Red Knife (27 page)

T
he baby’s cry pulled Lucinda from her husband’s arms. She went to see to Misty. The phone rang and she heard Will answer. She changed the baby’s diaper and put her in a new outfit, little Oshkosh overalls that had been a gift from one of the families who’d come to the visitation for Rayette and Alejandro. When she came into the living room with the baby in her arms, she found Will standing at the picture window, gazing out at the beautiful Sunday morning. He turned to her and looked happy.

“What is it?” she asked.

“That was Cork O’Connor on the phone. The sheriff is arresting Elise Reinhardt for killing her husband.”

“They’re sure it was her?”

“Cork says there’s proof. I told him I was afraid it had been Uly, because of the missing Dragunov and all. He told me he thought it might have been Uly, too. He figured we’d be relieved.”

“Oh, Will.” She felt a flood of relief, of gratitude, of happiness.

“That still doesn’t answer the question of why Uly took the rifle,” Will said.

“You can ask him yourself.” She nodded toward the road, visible through the window, where she saw Uly walking from town, carrying the overnight bag he’d taken to Darrell Gallagher’s house.

At the driveway Uly stopped for a minute, staring back toward Aurora.

“Sometimes he looks so lost it breaks my heart,” Lucinda said.

“At that age, Luci, everybody’s lost.” Will put his arm around her shoulders. “Tell me an age we aren’t.” He strode to the front door and called out, “Uly, could we talk to you?”

Uly dragged his feet up the steps like a man mounting the gallows.

Lucinda put the baby on the floor and sat down with her. She had Misty’s pink rubber pig in her hand, which squeaked whenever she squeezed. She made the pig squeak and Misty smiled and tried to reach for the toy.

When Uly was inside, Will said, “Sit down.”

Uly set his overnight bag on the floor and dropped onto the sofa. If he was surprised or pleased to see that his father had been released from jail, he didn’t show it. He put his hands together, almost as if he expected to be handcuffed, and he looked up at his father with a face ready to sulk. “What did I do now?”

“We just got word that they’re arresting Buck Reinhardt’s wife for his murder.”

Uly often hid his emotions behind a wall of feigned indifference, but the news had a visible effect. His whole body relaxed and his dark eyes lost their stony aspect and looked, in fact, as if they were about to melt.

“I don’t understand, Dad,” he said. “Why did you tell them you did it?”

“Because I thought you killed Buck Reinhardt.”

Uly looked stunned. “I killed him?”

“What other reason would you have for taking the Dragunov?”

Uly didn’t reply right away. His eyes settled on the baby, whose hands grasped at the pig in Lucinda’s hand. “I was going to kill him. I decided I couldn’t.”

“That’s a good thing,” Will said.

“I thought it was the kind of thing you would do.”

Will sat down beside his son and said, “I don’t want you to be me, Uly. I don’t want anyone growing up to be what I am.”

“Don’t say that, Will,” Lucinda broke in.

“It’s true, Luci.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “There’s so much about my past that I would undo if I could, Uly, so much about who I am that I would change. I’m proud of who you are. I don’t tell you that enough, but I am. I’m proud of the man you’re becoming. I’d rather have you picking up a guitar than a rifle. It seems to me the world could use more music and less gunfire, son.”

Uly looked uncomfortable, but said, “Thanks.”

“Where’s the rifle?” Will asked.

“I’ve been keeping it at Darrell’s house.”

“I’d like it back today.”

“I’ll go now, if Mom’ll let me borrow her car again. But he might not be home. He was thinking of going fishing with his grandfather. If I can’t get it back today, I’ll pick it up first thing tomorrow morning and drop it off at the shop after school. Okay?”

“That’ll be fine.” Will stood up as if he was finished, but he said one more important thing. “Uly, when I thought it was you who killed Buck Reinhardt and I thought about the possibility of losing you, it was one of the hardest things I ever faced.” Then he said something Lucinda had never heard from him before. “I love you, son.”

Uly stared at his hands and finally said, “Can I go?”

“Sure.”

Uly lurched from the sofa and walked to the kitchen, where he took the extra set of car keys from the drawer where Lucinda kept them, then he headed out the door.

“I think I embarrassed him,” Will said.

Lucinda gazed up at him and smiled. “I love you, Will Kingbird.”

