Forsaken Country

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2022 by Allen Eskens

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ISBN 9-780-316-70352-9

E3-20220713-JV-NF-ORI

I dedicate this book to the memory of Calvin P. Johnson, a mentor, a sage, and a true friend. You are missed.

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CHAPTER 1

Max Rupert laced his fingers behind his head and settled into his pillow to await the ghosts. He knew that Mikhail Vetrov would be lurking on the other side of sleep. It had been three and a half years since he had shoved Mikhail through that hole in the ice, and very few nights had gone by where the memory of that killing didn’t come to visit him.

In dreams, Max still had the short hair and clean-shaven face of a homicide detective, but that face was long gone. Max hadn’t shaved or cut his hair since the day he started his exile, so now his beard reached to his chest and his hair fell in a ponytail between his shoulder blades. Living alone in the woods, Max found that unkempt look fitting.

But there were other changes that didn’t sit so well with Max. His eyes seemed empty, and his cheeks had grown thin. At forty-five years old he felt too young for the tiny lines that now fanned out from his eyes and creased the edges of his mouth. And his features seemed to sag a touch, as though something inside of him, something dark and heavy, weighed him down with years that he had not yet lived.

But those parts of Max that he’d hoped might change as the years went by—his heart, his conscience—clung stubbornly to the past. He had shut himself away from the world to face his reckoning, willing to accept forgiveness or retribution in equal measure, but after three and a half years, he had found neither. His reclamation had become stagnant.

But was he really isolated?

Max’s cabin was a small A-frame that had been in his family for more than a century. To the west lay a lake. To the south and north, Max could walk for miles and see no other human. But to the east, a thin trail snaked through the pines connecting his cabin to the county blacktop that ran south to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a town of about ten thousand souls. So long as he could simply drive into Grand Rapids to resupply, his exile seemed destined to fail.

That failure had been on his mind on his last trip into town when he ran into Lyle Voight. What had it been, a week? Ten days? Time was unreliable at the cabin: minutes lingered, days lasted for weeks, and months disappeared into a fog. But Lyle had helped him put his finger on the problem: Max had been cheating. He needed to live like a true hermit, with no electricity, no running water, no trips into town. Lyle’s remark had been offhand, but it touched a nerve.

Max had met Lyle five years earlier, when Lyle was sheriff of Itasca County and the first to respond to Max’s 911 call the night his brother Alexander passed away at the cabin, a night Max still tried not to think about. And while they weren’t close, Lyle, a quiet man in his sixties with thick hands and thin gray hair, remained the only person in Grand Rapids that Max recognized by face.

On that recent trip to town, Max had just exited the Super One Foods carrying two paper bags filled with soups, and canned vegetables, and meat, when he saw Lyle in the parking lot, sitting in the cab of his pickup truck, tapping a finger on the steering wheel to the faint sound of music. Max had never been one to talk to himself, at least not out loud, so since moving to the cabin he had rarely said more than a few words a week, usually only a mumbled thank-you in the checkout lane of the Super One—and as his beard and hair grew longer, folks seemed just fine with not talking to him. But because Lyle had parked right beside Max’s SUV, Max felt obliged to at least say hello.

Lyle wore a beat-up ball cap and a frayed blue-jean jacket instead of his sheriff’s uniform. When he saw Max, Lyle turned down his radio and leaned out the truck’s window. “Hey, Max.”

Max opened the back of his Jeep Cherokee and put his bags inside. “Working up the gumption to go in?” Max asked, trying to sound more lighthearted than he felt. The words were like gravel in his mouth.

“Waiting for my daughter and grandson. They’re grabbing candy for the trick-or-treaters. I swear, we’d save a ton if we just bought a bag for the kid and called it a day.”

Max cleared his throat before he spoke again. “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

“I suppose.”

Even before he had retreated to the cabin, Max disliked chitchat, but now it seemed a painful thing. Still, despite the overwhelming urge to get in his car and go, Max couldn’t bring himself to be rude to the one man in town who could call him by name. So he leaned on Lyle’s rear fender and tried to come up with something to say. In the bed of the truck lay two enormous pumpkins. “You planning on doing some carving later?”

Lyle smiled. “It’s kind of a family tradition. Me and the grandson do the jack-o’-lanterns, then I take him trick-or-treating. I used to wear my sheriff’s uniform. That was costume enough for the kid, but now that I lost the election…” His words trailed off.

Max knew that there had been an election—he’d seen the lawn signs—but he hadn’t heard that Lyle had lost. He shook his head. “Voters can be a fickle bunch.”

“I guess I’ll just be Grandpa this year.” Lyle took off his cap and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Truth is, I kind of feel… I don’t know. I’m not sure what to do with my time anymore. I walk around all antsy, like there’re just too many minutes in a day.” Then he smiled to himself. “If it were only me, I’d move out to the woods and become a hermit like you, but Meredith would have my head.”

Until that moment, Max had never thought of himself as a hermit, a word that conjured up a crazy man in rags, living in a cave, eating bugs. Sure, he had let his beard and hair grow, but he still bathed, and clipped his toenails, and brushed his teeth. His cabin was sound and well insulated, with electric heat and appliances and a beautiful view of a lake.

That’s when it dawned on him that his exile—his attempt at penance—was the kind of existence that some people paid good money to experience.

