Free Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger

“And thank you, Stephen.”
    Cork’s son shrugged. “You’re welcome, Stella.”
    Stella? Cork thought. Not Mrs. Daychild?
    Marlee drew away from her mother and wiped her eyes. “What are we going to do? How do we tell Uncle Ray Jay?”
    “We’ll figure that out. Let’s just take this one step at a time. I need a cigarette, sweetheart. Cork and I are going to step outside while I smoke. Okay?”
    Marlee nodded and looked at Stephen. “Will you sit with me?”
    Stephen seemed more than happy to oblige.
    From the smell of the house, Cork figured Stella Daychild wasn’t averse to smoking inside. Maybe she did need a cigarette, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t the point of asking him to join her on the front porch. They both donned their parkas and stepped outside. Stella dug a pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket along with a Bic lighter. She tapped out a cigarette, put it between her lips, flicked a flame, inhaled, and sent a great plume of smoke toward the stars. She held the pack out to Cork, but he declined with a shake of his head.
    Although he didn’t know all the details, he knew that Stella Daychild had not had an easy life. But unlike many women who’d had it tough, she didn’t seem to have the broken, jagged edges that, in Cork’s experience, so often came with the territory of abandonment and adversity. She’d been a beauty when she was young, and she was lovely still. She had the broad face and high cheeks of the Ojibwe. Her skin was the color of honey on wheat bread, her hair as dark as a raven’s wing and worn long. She’dbeen born and raised on the rez, by parents who were addicted to alcohol and seemed to love the bottle more than they did their children. She and her two brothers had been taken and placed in foster homes, a series of them. Stella had eventually been adopted by one of the families but had grown up wild. At sixteen, she’d run away and headed to the Twin Cities. This part of her life, Cork knew nothing about. When the Chippewa Grand Casino had opened south of Aurora, Stella, who was in her mid-twenties by then, returned to the rez a single mother with two young children. She came because there was work at the casino and because she wanted to reconnect with her relations and her roots and to raise her children in Tamarack County. That was ten years ago. She’d worked steadily at the casino, and it seemed to Cork that she’d done a pretty good job where her children were concerned. Her son, Hector, was making her proud as a Marine. And because Marlee had been employed at Sam’s Place the previous summer, Cork knew that she was smart and responsible, and he liked her. He didn’t mind at all that she and Stephen “were talking.”
    Stella seemed to be taking the current situation rather well, although she drew on her cigarette a little more frequently than was probably necessary.
    “What do you think?” she asked.
    “Has anybody threatened you lately?” Cork replied.
    “No.”
    “You piss anybody off?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “How have your dealings with the folks on the rez been?”
    “Okay. Nobody’s threatened to cut off Dexter’s head anyway. You think it was a Shinnob who did this?”
    “Honestly, no.”
    “Somebody just getting their perverted jollies?”
    “I don’t think that either. I followed his tracks from where he left Dexter. They went out to the Loons. He’d left his snowmobile there. Probably didn’t want to alert you or Marlee to his coming. He headed back in the direction of Aurora.”
    “A chimook ?” she said, using the slang, and slightly unkind, Ojibwe term for white people. She blew smoke, a furious billow this time. “I get hit on at the casino bar a lot. I handle most of them pretty well. My livelihood depends on it. But every so often a guy won’t take no. Then I have to get serious. Sometimes I have security escort him out. When he leaves, he leaves pissed. Once in a great while, one of these guys is waiting for