THE WINTER OF 1944 HAD begun early in Grande Rouge and there had been almost a foot of snow on the ground by mid-December. The cold had come blowing off the lake and the nights froze deep and hard. Willie Running Buck was spending the evening working in Ted Hook’s outbuilding, tinkering over odd bits of carpentry and plumbing, a potbellied wood-burning stove sending out dry warmth with the wind fit to be tied outside, sleet rattling on the door. An old Motorola table-model radio was contributing Inner Sanctum. It was a good winter night.
Then Rita Hook had come knocking with a burr under her saddle. She had to go out to the lodge. She wasn’t drunk but she’d been drinking; she was full of hundred-proof courage, as if she’d been getting herself ready for something. She wanted Willie to drive her in the pickup truck and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. He didn’t want to go; he’d miss his radio shows, for one thing, and the heater in the truck wasn’t worth a damn. But there was no point in arguing.
The drive had taken almost an hour. The temperature was rising unexpectedly and the sleet got wetter and wetter, weighing down the wipers and piling up on the windows, causing him to stop several times and wipe it off with his gloved hand and the arm of his plaid mackinaw. Rita had been nervous, laughing without reason, smoking incessantly, filling the cab of the truck and making Willie cough. She talked constantly, thinking out loud, some of it making sense and some not.
She’d been preoccupied with money, telling Willie that her ship had really come in this time, that everything was going to be all right after she got through the evening. She went on about what she was going to do, how she was going to get the hell out of Grande Rouge and, once the war was over, she was going to do some traveling. And buy some pretty clothes. See the world and have a good time. Her ship had really come in this time.
Willie was only half listening, mostly because his attention was locked on the road, which seemed to slip and slide beneath the truck—but also because he was an Indian and he’d learned you could say or do anything in front of an Indian, they weren’t like real people. Not up in that neck of the woods. He nodded and grunted from time to time and Rita just rattled on, finally produced a bottle of bourbon from her bag and took a swig, smacking her lips. Willie remembered that, the smell of the bourbon mixing with the cigarette smoke. It was making him sick to his stomach and when he had to get out to take care of the mush on the windshield, he did so thankfully, gulping the cold, moist air.
They finally turned off the highway and the tire chains rattled and dug into the snow and gravel. The sleet and rain hung like a wall before them and he edged the truck slowly into the narrow path among the trees. It wasn’t until then that Rita began talking directly to him and the slur dropped away from her words. It didn’t make much sense to him but she clutched his arm and forced him to pay attention.
She said that she wasn’t there to check the pipes and the bottled gas, as she’d originally claimed. She was in fact going to the lodge to meet the members of the club; she rattled off the names, checking them off on her fingers. He knew some of the names; he knew the members of the club by sight but their names were of no account to him. They were white men, they were rich, they were from the Cities; beyond that there was nothing he needed to know about any of them. Rita didn’t go any further into why she was meeting them. Willie figured they were giving her money—why was none of his business. He didn’t care. White men had their ways and he didn’t give a damn one way or the other.
He didn’t much care for his role in the evening’s activities, however. Her plan was for him to pull the truck up beside the lodge and move off into the thick shrubbery about fifty yards in front of and above the building, where he could see quite clearly but would be hidden from view. When the meeting ended and her visitors left, he would come down and drive her home. It was simple. She even had him walk around the clearing, feeling his way in the darkness—so that there would be no telltale tracks across the rapidly disintegrating expanse of snow. He went because she told him to, because he worked for Ted Hook and she was Ted Hook’s wife, but he didn’t see the point of it, any of it.
Rita went into the lodge and he saw lights go on. He brushed the snow from a rock and sat down, the earflaps of his cap pulled down, huddled behind the windbreak of fir and evergreen. Icicles dripped in the darkness and the wind howled in the trees upland. Sleet and rain blew across the clearing. He was cold. He missed his radio and the aromatic smell of the wood fire but he waited.
