The Ravens (27 page)

A
FLUSH
quickly spread up Tammy’s throat when she saw who was standing on the front steps. The crimson didn’t reach her face, but stopped just below her ears and chin. Lance couldn’t help staring.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

She bit her lower lip, looking skeptical, then finally stepped aside to let him into the hallway.

“Did you forget something here last time?”

“You might say that,” replied Lance as he hung up his jacket.

“Well, I’m still here,” said Tammy in a low voice, almost as if she didn’t want him to hear what she’d said. She led the way into the living room. Everything looked exactly the same as it had two days ago. The ashtray was even in the very same spot on the coffee table, overflowing with cigarette butts. It looked like she hadn’t bothered to empty it since his visit.

“Well?” she said, looking at him.

“There’s something I . . . ,” he started to say and sat down.

His sister-in-law remained standing. Lance was afraid she’d misinterpret his intentions and think he wanted another chance.

“It’s about Lenny Diver,” he said.

She sat down on the other side of the coffee table, shook a cigarette out of the pack, and lit it.

“Have you decided to help me, after all?”

“Yes,” said Lance.

He saw how relieved she looked. He knew in his heart this was going to be the most difficult thing he’d ever done.

“But first you have to help me with something,” he went on.

“Sure. Anything,” said Tammy, giving her brother-in-law an expectant look.

“Have you ever met Lenny Diver?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Right. That’s what I thought. So I wonder why you described him as a man with long braids.”

Tammy stared at him, uncomprehending. It hadn’t yet dawned on her that Lance was not really here to help her.

“As some kind of ‘drug-addicted Indian brave, with those long braids of his,’ ” he said, mimicking her voice. “That was right after you threw up. Remember? You threw up when I told you that Andy had almost beaten a boy to death with a baseball bat when we were in high school.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“Why did you describe Diver as a man with long braids?” Lance repeated.

“I saw pictures of him in the papers,” said Tammy.

“But the papers used the police mug shot of him,” said Lance. “And he didn’t have braids.”

“Who cares about his hair? The man’s a murderer.”

“It was actually highly unusual for Lenny Diver to wear his hair in braids,” Lance continued. “Chrissy saw him like that only twice. Once when they first met. Now if you happened to be there, I’ll admit that you could have remembered about the braids. So why don’t you tell me where and under what circumstances Chrissy and Lenny Diver first met.”

“Well,” Tammy began, taking a long, deep drag on her cigarette. “I remember seeing them together, they met . . .”

“I know the answer,” Lance warned her.

“At the movies,” she said dismissively, but he could hear that she’d given up.

The only movement in the room was the bluish smoke curling up Tammy’s wrist and forearm, and the ash growing almost imperceptibly until it formed a white horn curving downward from the tip of the cigarette.

“He’ll get out as soon as I call the FBI and tell them what I know,” said Lance. “But I don’t necessarily have to do that.”

Finally Tammy looked at him again.

“What do I need to do?” she asked.

“Tell me what happened when you killed Georg Lofthus. I’ve spent every waking hour thinking about this case ever since I found his body. If I don’t find out what happened, I’m going to go crazy.”

“And what happens if I tell you?”

“It’ll stay just between the two of us.”

“But how do I know I can trust you?”

“Do you have a choice?”

Tammy fixed her eyes on the cigarette drooping from her fingers. She started breathing hard.

“Okay,” she sighed at last, without looking up.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, so I killed him,” she whispered.

“But Georg Lofthus didn’t have long dark hair in braids.”

Tammy raised her arms, her fists clenched, as if holding a baseball bat.

“I hit him as hard as I could,” she snarled.

“And then you kept on hitting him?” Lance asked cautiously.

“It felt good,” she said, with that same intense snarl.

“Good?”

Tammy’s hand shook as she picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke out the side of her mouth.

“You would never understand,” she said. “You’re a wimp, just like your brother. I’m the only man in this family. I was upstairs when I heard Andy phoning somebody, and for some reason I had a bad feeling about it. Probably because Chrissy had gone to Duluth that day, or so we thought. I picked up the extension and listened. He was talking to a little girl who said that Chrissy and Jennifer weren’t there. She hadn’t seen them at all. I knew what that meant. She was involved in that shit again. And Andy knew it too. From the upstairs window I saw him get the baseball bat out of the garage and put it in his car. Not long afterward, he started talking about going fishing out at Lost Lake.”

