Edgewise (25 page)

“Isn't there any way of rescuing him? I mean—if the Wendigo could take him into this sideways world, what's to stop us from going after him?”

“Excuse me, but do you happen to know
how
to get through to the spirit world? Because I sure don't—sideways world, upside down world, or any-which-way world: I wouldn't know where to start.”

They drove along the bumpy track in silence for a while. But then Lily said, “There's only one thing we can do, isn't there?”

“What's that?”

“We're like cornered animals, aren't we? And what do animals do, when they're cornered?”

“They crap themselves.”

“No, they don't. Whatever's chasing them, however much more powerful it is, they turn around and they attack it.”

“Meaning?”

“If the Wendigo's hunting for us, we'll have to find it first—go after it, and kill it.”

Shooks stared at her for such a long time that he almost drove into a tree beside the road. Eventually, he said, “
We'll
have to hunt down the Wendigo?”

When they arrived back at Lily's house, they found Special Agent Kellogg waiting for them. He climbed out of his car and came over to them, blowing on his hands to warm them up.

“I'm sorry,” said Lily. “I had my cell switched off. You haven't been waiting too long, have you?”

“Ten minutes, that's all. Mind if I come in?”

“Sure. Oh, by the way, this is John Shooks. John, this is Special Agent Kellogg from the FBI.”

“Our paths have crossed from time to time,” said Shooks, dryly. “How's life with you, Nathan?”

“Fine, thanks, John. Be interested to know what you're doing here?”

“Friend of the family, Nathan, that's all.”

“Wasn't aware that you
had
any friends.”

Lily opened the front door. Shooks said, “Listen, Lily, I have some people to see regarding that little bit of business of ours. I'll check with you later.”

“Okay, John. Thanks for the ride.”

She led Special Agent Kellogg into the living room. “Take off your coat,” she said. “I'll have this fire burning up in a minute.”

Special Agent Kellogg unwound his scarf. “You've been doing business with John Shooks? What kind of business, if you don't mind me asking?”

“Nothing much. He's helping me to trace a long-lost uncle of mine. You know, so that I can tell him about Agnes.”

“Oh, yes? He's a hoser, that guy, believe me.”

Lily shrugged. She hated to lie to him, but what else could she say?

Special Agent Kellogg took off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. “I wanted to talk to you off the record,” he said.

“About anything special?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he said, “This is real difficult. You've been the victim here. But Agent Rylance and myself . . . we can't help but think that we're missing something.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Lily—you don't mind if I call you Lily?”

“Of course not, so long as I can call you Nathan.”

“Sure. But the thing is—what's really going on here, Lily?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we have a jigsaw here and there's a big piece of sky missing and we have the feeling that you may know where it is—wittingly or unwittingly. I'm not suggesting that you're deliberately holding out on us. But four people have died during the course of this investigation, and they've all been killed in pretty much the same way: torn to pieces, and their bodies strewn for thousands of yards.

“Like we told you before, we don't have any idea who killed them, or
what
killed them, or how. A giant eagle? A flying bear? But I've searched through the FBI database and I've discovered that seventeen other people have also been killed like that, over the past twenty-three years. None of them was related to any of the others, and they were all killed in different parts of the country.

“But thirteen of them were involved in kidnap or abduction cases, and the other four were listed as missing persons. And all of them originally came from southern Minnesota or northern Iowa or western Wisconsin—none of them farther than two-hundred-fifty miles from Minneapolis.

“So there are strong similarities between each killing, and those similarities apply in your case, too.”

Lily said, “I honestly don't know what I can tell you.”

“Well, for beginners, you could tell me what you've really been doing with John Shooks. Come on, Lily, you must know what kind of a guy he is. He's the living definition of a Shady Character.”

Lily took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “My boss at Concord Realty put me in touch with him, when Tasha and Sammy first went missing. He helped my boss's brother to get
his
children back, when their mother abducted them.”

“But you have Tasha and Sammy back now. Why is Shooks still hanging around?”

“He's been very supportive—that's all I can say.”

“John Shooks? Supportive? Now I've heard everything.”

Lily sat down by the fire, and Special Agent Kellogg came and sat down opposite her. He looked at her appealingly, and for the first time she noticed that one of his eyes was gray and the other green.

“I'm going to be open with you, Lily. The rules say that agents should never get themselves emotionally involved. Total detachment from fellow agents, perpetrators, witnesses, and victims—the bureau insists on it. But ever since I first walked into this house and saw you . . . well, I've been finding it real hard not to tell you how special you are.”

“
What?
” She had always thought that Special Agent Kellogg was good-looking, in a sharp-faced, loose-wristed way, like a young Clint Eastwood, and he had always been very attentive, but she had been far too stressed to notice that he might have found her attractive. She didn't
feel
attractive. Her hair was still as fuzzy as thistledown and she hadn't slept more than a few hours since Agnes and Ned had been killed, so she now had plum-colored circles under her eyes.

“I think you're special,” Special Agent Kellogg repeated. “It's just the way you look. Vulnerable, I guess, but tough with it. And very pretty.”

“Well, I might be vulnerable. But as for
pretty
—I think you need to go back to FBI headquarters and take an eye test.”

“Look,” said Special Agent Kellogg, “I'm not trying to come on to you. I only want you to understand that I really care about you, and I don't want to see anything bad happening to you.”

“Is this your way of getting me to confess?”

“Lily—what the hell is going on? If you can tell us
anything
that helps us to fit this thing together . . .”

God, she was so tempted to tell him. At least it would take some of the burden off her. But she knew that telling him wouldn't change anything, and it would probably make her situation even more dangerous. The FBI might be able to arrest George Iron Walker and Hazawin, but they would never be able to find the Wendigo, even if she could persuade Special Agent Kellogg that it really existed. Little William would be ripped apart and eaten, and then the Wendigo would come after
her.

