Ray Jay had lived in terror for days, and then LaPointe was arrested and admitted he’d killed the woman and said nothing at all about Harmon and Ray Jay Wakemup having been there. Ray Jay didn’t know the why of it, but he was greatly relieved.
He followed the story in the papers-it was all over the North Country news-and many of the things he read bothered him. What bothered him most was that, besides LaPointe’s own admission of guilt, the most damning evidence seemed to be the skin found under the dead woman’s fingernails, and the fact that LaPointe had scratches down his cheek. And the reason this bothered him so much was that Ray Jay remembered no scratches being there at all when he and his brother had picked Otter LaPointe up from the chair in the living room and dragged him into the bedroom and laid him out on the bed beside the woman who had seemed to be merely sleeping but, he’d come to understand, was already dead.
And when he thought more about it, he realized that LaPointe had been sacked out in the living room chair in a stoned and drunken stupor when the woman had gone to the bathroom, naked, and then returned to the bedroom, after which the sound of Harmon’s laughter had been clear.
And the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that it hadn’t been LaPointe who’d killed Karyn Bowen.
He kept all this in his heart. He didn’t dare speak to Harmon, who was prone to fits of rage. And then LaPointe was convicted and sentenced to forty years, a lifetime, it seemed to Ray Jay, and the truth became like razor blades in his heart. He had to tell someone.
He’d been raised Catholic, more or less-probably less than more-and hadn’t been to confession in forever. But having no one else to advise him, he went to confession at St. Agnes. Ray Jay spoke to the priest there in vagaries about knowing a terrible truth that might get him into trouble if he shared it. The priest tried to pry out of him the exact nature of this truth, but Ray Jay didn’t cough it up. In the end, the priest’s advice was to unburden himself. Until he did this, Ray Jay’s conscience wouldn’t give him rest and his soul would carry a stain.
So, alone and more scared than he’d ever been, he went to the Tamarack County sheriff’s office and asked to speak to the only cop he knew, Cork O’Connor, who was a breed, a man with Ojibwe blood in him. But O’Connor wasn’t there, and the man who came out instead was big and red faced and smelled of cigars. He looked at Ray Jay in the way a lot of white people looked at Indians. He took Ray Jay back to his office and explained that he was the sheriff and whatever Ray Jay had to say to Deputy O’Connor could be said to him. So Ray Jay spilled his story. The sheriff listened and told him to wait and went outside for a very long time, and when he came back in, he brought with him two other men, neither of whom was Cork O’Connor. One man said he was Judge Carter, and he introduced the other as Sullivan Becker, the Tamarack County attorney. Judge Carter asked Ray Jay to repeat the story he’d told the sheriff, and Ray Jay did.
Afterward, all the men went back out and left Ray Jay alone. He had to pee, and he sat uncomfortable and fidgeting. He’d become sorry, very sorry, that he’d said anything to anyone, and he knew that Harmon would kill him when he found out, and all he wanted to do was run away. Finally, the men returned. The judge stood in front of him and looked down, and Ray Jay thought that God, when he sent someone to hell, probably looked exactly like that. The judge told him that no one believed his story. The judge told him that if they did believe it, it would mean that Ray Jay would go to prison for the rest of his life. Did Ray Jay know what happened to boys who went to prison? They were sodomized. Did Ray Jay know what that meant? Ray Jay did, and Ray Jay didn’t want that to happen to him. The judge told him to go home and to say nothing to anyone about this, ever. If he did, the judge would see to it that Ray Jay ended up behind bars, bent over and with someone’s dick up his ass.
Ray Jay never said a word of this, not to anyone, until, at thirty-six years of age, he entered AA and tried to make amends.
When Corrine Heine made the whole thing public, a media circus had followed. Everyone associated with the case was interviewed, including Cork, who maintained he’d known nothing about Ray Jay’s story. Sheriff Roy Arneson had died of cancer several years earlier, so he couldn’t shed any light. Judge Ralph Carter denied everything, as did Sullivan Becker, who, at the urging of an old law school classmate, had moved to Florida not long after the LaPointe case and gone to work for the Dade County DA, where he made a name for himself prosecuting organized crime.
The kicker was that LaPointe continued to insist that he had, in fact, committed the crime for which he’d been sentenced over twenty years earlier. When Heine vowed to get the case reviewed based on Ray Jay’s account, LaPointe would not agree to be a party to it, and he’d stayed in jail.
After the story broke, Cork talked with Ray Jay Wakemup, who swore that every word of what he’d said was true. Cork had tried to see LaPointe, but the man was refusing visitors. In the end, as they always do, things settled down. The media moved on to other stories, and the questions surrounding the truth of Karyn Bowen’s death became subjects of idle speculation, mostly over beer in the taverns of Tamarack County.
At the time, Cork had spent a good many restless nights considering his own culpability in all this. What he understood was that Ray Jay had not actually seen who committed the murder, and his perceptions, impaired by drugs, probably couldn’t be trusted. There was LaPointe’s continued insistence that justice had, in fact, been meted out correctly. And finally there was Roy Arneson, damn him, who’d left Cork totally in the dark about Ray Jay’s confession. Were it not for all these factors, Cork might yet have been plagued with guilt. But after a while he, too, let go of constantly mulling over the questions about that ancient case.
Eventually, the whole affair had faded away, even in the barrooms of Tamarack County.
Now someone had killed Ray Jay Wakemup’s dog and left his head as . . . what? There’d been nothing to indicate the reason, no note except “Welcome Home, Ray Jay!” Yet, as he drove toward Allouette to make sure of the Daychilds’ safety that night, Cork began to wonder if someone was finally calling Ray Jay to account for the sins of the past, sins still unforgiven.
CHAPTER 24
When the doorbell rang, Stephen didn’t respond immediately. He thought, This is what it’s like here. Colder than you could ever imagine. Hope you enjoy it, Skye.
The bell rang again, and from upstairs, Jenny called, “Stephen, get the door.”