Boundary Waters (8 page)

“Long time,” Joey said into the rearview mirror.

“They never get anything, but that doesn’t stop them,” Benedetti said. “They’re like flies. They hang around and make a nuisance of themselves.”

“If they’re only a nuisance, why are you here?”

“To help you. And to help Shiloh.”

“Yeah,” Joey said, turning his thick neck and speaking over his shoulder, “you’re in deep shit.”

“Shut up, Joey.” He lightly slapped the back of Joey’s head.

“Sure thing, Angelo.”

“The feds told you about Libbie Dobson, I’ll bet.” Benedetti waited for Cork to confirm but went on when Cork only stared at him. “I’ll bet they didn’t tell you about Dr. Sutpen. Shiloh’s psychiatrist.”

“What about her?”

In the front seat, Joey made a noise, a boy noise, the kind Cork often heard from Stevie in his play when he pretended something was exploding. Joey laughed to himself.

“She’s dead.” Benedetti allowed a dramatic moment before he went on. “Killed in a gas explosion at her Palm Springs office that burned the place down and destroyed all client records. Authorities are listing it officially as accidental.”

Joey swung the car into a turnaround and headed back in the direction from which they’d come.

“You don’t think it was an accident,” Cork said.

“Highly coincidental, don’t you think? I don’t know about you, Cork, but I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Only my friends call me Cork.”

“That’s what I’m here to tell you. In this, you won’t know who your friends are.”

“You claim the FBI lied to me. Why would they?”

“My father believes they’re protecting someone. Someone big.”

“Who?”

“He doesn’t know. He believes whoever it is, they were responsible for the murder of Shiloh’s mother. Back then, Marais Grand had a powerful friend, someone who pulled a lot of strings for her. My father never knew who it was, but he thinks Marais was killed to keep that friendship from being exposed. Now they’re trying to kill Shiloh.”

“Why?”

“Come on, Cork. The feds filled you in on that part. Shiloh’s shrink helped her remember things about the night her mother was killed.” Benedetti held up his hands in easy guilt. “It’s not hard to find these things out. Cops are civil servants and terribly underpaid.”

“Why isn’t your father here taking care of this business himself?”

“He’s not a well man. The flight here was hard on him. He’s resting. But my words are his.”

Cork looked straight into Benedetti’s eyes. They were green with flecks of gold. Women no doubt found them compelling. “Elizabeth Dobson was probably killed because someone wanted the letters she’d received from Shiloh. Some more letters from Shiloh were stolen last night.”

Benedetti didn’t flinch at all. “I’m not going to lie to you, Cork. Yeah, I know people who know how to steal. I know people who can set fires that look like accidents. I know people who kill as easily as you or I brush our teeth. But then, so does the FBI.”

Cork looked away from Benedetti, watched the placid morning surface of Iron Lake glide past. “Why should I believe you?”

Benedetti folded his hands to his lips as if he were praying. In the moment of silence inside the big Lincoln, Cork heard the snap of bubble gum from Joey up front.

“I hear you’re that rare bird, Cork—an honest man. They say you have integrity. If the FBI goes into those woods after Shiloh, she won’t come out alive. You’re her only hope as far as I can see. Even if you don’t believe me, what harm can it do to help her?”

“Help her how?”

“Go in and bring her out before the FBI can get to her. That’s all. No other strings attached. If you do this, my father will pay you fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand dollars.” Cork let his surprise show. “What’s his interest?”

“If Shiloh does remember who killed her mother,” Benedetti said, “my father wants to know the name.”

“There’s one problem. I don’t know where she is,” Cork said.

Benedetti lifted his hand as if to silence Cork’s objection. “If everything I’ve heard about you is true, you will.” He reached under his sweater and drew out a card from the pocket of his shirt. “Joey, a pen.”

Joey handed a gold ballpoint over the seat. Benedetti wrote on the back of the card, then handed the card to Cork. On one side was a lithographed purple parrot in a gold cage and under it Angelo Benedetti’s name. On the other side, Benedetti had written a telephone number.

“My cell phone,” he said. “Call me when you know something.”

They’d returned to the place where Cork had entered the Lincoln. Joey stopped the car.

“Like I told you,” Benedetti said. “You make sure Shiloh comes out safely and my father will be very grateful. Joey, is my old man grateful or what?”

