Vermilion Drift

Four miles south, Cork turned off the highway onto Moon Haven Drive. The road narrowed to a slender thread of black asphalt weaving among a thick stand of red pine. He didn’t have to think about where the road led. There was only one home on Moon Haven Cove, and it belonged to Max Cavanaugh.

He could have told the sheriff what he’d found, but the note had satisfied him that the disappearance of the DOE’s mining consultant probably wasn’t cause for alarm, and he’d decided that it would be better to pursue the lead quietly on his own. If, as he suspected, Kufus’s visit had nothing at all to do with mine business, a sudden appearance by the authorities had the potential for being embarrassing for all involved.

Of course, the whole question could have been easily answered with a phone call, but Cork had a gut sense—and he was nothing if not a man who followed his gut instincts—that something very interesting might result from seeing to this personally.

He drove slowly as he approached Cavanaugh’s lake home. It was a behemoth of a construction. All the homes that went up on the lake these days seemed to be that way. When Cork was growing up, a place on the lake still meant a modest cabin or a small house with a screened porch that may or may not have been insulated for winter occupancy. There was often a tiny dock, where a boat with a reasonable outboard or a little skiff with a mast for a single sail was tied up. The woods drew close around those old places, and they shared the shoreline together in comfortable intimacy.

No one built small anymore. Certainly not Max Cavanaugh. And the woods stood back from his opulent construct, as if drawing away, repulsed.

The great home lay in deep purple cast from the evening sky. The wide lawn appeared to be an inlet of a wine-colored sea. The black asphalt gave way to a circular drive made of crushed limestone bordered with flowers. Parked in the drive, near the front door, was the red Explorer that Kufus had rented for her time in Aurora. Cork pulled up behind her vehicle, turned off his Land Rover, and stepped out onto the drive. He saw immediately that the Explorer’s tires were flat. On closer examination, he discovered they’d been slashed, all four. He also discovered that an envelope had been slipped under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side. On the face of the envelope, printed in the dripping red font called From Hell, was Kufus’s name.

When he reached the porch of Cavanaugh’s house, he wasn’t surprised to find another envelope, this bearing the name of Max Cavanaugh, printed in From Hell. The envelope had been pinned to the door with a hunting knife that would have been perfect for gutting a moose or slashing tires.

He rang the bell, twice. No one answered. He began a slow circumnavigation of the property, checking the windows as he went, unable to see anything because the curtains were all drawn. From the back of the house came the sound of soft jazz playing over good speakers. Rounding the rear corner, he saw the great bricked patio, the table and wine bottle, the two chairs with towels folded over the back of each, but he saw neither Cavanaugh nor Kufus. The music came from an opened patio door.

Cork was just about to head that way when he caught sight of the dock on the far side of the back lawn where it edged the cove. Cavanaugh and Kufus were there. Cavanaugh wore red swim trunks. Kufus wore a swimsuit, a black one-piece that looked designed more for exercise than for showing off at the beach. They stood close together, and, as Cork watched, Kufus put her arms gently around her companion. Behind them in the late dusk, the surface of Moon Haven Cove was a perfect mirror of the plum-colored sky.

Cavanaugh spotted him and pulled away. He said something to Kufus, and they both turned toward the house. They spoke a moment more, then walked the path to the patio.

“My, my,” the woman said, taking one of the towels from the back of a patio chair. “You do get around.”

“I rang the bell,” Cork said. “No one answered.”

“Can’t hear much from down there,” Cavanaugh said, indicating the dock. He had a body taut and sinewy but also scarred in a number of places. In the shower after one of the basketball games the Old Martyrs had played, he’d told Cork they were all the results of his mine work over the years. He’d said he liked the danger of the job. “What’s up?”

Cork said, “Ms. Kufus, did you know the whole county is worried about you?”

“It’s Genie, and whatever for?”

“Some more threats have been delivered. As a matter of fact, you have one waiting for you on your car. And, Max, there’s one for you.”

Cavanaugh looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Why don’t we all go to your front door and I’ll show you.”

Cavanaugh led them into the house, leaving a gray trail of water droplets on the white carpeting all the way to the front door. When he saw the envelope, he reached for the knife that pinned it.

“It might be better to wait, Max,” Cork said. “The sheriff’s people will want to go over it for prints.”

Cavanaugh ignored him, tugged the knife blade free, and opened the envelope.

We die. U die. Just like her. In dripping red From Hell.

He held it out for Kufus to see. She read it, and her response surprised Cork.

“Fuck them,” she said. She looked beyond Cavanaugh to where her rental was parked. The envelope was clearly visible on the windshield, a white rectangle against the reflection of a bruise-colored sky, and she said again, low and hard, “Fuck them.”

Azevedo was the deputy dispatched on the call. When he arrived, he told Cork the sheriff wanted to see both Kufus and Cavanaugh at the department as soon as possible. Cavanaugh stayed while the deputy filled out an incident report, but Cork offered to drive Kufus into town immediately. Cavanaugh told her to go ahead. He’d be in touch. Azevedo put the notes, the envelopes, and the knife into evidence bags and gave them to Cork to deliver to the sheriff. Then Cork and a taciturn Kufus took off for Aurora.

Dark had fallen, and a mist of stars covered the sky. Kufus sat silently on the far side of the Land Rover, and Cork could feel her anger.

“Mind if I ask a question?” Cork said.

“Would it matter?” Clearly she was still pissed. Maybe about the threats. Maybe about Cork’s intrusion. Maybe about having to be chauffeured back to Aurora by a guy she didn’t particularly like.

“What is it between you and Max?”

She looked out the window and up at the stars. “He knows I’m a swimmer, and he invited me out to swim in the cove.”

“And to talk about mine business?”

“Yes,” she said. “Mine business.”

“That’s why you were holding each other? Mine business?”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I haven’t told you what I think.”

“You’re a man. I’ve spent my whole life in a business dominated by men. I know what men think.”

“Men like Max Cavanaugh?”

“Max is different.”

“How?”

She looked at him. “Are you really trying to get me to open up to you? Because if you are, you’re doing a shitty job.”

He kept his eyes on the road ahead, but he could feel her glare.

“Hell,” she finally said, settling back. “Are you married?”

“I was. My wife died.”

It had been well over a year, but the actual words still felt alien to him, and every time he was forced to say them, he wondered if they would ever come easy.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice softening just a bit.

“Gauging by the rock and the gold band on your finger, I’d say you’re married.”

“To a wonderful guy named Steve, whom I love very much. Given what you’re clearly assuming about me, you may not believe that.”

“I don’t know you well enough to assume anything about you.”

Cork swerved to avoid a deer lurking at the edge of the road.

“Look, Max speaks highly of you, so I’m going to level,” she said. “I knew him a long time ago. Before Steve. We were in graduate school together at Carnegie Mellon.”

“You knew him well back then?”

“Very well.”

“The one that got away?”

“I let him go. He made it clear from the beginning that he had no intention of ever settling down, having a family. And those were things I wanted very much.”

“For two people who let go of each other a long time ago, you looked pretty cozy on the dock.”

“We’ve stayed in touch over the years, okay? He needed to talk to someone about Lauren. It’s tearing him up, and he doesn’t have anyone here he feels he can confide in.”

Cork said, “I appreciate what you’re telling me.”

“And I’d prefer it wasn’t something you share with people.”

“Worried about conflict of interest where Vermilion One is concerned?”

“The appearance of it. In my mind, there is no conflict of interest.”

“Folks around here would give a whole lot to know your thinking about the mine right now.”

“I still have a lot of mine to look at. I’m excellent at what I do. And fair. If it’s a good site for nuclear storage, I’ll say so.” She was quiet again, then: “I have children, Cork. I have a home I love. I understand how people here must feel.”

“But in the end, you have a job to do?”

“In the end, don’t we all? And isn’t a part of who we are about the integrity we bring to our work?”

It was a tough point to concede, but Cork understood exactly where she was coming from.

He delivered Kufus to the sheriff’s office, along with the evidence bags. He stayed while Dross and Larson and Rutledge interviewed her.

As the two men drew their questioning to a close, Dross signaled Cork to follow, and they exited the interview room.

In the hallway, Dross said, “We got a preliminary indication from Agent Upchurch this evening. All the skeletal remains are female and, except for one, appear to be Native American. The one that isn’t was the one with the bullet in her spine.”

“Monique Cavanaugh,” Cork said. “Mother and daughter killed with the same weapon. Curiouser and curiouser.”

Cork escorted Genie Kufus back to her hotel. He walked her to her room, where she opened the door and allowed him inside to check the safety of her lodging.

“Lock your door,” he said as he prepared to leave.

“See? Just like a man. Of course I intend to lock my door.”

“Sorry,” Cork said. “Habit.”

“Are there any women in your life?”

“A couple.”

“They haven’t taught you anything, have they?”

“They’ve tried. Night,” Cork said.

“Good night.” Then she added, though it seemed to go against her better judgment, “Thank you.”

She closed the door behind him.

He waited in the hallway until he heard the lock click.

SEVENTEEN

Much earlier that night, when he saw how things were going, Cork had called Judy Madsen and asked her to supervise the closing of Sam’s Place. She’d agreed, though reluctantly, and had said, “You know, if I were a bona fide partner in this enterprise or, heck, owned the whole damn thing, I’d feel a lot better about this.”

Cork had never before seriously considered taking her up on her offer, but that night he thought the unthinkable. He thought, Maybe.

At the house on Gooseberry Lane, he fed Trixie and walked her. Afterward he carted in the boxes he’d taken from Millie Joseph’s room. He carried them to the office on the first floor, the office that had, for nearly twenty years, been his wife’s, and he set them on the floor next to the desk. Then he stopped, caught in one of those moments that still ambushed him sometimes. He reached out and ran his hand along the polish of the desk, recalling the day Jo had bought the old antique. He remembered the overcast sky, the farm where the estate sale had been held, the look on his wife’s face when she’d seen the desk that had been stored in the barn, covered with dust and strung with cobwebs. Somehow beneath that thick skin of neglect, she’d been able to see the beauty waiting to be rediscovered. She refinished the piece herself, over the course of the summer that she’d been pregnant with Stephen, and now, sometimes, when Cork’s hand touched the wood, it was as if he was touching Jo’s hand as well.

The moment set him to wandering. He left the office and walked the first floor, encountering apparitions. Trixie followed him, but only Cork saw the ghosts, which were the memories that haunted him and made him happy. They were his memories of being a father and husband. Memories of his children and Jo and him gathered around the dining room table for the pleasure of a thousand meals he’d thoughtlessly taken for granted. Of the games they’d played in the living room—Operation, Monopoly, Risk! Of wrestling with the kids when they were small enough and the girls not so worried about being girls. Of Jo and him on the sofa together in that quiet hour after Jenny and Anne and Stephen were asleep and before they themselves, wearied, had trudged upstairs to bed. Often in that sofa hour, Jo would slip her feet, cold always, under him for warmth.

So small and so precious, the moments lost to him now, lost to him forever except as the ghosts of memory.

He realized that he’d forgotten to eat, a chronic occurrence since Stephen had been gone and Cork had become responsible for feeding only himself. In a saucepan, he stirred together milk and Campbell’s tomato soup, and when it was hot he crumbled in some crackers. He grabbed a cold beer to wash it down.

He returned to the office and ate at the desk while he checked his e-mails, hoping for word from his children. He wasn’t disappointed. Jenny had sent him a short note updating him on a home painting project she and Aaron had undertaken. Anne had sent him a longer note. Her work in El Salvador was hard and the conditions were difficult and she was tired. But the bottom line was that she was doing what she felt she was meant to do and was happy. Nothing from Stephen. No surprise. Stephen was too busy having fun being a cowboy.

At last he turned to the boxes from Millie Joseph, boxes that contained more ghosts. Ghosts, Cork would discover, that he could never have imagined on his own.

He began to read his mother’s journals.

July 22, 1946

I wasn’t excited about the reunion in Chicago. My father’s family are ruffians, for the most part, and I’m amazed that Mother seems to enjoy herself in their company. They call her “their darlin’ squaw.” If it were said by anyone else, Mother would lash them and not just with her able tongue. She calls them “ignorant Micks,” an epithet that would land most folks flat on their back with a bloodied lip. But the men laugh and toast her, and I have heard them say to my father that she’s the prettiest and smartest bit of skirt they’ve ever laid eyes on, and how the hell did a four-eyed bookworm covered in chalk dust ever manage to land such a prize?

Tonight at dinner a guy sat across from me. A little older than me, I suspect. His name is William, although he goes by Liam, and he’s an O’Connor, too, the grandson of my grandfather’s brother, I’ve learned. I’m still trying to figure out what iteration of relation that makes us. He said nothing to me during the meal—it would have been hard, anyway, to be heard above the hubbub—but his eyes kept finding me and later he caught me outside, alone, enjoying the dusk. He introduced himself and I was about to offer my name in return when he said it wasn’t necessary. He already knew all about me. Attending teacher’s college in Winona—on scholarship, he said. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of that or if it was something he saw as admirable. I told him he had me at a disadvantage. He said, rather pleased, “Then I’m a mystery to you.” And I said, “Not so much as you imagine.” I looked him up and down and said, “You’re a policeman. New to the force. You have very little money and you live with your parents. On Friday nights, you drink with your bachelor friends. On Saturday, you play baseball. And on Sunday, you go to Mass and pray that a pretty young colleen will be swept off her feet by your blarney and favor you with a kiss.” He laughed and said, “And, sure, you’re the answer to my prayer.”

He is a handsome man, much too sure of himself. But then, he got his kiss.

The books were covered in leather, black or brown or red or green, and the spaces between the printed lines were small, perfect for the tight, precise script that filled them. The dates that headed all the entries began the year his mother had entered Winona Teachers College in Winona, Minnesota. The first entry was simple:

September 14, 1943

Away from home, at last! I feel like Dorothy at the door to the farmhouse, with Oz awaiting me outside. Homesick? A little. But I know that will pass. My roommate is named Gloria O’Reilly. She’s from St. Paul. Big city girl. We’ll be the best of friends, I can already tell.

Mingled with the journal entries were poems, generally brief.

The river bends to the strength of the hill

But does not from the conflict resign.

It shapes the rock with persistent will.

In both forces, beauty. In both, the divine.

She had graduated in the spring of 1947 and taught sixth grade for a year in Kittson County, in far northwest Minnesota, one of the flattest places in the world. She’d been fond of saying that it may not have been the end of the earth, but you could see the end from there.

In 1948, her father had become ill, very ill, and she’d returned to Aurora to help with his care. In returning, she discovered that the place she’d fled had changed, or that she had, and what she saw in the North Country was both beautiful and divine. After her father passed away, she stayed on with her mother in the small house in Allouette, living with her mother’s people and teaching in the one-room schoolhouse on the reservation that her parents together had founded.

In all that time, she’d been courted by the cheeky policeman from Chicago named Liam O’Connor.

November 24, 1949 (Thanksgiving)

Liam is asleep on the living room sofa. As I lie in my own bed, I can hear his deep breathing. A gentle sound, but with just a little forcefulness. That is Liam, yes. He’s asked again for me to move to Chicago. How can I? I find it an odious place, full of noise and stockyard smells and too many people living too closely together. I ask him, What’s wrong with Aurora? And he laughs. Backwater, USA, he calls it. Hayseed City. But I know he likes it here. He gets on well with my mother’s people, my people. He adores their humor. They make light fun of him. “City boy,” they call him. He and Sam Winter Moon have become fast friends. They both share a passion for baseball. Liam has told Sam if he ever gets down to Chicago, they’ll see the Cubs play.

In the spring of 1950, Liam O’Connor got a job as a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He was one of a force of four. In August of that year, he married Cork’s mother. With the G.I. Bill and his savings from his years as a bachelor cop in Chicago living with his parents, he made a down payment on the house on Gooseberry Lane. A little over a year later, Cork was born.

January 30, 1952

Corcoran is a fussy baby, colicky. Liam’s mother has told me that Liam was that way, too. She advised putting him in a basket and setting the basket on top of our washing machine and letting the machine run. We did not have a washing machine, but Liam bought one, used. And his mother was right. It calms Corcoran immensely. Liam is a wonderful husband. And even when Corcoran has been screaming for hours, Liam doesn’t lose his patience. He says it’s the result of years of having drunks and street punks scream at him in Chicago. He says it reminds him of home. (Ha, ha.)

The journals were not in any order, and Cork spent a good deal of time organizing them chronologically. He’d meant to locate immediately the journal or journals written during the period of the Vanishings, but every time he opened one of the volumes, he discovered his parents and rediscovered his childhood.

November 16, 1956

Cork’s fifth birthday today. Mom baked Indian fry bread and Sam Winter Moon supplied a venison roast. Henry Meloux came and said that a naming ceremony was long overdue. Hattie Stillday clicked away on her camera. Maybe we’ll end up in National Geographic, alongside the giraffes and emus and other exotics. Lots of friends from the rez, and from town, too, though the two groups don’t mingle well. Liam, ever the grand host and proud father, was everywhere with Cork on his shoulders, telling stories that kept our guests in stitches. Everybody says that someday he should run for office. Cork is a quiet boy, thoughtful. He watches, sees everything, but he isn’t a talker like his father. Liam was called away in the middle of festivities. A bad accident on Highway 1 due to ice. I prayed for him and for those on the road.

There were photographs slipped into the pages with this entry, clearly the work of Hattie Stillday. They were black and white, but not like the Kodak box photos his parents shot. They were taken with an eye that understood the nuances of light and shadow, that divined the drama of a human look. Cork was in one, a small child off to the side, watching a group of adults who surrounded his father. His little face was turned upward, hopeful, it seemed. But hopeful of what, Cork could not now say. There was another, of his mother, a beautiful woman whose hair was long and black (though he remembered that in the proper light you could see the scarlet tint that was a bit of her father’s Irish red), caught leaning against a doorjamb with a cigarette in her hand and a laugh on her lips. Cork didn’t remember his fifth birthday at all.

