Vermilion Drift

“So who am I pissed at?” he asked aloud, putting the question to Trixie, who only looked up at him with her brown eyes and then nudged his hand to be petted.

At long last, Cork went back inside and headed upstairs to bed, where his only company for a long time had been his nightmares.

THIRTY-FOUR

Cork slept surprisingly well and woke with several ideas rolling around in his head, knocking together like ball bearings. He was eager to get some of them out of there.

His first stop that morning was the sheriff’s department. Marsha Dross was at her desk, sipping from a big coffee mug. She had a thick folder open in front of her and was so intent on what it held that she didn’t notice Cork’s arrival. His “Good morning” startled her, and she spilled coffee over the documents and swore. She looked for something to wipe up the mess, had nothing at hand and, when Cork offered a clean handkerchief, accepted it, almost grudgingly.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I didn’t expect to see you so early.” She handed his handkerchief back, damp and stained.

“You look like you could use a couple more hours of sleep.”

“I could use some sleep period,” she said.

“A case like this, a lot of monkeys on your back, I imagine.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I sat in that chair for seven years. Believe me, I do.”

“Oh, is that so?” She stood up and leaned toward him, not in a friendly way. “You ever have an old serial killing and new murder dovetail? You ever have the newspapers call the department, and I quote, ‘rural and rudimentary’? You ever had the entire board of commissioners visit you at ten P.M. on a Friday night to insist that you do more to, and I quote again, ‘resolve this unfortunate situation before Tamarack County becomes the new Amityville Horror’?”

“Not really,” Cork said. “Guess I must’ve been a better sheriff, huh?”

She gave him a hostile stare, then took stock of his smile, and finally let her body relax. “Have a chair,” she said. When she’d retaken her own, she asked, “So what brings you here too early on a Saturday morning?”

“A few questions about your confessed murderer, Hattie Stillday. I’m not convinced you’re getting the true story there.”

“Nor am I. Rutledge said he filled you in. She knows things only the killer would know, but she’s also wrong on some pertinent facts. She’s involved, I’m just not sure in what way exactly.”

“Are you going to hold her?”

“It’s the weekend, so we can hold her without charges until court opens on Monday. I’m hoping we can use that time to work loose some better answers and maybe get some disturbing loose ends tied up. I’d hate to have someone of her reputation falsely charged. Definitely wouldn’t look good for this ‘rural and rudimentary’ department.”

“Did you do a follow-up interview with Derek Huff at the Northern Lights Center?”

“Ed Larson took that.”

“And?”

“Huff and Lauren Cavanaugh were involved sexually. That’s all there was to it, he insists. Sex. He was pretty open and nonchalant about it. Made it sound like not an unusual thing for a California kid, having sex with a woman twice your age.”

“Kind of makes me wish I’d grown up out there.” Cork smiled briefly.

Dross leveled a sober look at him, then went on. “If Hattie Stillday is right about the time of Lauren Cavanaugh’s death, Huff has an alibi. He was out drinking with Sonny Gilroy. Larson confirmed that.”

“Did he talk about the nature of the sex with Lauren Cavanaugh?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got my suspicions that Cavanaugh was not exactly the lady she led people to believe she was. Bed is a place where masks get dropped pretty quickly.”

“Maybe I’ll have Ed talk to the kid again, push that issue,” Dross said. “Have you come up with anything more in your own investigation?”

“You mean besides the probability that a Shinnob named Indigo Broom was responsible for the Vanishings and that he probably tortured and cannibalized his victims?”

“For God sake, don’t say that to anyone with a pen and pad in their hand. Rutledge is in Bemidji this morning, discussing that possibility with Agent Upchurch.”

“I’m pretty sure she’ll confirm it.”

“If it’s true, we’ll probably have to make it public at our press conference this afternoon. As for the possibility that Broom was burned along with his cabin, Ed and his guys are out there this morning, sifting through ash, looking for evidence. Depending on what they find, that could open a whole other can of worms on the rez. Cork, you’re getting some good information out there, but I’ll need to know names at some point.”

“I understand.” He stood up. “If I come up with anything else, I’ll let you know. You’ll do the same?”

“That’s our deal, isn’t it?”

They both smiled.

There was a program in progress at the Northern Lights Center, a showing. The lawn, still sparkling from the rain the night before, was set with easels displaying pieces by the current residents, who stood or sat next to their work. A long table had been set with refreshments and with a stack of brochures about the artists and the center in general. Cork ate a mini cinnamon roll and watched people milling about, moving from easel to easel, pausing, nodding, talking with the artists. Near the boathouse was a larger display, several easels with work clearly by the same artist, the featured artist, Derek Huff, who stood bathing in the glory offered him by the people of that rural and rudimentary county.

It was Ophelia Stillday whom Cork had come to talk to. He wanted to know if she was aware of the relationship between Derek Huff and Lauren Cavanaugh. But Ophelia was nowhere to be seen.

He wandered onto a large, recently constructed flagstone patio and walked through French doors into the house. It was quiet, and the enormous place felt empty. He made his way to Ophelia’s office, where he found the door closed but unlocked. He swung it open and was surprised to find Max Cavanaugh seated at Ophelia’s desk, intent on the contents of a file folder opened in front of him.

“Max?”

Cavanaugh looked up, startled. “Hey, Cork.”

“What are you doing here?”

Cavanaugh sat back and shook his head. “Battling, in a way.”

Cork came into the room and approached the desk. “What do you mean?”

“I never come here. I hate this place. When I was a kid, for years after we moved away, I had nightmares about it.”

“Lauren didn’t feel the same way, apparently.”

“Christ, I tried to talk her out of buying the estate, but she had her heart set on it. I knew nothing good would come from her being here.” His face contorted in a way that made Cork wonder if he was ill. “Can’t you feel it? This place is evil.”

“Mudjimushkeeki,” Cork said. “An Ojibwe word. It means ‘bad medicine.’”

“It’s certainly been bad medicine for my family.”

“So if you hate this place, why are you here?”

“You asked me for information about my parents during the time my mother was alive. I thought maybe Lauren might have something. She always had a fascination where our mother was concerned.”

“She was pretty young when your mother died.”

“Too young to remember her at all. Maybe the reason for the wonderment.”

“Have you found anything?”

“No.”

Cork nodded toward the folder opened on the desk. “Those look like financial documents. Anything to do with your mother?”

Cavanaugh closed the folder. Cork saw that on the outside someone had doodled a figure that looked like a dog or a wolf. “They deal with the center. As long as I was here, I thought I’d check on the financial mess Lauren left behind.”

“They’re holding Hattie Stillday for her murder. You’ve heard?”

“Yeah. I got a call. I was always afraid that Lauren’s shenanigans would get her into real trouble someday. I just never figured they would get her killed.”

