Vermilion Drift

TWENTY-NINE

He dreamed his father dying.

And he woke anxious and angry.

Clearly, he was nowhere near the end of the journey Meloux had referred to.

But he had an idea, which he wanted to pursue, and he got up quickly and prepared for the day.

Before he headed out, his phone rang. A call from his daughter Jenny.

“Dad?” She sounded worried.

“Hey, sweetheart, what a nice surprise.”

“I just heard about what’s going on up there in the Vermilion One Mine. Jesus, Dad.”

“Yeah, pretty crazy stuff.”

“On CNN, they reported that you found the bodies. Is that true?”

“Afraid so.”

“My God. Are you all right?”

“Me? Fine.”

“Are you… involved?” She phrased it much the way her mother might have, her words both a question and an admonition.

“Just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. No need to worry.”

“Just happened? Right.”

“Look, sweetheart, I’d love to talk to you, but I have some pressing business-”

“Does it have to do with-what are they calling it-the Vanishings?”

“I’m just going over to the rez to visit Millie Joseph. You remember her?”

“Old and a little senile, but nice.”

“That’s her. I try to visit whenever I can these days. So don’t worry about me, okay?”

“I can come up if you need me.”

“No, sweetheart, I’m fine. Give that boyfriend of yours my best.”

When he hung up, he wasn’t proud of himself, but at least he’d avoided actually lying to his elder daughter. He had enough to worry about without being concerned about her worry.

When he reached the Nokomis Home, he found Millie Joseph rocking in the porch shade. It was morning and still cool, and she had a knitted shawl around her shoulders.

“Boozhoo, Corkie,” she said with a smile so huge it nearly made her eyes disappear. “How come you never visit?”

Cork let her question slide and pulled up a chair next to her. “A beautiful day, Millie,” he said, looking toward the steely blue of the lake.

“At my age, Corkie, every day you wake up is beautiful.”

“Millie, could I ask you a question?”

“Sure. But it will cost you.”

“What’s the price?”

“Today’s Friday. Sarah LeDuc over at the Mocha Moose makes fry bread on Fridays. I’ll answer your question if you bring me back some fry bread.”

“It’s a deal,” Cork said.

“Ask away.”

“Indigo Broom-” Cork began.

“Oh,” Millie said, and her face changed. “Not him.”

“I just want to know where Indigo Broom lived.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“Do you want fry bread?”

She weighed her craving against her reluctance to answer and gave in. “He lived way over south on the reservation. An old logging road off Waagikomaan. He had himself a little cabin there. But you won’t find it now.”

“Why not?”

“Burned down.”

“When?”

“Long time ago. About the time he left, I think.”

“You mean disappeared.”

“He didn’t disappear. He left the reservation, and good riddance.”

“How do you know he left?”

“Sam Winter Moon said he got word from relatives somewhere. I don’t remember where. I just know I felt sorry for those people whoever they were.”

“This old logging road, do you recall where it cut off from Waagikomaan?”

“West of Amik, I believe. But why do you want to go there? It’s a bad place.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Everyone on the rez knows it’s a bad place.”

“Because Broom lived there?”

“Maybe the place is bad because Broom lived there, maybe Broom lived there because the place is bad. Doesn’t matter. People with any sense know better than to go there.”

“Nobody ever accused me of having much sense, Millie. Migwech.”

“My fry bread, Corkie?”

“Back in ten minutes.”

And he was.

Waagikomaan was an Ojibwe word that meant “crooked knife.” It was a good name for the road on the rez, which cut a winding path through aspen and then into marshland and finally into timber. Cork reached Amik, which was the Ojibwe name for a lake the whites called Beaver, without spotting any cutoff. He turned around and drove back more slowly. It had been a good seventy-five years since any significant felling had been done in the area, and a logging road gone unused for that length of time would probably have been reclaimed by the wilderness. Hell, it was enough time for a whole new forest to grow. Still, he eyed the pines carefully, and about a quarter mile west of Beaver Lake he spotted an unnatural break in the tall timber. He pulled the Land Rover to the side of the road, parked, and got out. He waded through the wild grass at the shoulder of the road and reached the edge of the trees, where he studied the vegetation. He laid his cheek to the earth and eyed the contour. Finally he ran his hand over the ground itself and was satisfied that there were still ruts, the faintest of scars, leading into the trees. He stood and followed them in.