Misty gurgled and flailed. Will bent down and lifted her in his arms.

“You always wanted a daughter to complete this family, Luci. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I guess.” He gave the baby a gentle kiss.

Late that night, Annie sat at her computer, trying to bring to a close her term paper on the true authorship of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. She was drafting her conclusion, which was basically an admission that the truth may never be known and an assertion that, in the end, the truth was pointless. She figured she’d end with something sappy, maybe a line of full alliteration, something she thought Ms. Killian, her English teacher, would love.

Does it matter who created the rose?
she typed.
The important thing is that its beauty exists for all to enjoy. So it is with the words and the wisdom the world has credited to William Shakespeare.

She wasn’t sure if she liked it, but she was sick of writing. Then Uly Kingbird IM’ed her.

r u there

yes
, she replied.

thank u

what for

your prayers helped

good

do u have more

for u

a friend

who

does it matter

The only friend she knew that Uly had was Darrell Gallagher.

i’ll pray,
she replied.

There was a long pause. She waited patiently for what turned out to be Uly’s final message of the night:
pray hard.

C
ork slept better than he had in days, and he rose early and refreshed. He slipped into his running gear and hit the street while the rest of Gooseberry Lane was just beginning to crawl into Monday morning. Normally he would have asked Annie if she wanted to run with him, but he knew she’d been up late the night before finishing a paper for her English class, the last major obstacle to a clean graduation. A couple more weeks of classes without much substance, a week full of ritual closure, and she was free. Softball practice in preparation for the state championship would fill her afternoons, but that was pure joy for her. As the sun rose over Iron Lake and put down a gold carpet under his feet, he felt like a man rich beyond his dreaming.

He ran a route that took him past Sam’s Place, where he stopped for a few minutes. The lake was the color of gemstones, sapphire water and topaz light, and above it two flights of geese arrowed north. He ran his hand along the wall of the Quonset hut and felt as if he was connecting with an old, neglected friend. His plan that day was to begin again the preparations to open the following weekend. There was a lot to be done, but he was looking forward to focusing on something simpler than all that had occupied his time and mind in the last week. He was looking forward to Aurora returning to normal, to settling into the quiet, unremarkable slide into summer, to the usual preparations for the migration of tourists that would come as surely as those flocks of Canada geese.

When he returned home, Annie was finishing her breakfast at the kitchen table.

“Dad,” she said, shoveling in the final spoonful of oatmeal, “you should have gotten me up.”

He pulled a tumbler from the cupboard and began to fill it at the kitchen tap. “Unfortunately you take after my side of the family, kiddo, and need all the beauty rest you can get,” he joked.

She crumpled her napkin and threw a fastball that caught him in the back of the head. “It’s best anyway,” she said. “I’m meeting Cara. We’re walking to school together.”

“Finish that paper?”

“Yeah, and I could live forever without reading another play by William Shakespeare. Or whoever.”

Jo entered the kitchen just in time to overhear the comment. “Someday you’ll understand there’s more to life than activities involving balls, Annie.”

Annie looked at her father and they both burst out laughing.

“You know what I mean,” Jo said, but she laughed, too.

“And with that profound advice ringing in my ears, Mother dear, I bid you adieu.” Annie picked up her backpack and danced out the door.

“Stevie,” Jo called toward the living room. “Get a move on, guy. I’ll drop you off at school on my way to work.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and sipped as she turned to Cork. “So what’s on your agenda today?”

“Sam’s Place. A lot to do to get ready for next weekend. You know, I’m really looking forward to opening the place up.”

“You always do, sweetheart.” She kissed him, tasting of coffee.

Cork headed upstairs to shower, passing his son on the way. Trixie wasn’t far behind. She had one of Stevie’s sneakers in her mouth.

“I’m teaching her to fetch my shoes,” Stevie explained.

“When you get her to mow the lawn, let me know.” Cork ruffled his son’s hair and moved on.

As he stepped out of the shower, he heard Jo pull out of the driveway in her Camry. He shaved and was almost dressed when he heard another vehicle pull up and park out front. He looked through his bedroom window and saw George LeDuc’s truck at the curb. LeDuc got out and Henry Meloux with him. Cork pulled his boots on and headed downstairs. He reached the door just as the bell rang.

