Milton Dane, prominent St. Paul attorney, is representing Sommer and his wife against the Duluth Medical Group that manages Ely Miner Hospital.
According to Dane, “Ely Miner violated the standard of care with respect to Sommer’s post-operative treatment. It is ironic that Hank survived the storm, the hypothermia, the rescue, and the surgery, only to be deprived of oxygen in a hospital recovery room.”
Irony has stalked Sommer throughout his writing career. His first two novels garnered critical attention but little in the way of sales. Then he wrote
Director Bruce Cook found a copy of
Broker shook his head, pushed up off the couch, put on his parka, and selected a cigar. Brandy seemed like a good idea, so he raided Billie’s liquor cabinet and poured two inches into a cup, hit the play button on Billie’s CD player, went out on the front porch, and sat down on the steps. Through the open door he heard Jay and the Americans kick in as he popped a match.
Cigar smoke clawed his throat, so he took a soothing drink by way of a solitary toast: Whiskey, Women, Work, and War-to Hank Sommer, who wears a coral snake on his wrist, who saved my life, who takes second billing to a kid’s plastic toy. .
Yeah, Hank, damned if I didn’t. Just to spite the suits.
He looked out over the dark lake and shivered. Damn, it was cold for October this year. Tiny glints clamped down along the shore; there’d be a skin of thin ice in the morning.
Uncle Billie’s porch faced north up Lake One and as the night filled in, the edges of the pine crowns feathered out and melted into a black sky. As the tree line disappeared so did perspective. Broker was alone with a star dome virtually unblemished by artificial light and, except for the occasional airliner and the seldom satellite, it was the cosmos of the ancients.
The Big and Little Dippers hung high to the north around the polestar, and Orion hugged the eastern horizon. The summer triangle of Deneb, Vega, and Altair slipped away to the west a little more each night.
Mom, hoping he could be the artist she had never been, tried to nurture in him a sense of discovery, and never missed an opportunity to slip a few coppers of wonder into his piggy bank of instincts.
Dad taught him to find the real animal in the forest; the deer by his tracks, where he bedded, where he fed; by his rubs and scrapes. Honoring both his parents, he’d let his practicality cross-fertilize his imagination.
The Cities, stacked with high-rise humans, had never been his home. This was home and, as always, the wilderness beckoned with silent beauty, absent mercy. Broker sipped his brandy and mused how the death traps in nature were always feminine: oceans, mountains, deep woods. Which was as it should be because their victims were usually young, romantic, dumb men.
Jay and the Americans called it accurately:
Come a little bit closer
you’re my kind of man
so big and so strong. .
Moved by the rhythm of the old music, he didn’t have to travel far to find the memory of Jolene Sommer’s green eyes.
Broker stood up, poured out the rest of his drink, grimaced at the cigar, and threw it away. Getting cold, he went inside, shut the door, and placed another log on the coals.
He dippered out a cup of his mom’s cider, settled back on the fold-out bed, took a sip, and let the citrus mix of honey and vinegar trickle down his sore throat.
The damn newspaper stared at him again, and he was about to toss it across the room when he caught the headline below the fold on page one.
“Crucified?” he said out loud. They gotta be kidding.
But they weren’t.
A bow hunter found a frozen body in the woods northwest of Marine on St. Croix yesterday afternoon. The deceased, identified as Timberry financial planner Cliff Stovall, had his left hand nailed through the wrist into the stump of an oak tree with a six-inch pole barn-spike. Sources close to the sheriff’s office said that a hammer and evidence of heavy drinking had been located at the scene. Stillwater resident Jon Ludwig discovered the body while deer hunting.
Stovall’s partner, Dave Henson, told the Washington County sheriff’s department that Stovall had gone to look at some property. Henson also explained that Stovall was distraught over a recent separation from his wife.
An anonymous source in the sheriff’s department said Stovall had been treated in the past for alcoholism and self-mutilation.
Broker slowly sat upright. The flu lost its grip as he calmly worked back through the delirious landing on Snowbank Lake. Distinctly, he remembered Sommer raving:
Chapter Sixteen
Directory assistance listed the number of Stovall and Hensen Associates in Timberry, a suburb east of the Twin Cities. Broker didn’t have to get past the receptionist.
“I know this is bad timing, but an acquaintance, Hank Sommer, recommended Cliff Stovall for investment counseling. And now, well, I thought maybe his partner. .”
“Of course, Mr. Sommer is-was-is one of our clients, I guess. .” her voice caught. “I’m sorry, it’s a little crazy around here.”
“I, ah, understand, maybe I should call later.”
“No. I’m sure Mr. Henson will talk to you. It’s just that these tragedies have hit our office kind of hard. Cliff and his wife were friends of Mr. Sommer and Dorothy. .”
“Were?”
“Well, before Mr. Sommer remarried. And, ah, before Cliff and his wife broke up.”
Dorothy? “Dorothy Sommer, right,” he said.
“No, she was-well, she’d never changed her name. So it was always Dorothy Gayler.”
“Right, is she still. .?”
“At the St. Paul Pioneer Press.”
“Of course. You know, I think I will wait awhile and call later. Thank you.”
Broker hung up and drummed his fingers on a yellow legal pad. Freshly showered and shaved after ten hours of healing sleep, he doodled circles bisected by crosshairs on his notepad. Then he printed “Sommer.” Under Sommer’s name he printed “Stovall.” He drew a circle around Sommer and Stovall. Then he printed “Trophy Wife- Bonnie (Parker?)and Clyde.” He drew a crude open arrow around Bonnie and Clyde and aimed it at Sommer. In a third column he wrote: Dorothy?
He went back to directory assistance, got the newspaper’s number, and punched it in. The switchboard passed him to the features department where he listened to Dorothy Gayler’s voice mail. The businesslike voice on the recorded message revealed nothing: “I’m not here; leave a message.” He hung up, poured another cup of