“You think Hattie’s guilty?”

“I don’t know Ms. Stillday well enough to say one way or the other. But the sheriff told me there’s a lot of evidence pointing her way. And, hell, she confessed.”

“Yeah,” Cork admitted. “There’s that.”

Cavanaugh stood up, took the folder to one of the file cabinets, and slipped it into a drawer. When he turned back, he looked drained. “I’ve got to get out of here. This place is killing me.”

“I understand.”

Cork walked him to the front door, where Cavanaugh said, “You coming?”

“No, I’m here for the art show. Think I’ll stroll around some more. Take care of yourself, Max.”

Cavanaugh looked at him with eyes still sunk deeply in sadness. “You told me the other day, Cork, that time would heal. How much time does it take?”

Cork put his hand on Cavanaugh’s shoulder. “More,” he said.

After Cavanaugh had gone, Cork returned to Ophelia’s office and pulled open the file drawer in which Max had put the folder. He thumbed through until he found the one with the canine doodle on the front. The folder was marked “Stillday, H.”

Cork opened it and found several invoices for artwork. A yellow Post-it was affixed to the first invoice. On it was a handwritten note: Pay this, you stinking whore!

Hattie’s writing? Cork wondered.

He put the folder back in the drawer, left the office, and headed down the hallway toward the north wing, which had been Lauren Cavanaugh’s private residence. The door to the wing was unlocked. He retraced the steps he’d taken only a few days earlier, when he’d first been hired to find Max Cavanaugh’s sister: through the study, the parlor, the dining room, the bedroom. As he went, he noted again the artworks that hung on every wall. Some were paintings, oil and watercolor and other media he couldn’t even guess at. Many were photographs, a lot of them by Hattie Stillday but a few by Ophelia as well. The approaches of both women were similar, though Hattie clearly had the more seasoned eye. Her nature photographs didn’t just frame a scene, they evoked atmosphere and mood and texture. They suggested story. He wondered which of the photographs were those Lauren Cavanaugh had purchased but never paid for, photographs important enough that Hattie claimed she had killed for them.

He sat on Lauren Cavanaugh’s bed, wondering if this was where she’d had her romps with Derek Huff, or had she used the bed in the boathouse for that? He opened the drawers of her dresser again and went through her vanity. He checked her closets. He returned to the study and rifled the drawers of the desk. He came up empty-handed, even though he hadn’t really known what he was looking for. He sat in an easy chair in the parlor and stared at the east wall, which was hung with an arranged display of photographs of the North Country. Three of the photos together formed a long panoramic view of a dramatic shoreline. They’d been shot in black and white, an odd choice, Cork thought, when the subject in reality was so vivid in its color—Iron Lake, which would have been hard blue against the powder blue of the sky, the face of a rock cliff, probably the gray of wolf fur, topped with aspens whose trunks were ivory and whose leaves would have been pale jade. He’d never understand art or artists, he decided, and got up and started away.

He’d reached the French doors and was about to step outside when it hit him. He turned and hurried back to the parlor and stood in front of the three photographs. The reason he’d been able to visualize the colors of the scene so well, he realized, was because he knew the place. A place of bimaadiziwin. It was where Cork’s revolver had been hidden but was no more.

Although he could already tell who’d taken the photos, he leaned close and read the artist’s tag to be absolutely certain.

Ophelia Stillday.

THIRTY-FIVE

He asked at the refreshment table if anyone knew where Ophelia Stillday was. They pointed him toward the dock behind the boathouse, and he found her there, sitting by herself on a bench with her cane at her side. She stared out at Iron Lake, where a few sailboats clipped across the water, the triangles of their canvases like white knives cutting the air. She didn’t hear him coming.

“Ophelia?”

Though he spoke gently, she looked at him with surprise and, he sensed, a little bit of fear.

“Okay if I join you?”

She didn’t invite him immediately. She had to think it over.

“I guess,” she finally said.

He sat next to her on the bench.

“You look worried,” he said.

“About Grandma Hattie,” she replied and returned to watching the sailboats.

“You know what I think about Hattie, Ophelia? I think she didn’t do what she says she did.”

Ophelia stared hard at the sailboats.

“I think she’s covering for someone else. It must be someone she loves a lot, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said without heart.

“I think you would. Ophelia, tell me about shooting Lauren Cavanaugh.”

When she finally looked at him, it was with something like relief. “How did you know?”

“Because I know where you got the gun. It’s a place on the rez, a place of bimaadiziwin, of healing. How did you learn about it?”

“Grandma Hattie,” Ophelia said. “She’s shown me a lot of places sacred to our people. She never photographs them herself, but she said if I thought I could do them justice and be respectful that it would be all right.”

“You went into the cave?”

“Yes. That wasn’t part of what Grandma Hattie had in mind, I know, but I wanted to understand the full importance of the place, of bimaadiziwin.”

“You took the gun?”

“Not then, but I knew it was there. When I finally understood Lauren, the real evil in her, I went back. But I only wanted to threaten her with the gun, not kill her.”

“When you took it, the gun wasn’t loaded, Ophelia.”

“I bought cartridges. I went to a store in Eveleth so no one would recognize me.”

“Most people when threatened with a firearm wouldn’t know whether it’s loaded. The firearm itself is usually enough to scare them. Putting bullets in, Ophelia, that makes me wonder.”

She looked back at the sailboats, then up where an egret flew above them, white and elegant. “I don’t know. Maybe I did want her dead. She was an awful person.”

“Tell me about her.”

She sighed deeply. “She wasn’t anything like she made people believe. I mean she was smart and charming and all that, but it was all surface. Below that everything about her was dark. She lied. She connived. She manipulated. She had no sense of decency. But unless you were around her all the time, like I was, you wouldn’t know because she was so good at keeping it hidden.”

“Why didn’t you leave her when you discovered what she was really like?”

“She promised to make sure the right people saw my work.”

“That’s it?”

She looked away.

“What else, Ophelia? It’s all going to come out anyway, so you might as well tell me.”

She laughed, but it was a sound without joy. “What was it you told me on the courthouse steps? The reasons people kill?”

She swung her eyes toward Cork, her young, pained eyes, and he understood.

“You loved her,” he said.

“And I thought she loved me. She told me this leg of mine, this ugly, crippled thing, didn’t matter to her. She told me she saw something beautiful in me and in my work.” She was crying now, softly. “And I believed her.”

“Oh, Ophelia,” he said and took her in his arms and let her cry.

To love and to be loved, he thought. Oh, God, who didn’t want that? And what parent didn’t want this simple blessing for his child?

“It’s all right, Ophelia,” he cooed. “It’s all right.” As her sobs subsided, he asked gently, “So there’s nothing between you and Derek?”

