There were no lights on in the tribal police building as I drove by, and nothing but dark around me. Lake Michigan on my right. Trees to my left. I’d planned to stop and see Ray Shankwa and raise as many kinds of hell as I could. Now I had nowhere to go with my anger and frustration. It was like looking for ghosts. I knew they existed, the two men, but they were nowhere. They found me easily enough, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. As if a cloak of invisibility had been drawn around the men, no one knew them, no one recognized the names, no one offered help. I got the feeling I was being shut out of a northern club I knew nothing about. Didn’t anyone care that two people had been murdered and left to molder at the bottom of a lake?

The thing about murder, to me, was the hideous arrogance of taking lives no one had the right to take. Most murderers were the worst kind of egoists: if I can’t have them; if they won’t listen to me; if I can gain something … why, I’ll just do away with them and then I’ll be happy. There always seemed to be that at the very bottom of the urge to kill: then I’ll be happy.

Who was happier after killing Mary and Chet? I asked myself as I drove back down through Sutton’s Bay. I curved with the road, past the Bay Theatre, Bahle’s Department Store, and all the galleries, toward Traverse City.

Why would Alfred Naquma kill his sister? I wondered. Maybe because Chet was a white man. There were plenty of Indians who held grudges. Would Alfred be happier knowing he had stopped his sister from making a terrible marriage? If I understood human beings better, maybe I could fathom that one, but the human psyche, much like that of animals, was, at heart, unknowable.

Was it because Chet was a married man? I wondered. That would do it for a lot of fathers and brothers.

Could be something else. Something illegal going on out at Sandy Lake Alfred couldn’t let Chet find out about. Especially with Chet’s soon-to-be aggrieved wife on the local police force.

But where was Orly Naquma? And Christine, the other sister?

Why would Alfred wipe out his whole family, and why would the tribe protect him?

None of it made sense.

Thirteen years was a long time to have kept this secret. It was like peeling an old onion layer by layer; the onion was rotten but the skin didn’t want to give up its core.

I couldn’t go home. Not back to that silent house. Too much on my mind and I’d failed to find Sorrow. I was tired and out of ideas. In the morning I was supposed to pick out Chet’s casket with Dolly. I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to see Leetsville for a while and didn’t want some melancholy job ahead of me. I wanted to be someplace where I was an Emily Kincaid I recognized. For just a few hours.

I headed out toward Spider Lake and Jackson.

___

Stripped down to his boxer shorts, a tee shirt, and bare feet, Jackson wasn’t expecting company when he came to the door.

“Anything wrong?” he asked as he unlocked the screen to let me in, maybe a little reluctantly. His good-looking face was lined with worry and irritation. I ignored the pallid greeting and walked in, slapping my purse on the kitchen counter and leaning over it, resting my hands to either side. Exhaustion hit me hard. I was tired from the night before, from not sleeping, and from the emotional stress of not finding Sorrow. Maybe even from making an ass of myself at the casino.

“What happened?” Jackson’s hands were on either of my arms. He turned me to him and held me. I think I might have cried—I was that frustrated.

I stepped away from Jackson, giving him points for kindness.

“Somebody stole Sorrow,” I said.

“That’s terrible,” Jackson frowned and drew me close again, patting me awkwardly on the back.

I let out a puff of air. Enough of that. I told him I just couldn’t go home, that I was miserable, and needed a bed for the night. He looked at me oddly, then sensed I wasn’t in the mood for sex. He said he would clear his papers from the spare room.

Nobody answered at the Leetsville Police Station when I called. I let it ring and ring. Finally, after about ten rings, when anyone needing help would have given up, a machine came on and I left the message for Dolly that I wouldn’t be able to go with her in the morning. I said I was sure she could pick out a casket by herself and that something unsettling had come up. I said I would tell her all about it when I got back home.

I got the number for the tribal police and left a message there, too. I asked Ray Shankwa to call me and gave him Jackson’s number. Maybe it wasn’t smart to admit to being thrown out of the casino but that’s what I said in the message, and told him why, and that I was looking for the men and that they’d kidnapped my dog and I was going to go after them, beginning in the morning when I would call the police in Sutton’s Bay, in Traverse City, in Gaylord—and soon nobody would be hiding and somebody would pay for everything that was going on … The answering machine at the other end beeped, stopping me.

I called Bill’s office next and left a message on his machine about the chicken bones. I promised a new story the next day.

Jackson, lying on the couch behind me, listening, put his arms up behind his head.

“Quite a night, Emily,” he said, and smiled a superior smile. “Did you really get kicked out of the casino?”

I nodded. “I want my dog back. One of those men is a murderer. If I keep quiet, who’s to say they won’t harm Sorrow, or even do something to me? They want the murders out at Sandy Lake hushed up and everybody in the tribe is covering for them.”

“Everyone?” He lifted an eyebrow at me.

“Well, it seems to me …”

“Maybe you’ve gotten a little hysterical …”

Christ! The old “now calm down little lady” routine. I’d forgotten that part of Jackson’s character. It made me wince. Too tired and angry to get mad at Jackson too, I made him move over and lay down beside him on the couch.

