“So if I were to mention your name to the sheriff’s investigators as someone who has both the ability and motive, and maybe even had the opportunity, to kill Jubal, you’d have no problem?”
“Oh, the chimooks would just love that,” Broom said, using unkind Ojibwe slang for whites. “Indians pointing fingers at each other.”
“Rainy Bisonette told me it was you who brought the news to her and Meloux out on Crow Point. How’d you hear about it?”
“Maybe the wind told me,” Broom said with an enigmatic grin.
Sarah said, “Smiley Black’s got a police radio scanner. He came roaring into town spouting the news to everyone in earshot. By the time you and the sheriff’s people got back to Trickster’s Point, pretty much the whole rez knew.”
“Why are you here?” Willie asked. Whyouere?
“Actually, I came looking for you, Willie. Mind if we talk a minute? Alone?”
Cork carried his mug, and they stepped outside. He walked slowly to accommodate Willie’s laborious locomotion. They stood in the light that fell through the window of the Mocha Moose.
“I just stopped by Winona’s house,” Cork said. “She’s not there. I need to talk to her.”
“Why?”
“You know that list I mentioned, the one with names of Shinnobs who Sam Winter Moon had taught how to bow-hunt? Winona’s name was on it.”
“She didn’t kill Jubal,” Willie said with great care. “God knows she had reason to, but she didn’t do it.”
“Where is she?”
“When she’s ready, she’ll let you know.”
“Is she hiding, Willie?”
“She’s grieving. Just let her be.”
“Will you tell her something for me?”
“Sure.”
“Tell her that Jubal gave me a message for her.”
“What message?”
“It’s for Winona.”
In the drizzle of light on the empty sidewalk, Willie Crane’s face became unreadable, stolid in the practiced way of the Anishinaabeg. At the Food ’N Fuel down the street, an old pickup pulled away, its bad muffler roaring like a wild beast. When the sound had faded into the night, Willie said, “Dead, and he still can’t leave her alone.” Then he said, in a voice vacant of all emotion, “I’ll tell her.”
CHAPTER 17
W hen Cork arrived home, Waaboo was already asleep in his crib. Cork wasn’t surprised-it was well past the little guy’s bedtime-but he was disappointed. He enjoyed those evenings when Jenny let him put Waaboo down. There was an old rocker in the bedroom that had become the nursery where Cork loved to sit with his grandson on his lap, and he would read to Waaboo from one of the many picture books- Goodnight Moon or The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Chicka Chicka Boom Boom — until those little eyelids drifted closed, and then he would sit for a while longer with that small, warm body nestled against him, and there was nothing he could think of that made him feel more content.
That night he would have appreciated a moment of contentedness.
Cork had come through the backyard, as he had earlier that day, to avoid any media who might still be lying in wait. Stephen and Jenny were at the kitchen table, and when he walked in, it was clear they’d been talking. Stephen was drinking from a glass of chocolate milk he’d made with Hershey’s syrup. Jenny had a mug in front of her. They were both eating chocolate chip cookies that Cork knew had come from the cookie jar shaped like Sesame Street ’s Ernie, which sat on the kitchen counter. The jar had been a baby shower gift when Jo O’Connor was pregnant with Jenny, and the cookies that had filled it had sustained the O’Connors through more crises than Cork could remember.
“There’s coffee,” Jenny said.
“No thanks.” Cork went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer. He lifted Ernie’s head, pulled a cookie from the jar, and sat at the table with his children. “How’re you doing, buddy?” he asked his son.
Stephen thought it over. “Okay, I guess. I just…”
“What?” Cork asked.
Stephen’s face tightened. “I just don’t understand why death seems to circle this family like some kind of, I don’t know, vulture.”
Cork said, “I don’t either. When I quit law enforcement, you guys were part of the reason. I saw the toll it was taking, and I wasn’t happy about it. I thought I could just step away, and that was that. I was wrong, I guess.”
Jenny lifted her coffee but didn’t drink. She said, “You’re a windbreak.”
“A what?”
“That’s what Mom told me once. She said trouble’s like this wind that blows and blows and there have to be windbreaks to keep it from sweeping everything away. She told me you’re one of the windbreaks. It didn’t make her happy, but it’s who you are.”
Cork said, “I don’t look for trouble.”
“Ogichidaa,” Stephen said.
“Ogichidaa?” Cork repeated the Ojibwe word, whose meaning he knew well. It was often misused, or misinterpreted, to mean “warrior.” Its true meaning, however, was “someone who stood between his people and bad things.”
“That’s what Henry told me once when we were talking about you,” Stephen explained. “He said you didn’t have a choice, that you were chosen. He said that when we come into the world we’re given responsibilities by Kitchimanidoo. Yours was to be ogichidaa. ”
“I’d give it back if I could.” Cork took a bite of his cookie. “These are good.”
“Stephen made them,” Jenny said.
“Did Meloux say your responsibility is baking?” Cork smiled.
“Nanaandawi,” Stephen said seriously. “Healing.”
“What about me?” Jenny asked.
“Nakomis,” Stephen said.
“A grandmother?” Jenny didn’t look pleased. “Like my skin’s wrinkled and my boobs are saggy? I need to have a talk with Henry.”
“He meant that your spirit is old and wise and nurturing, like Grandmother Earth.”
“I still think I’d better have a talk with him,” she said with a wry smile. She sipped her coffee and asked, “How’s Mrs. Little?”
“Distraught. But all things considered, she’s doing all right. She has her family around her for support.”
“Dad, how come she never came up here with Mr. Little?” Stephen asked.
“She did sometimes.”
“Not much. Whenever you got together with him, he was alone.”
“I think Camilla isn’t fond of the North Country, not like Jubal was. This was his home.” Then, to cut off this particular line of conversation, Cork said, “School tomorrow. You have homework?”
“A little math,” Stephen replied. “And an essay on Manifest Destiny. But I can do that in one word: Bullshit.”
A gentle knocking came from the dining room, from the door that opened onto the backyard patio. They all looked at one another with surprise and then irritation. Cork set his beer down and scooted his chair away from the table.
“No, Dad, let me,” Jenny said. “If it’s a reporter, I’ll say you’re not here.”