She shook her head. “I hated him at first. I thought he took Lauren from me. Then I realized Lauren simply used people and threw them away. But she didn’t let go of them until she was ready, and I realized Derek was a prisoner just like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanted out of it. She wouldn’t let him. She told him if he left her, she’d ruin him. She’d see to it that no one paid any attention to his work.”

“The night you shot her, would you tell me about that?”

She wiped her eyes, then folded her hands and stared at them awhile, gathering herself before she began.

“We’d met with some of the center volunteers to talk about the new group of resident artists who would be arriving the next day. It was a kind of a cocktail thing. Lauren had a little too much to drink. After everyone left, she went to the boathouse. She called Derek from there and said she wanted to see him. He came down from his room angry. I was finishing up some work in my office. He stormed in and told me he felt like a servant being called to a duty. He basically said to hell with her and went into town instead to drink with Sonny Gilroy.”

Gilroy was a local wildlife artist, a guy who liked his Johnnie Walker and painted great ducks.

“After he’d gone,” Ophelia went on, “Lauren called me, demanded I get Derek out there. I’d had the gun for a while. I’d been imagining what it would be like to confront her with it. I don’t know why exactly, but that night I decided it was time to find out. Maybe I’d had a little too much to drink, too. The truth is that I hated her. I hated what she’d done to me and I hated what she was doing to Derek. Everything in me just … hated her. So I loaded the gun with the cartridges I bought and went to the boathouse. I knocked. She told me to come in, and when she saw that it wasn’t Derek, she went crazy, screaming at me all kinds of obscenities. I pointed the gun at her. Honest, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. But it was like she didn’t even get it. She screamed something like, ‘Oh just give me that thing, you stupid bitch.’ She started throwing stuff at me, whatever she could put her hands on. I tried to jump out of the way.” She stopped, thought, then finished, “And the gun … just went off.”

“How many times?” Cork asked.

“Once.”

“You fired the revolver only once?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m positive. I was horrified. I mean, oh, God, I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I turned and I ran.”

“Did the bullet hit her?”

“I guess. She fell back anyway.”

“Did you take the gun?”

“When I got back to my office, I didn’t have it. So I don’t know, I must have dropped it. I was, like, in shock. I didn’t know what to do. I left the center.”

“And drove home to your grandma Hattie?”

“Yes.”

“What did Hattie do?”

“Everything. She heard me out, and then we drove back to the center in her truck. There was Lauren lying dead on the boathouse floor. Grandma Hattie told me to help her, and we wrapped the body in a canvas tarp and put it in the back of the pickup. We cleaned up all the blood. Then I took Lauren’s keys and got her car and followed Grandma Hattie out to the rez. She showed me where to ditch the car, and she drove me home and dropped me there. She said she’d take care of the body. She made me swear that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone, that I would just pretend I knew nothing. And that’s what I did.”

“When Lauren’s body was found with the others in the Vermilion Drift, did you ask Hattie about that?”

“Yes.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. She said I should never ask about that again, ever, and I haven’t.”

“Okay, back to the shooting in the boathouse. How far away was Lauren when you shot her?”

“I don’t know. Ten feet.”

“You’re sure?”

She thought a moment. “Yeah, pretty sure.”

“Did she fall down?”

“Yes.”

“Straight down, or did she fall back?”

She thought a moment. “She kind of stumbled back, like she was surprised or something, and then fell down.”

“On her back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“When you returned with Hattie, how was Lauren lying?”

Her brow furrowed, and she worked at remembering. “Facedown. I know because, when we lifted her up, there was blood all over the front of her dress and on the side of her face that had been on the floor.”

“What time was this?”

“After midnight, maybe twelve-thirty.”

“How long were you gone to Hattie’s?”

“Maybe an hour and a half.”

“So you shot Lauren at what time?”

“It was a couple of minutes before eleven when Derek left. I went to the boathouse a few minutes later, and I wasn’t inside more than a minute when it all happened.”

“When you left to go to Hattie’s, did anybody see you?”

“I don’t think so. Except for my office, the lights in the center were off. All the volunteers who’d had cocktails with us had gone home. The house staff were off for the weekend.” She reached out for her cane. “I need to go now. I need to get Grandma Hattie out of jail.”

Cork reached out and put a gentle restraining hand on her arm. “I’d like you to wait on that, Ophelia.”

“Why?”

“Your grandmother can’t be arraigned until Monday, but I suspect that our county attorney might be reluctant to charge her with anything. There are too many discrepancies in her story. I understand why now. Before you say anything to anyone, I’d like to do a little more investigating. I think I’m close to some answers, and I need a little more time.”

“Answers? I gave you the answers.”

“This is more complicated than you imagine, Ophelia. And Hattie’s a tough old girl. She can take a day or two behind bars, especially because she’s doing it for someone she loves. All right?”

She didn’t seem entirely convinced, but she said, “Okay, Mr. O.C. If that’s what you want. But will you do me a favor?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“When I finally do go in to talk to the sheriff, will you go with me?”

“Kiddo, I’ll be right there holding your hand.”

THIRTY-SIX

When Cork returned to the sheriff’s department, Ed Larson was back from the site of Indigo Broom’s burned cabin. He looked up as Cork walked into Marsha Dross’s office, and he shook his head.

“Nothing?” Cork said.

“My guys are still out there sifting dirt, but it’s not looking fruitful. Those manacles you mentioned to Rutledge? Not there. No bone fragments either. We didn’t find anything but scraps of metal and broken glass and broken crockery, all of it showing char. Oh, Azevedo got excited about finding a nineteen twenty-five Peace silver dollar, whatever the hell that is.”

“Did you see the rake marks?”

Larson nodded. “Somebody went over that area pretty carefully. After you got clobbered, how long were you out?”

“A couple of hours.”

“That might have been enough time to clean that small area. Bottom line is that, at the moment, we don’t have a thing to support any allegation against this Indigo Broom.”

“It appears that somebody’s protecting him. Which is odd,” Dross said to Cork, “if what you’ve told us about him is true.”

“I’m only repeating what I heard.”

“Heard where?” Dross said.

“I can’t divulge that at the moment.”

“If you did, we might be able to twist some arms legally.”

“They’d be Ojibwe arms and you’d get nothing. Ed, did you talk to Max Cavanaugh about his mother?”

“Yes. He claims he doesn’t remember much about his mother, but what he does remember is all good, warm, motherly stuff.”

“He said that?”

Larson pulled out a small notepad from his shirt pocket, flipped a couple of pages, read a moment, and said, “Yep.”

The sheriff and Larson both looked at Cork with blank faces.

“I can’t give you any more than I already have,” he told them.

Dross sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Because there’s no more to give or because you’re just not willing to give any more? Or am I being too pushy here?”