He glanced at the clock on Jo’s desk—his desk now, he reminded himself—and was surprised to see that it was after midnight and he still hadn’t found the journal entries that were of particular interest to him. He opened volume after volume and finally found one whose dates were promising.

June 15, 1964

Mom told me that Hattie Stillday’s daughter, Abbie, has run off and Hattie is heartbroken. Alcohol, Mom says. Hattie tried to get her to Henry Meloux, but she refused to be helped. And now she’s gone. Where, no one knows. The Twin Cities probably. Hattie’s afraid Abbie will end up a prostitute on Hennepin Avenue. She’s called friends down in the Cities, asked them to keep an eye out for her daughter. So many are lost to us. So many.

June 26, 1964

Naomi Stonedeer has vanished. Simply vanished. Mom says she went to practice the Jingle Dance at the community center and never came home. Liam has begun an official investigation, though he believes she probably ran away, which is what some of the men on the reservation believe, too. I don’t believe this, nor does Mother, nor does Becky Stonedeer. Naomi’s only thirteen. She has no reason to run. Men are blind sometimes. Worse, they’re stupid. And even worse, they don’t listen to their hearts. In my heart, I know that Naomi is in grave danger. Cork is sick with worry. He’s so fond of Naomi. And he’s angry with Liam for suggesting the girl has run away. He’s vowed that if Liam doesn’t find her, he will.

July 10, 1964

It’s been two weeks and Naomi is still missing. Liam has called authorities in the adjacent counties and in the Twin Cities. He’s gone to Crosby to question Naomi’s father, Corbett, whom we all called Fisheye when he was a kid because of his bulgy eyeballs. He’s turned into a hard-drinking man, and he claims ignorance and innocence. Liam doesn’t trust him, but he can’t break Fisheye’s story. I think Liam still believes that Naomi simply ran away, but he’s doing his best, what he calls “due diligence,” to make sure he’s covered every possibility. A lot of white folks in Tamarack County think he’s on a wild-goose chase and wasting both his time and public funds. He may be blind sometimes and stupid in the way of men, but he does listen to his heart. And in his heart he’s committed to being a good and fair officer of the law, and that means doing everything he can to give Naomi Stonedeer a chance to be found.

Cork remembered that time. He remembered it differently, though. In his own recollection, his father was too cautious, too lax. Cork wanted him to crack someone’s head, Corbett Stonedeer’s for sure, to get answers. He recalled that, when his father finally brought an official end to the search, there’d been an angry confrontation. It was in the evening, on the front porch, when, long after dinner had gone cold, his father returned from the last day of that futile effort. Cork didn’t recall now his exact words, but in no uncertain terms, he’d called his father a fraud. Liam O’Connor had stood there, taller by two heads than his son, and heard him out. And when Cork’s frenzied sputtering had come to an end, his father had said—this, Cork remembered icy word for icy word—“I’ve done my level best. That’s all I ask of anyone. That’s all I expect anyone to ask of me.” He’d moved toward the door, but Cork had blocked his way. His father had reached out, firmly threw his son aside, and gone in. For days after, they barely spoke to one another.

July 17, 1964

It hurts them both, I know, this silence. They walk past each other like strangers. Worse, like enemies. I’ve tried to mediate, but they hold to their anger fiercely. Liam refuses to discuss it with me. Cork listens but doesn’t really hear. He’s still a child, and his silence is understandable. Liam’s refusal, that’s just plain stubbornness. But, oh, he cares about his son’s opinion of him. He loves Cork so much.

Cork put down the journal and stared at the far wall. Of course his father loved him. He knew that. And he’d loved his father. Their anger had passed eventually. Hadn’t it?

August 12, 1964

Fawn is missing. We’re all frantic. God, what’s happening here?

That was the final entry of that particular journal volume. One line on the page, and when Cork turned that page, there was nothing more. But at one time, something more had been there. There’d been more pages. It was clear from the neat slivers left attached to the binding that someone had, very carefully, cut those pages out.

EIGHTEEN

Cork rummaged through the journals until he found one that began with the earliest date following the final entry of the volume whose pages had been removed.

September 17, 1964

Fall is here and everywhere I look I see blood. It’s in the color of the sumac and the maple leaves and the sky at sunset and at dawn. Henry Meloux is helping Hattie and Ellie and Mom and me. Liam walks like a man made of stone, cold and hard. Cork, ever the quiet, watchful child, sees and wonders but does not ask. Thank God.

Cork scanned the other entries for September of that year. No mention of the missing five weeks between August 12 and September 17. No indication of what had occurred in that time, though he knew of two things from his own recollection and from the collective recollection of Tamarack County. The search for Fawn Grand was futile. And another woman had vanished, a white woman: Monique Cavanaugh.

It was nearly 2:00 A.M., and he was tired and confused. He turned out the lamp on the desk and headed for the door. Trixie rose from the carpet where she’d been sleeping and followed him upstairs. He readied himself for bed, laid himself down, and stared at the ceiling where light from the streetlamp outside, shattered by the leaves of the elm on his front lawn, lay scattered like shards of broken glass. His mind was a muddy swirl of too little information and too many questions. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to sleep. But before he knew it he was dreaming.

His father stands at the edge of the flat rock, and behind him is the thunder of water. It seems familiar, this landscape. Mercy Falls, Cork thinks, watching from only a few feet away. There’s laughter at his back. A party perhaps. He considers turning to see, but he can’t take his eyes off his father, whose own eyes are locked on Cork. Is it anger in them? Disappointment? Confusion? Cork can’t tell. His father opens his mouth as if to speak and at the same moment steps backward, losing his balance. He flails his arms, fighting to right himself, and Cork, in a terrible panic, reaches out for him, but his arm is not long enough, and his father plummets, vanishing into the gray mists of the falls.

And then it happens again. The whole scene replays. Only this time Cork stands outside the dream, watching himself in it as it unfolds. He sees, as he always does in this nightmare revisited, that his father does not simply lose his balance. He sees that it is his own small hand, reaching out, that pushes his father backward, sending him—surprised? disappointed? angry?—stumbling over the edge into oblivion.

The next morning, he was waiting at the door to the Aurora Public Library when it opened at 9:00 A.M. Maggie Nelson swung the door wide and greeted him with a smile. He went immediately to the cabinets that contained the microfilm archives of the Aurora Sentinel, which was the town’s weekly newspaper. They also contained archived material from the Duluth News Tribune and several newspapers from the Twin Cities. He spent the morning reading every account about the investigation of what the reporters had dubbed “the Vanishings.”

The reportage was basically the same in all of them. The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department was stumped. They’d asked for assistance from the BCA and later the FBI. The authorities believed—were certain—that foul play was involved, but they couldn’t find any evidence. The victims had simply vanished, as if into thin air. There was no mention of the priest at St. Agnes and, except for Corbett Stonedeer, no indication of any suspects or persons of interest. The families were interviewed extensively, and their pain came through. Until Monique Cavanaugh disappeared, the white community of Tamarack County had been concerned mostly about the money and resources the sheriff’s department was expending on the search for the two Ojibwe girls. The predominant white sentiment seemed to be that most likely the girls had simply fled the abominable conditions of the Iron Lake Reservation. The Ojibwe community was more tight-lipped, but those who spoke for the record had nothing good to say about Cork’s father, whom they accused of being less than diligent in his investigation of the missing girls. Cork recognized the names of those quoted. Percy Baptiste. Bob Fairbanks. Arthur Skinaway. Shinnobs for whom, no matter what a chimook did, it was no good. The way the news stories were structured, however, made it sound as if the whole of the Anishinaabe people were aligned against Cork’s father.

Once the white woman—a rich white woman—vanished, the white community’s concern over misused law enforcement resources seemed to vanish as well.

Cork didn’t know much about Monique Cavanaugh or the specifics of her disappearance, nor was he able to glean much from the newspaper coverage.

Monique Cavanaugh had been the only child of Richard and Agnes Goodell, wealthy Bostonians. She’d been raised much abroad and was well educated. She had apparently met Peter Cavanaugh in Boston while she was briefly home visiting her parents, and Cavanaugh was conducting business with Richard Goodell on behalf of the New York City office of Great North. They married a very short time later. They’d had two children, Max and Lauren. When Thomas Cavanaugh, Peter Cavanaugh’s father, fell ill, the son moved his family from New York to Minnesota in order to assume the reins of Great North. Before their arrival, Thomas Cavanaugh built an elaborate home for his son on North Point. A year later, Thomas Cavanaugh died, and less than a year after that his daughter-in-law disappeared.

Cork paused. Judge Robert Parrant had lived on the North Point property so long that everyone called it the Parrant estate. But it had actually belonged to the Cavanaughs first. Cork had forgotten that little piece of history.

He read on.

By all accounts, Monique Cavanaugh had been an extraordinary woman: a wonderful hostess; an accomplished musician; a generous benefactor of numerous social causes, including the Ojibwe of the Iron Lake Reservation; a devout member of the St. Agnes parish; a loving wife; a doting mother.

On the night she disappeared, she’d gone to Duluth to attend a gala fund-raising event for a hospital charity. She’d left the event alone shortly after 10:00 P.M., intending to drive the two hours to Aurora rather than spend the night in a hotel in the port city. She never arrived home. No trace of her or of her automobile had ever been found.

Plenty of photographs of Monique Cavanaugh accompanied the news accounts. Hers was a face the camera loved. Cork found it uncanny how much her daughter, Lauren, resembled her.

His cell phone vibrated, and he picked up the call. It was Sheriff Marsha Dross.

“Are you available to come to my office now?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“You’ll see when you get here.”

NINETEEN

When he arrived at the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department and County Jail, Cork understood what Dross had meant with her cryptic parting comment. The parking lot was full of news vans. Clearly, the story of the bodies discovered in the Vermilion Drift had broken, and, like crows flocking to a carcass, the media had descended. Cork made his way inside and was buzzed through the security door. He found Dross, Larson, and Rutledge in council in the sheriff’s office. Agent Susan Upchurch, the BCA’s forensic anthropologist, was with them.

Cork took the only empty chair. “So,” he said. “They know.”

Dross gave a philosophic shrug. “We’ve been able to keep a lid on things for almost two days. I knew that sooner or later this would happen. I’ve scheduled a news conference for noon. Simon and I will handle it. But before we go in there, I’d like to know exactly where we stand with everything. Ed?”

Larson wore spectacles and was fond of sport coats with leather patches. His hair was neatly cut and just beginning to silver. He spoke in considered tones and had always reminded Cork of a college professor. He removed his spectacles and began cleaning them with a handkerchief he’d pulled from his back pocket.

“Using dental records, we’ve been able to establish the identity of all but one of the older victims,” he said. “They are Monique Cavanaugh, Abigail Stillday, Fawn Grand, and Naomi Stonedeer. We believe, based on what Cork’s found out, that the final victim is Leonora Broom, but we haven’t been able to confirm it yet. The most recent victim has been positively ID’d as Lauren Cavanaugh. The medical examiner has determined her death was the result of a gunshot wound to the chest. We believe her mother, Monique Cavanaugh, was also the victim of a gunshot wound. Simon’s forensic people have told us that the bullets that killed both women were fired by the same weapon. In the case of the daughter, powder tattooing on the skin indicates that the firearm was discharged at nearly point-blank range. We believe the murder took place somewhere else and the body was transported to the Vermilion Drift site, where it was hidden with the others. So far, we’ve been able to find no witnesses to Lauren Cavanaugh’s murder. We can’t find her car. We have no idea where the actual murder might have taken place. Currently, we have no suspects in any of the killings.” He paused, thought a moment, then said, “I guess that’s it for me.”

Dross looked to BCA Agent Rutledge. “Simon?”

“I don’t have anything to add,” he said. “I’ll defer to Susan.”

All eyes settled on the forensic anthropologist.

“I haven’t had time to do anything except a cursory examination of all of the remains,” Upchurch said. She spoke slowly, and her words were drawn out slightly with her Alabama drawl. “With only bone left to us, it’s difficult at this stage to speak with any certainty about cause of death. None of the victims show evidence of blunt trauma, nothing broken. Except for Monique Cavanaugh, all of them show clear evidence of sharp force trauma—bone cuts—that appear to be incised wounds, but the locations vary from victim to victim.”

“Incised wounds?” Dross said.

“These would be from cuts or incisions rather than stab wounds. These marks tend to be longer than they are deep. But we have to be careful, because sometimes the teeth of scavengers leave the same kind of mark.”

“Is there a reason why you believe these are from cuts and not from scavengers?” Dross asked.

“Scavengers large enough to leave marks would probably also have spread the bones around. The skeletons were all intact.”

“Okay, so what would these wounds indicate?”

“If they are, in fact, knife wounds, then torture, perhaps. Or maybe something ritualistic. Two of the victims show cuts consistent with stab wounds on the left side of the thoracic cage, which might indicate a knife thrust to the heart.” She paused and thought a moment. “That’s really all I can say for sure at this time.”

“Thanks, Susan,” Dross said. “Cork?”

He could have told them that his father, the man responsible for the investigation of the Vanishings more than forty years earlier, knew about the hidden entrance to the Vermilion Drift. He could have told them he had an idea about the weapon that had been used to kill both mother and daughter, that there was a very good possibility it had once been his father’s sidearm and had been his, too, but now it was missing. He could have told them that he’d found journals that should have contained a full and personal account of the final days of his father’s investigation but someone had removed the pertinent pages. But how could he explain any of this?

He said, “Nothing to add, I guess.”

“Any speculation on the connection between the Ojibwe women who were the early victims?”

Cork shook his head. “Leonora Broom and Abigail Stillday weren’t identified as victims during the investigation in ’sixty-four, so they wouldn’t necessarily have been missed. Most folks on the rez thought they’d simply run off. The vanishing of Naomi Stonedeer was the first to raise concern. She was a very young woman, well known, whose absence would be quickly noticed. The final Ojibwe victim, Fawn Grand, was a girl of simple mind and simple understanding—these days we’d call her challenged—and was probably way too trusting. She could easily have been enticed by almost anyone. But her disappearance certainly wouldn’t have escaped notice. So, I haven’t seen anything that ties them together, except their heritage.”

“Someone who had a significant prejudice against the Ojibwe?” Larson asked.

“Maybe. But then how do you explain Monique Cavanaugh?”

“Exactly,” Dross said.

“Has anyone looked at the old case files?” Upchurch asked.

“I’d love to,” Larson said. “But we don’t have any. The sheriff’s department used to be housed in the courthouse. Back in ’seventy-seven there was a fire, destroyed a lot of our records. Right after that, the county built this facility.”

“The BCA was involved though, right?” She looked to Rutledge. “You probably have files.”

Rutledge looked a little sheepish. “I’ll see what I can find.”

“Finally,” Dross said, “what’s the connection between Lauren Cavanaugh and the Vanishings in ’sixty-four?”

“Why does there have to be a connection?” Larson asked. “The notes that Haddad’s wife and Genie Kufus and Max Cavanaugh received pretty much indicated she was killed because of the mine.”

“Or someone wants us to believe that’s why she was killed,” Rutledge said. “Whoever killed her knew about the other bodies, and the other bodies were there long before anyone proposed schlepping nuclear waste into Vermilion One.”

Quiet descended. Through the opened window came the sound of media vehicles continuing to arrive for the news conference at noon.

Cork said, “Maybe Lauren knew something.”

“Knew what?”

“Something about the Vanishings.”

“How could she?”

Cork said, “The Parrant estate belonged to her father before it belonged to Judge Parrant. She spent some time there when she was a child.”

“So?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she found something when she moved back in. Or returning to the old place caused her to remember something.”

“You’re suggesting she was killed because of what she knew?”

“Just throwing mud against the wall to see what sticks, Ed,” Cork said.

“All right. We need to interview her brother again with that possibility in mind,” Dross said. “If she knew something, maybe he knows the same thing.”

“Okay if I take that interview?” Rutledge asked.

Simon Rutledge was well known for his interviewing ability, especially when it came to coaxing a confession from someone. Among Minnesota law enforcement agencies, the particular effectiveness of his technique was known as “Simonizing.” On a number of occasions during his time as sheriff, Cork had seen hardened criminals slowly bend during Simon’s interviews and finally break.

“That’s fine,” Dross said. “Would you like one of my people with you?”

“I can handle it by myself, Marsha.”

“He knows his mother was one of the victims in the Vermilion Drift?” Cork asked.

“Yes,” Dross said. “I spoke with him at his home earlier this morning.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Surprised. Stunned, actually. But not emotional, really. It was a long time ago.”

“And Hattie Stillday?” Cork said. “Does she know about her daughter?”

“I’ve tried to reach her several times,” Dross said. “Until I do, we’ll refrain from making Abigail Stillday’s name public. Same with the others.”

“Mind if I track her down and deliver the news myself?” Cork said. “She’s a family friend.”

The sheriff thought it over briefly, then said, “I sent Azevedo out this morning to request her presence in my office, but he couldn’t find her. If you can, and you’re willing to deliver the news, all right. Just let me know when you’ve connected.”

“She’ll probably want to claim what remains of her daughter.”

Dross said, “That’ll be up to the BCA and Agent Upchurch.”

Cork gave the agent a questioning glance.

“I can’t say at this point. A week, maybe two,” Upchurch replied.

“I’ll tell her,” Cork said. “What about Isaiah Broom?”

“What about him?” Larson said.

“His mother was probably one of the victims. He ought to know.”

“When we’re certain of that, we’ll make sure he’s informed. In the meantime, it would be best if you kept it to yourself.”

“Sure,” Cork said. “Are we done here?”

Dross waited for someone to say otherwise. “For now,” she said. “By the way, Cork. Lou Haddad and his wife have taken a little vacation, and Kufus and her team are gone. The DOE pulled the plug on their assessment until all this gets sorted out.”

“But Max Cavanaugh’s still around?” Cork asked.

“Last time we checked,” Rutledge said.