“But you knew he was going out to look for Chrissy.”

She nodded and took another deep drag on her cigarette.

“I drove north, thinking that he might be on his way to Grand Portage to look for them. The strange thing is, I did it to prevent something bad from happening.”

“What made you drive down to the cross?”

“That’s where everybody goes to make out. I was hoping they might be there and that Andy wouldn’t find them. When I was partway down the road, I saw his car. It was a miracle he didn’t see me. I backed up almost as far as the highway and pulled onto an old tractor road. While I was walking down to the parking lot, I heard Andy’s voice. He was screaming his head off. He slammed the bat on the hood of Diver’s car and shouted that he was ruining our daughter and that he’d get him locked up in prison if he didn’t stay away from her. Lenny Diver was really calm. It was eerie. I was probably only about fifty yards away. Suddenly Andy hit Chrissy, and she ended up lying on the asphalt. I could hear the impact from where I stood. I was about to run out of the woods to stop him, but fear held me back. The whole situation felt like a bomb that might explode at any second. She lay on the ground for a good long while, holding her face. In the meantime Andy kept on yelling and screaming. Finally he dragged her over to his car as if she was a fucking deer that he’d shot or something. And that horrible man just stood there, watching. If he’d been a real man, he would have defended her. My little girl . . .”

“And then they drove off?” asked Lance.

She nodded.

“So it was just you and Lenny.”

“Yes. I stood there, not daring to move. You should have seen that bastard when he picked up the bat and started swinging it around. He kept on doing that while he babbled furiously, like some kind of maniac. I couldn’t really make out what he was saying, but I didn’t want to know either.”

“But Lofthus was killed sometime after midnight,” said Lance. “What happened in the meantime?”

“It wasn’t hard to guess where Andy was going to take Chrissy. So I drove all the way up to Lost Lake. I don’t know what I was thinking of doing. Maybe just talk to them. Tell Andy what
I thought of him hitting Chrissy. I don’t remember what I thought. But when I got to the cabin, I saw . . . Through the window I saw Chrissy sitting on a chair, but she looked strange. Then I realized that he’d tied her up. It was straight out of a horror movie. She was crying and screaming, and that cowardly shithead just stood there, looking at her. If it hadn’t been for Lenny Diver, none of that would have happened. And I knew Andy wouldn’t have the guts to do anything about it. He could hit his daughter, but he’d never dare go after Lenny Diver. So it was up to me.

“I got out of there and drove back down to Baraga’s Cross. When I got to the parking lot, I saw the bat was still lying on the ground. It was almost too good to be true. If I hadn’t found the bat, I probably would have left, because I had no idea how I was going to kill Diver. But there it was, in the middle of the parking lot, and his car was there too, so I knew he was somewhere nearby. As I leaned down to pick up the bat, I saw Chrissy’s scarf. It was drenched in blood. You have to understand . . . that was my little girl’s blood, Lance. My only child, my one and only joy. It may seem stupid now, but at that moment it felt right. I wrapped the scarf around my hand and picked up the bat. At that moment I was bound and determined to find Diver and kill him. I wasn’t insane or anything like that, but I think I was as scared as anyone could be. If a mouse had run across my path, I would have beaten it flat.”

“Wasn’t it dark?” asked Lance.

“There was moonlight, almost a full moon, and slowly the sky got lighter. It was the middle of the summer, you know. First I went over to the cross, but he wasn’t there. I walked slowly, didn’t make a sound. And then . . . somewhere in the woods . . . suddenly I realized a naked man was standing only a few yards away from me.”

“Georg Lofthus,” said Lance.

“I hit him in the head before I even stopped to think. And when he lay on the ground, I kept pounding at his skull. It felt so good, Lance. You would never understand . . . finally to be totally . . .
free
. But later . . . it was like I came to my senses. And I saw that it wasn’t Diver lying on the ground. That was horrible! I thought what I’d done was wasted effort. That I’d killed a man
without getting anything out of it. But when I went back to the parking lot, I suddenly knew how I was going to get that bastard after all. His car wasn’t locked, so I hid the bat under some junk inside.”