“I told you about the Ojibwe, Marsha. You can’t twist arms. What they give me, they give in their own time and in their own way.”

“Which is exactly how you give it to us,” she said.

Cork said, “Any chance I could get my hands on the M.E.’s final autopsy report for Lauren Cavanaugh?”

“What do you want to know?” Larson asked.

“Tom Conklin said he found two wounds. One of them appeared to be superficial, right?”

“That’s right,” Larson said. “A graze on her left side below her rib cage.”

“Fired at close range or from a distance?”

“No tattooing, no singeing, so probably from a distance. Why are you asking?”

“Just collecting pieces of the puzzle, Ed. You checked out Derek Huff’s alibi, that he was drinking with Sonny Gilroy, right?”

“Gilroy confirmed it.”

“How long did they drink together?”

“Until about midnight.”

“Then Huff went back to the center?”

“That’s what he said.”

“To bed?”

“I didn’t ask him that.” Larson studied him a moment. “You like Huff for the shooting?” Larson shook his head. “He was at the Black Bear with Gilroy when Cavanaugh was killed.”

“That’s true only if Cavanaugh was killed when Hattie said she was. But we all know there are holes in Hattie’s story.”

“Maybe, but she sure as hell hauled the body away and dumped it. Look, Cork, I know how you feel about Hattie Stillday, but you’re wasting your time with Huff, I can guarantee it.”

At the moment, there was no reason for Cork to argue.

Dross said, “The pieces of this puzzle that you’re collecting, Cork, if you put them together, you’ll let us know, right?”

“I’ll do that, Marsha.”

“And not on Ojibwe time,” she added.

“One more thing,” Cork said. “Any chance you’d let me talk to Hattie again?”

Dross looked at Larson, who voiced no objection. “I’ll have her brought to the interview room,” the sheriff promised.

“Mind if I take her a cigarette?”

“Be my guest.”

Hattie Stillday listened impassively while she smoked the Marlboro that Cork had brought her. When he finished talking, she said, “You think you’ve been a pretty good father, Corkie?”

It was a question that caught him off guard, but he answered honestly, “I think I’ve done my best, Hattie.”

“You probably have.” She sat back, tired. “I was a shitty mother. My girls were less important to me than my photographs. I was tramping all over hell and gone, making a name for myself when I should’ve been home. Couldn’t keep a husband. Let my mother raise my girls. They were little hellions, of course. Into all kinds of trouble. When Abbie disappeared, I figured she’d just run off, which, in its way, was what I’d done. Janie, that was Ophelia’s mother, she couldn’t wait to get away. Ended up dying in a rat’s nest of a place in Los Angeles, heroin overdose. Which was how I ended up with Ophelia. You shoulda seen that little girl when I went out to L.A. to get her. Broke my heart. I swore I’d take care of her better than I did her mother. And I have, Corkie. Hell, life’s not been kind to that girl, but she never gives up.”

Hattie Stillday let out a trickle of smoke that climbed her cheek, where it met a little stream of tears.

“I lost two daughters because of my selfishness. I’ve always looked on my granddaughter as a way to make amends. I swear I’ve done my best by Ophelia. I’ll die, yes, I will, before I see that girl lost to me.” She gave him a look that was iron hard and at the same time full of soft pleading. “You can’t tell them. Promise me you won’t say a thing about Ophelia. Promise me, Corkie.”

“I’ll make a deal with you, Hattie. Tell me how you knew about the bodies in the Vermilion Drift and I promise I won’t say a thing about Ophelia.”

She drew back, drew herself up. “You got no idea what you’re asking.”

“That’s the deal I’m offering.”

She stared at him, the cigarette idle in her fingers, a snake of smoke coiling between her and Cork. “Would you really break my heart? I’m asking you—begging you. If someone has to pay for what happened to Lauren Cavanaugh, Corkie, let it be me.”

He could have played her longer, played her harder, but he didn’t have it in him. He said, “I don’t think Ophelia killed Lauren Cavanaugh, Hattie.”

She looked startled, then disbelieving. “Is this some kind of trap?”

“I think the bullet your granddaughter fired only grazed the woman. After Ophelia left for the rez, someone else came to the boathouse.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Did you say anything to the sheriff?”

“No. It would have required explaining about Ophelia.”

“When are you going to tell them?”

“Not until I have a few more answers.”

“Answers that will keep my granddaughter’s name out of all this?”

“It’s like how I raised my children, Hattie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll do my best.”

* * *

Cork left the sheriff’s department and drove back to the Northern Lights Center for the Arts.

It was just after noon, and the day was growing hot and humid. The gathering had thinned as people began to think about lunch. Each of the artists displaying work had been given a deli box, and they were all relaxing at the moment, eating sandwiches. Derek Huff sat apart from the others, alone on the grass that edged the shoreline of the lake.

Cork stood between Huff and the sun, in a way that made the young artist squint as he looked up. “Remember me, Derek?”

Huff smiled, a genuinely friendly gesture, and Cork could see why women would fall for the kid. He was good looking, with blond hair that tickled his shoulders, a deep tan, the build of a swimmer.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Huff said.

“My name’s O’Connor. I’m working with the sheriff’s department on the Lauren Cavanaugh murder investigation.”

Recognition lit Huff’s eyes. “You’re the guy who found Lauren’s body in that mine tunnel.”

“I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with her.”

“I already talked with somebody from the sheriff’s office.”

“Captain Ed Larson,” Cork said. “I’d like to ask a few questions he didn’t.”

Huff shrugged easily. “Sure.”

Cork glanced around, saw an empty folding chair, grabbed it, and set it next to Huff. “Derek—you mind if I call you Derek?”

“Go ahead.”

“Derek, we know you had a sexual relationship with Lauren Cavanaugh. From what I understand, it wasn’t exactly a healthy kind of thing.”

Huff looked uncomfortable. “What do you understand?”

“She did a lot of threatening.”

“That’s true.”

“Pissed you off, I understand.”

“So?”

“Maybe enough for you to kill her?”

“Hey, I was drinking with an artist friend when Lauren was shot. Ask that other guy, Larson. He knows.”

“You left the bar around midnight. What did you do then?”

“Came back here, went to bed.”

“You didn’t stop by the boathouse?”

“Are you kidding? Lauren was in a mood. I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

“What happened in your relationship?”

Huff put his half-finished croissant sandwich back in his deli box and set the box on the grass. “Look, I know my way around women, okay? Lauren was like no woman I’d ever come across.”

“How so?”

“She was one thing at first, then she turned into something else. You know The Wizard of Oz? She started out all Good Witch of the North, but ended up Queen of the Flying Monkeys.”

“Tell me about it.”

