In January the cold winnowed him. It stayed near zero during the day and twenty below at night for a week. In order to walk he had to wear an irritating face mask and he went less far in the woods out of timidity. He carried a compass and wood matches in a small aluminum tube, also candles in his vehicle in case it broke down. It did on a country road south of Trenary with a metallic, hacking cough. Two candles plus the afternoon sun kept the interior well above freezing. He dozed, content that he would live through this and remembering his cell phone was on the coffee table in the living room. He had turned on the warning lights and overcame the irksome clicking sound by turning on the NPR station to a rather dreary Haydn piece and mulling recent developments in the case. Mona had shown him an e-mail from King David sent through Carla. “Carla tells me that you’re extorting information from her. You better be careful, kiddo. You’re no longer a law officer.” Sunderson replied, “It is unwise to threaten someone from jail. I need only to send your message to Maui officials to get your sentence extended. However, I want you out of jail so I can get at you.” To Carla he said, “You should behave yourself. I need only to call the prosecutor to begin extradition on you for sexual abuse of a minor.” He wanted Mona to add, “Mona is now willing to testify,” but she refused. She was stirring a short-rib-and-lentil soup at his stove and said, “Carla got me drunk and stoned and ate me out. I can’t say that. I’m a big girl not one of those kids King David is fucking with.”
A logger towed Sunderson to a tavern in Trenary and pointed out the hole in his engine drooling oil. “You’ve thrown a rod,” the logger said. “Your Blazer is shit-canned, buddy.”
He signed the title over to the logger who could use a vehicle for spare parts for the price of a hamburger and a beer. Marion picked him up in an hour. Sunderson got his gear out of the woebegone junker.
“Aren’t you going to say something sentimental?”
“Good-bye, darling,” he said, patting the hood. The hard part was when he found his dead dog’s teddy bear under the backseat.
When they got back to his house Mona was frying a chicken and had also made succotash, one of his favorites.
“I’m being nice so you won’t run away like my dad did.”
He and Marion looked at each other feeling uncomfortable at her frankness. She was wearing a pair of turquoise earrings Marion had bought her on a trip to Albuquerque.
“Carla e-mailed to say that Queenie’s grandma died and she’s going to inherit a lot more money. The cult is definitely moving to Nebraska in April.”
Sunderson exhaled over a whiskey thinking that he would have time to get all of his ducks in a row whatever that meant. He would walk, read, and intermittently hibernate for three months and then, by God, he would somehow close the case.
In the morning he bought a used, gray Subaru with only sixty thousand miles on it, then stopped at Snowbound Books for a copy of Lolita. He had a painful lunch with Diane which she had requested. She talked a lot about her husband’s white corpuscle count and other medical details and barely touched her food which he, typically, finished. He was down fifteen pounds in the nearly three months since retirement, which made him ponder on the scales whether or not he had a fatal disease but then figured it must be the addictive walking. By the end of lunch she was in tears and he was near tears. Outside she hugged him good-bye and he shuddered at their first real physical contact in over three years. Life could be so merciless.
He fled out to the Skandia area for a hike. The temperature had risen to a balmy ten degrees above zero and he made a three-hour circle on a packed snowmobile track, which made walking without snowshoes easy. When the car came in sight after the lovely mindless exhaustion he wasn’t ready to go home yet and stopped and built a small fire out of dead pine branches to keep himself company. He was thinking about back after 9/11 when he had attended two law enforcement conferences in Canada on the cooperative efforts to prevent terrorism. The problem seemed unlikely indeed in the Upper Peninsula but the U.S. government was paying the tab and the chief ordered him to go. The first was in Toronto and the meetings were mostly pathetic nonsense but the city was wonderful. He met a now retired Toronto detective named Bob Kolb and they talked for hours in taverns and restaurants about trout fishing and grouse and woodcock hunting. There was another meeting a few months later in Calgary wherein much the same material was repeated so that one day he and Kolb skipped a couple of sessions to see the zoo. Strange to say Sunderson had never been to a zoo and the event comprised the beginning of what passed for him as a spiritual life. Soon after entering they saw a group of giraffes and Sunderson stared long and hard at a very young giraffe, a weanling, feeling goose bumps sweep up and down his body. Simply enough, the animal seemed impossible. How could it exist? Of course he had seen pictures but they had meant nothing. How could this creature have been invented? He had taken several college science courses and he was a devout evolutionist but he suspected a mind had to be behind this sublime creature, maybe what Indians called the Great Spirit.
There were repercussions that continued onward to the present time. A trout wasn’t just a trout any more than a crow was simply a crow. This spirit of attention wasn’t with him often but often enough. Marion was better practiced in this spirit of attention and when Sunderson visited Marion’s remote cabin he learned a great deal from him. Once they had found a dead yellow-rumped warbler which Sunderson had kept and put in a plastic bag in the freezer to remind him of the ineffable. A creek or river would also change the texture of his spirit so that staring into the moving water would make his brain tingle as it had in his childhood when wonder is nothing special but an everyday event.
Stooping before the fire his back and butt were chilled with drying sweat. When his job confused him he often reread from a letter Kolb had sent years before now kept in a tiny plastic envelope in his wallet. Kolb was responding to Sunderson’s note on how simple it must be to work in the U.P. compared to an immense city like Toronto. “No surprise but the TV networks, the news media, and I imagine most writers, have got it wrong. Crime is not interesting, it’s pathetically predictable. Nothing has changed since Cain slew Abel. Greed, jealousy, mental instability, and economic deprivation remain the prime ingredients. Religion has a place as well. Today substance abuse and moral lassitude thicken the gravy. The interest is in the circumstances, not the act, and not necessarily the people directly involved. Witnesses seldom tell the same story. For any detective, geography notwithstanding, police investigation involves hours of grinding boredom interspersed with moments of shit-your-pants excitement. The latter keeps the adrenaline junkies in the game.”
Sunderson watched the fire die. He shivered and anticipated the soup Mona said she would make out of venison shanks and neck plus barley and his favorite vegetable, rutabaga. Sunderson didn’t realize that he had been a good detective because he was utterly ordinary like a root vegetable. He didn’t separate himself from others like the Romantic hero, writers, painters, famed athletes. He made warm eye contact and spoke slowly in the grungy local accent. “Let’s have a brewsky, hey?” People were disarmed and told him everything. His day job had been total consciousness.