The Ravens (6 page)

IT
WAS
AN
ORDINARY-LOOKING
BAR,
equipped with a simple sound system and a microphone on a stand at one end of the room. Next to the microphone was a bar stool and a tall table with a pitcher of water and a glass. Lance noticed that Chrissy didn’t seem to know anyone, or at least she didn’t greet any of the other patrons. Yet there was something about the way she moved through the room that led him to believe she’d been there before.

They found a table at the very back and hung their coats over the backs of their chairs.

“I want something hot to drink,” said Chrissy. “Want anything?” She was speaking in a lower voice than normal.

“A Diet Coke would be good. It’s my treat,” he said, handing her a five-dollar bill.

Chrissy took the money without a word and went over to the bar, where she got in line behind a few other customers.

Lance sat down, trying to look as unobtrusive as possible. A quick glance around the room told him that there were about thirty people present. At the very end of the bar, seated near the microphone, he saw two men and a woman, who he assumed must be the poets. They were middle aged, the woman possibly a bit older than the men, and they were all leafing through pages of text. One of the men had a ponytail and a neatly trimmed gray beard. Lance thought he looked like an artist. The other man looked totally normal, almost like a bank teller, while the woman
was thin and elegantly dressed. She didn’t look like any of the women that Lance usually associated with—women who, for the most part, were employed by the U.S. Forest Service. He was well aware that he didn’t fit in with the rest of the audience. No doubt he looked like he’d just climbed off a snowmobile, while many of the others wore clothing that looked homemade, even though it had probably been bought in a shop and for a higher price than all of the insulating, weatherproof, synthetic fibers in which he’d wrapped his body—from the underwear made of knitted polyester with a quick-dry function to the enormous thermal jacket he’d draped over the back of his chair.

Chrissy wound her way between the tables carrying a glass of Diet Coke and a mug with steam rising from it. There was something about the way she walked that seemed so respectful, almost as if she were stooping forward a bit so as not to disturb the others. She was by far the youngest person in the bar, and Lance thought that maybe he ought to feel proud of his niece. But he noticed that several people cast an inquisitive glance in her direction as she walked past in those strange black clothes of hers, with the heavy eyeliner and the black lipstick. So when she set the tea and Coke on their table and sat down, he instead felt embarrassed. Did they think she was his daughter?

“Do I really have to stay here?” he said.

She frowned as if she didn’t understand the question.

“How about if I run over to Lakeview and visit your grandmother in the meantime?” he went on. “Then I’ll pick you up afterward. What do you think?”

“I think that’s a bad idea, since nobody’s supposed to know that you’re here,” Chrissy pointed out.

For a moment Lance had totally forgotten about that. His shoulders began shaking with suppressed laughter.

“Jeez, what a weirdo you are.” Chrissy shook her head.

Suddenly he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop laughing, so he stood up and gestured toward the men’s room at the other end of the bar.

“Hurry up, then,” said his niece. “They’re going to start soon.”

Having made his way across the room, Lance was relieved to be able to close the door behind him, safely out of view. After
spending two months alone in a hotel room, he clearly wasn’t used to being out in public anymore. He sat down on the toilet, propped his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands. A thin film of sweat covered his brow. It wasn’t simply because he was out of practice being in a roomful of people. There was everything else as well. For instance, the fact that he was lying to his own niece, whom he’d known all her life, making her think he was working undercover for the police, while in reality he was convinced she was living in the same house as a murderer. He thought about what she’d just told him about partying at the cabin. Her story fit with the discovery of the music magazine
Darkside,
which he’d found when he broke into their cabin in the summer. So Andy hadn’t been there at all on the night of the murder. What had he been doing the whole time until he picked up Chrissy from her girlfriend’s house in Duluth the next morning? All indications were that at some point, maybe around dawn, he had been standing in the ditch along the road outside Finland, holding a baseball bat and covered in blood. What had that boy said? That it definitely wasn’t an Indian they’d seen standing there? But it wasn’t that simple, because Andy and Lance were descendants of Knut Olson and his Ojibwe wife, Nanette.

He was about to go back into the bar when something caught his eye. Hanging on the door in front of him was a poster announcing the evening’s “poetic master reading,” as it was being called. A simple poster with no pictures, just a brief blurb about each of the three poets. And it was the last of the bios—or rather, the name at the very bottom of the poster—that had caught Lance’s attention. At first he merely skimmed the words, but then he took a step back and read more carefully:

On the other side of the door he heard a woman’s voice welcoming the assembled audience to the evening’s master reading. If he didn’t exit the toilet at once, he’d be forced to walk through the
bar while one of the poets was in the middle of a reading. The very thought filled him with terror.

He stepped out, keeping his head low as he hurried past the poets and emcee to make his way over to Chrissy.

At that moment the emcee introduced the first of the poets. “A woman who has devoted a large part of her life to studying Lake Superior: Liz Brent!”

The slender, gray-haired woman with the gold-rimmed glasses read a series of poems in which Lance could find only scattered references to the lake, through phrases such as “lava rocks,” “the ancient geometry of arrowheads,” “the city, the iron, the water,” and “the good woman and the bad woman standing on either side of the lake, shouting.”

When she was done, he politely applauded as he tried to guess which of the two men was Clayton Miller. Both were tall, and it was his height that was practically the only thing Lance could remember about Clayton. Even so, he thought it had to be the man who looked like a bank teller, and he turned out to be right. When the emcee introduced “Clayton Miller, native son of Duluth,” the man with the cropped hair got up and took a seat on the bar stool next to the tall table. Calmly and deliberately he adjusted the microphone, as if he were in the privacy of his own home and not in a bar where thirty strangers were watching his every move.