Huff actually looked pained as he recalled. “At first, it was pretty normal, then things began to get too weird. She’d, like, want to tie me up, which I would have been okay with except I got really uncool vibes from her. Get this, man. A week ago she pulls out a gun, puts the barrel inside her, and tells me to pull the trigger.”

“By ‘inside her’ you mean … ?”

“I’m not talking about her mouth, dude. But, look, it wasn’t just the strange sex stuff. She was always making promises she had no intention of keeping. She was going to make my name huge in the art world. She was going to introduce me to important gallery owners. She didn’t do any of that. And when I got pissed because of it, she threatened me. And not only that, man, she was really cruel to Ophelia sometimes.”

“Did she behave bizarrely to anyone else?”

“Naw, with everybody else she was all sugar and spice.”

“Did you tell any of this to Captain Larson when he interviewed you?”

Huff shook his head. “I didn’t think he’d believe me.”

“I believe you. But I also think you might have killed her.”

“No way. I told you, I was drinking with Gilroy. Besides, Ophelia’s grandmother confessed.”

“I don’t think Hattie’s confession is going to stand up, and I don’t think Lauren died when Hattie said she did. I think there was time for you to have come back and visited the boathouse and shot her.”

The kid looked scared now. “Jesus, I told you. I went straight to bed. Look, I can prove it. I keep a video diary. It’s up in my room. Every night when I go to bed, I record something. I’ll show you.”

Huff got up and led the way back to the big house and upstairs to his room, which was at the end of the south wing. He went to the desk, where a laptop sat open. He sat down at the desk and worked the touch pad.

“It’s got a built-in webcam,” he said.

In a moment he brought up a piece of video that carried a time-date stamp in the lower right-hand corner. The date was the Sunday that Lauren Cavanaugh died, and the time was 12:17 A.M.

Derek Huff stared out from the screen of the laptop. For a long time he said nothing, just sat looking hollow-eyed and drunk. When he finally spoke, it was three sentences full of despair.

“Tomorrow I tell Lauren to go to hell. I miss the ocean. And I hate the fucking smell of pine trees.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Although Derek Huff’s video diary proved absolutely nothing, the feel Cork got from the kid—that he didn’t kill Lauren Cavanaugh—was genuine. He was also thinking about the squealing tires Brian Kretsch had reported on North Point Road well before Huff returned to the center. He didn’t write the kid off completely, but when he left Huff’s room, he turned his thinking to other possibilities.

He drove to his house on Gooseberry Lane, had some lunch, and afterward took Trixie for a midday walk. While he walked, he thought.

If not Ophelia, if not Hattie, if not Huff, then who?

He didn’t get much further before a black Tahoe pulled to the curb beside him, with a familiar Shinnob at the wheel. Tom Blessing leaned across the seat and hollered out the passenger window, “Hey, Cork! Somebody on the rez you need to talk to.”

“Mind if I bring my dog?”

“No problem. Hop in.”

Cork opened the passenger door, and Trixie, who hadn’t learned and probably never would learn to distrust strangers, eagerly leaped in ahead of him.

“I tried your home phone and Sam’s Place,” Blessing said, pulling away from the curb. “Didn’t have your cell number, so I finally decided to come into town and see if I could track you down.”

“What’s up?” Cork asked.

“You’ll see when we get to Allouette.”

Blessing headed out of Aurora, around the southern end of Iron Lake, and back up the eastern shoreline. He drove with the windows down, something Trixie thought was heaven. She sat on Cork’s lap with her head outside, blinking against the wind.

“Heard that with all the crap that’s happened in the Vermilion One Mine the government’s going to look elsewhere to store all their nuclear junk,” Blessing said. “True?”

“As far as I know, all they’ve done is pull the survey team back. They haven’t crossed the mine off their list yet.”

“But they’re thinking about it?”

“That’s my hope. A lot of bad publicity so far, and the worst is yet to come. But it’s the government, and you know how deep bureaucratic stupidity can run.”

“What do you mean the worst is yet to come? What’s worse than a bunch of bodies stuffed in a mine tunnel?”

What happened to those bodies before they got there was what Cork thought but didn’t say.

Instead he replied, “I’m just thinking there’s no chance they can spin any of this in a good way, Tom.”

“Are you kidding? They sold an entire nation of Christian folk on the idea of killing most of us Indians. If there’s a way to make radioactive drinking water sound like Kool-Aid, the federal government’ll find it.”

A few miles outside Allouette, Blessing got on his cell phone. “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “You still got him? Good.” He snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.

They entered Allouette, pulled onto Manomin Street, and swung into the parking lot of the community center.

“How long will this take, Tom? I’m wondering if I should leave Trixie in the truck.”

“Bring her in. Elgin’ll watch her.”

Inside the center, they walked down a long hallway, past the open doors to the gym, where Ani Sorenson was running some girls from the rez basketball team, the Iron Lake Loons, through drills. They passed the door to the administrative wing, where all the tribal offices were situated, and they took a right toward the room where Blessing did his work.

Tom Blessing had been a hard case. He’d been a leader in a gang of Ojibwe youths who’d called themselves the Red Boyz. As a result of a remarkable and deadly firefight on the rez, he’d experienced a radical transformation. Now he was deeply involved in the Wellbriety Movement, helping troubled Ojibwe kids find their way on a healing path using the teachings of elders and based on ancient wisdom and natural principles.

On his door hung a poster of a white buffalo. Inside his office, the walls were plastered with photographs of Blessing and some of the other former Red Boyz, along with a lot of kids doing a lot of things—learning to make birch bark canoes, harvesting wild rice, boiling down maple sap into syrup, playing softball, serving fry bread at a powwow, preparing for a sweat.

Elgin Manypenny, who’d also been one of the Red Boyz, sat on Blessing’s desk. In a chair shoved against one of the walls slumped a teenage kid. Cork knew him. Jesse St. Onge. His uncle Leroy stood next to him.

“Boozhoo, Elgin, Leroy,” Cork said and shook each man’s hand in turn. “Boozhoo, Jesse.”

“Anin,” the kid replied respectfully.

“Shake the man’s hand,” St. Onge said.

The kid reached up and did as he was told.

“Sit down, Cork,” Blessing said. “Elgin, mind taking Trixie for a walk?”

“Happy to.” Manypenny slid from the desk. “Come on, girl. Let’s go play.”

Trixie didn’t hesitate a second.

Blessing sat in his desk chair and nodded to Leroy St. Onge, who held out a folded piece of paper toward Cork.

“Found that in my nephew’s coat pocket this morning,” he said.

Cork unfolded the paper. Printed inside in the bloody From Hell font were the words We Die. U Die.

“Jesse got one of these threats?” Cork asked.

“Not exactly,” Leroy St. Onge said. “Go on, Jesse. Tell him.”

