The Ravens (28 page)

ON
A
SATURDAY
IN
LATE
MAY,
Lance Hansen parked his old Jeep Cherokee in the lot near Baraga’s Cross. Next to him sat Jimmy, holding the old dream catcher that Lance had been given by Willy Dupree.

“Are you ready?” asked Lance.

Jimmy nodded solemnly.

Hand in hand they headed across the deserted parking lot. When they came to the path that led to the cross, they had to walk single file, and Lance let his son go first. Since Jimmy was holding the dream catcher out in front of him on the palms of his hands, he moved slowly through the woods, but Lance thought that was appropriate. It was as if the boy were carrying a gift or an offering.

“Should I give it to you now?” Jimmy asked as they emerged from the woods and saw the lake in front of them.

“You can wait a bit,” said Lance.

He put his hand on the back of his son’s slender neck, and then they walked the last stretch over to Baraga’s Cross. Lance leaned against the cold granite and looked out at Lake Superior. He thought about that morning when he found the body of Georg Lofthus. Since then he’d lost a large part of his family. Inga was dead, Tammy was in prison, and Andy would never speak to him again. Down in Minneapolis, Chrissy was in a treatment program for young drug addicts. He’d been afraid that she would
be drawn to Lenny Diver again once he was a free man, but that hadn’t happened. Maybe she’d finally understood how serious things were when she realized that her mother, out of sheer desperation, had tried to kill her boyfriend. But she’d chosen to keep the brown-tinted contact lenses—her Ojibwe eyes. When Lance went to visit his niece, he couldn’t help noticing that something had changed between them. Even though Chrissy understood that Tammy had to pay for the murder she’d committed, her uncle would always be the man who had sent her mother to prison.

Yet the most important thing was that he could stand here with his son, without feeling any shame about what he’d done, and without having to lie anymore. On the way here from Grand Portage, he’d told Jimmy about Swamper Caribou, who might have been killed at this very spot long ago. The boy had listened, wide-eyed and happy at being initiated into something that clearly belonged to the grown-up world.

“Okay, you can give it to me now,” said Lance.

Jimmy handed him the dream catcher, and together they walked over to the edge of the rocks, where Lance squatted down.

“We’re doing this to restore balance to things,” he said.

For one last lingering moment he held the sacred object in his hands before he placed it on the water. Swamper Caribou’s old dream catcher floated as light as a cork. Lance thought it looked like a funeral wreath as it bobbed up and down on the rippling waves.

Vidar Sundstøl
is the acclaimed Norwegian author of seven novels, including the Minnesota Trilogy, written after he and his wife lived for two years in Two Harbors, Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
The Land of Dreams
(Minnesota, 2013), the first novel in the trilogy, was awarded the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel of the year in 2008 and was nominated for the Glass Key for best Scandinavian crime novel of the year.
The Land of Dreams
was ranked by
Dagbladet
as one of the top twenty-five Norwegian crime novels, and the Minnesota Trilogy has been translated into seven languages.

Tiina Nunnally
is an award-winning translator of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish literature. Her many translations include Sigrid Undset’s first novel,
Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal
(Minnesota, 2014). Her translation of Undset’s
Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross
won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. She was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her efforts on behalf of Norwegian literature in the United States.