TWENTY

On his way to the rez to see Hattie Stillday, Cork made one stop first, at St. Agnes Catholic Church. He found the young priest in his office there, reading a baseball book, The Boys of Summer.

“When I was a kid,” Father Ted Green said, marking his place with a strip torn from an old Sunday bulletin, “I wanted two things: to pitch for the Detroit Tigers and to win the Cy Young Award.”

“What happened?”

The priest touched his collar. “Got called to play for another team with a manager you can’t say no to. That, and I never could deliver a fastball worth squat. What can I do for you, Cork?”

Ted Green was a lanky kid, half a dozen years out of seminary. He’d taken a while to get his feet firmly on the ground with the parishioners of St. Agnes but had proven to be an able administrator, preached a pretty good homily, and represented the Church well in a time when much of the non-Catholic world was suspicious of the Vatican and its clergy. Cork quite liked the guy.

“I’m wondering how difficult it might be to track down one of the priests assigned to St. Agnes years ago, Ted.”

“If he’s still a priest, not hard.”

“If he isn’t?”

“More difficult but not impossible. Care to tell me who?” The priest arched an eyebrow and added, “And I wouldn’t mind knowing why.”

* * *

Hattie Stillday was famous and could have been wealthy, except that all her life she’d held to one of the most basic values of the Anishinaabeg: What one possessed, one shared. Hattie was a generous woman. Long before there was a Chippewa Grand Casino bringing in money to underwrite education for kids on the rez, she’d established the Red Schoolhouse Foundation, which helped Shinnob high school grads pay for college. She’d helped build the Nokomis Home and had begun the Iron Lake Indian Arts Council. She lived with her granddaughter, Ophelia, in the same small house in which she’d resided when her alcoholic daughter, Abigail, had run away four decades earlier and had never come home. Except that Abbie hadn’t run away. Or if that had truly been her intention, she hadn’t gone far.

Hattie had decorated her yard and home with artwork by other Indian artists, which she’d acquired over the years. On her lawn, never well kept and chronically crowded with dandelions, stood a tall, rusting iron sculpture meant to represent a quiver full of arrows. There was a chain saw carving, a great section of honey-colored maple topped with a huge bust of makwa, a bear. There were odds and ends that dangled and glittered and made music in the wind.

Cork knocked on the door and got no answer.

“Hey! Cork!”

He turned and spied old Jessup Bliss crossing the street. Because of his arthritic knees, Bliss walked slowly and with a cane.

“Lookin’ for Hattie?” Bliss called out.

“I am, Jess.”

Bliss walked up Hattie’s cracked sidewalk.

“Sheriff’s car was here earlier, looking for her, too, I guess.”

“You tell them anything?”

“Cops? You kiddin’?”

“Know where she is?”

“Sure. Went over to see Henry Meloux, way early this morning. Ain’t come back. Say, true what I heard? Buncha bones in that mine over to the south end of the rez? Buncha dead Shinnobs buried there?”

“It’s true.”

“Son of a bitch.” Bliss spit a fountain of brown tobacco juice into the profusion of dandelions that yellowed Hattie’s yard. “When’ll white folks learn?”

“Learn what, Jess?”

“Us Indians are like them dandelions there. Don’t matter what you do to get rid of us, we just keep comin’ back.”

Cork cut across the rez on back roads and parked at the double-trunk birch that marked the trail to Meloux’s cabin on Crow Point. Hattie Stillday’s dusty pickup was parked there, too. He locked the Land Rover and began a hike through the pines. He’d been down this path so often and was, at the moment, so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see the beauty of that place. Thin reeds of sunlight plunged through the canopy of evergreen, and if Cork had taken even a moment to see, he would have realized they were like stalks whose flowers blossomed high above the trees. A moment to listen and he’d have heard the saw of insect wings and the cry of birds and the susurrus of wind, which was the music of unspoiled wilderness. A moment to feel and he’d have been aware of the soft welcome of the deep bed of pine needles beneath his feet. But all the confusion, the bizarre nature of the puzzle he was trying to solve, made him deaf and blind.

Then he stopped, brought up suddenly in the middle of a stand of aspens by the intoxicating fragrance of wild lily of the valley, a scent that reached beyond his thinking. In the mysterious and immediate way that smell connects to memory, he was suddenly transported to a summer day nearly fifty years in the past.

He was walking the trail with his father, headed toward Meloux’s cabin, feeling happy and safe. He recalled his father’s long, steady stride. He remembered watching that tall, wonderful man float through shafts of sunlight, illuminated in moments of gold. And he remembered how his father had stopped and waited and lifted him effortlessly onto his broad shoulders, and they’d moved together among the trees like one tall being.

As quickly as it had come, the moment passed, and Cork found himself once again a man older than his father had ever been, alone on the trail. He stood paralyzed, wracked by terrible uncertainty. How could the man in that moment of golden memory have been the same man who knew about the hidden entrance to Vermilion One, whose sidearm had been a murder weapon, and yet who’d claimed bafflement at the Vanishings? How could he be the same man whom Cork, in his nightmares, had pushed again and again to his death?

Meloux wasn’t at his cabin, but Rainy Bisonette was. She came to the door holding a book in her hand. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. Meloux, she said, was with someone at the moment and couldn’t be disturbed. Cork looked toward the rock outcroppings near the shoreline of Iron Lake and saw smoke rising beyond them. Without another word, he started in the direction of the smoke.

“Wait!” Rainy called. “Damn it, come back.”

He found Hattie Stillday and Meloux sitting at the fire ring, burning sage and cedar. At his approach, they looked up, but neither of them showed any emotion.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Henry,” Rainy said at Cork’s back. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“Let him come,” Meloux said. “What is it that cannot wait, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“I have something I need to tell Hattie.”

“Then tell her.”

Cork walked forward and knelt before the old woman. “Hattie, they’ve been able to identify most of the remains found in the Vermilion Drift. They’re certain one of the victims is your daughter, Abbie.”

Her look didn’t change, not in the least. No surprise, no shock, not even the specter of sadness. And Cork realized that she already knew. How? Had Meloux, in that inexplicable way of knowing, understood the truth and revealed it to her? Had the news somehow reached the rez telegraph and traveled, as it often did, with unbelievable speed? Or—and this came to Cork in a sudden rush that nearly knocked him over—had she known from the beginning? Had Meloux?

“What’s going on, Hattie?” She didn’t answer and Cork addressed Meloux. “What the hell is going on, Henry?”

“You are intruding here, Corcoran O’Connor.”

“I need answers.”

“No, you want answers,” Meloux said. “Need is a different animal.”

“What are you hiding? What are you all hiding?”

Their eyes lay on Cork like winter stones.

“I’ll find the truth, Henry, wherever it’s hidden.”

“The truth is not hidden, Corcoran O’Connor. It has never been hidden. You simply are not yet ready to see it.”

“Jesus Christ. For once, can you cut all the mystic bullshit, Henry, and just tell me straight-out what’s going on?”

“Leave,” Meloux said, firmly but without harshness. “Your anger disturbs this place.”

“Anger, Henry? You haven’t seen my anger yet.” Cork turned and began to march away.

“I have seen your anger,” Meloux said at his back. “More than forty years ago I saw it in another man who was not yet ready to understand the truth.”

Because he didn’t care what Meloux had to say, Cork gave no sign that he’d heard. He walked away from the circle of stones, from the fire at its heart, from the cleansing smoke of the cedar and sage, and from the man who held to the truth like a miser to his money.

TWENTY-ONE

It was nearing sunset when Cork pulled into Ashland, Wisconsin, an old port city on Chequamegon Bay, a deepwater inlet of Lake Superior.

He parked in the lot of the Hotel Chequamegon and headed to Molly Coopers, the hotel’s restaurant and bar. On the deck, which overlooked Lake Superior and was nearly empty, he spotted a man wearing a dark blue ball cap and a T-shirt that stretched tightly over twenty extra pounds of belly fat.

“Father Brede?”

The man looked up and smiled. “It’s been just plain Dan Brede for more than four decades. You O’Connor?”

“Yes.” Cork shook the man’s hand and sat down. “Father Green didn’t have any trouble locating you.”

“I haven’t tried to hide. From what Ted Green told me, you have some questions about the Vanishings. Nobody’s asked me about the Vanishings in over forty years.”

“But you haven’t forgotten.”

“A thing like that never leaves you.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind talking to me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Did Father Green tell you that the women who vanished have been found? Or what remains of them.”

“He told me.”

“And did he tell you that there’s been another, recent murder, and that the woman’s body was hidden with the others?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want to talk about that?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“What are you saying?”

“Have a beer,” Brede said, signaling the waitress, who was already coming their way. “And then you can tell me about who you are.”

Cork ordered a Leinie’s and watched a big motor launch back away from its slip in the marina behind the hotel, swing around, and head north up the deep blue bay.

When his beer was delivered, Cork said to Brede, “You knew my parents, Liam and Colleen O’Connor.”

“I remember them. And I remember you, too.”

For Cork, the memory of the priest was fuzzy. He recalled a young man with a great deal more hair, and it hadn’t been gray. Brede had been thin then, Cork remembered.

“In the year I knew you, you were a lot of trouble,” the ex-priest said.

“Trouble?”

“You have any idea how much your mother prayed for you? And your father?”

This caught Cork off guard. He didn’t remember being a problem to them at all. “Not really.”

Brede smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me. Kids, teenagers especially, are clueless.”

“You work with kids a lot?”

“Over the years. And I have two of my own.”

“You said you haven’t been Father Brede for over forty years. You stopped being a priest not long after the Vanishings then.”

“A year after I was yanked from St. Agnes.”

“Yanked?”

“The Church reassigned me. To a little parish in southern Indiana where nobody cared or really even knew about the Vanishings. Two things about it bugged me. That I was found guilty without a trial and without any chance to defend myself. And that, finding me guilty, they simply reassigned me. I’m not sure which trespass of conscience I objected to more.”

“Will you tell me about the Vanishings, what you remember?”

“Why are you interested? I understand that you were a cop once, like your father, but you’re not anymore. Ted Green said that you’re a private investigator. Who are you working for?”

“The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. As a consultant.”

“They know you’re here?”

“Is that important?”

He laughed. “People who have something to hide often respond to a question with a question. What is it that you’re hiding, O’Connor?”

“There are aspects of this case, old and new, that are very personal for me. Although I intend to share everything I find with the sheriff and her investigators, I need to put a few things in perspective for myself first. I think my father knew more about the Vanishings than he officially revealed.”

“I know he did. For one thing, he knew about me.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“Most people who know about his silence believe it was out of loyalty or respect for the Church.”

“But it wasn’t?”

He shook his head. “He knew I was innocent.”

“How?”

“Your father was an astute judge of character.”

“That’s it?”

Brede laughed and took a swallow of beer. “You’re a cop all right. You require evidence.”

“My father was a cop, too. A good cop. I’m sure he asked for evidence.”

“He did. And I explained to him that I knew who’d planted the items that had incriminated me but that I couldn’t reveal the name.”

Cork said, “Because it was something you’d learned in confession?”

“The sanctity of which I firmly believed in then.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m a Methodist,” he said.

Cork drank from his own glass and waited. The ex-priest eyed the still water of the bay for a minute, then told his story.

At first the woman came to him in the normal way, confessing sins he’d heard before and for which he was fully prepared emotionally. An unclean thought. A coveting. A harmless lie to her husband. Hail Marys, he instructed her, and to pray for strength to resist these small temptations. He knew full well who she was. In a small parish, he knew the voices of all those who entered the confessional. As time went on, the sins she confessed began to change. They became darker, more disturbing. Sex with men other than her husband. Sex with women, too. Sometimes with both at once.

“Did you believe her?” Cork asked.

He didn’t know what to think. Surely there was no reason to lie about these things, especially for a woman in her particular position. He took her seriously and advised her to pray and to seek God’s guidance, and when that didn’t work, he urged her to seek professional help. She laughed at him, laughed seductively. And then she began the overtures. She often thought about them together, she said. She fantasized him forcing himself upon her in ways that disgusted him. He instructed her to banish such thoughts, but she swore she couldn’t. The images overwhelmed her and she masturbated thinking of them. This was beyond his ability to deal with, spiritually and emotionally.

The priest looked into the empty distance above the lake and shook his head. “The oddest part of it was that I saw her every Sunday in church, and she spoke to me cordially during our social hour afterward, and it was as if she’d never said any of those foul things to me in the confessional.”

Then she threatened him. She said if he didn’t have sex with her, she’d make him sorry. And very soon after that, the anonymous phone call had been made, and the incriminating items had been found. Although he couldn’t prove it was her, he knew that it was. Everything that had gone on, however, had been framed within the context of the confessional and her confessions, and he truly believed that he was bound to a sacred vow of silence. And the woman, if her name were made public, was so well thought of that he couldn’t be certain anyone would even believe him. So he’d said nothing. Yet Cork’s father had somehow divined his dilemma and had done his best to manipulate the public information so that the priest was never a part of the official investigation.

“How did he know?” Cork asked.

“Got me. He never said. But he saw to it that I was removed from the parish. Which,” Brede added philosophically, “was better for everyone in the long run.”

Cork said, “You’ve carefully avoided telling me the name of the woman.”

“I thought you might have guessed by now.”

Cork said, “A woman in, as you said, a particular position. Someone well thought of. Someone relatively new to the parish, I’m guessing. Young, intelligent, devious and deviant but able to hide it well, so probably sociopathic or maybe even psychopathic. Someone who, apparently, caused no problem for the priest who replaced you, Father Alwayne, who everyone said looked like Cary Grant. Which means that either Cary Grant wasn’t her type or she ended her behavior toward priests or, most likely, she herself was removed from the scene. Given all that, Monique Cavanaugh would be my guess.”

The former priest lifted his beer and said, “Cheers.”

TWENTY-TWO

Cork reached Aurora shortly before midnight. During the three-hour drive from Ashland, he’d examined everything he knew so far.

More than forty years earlier, four Ojibwe women had been abducted and murdered and their bodies concealed in an abandoned drift of the Vermilion One Mine. Monique Cavanaugh had also been abducted and murdered, and her body had been hidden in the drift with the others. Some Ojibwe undoubtedly knew about the secret entrance to the drift. According to Henry Meloux, Cork’s father also knew.

Two of the Ojibwe women were eager to leave the rez, and that may have contributed to their abduction. Two of the Ojibwe were quite young and vulnerable, and their naïveté might have allowed them to be easily duped. The white woman was an outlier. So far as Cork knew, she was neither eager to quit Tamarack County nor naïve. But she was abnormal, to say the least, in her behavior. And it was the kind of abnormal that could easily have put her at risk.

Because he was a cop, Cork’s thinking had been shaped in a way that made him skeptical of coincidence and always on the lookout for connections, no matter how thin they might appear to be at first. As a result, he found himself considering another possibility where Monique Cavanaugh was concerned. She’d been a woman with bizarre sexual proclivities. Worse than bizarre. Her behavior with the priest had been not only heartless but criminal as well. Could her appetites have been even more unsavory? Given the timing, could she also have been somehow involved in the Vanishings?

Cork let himself think along this line for a while and saw a problem. Although he couldn’t say about the first two victims, the second two—Naomi Stonedeer and Fawn Grand—had disappeared from the rez itself. If Monique Cavanaugh had been on the rez, trolling for vulnerable young women, she’d have been seen. A beautiful, rich white woman would have stood out like a polar bear. So how could she have snatched the girls without raising an alarm?

The only answer that made sense to Cork was that if Monique Cavanaugh was, indeed, involved, she wasn’t working alone. Whoever took the girls was probably someone who would have gone unnoticed on the rez.

Cork thought about all the people he knew on the Iron Lake Reservation, and that was almost everyone. He couldn’t think of many he’d call saints, but he also couldn’t think of anyone alive at the moment and old enough to have been involved in the Vanishings who struck him as deeply predatory. He didn’t know the history of the rez well enough to be able to finger a suspect from the past.

But there was someone he did know who, in his consideration of all the possibilities, he couldn’t overlook. And that was his father.

Liam O’Connor had been a regular visitor to the reservation, most often as a relative or friend rather than in his official capacity as sheriff. He could easily have come and gone without much notice at all. The priest had said that Cork’s father had somehow intuited his dilemma. Perhaps an intuitive understanding wasn’t the reason. Maybe the reason stemmed from his father’s deep involvement in the Vanishings. Involvement with Monique Cavanaugh herself, perhaps. It was, after all, probably his weapon that had killed the woman. Was it possible that, in the way she’d tried to seduce the priest, Monique Cavanaugh had succeeded in casting her seductive net over his father?

Cork arrived home thinking all these things and hating himself for it.

He took Trixie for a long overdue walk under a moon that was waning. And as they walked in the night shadows, he kept circling the facts in his head, jabbing at them, hoping he could get them to reveal the truth.

His father knew about the second entrance to the Vermilion Drift. His father had the unique ability, because of his position as sheriff, to make certain that any investigation could be thwarted. Someone had torn important pages from his mother’s journal. Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday held some damnable secret. Someone was being protected, it was clear. Or the memory of someone.

For most of Cork’s life, his father had existed as a memory, an accumulation of memories. But memories were unreliable. Cork understood well that, although they came from the fabric of fact, more often than not his own were a weave of the way things had been and the way he desired them to be. His father had died in the fall, not long after the Vanishings had ended. Cork was only thirteen years old. Was the man he had always believed his father to be simply the construct of a boy’s desire and a boy’s imagination?

When he pulled the box from the attic, it was layered thinly with dust. He took it to the office downstairs, switched on the desk lamp, and sat down. He removed the lid. Inside, jumbled without any order, were dozens of family photographs his mother had kept with the idea that someday she would organize them into scrapbooks. She’d never quite gotten around to it, and, after her passing, they’d fallen to Cork. It had been a good long while since he’d handled the photos, always a nostalgic experience. This time he was concerned that the experience would be different.