The kid focused on his hands, which were folded in his lap. He didn’t say anything at first.

“Jesse,” his uncle said.

The kid gathered himself and mumbled, “Okay, I did the throw up in the Vermilion One Mine.”

“The throw up?” Cork asked.

Blessing explained. “When a piece of graffiti art is done fast, it’s called a ‘throw up.’”

“It was you? How did you get into the mine?”

“Through the entrance on the rez that the cops got all taped up now.”

“How’d you know about that entrance, Jesse?”

The kid got quiet again.

“Go on,” his uncle said sternly.

“Isaiah Broom.”

“Did he go into the mine with you?”

“No, just showed me the way. He wouldn’t, you know, go in himself.”

“Why not?”

Jesse shrugged.

Everyone waited.

Finally Jesse said, “I got the feeling he was scared.”

“But you weren’t?”

“No.” The kid straightened up in a display of bravado.

“You went in alone?”

“Yeah. I took a flashlight and my paint cans and this printout Isaiah gave me of what he wanted me to do.”

“Did you notice anything strange in the mine?”

“Yeah, the smell. Like something dead. I understand now, but I just thought, you know, that maybe an animal got stuck in there and died. I didn’t think … you know.”

“Sure, Jesse,” Cork said. “Tell me about being in the mine.”

“Well, I went in like Isaiah showed me, and it was real dark and spooky. I had a flashlight but it wasn’t much and going into all that dark was like pushing through mud. I went all the way to the end of the tunnel. There was a wall and I couldn’t go any farther. I went back and told Isaiah, and we left and went to his place, and he got some stuff, power tools, you know, and we came back. This time he came in with me.”

“He went all the way in?”

“Yeah, but he was all jumpy, like the place was full of ghosts or something. We got to the wall, and Isaiah cut through it, and we crawled in and kept going to where the elevator shaft was. I was going to do my piece there, but Isaiah said we should go down farther so they wouldn’t know how we got in. So we climbed down this ladder that was, you know, next to the elevator. Isaiah showed me where he wanted me to work. Me, I wanted to do something I’d be proud to tag, but he wanted it done just like he’d printed out and he wanted it done fast.”

“It was Isaiah’s design?”

“I guess. I’m all like, hey, man, it’s not aesthetic. But it was what he wanted, so I just did the throw up, and we left.”

“Why?”

The kid stared at Cork. “What do you mean?”

“Why did you agree to do what Broom asked?”

“You mean his design?”

“No, the whole thing in general. It was pretty risky.”

“I don’t want all that radioactive stuff here,” Jesse said, as if it should have been perfectly obvious to anyone. “It was a way of fighting back. The warrior’s way,” he added proudly. “Isaiah, he’s been sort of leading the protest, and when I told him I wanted to help, he said The People could use my talent. See, on the rez I’ve got kind of a rep for my work. Isaiah said he had an important job for me.”

“ ‘We Die. U Die.’ What did that mean?”

“Just, you know, that if the junk they put in there leaks, we’re all dead. Even the assholes who are responsible.”

“Who would those assholes be?”

“I don’t know. The guys who make the decisions, I guess.”

“Names?”

“I don’t know.”

“Max Cavanaugh? Lou Haddad? Eugenia Kufus?”

“I don’t know who those guys are.”

“Some of the people making the decisions. They all got notes saying ‘We Die. U Die.’ Do you know anything about that, Jesse?”

“No, nothing. I just did the throw up in the mine.”

“We Die. U Die. Who came up with that?”

“Me, sort of. When I was on the protest line in front of Vermilion One, I said we should have a sign that read something like ‘This won’t kill just us. It will kill everybody.’ Isaiah liked it, but he shortened it for the throw up.”

Leroy St. Onge asked, “What kind of trouble is he in, Cork?”

“Trespass with criminal intent, maybe. Vandalism.” He leveled a long look at Jesse. “His heart was in the right place, and I think even the people who own the mine aren’t excited about the prospect of dumping nuclear waste there, so I’m guessing that, when the whole story’s known, no charges will be brought. That’s certainly the recommendation I’ll make to the mine people and the sheriff.”

St. Onge said, “I think I need to have a talk with Isaiah Broom.”

“Get in line, Leroy,” Cork said.

“Can we go now?” Jesse asked.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Cork told him. “Look, I’ll do what I can to make things easy for you, Jesse, but the sheriff’s people will want to talk to you.”

He made a sour face. “Ah, man.”

“I’ll be there with you,” his uncle said and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Mind giving us a few minutes alone, Cork?” Blessing asked.

“No. I need to go outside and make a call on my cell phone anyway. Meet you at your truck?”

“Fine.”

Cork left the way he’d come. Outside, he could hear Trixie barking in the park next to the marina a block away, and he saw Manypenny throwing a Frisbee, which Trixie was having a great time chasing down. He plucked his cell phone from its belt holster, pulled up the number from which Rainy Bisonette had called two nights earlier, and punched redial. While he waited, he watched Trixie having the best time she’d had since Stephen left for West Texas. He made a mental note: Play more with the dog.

Rainy answered, her voice distant and impersonal. “Yes, Cork?”

“Boozhoo,” he said, trying to be cordial.

“What do you want?”

All business, this woman. All right then, he thought, and got down to it.

“What time did Isaiah Broom leave Crow Point yesterday?”

“Early. Shortly after sunup.”

“Any idea where he was headed?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Is Henry there?”

“No. He’s out gathering.”

Herbs, Cork figured.

“How did Broom seem when he left?”

“Hungover. Worried.”

“Did Henry talk to him?”

“Not really. Broom hurried off like a man on a mission. Uncle Henry couldn’t persuade him to stay.”

“Thanks, Rainy.”

“For what?”

He meant to say for the information she’d just given him. But what came out was “For taking care of Henry. I love that old man.”

Her end of the line was quiet. “So do I,” she finally said, speaking more gently than she ever had to Cork.

When he hung up, he headed immediately back into the community center. He ran into Blessing outside the open gym doors and spoke over the squeak of rubber soles on urethane.

“I need a favor, Tom.”

“Ask.”

“I need to borrow your truck for a little while.”

Blessing reached into the pocket of his pants, pulled out his keys, and handed them over.

“Is it okay if Elgin plays a little longer with Trixie?” Cork asked.

“How long will you be?”

“Not long if I can find the man I’m looking for.”

“Broom?” Blessing guessed.

“Broom,” Cork said.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Isaiah Broom lived in a cabin of his own design and making. It stood at the end of a short stretch of dirt track in a small clearing a couple of miles east of Allouette. Where the track split from the asphalt of the main road, Broom had pounded a post and hung a sign from it: Chainsaw Art.

