Jack Pine, page 4
“Go ahead, Hector.”
“Ah, just got a call from the sheriff….The girl at the lodge recanted her story there….Says she’s not sure what happened now.”
He stood with the radio for a moment.
“She still at the lodge?”
“Ya, sheriff has gone home.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Reuger clipped the radio and turned to Jeep still holding the empty gas tank.
“Have a boat I could borrow there, Jeep?”
“Oh, ya, you bet, Sheriff, whatever you need here.” He gestured to the high school boys. “You boys here get this one here up to the top and bring the sheriff’s gear and put it in my boat up there.”
“We’ll meet you at the top, Jeep,” he called starting up the hill with Gus.
“What in hell is going on down there, Reuger,” Gus grumbled, limping next to him.
“Hurt yourself there?”
“Jest a little arthritis in my hip there.” He shut one eye. “Don’t yer worry I can keep up with yer. But what’s Riechardt up to with this girl?”
He squinted up the hill where sun lay like a fleece of gold.
“Find out.”
6
HE WALKED THOUGH the charred timbers. Dusk had already shadowed the land, and burned wood smelled like a damp fireplace. He walked toward the blackened slasher and glanced around again. What the fuck had happened? How did it go so bad? He glanced around the quiet land and reached up to the gas tank for the motor that ran the hydraulics of the cherry picker and the saw.
The cap screwed off roughly from the heat. He saw the brittle wire just inside the tank and carefully pulled out the bare light bulb. The filament was still there and, amazingly, so was the gas. The truck had burned and somehow the gas had not ignited in the smaller tank. So the fire didn’t start from there! Somebody really fucked up. He walked over the crackling wood, holding the bare wires going to the filament. The rest of the wire had burned away.
He stood back. When the slasher started up, the bulb should have ignited. That would have blown the tank, and there would have been a neat fire. But…this. No. He walked away from the truck and stared over the landscape. The fireweed was crushed down, and he walked like a man approaching a dangerous animal. This was where he was. He could see the blood spread out in the weeds. It looked like someone had dressed out a deer. A man had a lot of blood.
He turned and shook his head. Not so easy this business. He stood in the shadow of the forest and wondered if things were spinning out of control.
7
A BOAT GLIDED on the shell-colored bay with undulations rippling from its sides. Reuger watched the boat for a moment then turned from the window to the girl in a chair among the five adults. Dana Reynolds wore sunglasses and had bleach-matted hair and pink-painted lips and fingernails. She scuffed her sandals on the plank wood and chewed gum every few minutes. A halter-top barely covered her breasts, her shorts were so tight her vulva bulged.
Reuger’s eyes drifted to the bearskin rug next to mining lanterns and snowshoes and an old chain saw from 1955. The faded green tiles of the floor, pine walls, and comfortably saggy couches were familiar to him. Pine Lodge was like a VFW hall with an A-frame ceiling and long windows facing the lake. Reuger looked at the owner, Jim Carpenter, standing with his arms crossed, wearing a checkered shirt and sagging blue jeans and a BWCA belt buckle. He was pale and looked like he might get sick any minute.
The lodge had survived the Wilderness Act when many others didn’t. When the law was passed in 1968, there was a bloodletting of lodges. The Forest Service bought the lodges at market value and then lit the timbers. They burned twenty-seven lodges on Basswood Lake. The line was arbitrary and sweeping. Anything above the line that was not a canoe or of nature was forbidden. The line swept down through Snowbank and bisected the lake. Lodges were put on sleds and pushed to the Southern End to escape destruction. Pine Lodge had just made it and ended up being the only lodge close to the Boundary Waters.
Jim’s father had bought the abandoned logging camp after World War II and built a lodge on the horseshoe bay off Snowbank Lake. The lodge resembled an old ranch house with a sagging roof of red cedar washed to gray from melting snow. Originally, the site was a logging camp, and the roads left behind became the lodge road and the network of cabins. Down the road from the lodge was the woodshed where Dana Reynolds said she was attacked.