Something caught Lyle’s attention and he turned to look at a woman and child walking toward them. The woman, in her midthirties, wore the tired face of a mother nearing the end of a long day. Her gray sweatshirt had a large chocolate stain just left of center, and her black hair fell in looping strands from the remnant of a bun atop her head. She pushed a cart of groceries with one hand and held her son’s hand with the other.

“There’s my crew now,” Lyle said, stepping out of the truck. He walked to the back and opened the tailgate. “You ever met my daughter?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Max, this is Sandy.” Lyle began lifting bags of groceries from the cart, nestling them next to the pumpkins.

The woman smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes. She had the lithe body of a runner, with strong cheeks and dark eyes that gave her a look of quiet confidence. Max held out his hand. “Max Rupert,” he said.

Lyle said, “He’s that detective I told you about, the one living north of town?”

Sandy looked like she had no idea what Lyle was talking about, but shook hands with Max anyway, her eyes narrowing slightly as though trying to find a big-city homicide detective behind the flop of hair and beard. “Nice to meet you,” she said. Her hand was soft and warm, and her fingers gave a light squeeze as she wrapped them around Max’s hand.

“And that little bugger there…” Lyle pointed at the boy, maybe five or six years old, who stood behind his mother. “That’s my Pip Squeak.”

The boy tucked his face into his mother’s leg as if to hide. It was official—Max had a face that could scare children. Maybe Lyle’s hermit comment wasn’t that far-fetched after all. Max would have preferred to ignore the boy, but his apprehension bothered Max. He didn’t want the child to have nightmares about the scary man he’d met at the grocery store. Slowly, Max squatted down to be eye to eye. “Your grandpa tells me you have quite the gift for carving pumpkins,” Max improvised.

The boy remained silent.

“What are you going to be for Halloween?” Max asked.

When he didn’t answer, Sandy patted the boy’s head and said, “It’s okay, Pip. You can tell him.”

The boy looked to his grandfather too before answering in a voice so small that Max could barely hear it. “A pirate.”

“A pirate,” Max said, his voice cracking as he tried a whimsical lift to his words. He softly cleared his throat again. “That is a great costume.”

Pip looked at Max as though he still wanted him to go away.

Max tried one more time. “Do you know what a pirate’s favorite letter of the alphabet is?”

The boy gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

“It’s the letter arrrrrrrrr.” Max sold the joke by scrunching up the side of his face and pinching one eye shut. Pip’s cheek twitched and then a wispy smile fought its way through his bashfulness. Max smiled back, content in his small victory.

Max stood and nodded. “It was nice meeting you both. Lyle.” He held out his hand and gave the old sheriff’s hand a shake.

The first thing he noticed, on his half-hour drive home, was a feeling of warmth in his chest. Lightness. His face wore the remnants of a smile. Max thought back; had he smiled since retreating to the cabin? He didn’t think so. He wasn’t supposed to be happy. He had gone there to be alone, to be forsaken by the world. This seemed all wrong.

The cacophony of pleasantries from that day brought his hypocrisy into sharp focus. The grocery bags in the back of the SUV held wild rice soup and ribeye steaks. Apparently Purgatory came with fresh cuts of meat. No wonder atonement remained beyond his reach. Then he thought about Lyle’s words: If it were just me, I’d become a hermit like you.

But Max wasn’t a hermit—not yet. The solution seemed both obvious and elegant.

First thing the next morning, Max drove to town and had his electricity shut off. When he arrived back at the cabin, he went to work preparing for his deprivation. He buried two coolers in the crawl space beneath the cabin to store what vegetables he had already and those he intended to grow. He dug a hole outside where he would lay his refrigerator to hold frozen meat once winter came. He fixed the old hand pump in the front yard so he could have water. His main source of food would be the fish, so he rowed out every morning and cast a line until he caught enough for the day. By the sixth day, he had grown sick of eating fish.

Max’s father had left him two guns when he died, a twenty-two-caliber rifle and a twenty-gauge shotgun; they were among the few possessions Max had brought to the cabin. He hadn’t used either since he’d hunted with his father as a teenager, back before his father’s drinking had affixed him to the cushions of the living room furniture. Max had never actually shot anything on those outings, but he had watched his father. He believed he remembered enough of how to skin a rabbit or field dress a pheasant to make a go of it now.

On the seventh day of his hermitage, he decided to hunt down some red meat, choosing the twenty-two for that outing.

He stepped into the woods at daybreak, the air infused with the scent of wet tree bark, the world chilly and quiet beyond the crunch of pine needles under his boots. He walked south across land he had played on as a child, taking a path he and Jenni had walked the first time he’d brought her to the cabin. Some of the trees had already dropped their leaves for the fall, but most hadn’t. The brilliant yellow of the poplars and aspens mixed with the rust of the oaks and the bright red of the sumac. The woods looked like a child’s finger painting.

He carried the rifle into the state forest, no hunting license, the gun still registered to his father, and he considered the laws he was about to break. There was a time when rules meant everything to him. But Max was no longer that man—that much he knew. Who he had become remained lost in a fog.

After about an hour, Max leaned against a fallen tree, his gun at his side. He tried to remember what his father had taught him about hunting: Be patient, stay quiet, keep a keen eye out for movement. Max scanned the trees and was about to start walking again when he saw the rabbit, thirty yards out, moving carefully beneath the branches of a small pine.

Max raised the rifle butt to his shoulder and pressed his cheek to the stock, eyeing down the barrel to line up the front and rear sights. The rifle felt foreign in his hands after so many years carrying a pistol, and when he squeezed the trigger, the gun fired with a muffled pop.