“
Anin
, Henry.
Anin,
George,” he said, using the more formal Ojibwe greeting. “Come on in.” He moved aside to let the men enter. He couldn’t read their faces. “Coffee?” he offered.

“No,” Meloux replied. LeDuc shook his head.

“What’s up?” Cork asked.

LeDuc said, “Henry showed up on my doorstep this morning. He told me he had to see you.”

“Well, here I am.”

The old Mide spoke: “I told you, Corcoran O’Connor, that I had a vision of a dark, hungry thing.”

“I remember, Henry.”

“I have finally seen this thing clearly. It came to me before sunrise. It has the face of a youth. And I saw it standing in a meadow, surrounded by many bodies, also young. This dark thing was drinking their blood.”

“Do you know what it means, Henry?”

“I am not sure. But the meadow is a place I know from the stories I heard when I was a boy. It is called Miskwaa-mookomaan.”

“Red Knife,” Cork said. He knew the name, too. It had come up a few years earlier when the school district was debating the site for the new high school. They’d elected finally to build it on the place where, long before, the Ojibwe had slaughtered a hunting party of Sioux.

“One more thing, Corcoran O’Connor. I saw your daughter, Anne, among the bodies covered with blood.”

“Where is Annie?” George LeDuc asked.

“She left for school. She’s probably there by now.”

Then Cork thought about what Will Kingbird had told him, about Ulysses taking the rifle from the gun shop. Will had been afraid his son had taken it to kill Buck Reinhardt, but maybe Uly, a boy misunderstood and much picked on, had a different purpose in mind all along.

Cork grabbed the telephone in the hall and dialed Annie’s cell phone. The phone rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. He tried not to panic. Annie always turned her phone off before she went into school. It was a rule.

He hurried to the kitchen and grabbed the keys to his Bronco. He shouted to LeDuc and Meloux as he headed out the side door, “I’m going to the high school.” He didn’t wait for an answer.

He backed out of the drive in his Bronco and shot down Gooseberry Lane. He thought briefly of calling the sheriff’s office, but he had no proof that anything was going to happen, today or any other, just the vision of an old man. Besides, it would take him only five minutes to get to the high school. And what could possibly happen in five minutes?

A
nnie had just turned off her cell phone and was coming into the school parking lot with Cara when Uly Kingbird called to her. He was standing beside the red Saturn his mother usually drove.

“Annie, can I talk to you?”

“Go on,” Cara said. “I’ll see you inside.” She headed toward the school entrance where a late-arriving bus had parked and its student riders were spilling from the door.

Annie put her cell phone in her purse and crossed the parking lot to Uly. He looked terrible, disheveled, red eyed, as if he hadn’t slept at all. “Uly, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“Could we talk? Please? In private, in the car?”

“Sure. We need to make it fast, though. We don’t want to be late our first day back after suspension.”

Uly got in the driver’s side. Annie went around to the passenger door and slid in. Uly grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed, as if he were choking a snake. The tension in his body and the pain that twisted his face frightened Annie.

“What is it, Uly?”

“I don’t know what to do, Annie.”

“About what?”

“Last night I went over to Darrell’s house. I had to get one of my dad’s rifles.”

“What was it doing over there?”

“Long story. I’ve got it in the trunk. I’m taking it back to the shop after school.”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“Darrell was all pissed off when I got there. His granddad and him had been fighting, I don’t know what about. Darrell said he was going to add him to the target list.”

“Target list?”

“It’s this list we keep. Whenever somebody’s really been an asshole, we put him on the list. Then we shoot him.”

“What?”

“Darrell’s granddad keeps a lot of firearms around: pistols, rifles. We go out and set up bottles somewhere and shoot the hell out of them. Each bottle is somebody on the list. It’s just a way to, you know, deal with stuff. It’s not serious. At least I never thought it was. Last night, Darrell starts saying things that scared me. He said it was time to take care of the target list. He said he had a plan all worked out. He wanted us to do it together.”

From the school came the ring of the final bell, calling students to homeroom.

“He said what we’d do is lock the doors, chain them from the inside so nobody could get out. He has them, the chains. He showed them to me. And the locks. Then we’d sweep through, taking down anybody we wanted to.”

“What doors, Uly?”

He stared at the school and nodded in its direction.

“Oh my God.”