His father hadn’t been a handsome man, but in the photographs he was always smiling and there was something boyishly charming in his aspect. Cork picked up a photo of his father in his youth in Chicago, a black-and-white of a boy, maybe nine years old, squinting into the sun and grinning big, with a ball glove on his right hand. In the background was a vacant lot and in the distance, miragelike, the city skyline. Cork recalled his father talking about his boyhood, and although it had been in the days of the Depression, he’d spoken of that time with warmth. There was a photograph of his father in an army uniform. He’d served in the 82nd Airborne Division and had been wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He’d kept the Purple Heart in the top drawer of his dresser. There was a photo of him holding a baby who was Cork. Although memory could lie, photos seldom did, and it was abundantly clear how proud and happy a father he was. There were photos with his deputies and his friends on and off the rez. There were photos with Cork’s mother and with Cork—camping and fishing and picnicking. In them all, his father was a man clearly happy with his life and surrounded by people who looked on him with admiration and love.

Could the man in those photographs have fooled his family and his friends all his life? Could there have been a dark depravity to him that he ably hid? Cork tried very hard to accept the possibility, but it simply didn’t fit. It felt so god-awful wrong, not only in his own memory but in all the evidence he had from the memories of others and from the photos in the box.

His father had not been the one responsible for the abductions of those young women from the rez almost fifty years before, but there was something about his father’s involvement in the Vanishings that was necessary to keep hidden. What could that have been?

And if his father had not made those women vanish, who had?

TWENTY-THREE

Max Cavanaugh agreed to see him, and, at 9:30 the next morning, Cork was shown into Cavanaugh’s very large office by an administrative assistant, a young man whose round glasses made him look like Harry Potter. Cork shook hands with Cavanaugh, who turned to Harry Potter and said, to Cork’s great amusement, “Coffee for both of us, Harry.”

“Is that really his name?” Cork asked after the young man had left.

Cavanaugh shook his head. “It’s Howie, but no one calls him that. He’s okay with the Potter thing. Sit down.”

They took cush chairs near the window, which overlooked the great red wound that was the Ladyslipper Mine. Cork began with a condolence, sympathy over the news that Cavanaugh’s mother was one of the bodies found in the Vermilion Drift.

“It was a long time ago,” Cavanaugh replied. “But it does answer a question left hanging in the air all my life.”

“What do you remember about your mother?” Cork asked.

“Not much. I was only five when she disappeared.” He caught and quickly edited himself. “When she was murdered.”

“Do you have any early impressions?”

“Of course. But why are you asking?”

“I’m just trying to build a profile of all the women involved in the Vanishings. The more we know about the victims, the better chance we have of understanding the crime.” He wasn’t proud of himself, stringing Max along this way, but he also knew he couldn’t simply blurt his suspicions.

Cavanaugh thought a moment. “She was beautiful. Smart. Vivacious.”

Which were things people said about her, but was that the way a five-year-old would have remembered her?

“Was she an attentive mother?” Cork asked.

“Attentive?”

“Do you have a lot of memories of doing things with her?”

“Not really. But as I said, I was only five. And she was a very active woman in community affairs.”

“That was certainly true in Aurora. What about before you moved here?”

“I don’t remember anything before Aurora.”

“Your parents lived in New York City after they were married, is that right?”

“My father was an attorney for the Great North office there. It’s where I was born, and Lauren. When my grandfather became ill, we moved back here.”

“What about after your mother’s disappearance? Where did you go?”

“My father returned to New York City and raised us there.”

“And turned management of Great North over to others?”

“Yes, it ceased being the family-run operation my grandfather had hoped to continue. It wasn’t at all a bad decision. From New York, my father helped expand Great North into a global concern.”

“Why New York City? Couldn’t he have accomplished the same thing here?”

“Although he was born on the Range, he didn’t really feel at home here. He was a city guy at heart.”

“What about you, Max? You’ve worked mines in India, South Africa, Australia, Germany, Chile. You feel at home here?”

“The truth is I never feel at home anywhere except in a mine. I love the work of mining, Cork. It’s a battle of sorts, and involves all kinds of strategy to get the rock to release what it holds. Done well, it’s an art.”

“From what you’ve told me, you don’t spend much time in the pit these days,” Cork pointed out. “Why’d you come back here to take an office job? I mean why now?”

“The economy,” he said with a shrug. “It’s lousy, and making this mine profitable—hell, making any mine on the Range profitable these days—is a challenge, but it’s one I’m good at. Second, when I learned that the DOE was interested in Vermilion One, I figured I wanted to be here to oversee that process personally. Honestly, I felt I had an obligation to do what I could to discourage the government. The Range has been good to my family. And I feel my family has an obligation to the people here. I don’t want what we created with Vermilion One to end up the death of this place or these people. Literally.”

“What about your sister?”

“What about her?”

“Did she love mining?”

Cavanaugh looked surprised at the question. “She knew absolutely nothing about mining.”

“But as nearly as I can tell, she followed you everywhere, to every mine location, and finally here. Any particular reason?”

“We were close all our lives,” Cavanaugh said. “Neither of us were married, and really we only had each other.”

It was a closeness that seemed more than a little unusual to Cork, but he let it go.

“Did your father ever talk about your mother?”

“No. At least not that I recall.”

“Did that trouble you?”

“Why should it?”

“No reason. Did he remarry?”

“No.”

“He was still a young man, relatively speaking, when he lost your mother, yet he went the rest of his life without marrying again. Any reason that you’re aware of?”

There was a knock at the door, and Harry Potter returned with coffee: two white mugs on a tray with a small container of cream, a little bowl of sugar, some packets of Splenda, two spoons, and a couple of napkins.

“Thank you, Harry,” Cavanaugh said, and the young man left.

Cavanaugh handed Cork a mug, then stirred cream and sugar into his own coffee.

“What do you know about my father, Cork?”

“I’m beginning to think not enough.”

“For starters, he wasn’t exactly the son my grandfather wanted.”

“Why not?”

Cavanaugh sipped his coffee, then said casually, “For one thing, he was homosexual.”

Cork didn’t bother to hide his surprise.

“I’m not telling you any secrets. Most people who knew him in later life were well aware of it. But he hid it well in his early years here. Hell, he probably didn’t even acknowledge it to himself then. The war broke out and he enlisted, and after that he went to college, Yale and then Harvard Law, and by that time his life and what he was willing to accept had changed, I guess. New York City was a reasonable place to be gay in the fifties. But he still needed a good cover for the sake of business and my grandfather. My mother gave him that cover.”

“She knew?”

“Of course.”

“But they had children.”

“To keep the families happy and at bay and to maintain the façade.”

“Did you always know?”

“No. They had separate bedrooms, but I was a kid then, and what did I know? They also had very separate lives, but I don’t suppose that was unusual either. My father was a good man, Cork, and a good father. He loved Lauren and me tremendously.”

“And your mother?”

“Love wasn’t at all what their relationship was about.”

“I meant did she love you.”

“I think we were like expensive vases in the living room, something for people to look at and admire, part of a perfect life. Or the image of a perfect life.”

“But it wasn’t perfect?”

“What I remember wasn’t awful. It was just”— he thought a moment —“a vacancy. Air where a mother should have been. But why all these questions about my parents? That’s ancient history. What about Lauren? Shouldn’t you be asking questions that will solve her murder?”

“Your mother and your sister were killed with the same weapon. That would tend to suggest they were killed by the same person. So, if we could solve the earlier murder we might solve your sister’s murder as well. Theoretically.”

Cork didn’t necessarily believe his own logic, but he hoped it sounded plausible and would keep Cavanaugh answering the questions that concerned him most at the moment.

“Do you have any family memorabilia from that period?” Cork asked. “Photographs, letters, journals?”

“What good would that do?”

“I won’t know until I’ve had a chance to see the things,” Cork replied.

“No,” Cavanaugh said firmly. “Nothing.”

“What about from the time before your folks moved here?”

“Not then either.”

“After?”

Cavanaugh said, “I have some things in storage at home. I suppose I can look and see what’s there.”

“So these would be items your father kept after your mother disappeared?”

“That’s right.”

“He kept nothing from before that, from his time in Aurora and all the earlier places?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Wedding photos?”

“I told you, nothing.”

“Even though it wasn’t a marriage in the usual sense, Max, doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

Cavanaugh considered Cork’s question and appeared to be surprised. “You know, I never thought about it. Or if I did, I suppose I just figured that it was all too painful and he simply wanted to forget.”

“So he never talked about her and you never asked?”

Cavanaugh folded his arms on his desk and leaned toward Cork. “My father was in the war, World War Two. Whenever I asked him if he’d killed any Germans, he would always reply, ‘I shot at a lot of them.’ It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. Whenever I asked him about my mother, he’d say, ‘Why try to remember what’s best forgotten?’ In its way, it was, I suppose, the same response.” Cavanaugh sat back and said with a sigh, “I’ll look through the things I have and see what I can come up with, all right?”

“I’d appreciate it, thanks.” Cork put his mug down. He realized he hadn’t taken a single sip. “Max, your sister’s death has opened a lot of wounds. I’m sorry that it seems like all I do is pour in salt.”

Cavanaugh turned away, swiveling in his chair, and stared out the window toward the great wound that bled iron. He was quiet a long time, and Cork realized it was because he simply couldn’t speak. The weight of Cavanaugh’s sadness was undeniable, as if every breath the man exhaled filled the room with suffocating grief.

“You want to know the truth, Cork?” His voice broke as he spoke. “I feel as empty as that hole out there. I didn’t know anything could hurt so much.”

“I understand, Max. My own experience has been that, as cliché as it sounds, time will help you heal.”

Cavanaugh swung back to him. “First I need to know who killed her. Then I can start healing.”

Millie Joseph sat in her wheelchair on the porch of the Nokomis Home with a lap blanket spread across her knees. From there, she could see much of Allouette, the town where she’d lived all of her eighty years, and beyond Allouette the wide, cool blue of Iron Lake, sparkling under the noonday sun. The air was full of the scent of late-blooming lilac, and Millie Joseph looked perfectly content and seemed absolutely delighted to see him.

“It’s been a long time, Corkie.” Like Hattie Stillday, she called him by the nickname all his mother’s friends had used.

Only two days, Cork thought, but it was obvious that his last visit wasn’t there at all in the perfectly clear sky of her memory.

“Millie, I’d like to ask you some questions about my mother’s journals and about the people on the reservation many years ago.”

“When I was a child, the government didn’t want us to speak our own language here. Did you know that, Corkie? But your grandmother said hogwash. And she taught Ojibwemowin to the children in her school. Your grandmother was a strong woman.”

“Yes. And a woman much loved.” Cork leaned against the porch rail. “Someone cut out pages from my mother’s journals, Millie. Do you know who?”

“Oh, Corkie, I know I should have looked at everything she gave me, but I never had the time. If something’s missing, well, I suppose it was your mother’s doing. Everybody’s got things in their past they don’t want folks to know, don’t you suppose?”

“I suppose,” Cork agreed. “Millie, was there someone on the reservation when you were a young woman who was not so well loved? Someone you were warned against?”

“Mr. Windigo,” she said darkly and without hesitation. “Oh, I used to be scared of him. We were always warned about Mr. Windigo.”

She was speaking, Cork assumed, of the creature out of Ojibwe myth. In the stories the Ojibwe told, the Windigo was a cannibal giant with a heart of ice. It had once been a man but had become a monster that loved to feast on the flesh of the unwary—children especially. It was often used in much the same way white people employed the bogeyman, to frighten children into obedience.

“Was there a man or a woman that people on the rez stayed away from?”

“We didn’t like everyone, but we were all Shinnobs and neighbors and got along. Some people were afraid of Henry Meloux. They called him a witch. The government doctors tried to tell us that. Henry a witch,” she said with a dismissive laugh.

Meloux. He knew he should be talking with Henry, but his old friend had made it clear that Cork was on his own.

“And Mr. Windigo, of course,” the old woman added. “There were all kind of stories about Mr. Windigo snatching kids.”

“When Fawn disappeared, did my mother or my aunt talk to you?”

“Your mother always talked to me.”

“Did she talk about Fawn?”

“Of course.” Millie Joseph smoothed her lap blanket. “And she talked about Mr. Windigo.”

“Did she think the Windigo had something to do with the Vanishings?”

“She knew he did.”

Cork was confused. Why would his mother blame a mythic beast for a real disappearance?

“She was awfully sad, your mother. Your aunt, too. We all were. And scared, because who would be next?”

“But the next to vanish was a white woman. And she was the last.”

“Oh, we were all very happy about that.”

“That the white woman vanished?”

“That she was the last Mr. Windigo took.”

“Did you know her, the white woman the Windigo took?”

“Sure. From St. Agnes.”

“Did you know her well?”

“Not well, no.”

“What did you think of her?”

“She was rich.” Which clearly was not a good thing to Millie Joseph. “Your mother knew her better.”

“What did my mother think of her?”

“Your mother used to say that she was a woman like a snowshoe rabbit. In the winter, she would be white, in the summer dark.”

“What did she mean?”

“A woman who was two women, I guess.”

And one was light and one was dark, Cork thought.

“After the white woman vanished, what did my mother say?”

Millie thought awhile and her hands twitched. “Why, I don’t think she said anything, except what the rest of us said. That it was good Mr. Windigo wasn’t lurking around the rez anymore.”

An old pickup cruised past on the street and the driver, Ben Cassidy, lifted his hand and called out, “Boozhoo, Millie! Cork!”

She waved back and said, “We found his truck.”

“Whose truck?”

“Mr. Windigo. We found it half-sunk in a bog way south on the rez.”

“The Windigo drove a truck.”

“You keep saying ‘the Windigo.’ I’m not talking about the Windigo. I’m talking about Mr. Windigo.”

“He was a man?”

“Of course he was a man. His name was Indigo. That’s how he got the name we called him.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He was tall and thin like a broomstick. Had eyes like black fire. Whenever he looked at me, I burned and got cold at the same time. I didn’t like that man.”

“Was Indigo his only name?”

“No, he had a last name. It was perfect for him, because it was exactly what he looked like, a broomstick. His name was Indigo Broom.”

TWENTY-FOUR

He found Isaiah Broom among the protesters at the gate to the Vermilion One Mine, although, in truth, Broom wasn’t exactly “among” the protesters. He’d separated from them and stood blocking the progress of a huge pickup truck that belonged to Great North Mining Company and that was trying to reach the gate. Cork pulled off the road, parked, and, as soon as he got out, he could hear the heat of the discussion.

“You’re women, but you work for a company that rapes the earth,” Broom challenged.

“You’re a man, but you’re going to be dickless if you don’t move out of our way” came a reply from inside the cab.

That was followed by another from the cab: “Hell, he’s probably already dickless, Bobbi.”

Cork knew the voices. The Noon sisters, two women no man in his right mind would cross. Not only was Broom in contempt of the restraining order, but he was baring his chest to she wolves.

Before Cork reached the pickup, the women had opened their doors and stepped out. Kitty Noon held a baseball bat. Bobbi Noon gripped a tire iron. They both were dressed basically the same: faded jeans, work boots, ball caps, and denim shirts with the sleeves rolled high enough because of the heat to show impressive biceps. In the glare of the midday sun, they faced Isaiah Broom, a wall of a man.

“We’re just a couple of peace-loving females, Broom. And right now we’d love nothing more than a piece of you,” Bobbi said.

Broom didn’t give an inch, and Cork had to admit those dark Shinnob eyes showed no glimmer of fear. In Broom’s place, Cork would’ve been thinking about the state of his health plan.

“Lunch is just about over,” Kitty said. “A couple of minutes from now, we’ve got to punch back in. Got work to do on the other side of that gate. Every second we’re late you pay for, Broom, one way or another.”

“Hey, Kitty. Broom doesn’t get out of our way, what do you say we make him our afternoon work? Maybe use him as fill for a pothole or something.”

The two sisters laughed.

Broom said, “You can do violence to me. That would be a small crime. But the violence to Grandmother Earth is another kind of crime. And the violence a nuclear waste dump would do to generations after us, that’s the greatest crime of all.”

Kitty laid the bat over her shoulder and looked like a hitter waiting her turn at the plate. “We’re not arguing your point, Broom, just your tactic. You’re not winning yourself or your cause any friends by keeping a couple of breadwinners from jobs that put food on the table.”

“You got a problem with dumping nuclear waste here, fine,” Bobbi said. “The idea doesn’t exactly make me do somersaults. But our work has nothing to do with that. So kindly step aside and let us pass.”

Broom stood his ground. “If not us, who?” he said, more to the crowd than to the sisters. “If not now, when?”

“You know, you’re beginning to piss me off,” Kitty said and unshouldered her bat.

The gathering of protesters clearly didn’t know which side to root for: Broom, big as a bear, or the two women, tornadoes in tight jeans.

Cork approached on foot and said, “Isaiah, you don’t stand aside, you’re in contempt of the restraining order.”

“And who’d blame us for kicking your ass?” Bobbi said.

Broom crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m willing to be arrested for doing the right thing.”

“Nobody doubts that, Isaiah,” Cork said. “But why not save that move for when the big trucks roll up carrying the nuclear waste? It’ll get a lot more play in the media than a confrontation with two women.”

Kitty turned on Cork. “You saying we don’t count?”

Bobbi said, “Relax, Kitty. He’s on our side.”

Cork said, “I’m not taking sides here. I’m just saying consider which battles you fight, Isaiah. You really want the news story to be that you got knocked around by a couple of working females just trying to put food on the table for their families?”

“Let ’em pass,” one of the protesters hollered.

Broom held his ground for a moment more, then lowered his arms and stepped out of the way.

The two sisters started back to the pickup.

“Thanks, Cork,” Bobbi said.

Kitty still looked pissed. “You ever insinuate that women don’t count in a confrontation, I’ll shove this ball bat up your ass, understand?”

“I read you loud and clear, Kitty.”

“Good,” she said. She opened the driver’s door, threw the ball bat inside, and said over her shoulder to Cork, “Next time we see you at the Buzz Saw, your beer’s on us.”