As Cork drove into the clearing, he spotted Broom in front of the cabin, shirtless, a big Stihl chain saw in his hands, working on a section of maple log that stood six feet high. The noise of the saw drowned out the sound of Blessing’s truck, and Broom didn’t notice Cork’s approach until the vehicle pulled to a stop in a shroud of red dust.

Broom shut off the chain saw and watched Cork come. He didn’t put the Stihl down. In the heat of the summer afternoon, his powerful torso dripped with sweat.

“Isaiah.”

“What do you want, O’Connor?”

“How’s the head?” Cork asked.

“Huh?”

“Heard from Rainy that you were a little hungover the other day. I know how that feels. You okay now?”

“My head’s fine,” Broom said.

“Aren’t you going to ask about mine?”

“Why should I?”

“Somebody whacked me good yesterday. Right here.” Cork pointed toward the back of his head. “Still a little tender, but I’m okay. Thanks for your concern.”

Broom finally lowered the chain saw to the ground, where it sat amid chips and sawdust. “What’s your game, O’Connor?”

“Looks like it’s going to be twenty questions. What did you do with the things you raked up at your uncle’s cabin?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I was out at Indigo Broom’s yesterday morning. Just wanted to see the place for myself. Or what remained of it, which wasn’t much. I stumbled onto a couple of items that made me believe some of the things I’ve been thinking lately about your uncle are true. Then I get hit on the head, and when I come to these things are gone, along with anything else that might incriminate your uncle.”

“I wouldn’t go spreading rumors about my family if I was you, O’Connor.”

“See, right there, that’s the point.”

“What point?”

“I can’t think of anybody who’d care what I said about Indigo Broom except you. And I know you were no fan of the man. So the only thing that makes sense to me is that you’re trying to protect your family and your family’s name. You don’t want it associated with the kinds of things your uncle did. Considering the monster he was, if I was you, I wouldn’t want that either. Family’s important, Isaiah, and should be protected. I get that.”

Broom’s hands drew themselves into fists. “Get out of here, O’Connor.”

“So the first thing I want to say is that my head’s all right, and, all things considered, there’s no need for you to apologize.” Cork gave him a quick smile, then went on. “Now we come to the part that’s more troublesome. I just had a long talk with Jesse St. Onge. I know you put him up to the graffiti in the mine. I know you showed him the way in and you cut through the wall in the Vermilion Drift and led him to the place you wanted him to put his throw up.”

“His what?”

Cork laughed. “Yeah, sounds funny, doesn’t it? His art, Isaiah. Except that it wasn’t really his art. It was yours. Exactly the same design that was on the threatening notes a bunch of folks in Tamarack County got. You sent those notes.”

Broom’s fists relaxed, then balled again, and Cork wondered if the man was aware at all of his body language.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Broom said.

“Oh, I’m certain you do. And when Jesse tells his story to the sheriff’s people, they’ll be certain, too. The thing I don’t understand is why you killed Lauren Cavanaugh.”

“I killed Lauren Cavanaugh? What the hell are you talking about?” Now his hands went limp, as if they’d just let go of something.

“The second set of notes. The ones you sent to Haddad’s wife and put on the windshield of Genie Kufus’s car and stuck to Max Cavanaugh’s door with a hunting knife. See, whoever wrote that second set of notes knew Lauren Cavanaugh was dead. That was something known only to the authorities and to those of us on the inside. And, of course, the killer.”

“Second set of notes? Look, O’Connor, I don’t know anything about a second set of notes. Yeah, I went into the mine with Jesse and we put up the warning. And, yeah, I sent some threats to Haddad and Cavanaugh and that Kufus woman. Just to scare them. But I didn’t have anything to do with those other notes you’re talking about. And I sure as hell had nothing to do with killing Lauren Cavanaugh. Why would I kill her? I didn’t even know her. My only concern in all this is to keep nuclear waste away from our land, to protect Grandmother Earth.”

“Where did you get the font you used for the notes?”

“Off the Internet. You can get any damn thing off the Internet.”

“Mind showing me?”

Broom looked at Cork as if the request was crazy.

“The police will be asking you to do the same thing, Isaiah, after Jesse talks to them. If I get a jump on things, maybe I can help protect your family’s name.”

Broom eyed Cork, made a sound like he’d just forced something odious down his throat, and turned to his house. Cork followed him inside.

Broom was a man who’d never married, and his place showed no evidence of a woman’s influence. It was cluttered with papers and magazines. Broom subscribed to a lot of publications across a broad spectrum of interests. American Indian Culture and Research Journal. American Indian Quarterly. Anishnabeg Mom-Weh Newsletter. The New Yorker. The Wall Street Journal. Time. Mother Jones. National Geographic. And others sitting in stacks around the living room and dining area. The floor hadn’t been swept since the Ice Age, and from the mess he could see through the doorway to the kitchen, Cork was very glad Broom would never invite him to lunch.

Broom went to a desk in a corner of the living room where a computer tower and monitor and DSL modem had been set. On a cart next to the desk was an ink-jet printer. He plopped down in the desk chair and brought the machine out of hibernation. With a couple of clicks of his mouse, he was on the Internet. Cork watched over Broom’s shoulder as he hit the drop-down box in Google search, checked his search history, found a website with the URL http://www.eyepoppingfonts.com, and clicked on it. Once the website came up, Broom navigated quickly to the font called From Hell.

“There.” He shoved away from the desk.

“You did that pretty quickly,” Cork said.

“Any idiot could do it quickly,” Broom said, then gave Cork a cold look and added, “Even you.”

They went back outside and stood near the sculpture, which was barely begun and showed no sign yet of what it would become. Cork touched the rough-cut wood. “What’s it going to be, Isaiah? An eagle?”

“Animikii.” A thunderbird. “What happens now?”

“You’ll get a visit from the sheriff’s people, I imagine. But it would probably be best if you visited them. It would look better. And you’d also have high ground for any activist statements you might want to throw in. But take a lawyer with you.”

Broom bent and lifted his chain saw. His face was like the wood of the sculpture, hard to read.

“Isaiah, there’s no way I can keep your uncle’s name out of this. We both know what he did.”

Broom gave the chain saw cord a yank. The roar of the motor would eat anything more Cork might have had to say, so he simply turned and left.

THIRTY-NINE

It was midday and hot under a cloudless sky when Blessing dropped Cork and Trixie back at the house on Gooseberry Lane. Cork tethered his dog to her doghouse and prepared to head to the sheriff’s office to report what he’d learned. He was two steps from his Land Rover when Simon Rutledge drove up in his state car, parked in the driveway, and got out. He was wearing a gray sport coat and blue shirt, no tie. In his right hand he held a six-pack of cold Leinenkugel’s.

“Got a minute or twelve?” Rutledge asked, lifting the beer toward Cork as enticement.

