Red Knife Read Online Free PDF Page A

when justice was impossible to offer?
    He was pulled from his reverie when his daughter, seventeen-year-old Annie, left the choir loft and joined another teenager—Ulysses Kingbird—in front of the chancel rail for the offertory. Annie sang a medieval hymn that the young Kingbird had arranged. Ulysses accompanied her on guitar. They’d been practicing for weeks. Cork had heard Annie singing in the bathroom, in her bedroom, humming on the stairs. This was the first time he’d heard her with the accompaniment and he was moved. It was extraordinary.
    After the service, Cork and Jo caught up with Ulysses Kingbird in the common room in the church basement. This was where the congregation usually gathered to socialize. Refreshments were kept simple: juice or punch for the children, coffee for adults, cookies for all. The kitchen abutted the common room, and there were always several women visible through the wide serving windows, bustling around in an important way.
    Ulysses stood in a corner with his father, Will Kingbird, who had a cell phone to his ear. Ulysses was sixteen—barely. His skin had the shadowy cast of the Ojibwe, courtesy of his father, but his features were sharp, his face narrow, his lips thin and soft, all evidence of the Hispanic blood on his mother’s side. In a couple of years, he might grow handsome, but at the moment he was awkward and pimpled. Standing beside his father, he looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.
    “Ulysses,” Jo said, approaching him with a warm smile. “That was an absolutely beautiful piece you played.”
    “Thanks.” His dark eyes dropped to the linoleum. “It was Annie, you know. She’s got the voice.”
    “Don’t go selling yourself short. You play the guitar wonderfully. And that arrangement was extraordinary.”
    He shrugged off her compliment. It was clear that if there had been a way, he would have disappeared.
    “Where’s your mother?” Jo asked. “I can’t believe Lucinda would miss this.”
    His father flipped his cell phone closed. “That’s what I was just trying to find out.” Will Kingbird was full-blood Ojibwe. Powerfully built, he stood well over six feet tall. He was Cork’s age, staring fifty in the face, and his black hair, which he kept military short, was salted with gray. He held himself impossibly rigid, the result, Cork figured, of thirty years in the marines. “She was supposed to pick up Rayette and Misty and bring them to church like she always does. Can’t get her cell phone and nobody answers at Alex’s place.”
    “Car trouble maybe,” Cork suggested. “If they’re on the rez, it’s hard to get a cell phone signal.”
    “Or baby trouble,” Jo said. “They can be a handful.”
    Kingbird frowned at their casual suggestions. “I think Uly and me’ll head out there, see what’s going on.”
    Annie worked her way toward them through the post-Mass gathering. When she reached Ulysses, she playfully punched his arm. “Awesome, dude.”
    A smile slid briefly across his lips. “No, you were.”
    “Oh, like you and your guitar were totally not there.” She put her arm around him in the way Cork had seen her do with her softball teammates. She glanced at Will Kingbird, cordial but not friendly. “Morning, Mr. Kingbird.”
    “Morning.”
    “Wasn’t he incredible?”
    “You both did a nice job.”
    “Dude,” she said to Ulysses, “your mother would have loved it. Where is she?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “We’re about to find out,” Will Kingbird said. He gave them all a nod in parting. “Let’s go, Uly.”
    Cork watched them weave their way across the basement. Halfway to the door, the parish priest, Father Ted Green, met them and spoke to Kingbird for a moment. They followed the priest toward another door where Cy Borkman, in his deputy’s uniform, was waiting. They all went upstairs.
    “What was that about?” Annie said.
    “No idea,” Cork replied. But it didn’t look good.
    Jo turned to head