“His gratitude is boundless,” Joey confirmed. “You should take the money,” he advised, grinning over the seat at Cork. “Keep Angelo’s old man happy. Cuz when he ain’t, he’s one mean son of a bitch.”

Cork noticed that this time Benedetti didn’t tell Joey to shut up.

“Tell your father to keep his money. Whatever I do, I do for my own reasons.” Cork opened the car door and stepped out.

Benedetti leaned out after. “I’ve been as straight with you as I’ve ever been with any man. Help Shiloh. Please.”

The door closed. The big Lincoln pulled away.

Cork started running again, back toward Sam’s Place. He’d told Meloux things became clearer to him when he ran. But the way the situation stood now, he could run all the way to the fucking moon and everything would still be a mess.

12

A
T
G
RANDVIEW
, Willie Raye opened the door to Cork’s Bronco and stepped in.

“Morning,” he said cheerfully.

“Tell me about Vincent Benedetti,” Cork said.

Raye looked startled. “Benedetti? Why do you want to know about
him?
” The last word was full of poison.

Cork explained his morning meeting.

“Don’t ever trust a Benedetti,” Raye said. He stared at the trees that isolated his cabin and worked his jaw as if he were chewing on something old and bitter. “I never knew for sure if it was him who killed Marais. But if he wanted her dead, he knew how to get it done.”

“What do you know about him?”

“I haven’t seen him in years. Not since—well, not since Marais’s funeral. The bastard had the gall to be there, looking innocent as a lamb,” Raye said. “Man like that,” he added in an acid Ozark twang, “got hisself a cast-iron soul and a shithole for a heart.”

Wendell Two Knives’ mobile home sat on a patch of green lawn that rolled gently down to the reflection of blue sky that was Iron Lake. Under the windows were flower boxes that held red geraniums still in full bloom. The whole place was surrounded by birch trees, trunks white as icicles, leaves gold as freshly minted doubloons.

The note Cork had left the night before was still taped to Wendell’s door. Cork knocked, but Wendell didn’t answer. He crossed the lawn to the big corrugated shed that Wendell used as a garage and peered in at a window. He beckoned Willie Raye over.

“Wendell drives a Dodge Ram pickup,” Cork said. “Pickup’s gone. But take a gander at what’s sitting in its place.”

The floor of the shed was covered with fragments of birch bark, and the shed itself was full of tools that Wendell used in the building of birch-bark canoes, an art he’d practiced his entire life. Mallets, wood chisels, buckets, sawhorses, brushes—all hung on racks or sat on benches. In the center was a cleared area large enough for a truck to park. Instead of Wendell’s truck, a small red sports car sat there, highlighted in a long shaft of sunlight that came through the window on the far side of the shed. A coating of dust dulled the sheen of the car’s finish.

“Shiloh loves sports cars,” Raye said.

Cork walked around to the back of the shed where there stood a canoe rack with spaces for four canoes. Only one space was filled.

“What do you think?” Raye asked.

“I think he’s gone for a while.”

“To Shiloh?”

“Let’s hope so. Come on.”

“Where to?” Raye asked as he followed Cork to the Bronco.

“To Stormy Two Knives. He’s the only other person I can think of who might know where that is.”

Two miles up the road, just beyond the far outskirts of Allouette, Cork pulled into the drive of a small log home set among white pines growing in planted rows. A sign posted beside the drive advertised firewood for sale. Next to the house, a woman stood at a clothesline, her arms lifted, holding a wet sheet. A slight northwesterly breeze had picked up and the ends of the hung linen ruffled leisurely. The woman finished pinning the corner of the sheet to the line with a clothespin, then shielded her eyes against the sun as she watched the two men approach.

“Anin,
Sarah,” Cork greeted her.

“Anin,
Cork.” Her reply was polite, but not warm. She was a small woman in her early thirties with high cheeks and dark red hair that she wore long. She had on Nikes, neatly creased jeans, and a blue denim shirt. Her attention glanced off Raye, then quickly settled again on Cork.

“I’m looking for Wendell,” Cork explained. “We stopped by his place, but he’s not home.”

Something cloudy passed briefly across her face. “You’d better talk to Stormy.”

“That’s what I figured, too. Where can I find him?”

“Him and Louis are cutting firewood. On the old logging road at the bridge over Widow’s Creek.”