“I told him it was crazy, Annie. He’s like, ‘Dude, the whole fucking world is crazy. In the end, you’ve got only one choice. Do you go out with a bang or a whimper?’ It’s something he got off the Internet. He says it all the time.”

“We’ve got to tell somebody.”

“Who?”

Annie thought a moment. “Let’s start with Ms. Sherburne.” The school psychologist, who was also Annie’s softball coach.

Uly’s face went sour. “I don’t know. I’ve talked to her about stuff before. We don’t, you know, connect. And what if I’m wrong? Darrell already takes a lot of crap. If this got out, Jesus, he’d like have to move or something.”

“What if you’re not wrong?”

“I don’t know, Annie. I thought about it all night long and I just don’t know.”

“Look, if he’s talking this way, he needs help even if he’s not really thinking of doing anything.”

“Why? I mean sometimes I’ve thought how great it would be just to shoot all the assholes. That’s why we had the target list.”

“But would you, Uly? Would you really shoot them?”

He stared at the school building and finally shook his head. “No.”

“Would Darrell?”

Uly thought it over. “All right,” he said at last, though he didn’t sound totally convinced.

They got out of the car. The parking lot was empty and quiet. Annie knew they were already late for class, but they needed to talk to Ms. Sherburne and would be even later. They walked silently to the front entrance. Annie reached out and pulled the door handle. The door opened just a little then stopped. Annie yanked and heard the metallic rattle of a chain on the other side and in the last moment of her mind working clearly, she thought,
Oh God. Darrell Gallagher.

Once when she was much younger, she’d been trapped under a diving raft on Otter Lake, the back of her swimsuit strap snagged on something she couldn’t see, couldn’t reach back to release herself from. She’d struggled desperately. Seconds seemed too few and at the same time endless. Her mind took in everything, including the useless details of her situation—the soft green light of the water; the bubbles gathered along the bottom of the raft, like frog eggs; the velvet algae on the raft chain—but understood almost nothing in a useful way. The lake pressed around her, against her, isolated her, entombed her.

That’s how she feels now, as if she’s underwater, struggling to fight her way out of an airless tomb, moving too slowly, unable to think clearly, to breathe, to release herself from the terror that has gripped her.

She’s alone. Uly’s no longer beside her. Where he’s gone, she cannot say. Her cell phone is in her hand—how did it get there?—and her thumb is pressing the power button.

She stumbles away from the chained front entrance, out of the shadow of the portico, and into sunlight. Without really thinking, she turns and sprints for the doors at the south end of the building. Her feet seem mired in mud, dragging like dead things. Through the windows of the classrooms, she sees students milling about, settling gradually into their desks for homeroom, oblivious. The south doors appear suddenly in front of her. She grasps the handles and yanks. These, too, are chained and locked.

Gallagher, she understands, has trapped everyone inside.

Think, Annie,
she tells herself.
Think.

She remembers the entrance for the school kitchen, where deliveries are made, which is never used by the students or faculty. She spins and heads north.

The cell phone plays a twinkling tune to let her know it’s powered on now and she punches in 911 as she races along.

Tamarack County Emergency Services.

Annie knows that voice, a woman’s voice, but a face doesn’t come to her.

This is Annie O’Connor,
she cries into the phone.
I’m at the high school. Darrell Gallagher has a gun. He’s going to kill people.

Have you seen the gun, Annie?

No, but I know he has it. He’s locked the doors and trapped everybody inside.

Officers are on their way, Annie. Are you in the school?

No, I’m outside.

Stay there and don’t go in.

But she’s already at the kitchen service entry and she pushes inside, snapping her phone closed as she goes.

The moment she enters she hears from somewhere in the distant interior four rapid cracks—
bam bam bam bam
—like a fist smacking against lockers in the hallways. She runs through the kitchen. Morning sunlight glances off stainless-steel countertops and sinks and commercial-size stoves. Two women in hairnets are frozen in the act of pulling big mixing bowls from the cabinets. They stand as if posed, heavy women with arms uplifted, glittering silver bowls cupped in their fleshy hands. It reminds her of a painting, some Renaissance thing about a pagan offering she should know because she studied it—didn’t she?—in her humanities class.

Get out!
Annie yells as she passes them.
He has a gun! He’s shooting in the school!

She doesn’t wait to see if they respond.