Reuger stared at the girl. He had yet to hear the word raped. He had brought his rape kit along just in case, but Jim Carpenter was careful to use the word attacked. Raped, and he could kiss the lodge goodbye. Attacked, and he might have a chance. Reuger rested his right hand on the Colt. It had been a while since he had a crime of this nature. Not since Annabel Günter.
A year ago, he found her walking on the old lodge road, stumbling with cuts and bruises and one sandal missing. She wouldn’t talk about it. Annabel now worked at the lodge, and every time he came there she avoided him.
“Well!” Joel Reynolds barked. “What the hell are you going to do?”
Reuger turned to the man standing before him. Joel Reynolds was bald and brown and heavy lipped. He stood in the middle of the room with a cell phone blinking under a raft of weight on his belt. A laptop sat open and glowing behind on the round kitchen table in front of the coffee pots.
“I want everyone’s names here,” he declared, swinging around.
The girl rolled her eyes.
“Chill, Dad.”
“Shut up! I’ll handle this.”
He sat back down at the computer. A phone shrilled, and he was up again.
“What…yes. I want the best investigator you have…yes my daughter has been molested in some lodge up here in the middle of bumfuck I don’t know where.” He passed Jim Carpenter.
“You better find another lodge, my friend, because I’m going to sue you into oblivion and then back….What? Yes, call me back when you get hold of him and see when you can get him a flight up here.”
He clapped away the phone and faced his daughter. When he had come to the lodge, the father had said the daughter changed her mind and that she had been attacked. A phone clipped to her pink shorts rang. Dana Reynolds brought it up to her ear.
“Oh hey…I can’t hear you…”
Her father wheeled around like a general.
“Get off the phone, Dana!”
She glared at her father.
“I have to get off, my dad is being an asshole.”
She folded the phone and scowled.
“There, I’m fucking off, all right?”
Joel Reynolds paced the room. He was sweating and his forehead and upper lip glistened in the window light.
“Were you molested, Dana?” Joel Reynolds whipped around and stared at Reuger. “We already went through this!” he shouted. “Of course she was molested!”
Reuger squeezed one eye closed and tipped his hat to the girl.
“Asking your daughter here, sir. I understand there’s some confusion.”
Joel Reynolds crossed the room and stepped close. He was wearing a cheap aftershave Reuger hadn’t smelled for years. It reminded him of a drugstore in the lower forty-eight from when he was a boy. This man oozed sweat from almost every pore on his face and his brown eyes darted from side to side like caged bees.
“Listen to me, no backwoods sonofabitch is going to interrogate my daughter. You think you can fuck with me because I’m not from around here, well you have another thing…”
Reuger clamped his shoulder and pulled him close. He hated to do it this way, but this man was so used to giving orders he was no longer listening, and now some boundaries had to be established.
“Don’t stand so close to me,” he said in a low voice. “And don’t threaten people with closing their business. I’m the deputy sheriff of the Northern Territory, and I’ll ask your daughter what I need to here.” He leaned closer with his hat brim touching his forehead. “You call me a sonofabitch again, and I’ll have you out in that road.”
The eyes pushed against the glass lenses and the man breathed heavily.
“Are you…are you threatening me?”
“Oh shut up, Joel, and let the man do his goddamn job!”
He turned to the woman behind him. Her curly hair sprouted from a hat waging war with humidity and wind, and gold sagged on low cleavage. She looked wearily at her husband.
“You didn’t ask her one question, Joel, before dragging us all down here, so let the man do his job!”
Joel swept the room with his hand.
“I’ll handle this, Myra!”
“Yeah, sure you will,” she nodded slowly, her eyes hard as bullets. “Will you for once quit being the lawyer?”
Joel wheeled around to his daughter, speaking in a low voice.