Cork believed that a forest was a living thing and that people who paid attention heard its voice and smelled its breath and knew its face. He realized very quickly that Millie Joseph had been right. In that place, the forest was sick. Not with blight caused by beetle or fungus, but suffused with a sense of malice.

Mudjimushkeeki, he thought. Like the Parrant estate, this was a place of very bad medicine. Although he couldn’t remember ever having been there, the way seemed oddly familiar to him, and the deeper he went into the trees, the more powerful became his own sense of resistance.

After fifteen minutes, feeling far weaker than the distance and the effort should have made him, he came to a place almost devoid of undergrowth. It was backed by a ragged wall of bare, slate-colored rock. The place was dead quiet. He couldn’t hear the call of a single bird among the trees or see the dart of a single insect in the air. He felt a little nauseated and realized that his stomach was knotted in a way that usually only happened when he was very afraid.

What was there to be afraid of?

Cork stood momentarily paralyzed. He thought about the fact that he’d spent a good deal of his life in places where great trauma or tragedy had occurred, arenas where death was a regular contender. Yet he’d never before felt what he felt from the clearing in which he now stood, where even the sunlight seemed sucked dry of its energy.

He started toward the rock wall and within moments saw the outline of a cabin foundation in the dirt, a black rectangle of half-buried, charred logs. A dozen yards to the north was the foundation of another burned structure, much smaller than the cabin. Cork paused before he crossed the boundary of the cabin logs. He fought against the urge to turn and run. Finally he stepped inside the rectangle.

The ground was bare, with a deep covering of soil dry as ash. Cork’s boots left clear impressions as he walked. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but wished he’d brought a shovel or something suitable to turn the dirt, to sift the past. He could tell the basic layout of the cabin. One large room, two smaller rooms. Beyond that, the ruin told him very little. He knelt, lifted a handful of the dry earth, and let it slide between his fingers. It left a gray residue that Cork wiped on his pant leg. He stepped out of the outline of the cabin and went to the smaller structure. A storage shed perhaps? A garage? The ground there was ash-dry as well, and Cork saw boot tracks. They were clean, the edges still well defined. Not much time had passed since they’d been made. He turned in a circle, scanning the trees around the clearing, the top of the rock wall. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t being watched. He realized his gut had knotted even more. He didn’t like this place, didn’t like it one bit.

But he’d come for a reason, and he turned back to his purpose. He began to kick through the layer of dry soil in the smaller ruin, searching for a clue to the purpose of the original structure. The toe of his boot hit metal. Cork bent, felt in the dirt, and his fingers touched rusted iron. He dug and got a grip and pulled from its grave a long and heavy chain with an open iron cuff at each end. He rose slowly and realized he was holding a set of manacles.

He laid the piece down, knelt, and began to scrape through the dirt, using his fingers as a rake. It took him five minutes before he came across the bones.

There was nothing large, only chips and fragments. And a tooth. He knew that fire burned flesh and muscle and cartilage completely, but even a crematorium couldn’t get rid of all the bone in a body or any of the teeth. Who’d died in the fire here almost fifty years ago? Indigo Broom? Was this the reason for his disappearance? And if so, who was it that caused him to disappear in this way?

He was so engrossed in his thinking that he didn’t hear until it was too late the soft patter at his back of someone in a rush. He tried to turn, but not quickly enough, and the morning exploded, brighter than sunlight, followed by a darkness more than night.

He came to feeling as if his skull had been split open across the back. His right cheek pressed against the ground, and the taste of dirt was in his mouth. He lifted himself slowly, waiting a moment on his knees for everything around him to stop spinning. He spit wet, black grit and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He tried to stand, returned to his knees, gathered himself, and finally came to his feet. He realized he was no longer inside the foundation of the smaller structure. He’d been dragged outside the ruin. Inside, the ash-dry dirt carried rake marks. The whole area had been carefully gone over. He checked his watch and realized that he’d been out for nearly two hours. He could have dug some to check for anything that might still have remained, but he doubted he’d find anything. Besides, he wasn’t seeing particularly well at the moment and was worried about the pain in his head. He turned and stumbled away, eager to be clear of the sickness of that place.