Free Red Knife by William Kent Krueger Page A

Sunday night Annie sat in front of her computer, trying to work on the final paper for her lit class. She was asking the question: Was it really William Shakespeare who’d penned the plays that all the world loved? She’d constructed the paper to be a kind of whodunit, presenting evidence that pointed toward various suspects: Marlowe, Raleigh, Bacon, Johnson. She needed to begin wrapping it up, but she sat staring at the screen, dreadfully aware that she didn’t care who’d written the plays, didn’t care about the paper, didn’t care about school at all. She was finished. All the seniors were finished. For the next few weeks, they were just going through the motions.
    A message appeared on her screen. From Uly Kingbird. They’d IM’ed a lot while they were practicing the music they’d played that morning at church.
    thanks
    what4, she IM’ed back.
    thought i wanted to be alone this afternoon but i didn’t. the dark is no place for children and children we all are.
    more dylan
    more mine
    pretty
    pretty words don’t change anything.
    the worlds still an ugly place. the words come from somewhere beautiful inside you. your music comes from the same place.
    He didn’t respond for a minute. She wondered if he was still online.
    Then another message: i used to believe…
    what, she replied.
    nothing. late. good night.
    She sat back and stared at the screen. She was about to turn her own computer off when a final message from Uly appeared.
    that every day is a chance for something better. but the truth is every day is a hole you try to climb out of. and one day you won’t.
     
    Misty took forever going to sleep. By the time Lucinda laid the baby in the crib that she’d put up in Alejandro’s old room, she was exhausted. She went to her own bedroom and found Will sleeping deeply. She stood looking down at her husband and realized she was exhausted with him, too. It wasn’t that he was an awful man, a bad man, he was just a difficult man, a man hard to love. Even after more than a quarter century together, he was like a foreigner to her, speaking from a sensibility she couldn’t understand, following rituals she couldn’t appreciate. More than anything else, it was his silence that kept him a stranger. He spoke, yes, but often in a way that felt to her like silence. Years before, she’d thought of leaving him, but she had no way of supporting herself or her boys. And it wasn’t as if he was cruel to her, abused her, beat her. He never did.
    When she was a girl in Los Angeles, in the backyard of her stepfather’s home there was a carob tree. It had been a beautiful thing, huge and shady. Under it her mother had put a little grotto, a bathtub virgin. Lucinda spent much time under the carob, daydreaming or praying to the Virgin Mary. Then one day the tree fell apart, just fell apart. The inside, it turned out, was completely rotten. As it collapsed, a huge section of the carob tree smashed the bathtub and its virgin. These days, Lucinda often thought of her marriage as being like that carob tree: something that was rotting from the inside and would someday simply crumble.
    She took a blanket from the linen closet and stretched out on the sofa in the living room. From there, she could easily hear if the baby woke and began to cry. She’d always been a light sleeper.
    She closed her eyes. Against the darkness splashed the image of Alejandro and Rayette, tangled in the meadow grass, their bodies torn open by the shotgun blasts. She sat up and stared at the curtains, drawn closed over the picture window. The curtains were new. Rayette had helped choose them, and while they considered fabric she had talked to Lucinda about her childhood.
    When Rayette was seven, her mother had left her with her grandparents and gone to Minneapolis with a man named Douglas Bear. She’d promised to come back for Rayette when they were settled. That never happened. Her mother and Bear were killed in a head-on collision north of Cloquet.