I never got to the spare bedroom. Never even got out of my clothes. We fell asleep like that, in each other’s arms. It wasn’t until near morning that I moved to a deep chair and curled up with a blanket pulled to my chin.

Jackson made pancakes with real maple syrup for breakfast. I was hungry. Anger can do that, bring on the need for quantities of food to tap down all those roiling feelings.

I don’t know if he expected me to leave after breakfast, but I didn’t. While he went up to his office/bedroom to work on The Mosaic of Humanity in the Canterbury Tales, I took a full pot of tea to his deck and wrote out a new story for Bill. Two kayakers paddled silently past, and the voices of swimming children came from down around the cove. I felt safe there, with Jackson writing upstairs, with people doing things they should be doing up north. Nobody wanted to hurt me. Maybe I was hiding, but it felt good and freeing. Soon enough I’d get it together and go home. Since I had no clothes, no toothbrush, and nothing else other than the lipstick and hair brush in my purse, I imagined I would, like Shaw’s houseguests, begin to stink like dead fish—sooner rather than later.

Jackson didn’t seem to mind. I stayed on through lunch and then he invited me out to Hannah’s Bistro for dinner and a movie. On our way through town later, I dropped the story off at the paper without seeing anyone.

How normal. A regular life. I enjoyed the salmon at the bistro and loved the movie, though I slept through most of it. On the way home we talked about our life before divorce, back when we’d been happy.

“You were a good foil for all the academic businesses,” he said, turning to smile as I reclined in his Jaguar, feeling rich and important, a woman with real things to do and intelligent topics to talk about.

“You introduced me to that world I would have been shut out of otherwise,” I said. “All those professors. That was fun—the discussions, even the arguments.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “We made a good pair.”

“Except for your need to look elsewhere,” I said, unable to let him off the hook, though it was a halfhearted attempt.

He shook his head. “Mea culpa. Remnants of my teen years, I’m afraid. It is possible to be a child and an adult at the same time.”

“Sounds like an excuse a lot of men use.”

“An atavistic giving into impulses, I’ve come to think. Really, those women had nothing to do with how I felt about you.”

“Oh, Jackson.” I was tired. Too tired to plow old ground and sane enough to realize it had all been plowed too many times before.

We didn’t talk for a while as we drove back to his house on Spider Lake.

“I’ve been thinking hard about selling and going back to Ann Arbor,” I said, almost wistfully.

“I know,” he said. “Though I have to say, I’ve never seen you quite as happy as you’ve been up here. I have thought, more than once, how lucky you are to live in the North Country. For writing, it couldn’t be a better place. Tough, I suppose, to make a living. But then, that’s not a worry of yours. Not with the money from our divorce, and then there is the money your father left you.”

There was nothing to say. If I told him my money problems, he might think the only reason I wanted to remarry him was to get a steady meal ticket. And—being honest with myself—that could be the truth. I didn’t like women like that, but now I understood, just a little, how a woman might find herself frantic, needy, and vulnerable.

“Still,” Jackson drove carelessly, a wrist draped through the steering wheel, “since your books don’t sell and you’re only working as a journalist part-time, I can see where you might want to get back into real life.”

I bit my lip—hard. When I could speak, I said, “I was thinking, perhaps we might try again.”

He hesitated. “You mean marriage? Us?” The laugh he gave wasn’t flattering.

“We seem to be in a different place now,” I pressed on.

“Yes, that’s true … but are you certain? I mean, I know I’d be a much better husband than I was.” He went into deep thought as we turned on Hobbs Highway. “In truth, I’ve missed you. It takes a wife to plan the kinds of parties we used to give. And they were good parties. At least never dull.”

I nodded.

“And, with the married professors—their wives held the divorce against me. For God knows what reason. We’d be back in the married set again. That wouldn’t hurt me at the university. I mean, we all reach a point where we are one thing or another: young and on the prowl, or married and settled. I suppose we could, eventually, fall back into the exact circle of friends we used to have.”

I nodded, though cringing at the clinical analysis of our chances for success. And at the heavily weighted practical pros and cons.

He turned to me as we pulled in the drive under the tall pines. “We’re getting on so well now. I like our being … close, the way we are. So very … comfortable.”

We slept together that night. Almost a joyous occasion, as if a decision had been reached. It looked as though my little golden house could go on the market or be rented out. That idea began to hurt a lot. I forced it behind me.

Sunday morning I lazed around for a few hours, cooked breakfast for us, and then, stretching, suggested I’d better be getting home.

Jackson nodded. “I’ve got a lot of work to accomplish today. Probably best for both of us if you leave.”

A little too enthusiastic for my ego, but it was true. I had to get back and face the funeral in the morning, had to track down those two men, had to get that cemetery story finished and into Northern Pines Magazine, had to find Sorrow—a lot of things I hadn’t been thinking about.

Jackson said he would call in a few days and bring over more manuscript sheets. I took his face between both my hands for just a minute. I needed to look into his eyes. There was impatience there. There was a kind of satiation. There was a cautious kindness. I didn’t know about love. Maybe at our age love wasn’t so apparent. Maybe we’d both learned to guard our feelings. Maybe I needed to stop looking for overt signs and settle for what was said.

We kissed good-bye and I was out of there—no bags to pack. No long leave taking.