The sisters slammed the doors shut. The engine kicked over, and the big pickup rolled through the front gate.

“Got a minute, Isaiah?” Cork asked.

“Fuck you, O’Connor.” Broom started back to join the other protesters.

“I have a question about one of your relatives. Indigo.”

That stopped Broom in his tracks. He turned to Cork and, for a Shinnob, showed an unseemly amount of emotion.

“Why the hell are you asking about him?”

A car approached on the highway where the two men stood. It gave a little warning honk.

“Let’s talk over there.” Cork pointed toward his Land Rover.

They cleared the asphalt, and the car drove past. The protesters settled back into their canvas chairs or returned to quiet conversations in small groups. Cork walked to his Land Rover with Broom fuming at his side.

“You ever mention that name again and I’ll beat you within an inch of your life,” Broom swore.

“He was a relative of yours, right?”

“My mother’s cousin. What’s it to you?”

“According to Millie Joseph, he disappeared about the same time the Vanishings ended.”

“So?”

“Just wondering if there might have been some connection.”

“Between him and the Vanishings?” Broom seemed genuinely surprised but not offended.

“Isaiah, has the sheriff talked to you about the remains they found in the Vermilion Drift?”

“What about ’em?”

“They’ve positively identified all but one of the bodies. The one still remaining? I think there’s a good chance it’s your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Millie Joseph told me your mother disappeared just before the Vanishings began. Everyone thought that she’d taken off, abandoned you. I believe that wasn’t true. I believe she was one of the first victims. And I believe that Indigo Broom may have had something to do with it.”

Broom was stunned to silence. He stood there, a big man with his mouth open.

Cork went on. “Millie Joseph called Indigo Broom ‘Mr. Windigo.’ She told me he was a man folks on the rez avoided. Did you know him?”

Now Broom’s mouth closed and his eyes became hard as fists. “I knew him,” he said, his lips barely moving.

“What happened to him?”

“He left.”

“And went where?”

“I didn’t care.”

“Did anyone ever say?”

“No. And no one gave a shit.”

“Not even his family?”

“Family? He fed on family.”

“What do you mean?”

Broom looked at Cork. “We called him Mr. Windigo, too.”

“Was he the kind of man who could have made those women disappear?”

Broom said, “I’ve talked enough.” He turned his back on Cork and began to walk away.

“Isaiah,” Cork called after him. “Are you responsible for the graffiti in the mine?”

Broom stopped and turned back.

Because the second entrance to the Vermilion Drift was on the rez, Cork had felt strongly from the beginning that a Shinnob was responsible. Although Cork’s question had been a shot in the dark, Broom’s reaction made him think he might have hit the mark.

“Which would mean you knew about the other way into the mine. Did you know about the remains?”

Broom walked slowly back and stood looking down into Cork’s face. The big Shinnob cast enough shadow that it completely swallowed Cork.

“I know nothing about those bodies down there. As for the graffiti, if I had anything to do with it, which I didn’t, I’d know that tunnel was about the most evil place on earth.”

Broom left, taking his huge shadow with him.

TWENTY-FIVE

Given what Cork now knew, he believed that Isaiah Broom’s long-lost relative, Indigo, was a very likely suspect in the disappearance of the women on the Iron Lake Reservation more than forty years earlier. It struck him as odd that Indigo Broom’s name had never been mentioned during the investigation Cork’s father had conducted. Cork had made the connection with relative ease. Why hadn’t his father? Or the other people on the rez?

He thought about these things as he drove back to Aurora, and before he reached the town limits, he’d arrived at some very speculative conclusions.

Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh had disappeared at approximately the same time, and the Vanishings had stopped. Broom was a man of desires dark enough to be feared, even by his own people. Cork might have suspected that Indigo Broom was responsible for the fate of Monique Cavanaugh except for one salient detail: his father’s .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special may well have been the weapon used to kill her. He knew, too, that Cavanaugh was a woman of dark desires and devious motives, which she’d hidden well from others, but not from the priest and probably not from her husband, who refused to speak of her once she was gone. Could she, too, have played some part in the Vanishings?

It was entirely possible, probable even, Cork concluded, that the Anishinaabeg of the Iron Lake Reservation had not been as ignorant as the official reports of the investigation seemed to indicate, nor had his father.

But why had they all lied?

And how had a bullet from his father’s gun come to be lodged in the spine of Monique Cavanaugh? If he knew that, maybe Cork would know how a bullet from the same weapon had found its way into the body of her daughter.

As he pulled into town, his cell phone rang. Sheriff Dross. She told him that she’d scheduled another news conference for the afternoon. She wanted everyone in her office beforehand, at 2:00 P.M., so that she knew where all the parts of the investigation stood.

Cork stopped by home, grabbed a quick bologna sandwich, and took Trixie for a short walk. Then he headed to the Tamarack County sheriff’s office. He was the last to arrive. In addition to Dross, there were the other usuals: Captain Ed Larson, Agent Simon Rutledge, and Agent Susan Upchurch. Once again, there weren’t enough chairs, so Cork leaned against a wall.

“Susan,” Dross said to the BCA agent, “why don’t you give us an update on what you’ve found so far.”

“All right. Remember the marks on the bones that I indicated earlier could have been made by incisions or by the teeth of a scavenger? I’ve pretty much concluded that they’re the result of a knife blade. I also believe they were delivered perimortem.”

“Perimortem?” Cork asked.

“At or very near the time of death.”

“What makes you believe that?” Larson said.

“In perimortem wounds, the edges of the bone along the incision often curl, like if you’d cut into a live branch that you’ve pulled off a tree.”

“So the victims may well have been alive when these cuts were made?”

“Yes. But it’s also possible the cuts were made immediately after death.”

“To what purpose?”

“They might be ritualistic. They might have been the result of some kind of homicidal frenzy, I suppose. But you also sometimes find this same kind of mark on victims of cannibalism.”

“Cannibalism?” Dross looked aghast.

“I’m not saying that’s what occurred, just that the marks are consistent with a number of possibilities, and that’s one of them.”

“Great,” Dross said. “The media will love that, I’m sure.”

Cork asked, “Did Monique Cavanaugh have any of these marks?”

“No. We’ve found no knife marks on the remains of the Cavanaugh woman, no evidence of knife wounds.”

“So cause of death was probably the bullet lodged in her spine?”

“That’s the best speculation at the moment.”

Cork looked at the sheriff. “Anything more from the Lauren Cavanaugh autopsy?”

“Yes,” Dross said. “In addition to the bullet wound to her chest, Tom Conklin found a superficial wound on her right side, just above her hip.”

“What kind of wound?”

“Tom thinks it’s a bullet graze.”

“The killer missed the first time around?”

“We couldn’t say that officially, but that would be my current speculation. Ed, tell Cork what you’ve got.”

“We’ve gone over the old Parrant estate,” Larson said. “We didn’t find anything of particular value in the big house. But in the boathouse, which Ms. Cavanaugh had renovated into an additional private living area for herself, we found two things. First, between the floorboards, we discovered traces of what we believe to be blood. Simon’s people are analyzing the samples now.”

“What do you think?”

“Well, the M.E. believes she died quickly from the gunshot wound. The blood covered a significant area, so I think Lauren Cavanaugh lay facedown after she died, lay there quite a while so that gravity pulled a lot of blood out the chest wound. It looks to me like someone eventually tried to clean things up and, except for what seeped between the boards, did a pretty good job.”

“What was the other thing?” Cork asked.

“We got really lucky. We pulled a fingerprint from the back of a table lamp. A bloody fingerprint. Simon’s people are analyzing that blood, too, and trying to match the print.”

“You’re pretty sure she was killed in the boathouse?”

“Like Marsha says, I wouldn’t state that officially, but that’s my current speculation.”

“So killed in her boathouse, taken to the Vermilion One Mine, and sealed up with the other bodies in the drift,” Dross summed up.

“Anybody at the Northern Lights Center hear or see anything?” Cork asked.

“The current residents didn’t arrive until the next day, and all the staff had gone home by then,” Larson said. “The only person who might have heard was a guy named Huff. He’s a long-term resident. But he wasn’t at the center in the time frame we believe the killing took place. He was out drinking and has someone who backs up his story. So basically nobody’s been able to give us anything.”

“I’ll give you something,” Cork said. “Huff was quite comfortable in Monique Cavanaugh’s private area. You might want to lean on him a little, see what gives.”

“And you know this how?”

“I was there a couple of days ago, talking with Ophelia Stillday. Just an observation I made.”

“All right.” Larson jotted a note in his little book.

Simon Rutledge eyed Cork, and there was an enigmatic expression on his face. He said, “I have a little something to add about the earlier killings. The priest assigned to St. Agnes in those days was accused of masturbating in the confessional. Shortly after that, some women’s panties were found hidden there, stained with semen. The investigating officer apparently didn’t feel the situation was such that the priest should be looked at as a viable suspect in the Vanishings, but the Church yanked the guy.”

“Jesus, where’d you get that information?” Larson asked.

“You said the files had been destroyed, but I knew that one of your retired deputies, Cy Borkman, had been with the department back then, so I talked to him. Then I tracked down the priest. It was basically the same thing Cork did.”

Dross leveled a cold eye on Cork. “You knew about this?”

“Yes.”

“And you were going to tell us when?”

“As soon as I had a few more things worked out.”

“Like what?”

Cork said, “Simon, did the priest tell you about Monique Cavanaugh’s sexual proclivities?”

“Reluctantly.”

“What do you think?”

“If it’s true, she wasn’t exactly Snow White.”

Dross leaned forward, and, even across the room, Cork thought he could feel the heat of her rising anger. “What are you two gentlemen talking about?”

“According to the priest, Monique Cavanaugh propositioned him several times,” Cork replied. “She finally threatened him. And that was followed by an anonymous call to the sheriff’s department that resulted in the aforementioned soiled intimate items coming to light in the confessional.”

“She set the priest up?”

“That’s certainly what he believes.”

“That doesn’t mesh at all with the image everyone has of her,” Larson said.

“You need to press her son a little more on the subject of his mother, Ed. You may discover that he doesn’t consider her Snow White either.”

“Is there anything else you know but haven’t told us?” Dross asked.

“I saw Isaiah Broom today,” Cork replied. “I told him I was pretty sure the unidentified body was his mother.”

“Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?” the sheriff cried. “We haven’t positively ID’d the final remains. If this gets out and you’re wrong …” She took a moment to rein in her anger, and the whole time the smolder of her gaze was directed at Cork. At last she said, “What’s done is done. That’s all for now, gentlemen.”

The normal tourist traffic had swelled with the influx of folks curious about the grisly discovery in the Vermilion Drift, and Sam’s Place was doing a land-office business. Judy Madsen, Jodi Bollendorf, and Kate Buker had the situation under control when Cork checked in. He promised to be there early that night to close and left things in their capable hands.

He returned home, gathered the boxes that contained his mother’s journals, and took them out to the patio in the backyard. Trixie jumped up and ran to greet him. He released her from the tether that held her, and she bounded to the far corner of the yard and snatched a dirty tennis ball in her teeth. Cork threw it a few times, then told her gently he had work to do. He grabbed a cold Leinie’s from the refrigerator, settled into a patio chair, and took out the journal that contained the entries immediately following the missing pages that would have chronicled the time of the Vanishings.

September 17, 1964

Fall is here and everywhere I look I see blood. It’s in the color of the sumac and the maple leaves and the sky at sunset and at dawn. Henry Meloux is helping Hattie and Ellie and Mom and me. Liam walks like a man made of stone, cold and hard. Cork, ever the quiet, watchful child, sees and wonders but does not ask. Thank God.

Does not ask, Cork thought. Well, he was asking now.

He scanned other entries, looking for anything that might be a clue to the missing days.

September 21, 1964

The first day of fall officially. Usually a glorious time, but this year we all mourn. Winter is already in our souls. Liam grows more distant. What has been asked of him is great, and he struggles. He is not one of The People. If he were, he might understand and better accept how things must be. There is friction between us. This I can live with. For now. What hurts is seeing how Liam has distanced himself from Cork as well. He’s short with his son. And the Irish in Cork flares up and he lashes back. They battle these days. Except that Cork has no idea of the true enemy here.

September 29, 1964

Cork has been suspended from school. He got into a fight with another boy. Over what neither of them would say. Liam is furious. Nothing new. He’s angry all the time now. I’ve asked him to talk to Henry Meloux. He refuses. Cork sits in his room, staring a hole through the wall. My heart is breaking.

October 16, 1964

Liam my beloved Liam is dead.

Dear God why?

TWENTY-SIX

In October 1964, the Summer Olympics were held in Tokyo. In that same month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize. The St. Louis Cardinals became World Champions, beating the heavily favored New York Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. China detonated its first nuclear weapon. The Star of India was stolen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Nikita Krushchev was removed as leader of the Soviet Union.

And in October 1964, Cork O’Connor lost his father.

In his memory, his life until then had been happy. But one cool fall day, when the oak leaves were a stunning russet against a startling blue sky, when the cry of migrating Canada geese chorused over Iron Lake, when the evening air was full of the scent of woodsmoke curling from the chimneys of Aurora, everything changed. Changed over the course of a few hours. Changed, in fact, in a single instant. Changed forever with the final beat of his father’s heart.

It had begun with a shoot-out. Cork’s father and a deputy had responded to an alarm at the First Citizen’s Bank, where three inmates who’d escaped from Stillwater Prison were attempting a robbery as they fled toward Canada. During the exchange of gunfire that erupted, a deaf old lady, a cantankerous woman notorious for yelling at children trespassing on her precious lawn, wandered into the line of fire outside the bank. Cork’s father left the cover of the Buick that shielded him to pull the old woman to safety. In those few moments of exposure, a bullet from a stolen deer rifle pierced his heart.

He didn’t die immediately. He lingered for several hours, unconscious, with his wife and son at the side of his hospital bed. The doctor, a good man named Congreve, didn’t have the ability to mend a heart torn by a bullet designed to bring down a deer and gave them no hope. Cork’s mother had prayed, prayed desperately. Although Cork had said prayers with her, they were empty words. As soon as the doctor had proclaimed that there was no hope, young Cork O’Connor had closed his heart in the way he might have closed a door to an empty room.

It took him a while to absorb the full impact of his father’s death. He was numb for days, numb during the funeral, numb at the site of the open grave, numb to the words of consolation, numb to his mother’s grief. For a long time he felt nothing, neither joy nor sadness nor fear nor hope.

That year in mid-November, he helped Sam Winter Moon close up Sam’s Place. The trees by then were bare things, wet, black skeletons in the drizzle of the bleak season. Sam had been his father’s good friend, and as he and Cork put plywood over the serving windows of the Quonset hut, he talked about Liam O’Connor.

“You know,” Sam said around a nail gripped in his teeth, “that man could outfart a draft horse. Hold your side up a little higher, Cork.” He took the nail from between his teeth and positioned it.

Cork thought it a little unseemly, speaking of his father that way, but he held his tongue.

“We were canoeing once up on Angle Lake. Came around a point, headed for the next portage. There not five feet away was a bull moose, munching on lakeweed. We startled him as much as he startled us. That animal lowered his head and was about to do real damage to our canoe and probably to us in the bargain. Your father, he farts and it’s like cannon fire. Echoes off the trees. Sends a tidal wave across the lake. Scares the crap out of that bull moose. The critter turns and hightails it.” Sam was laughing hard enough that he couldn’t hammer. He leaned against the Quonset hut for support and finished, breathless, “And then your father, he says, ‘I just hope we don’t run into a bear, Sam. I’m clean outta ammo.’”

Cork stood holding up his side of the plywood, watching Sam Winter Moon laugh heartily.

“It’s okay, Cork,” Sam said. “It’s okay to laugh. It was something your father loved to do.”

And Cork did laugh. He laughed so hard tears began to squeeze from his eyes, and before he knew it, he was crying. Sam Winter Moon laid his hammer down and took Cork’s hands from the plywood, wrapped his big arms around the weeping boy, and held him.

December 24, 1964

Christmas Eve. We went to the candlelight Mass at St. Agnes. A lovely service. Walking home, snow began to fall. I took Cork’s hand and he let me. He’s a somber young man these days. He misses his father. As I do. Henry Meloux says that what we feel, this incredible emptiness, is like a held breath. He says the heart is wise, and if we listen to it, we will understand how to breathe again. I hope Meloux is right.

Cork put down the journal he was holding and thought about that dark time. He’d grieved for a year, and in the fall of 1965 he’d hunted a bear with Sam Winter Moon, an enormous black bear that Sam had tried to capture with a log trap. The log was heavy enough that it should have broken the back of any normal black bear, but the animal had shrugged it off. Sam, fearing the great creature might be injured and suffering, had gone after it, and Cork had gone with him. It was a journey far different from anything either of them had imagined, a journey that involved a brush with a Windigo and that resulted in the largest black bear pelt anyone in Tamarack County had ever seen, a journey that finally brought Cork out of his grieving.

January 1, 1965

We didn’t celebrate the beginning of this new year. We have no reason to celebrate. My husband is dead. My niece is dead, killed by a madwoman and an Ojibwe majimanidoo. And we who are left abide with our guilt, an uncomfortable companion in all our hours. I miss Liam so much. I will miss him forever.

Cork paused and reread.

My niece is dead, killed by a madwoman and an Ojibwe majimanidoo.

Majimanidoo. Evil spirit, Cork translated. Devil. Indigo Broom.

A madwoman? Monique Cavanaugh?

His mother had known.

We abide with our guilt.

What the hell did that mean?

The summer solstice was only a couple of days away, and as Cork headed to Sam’s Place that night to close up, a narrow strip of sky along the western horizon was still lit with a pale yellow glow. Jodi Bollendorf and Kate Buker had shut the serving windows. They looked beat, and Cork told them to go on home, he’d take care of the cleaning and would close up himself. They agreed without argument.

He emptied the deep-fry well, scraped the grill, wiped the prep surfaces clean with a mix of water and bleach, washed the serving utensils, and mopped the floor. He took the cash from the register and went to the rear half of the Quonset hut to do the daily count.