“This man is going to ask you some questions.”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“Yeah… I know that, dad.”
The man glared at Reuger, then went by his wife and crossed his arms.
Ben Johnson had been quietly sitting in the corner and crossed an embroidered three hundred dollar boot over his knee and lifted his tan Stetson. He looked like he might bust out laughing any minute. Jim looked like he might puke.
Reuger pursed his lips and concentrated on the girl again. She tilted her head and fingered a pink nail. “So…where were you when this man came up on you, Dana?”
She shrugged, whisking her blond hair back behind her shoulders.
“Inside that old shed with boards and stuff.”
“The woodshed?”
“Yeah.”
Reuger nodded and rubbed his eyes.
“Where were you before that?”
“At the campfire.” Her eyebrows lowered. “Like I said before.”
“About what time?”
“Close to midnight,” she muttered, smacking her gum loudly.
“Midnight!” Her father marched across the room. You said nine o’clock before! What the hell were you doing out at midnight!”
“Yeah, so what,” Dana shrugged, pulling back her blond hair. “I snuck out of my window.”
Myra Reynolds grabbed her husband’s arm.
“Joel, let her talk!”
He went by his wife and crossed his arms again wearily. Reuger walked the planks with his boots creaking the boards. The girl’s body language suggested nothing had happened. She was sitting with her legs apart and her shoulders slumped. Her whole body suggested boredom, not someone who was just raped.
“What did you do after the campfire, Dana?”
“I started walking home and went past that shed and heard a noise,” she said nonchalantly.
“In the woodshed then?”
She nodded, pulling back her hair again.
“Yeah.”
“What did you do then?”
She crossed her legs, bobbing one knee over the other.
“I went in to see what it was.”
That’s when you saw the man there?”
“Yeah, right.” She nodded quickly. “That’s when he snuck up on me.”
Reuger looked at her directly.
“What’d this man look like?”
“He was…I don’t know…he was dark.” She opened her mouth and hesitated. “Big. He had this long black hair…you know… like an Indian.”
Reuger smoothed his mustache.
“Did he grab you, Dana?”
“I think…I think he tried to,” she said slowly. Her eyes flicked up to him, and Reuger saw something like the flash of a cooling match. The nonchalance was stripped for a second, and it made his stomach sink. She was squirming in the chair again. “But I ran before he could get to me.”
“You think he did!”
Her father was moving again and Reuger turned away. The girl was already sullying up against the parental intrusion.
“Well…it was fucking dark.”
Joel Reynolds lorded down on her with a fat forefinger.
“Watch your language, young lady!”
“Oh, big fucking deal,” she muttered.
“Dana…” Her father shook his finger at her again. “I’m warning you.”
“Joel!” Her mother crossed between them. “Let her talk!”
“Myra…please!”
Reuger turned back to the window. The sun had touched the lake with gold and he watched a boat heading out for the evening fish. He felt like he was watching one of those shows from the lower forty-eight. It was controlled chaos, and he had a room full of it. He had no way to tell what happened to the girl because the air was filled with static from the father. He turned back to Dana Reynolds in the kitchen chair.
“This Indian who came into the shed…he didn’t actually touch you?”
“Well…” She opened her mouth and hesitated, a pink blush rising on her cheeks. “I guess not…I mean, maybe, I mean… I don’t know if he did or he didn’t!”
Joel Reynolds clapped his forehead.
“What!”
She glared at her father.
“He didn’t touch me—but he wanted to.” She said it with the shorts riding high like a bathing suit. “Most men want to touch me! You were the one who said I was attacked!”
“Because you said you were!”
The gum started a quick rotation and she examined her pink nails.
“I said I was sort of attacked,” she muttered.
“Sort of!”
Dana shrugged and crossed her leg again, bobbing one foot over her knee. Reuger tapped his gun belt, biting the inside of his mouth, choking off the annoyance he felt. He looked at the lawyer struggling with some creature contorting his mouth. Reuger turned to the girl.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me, Dana?”