Three more cracks in rapid succession echo down the empty hallway as Annie enters. She looks left, a clear view all the way to the main doors where light floods through the windows and down the polished tiles until it hits an obstruction, a dark oblong, lying crossways on the floor, that breaks the stream of light and begins a flow of its own, a dark and glistening stream. She thinks of a deer her father hit years ago when she was with him in the Bronco and she remembers how the animal lay across the road in just this way, bleeding, dying, then dead as she stood there with her father, watching helplessly as what neither of them could stop transpired.

Screams ricochet off walls at the other end of the hall.

Bam-bam. Bam-bam.

Two doors down, Iris Surma, the librarian, sticks her head out.

Darrell Gallagher has a gun!
Annie cries in her mind. But does she speak it? She’s not sure.

The librarian replies, her words like wood blocks that Annie gathers in her head and slowly puts together to construct their meaning:
We can’t get out. The doors are locked.

Annie points back the way she’s come.
Through the kitchen. The service door is open.

Iris Surma beckons behind her.
Hurry!
Eight students rush out and make a beeline for the cafeteria. Ms. Surma pauses and motions frantically for Annie to come with them. To Annie, it seems like a scene from an old movie where people stand on a pier waving to a boat that has already sailed.

Annie turns away from the librarian, turns toward the body on the floor.

It’s Lyle Argus, she discovers, one of the two security people in the school. He lies on his side, his arms outstretched toward the chain on the door. He stares beyond the reach of his empty hands, and Annie, who believes absolutely in heaven, wonders, as she kneels beside him, what those sightless eyes see now.

Bam-bam.
The shots sound as if they’re coming from the second floor.
Bam-bam-bam-bam.
The north stairwell disgorges students and several teachers, who stumble into the hallway. They rush toward the main entrance and Annie lifts her hands to stop them.
It’s locked! Go through the cafeteria to the kitchen door!

Some hear and swing in that direction, but many of them continue past Annie, leaping over the body of Lyle Argus in their hurry to reach the chained entry where they bunch like driven cattle. Annie’s cell phone bleats and she realizes it’s still in her hand. The call, she sees, is coming from Cara’s phone.

Cara?

Annie, I’m shot,
she says, her voice barely audible.

Where are you?

South stairwell.

I’m coming.

Behind her as she rises, those grouped at the chained entrance kick uselessly at the doors.

Her legs move as they do when she runs in the mornings with her father, without her thinking of them or even feeling them, really. She passes an open classroom where Mr. Henning, who teaches geography, sits on the floor with his back against the wall, cradling a student’s head in his lap. In the middle of Mr. Henning’s blue shirt is a huge red continent, like one of those he teaches about, but it’s a continent whose shape she doesn’t recognize. Mr. Henning looks at her as she passes, and he is crying.

A long trail of blood on the hallway floor leads to the girls’ bathroom and disappears under the door. Annie leaps over the blood and races on.

She approaches a corner and sees three black spiders crawling across the wall ahead. Nearer, she realizes they’re bullet holes that radiate cracks across the surrounding white plaster. She turns the corner and her legs carry her down another hallway, past closed gray lockers, past closed classrooms where the sound of desks scraping across floors tell her barricades are being erected. More gunshots—so many it sounds like corn being popped—and she reckons them to be coming from the direction of the main doors. She tries not to think of her classmates who’ve crowded there, desperately hoping to escape.

She rounds another corner and is at the south stairwell.

Cara lies at the bottom of the stairs, her face a bloodless white. She still clutches her cell phone in her hand. Her long legs, so graceful on the ball field and beautiful to watch, are sprawled under her, limp and twisted. She stares at Annie out of eyes that seemed to have turned into two dark tunnels. Annie glides to her and kneels.

Can’t feel,
Cara whispers.

Annie lifts the bottom of Cara’s soggy sweater and sees the blood welling up. There is so much she can’t see the hole the bullet has made. The blood comes from somewhere deep inside her friend and pours out so quickly that it is dark purple. It runs onto the polished floor and begins to snake away.

Annie…

Hush.

She wipes at the mess and locates the wound, to the right of Cara’s navel. She presses her hand there, but bruise-colored blood continues to slip under her palm and feed the snake on the floor. Annie lifts her hand away, and in the next moment she has taken off the Reebok she wears on her right foot, has yanked off her white cotton sock and folded it into a compress that she lays over the wound as she presses again.