All the while his brain was working on the mystery of the Vermilion Drift.

His mother knew about Monique Cavanaugh and about Indigo Broom. Probably his father had known, too. If so, why hadn’t he arrested them, done his duty as an officer of the law? Was it possible that, in the extraordinary circumstances of forty years ago, he’d seen his duty differently, and that was why a bullet from his revolver had ended up lodged in Monique Cavanaugh’s spine?

The more Cork thought about that last consideration, the more he thought about the image of Liam O’Connor which had emerged from his mother’s journals. A man, at the end, dark and distant and brooding. What had happened to make him so? What had been done that was so difficult for him to accept that it ate at him constantly?

Cork had finished the daily count and was preparing for a night deposit when his cell phone rang.

“O’Connor,” he said in answer.

“Cork, it’s Rainy. You’ve got to come out to my uncle’s place. You’ve got to come out now.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s Isaiah Broom. He’s going to kill Henry.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

She called him again just after he’d parked his Land Rover at the trailhead to Crow Point. The moon was up but on the wane and offered only enough light to give definition to the larger particulars of the forest. Cork carried his Maglite. He paused and slipped the phone from his pocket.

“Where are you?” Rainy demanded.

“On the trail. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“My god, it’s taking you forever.”

In fact, he’d practically flown. But Cork knew that the kind of tense situation in which Rainy had found herself caused every minute to drag on forever, and he let her censure slide off his back.

“What’s going on?” he asked, moving ahead as quickly as he could, using the Maglite to illuminate his way.

“Broom’s barricaded the door. It won’t budge. And it’s quiet in there now.”

“Will either of them respond when you call?”

“No. But I think I can hear voices.”

“Don’t try to force your way in, Rainy. Wait for me. I’m coming as quickly as I can.”

He leaped Wine Creek and a few minutes later neared the edge of the woods. Before he left the cover of the trees, he killed the beam of his flashlight and silenced his cell phone. He knew the dark would afford him an opportunity to assess things as he approached, and if all his years in law enforcement had taught him anything, it was the wisdom of caution. In the drift of soft light from the gibbous moon, Meloux’s cabin was a dark shape rising on the far side of the open meadow. No light was visible inside. The trail across the meadow was dimly discernible, and he kept to the path most of the way, bent low, moving swiftly. Fifty yards from the cabin he paused, listened, heard nothing. Rainy was nowhere to be seen.

He crept left and circled behind Meloux’s outhouse to come at the cabin from behind. When he reached the back wall, he paused, heard a small muffled cough, then heard Broom whisper, “Shut up.”

“I didn’t …” It was Rainy’s voice.

“Shut up.” A few moments passed, then Broom whispered, “Where is he?”

“You know everything I know.” Her voice was a knife honed sharp with anger.

“Christ, if you screwed me, I swear I’ll kill you and the old man both.”

“I’ve done everything you asked. You’ve heard everything I’ve said to him.” Then, much to Cork’s dismay, she added, “Asshole.”

Cork inched to the end of the wall and peered around the corner. The cabin blocked what little light the moon offered, and Cork saw only darkness. He had no way to assess the situation. If he came at Broom quickly, he might be able to surprise the man, but at what cost? If Broom had a firearm pointed at Rainy, it could easily discharge in the fracas, maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally. Cork ran quickly through his options as he saw them and made a decision. He retraced his steps to the outhouse, crouched, and loped far out into the meadow, where he laid himself down in the tall grass.

“Isaiah!” he called.

Broom made no response.

“If you think I’m coming up there, Isaiah, think again.”

“I’ve got the woman and the old man, O’Connor.”

“So?”

“I’ll kill ’em.”

“So?”

Broom was quiet.

Cork said, “What is it you want from me, Isaiah?”

“I want to know what you know about the Vermilion Drift. I want to know what the old man knows.”

“You could ask.”

“He’s saying nothing.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like being threatened. Look, Isaiah, you’ve got good reason to be pissed, but that doesn’t give you license to threaten folks. You want to talk, I’ll talk. I can pretty much guarantee that Meloux will talk, too, if you approach him reasonably.”

“He’s drunk, Cork,” Rainy called. “And he’s got a rifle.”

“Shut up!”

Cork heard the woman grunt.

“Rainy, you okay?”

“Yes. But I’ll have a hell of a bruise in the morning.”

“Look, Isaiah, I give you my word that I’ll tell you everything I know if you just step away from all the threats.”

“What about the old witch man?”

Old witch man? Broom evidently saw Meloux in the way many modern Shinnobs did: an anachronism. An old man of the old ways, a witch. Unfortunate because Broom might have been easier to deal with if he respected Meloux in the way Cork did.

“Just ask him, Isaiah. Ask him without the rifle.”

There was only silence from Broom’s direction. Then Cork saw movement in the dim moonlight that fell on the ground in front of the cabin. He made out Broom, pushing Rainy ahead of him to the cabin door. He heard the squeak of hinges, but no light came from inside. Then the door squeaked shut. A moment later, behind the curtain of a front window, a faint orange glow appeared. One of Meloux’s oil lamps had been lit.

Cork stayed where he was, hoping reason had prevailed.

The door opened, and Broom stood silhouetted against the light. A stupid move, if Cork had been armed. Cork could see the black outline of Broom’s rifle still held in his right hand.

“Okay, O’Connor. The old man says he’ll talk. Come on up.”

“Not until you put that rifle down, Isaiah.”

Broom leaned to his right, and when he came back up, his hand was empty.

Cork stood, slipped his Maglite into his back pocket, and walked to the cabin. Broom stepped away from the door, and Cork entered. Inside, he found Meloux bound to a chair next to his table. Rainy sat across the room on her great-uncle’s bunk. Cork turned back to Broom just as the big Shinnob pulled a target pistol from under the shirttail at the small of his back.

“Ah, shit,” Cork said. He glanced at Rainy. “You told me he had a rifle. You didn’t say anything about a handgun.”

“If I’d known I would have told you,” she replied drily.

“Sit down, O’Connor.” Broom waved him toward an empty chair.

Cork did as he was told and took stock of Broom. The smell of whiskey was strong off him. His eyes were heavy and red, and he was unsteady in his movements. He was a huge Shinnob. To stagger the way he did, he must have consumed a lake of alcohol. On the other hand, Broom wasn’t a man with a reputation for being fond of liquor, so maybe he simply had little tolerance for drink but a lot of motivation that day for drinking.

“I want to know everything you know, everything the old man knows,” Broom said.

“All right, Isaiah. Where do you want me to start?” Cork replied.

Broom didn’t answer. He turned his attention to Meloux. “Was it my mother in that tunnel?”

Meloux said, “No. Your mother long ago walked the Path of Souls.”

“Don’t play games, old man. Was that my mother’s body?”

“It was her body,” Meloux acknowledged.

“How’d it get there?”

“Like the others.”

“How’d they get there?”

“Majimanidoo,” the old Mide said.

Broom thought a moment, swaying like a tree in a strong wind. “Evil spirit?”

“Indigo Broom put them there,” Cork said.

The big Shinnob stared at him, red-eyed. “He killed my mother?”

“I think so. Her and the other women whose remains were in the Vermilion Drift.”

Broom fell silent. His legs looked as if they were becoming more wobbly by the moment. “It was him,” he said with certainty.

Meloux spoke quietly. “He showed you the tunnel, didn’t he? A long time before he put the bodies there.”

Broom lifted his eyes to Meloux.

“I know what he did to you in that tunnel, Isaiah Broom. Things only a man of evil spirit would do.”

Broom seemed angered by Meloux’s knowledge. “I never told anyone.”

“You never told anyone,” Meloux agreed gently. “But your mother knew.”

“No,” he said. Then: “How?”

“That was a thing a small boy could not hide from a mother who loved him. She wanted to kill Indigo Broom, but she vanished.”

“Loved me? You’re a liar.”

“A very long time ago, I tried to guide you to the truth, but your heart was hard, and your spirit was all fire. I could not help you. You are a man now, and I am offering you the truth again.”

Broom looked suddenly sick. He turned, threw open the door, and rushed outside. From the dark came the sound of retching.

Cork took the opportunity to grab Broom’s rifle. He checked the chamber. It was empty, and the magazine, too, which probably meant Broom intended to use the weapon only to frighten. Rainy went to her great-uncle and untied the rope that bound him to the chair.

In the light of the lantern on Meloux’s table, they waited. Broom didn’t return. Cork finally lifted the lantern and went to the door. The big Shinnob lay on his back at the edge of the meadow, passed out.

“What do you want to do with him, Henry?” Cork asked.

“Let him sleep for a while. Then I will talk with him.”

“He may be just as belligerent when he wakes up,” Cork said.

Meloux replied, “He would not have been a problem except my niece was less than hospitable. She spoke to him harshly.”

“Jesus, Uncle Henry, a drunken maniac breaks into your cabin waving a rifle and you treat him like an honored guest.”

“It is my cabin. If I choose to treat him that way, it is my right. And, Niece, until you spoke, he did not point his rifle at anyone.”

“Oh, Christ,” she said and turned away.

Meloux asked her, “Will you build a fire in the ring? Corcoran O’Connor will help you. If Isaiah Broom wakes, I will bring him there.”

Rainy stormed down the path toward the fire ring at the edge of the lake. Cork took the Maglite from his back pocket.

“I think it would be safer if I stayed here with you,” Cork said.

“I am not afraid of Isaiah Broom.”

“It’s not Broom that has me worried, Henry.” He glanced down the path where the angry woman had gone.

In the dark, he saw the old man smile.

TWENTY-EIGHT

He offered his flashlight. She refused.

“I don’t need your help,” Rainy said as she gathered cut wood from a box near the ring. “I know how to build a fire.”

“Fine,” Cork said. “I’ll just stand here and watch.”

The moon gave only a faint definition to things. The tall outcroppings that isolated the ring were the color of pencil lead. The ground was a gray pool of bare dirt, the fire ring a black hole of ash. The lake a dozen yards away was like mercury, a dark liquid silver. The woman, as she moved from the woodbox to the fire ring, was an angry obsidian blur.

Cork said, “He can be hard to understand sometimes, but in my experience, he’s usually right.”

She dropped a load of wood inside the ring. “Jesus, the man was drunk. He was waving a rifle, for Christ sake. And I’m supposed to say ‘Mi casa, su casa’?”

“Henry’s casa actually.”

She bent and spent a minute arranging the wood. Cork could hear the snap of kindling.

“Damn it,” she said.

“What?”

“I didn’t bring any matches.”

“Me either.”

“I need to go back to the cabin.”

“Why don’t you relax for a little bit? That was pretty intense stuff back there.”

She stood a moment, outlined against the dark silver of the lake, then sat on the ground not far from Cork.

He studied the stars and let a minute pass.

“Why did Broom come to Henry?” he asked.

“People come to Uncle Henry all the time. They think he knows everything that happens on the rez.”

“He probably does. Why did you come to Crow Point?”

“I told you. The family’s worried about Uncle Henry.”

“No, I mean why you? Of all the family, why you?”

“For one thing, I’m a public health nurse.”

“Summer off?”

“Funding cut. I’m between jobs at the moment.”

“For another thing?”

“My children are raised and gone. I have no one who depends on me being there every day.”

“Not married?”

“Divorced. A long time ago. Are you always this nosy?”

“Inquisitive. Goes with my job.”

“And your nature, I’d say.”

Cork heard the flap of big wings overhead. Rainy looked up startled.

“An owl,” Cork said. “Should I be worried about Henry?”

Rainy didn’t answer immediately. She continued to look up where the owl had flown and where the stars were legion.

“The shaking? The tiredness? They’re symptoms,” she said. “Of what, I can’t say. There are dozens and dozens of diseases or conditions that could cause it. If it were something like multiple sclerosis, I’d expect to see problems with his vision and maybe numbness or tingling in his limbs. He claims to be fine. If it’s the result of a stroke, then it was a mild one. But even so, I’d expect to see, oh, I don’t know, muscle weakness or numbness or maybe some disorientation. Maybe it’s simply a neurodegenerative situation of some kind. Old age, basically. But he’s not showing any other symptoms, so I don’t know. Whatever it is, he doesn’t seem much concerned.” A loon called from the lake, and Rainy turned her head. “It’s lovely here,” she said.

“Not a bad place for a man to live. And to die, when that time comes.”

“That time will not come soon, Corcoran O’Connor.”

They hadn’t heard the old Mide’s approach, but Meloux stood not ten feet away. He came now and sat with them.

“I thought you were going to build a fire, Niece.”

“I didn’t have matches, Uncle Henry.”

“Just as well,” Meloux said. “I think Isaiah Broom will not wake until morning. And I think I need to sleep. Thank you for your help,” he said to Cork.

“You want me here when Broom wakes up?”

“He will wake in sunshine and hungover. He will not be in the mood for confrontation. He will want to be quiet, and I think he will listen.”

“What will you tell him?”

“What I tell him will be for his ears only, Corcoran O’Connor.”

In the dark, Cork leaned nearer the Mide. “I’ve found a few answers, Henry, but I still have a lot of questions. I think you can help me.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“All right. Forty years ago, it went like this. I think that the Vanishings began with Leonora Broom. I think she confronted Indigo about what he’d done to her son and Broom killed her and put her body in the Vermilion Drift. Maybe he’d killed before or just had the deep desire to kill, I don’t know, but murdering Isaiah’s mother set him off that summer for sure. Next it was Abbie Stillday, a girl everybody knew was leaving the rez sooner or later. And then it was the vulnerable ones, the ones easily preyed on. Somewhere along the way, Broom brought Monique Cavanaugh into it. Or maybe it was just the evil of these two people that somehow brought them together. Broom snagged the victims and he and Monique Cavanaugh both …” Cork searched for the right word.

Meloux supplied it. “They fed.”

“Fed?” Rainy said, aghast. “You don’t mean they cannibalized their victims?”

“Do you know the story of the Windigo, Niece?”

“A monster with a heart of ice. A cannibal.”

“They were both Windigos,” Meloux said. “They did not start out that way, but they did not start out as whole human beings either. They were born with something missing. They did not have souls.”

“Everyone has a soul, Uncle Henry,” Rainy said.

“What is a soul? I believe it is our connection with the Creator and our deep awareness of our connection with all things created by him. And this is what they did not have. Some people who have souls make choices that lead them to evil. These two did not have a choice.”

“Majimanidoo. That’s what you called Broom. Evil spirit. He was simply born that way? But why would the Creator do that, Uncle Henry?”

“I have lived a very long time, Niece, and I have seen many things I do not understand. I only know they are so.”

“If Broom and Monique Cavanaugh didn’t start out as Windigos, Henry, what happened?” Cork asked.

“A small evil is like a shadow. It follows us but it has no effect. But when evil finds evil, it can become a different creature, Corcoran O’Connor. It can become huge and monstrous. When those two soulless people met, something worse than what they had been before was created. They fed on their own evil and then they fed on The People.”

“Why The People?”

“Because if the Ojibwe disappeared, who would care? Only the Ojibwe and we were few and powerless.”

“How did these two find each other, Henry?” Cork asked.

“I do not know.”

“My father knew about them, didn’t he?”

“He knew.”

“What did he do about it?”

“Your father was a good man. One of the best I have ever known. But he was not one of The People.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are not yet at the end of your journey, Corcoran O’Connor. When you have reached the end, you will understand and my answers will not be necessary.”

“It was my father’s gun that killed Monique Cavanaugh, wasn’t it, Henry? Explain that to me.”

“You still ask in anger. The end of your journey is a place without anger. Come to me when you have reached that place.” Meloux slowly stood. “I am going to bed now.”

Cork watched the dark between the outcroppings swallow his old friend.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

Rainy said, “He can be hard to understand sometimes, but in my experience, he’s usually right.”

“Oh shut up,” Cork said and got to his feet.

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.

THIRTY

When they heard how long Cork had been unconscious, the ER staff at Aurora Community Hospital immediately took X-rays and then did a CT scan. The results showed no fracture and nothing more serious than minor swelling to the area outside the skull where the blow had landed. They were frankly amazed.

“My hard Irish head,” Cork joked.

They wanted to keep him overnight for observation; he told them no, he had things to do. They argued, but in the end sent him home with lots of Tylenol and a printed sheet of symptoms that might indicate more serious developments later. He stripped his clothes off and showered the dirt from his body, fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and, against medical advice, popped the cap on a cold bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer.

He sat on the patio, where he tossed a tennis ball for Trixie to chase, nibbled on his sandwich, drank his beer, and tried to figure who’d blindsided him.

When Jo was alive, he’d often consulted with her, tossed questions and speculations her way to get her response. She’d had a fine mind and was somehow able to think logically without losing sight of the human element and its unpredictability and to remember always the need for compassion in any of Cork’s considerations. Left to himself, Cork tended to be easily influenced by his prejudices and selfish concerns, and he wasn’t certain he could trust any of his own conclusions.

But there was no other option, so he thought alone through the things that troubled him.

Someone had been there ahead of him. The boot tracks inside the smaller foundation told him that. How long before his own arrival, he couldn’t say, but it was entirely possible that, whoever it was, his coming had surprised them, and they’d slipped into the trees and simply waited for their chance to bushwhack him. He’d seen no other vehicles on Waagikomaan. Did that mean they’d hiked in, or they’d parked somewhere out of sight? And what were they after? Cork hadn’t known exactly what he’d find, but his assailant had brought a rake and so must have had a pretty good idea of what was there. Bones and teeth. They could have been from additional victims of Broom’s savagery, or they could have been the remains of Broom himself. Because he hadn’t learned of anyone else who’d gone missing over forty years earlier except those discovered in the Vermilion Drift, and because the burning of the cabin coincided with the disappearance of Indigo Broom, Cork was inclined to think they belonged to the man Millie Joseph had darkly referred to as “Mr. Windigo.”

Who would have known about Broom’s death?

