Red Knife Read Free

and grin at you the whole while. It was nothing personal; he was that way with everyone. Everyone except his daughter Kristi. Her he’d done his best to spoil rotten.
    Kristi was the only child born from Buck’s second marriage. His first wife was dead and the children from that marriage were all adults. Most of them had fled to the four winds to escape their father. With Kristi, it seemed that Buck Reinhardt was determined not to make the same mistakes he’d made before. He went on making mistakes; they were just different ones.
    Reinhardt built a place on Skinner Lake five miles west of Aurora, where he had the area pretty much to himself. There was public access on the far side, but it wasn’t often used because the lake was shallow and if you were a fisherman looking for the big ones, you wouldn’t find them in Skinner.
    Cork turned onto the narrow gravel road that skirted the lake and wove his way through a fine stand of sugar maples that Reinhardt tapped each year. The man may have been a bona fide bastard, but he boiled down a great maple syrup, which he gave away in small bottles as gifts at Christmas. Cork could see the lights of the house through the trees and again where they reflected off the black water of the lake. It was a big, sprawling place, begun small and added onto over several decades as Reinhardt’s growing fortune allowed. He’d done all the work himself; the house ended up as quirky as the man whose mind had conceived it. There was no eye to a unifying design. Buck Reinhardt built whatever suited his fancy at the moment he picked up saw and hammer. It had started as a one-bedroom cabin, but over the years had grown into a multitude of additions put together side by side or on top of one another. In the end, it resembled nothing quite so much as the random construction a child might create with a handful of building blocks. It wasn’t ugly exactly. It was certainly unusual, and very big, especially now that Buck and Elise, his second wife, lived there alone.
    Cork parked in the drive and climbed the steps of the front porch, which overlooked the lake. The porch light was on. It was early May, too soon for moths. Another three or four weeks and they’d be swarming around the light. He knocked. Almost immediately the door opened.
    Elise Reinhardt was younger than Cork by several years, early forties somewhere. Reinhardt had met her while she was carting cocktails in the bar of a four-star resort near Grand Rapids. Shortly after that, the first Mrs. Reinhardt moved out and six months later was dead of pancreatic cancer. Within a year, Buck had married again.
    Elise Reinhardt was a strong woman. Any woman who’d marry an old piece of tough leather like Buck Reinhardt had to be. She was an attractive, blond, blue-eyed, big-boned Swede whose maiden name was Lindstrom. Although she was no longer a young woman, she kept herself in shape and knew how to look good. Men in Aurora noticed. Reinhardt liked that about his wife, liked that men looked at her. He often said as much. Said, too, that he’d kill her if he ever caught her looking back, but only said that part after he’d had too many boilermakers.
    When she opened the door, she wasn’t at all the woman who’d catch a man’s eye. Her own eyes were tired and puffy, her face plain, her skin sallow, her lips set in a snarl. She was a woman in mourning and she wore her grief with an awful fury.
    “What?” she said.
    “Sorry to bother you, Elise. I’m looking for Buck.”
    “Look somewhere else. He’s not here.”
    “Any idea where I might find him?”
    “Like I could give a good goddamn.” She took a couple of seconds and pulled herself together. “Try the Buzz Saw. He’s probably getting shit faced with the boys. He does that a lot these days.”
    The truth was that Buck had always done that a lot. Reinhardt owned a tree-trimming business. He’d secured a number of lucrative contracts with power and telephone companies to keep the