“He’s got himself a new compound bow now. A Bear Carnage, top of the line. You didn’t know that?”
“Like I said, that boy don’t visit me like he should. Little snot.”
“I thought he was here on Saturday.”
“I told you not two minutes ago he wasn’t.” Bigby shifted and sat up. It wasn’t only his eyes that seemed on the alert now. His whole body, collapsed as it was, had tensed. “Or maybe he was. That was a couple of days ago. Sometimes I forget things.”
Forget the slight of an ungrateful son? Cork thought not.
He stood and said, “Thanks for your time, Buzz.”
“And you, thanks for nothing. Give me that remote before you go.”
On his way out, Cork stopped at the front desk to sign out. He used the opportunity to check the register pages where visitors had logged in and out over the weekend. He didn’t see Lester Bigby’s name there at all.
The young attendant was on the phone. Cork hung around until she’d finished her call, then he asked, “Does everyone sign in and out?”
“Not always. Sometimes family who visit a lot just go to their relative’s room without stopping here.”
“Does Buzz Bigby’s family visit often?”
“Oh yeah. Especially his son.”
“Do you know if he visited on Saturday?”
“I didn’t work this weekend, so I couldn’t say.”
“Anybody here who might be able to say?”
“I really don’t know.” She said it in such a way that Cork understood she probably did but was not going to tell him. A professional thing, he figured, resident privacy or something. He didn’t push it.
As he left, the eyes of the ladies in the open area followed him, as if they were watching the passage of an exotic bird.
Cork pulled up to the curb in front of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler and parked behind the car that Lester Bigby often drove, a mint-condition 1965 Karmann Ghia. He found it interesting that Bigby preferred the same kind of vehicle his brother, Donner, had driven before he died.
Inside, Cork found Bigby sitting in the same booth that, according to Heidi Steger, he’d occupied when Cork and Jubal breakfasted there on the day Jubal died. There was an empty plate in front of him, and he was reading a newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Compared to both his father and his brother, Lester Bigby was small and, in his face, more resembled the fine-boned features that, Cork recalled, had made Mrs. Bigby so lovely and yet so sad. In his mid-forties, he was mostly bald, with only a narrow strip of dull brown hair circling his skull like a dead laurel wreath. He didn’t notice Cork approaching.
“Mind if I join you?” Cork said.
Bigby looked up from his paper. “I prefer to eat alone.”
“Looks to me like you’ve finished eating.” Cork slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.
Bigby carefully folded his paper and set it aside.
Cork laid his arms on the table and leaned forward. “We’ve never liked each other, Lester.”
“That’s not something I lose any sleep over.”
“In a town like Aurora, it’s hard to avoid folks, but somehow we seem to do a pretty good job of it.”
“Believe me, I don’t go out of my way, O’Connor.”
“I think I can truthfully say the same. But there it is. I’ve been wondering why.”
“You looked me up just to tell me that?”
“That’s not the reason. It’s just something that came to me.”
“What’s the reason then?”
“I’ve been thinking about your resort on Crown Lake.”
“What about it?”
“You’re pretty heavily invested in it, I imagine. All that land, the cost of construction.”
“So?”
“Sulfide mining,” Cork said. And he saw from the look in Bigby’s eyes that he’d struck home.
Cork had grown up in the Arrowhead of Minnesota, the northeasternmost section of the state, where some of the most beautiful wilderness in the entire nation lay next to the richest ore deposits imaginable. Historically, this unfortunate positioning had resulted in the decimation of a great deal of the pristine Northwoods by iron mining. The sacrifice of that land had made possible the industrial growth of the rest of the United States in the late 1800s and well into the twentieth century, but the deep open-pit mines of the Iron Range were wounds that would never heal.
The mines had begun closing in the late 1960s, and the Arrowhead suffered one economic blow after another. Businesses folded. Range towns became ghost towns. But in recent years, there’d been a great deal of renewed interest in the mineral resources of the area. The demand for the raw materials to make steel in China and India had spurred a resurgence of mining in the open pits. Perhaps more important, there was intense interest in creating additional operations that would mine the deposits of base metals-copper-nickel and platinum. These precious ores had been discovered long ago in the Arrowhead but, until recently, were too difficult and costly to get at. New advances in mining technology, however, promised cheaper, better methods of extraction, and global mining concerns were clamoring for a shot at the riches that still lay beneath the wilderness of the Arrowhead. The proposals for these new mines had set factions in the North Country at war.
Because the metals were contained in sulfide ore, the technique for extracting them was called sulfide mining. Environmentalists claimed the mining of this ore would create mountains of sulfide tailings that were exposed to the elements. When sulfide mixes with air and water, the result is sulfuric acid, which would inevitably leach into the groundwater, polluting the pristine lakes and streams of the region. This had already been the case in other areas where sulfide mining had been allowed, and a lot of folks in the Arrowhead believed that looming on the horizon was yet another instance of the earth suffering horribly for the benefit of industry.
On the other side of the coin, the new mines represented the possibility of a rebound in the depressed economy of the region. This meant jobs in an area where, for too long, they’d been far too rare, and also much- needed tax revenues for the state as a whole. Because the mining companies were full of assurances that the new technologies would allow safe, nonpolluting extraction-they had all kinds of reports and charts to prove it-a great many people in the Arrowhead, and in Minnesota in general, welcomed the prospect.
In his gubernatorial campaign, Jubal Little had talked about the need for sacrifice in order to make Minnesota self-sustaining. He’d strongly supported opening the North Country to additional mining. He never spoke of this as sacrifice but couched it in terms of responsibility and risk. It would be his responsibility as governor to ensure that mine companies kept their promises. And what small risk there might be to the Arrowhead was outweighed by the great benefit to the state as a whole. This was in direct contrast to the position of the incumbent, a man of liberal leanings who’d made environmental protection one of his top priorities but who’d been ineffectual in all his efforts to revitalize the state’s stagnating economy.
Jubal’s argument about exploiting Minnesota’s mineral potential was the same kind of argument he’d made about the casinos. Responsibility and risk.
Politically, Jubal characterized himself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative. But his politics had mattered a good deal less than his image. He was tall and good-looking. Confident, charming, self-assured. He could be winningly self-effacing. But more than anything else, he offered the image of a man who, like a great frontier scout, knew the way ahead was fraught with danger, but if you followed him, he’d absolutely get you to the promised land. In all the darkness of economic uncertainty, he offered voters the hope of light, and they flew to him like moths.
Not Cork. And not the Ojibwe. And not, he knew, Lester Bigby.
“As I understand it, Lester, construction of that resort of yours ground to a halt last summer. All because Jubal Little pledged to open the area to sulfide mining if he was elected. Crown Lake is just a few miles downstream from the site where that Canadian company intends to begin mining as soon as they get approval, which Jubal’s election would pretty much have assured. You stood to lose a lot of money.”
“I’ve lost money before,” Bigby said.
“This would have been on a huge scale. And probably a lot of other folks you talked into investing in your company stood to lose their shirts, too.”