Sam Winter Moon must have known because the story he’d spread about Broom leaving the rez to be with relatives somewhere else had clearly been a lie.

Did Cork’s mother know? His father? Henry Meloux? And if they knew, what had been their part in getting rid of Broom?

The night before, after the nightmare of his father dying, he’d lain awake thinking about what Meloux had said, that Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh had behaved like Windigos, cannibalizing their victims. Which was probably the reason for the cuts Agent Upchurch had found on the bones from the Vermilion Drift. But something that gruesome had to be well hidden, carried out in great secrecy, and where could that have been? Which had got Cork to wondering about where Indigo Broom had lived. When Millie Joseph told him it was a cursed place, he’d been almost certain he had the answer he was seeking. And when he’d found the manacles, he knew absolutely it was a place of horrific incident.

Cork sipped his beer and watched Trixie romping in the afternoon sun, and he puzzled over Broom and Monique Cavanaugh, who came from two very different worlds but in the darkness of their souls were united. How did they connect? How did evil find evil?

The Internet might have been a way, but 1964 was decades too early. A personal ad in the Aurora Sentinel? Cork could just imagine: MWF with bloodlust seeks like companion. Finally Cork decided there might have been another way, an age-old way of connecting.

He went inside and looked up a telephone number in his address book, then dialed.

He ordered Leinie’s for them both, and when the beers came, he slid one of the frosted mugs over to Cy Borkman.

“Thanks, Cork. Been too long since we tipped brews together.” Borkman tapped Cork’s mug, then took a long draw from his own and wiped foam from his upper lip. “How’s the investigation going?”

“Plodding along,” Cork said.

“Yeah, after you talked to me, Simon Rutledge looked me up, covered the same ground about the priest. You guys really ought to coordinate better.”

“We’re trying, Cy. Which is one reason I called.”

“I figured.” Borkman smiled. “What do you need?”

They sat at the bar of the Four Seasons with a view of the marina through a long bank of windows off to their right. When Cork was a kid, the Four Seasons hadn’t been there and the marina had been a simple affair with three short docks where maybe a dozen boats were tied up at any given time. Now it was a forest of masts with sailboats too numerous to count, a summer port to ostentatious powerboats and small yachts that often sat idle in the water for weeks on end, playthings for the rich who looked on Aurora as a place of diversion and looked with thinly veiled disdain on those who called the town home.

Cork said, “Back in your early days with the department, was there a bar somewhere that had a particularly unsavory reputation? Someplace that catered to, I don’t know, a clientele like the Hells Angels maybe? The kind of place prone to trouble but the owner maybe preferred to handle it on his own.”

“Here in Aurora?”

“Probably not. Maybe not even in Tamarack County, but close enough that someone from Aurora could patronize it if they wanted to.”

“Oh, sure. Used to be a place like that in Yellow Lake. Jacque’s. Christ, there was a dive. Story was that the guy who built it was descended from one of the Voyageurs and his ancestor’s name was Jacque something or other. Pretty quiet in the winter, but come summer that place really jumped. Full of loggers and miners, big guys who could get pretty mean when they were drinking. A magnet for lowlifes, too, troublemakers of every kind. Bikers. Indians. Prostitutes. The joint had a little postage stamp of a stage and a strip show. Guy who owned it last, let’s see, his name was Fredricks or Fredrickson, something like that, he used to keep a loaded Mossberg behind the bar. Discharged that bad boy on a number of occasions, never at anyone, just to, you know, get everybody’s attention. That was when Hal Sluicer was chief of police in Yellow Lake. He never seemed to take much notice of what went on down at Jacque’s. Turned out Fredrickson, or whatever his name was, was paying Sluicer off. Eventually Sluicer got his ass fired. Yellow Lake went for a spell without a regular police presence and contracted with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement during that time.”

“You ever get a call down there?”

“Oh, yeah. That place kept us plenty busy.”

“Ever run into an Indian there name of Indigo Broom?”

“Broom? From the rez? Sure, Broom was right at home.”

“How about Monique Cavanaugh?”

Borkman seemed surprised. “What would a woman like her be doing in a place like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That lady had class. No way she’d be caught dead in a joint like that.”

“Maybe if she wore a wig and called herself something else?”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. Forget it.”

“Naw, you asked. Why?”

“The truth is, Cy, that I’m thinking there was some connection between Monique Cavanaugh and Indigo Broom. But they moved in such different circles, I can’t figure out how they would have stumbled onto each other. I thought a place like Jacque’s might have provided the opportunity.”

“A woman like her with a guy like Broom? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t. Forget I said anything.”

Borkman sat quietly for some time sipping his beer. Cork watched a sailboat back from its slip, come around, and head out into the lake under the power of its engine. When it cleared the marina, a sail went up, an explosion of white against the blue of the sky, and the vessel tilted in the grip of the wind and glided east across the water.

“Jesus,” Borkman said. “Oh, Jesus.”

Cork turned on his stool. “What?”

Borkman looked at him, and his eyes were big circles of wonderment.

“What is it, Cy?”

Borkman didn’t answer immediately. Cork could tell he was working through something in his head.

“Your father was a good man,” Borkman finally said, but so softly that Cork had to lean to him. “But he wasn’t a perfect man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, I shouldn’t be telling you this, you of all people.”

“Don’t crap out on me now, Cy.”

“It was decades ago, so I suppose …” Borkman gripped his beer with both hands, as if the mug was all that anchored him. “Look, your father was seeing another woman.”

“What?”

Borkman said, “It wasn’t that he didn’t love your mother. It’s just that sometimes a man, well, you understand.”

“No, Cy, I don’t. Enlighten me.”

“Look, the Vanishings had him all twisted up. He was going crazy. And frankly, your mother was riding him hard, because it looked like her people were the ones being targeted. He wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t particularly eager to go home at night. And, hell, you were being a little shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were a teenager, and, hell, teenagers are always difficult. And because the investigation took your dad away a lot those days, I suppose you were the one helping your mother through what she was dealing with and saw mostly her side of things. Anyway, you did nothing but give him grief and push him away, and I got the sense your mother was doing the same. He ended up getting pushed into the arms of a woman.”

“What woman?”

“I didn’t know who it was, but he met her at Jacque’s. And it wasn’t about love, Cork, I can tell you that.”

“What was it about?”

“Look, it happened like this. We got a disturbance call. Your father and me, we both responded, arrived in our cruisers about the same time. A couple of guys in the parking lot were beating the hell out of each other over a woman. A skanky looking thing, a peroxide blonde in a skirt that barely covered her ass. We broke up the fight. Didn’t book anybody, but the woman claimed she was afraid, so your father offered to give her a ride. He was gone a long time, longer than necessary, and when he came back into the department, there was something different about him. The kind of different easy to spot. Wouldn’t look me in the eye. None of my business, so I didn’t push him. We were in the middle of the investigation of the Vanishings, so he was out a lot anyway, but after that, sometimes when he was gone, I figured it had nothing to do with the job.”

“How’d you know?”

“A feeling. I knew your old man pretty well. Anyway, after the Cavanaugh woman disappeared, I didn’t see any more of that behavior from him.”

“And you’re saying what?”

“You were the one who said the Cavanaugh woman could’ve worn a wig and called herself something else. It’s pretty coincidental that after Monique Cavanaugh disappeared, your old man settled back down. And you know as well as I do that coincidence is never coincidence.”

Cork looked outside at the lake and tried to think clearly through a spin of unpleasant images.

Borkman said, “You asked about Monique Cavanaugh and Indigo Broom, so you must know something about her I don’t. Was she the kind of woman who could’ve got her jollies disguising herself and slumming it at Jacque’s? And if she was, was she the kind of woman who’d make your old man the kind of offer he couldn’t refuse?”

Before Cork could answer, his cell phone rang. Sheriff Dross.

“Cork, I wanted to let you know. That bloody fingerprint we found in Lauren Cavanaugh’s boathouse? We finally got a match.”

“Who is it?”

“Hattie Stillday. We just brought her in.”

THIRTY-ONE

Sheriff Marsha Dross looked tired but relieved. She wore her khaki uniform, something she usually did only when she had to face the media and wanted to be certain that the impact of her authority came through in every way possible. Agent Simon Rutledge sat in a chair in a corner of the office. He wore a tan sport coat, white shirt, and yellow tie. The knot on his tie was pulled down a comfortable few inches, and the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned. He was working a Rubik’s Cube and seemed to be paying very little attention to the conversation between Cork and the sheriff.

“When we showed up at her home to interview her, she took one look at us and told us everything,” Dross said. “We brought her back to the department. She refused an attorney and then repeated everything on videotape for us. She seemed happy to get it off her chest.”

“You believe her confession?” Cork sat on the far side of the sheriff’s desk, trying not to pay too much attention to the pounding in his head, which, despite the Tylenol, threatened to crack his skull wide open.

“The evidence is all there,” Dross said. “In the back of her pickup we found a canvas ground cloth with bloodstains on it. She claims she wrapped Cavanaugh’s body in it. Simon’s people are taking it down to Bemidji to analyze the stains. And she certainly knows things about the murder that we haven’t made public.”

“Like what?”

“That Cavanaugh was killed with a thirty-eight.”

“Does she have the weapon?”

“She claims she threw it into the lake.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere along the eastern shoreline, near the rez. She doesn’t remember exactly where.”

“What about the details of the shooting itself? Lauren Cavanaugh was shot twice, right? The graze and the fatal wound. What did Hattie have to say about that?”

“She was unclear about the number of shots she fired.”

“Unclear?”

“She said she fired once. I didn’t press the issue. But she told us other things only the killer would know.”

“Like what?”

“She claimed to know precisely the location of Lauren Cavanaugh’s car.”

“Which is where?”

“Sunk in a bog half a mile from the entrance you and Haddad found to the Vermilion Drift. Ed Larson and his crew are out there right now checking on it.”

“What was her motive for the killing?”

“She argued with Lauren Cavanaugh over payment for some photographs. She didn’t mean to kill her, just to threaten her. Things went south. An accident.”

“What was the deal with the photos?”

“Cavanaugh bought them but kept sidestepping the issue of payment. Finally Stillday demanded they be paid for or be returned. Cavanaugh flat-out refused, so Stillday confronted her in the boathouse with the gun. Bang.”

A diseased place, Cork thought. Meloux had been right.

Dross glanced at Rutledge, intent on his Rubik’s Cube, then said, “It makes sense, Cork. People get crazy when money’s involved.”

“And she put the body with the others already in the mine?”

“Yes.”

“How did she know about the Vermilion Drift?”

“On that subject, she’s saying nothing.”

“For now,” Rutledge said without looking up.

Cork thought that before too long Hattie Stillday would be “Simonized.”

“Did she say where she got the murder weapon?”

“Claims she’s had it for years. Came down to her from some dead relative on the reservation.”

“Does she know the thirty-eight was also the weapon that killed Monique Cavanaugh?”

“She didn’t offer any information that would indicate she did. Like I said, she wasn’t inclined to talk about the Vanishings.”

“What about the threatening notes Max Cavanaugh and the others have received?”

“She says she doesn’t know anything about those. And she finally refused to answer any more questions without an attorney.”

“Has she retained one?”

“She called Oliver Bledsoe’s office.”

Bledsoe ran the Office of Legal Affairs for the Iron Lake Ojibwe.

“The counselor was down in Duluth for a hearing, but he’s on his way back,” Dross continued. “Should be here in an hour or so.”

“Did she say when the killing took place?”

“A week ago Sunday.”

“That’s right in keeping with the M.E.’s assessment,” Cork agreed. “Did she give you a time?”

“Apparently there was some kind of meeting at the center that night. Hattie says she waited outside until it was over and Lauren Cavanaugh went to the boathouse, where she confronted and shot her.”

“Mind if I talk to Hattie?”

“I guess not. Provided she’s willing. Okay with you, Simon?”

“Sure,” Rutledge said in a distracted way.

“I’ll have her brought to the interview room,” Dross offered.

“Thanks.”

Rutledge held up the Rubik’s Cube, solved. “I hear you’ve got yourself quite a headache, Cork.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Around. What happened?”

“My best guess is that someone on the rez isn’t particularly happy with my investigation.”

“Any idea who?”

“Still working that one out, Simon.”

“And you’ll be sure to let us know when you do?”

“Absolutely.”

Rutledge gave Cork a Mona Lisa smile and started undoing the puzzle he’d just solved.

Hattie Stillday sat with her old hands folded on the tabletop in the interview room.

“This is serious, Hattie,” Cork said from across the table.

“I know that, Corkie.”

“Have you ever been in jail before?”

“Hell, yes. In Youngstown, Ohio, back in ’fifty-two when I was shooting photos of the steelworkers’ strike. And again in Pittsburgh a few days later. Now that was a fine time in labor history. And two years ago during the vigil at Fort Benning. I’ve always been rather proud of my incarcerations.”

“That’s good, Hattie, because if your confession stands up, you’ll very likely finish your life in prison.”

“I didn’t mean to kill that woman, Corkie.”

“But kill her you did.”

“Intent matters,” she said, as if she knew the law. “And what do you mean if my confession stands up?”

“There are things about this killing that you don’t know.”

“I know everything about this killing. I was there.”

“How many shots were fired from your gun, Hattie?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“You just told me you knew everything.”

“This old brain of mine doesn’t always remember all that it should. And it wasn’t exactly like I was playing mah-jongg.”

“You told the sheriff you killed Lauren Cavanaugh over money. Is that true?”

“I said it, didn’t I? That woman was a cheat.”

“You killed her because she was a cheat? We have courts to help people get what’s rightfully theirs, Hattie.”

“You think a court is going to side with an old Shinnob woman over a rich white woman like Lauren Cavanaugh?” She laughed, as if the idea was absurd.

“So you killed her?”

“You keep coming back to that. Yes, I killed her. I’d kill her again.”

“You said it was an accident.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m unhappy with the outcome.”

“Do yourself a favor, Hattie. Don’t say that to anyone. By the way, where did you get the gun you used?”

“Oh, I’ve had that for years.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“I don’t remember exactly. A cousin or something.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Threw it into the lake.”

“But you don’t remember where?”

She tapped her head. “Like I said, rusty thinking sometimes.”

“You waited outside the Northern Lights Center until the meeting was over and everyone had left, then you followed Lauren Cavanaugh to the boathouse. Is that how it happened?”

“No. That’s just how I got to the boathouse. How it happened involved pulling a trigger, Corkie. I’m tired. I think I’m all done talking for now.” She moved her chair back and made ready to stand.

“Does Ophelia know you’re here?”

“I don’t think so,” Hattie said.

“Would you like me to tell her?”

“Would you?”

“Sure.” He stood, crossed to the button near the door that would call for the jailer, but hesitated before pressing it. “Hattie, is this why you were with Henry Meloux last night? Was this what you were planning?”

“You’ve always been a curious person,” Hattie replied. “Like your father. Always asking questions. I hope the answers, if you find them, make you happier than they made him.”

Cork buzzed, and a moment later Dross opened the door, accompanied by a matron who took Hattie Stillday away.

“Did she tell you anything more?” the sheriff asked.

“Nothing you didn’t already know.”

Dross nodded and said, “Ed Larson just called. He found Lauren Cavanaugh’s car exactly where Hattie Stillday said it would be.”

THIRTY-TWO

Ophelia Stillday bent toward the camera mounted on a tripod on the back lawn of the old Parrant estate. Even though it was called the Northern Lights Center for the Arts, Cork never thought of it that way. “The old Parrant estate” inevitably came to mind, a name that called up all the darkness of that diseased place.

Ophelia was intent on her photography, a shoot that, as nearly as Cork could tell, was focused on Iron Lake. It was late afternoon, and the sunlight was the soft color of goldenrod. The lake was beautiful, but he’d seen so many photographs of it over the years that even to his pedestrian eye the subject seemed a little tired.

He coughed as he approached, a subtle announcement of his presence. Ophelia straightened up and turned to greet him.

“Boozhoo, Ophelia,” he said.

She smiled pleasantly. “Hello, Mr. O.C.”

“Beautiful day for a shoot.”

“My grandmother says there’s no such thing as a day unsuited to photography. She says the eye of the artist should always be able to discern the opportunity in any circumstance.”

“It’s your grandmother that brings me here,” Cork said. “Did you know she’s in the Tamarack County Jail at the moment?”

“Grandma Hattie? What for?”

“She confessed to killing Lauren Cavanaugh.”

Ophelia looked genuinely stricken. “I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true. She claims the killing was an accident and that it was all about payment for some photographs. Do you know anything about that situation?”

Ophelia didn’t respond. She seemed overwhelmed with trying to wrap her thinking around her grandmother’s situation.

“Ophelia?”

“Yes,” she said in a dazed way. “I knew about it. I told you the center was in financial trouble. But Grandma Hattie would never kill someone over something like that.”

“What would she kill someone over?”

That snapped her awake, and she shot Cork an angry look.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was uncalled for. The truth is I’m having trouble buying her confession, especially considering the motive she’s given. I’ve known your grandmother all my life. She’s never cared anything about money. Whenever she’s had it, she’s given it away. So I’m thinking either she’s not telling the truth about killing Lauren Cavanaugh or she’s being untruthful about her motive.”

“She didn’t kill Lauren Cavanaugh,” Ophelia stated with absolute certainty. “Grandma Hattie couldn’t kill anybody. I need to go to her. Will they let me see her?”

“You can always ask.”

She turned and started away, then spun back. “My cane,” she said.

Cork picked up her cane from where it lay on the lawn near the tripod and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she said and hobbled quickly toward the big house.

When he was alone, Cork headed to the boathouse where Lauren Cavanaugh had probably been killed. The door was barred with crime scene tape. He tried the knob. Locked. He walked the perimeter, peering in at every window, recalling that the boathouse had been remodeled into what was essentially a large boudoir, which made him think about the morning he’d been there with Ophelia and then Derek Huff had walked in.