“Nathan,” she said, and reached out to take hold of his hands. “You've done my confidence a whole lot of good. Thank you.”

He shook his head in exasperation. “Take my advice, Lily. Even if you can't tell me what's happening, stay well away from John Shooks. He's trouble.”

Lily thought, that's exactly what I'm looking for:
trouble
.

The next morning, Special Agent Rylance phoned Lily just after nine
A.M
. to tell her that the Minneapolis coroner had released Agnes and Ned's remains, and asked her if she had chosen a funeral home.

Remains.
The word made her feel as if she had stepped up to her chest in icy-cold water, and she couldn't answer him for almost fifteen seconds. In spite of that, Special Agent Rylance waited patiently on the other end of the line while she tried to pull herself together.

“I'll get back to you,” she said. “I really hadn't thought about a funeral.”

“You've seen their kids? How are they coping?”

“Not too bad, I suppose, but I don't think it's really sunk in yet.”

“OK. By the way, I asked the St. Petersburg police about your ex. They're holding on to
his
remains for the time being, pending some further investigation.”

“Thanks.”

There was a long pause, and then Special Agent Rylance said, “We're here to help you, Mrs. Blake. You do understand that? It's our job.”

“I know,” Lily told him. “One day—well, I hope one day that I can show you how much I appreciate the way that you and Agent Kellogg have helped me to cope with all of this.”

“Like I say, Mrs. Blake, it's all in a day's work. Call us—you know—if you need us. Or if you think of anything that might help us. You know what I'm saying?”

She was beating up Aunt Jemima's pancake mix when the doorbell chimed. It was John Shooks. He was shivering and sniffing and chafing his hands together, and there was a drip on the end of his nose.

“Why the freak do I live in Minnesota?” he demanded. “I must be some kind of freaking masochist! I could just as easy be a private eye in California, or Florida. I could run my business from a sun-lounger, with some babe in a bikini for a secretary. A very, very small bikini.”

“Here, come into the kitchen. Did you have any luck last night?”

He dragged off his scarf but kept his overcoat on. “Yes, and no. I talked to some of my Native American relatives. Jesus, what a crew! Most of them sound like Tonto on speed. They all knew about the Wendigo. Like, find me a Native American who
doesn't
know about the Wendigo. But what they knew was all mythical stuff, like how it chases you and never lets you get away and how it comes right up behind you but when you spin around it's
still
right behind you. Nothing
practical
—like how to track one down and annulify it.”

“So none of them could help us?”

“Not definitely sure yet. My second cousin Kenneth Return-From-Scout said I should visit my great-uncle in Como—Thomas Bear Robe. Apparently he used to teach Native American Studies at the U, and he's written books about Native American legends. So that's what I'm going to do, as soon as I've had a leak and a cup of coffee and . . . Are those pancakes you're whipping up there?”

He was still eating when Tasha and Sammy came downstairs for their breakfast. Sammy promptly sat down on his usual stool but Tasha stayed close to Lily, frowning at Shooks with deep suspicion.

“These are great pancakes,” said Shooks, waving his fork. “I haven't had pancakes in a coon's age.”

Lily put her arm around Tasha's shoulders. “This is my friend John Shooks, sweetheart. John is a private detective. He's helping me to find out what happened to Aunt Agnes and Uncle Ned, and little William too.”

“Okay,” said Tasha, reluctantly. She sat as far away from Shooks as she could, while Lily served her pancakes and poured on maple syrup for her.

“You mustn't mind me,” Shooks told her. “I know I look like I've slept in a dumpster, but I've been working all night on behalf of your mom, and all I'm interested in doing is arranging for you and your mom to have the happiest ending possible.”

“Mom?” said Tasha.

Lily smiled at her. “It's true, sweetheart. John's here to help us.”

Tasha drew her very close. “But he
smells,
” she whispered. “He smells like old carrots.”

“That's okay. I'll make sure that he takes a shower. You want to take a shower, John?”

Shooks wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and burped. “Sure, I'd love one. Don't want to go around smelling like old carrots, now do I?”

He laughed, and then Sammy laughed, and Tasha looked up at Lily, and Tasha smiled too.

Thomas Bear Robe sat in the far corner of his yellow-leather couch, his bulky legs crossed, his stomach bulging over his silver-buffalo-head belt.

“The
Wendigo?
” he said, in a deep, chocolatey voice. “Hell of a long time since anybody asked me anything about the Wendigo.”

He was a big, broad-shouldered man, at least seventy-five years old, with long steel-gray hair that was tied in a ponytail. His eyes were so pouchy that they were half-closed and he had a prominent bump on the bridge of his nose. He looked like one of those old sepia photographs of Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse.

They had driven up to the university suburb of Como under a sky that was growing grimmer and grimmer, and Lily began to feel that something terrible was about to happen. The wind was rising, too, so that snow-devils whirled across the highway.

Thomas Bear Robe lived in a dilapidated bungalow on a sloping triangular plot, surrounded by seventy-five-foot pines. It looked as if the bungalow's cladding hadn't had its pale-green paint refreshed since the 1960s, and there was a rusting old truck parked outside the garage, draped in a snow-covered tarpaulin.

The inside of the bungalow was gloomy and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the roast-chicken pie that Thomas Bear Robe must have made himself for lunch, because the dirty plate was still on the dining table, along with heaps of newspapers and magazines and books.

Thomas Bear Robe said, “My father would never say the name ‘Wendigo' out loud because he believed that the Wendigo would prick up its ears and hear it, carried on the wind, and was likely to come after him. He always called it ‘That Forest Thing.' ”