After half an hour he heard the first car on the narrow road, saw the fingers of fight hooking around the corner as it slid slowly toward the lodge. Two over-coated men got out and hurried, dark shapes, hats pulled low against the night, hands in deep pockets, into the lodge. Smoke was curling up from the chimney, the wind taking it once it reached the proper height and whipping it angrily. Fifteen minutes later another large car, a LaSalle of some years, pulled up behind the other and two men slogged through the slush, up the stairs, and inside. Finally, not long afterward, the third car, with two men, arrived and emptied. Six men in all and Willie waited shivering, nose running, fingers numb.
Shadows moved across the yellow windows but all he could hear was the wind. He was wet and cold and tired. Another hour must have passed; he had dozed off and on. What woke him was the slamming of the front door as it was thrown open and banged against the wall. A woman’s piercing shriek filled the clearing and yellow light cut across the porch. Rita was standing silhouetted in the doorway, feet apart, half turned toward the night. She had screamed at someone inside and Willie had no idea what was happening. He heard a deep, commanding voice shout not to let her get away …
Suddenly she turned to face Willie as if she were searching for him and made a stumbling dash down the steps, fell into the snow as she reached the bottom. As she struggled to her feet, the men filled the doorway, a confusion of voices, like hounds in pursuit of a fox. On her feet she threaded her way between the cars, slipping and falling, reaching for a running board to pull herself back up. They came behind her, one man falling heavily on the stairs and swearing. They all moved slowly, hampered by the lack of footing.
As she reached the clearing, only a dark form from where a frightened Willie crouched, she stopped as if she knew there was no place to hide. She turned back to face them. A man in a camel-hair coat broke away from the group and went to her, spun clumsily to face them, hands up, shouting something, waving at them, No, no, no … and the commanding voice yelled at the others to get out of the way, stepped forward, and with a terrible roar and flash, arm stretched to its full length, shot the man in the camel coat, who fell sideways to his knees, holding his head, then toppled over in the snow. By the time he was still Rita had turned and begun to run again. She got five sliding steps before the roar and flash exploded twice more, slamming her forward, face down into the snow.
Willie said that when the noise died, there was a silence more complete than any he’d ever known. The men stood stock-still for an endless time as he watched, a fist across his mouth to keep him quiet. Finally, the rain pelting down on them, they moved closer to the man who’d done the shooting, then on toward the two bodies, bending down. The man in the camel-hair coat was turned over, limp, a mound of clothing in the dark. Rita Hook lay flat; they turned her over, knelt staring at her. Willie didn’t move. He didn’t want to die.
In the end, after a certain amount of jabbering among themselves, they carted the two bodies around to the back of the lodge. The largest man carried the body of Rita Hook over his shoulder. Willie was drawn to the ghastly procession; he moved among the trees, keeping them in view as he skirted the ridge of firs, hidden. They trekked up the path toward the ice cave, the last man, the roly-poly one, who had fallen on the stairway, bearing a large packing case from the woodshed. He fell again and someone laughed harshly, the sound carrying over the wind and rain.
Willie wasn’t more than a hundred feet above them, rain streaming down his face and soaking his coat, when they reached the entrance to the cave. By flashlight, their faces pale and dripping, they pried back the side of the large case, which screeched as the wires were bent, until it lay open, a huge, square coffin. Willie saw that it had once held a gas range.
They were breathing hard. Willie recognized them but forgot to put names to them. One was the priest—he remembered him—the fat one who carried the case.
They stood resting for a moment, lighting cigarettes, stepping under the cave’s overhang, out of Willie’s sight, leaving the two bodies and the crate out in the rain. They were talking but he couldn’t catch any words. The red tip of a cigarette arced through the rain and disappeared in the snow. They lifted the two bodies and put them in the case, awkwardly crammed together beyond pain or humiliation. Then they closed the lid and wired it shut. With much groaning and swearing, they pulled and pushed it into the cave. Ten minutes later they straggled back out and went quickly down the path to the lodge. “Damned good riddance,” one of them said, “both of them.” Other voices chimed in. It was agreed.