He recrossed the lawn and came to the tripod and the camera, which Ophelia Stillday in her haste had left behind. It looked like an expensive piece of equipment with a powerful telescopic lens affixed. He thought he’d best take it into the big house, but before he did, he bent and squinted to look at the image she’d been framing for her shot. He almost laughed. Iron Lake hadn’t been the real subject of her interest. Brought marvelously close by the power of the lens was the image of Derek Huff, swimming laps far out in the lake. With every stroke, his great swimmer’s hands flung droplets of water into the air, where they arced, sparkling like diamonds.

Simon Rutledge was sitting in the swing on Cork’s front porch when Cork returned from walking Trixie that evening. Trixie bounded up the steps, jumped on the swing, and greeted the BCA agent with little woofs and a wagging tail. Cork wasn’t as enthusiastic.

“Evening, Simon,” he said.

“Cork,” Rutledge replied.

“Come on, Trixie,” Cork said, calling the dog to his side. “What’s up, Simon?”

Rutledge took a moment, as if composing himself, and began in a tone that was clearly part of an architecture of diplomacy. “We’ve known each other a long time, Cork. We’ve worked a number of difficult cases together. I’ve thought of us as friends as well as colleagues. The thing is, I think I can read you pretty well. And what I’m seeing right now concerns me.”

“What are you seeing?”

“Mist.”

“Mist? Is this a riddle, Simon?”

“Definitely. And the answer to the riddle is whatever is behind the mist, whatever it is that you’re trying to keep us from seeing.”

“You think I haven’t been honest with you?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that you haven’t been completely honest. I get the feeling that you’re throwing us bones, Cork, and keeping the meat for yourself.”

A fair reading of the situation, Cork decided. In truth, he appreciated that Rutledge was approaching him this way rather than in some kind of confrontation with Sheriff Dross or Captain Ed Larson present.

“What would you like from me, Simon?”

“How about a name?”

“What name?”

“I think you know a lot more than you’re telling about the Vanishings. I think you might even have a suspect in mind.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Ah, you see? You didn’t say I was wrong. Give me a name.”

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

“I need a little more time.”

“You’re asking a lot.”

“Not really. What went on over forty years ago is ancient history, Simon. For those involved, it’s over.”

“Not quite over. There’s Lauren Cavanaugh.”

“Did you Simonize Hattie yet?”

Rutledge smiled at the reference to his interview technique. “I questioned her. Her attorney was present.”

“What did she tell you?”

“I think that’s something I’ll hold on to.”

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you a name if you tell me what Hattie Stillday said when you questioned her.”

Rutledge thought it over for a second. “Deal. You first.”

“Indigo Broom,” Cork said.

“What’s that?”

“The name of a man reviled by the Ojibwe on the Iron Lake Reservation more than forty years ago.”

“Responsible for the Vanishings?”

“I believe so.”

“How do you know this?”

“I’ve asked a lot of questions and put the answers together. That headache you heard about. Someone coldcocked me this morning when I was at the site of Indigo Broom’s cabin.”

“What were you looking for?”

“I didn’t know exactly. I just wanted to see where he lived. The cabin burned to the ground around the time the Vanishings ended, and Broom disappeared the same time. Word on the reservation was that he’d left to visit relatives and never returned. I think that wasn’t true. I think he was burned along with his cabin. And one more thing, Simon. I found manacles in the ruins. My guess is that’s where the victims were killed.”

“Where is this place?”

“A couple of miles north of the entrance Haddad and I found to the Vermilion Drift. I’ll draw you a map. Now, what about Hattie Stillday?”

“One more question first. Do you have any idea who coldcocked you?”

“Not at the moment. Like I told you this afternoon, I’m still working that one out. Honest.”

“All right.” Rutledge got up and stood at the porch railing. He looked across the quiet street, where rooftops half hid the setting sun. “Hattie Stillday definitely had something to do with the murder of Lauren Cavanaugh, but I haven’t figured out what exactly. She knows some things, she hedges on others, and to some of my questions she gave the wrong answer.”

“Like what?”

“Her story is that when she confronted Cavanaugh the woman went berserk. Began throwing things. Stillday moved to avoid one of the items and the gun went off. I asked her how far away from Cavanaugh she was at that point. She said a few feet. But according to the medical examiner, the powder burn indicates the shot was fired point-blank. Another thing. I asked her about the murder weapon, the thirty-eight she claims she’s had forever. I asked her if she ever cleaned the weapon. She said she did. I asked her how she went about it. She couldn’t answer.”

“What did she have to say about getting rid of the body?”

“You’ve been thinking about that, too?” Rutledge smiled, as if it made perfect sense to him. “Her story is that she panicked, drove back to the rez, thought better of it, and came back to the center to clean things up and get rid of the body. I asked her how she managed to drive her truck, with Cavanaugh’s body wrapped in a tarp, out to the rez and also get Cavanaugh’s car out there. She wouldn’t answer me. She’s a tough lady, but I saw worry on her face, Cork.”

“What did she say about the Vermilion Drift and the bodies there?”

“Absolutely nothing. When I tried to take the questioning in the direction of the Vanishings, she clammed up. Her attorney wouldn’t let her answer any questions about the old killings. I got the feeling that, even if Oliver Bledsoe hadn’t been present, Hattie Stillday would have told me squat about what happened over forty years ago. Is it possible she threw in with Broom back then?”

“Absolutely not, Simon. Hattie lost a child to the Vanishings. If it was Indigo Broom behind those killings, and I’m almost positive it was, the business Hattie had with him was a different kind of business entirely.”

Rutledge stared at Cork for a moment. “You said Broom was burned along with his cabin. An accident?”

Cork shook his head. “I’d say justice.”

The two men both stared toward the sunset, where the sky was going red.

“Simon, Hattie insists that she had nothing to do with the second set of threatening notes. Do you believe her?”

“Yeah, I do. Why would she confess to the killing but lie about that?”

“You know what it means?”

Simon’s face was a red mask reflecting the vermilion sky. “It means we’re still in the dark in a lot of ways.”

“And,” Cork added, “it means people associated with Vermilion One might still be in harm’s way.”

THIRTY-THREE

After Rutledge had gone, Cork got out the box given to him by Millie Joseph that contained his mother’s journals. Since his conversation with Cy Borkman that afternoon, he’d been chewing on questions for which he had no answer. Had Borkman read the situation right? Had his father really been involved with another woman? If so, could that woman have been Monique Cavanaugh? Did his mother know?

He took the box to the patio and, in the warm blue of summer twilight, sat down and began to read.

January 1, 1965

We didn’t celebrate the beginning of this new year. We have no reason to celebrate. My husband is dead. My niece is dead, killed by a madwoman and an Ojibwe majimanidoo. And we who are left abide with our guilt, an uncomfortable companion in all our hours. I miss Liam so much. I will miss him forever.

His mother had known about Monique Cavanaugh’s involvement in the Vanishings, and something had happened in all that terrible, chaotic time that left her with guilt, an uncomfortable companion in all our hours. Was it something to do with Monique Cavanaugh’s death? Was it guilt over having driven her husband away, driven him into another woman’s arms? Guilt because there’d been no reconciliation before he died? But the guilt was some kind of collective guilt as well: . . . we who are left. Had she meant Cork, who, according to Borkman, had been party to driving his father away? Or had she meant someone else?

He read entry after entry with no indication of remonstration against his father for unfaithfulness. Yet Borkman had been certain of the infidelity, uncertain only of the true identity of the woman his father had picked up at Jacque’s.

Cork closed his eyes, trying hard to remember those days. He blanked. He recalled clearly the hospital vigil he’d kept with his mother while Liam O’Connor lay dying, but before that so much was missing, which was something he’d never really thought about before. Memories were always spotty at best, snapshots put together to create the sense of a more detailed whole. But the summer of 1964 was different. It wasn’t just that there were no snapshots; it was a sense that, like those missing pages of his mother’s journal, something important had been torn out.

It was nearly dark when he put the journals back into the box and went inside. He took the Rolodex from the desk in his office and flipped to a number he hadn’t called in quite a while. He got voice messaging.

“This is Dr. Gray. I can’t take your call at the moment. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

Cork waited for the beep. “Faith, it’s Cork O’Connor. I know you get this all the time, but here goes. I need your help and I need it now.”

A summer storm moved in after dark, bringing a steady rain. Cork was preparing a night deposit slip at Sam’s Place when Dr. Faith Gray returned his call. It was 10:45 P.M.

“You sounded pretty desperate,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Not really.”

“I’m at home if it’s an emergency.”

“I’d appreciate talking to you.”

“Come on over. I’ll leave the porch light on.”

Faith Gray lived four blocks from the O’Connor house, in a rambler painted light blue with yellow trim. She was a quirky homeowner, with no particular love of lawns. Her property was given over to hostas and planter boxes and rickety-looking trellis affairs without any apparent master plan. Sun catchers and medallions and odd, glittery bits hung on ribbons from the low branches of her trees. Here and there she’d stuck signs amid the foliage. The signs changed from time to time, depending upon the political season and the affairs of the world beyond Aurora, but they tended to praise peace and advocate justice and, in general, exhort people to follow a reasonable and compassionate path through the minefield of life.

Her porch light was on, as promised, and when Cork came out of the rain and mounted the front steps, she was already waiting at the door.

“Come in,” she said with a gracious smile.

She was tall, solid, big-boned, with lovely, long gray hair, a plain, angular face, and eyes the welcoming green of ivy leaves. “I’m having chamomile tea. Would you like some?”

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Have a seat.”

Her living room contained almost as much foliage as her yard, and Cork took an easy chair next to a healthy rubber tree plant.

“You look nice,” he said.

She sat on the sofa, which was backed by a shelf of ferns. “A date.”

“Do I know her?”

“This is about you,” she said. “Talk to me.”

“I need to remember some things, Faith.”

“Okay.”

“Things from my past. From my childhood. I try to reach back, and it’s like everything is there except the one thing I’m trying to remember.”

“That’s not unusual. Our memories are protective that way.”

“It’s important that I remember this period.”

“Why?”

“Is this confidential? Doctor-patient?”

Faith Gray was a psychologist. During his tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork had brought her on as a consultant to work on psychological assessments of new hires and to help establish guidelines and regulations concerning such things as treatment for deputies involved in officer-related shootings. He liked her. More important, he trusted her.

“I’ll consider it so,” she replied. “And I’ll bill you for this session. I ought to warn you, I charge overtime.” In response to his blank stare, she offered a smile. “That’s a joke, Cork.”

On the street outside, a car went past, and the sound of tires on the wet pavement was a long, heavy sigh. Faith Gray waited.

Cork gathered himself and said, “It’s about the Vanishings.”

He didn’t tell her everything. He left out the parts that might incriminate anyone, and focused on those elements that were about his family, particularly Borkman’s accusation concerning his father’s infidelity. As evidence that there were things hidden, he also told her about the missing journal pages. He asked if she could maybe hypnotize him in order to help him remember what happened in the late, fateful part of the summer of 1964.

“I don’t hypnotize people, Cork. But what I can do is guide you through some relaxation techniques that may help you retrieve the memories yourself.”

“What do we do?”

“Why don’t you start by lying down?”

They exchanged places, and Cork, once he’d laid himself on the sofa, could smell the hot chamomile tea in the cup on the end table.

“Close your eyes, and listen to my voice. What I’m going to do is offer you some suggestions meant to help your body and your mind relax. They’ll all be very simple and very safe, all right?”

“I’m ready,” Cork said.

She began in a soft voice and had him focus on his toes, on being aware of each of them. Gradually she moved up his body, toward the top of his head, but as she was leading him ever so gently through the relaxation of his eyes, Cork suddenly found himself in the middle of the nightmare, watching his father fall to his death.

He jerked awake.

“What is it?” Gray asked.

“Sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

“That happens sometimes.”

“I was dreaming. A nightmare.”

“Want to talk about it?”

He sat up and shook his head. “It was just a normal nightmare.”

“One you’ve had before?”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“They began a little over a year ago.”

“Is it the same nightmare every time?”

“Not exactly.”

She sat patiently. Outside the window, rain dripped off the roof and hit the leaves of her yard plants with steady little slaps. Finally Cork told her. About how, when his father fell, it was in different ways, and how the nightmare repeated itself, and how, the second time around, he stood outside and watched himself push his father to his death.

“Just a normal nightmare?” she said. “Cork, dreaming that you had a hand in killing your father isn’t exactly your usual thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-night nightmare.”

“All right, what is it?”

“What kind of relationship did you have with your father?”

“He was a terrific father. I loved him.”

“Yet time and again you push him to his death.”

“Not because I didn’t love him.”

“Why then?”

“You’re the mind reader. You tell me.”

“Any conflicts with him?”

“Not that I remember. Although people I talk to lately tell me differently.”

“What do they tell you?”

“That I was kind of a shit toward him.”

“But you don’t remember that?”

“No. It’s part of all that stuff I can’t recall.”

“How old were you when he died?”

“Thirteen.”

“It could be Oedipal,” she said.

“What? I wanted him out of the way so that I could sleep with my mother? Right.”

She shrugged. “I’m not a big fan of Freudian interpretations either.”

“So what else?”

“How did he die?”

Cork explained the shoot-out at the bank and the vigil at the hospital.

“You were with him when he died?”

“Yes. My mother was there, too. Praying her heart out.”

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you praying your heart out?”

He shook his head and realized the headache he’d had most of the day was coming back, big-time. “I knew it was hopeless.”

“Why?”

“Because the doctor said so.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Probably not. I wasn’t happy with God at that point.”

“Oh?”

“Didn’t believe him.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I’ve always thought it was my age.”

“Do you think it might have made a difference if you’d prayed?”

“Maybe. I suppose I’ve always wished I had.”

“So do you think it’s possible the root of the nightmare might be that you interpret not praying as pushing your father into his death?”

“I don’t need a nightmare to tell me that. I’ve always felt guilty and always wondered if I’d prayed like my mother would it have made a difference. I thought nightmares were about things you didn’t want to know about consciously.”

“Nightmares can be complicated and about more than a single thing. Our minds are pretty complex, and connections can be intricate. You told me that the nightmares began a little over a year ago. That would be shortly after your wife died, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes, Cork, when we see someone fall in our dreams, it may have to do with our own belief that we’re lacking an essential quality they possess or that we’ve let them down somehow.”

“But it was Jo I lost, not my father.”

“Do you believe your father would have saved Jo?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Just a question. But I think it’s a relevant one, considering when the nightmares began.”

“Nobody could have saved Jo.”

“You sound a little angry.”

“There’s a lot going on. I’m kind of wound up.”

“I understand.”

She waited and watched him, and when she didn’t offer anything further, he blurted, “Look, it’s not about Jo, okay?”

“If you say so.”

He pulled himself back, tried to quell his inexplicable anger, and said, “So what else could it be about?”

“It’s possible the nightmare has to do with something very particular, something you don’t remember from that time you can’t recall.”

“If it is, what do we do about it?”

“The truth is that nothing is ever lost. It’s all in there somewhere,” she said, tapping her head. “It could take a long time to crack that nut, Cork, but I’m willing to help you try. If you call my office tomorrow, I’ll see when I can work you in.”

“A long time?” Cork closed his eyes and rubbed his throbbing temples. “I’ll think about it. Do I still have time on this hour?”

“Sure.”

“What do you know about psychopathy?”

“That depends on what you’re interested in.”

“Can it be inherited?”

“There’s a lot of research that points toward a genetic component.”

“People can be born bad?”

“ ‘Bad’ is a judgmental term. But I believe people may be born without a conscience, yes. Environment also plays an important part in shaping psychopathic behavior. What you’re talking about is generally referred to these days as dissocial or antisocial personality disorder, and psychopaths are generally referred to as antisocial personalities.”

“A rose by any other name,” Cork said. “They’re good at hiding who they really are, right? Like Ted Bundy?”

“They can be very good. They’re often bright, and although they don’t feel remorse or guilt or empathy the way most people do, they know how to mask that. There have been a number of famous cases in which serial killers were able to hide their activities from wives or husbands or parents. But just because someone might be diagnosed with this disorder, that doesn’t mean they’re dangerous like Ted Bundy was dangerous. These traits can make them very successful in competitive environments, like business or politics.”

“Are you saying our politicians are psychopaths?”

She smiled. “Some of them, probably. As were some of the great robber barons and industrialists, certainly.”

“But they didn’t kill people, at least not outright, not like Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. What makes someone do that?”

“We’re outside my comfort zone of knowledge here, Cork. If you’d like, I’ll do a little research on the subject. I know a couple of colleagues who are better versed in psychopathic behavior than I am. I’ll be glad to talk to them.”

“Thanks, Faith.” He stood up, prepared to leave.

“You’ll call tomorrow, make an appointment?”

“I’ll think about it seriously.”

But what he was really thinking was that he needed answers sooner than Faith Gray was going to be able to supply them.

It was still raining when he got home. As Cork stepped from the garage, Trixie poked her nose out the door of her doghouse and woofed. He freed her and let her in the house, gave her a fresh bowl of food and fresh water, took some Tylenol for himself, went out to the front porch, and sat on the swing. A few moments later, Trixie scratched at the screen, and Cork let her out so that she could join him.

They sat together while rain made everything that was illuminated by the streetlamps look liquid. The swing had been an important part of Cork’s life. He and Jo used to sit in it after the kids had finally gone to bed, and they’d talked about the things that parents and married people and longtime lovers discuss in quiet voices meant not to be overheard. He missed that. Missed Jo. Although his deep grieving had long ago ended, he still sometimes found himself feeling terribly sad and abandoned. His children were gone, establishing their own lives, and that was only natural. But where did it leave him? What was the road ahead for a man who was no longer a husband and was a father mostly at a distance?

Thinking of all these things brought him back to the question Faith Gray had posed earlier: Did he think his father might have saved Jo? It seemed like a question out of left field, but it had stung him, and he wondered now where his anger had come from. He wasn’t angry at Jo. He didn’t believe he was angry at his father. And although he’d snapped at her, he hadn’t been angry at Faith Gray.