“What about your clothes?” said Lance. “They must have been covered in blood.”

“When I got home, I took a shower and put on clean clothes. Then I put the bloodstained clothes in a garbage bag and drove to the lake. It was before dawn, so I didn’t meet anyone on the way. On the north side of Lighthouse Point, I stuffed some rocks in the bag, tied it up, and threw it as far as I could into the water. It didn’t go very far. It’s probably still there.”

Conclusive evidence, thought Lance.

“After that, it was just a matter of driving home and waiting for them to come back,” said Tammy. “Chrissy ran straight up to her room. She looked awful after the beating she’d taken. It was obvious that Andy had hit her at the cabin too. And I was supposed to believe that she’d spent the night with a girlfriend in Duluth! Andy was upset and wanted to know if I’d heard the news. He told me a murder had been committed near Baraga’s Cross.”

“What did you think when you heard I was the one who found the dead man?”

“I couldn’t believe it. Things like that don’t happen. That’s what I thought. But it did happen.”

“Yes, it did,” said Lance with a sigh.

The phone on the end table next to the sofa started ringing.

“I’ll take it upstairs,” said Tammy and stood up.

Lance was surprised at how calmly she walked across the room, as if this was just an ordinary day in her life. Next he heard her running up the stairs, and then the phone stopped ringing. He wondered whether he should pick up the receiver and listen to the conversation, but decided that it didn’t really matter who she was talking to.

As he sat there alone, he realized that the blood traces at the scene of the crime, which the authorities had said with a hundred percent certainty had to have come from a person of Native American origin, could have come from Chrissy’s bloody scarf, which Tammy wore wrapped around her hand when she killed
Lofthus. Chrissy had the same Ojibwe ancestry as Lance and Andy, after all. Or Andy could have cut himself and bled when he bashed Lenny Diver’s car with the bat, or when he punched Chrissy. The blood could even have been Lenny’s, just as the police had assumed all along. A small cut on his hand would have been enough to leave blood on the bat when he picked it up. No matter who it belonged to, the blood had been carried into the woods by Tammy, either on the scarf or the bat, and left at the crime scene. The only person out of the four that the blood
couldn’t
have come from, was the murderer.

At that moment he noticed how quiet it was upstairs. When he thought about it, he hadn’t heard Tammy’s voice for a while. Lance went over to the end table and cautiously lifted the phone. But all he heard was a dial tone.

SHE
WAS
SITTING
ON
THE
BED
with his gun beside her.

“Tammy,” said Lance.

As she raised the gun with a trembling hand and pointed it at her temple, he saw that she had something wrapped around her wrist. It took a couple of seconds before he realized she’d kept her daughter’s bloody scarf.

“Tammy,” he said again, taking a step into the room.

“Don’t move,” she shouted, fear in her voice.

Lance froze in midstride and stood still as they stared at each other. Aside from Tammy’s shallow breathing, there wasn’t a sound in the house.

“I don’t trust you,” she whispered. “You’re going to tell.”

He heard the familiar scraping sound of a plow moving past. Outside it was just another boring Tuesday in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The kind of day almost nobody remembers afterward, but Lance Hansen would remember it for the rest of his life.

“Who was on the phone?” he asked in an attempt to talk her back from the edge.

“The school. They don’t know where she is. Every time the phone rings, I’m afraid she . . .”

“If you kill yourself, Lenny Diver will be the only one she has left,” he said.

Looking into Tammy’s eyes, he could see she was slowly coming back from that void where she’d gone. Shaking, she put
down the gun. Finally he could move, and in three long strides he reached the bed and picked up the weapon. At that instant she collapsed onto the floor, and there she stayed, soundlessly shaking all over.

Lance sat down next to her. He suddenly felt completely drained of all strength. He sat there for a long time, listening to the normal everyday life going on outside the four walls of this house, as he stroked Tammy’s hair and thought about all the years in prison that lay ahead of her.