Free Trickster's Point by William Kent Krueger

to Crow Point, I was out here all the time looking to Henry for advice, spiritual and otherwise.”
    “You think this might have been a Shinnob?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Is it the same person who killed Jubal Little?”
    “It could be, but if you were the murderer, would you keep offering clues that might lead back to you? And if you’d spent a lot of time trying to point the finger of guilt somewhere else, why muddy the waters with something like this?”
    “So, two different people, you think?”
    “I can’t say that at this point either. I don’t know my quarry yet, so I don’t know his pattern.”
    “His? You’re sure it’s not a woman?”
    “If it is, she has awfully large feet.”
    “If I were a woman and wanted to throw you off, I might wear big boots. Just a thought.”
    “A good one,” Cork allowed.
    Rainy offered him a sad little smile. “You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
    “Nope. Do you?”
    “I can tell you two things. The murderer is someone who didn’t particularly care for Jubal Little. And it’s someone who doesn’t particularly care for you. Implicating you kills two birds with one stone, you see?”
    Cork stared at the restless gray water of Iron Lake. The wind was out of the west, carrying snow like ash from a distant fire. Despite his coat and gloves and cap, he was cold to the bone. “Jubal’s murder was well planned,” he said. “The killer knew we’d be hunting at Trickster’s Point, probably had known for a while. He probably knew that eventually Jubal and I would separate, and maybe even knew where. If I understood how thatwas possible, I’m betting I’d be pretty close to figuring out who it was.”
    “It’s got to be someone who knows you, Cork. Someone who knows you pretty well,” Rainy said. This understanding clearly troubled her.
    “There’s a positive side,” Cork replied in a voice as cold as that late autumn wind. “I know them, too.”

C HAPTER 8

    C ork said good-bye to Rainy and Meloux and walked back to his Land Rover. It was Sunday morning. He glanced at his watch. A few minutes before ten. The bell would be ringing at St. Agnes, calling the faithful to Mass. He wondered if Jenny and Waaboo and Stephen were going that morning. Usually they all went together, which Cork enjoyed very much. He didn’t think of himself as particularly devout, but church was something that they did as a family, and in Cork’s life, family, even more than God, took center stage. God was generally a distant ideal, but a hug from one of his children or the sound of Waaboo’s giggling were things wonderfully real to him and blessedly comforting and, in their way, sacred.
    The wind had died. The temperature had risen a few degrees, and the snow had turned to a light drizzle that, every so often, dripped off the bill of his cap. The woods, as he walked the trail, were still and quiet. Although the air was filled with the scent of evergreen, it was the smell of wet earth that he noticed, of all the summer growth that was dead now, of leaves gone gold or red or brown and fallen and lay wet and rotting, becoming again the earth from which they sprang. Usually, when he walked this familiar trail, his heart was light, but now all he could think about was death. Cork felt overwhelmed by the weight of all those in his history whom he’d loved and who’d died violently. His father,his good friend Sam Winter Moon, his wife, and now Jubal Little.
    He stopped and wondered: Had he really loved Jubal?
    *   *   *
    In the first spring after Cork’s father died, Sam Winter Moon had given Cork a gift, a recurve bow that Sam had made himself. Cork had rifle-hunted with his father, but that was something so many in the North Country did. There were bow hunters as well, but not many men hunted as Sam Winter Moon did, stalking in the old way, and Cork had heard of no one who equaled Sam’s prowess with a bow. He longed to learn, but his father had once told