Willie made his way back to his original outpost and sat back down on the stone, wondering at the behavior of these men. He wasn’t really saddened: Rita was no favorite of his, neither were the men. They were simply white, another race, strange and inexplicable in their ways. But, as he sat and waited for the men to leave, he knew he’d better keep his mouth shut or he’d be up on a murder charge. He thought about that for a time as the rain beat down steadily. The snow in the clearing was washing away, turning to mud.
When they came out at last, there were hurried good-byes, engines turning over, headlamps snapping on, the large automobiles backing and turning, churning the clearing, splashing mud. Once they were gone, Willie ventured down and stood in the rain where Rita Hook had fallen.
He drove slowly back to Grande Rouge. He went to Ted Hook’s place, told him that Rita had decided to stay the night, and bought a bottle of apple brandy. Ted groused that that was Rita all over and he hoped the children didn’t wake up too early, he was weak and needed his sleep.
It was not his custom but Willie drank himself to sleep. The rain drummed overhead all night.
The fire jumped and spit behind Billy and when he finished, there was a clap of thunder. A prolonged flash of lightning illuminated the clearing outside with an icy white glare. It was raining hard. We all looked, we all saw the spot where Carver Maxvill and Rita Hook had died, where the club had made sure they were dead. Billy turned and went to the window, where he stood with his hands jammed into his pockets. He scowled at us.
“That’s the story Running Buck told me. Two days later he was dead and I was the only one who knew … well, what the hell was I going to do? It had been almost thirty years, the word of a dead Indian, and the investigation—Jesus, that was quite an investigation … but I suppose the rain had washed everything away and they weren’t looked for clues in a murder case—the investigation hadn’t turned up anything to make anybody suspicious.” He threw up his hands and came back toward us. “But it festered in my mind, two people had been shot down in cold blood and nobody had ever been charged with the crime … hell, nobody knew there’d even been a crime! That was one thing … and Willie had also told me about Kim and her brother—Rita got a little high one other time and confided that little bit of news to Willie … never told him who the father was. So that ate at me. For about six months. Then I figured I had to tell Kim …”
I was wrapped in my usual confusion, which was deeper than usual. If Kim had known the story of her mother’s real identity, the incestuous nature of her marriage, then why had she gone through the Bernhardt routine when we told her our conclusions? The hysteria had been real enough. I had felt the impact of shock pass through me on its way from her. But why? To what end?
“And you told your former wife of the double murder of her mother and Carver Maxvill? He’s obviously the other victim—no one else disappeared that night. Kim knew the whole story?” Archie smoothed his way through the questions.
“Everything. Why not? It was all so remote.”
“How did she take it?” Archie asked again.
“I couldn’t tell, I never could tell what was going on in her mind … She just listened to me, didn’t say much, took it all very quietly. She had her doubts, as I said … She made us a pot of coffee and we talked all afternoon and when I left, she gave me a kiss and that was that. I knew she was thinking it over but I had no idea what she thought.” He leaned against the mantel and watched the fire for a moment. “She’s a thinker. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d tried to verify the story some way. But I don’t know.”
Why had she gone to the trouble of doing the number on us? Had it been our conclusion that Carver Maxvill had been her father? Then she’d have realized that both her father and mother were dead. Archie and I hadn’t known Carver was dead, nor Rita … that made a kind of sense.
“Now I read about the members of the club getting killed,” Billy said, “and you come snooping around with questions about what happened at the lodge that night, like maybe Running Buck might have told me something … Well, hell, at first I figured you actually knew what had happened and were trying it on me to see if I knew. Then I decided I was being paranoid, that I had to take the chance and tell you.” He sighed. “That’s why I’ve got a gun in my pocket. If one of you is the killer and wants me out of the way, you’re bound for one hell of a problem …”
Archie shook his head. “No, it’s not us. And it’s not the man we thought it was, either. That’s the peculiar part of it. We had the wrong man in mind … though I’m sure he was the father of Larry and Kim. That’s why he had to die, because he was Rita’s lover and tried to protect her from the others …”
The weather was getting worse. It was past ten o’clock. The wind ripped a screen off one of the windows and branches scraped against the house. In the dim light it was easy to think these were ghosts among us.