“No,” she said in a small voice.
Reuger tapped his gun belt and looked up at Joel Reynolds.
“You can file a report if you like, sir.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Mrs. Reynolds snapped. “Come on, Dana. We’re going home for a little talk. Get your computer, Joel, and let’s go!”
The lawyer stared at his daughter, his wife, then Jim. Myra Reynolds held the screen door open in a slash of twilight. The lawyer opened his right hand.
“I think gentlemen. I owe you an…”
“Oh, come on, Joel,” Myra shouted. “Before you make a bigger ass out of all of us!”
He shut his mouth and slinked out behind his family. Ben Johnson stood up from the chair and walked to the picture window. He shook his head slowly, pushing up his hat to a line of sunburn.
“Well if that isn’t the damnedest thing,” he growled, shaking his head. “Damn swampys from the lower forty-eight they come up here like a disease.” He turned to Reuger. “You knew she was lying all along, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know about that,” he murmured, watching the family.
A door behind them swung open, and they turned to Diane Carpenter with a shotgun in her right hand. Jim’s wife walked to the window and blossomed smoke rings on the glass, her Annie Oakley curl of brown hair flowing down over a flannel shirt cuffed at the sleeves with Marlboros.
“Ya,” she nodded. “Telling stories like that about people here, you know she keeps her parents busy, that one,” she nodded flaring the cigarette again and turning in the dusk light. “Thought I’d show you my birthday present, Reuger.”
He took the shotgun and fingered the mahogany stock then sited the barrel. Gun oil slicked his palms and he could smell the new wood of the slide. He lowered the gun.
“Mossberg 20 gauge?”
“Oh, ya,” Diane nodded, flipping her hair back with her shoulders. “Go ahead and check out the action there.”
Reuger worked the slide and pumped the gun once. It was smooth and clean. Diane crinkled her lips, popping the cigarette in a torrent.
“Can’t wait for the fall, you know. Shoot me some partridges from the jeep,” she said, taking the shotgun from him.
“So did you hear all that?” Jim motioned with his coffee cup. “We almost just lost the lodge.”
Diane tipped ash in her palm with the shotgun over her forearm.
“Ya, I heard it.”
Reuger watched her smoke, the heavy mascara sooty in the retreating light. Diane Carpenter was the daughter of a taconite miner. A waitress when Jim Carpenter went to the Ely Diner and sat all night drinking coffee, trying to get up the nerve to ask her for a date. After they turned off the lights of the restaurant she walked up to his table and said, “Ya, Jim, we’re closing, would you like to go get a drink?” Jim had nodded and said, “Just about to ask you the same thing.”
She shook her head slowly.
“I was just baking my rolls and cookies here and such and hear all this yelling and see Reuger there, and I knew something was going on.”
He turned to her. Where Jim was slow and methodical and didn’t speak much, Diane had the frankness that comes from watching a father die of black lung disease and going to work full time when she was just sixteen.
“What do you think about the girl, Diane?”
“Oh, ya, the little bitch was lying.” She christened the glass again with a wreath of smoke and looked at Reuger. “Anyone could see that, you know.”
8
IT WAS GETTING dark early already. He glanced around and pulled out the twelve-inch spike from an army rucksack. He looked up at the white pine. It wasn’t a bad tree at that. He glanced around at the surrounding jack pine and pulled a five-pound sledge out of the rucksack and lined up the spike in the center of the white pine. He hit it slowly with the ping coming back from the trees. Amber sap squished out around the spike.
He finished pounding the spike into the tree. He hit it three more times until only a small circle of steel was visible. He scraped off some of the sap and added some bark then smoothed it over the spike. There. Not bad. He stepped back. Nope. No one could see the twelve-inch rod inside the tree. He glanced around at the other trees. You never knew what tree the motherfucker was going to cut, but it looked like he was headed this way.
