“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but it must have been serious. A year later, my father had a coronary. He was hospitalized for weeks before he passed on. But Joel never visited him. After that argument over Red Max, they never spoke to each other again. Ever.”
Joel Kennedy, of Stanfield, Kennedy, and Bauer, attorneys-at-law, had a third- floor corner office with his name on the door in a century-old Main Street office complex, a block from the harbor yacht club.
If he was surprised by Sara’s visit, in the company of two construction roughnecks, he hid it well. He seemed more curious than concerned.
Tall and slender, with crisp, dark hair and a sunlamp tan, Kennedy wore a three-piece pinstripe that probably cost more than Shea’s truck.
“My sister called ahead to warn me you were coming,” Kennedy said, waving them to maroon leather seats facing his ornately carved desk. “She needn’t have bothered. With all the talk about the memorial, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about those days, lately. Maybe it’s time to clear the air, get it off my chest. What do you want to know?”
“What can you tell us about the jailbreak?” Sara asked.
“Which one?” Kennedy smiled, bridging his narrow fingertips. “At the time, with the police blaming SDS and the Weathermen for breaking Max out, most of my friends thought the break was a freaking miracle, proof of revolutionary solidarity, the brotherhood of the working class.” He shook his head ruefully.
“It was all nonsense, of course. Max Novak talked a good show, but one night in that jail and he was threatening to drag us all down with him if somebody didn’t get him out. The sheriff contacted my father, Dad called a few friends, and they arranged for the famous Christmas breakout. But not by revolutionary action. They did it the old-fashioned American way. They bought it.”
“And you knew about it at the time? How?”
“They asked me to help. After the escape, Max was too hot to hide. His face was all over the news, he had to get out of the country right away. Our little anti-war cell had been running an underground railroad, smuggling draft evaders into Canada. We thought it was a big secret, but somehow my father knew about it, and so did his friends. When he asked for my help, it was the most disillusioning experience of my young life.”
“How so?” Shea asked.
“Because I realized the whole thing was bogus. We were preaching power to the people, but all Max managed to do was blow up some poor working stiff. Revolution was just a game we’d been playing. And our parents weren’t really the enemy, they’d just been humoring us. Like the kids we were back then.”
“Dawn told us you and your father had a terrible row. Is that what it was about?”
“No,” Joel said flatly. “She shouldn’t have told you about that.”
“But she did,” Sara said simply. “It’s time for the truth now, Joel. You said they asked for your help. Did you help them?”
Kennedy sighed. “I didn’t have much choice. I knew a Métis who was smuggling dope down from Canada. We’d been paying him to take draft evaders along on the return trip—”
“Métis?” Sara asked.
“Half-breeds, sort of,” Puck explained, “Métis are part French Canuck, part Cree or Odawa, claim to be descendants of the original French voyageurs. Great woodsmen, most of ’em.
“My father offered the Métis, Bobby Roanhorse, five thousand dollars to smuggle Max across the lake into Canada. But there was a problem.”
“It was already late December,” Puck said. “And Lake Huron froze over early that year.”
“Roanhorse said going by boat was impossible, they’d need a snowmobile. So my father arranged for one, a brand new Polaris 340 from Hal Jensen’s dealership.”
Sara nodded. “Another name on Kowalski’s list. Do you know if they made it to Canada?”
“They must have,” Joel said carefully. “Max held a press conference to condemn the killings at Kent State. It was televised.”
“And a million people saw a man in a ski mask,” Sara said. “But that’s not what I asked, exactly. Do you know if they made it across?”
Joel looked away, taking a long ragged breath, and let it out slowly.
“No, I don’t know. But to be honest, I very much doubt it. As we were putting together the final arrangements, my father confessed that he’d promised Roanhorse an extra ten thousand to be sure Max never made it off that ice.”
“Dear God,” Sara said softly.
“He did it to protect us,” Joel pleaded, “I realize that now. Max had already tried to sell us out, he’d do it again in a heartbeat the next time he got jammed up. We were just kids, but we could have gone to prison for years, for believing in an unpopular cause and Red Max Novak. My father recognized the danger to us, so he... did what he had to. To save us.”
“What did you do about it?”
“I warned Max. I whispered to him, just before they set off.”
“How did he react?” Puck asked.
“He said it didn’t matter. That he had to get to Canada and the Métis was his only chance to make it.”
“Are you sure he understood you?” Sara asked.
“He understood, all right. Because I did more than just warn him. I...” Kennedy swallowed. “I slipped him a gun.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Puck said softly.
“I had to,” Joel said. “They meant to kill him, forgodsake.”
“And did they?” Puck pressed. “Do you know what actually happened?”
“I truly don’t. Max supposedly appeared at that press conference, but I have serious doubts it was actually him. The Weathermen could have staged that show for their own reasons, and who knows what the FBI was up to in those days? All I know for sure is, a year later Bobby Roanhorse came back to Port Martin. And my father paid him his blood money. Ten thousand dollars. And nobody’s seen Red Max Novak since the spring of nineteen seventy.”
“Maybe you’d better sit this one out, miss,” Puck suggested. “I’ve worked with a lot of Métis over the years, and most of ’em are fine people. But if this dope dealer did Novak in back then and we show up asking questions...” He broke off when Sara glanced at him curiously, as if wondering what language he was speaking. And he realized he might as well be talking to the wall.
Shea kept his eyes focused on the road. They were a dozen miles out of Port Martin, following Joel Kennedy’s directions. The gravel track skirted the shore of Burt Lake, a spot infamous to Native Americans. A nearby Ojibwa town was burned to the ground by local authorities during the Great Depression. Families turned out into the snow in the dead of winter. To forage, or starve.
Even now, with the afternoon light fading into the forest, the land had a somber edge, still brooding over ancient injustices.
The Roanhorse Tree Farm backed up to the edge of a section of National Forest. Thousands of acres of rough country, uninhabited and untouched for a hundred years.
The tree farm wasn’t much better. Rows of ragged spruce and jack pine, poorly shaped and trimmed, fit only for replanting along roadways, or to shield landfills.
The house looked abandoned. A ramshackle, two-story saltbox a century old and showing every day of it. Flaking, chalky whitewash, eyeless windows with shades pulled down. The only signs of habitation were cords of firewood neatly stacked on the sagging front porch. And animal pelts drying on stretch racks against the railings, filling the air with the redolence of wildness and putrefaction. Nature in the raw.
Sara knocked on the door. No answer. “Mr. Roanhorse?” she called.
“Out back.”
They followed the echo around the side of the house.
Bobby Roanhorse was splitting wood, his double-bitted ax ringing as he put his back into every swing. He was working stripped to the waist, wearing leather gloves, army fatigue pants tucked into high-top logging boots, a shaggy mane of raven hair, shot with gray, loose around his shoulders. He looked wild and surly and hard, his dark eyes unreadable behind thick brows.