Free Boundary Waters by William Kent Krueger Page B

gold as freshly minted doubloons.
    The note Cork had left the night before was still taped to Wendell’s door. Cork knocked, but Wendell didn’t answer. He crossed the lawn to the big corrugated shed that Wendell used as a garage and peered in at a window. He beckoned Willie Raye over.
    “Wendell drives a Dodge Ram pickup,” Cork said. “Pickup’s gone. But take a gander at what’s sitting in its place.”
    The floor of the shed was covered with fragments of birch bark, and the shed itself was full of tools that Wendell used in the building of birch-bark canoes, an art he’d practiced his entire life. Mallets, wood chisels, buckets, sawhorses, brushes—all hung on racks or sat on benches. In the center was a cleared area large enough for a truck to park. Instead of Wendell’s truck, a small red sports car sat there, highlighted in a long shaft of sunlight that came through the window on the far side of the shed. A coating of dust dulled the sheen of the car’s finish.
    “Shiloh loves sports cars,” Raye said.
    Cork walked around to the back of the shed where there stood a canoe rack with spaces for four canoes. Only one space was filled.
    “What do you think?” Raye asked.
    “I think he’s gone for a while.”
    “To Shiloh?”
    “Let’s hope so. Come on.”
    “Where to?” Raye asked as he followed Cork to the Bronco.
    “To Stormy Two Knives. He’s the only other person I can think of who might know where that is.”
    Two miles up the road, just beyond the far outskirts of Allouette, Cork pulled into the drive of a small log home set among white pines growing in planted rows. A sign posted beside the drive advertised firewood for sale. Next to the house, a woman stood at a clothesline, her arms lifted, holding a wet sheet. A slight northwesterly breeze had picked up and the ends of the hung linen ruffled leisurely. The woman finished pinning the corner of the sheet to the line with a clothespin, then shielded her eyes against the sun as she watched the two men approach.
    “Anin, Sarah,” Cork greeted her.
    “Anin, Cork.” Her reply was polite, but not warm. She was a small woman in her early thirties with high cheeks and dark red hair that she wore long. She had on Nikes, neatly creased jeans, and a blue denim shirt. Her attention glanced off Raye, then quickly settled again on Cork.
    “I’m looking for Wendell,” Cork explained. “We stopped by his place, but he’s not home.”
    Something cloudy passed briefly across her face. “You’d better talk to Stormy.”
    “That’s what I figured, too. Where can I find him?”
    “Him and Louis are cutting firewood. On the old logging road at the bridge over Widow’s Creek.”
    “Thanks, Sarah.”
    “I’m not saying he’ll talk to you, Cork,” she cautioned.
    “I understand.”
    As they pulled back onto the road, Raye asked, “Why wouldn’t he talk to you?”
    Cork turned east out of Allouette and began to follow a dirt road that cut through thick forest. “Stormy’s got a temper,” he explained. “A few years ago he got into a fight, killed a man. Afterward, he panicked and ran. Holed up in a shack up north on Iron Lake, threatened to shoot anyone who tried to come near him. The sheriff talked his way in and convinced Stormy to give himself up. Assured him he’d get a fair trial. As it turned out, he didn’t. Stormy spent five years in the prison at Stillwater.”
    “That still doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t talk to you.”
    Cork pulled across an old wooden bridge over a small creek and stopped behind a dusty blue Ford Ranger parked at the side of the road. “I was the sheriff.”
    The biting whine of a chainsaw chewed through the stillness of the woods near the creek. Cork followed the sound until he came to an area where a number of big dying firs stood brown among the other evergreens. Several trees had already been felled, their dry branches splintered against the ground. Stormy Two Knives was moving swiftly down one of the