He bucked forward before either of us got off a shot and he fell to the floor. A dark red stain bloomed low on the back of his shirt. Schanno, I thought. Dougherty, in the moment he stood wavering, had presented a fine target for the carbine, and Schanno hadn’t wasted the opportunity.
Dougherty groaned. I crossed the room and took his weapon. If I’d had time, I would have tried to do something for him, but Rupert Wellington was outside, bent on killing his brother and Meloux.
I stuffed the SIG into my belt and retrieved my rifle from the front porch.
Then I went hunting.
FORTY-NINE
I entered the woods where I’d seen Meloux and Henry Wellington disappear. Their trail was easy to follow, unsettlingly easy. Obviously, they’d been more intent on speed than secrecy. They’d headed west and very quickly joined the trail that led to the ruins of the cabin in the hills. There was a lot of evidence of their recent passage: footprints where the soil was soft, trampled weeds, brush along the edges of the trail with visible broken branches. Meloux and his son were blundering along like elephants.
I found the place where Rupert Wellington had picked up their tracks. His own were just as easy to follow.
They were many minutes ahead of me. Meloux, spry as he was, was still quite old, and I didn’t believe he could hold very long to the kind of pace that would be necessary to keep them ahead of Rupert. I wondered why he hadn’t just taken to the woods and used all he knew, his vast knowledge of hunting and tracking, to hide himself. Probably it was because he had his son with him and that made a difference in his thinking.
I padded along as quickly and quietly as I could, knowing it would do no good to give myself away and get shot in the bargain.
I’d gone a quarter of a mile when I came to a little creek I remembered from the day before. Beyond it was the meadow where Meloux had paused to take in the mint scent of the wild bergamot. On the far side of the clearing, just slipping into the trees, was a flash of light blue. Rupert Wellington’s polo shirt. He wasn’t far ahead.
I leaped the creek but waited before entering the meadow. I didn’t want to risk becoming a clear target for Wellington, should he look back. From my right came a low, birdlike whistle. There was Meloux, twenty yards away, with his son beside him, both of them eyeing me over a fallen, rotting log. I wove toward them through the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.
“Henry, you were too easy to follow,” I whispered. “Rupert knows you came this way.”
The old man actually gave me a sly wink. “A trick the Ojibwe learned from the bear. Give the hunter an easy trail, then circle behind.” He stood up. “We can go back now. Or”-he looked to his son for the decision-“we can become the hunters.”
Wellington turned to me. “What’s the situation back at the house?”
“Benning and Dougherty have been taken care of. Wally’s hit. He needs medical attention. And, Henry,” I said to Meloux, “Trinky Pollard’s dead. They killed her.”
Meloux’s face was stone. His eyes were dark ice. In the quiet at the edge of the clearing, his breath became fast and angry. I couldn’t ever remember seeing him upset, but I could see it now.
“If we go after Rupert,” Wellington said, “we risk ourselves and your friend Schanno. What’s the point? We should go back.”
I thought Meloux probably felt differently. Hunting Rupert Wellington, the black heart behind so much recent misery and the son of a heart even blacker, would have been his choice. Meloux was Mide, concerned with the wholeness and balance of being. Hunting an enemy was not alien to his understanding of the forces that kept that balance. But he’d given the decision to his son, and the decision had been made.
He nodded and we all turned back together.
From his house, Wellington called the provincial police station in the town of Flame Lake. Then he turned his attention to Dougherty, who’d lost a lot of blood but was still conscious.
Henry and I went to see about Schanno. He wasn’t where I’d left him. We found him sitting propped against a pine tree next to the body of Trinky Pollard. He looked empty, his face pale, his eyes blank.
“You need to lie down, Wally,” I told him gently. “You’re going into shock. The wound,” I said, though I suspected it was more than that.
“I don’t get it, Cork.” He stared, uncomprehending, at Trinky’s body.
“She must have followed us, been watching our backs, Wally.”
Later, the police found her green SUV, the one that had tailed us from Thunder Bay, parked in the woods, not far away.
He shook his head slowly. “I was the one who was supposed to watch our backs.”
Meloux had seated himself between Trinky Pollard and Benning. He began to sing softly. Singing, I knew, to help guide them onto the Path of Souls.
“Lie down, Wally.” I took his shoulders and urged him into a prone position. I lifted his feet and propped them on Benning’s body to keep them elevated and keep blood flowing to his brain. I didn’t think about the irony of that situation. I did it because it made sense.
Schanno stared up at the sky, which was broken into blue fragments by the green weave of pine boughs above us. “I’m too old for this,” he said.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Is anybody ever young enough?”
From far away came the cry of a siren, a sound as out of place in that quiet morning as all the death that had come before it.
Schanno and Dougherty were airlifted by helicopter to the community medical center in Ignace. Dougherty, devastated by Benning’s death, talked to investigators and told them what he knew, plenty to corroborate the story the rest of us had given.
Trinky Pollard’s body was taken to Thunder Bay. A stepbrother arranged for her memorial service, which was held a week later. Schanno and I drove up from Minnesota for it. Most of the people at the service were former RCMP colleagues. She didn’t have much family. The memorial was brief, and afterward her stepbrother, in accordance with her wishes, went out on a boat he’d chartered and spread her ashes across the water of Lake Superior.
A couple of days after the shootings, Rupert Wellington walked into the police station in Flame Lake and turned himself in. The press had arrived by then, and the papers and television news were full of images of him, dirty and tired and hungry, trying to use his handcuffed hands to block his face from the cameras. Later, we would all learn that the sounds of the sirens had alerted him to the danger of returning to his brother’s place, and he’d kept to the woods, hoping to figure a way out of the mess he’d gotten himself into. There wasn’t any.
Meloux stayed in Canada. He spent ten days with his son and his grandchildren, who came from British Columbia and Toronto to be with him and their father. I had no doubt Meloux’s heart was as light and healthy as it had ever been.
Immediately after the shootings, I spent a night in Ignace making sure Schanno was okay in the hospital there. The doctors wanted to keep him a couple of days for observation. The provincial police had given me permission to return to Minnesota, with the understanding that they could call me back if I was needed. The next morning, I took off for home.
At a gas station in Grand Portage, just south of the border, I called Jo. I tried her office first, but Fran, her secretary, told me she wasn’t going to be in all day. She wouldn’t tell me why, and I didn’t like the reservation in her voice. I called home. Jo picked up. I could tell something was wrong.
“It can wait until you get home. You’ve been through enough the last couple of days,” she said.
“Jo, what is it?”
She was quiet, considering whether to put me off or let me in.
“It’s Jenny, Cork. She started bleeding last night. I took her to the hospital. She lost the baby.”
“Ah, Jesus.” I leaned my forehead against the wall above the pay phone. “How is she?”
“A mess.”