“So Kim knew from the day you spoke with her in 1972 that the members of the club had killed her mother …” I tried to hold the idea still by saying it aloud. “She knew that one of them was an actual murderer and that the others had acquiesced. And she knew Larry was her brother.” I heard my own voice shaking. “It must have terrified her—knowing that she knew what they were and what they had done. The only thing that protected her from them was the fact that they were unaware she knew … if they ever found out that she knew, bang-bang, she was dead.” I blew out a lungful of tension. “And she lived with that for two years. And that’s why she’s taken cover now. Now … someone knows she knows, thus the note suggesting suicide … the note we assumed was from Carver Maxvill. So who the hell wrote her the note?”
“The murderer,” Archie said. “Someone who has so far murdered five people and driven another to suicide. Carver Maxvill, Rita Hook, Tim Dierker, Martin Boyle, James Crocker, and Larry Blankenship.” He spoke the names slowly, a litany, and we looked at each other. “Assuming, of course, that Willie Running Buck’s story was the truth …”
After a while Billy Whitefoot said, “Let’s find out.”
Billy’s flashlight spread an arc of light up the pathway from the back of the lodge. The rain had turned it muddy and we were soaked within minutes. Lightning bursts showed me their wet faces; our breath came hard as we fought to keep our footing in the slippery rivers of mud and slick grass and it was as if we were joined in the rumble of the night by the men who had made the same dread journey so long before us. I slipped and cracked my knee on a jagged rock that slit my trousers and flesh like a blade; the blood trickled inside my pants, warm. Martin Boyle had carried the empty packing case in the rain and sleet and he, too, had fallen.
Archie stopped halfway, leaned against a tree trunk, catching his breath. His eyes searched mine. Had we come too far? Should we have left it alone? Billy called back to us, passing the beam across our faces. Come on, there was no point in dragging it out.
And it still took forever, rain gushing through the leaves, blinding me, running into my eyes and mouth and inside my clothing, cold and chilling my bones. Finally we reached the entrance to the cave and sagged against the rock sides, wiping our faces, looking back down the hill to the lodge with the yellow lights in the windows, smoke rising from the chimney. We gasped, sucking oxygen, legs quivering. Archie was pale as death.
Moss, bits of shrubbery, dead leaves. The cave curled back out of reach of flashlight’s beam. I felt my body tensing, rebelling at the idea of going into the depths; the walls were already closing around me. My throat contracted. A furry black family of bats hung from the ceiling and I shrank back, crying out.
But Billy pushed on in and we followed, Archie in the rear. Twenty feet inside, when the first turn came, I began to stoop a bit and felt a shocking blast of cold air in my face. I didn’t know the first thing about the workings of an ice cave but there was no doubt about the reality of it. Twenty feet farther and Billy stopped. Our breath hung before us in the cold. He waited for us both to catch up. Then he pushed on. There were no more bats: It was too cold, they couldn’t have lived. I smelled a kind of mossy, earthy vegetation, but the primary sensation was one of bitter cold.
We must have been forty yards into the cave when it abruptly came to an end. Ice covered the sides and the back wall of the cave was covered with frost, a dirty gray slipperiness in the beam of the lamp. Billy picked up a rock and scraped at the flat frost, chipping a layer of ice away, sliding his bare hand under the brittle pane of ice, pulling it away, breaking it off in sheets.
I saw pale wood behind the ice.
Heart pounding, I joined him, cracking the ice and pulling it away. It was the packing case, slowly appearing beneath our frenzy, pale and rough and preserved, the wires connected at the side, wires rusting and frozen tight. I grabbed the first one, felt it tear a fingernail, felt my hand finally lose its feeling from the cold. It took us fifteen minutes to pry the wires back and when they were undone, we stood back looking into each other’s eyes, afraid at the end to open it.
Archie had been watching. As our energies and courage flagged, he stepped between us, a wet, bedraggled, frail old man. Without a word he reached forward, took hold of the case’s lid, and with a mighty tug yanked it open.
They were frozen. Frost clung to them like white moss. Her face was caked with brown blood. The flesh had sunk against the bones …
“It’s them,” Archie said.