“Thanks, Sarah.”

“I’m not saying he’ll talk to you, Cork,” she cautioned.

“I understand.”

As they pulled back onto the road, Raye asked, “Why wouldn’t he talk to you?”

Cork turned east out of Allouette and began to follow a dirt road that cut through thick forest. “Stormy’s got a temper,” he explained. “A few years ago he got into a fight, killed a man. Afterward, he panicked and ran. Holed up in a shack up north on Iron Lake, threatened to shoot anyone who tried to come near him. The sheriff talked his way in and convinced Stormy to give himself up. Assured him he’d get a fair trial. As it turned out, he didn’t. Stormy spent five years in the prison at Stillwater.”

“That still doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t talk to you.”

Cork pulled across an old wooden bridge over a small creek and stopped behind a dusty blue Ford Ranger parked at the side of the road. “I was the sheriff.”

The biting whine of a chainsaw chewed through the stillness of the woods near the creek. Cork followed the sound until he came to an area where a number of big dying firs stood brown among the other evergreens. Several trees had already been felled, their dry branches splintered against the ground. Stormy Two Knives was moving swiftly down one of the horizontal trunks, a big yellow McCulloch in his gloved hands, carving away the limbs and slicing the trunk into sections. The air smelled of oil and gas and sawdust. A boy of ten followed on the ground gathering the debris into piles. The boy noticed them first.

Cork waited in a big patch of sunlight until Stormy Two Knives cut the motor of the chainsaw and lifted his safety goggles. Two Knives saw the boy looking, and he looked, too. He stepped off the fallen tree.

“Anin,
Stormy,” Cork said.
“Anin,
Louis,” he said to the boy.

Two Knives set down the chainsaw. He took off the ball cap he was wearing and shook his head vigorously. Sweat flew off him like a dog shaking dry after a bath. “You don’t have to pretend the Indian shit with me, O’Connor.”

“Anin,”
Louis Two Knives said.

His father shot him a stern look.

Stormy Two Knives was slightly smaller than Cork but outweighed him by fifty pounds. He stood hunched a little forward from overdeveloped back muscles, a characteristic of men who’d cut timber most of their lives. In the years he’d been in prison, Two Knives had used his time to develop the rest of his body as well. His chest was massive. The sleeves of his plaid flannel shirt were rolled back, revealing sinewy arms. But prison had also developed something else in Two Knives, and it showed in the coldness of his dark eyes.

“Sarah told us you’d be here. I need to talk to you, Stormy.”

“I’m busy.”

“It’s important. It’s about your uncle.”

Two Knives reached down to where a thermos sat on a stump. He poured cold water into the thermos cup and took a drink. He offered the cup to his son.

“Wendell? What about him?”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“Why?”

“It’s important I talk to him.”

“Haven’t seen him.”

Louis Two Knives handed the thermos cup back to this father. “He’s in the Boundary Waters.”

“Louis,” Stormy Two Knives snapped.

“He’s been gone a long time,” the boy continued, ignoring the hard look from his father.

“Stormy,” Cork said. “He may be in trouble.”

“The only trouble an Indian is ever in is with the law. Has my uncle done something?”

“He guided a woman into the Boundary Waters. We think somebody may want to hurt her, and they might try to use Wendell to get to her.”

“We?” Two Knives coldly scrutinized Arkansas Willie Raye, looking directly into his eyes, an unusual thing for an Ojibwe. But prison had changed Stormy Two Knives in a lot of ways. “I know you.”

“Call me Arkansas Willie,” Raye said. He thrust a hand out, but Two Knives only looked at it.

“Used to watch you on TV,” Stormy Two Knives said. “Didn’t know you were still alive.” He turned his attention back to Cork. “I don’t know anything about my uncle.”

“Stormy, this woman’s life may be at stake. Your uncle’s, too.”

“My uncle can take care of himself.”

“I’ve been told he goes in and out of the Boundary Waters frequently. I think he must take supplies to this woman. Louis says he’s been gone a long time. That makes me worried.”

“Look, what do you care, O’Connor? You’re not the sheriff anymore. You don’t make the laws around here.”

“I never did, Stormy.”

“Like I said,” Two Knives went on, lifting his chainsaw, “I’m busy. Hand me that bar tool, Louis. I want to tighten this chain.”