Then Clayton Miller began to read. These poems had nothing to do with the lake, at least as far as Lance could tell, but that was really the only thing he understood. Soon he stopped listening altogether and instead stared at Miller, envious at how good the man looked. From what Lance could recall, Clayton had been one grade behind him in school, which was one grade ahead of Andy, but he could easily be taken for ten years younger than either of them. This was the boy who had been lying on the ground in the schoolyard, actually not very far from this very location. “He tried to kill me,” Clayton Miller had gasped after Andy had run away. That was the only time Lance had spoken to the man who was now sitting on a bar stool, whispering words into the microphone: “a mother-of-pearl heart on the mantelpiece, a knife, a peeled apple.”

After the applause faded and Miller was once again sitting at the bar next to Liz Brent, Lance leaned over to his niece and whispered in her ear: “Do you think it’d be possible to talk to the authors afterward?”

“You want to
talk
to them?”

“Do you think I could?”

“Sure. They usually sell copies of their books after the reading. So, did you like it?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Clayton Miller?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jesus,” she said.

The last poet was introduced, but the only thing Lance could think about was what he was going to say if he got the chance to talk to Miller.
Do you remember that time in high school when you got beat up real bad? Well, that was actually my brother who did that to you. So, how’s it going?
No, he couldn’t ask about the one thing he wanted to know. If he was going to try to do that, he’d have to get Miller to meet him somewhere else, in some other setting than this one, maybe go to a pub or something. But why would Professor Miller go to a pub with a guy like Lance Hansen? He wouldn’t. But maybe with a girl like Chrissy? But wasn’t Miller gay? At least that was what everyone had said about him in school. And besides, Chrissy was practically a child.

WHEN
THE
POETRY
READING
WAS
OVER,
the emcee announced that books would be for sale, and the authors would be happy to sign copies. The poets took seats behind a table with stacks of books. The audience members started getting up from their chairs. A few headed for the door, but most looked as if they planned to stay awhile longer.

“Are you going to buy a book?” asked Chrissy, looking at Lance.

There was something strange about the look in her eyes.

“Er, I don’t know,” he replied.

“But I thought you said you liked Clayton Miller.”

“Sure, but what should I say?”

“If you give me the money for a book, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

Lance hesitated but then shrugged and took out his wallet.

“How much do you think it costs?”

“Come on. We’ll find out.” She took his wallet from his hand.

Together they got up, grabbed their coats, and went over to the table where people had formed a haphazard line to purchase books and get them signed.

“It’s not really necessary,” said Lance, wanting to leave.

“But
I
want to buy a book,” Chrissy insisted.

Lance pictured Andy finding a book by Clayton Miller on their coffee table.

“Okay,” he said.

When it was finally her turn, Chrissy leaned forward as she held her long black hair back from her face. Miller looked up at her and smiled.

“Hi,” she said shyly. “I’d like to buy a book.”

“Which one?”

She pointed at one of them.

“That one,” she said.

Miller picked up the slim volume.

“Siamese Wing Strokes?”
he said.

She nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Chrissy.”

He quickly wrote a greeting on the first blank page.

“That’s twenty dollars.”

Chrissy opened her uncle’s wallet and handed a bill to Miller.

“Thanks for the poems. They’re great.”

The professor gave her a brief smile and then turned to look for the next customer as Chrissy slipped behind Lance. Suddenly he felt her hand pressing against his back. She pushed him forward to the table until he was standing in front of Clayton Miller, who looked up at him with an expectant smile.

“Hello,” he said.

“I bring you greetings from an old acquaintance,” Lance managed to say, feeling beads of sweat appear on his forehead.

“Oh, really? Who could that be?”

“It’s a personal matter,” said Lance in a low voice. “Do you think it’d be possible to have a few words with you in private afterward?”

Clayton Miller cast a quick glance at his watch.

“This is probably going to go on for a bit, and I also need to talk to the organizers before I can leave . . .”

“I’ll wait,” said Lance.

“Sure. Okay. If you like. But didn’t you want to buy a book?”

“No, thanks.”

Lance turned on his heel and saw Chrissy watching him from a short distance away, a tentative smile on her face. He hoped she hadn’t heard what he’d said to Miller.

“You didn’t buy a book?’ she asked in surprise when he went over to join her.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Lance merely grunted in reply.

“What?” said Chrissy.

“Listen . . . I arranged to have a little talk with him when he’s done here. Could you go somewhere else, and then I’ll pick you up later?”

“A talk with who?”

“With Miller.”

“What?”

Lance nodded, trying to act nonchalant, as if it were perfectly normal for him to be having talks with professors and poets.

“But what do you want to talk to him about?”

“Poetry,” said Lance after a slight pause.

His niece gave him an incredulous look.

“But why can’t I stay?’ she asked.

“Because it’s . . . guy talk.”

“About poetry?”

“Oh, can’t you just . . . ,” snapped Lance, annoyed.

“So why do you want me to get lost?” she shouted, starting to cry.

“Chrissy. Honey.” Astonished, Lance reached out to put his hand on her shoulder.

“Leave me alone!”

Lance noticed that people were staring at them. Clayton Miller was too. Not to mention the gray-haired Liz Brent, who looked as if she were about to get up and come over to them.

“This is important to me,” Lance whispered, urgently.

Chrissy looked at him with big, tearful eyes, her lip quivering.

“Let’s go outside for a moment and I’ll explain.”

“Okay,” she sniffled.

Shamefaced, he headed across the room with his niece in tow. People moved out of their way as if they were lepers. Outside on the sidewalk he put his hand on Chrissy’s shoulder, giving it a cautious squeeze. Just once.

“I’m an idiot for talking to you like that,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Chrissy smiled uncertainly.

“We were both acting like idiots.”