Authors: William Kent Krueger
Trickster's Point
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ONTENTS
For Joanna MacKenzie and Alec MacDonald, two of my brightest guiding stars
To Live and Die in Minnesota
Minnesota is a state of mythic storytelling. Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Paul Bunyan and Babe. In a more modern vein, the stories of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, of course, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales. I’m sure that a lot of readers assume I’ve set the Cork O’Connor series in Minnesota simply because I live here. True, but only a small part of a much larger picture. In the course of my life, I’ve made my home in some stunningly beautiful areas: Oregon, northern California, Colorado. I’ve tried to write stories nestled in these places, but the inspiration hasn’t been there for me, not in the way I feel when I write a novel grounded solidly in Minnesota. And here’s the reason in two words: conflict and heart.
What is it that drives great stories? Conflict. Think
Romeo and Juliet
. The engine at the heart of that timeless tragedy is the conflict between two families, the Montagues and the Capulets. In
Moby Dick
, it’s Ahab’s relentless battle against the great white whale. In
To Kill A Mockingbird
, social justice is pitted against racial prejudice in the Depression-era South. Conflict, conflict, conflict. When, at just over forty years of age, I decided to try my hand at writing a mystery, I turned my sights to the North Country of Minnesota, because all I saw was conflict. There was the age-old abrasion of the Ojibwe culture rubbing against the culture of the white intruders, and before that it was the Lakota being pushed out by the Ojibwe through bloody battle. There was the land itself, a rugged topography of old rock, immense forests, deep lakes, fast streams, and vast areas of isolation. On top of all this, there were the infamous bitter winters of Minnesota, looming, in the imagination of most Americans, as large as Paul Bunyan and as deadly as the cannibal monster of Ojibwe myth, the Windigo. In a nutshell, Minnesota is a land that, from its beginning, has been steeped in conflict.
But I couldn’t write about this place if my heart wasn’t wholly invested in it, and that’s probably the most important reason for the setting I’ve chosen.
I’m not native to Minnesota. I came here at the age of thirty so that my wife could attend the University of Minnesota’s law school. Before that, I was a gypsy kid. Growing up, I lived in ten different towns in eight different states. I never had a place I truly thought of as home. The moment I set foot in Minnesota, however, I knew I’d finally found my home. I fell in love with this state and its people, and I understood from very early on that, when I knuckled down and became serious about my writing, whatever I created would be, in some way, a tribute to this adopted homeland of mine.
The writer Tony Hillerman, author of the marvelous Navajo Tribal Police series, which is set in the Four Corners area of the Southwest and deals significantly with the culture of the Dinee, had a profound effect on the decisions I’ve made regarding my own Cork O’Connor series. I had the great good fortune of hearing his editor, Eamon Dolan, speak at a mystery conference many years ago. During the course of his remarks, Dolan told his audience that Americans liked to read “domestica exotica,” which was a term he’d coined. What he meant was that Americans enjoy reading about a setting within the confines of the continental United States, ergo, domestica, but they prefer to be introduced to a place that’s more or less unknown to them and that, as a result, has an exotic flavor.
In my own stories, I try very hard to give readers a sensual journey. I want them to feel as if they’ve been to the North Country, felt the bite of a bitter winter wind or breathed the piney scent of an evergreen forest or plunged into the bracing, pristine water of a wilderness lake. I want them to love Minnesota as much as I do.
I’m not alone in putting my feelings about this remarkable state on paper. Some of the best mystery writers in the country are my neighbors, and they, too, set their work here—John Sanford, Ellen Hart, Pete Hauptman, Mary Logue, David Housewright, Brian Freeman, Jess Lourey, to name just a few. I’m often asked why Minnesota breeds so many fine authors in the genre. Cabin fever always comes readily to mind, but there’s a more realistic reason. It’s a state that inspires fine writing in general, and our mystery writers are simply a subset of that great whole.
In my fiction, setting is the foundation for almost everything. Character is built on it. Motivations arise from it. Death visits because of it. To read a Cork O’Connor novel is, in a way, to understand what it is to live and die in Minnesota.
ROLOGUE
T
he dying don’t easily become the dead.
Even with an arrow in his heart, Jubal Little took three hours to die. Politician that he was, most of that time he couldn’t stop talking. At first, he talked about the arrow. Not how it got there—he believed he knew the answer to that—but arguing with Cork over whether to try to pull it out or push it through. Corcoran O’Connor did neither. Then he talked about the past, a long and convoluted rambling punctuated by moments of astonishing self-awareness. He admitted he’d made mistakes. He told Cork things he swore he’d never told anyone else, told them in a way that made Cork feel uncomfortably like Jubal’s confessor. Finally he talked about what lay ahead. He wasn’t afraid to die, he said. And he said that he understood the situation, understood why Cork had put that arrow in his heart.
He died sitting up, his back against hard rock, his big body gray in the long shadow cast by the imposing monolith known as Trickster’s Point. If the political polls were correct, in just a few days Jubal Little would have won a landslide victory as the new governor of Minnesota. Cork had known Jubal Little all his life and, for some of those years, had thought of him as a best friend. Even so, he’d planned to mark his ballot for another man on election day. Partly it was because Jubal wanted different things for Minnesota and the North Country and the Ojibwe than Cork wanted. But mostly it was because Jubal Little was absolutely capable of murder, and Cork O’Connor was the only one who knew it.
HAPTER
1
T
he walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plain wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County.