap with LEINENKUGEL’S across the crown. The sun was high at his back. The clearing below was a field of tall grass full of wildflowers just beginning to blossom. At its center stood the old mission building, white as a block of ice.
As he waited for things to begin, Cork thought about his discussion with Marsha Dross at the ruined ironworks the night before. She said she was hammering at Reinhardt’s alibi. Cork had awakened that morning with an idea about Reinhardt. Depending on how things went with Thunder today, he’d decided he might have a crack himself at breaking Reinhardt’s story.
Half an hour before noon, he spotted a glint of sunlight off glass or metal on a hilltop on the far side of the clearing. He’d chosen his own position on the ridge knowing that, with the sun behind him, there’d be no reflecting light to give him away. The hill on the other side faced east, directly into the morning sun. And the sunlight had given something away.
Cork shifted his position and used his knees to steady his binoculars. He studied the locus of the reflection for several minutes. The glint from the hilltop came and went. More and more, Cork was convinced it came from someone who, like him, was observing the mission with field glasses.
When the first of the vehicles appeared in the distance on Mission Road, he turned his attention back to the clearing. It was the priest’s car. Not far behind were the Kingbirds. The vehicles continued to come and people parked around the mission and spilled out. Mostly they were Shinnobs from the reservation. Cork recognized many of the Red Boyz. George and Sarah LeDuc were there, as were many of the tribal council members. Cork figured they’d come not so much for Kingbird, who’d been seen as a troublemaker, as for Rayette. There were easily a hundred people present. Lonnie Thunder was not among them.
The small mission was clearly not large enough for the gathering, so Father Ted held the service in the meadow. He was assisted by Ben and Kevin Olson, two altar boys whose mother was full-blood Ojibwe. Uly Kingbird played the guitar. Because the day was so still, Cork could hear the playing and the voices of the mourners when they sang “Amazing Grace” and “Morning Has Broken.” A few people stepped forward to speak, but none of the Red Boyz. Cork knew that if Alexander Kingbird were alive, he’d have spoken eloquently. Tom Blessing, to whom the duty should have fallen, remained silent.
When it was finished, the people drifted back to their vehicles and began to depart, all heading toward Allouette, where a postfuneral meal was being served at the community center. Only one vehicle did not follow the others. Tom Blessing’s black Silverado headed the other way. A mile beyond the clearing, Mission Road turned east toward the Sawbill Mountains and wove its way through miles of uninhabited bog country.
Cork lifted his binoculars to the hill on the far side of the clearing. The reflection had vanished.
Cork kept his distance. He didn’t have to worry about losing Blessing. The spring melt-what little there was that year-had left the lowlying areas soggy, but the red dirt and gravel roads were dry and dusty. Cork followed the choking cloud kicked up by the big tires on Blessing’s Silverado. Technically, they were still on Mission Road, though once it passed beyond the mission itself, the Iron Lake Ojibwe called it ginebig, which meant snake. The road curled and twisted, following the contours of the hills. It shadowed, more or less, the southern edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Between the hills lay marsh and treacherous bogs edged with tamaracks, white cedars, and black-ash trees. Cork had driven the road in summer when swarms of mosquitoes often formed a gray, shifting fog in the marshy areas. The soggy ground and the mosquitoes made this region unattractive for habitation, and there were no resorts or summer cabins along the way. The road had been cut for logging, and the logging had been done in the winter, when there were no mosquitoes and the ground was frozen hard. It dead-ended far short of the Sawbills and was maintained only because it offered access to two remote entry points for the BWCAW. If Thunder wanted to hide where no one would look for him, he’d chosen a pretty good place.
Cork suddenly realized that he’d broken from the ghost of dust that had hung over the road in Blessing’s wake. He pulled to a stop, glanced back, and saw no side access where Blessing could have turned off. He continued another fifty yards until he found a stretch of dry, solid ground off the road that was shielded by a stand of tall sumac. He parked the Bronco out of sight, then walked back. He located the crush of undergrowth that marked the place where Blessing had left the road, and he discovered a blind of brush that had been built to hide the trail Blessing had followed. As he stood before the blind, he heard the approaching growl of another engine and