“Depends on what you’ve got on your mind, Simon.”

“Beer. What else do you need to know?”

Cork waved him to the front porch, and the two men settled in the swing. Rutledge handed Cork a bottle, then took one for himself. They unscrewed the caps and sat for a minute, letting the brew wash their throats.

“Nothing better than a cold beer on a hot summer afternoon,” Rutledge said.

“Agreed.”

Two boys of maybe ten or eleven rode by on bicycles, carrying tennis rackets, heading, Cork figured, to the courts in Grant Park.

“You know, tomorrow’s my son’s birthday,” Rutledge said.

“Yeah? How old?”

“Thirteen.”

“Teenager. Tough times ahead.”

“He’s a good kid. I’m not worried. I’d love to be there.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because we’re close to an end here. I can feel it. I don’t want to leave until I know we can shut the lid on this one.”

“This isn’t just one thing, Simon. It’s a whole bunch of things.”

“Yeah, but they’re all tied together somehow, Cork. And you know what?” He laid his arm on the back of the swing and gave Cork a long look. “I think you’ve got an idea how.”

Cork smiled despite himself. “Gonna Simonize me?”

“I was kind of hoping the alcohol might loosen your tongue.”

Cork laughed. He heard Trixie barking and said, “Be right back, Simon.” He went through the house and out the patio door to where he’d tethered Trixie. He freed her, and she followed him eagerly to the front porch. She jumped on the porch swing beside Rutledge and nuzzled his hand.

“You spend a lot of time with this dog,” Rutledge noted.

“Nobody else around to see to her these days. Same goes for me.” Cork sat on the swing, so that Trixie was between him and Rutledge. He patted her head gently. “This isn’t exactly how I’d envisioned spending my time once the nest was empty, Simon. I figured Jo and me, we’d do the things we were always talking about doing. She wanted to spend a month in Italy, rent a villa in Tuscany, you know? Me, I never had much interest in Italy, but if that’s what she wanted.” Trixie looked up at him with affectionate brown eyes. “What do you say, girl? Want to go chase some Italian rabbits one of these days?” He glanced at Rutledge and apologized. “Sorry. Off topic.”

“No problem,” Rutledge said quietly.

Cork told him much of what he’d learned that day, including his speculation that someone other than Hattie Stillday had killed Lauren Cavanaugh. He kept Ophelia’s name out of it. For the time being.

“Okay,” Rutledge said, nodding tentatively. “So who did kill Cavanaugh? What about Broom?”

“He’s copped to the graffiti and to the first notes but swears he had nothing to do with the murder or the second round of notes. If he’s telling the truth, then someone else sent them.”

“You believe him?”

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been fooled.”

“Okay, if not him, then who?”

Cork sipped his beer and stared at the shadow on his lawn cast by the big elm. “I’ve been thinking about the timing of Lauren Cavanaugh’s murder. Someone visited her after Hattie left and before she returned, and that person probably killed her. So was this person’s visit an unfortunate accident? Or did this person know an opportunity existed and took it?”

“How would they know?”

“A couple of possibilities. Either they responded to the shot fired by Hattie or they came because Lauren Cavanaugh called them.”

“Maybe she had another appointment that evening?” Rutledge offered.

“I don’t think so. According to Ophelia, she was all set to spend the night with Huff, but he crapped out on her.”

“So,” Rutledge said, clearly skeptical, “you’re saying she’d been grazed by a bullet and was still looking for someone to sleep with?”

“More probably someone to take care of her, to bind her wound, to sympathize.”

“Who would that be?”

“Didn’t Ed say that the last call from her cell phone was made a little after eleven?”

“That’s right,” Rutledge replied.

“Do you know who she called?”

He shook his head. “We can phone Ed and find out. But what about the possibility that someone heard the shot and used the opportunity?”

“It would most likely have been someone at the center, but the center was empty that night. All the staff had gone home, and the new residents didn’t come until the next day.”

Rutledge thought it over. “All right. What say we find out who she called before she died?” He set his bottle on the porch and pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his sport coat. He tapped in a number, put the phone to his ear, and waited. “Ed. Simon here. A question for you. Who did Lauren Cavanaugh call the night she died?” He listened. “Uh-huh. That’s it? Just the one call, you’re sure? Thanks, Ed.” Rutledge slipped the phone back into his coat pocket. He reached down, picked up his beer, and took a long draw.

“So?” Cork said.

Rutledge ran the beer around in his mouth, then swallowed. He looked at Cork and said, “Her brother.”

FORTY

Dross sat at her desk, listening, her face unreadable. Larson leaned against a wall, arms crossed, expression neutral.

“Think about it,” Cork said. “It fits. The second round of threats referenced his sister’s death. He was the only one outside of our investigators who knew that his sister was among the bodies in the Vermilion Drift.”

“Why the second round of threatening notes?” Larson asked.

“To throw us off, maybe. Make it look like her death was about the mine stuff, not about—hell, whatever it was about.”

“What was it about?” Dross said.

“I don’t know. I do know that he was bleeding money to support his sister and the Northern Lights Center.”

“Money?” Larson said. “You really think he’d kill his sister over money? He’s a very rich man, Cork. And I suspect anything he loses to the center is simply a tax write-off.”

Dross got up, walked to a window, and stood looking out with her hands clasped at the small of her back. “You found the second We die. U die. notes shoved under the Kufus woman’s windshield wiper and pinned to Cavanaugh’s door. How did he do that, with the woman there?”

“Slipped away from the dock while she was swimming in the cove,” Cork said. “Maybe he went inside, ostensibly to get drinks or to use the head, and he did it then. It wouldn’t have been that difficult. If we can get a look at his computer, we can check to see if he’s accessed the website for the From Hell font. That would be pretty damning.”

Larson shook his head. “Not necessarily. He could simply have wanted to check it out for himself once he knew where the font had come from. At least that’s how I’d argue it if I were his attorney.”

“We have to walk carefully here,” Dross said, not turning from the window.

“We come back to why,” Larson said. “Why would a man kill his sister?”

Simon Rutledge, who’d been sitting quietly, said, “In many of the homicide investigations I’ve been involved in, Ed, it’s ended up being about family.”

“There’s a big problem with thinking of Cavanaugh as a suspect,” Larson responded. “He was at a reception for Genie Kufus and her team the night his sister was killed.”

“You confirmed that with Kufus and the others?”

“Not Kufus, but Lou Haddad, who was there, too.”

“The reception was at the Four Seasons?” Cork asked.

“Yeah.”

“Which is five minutes from the center. Is it possible Max left and came back? Said he was going out for a smoke or something?”

Larson said, “I’d have to look at my notes. But I’ve got to tell you, it feels like a stretch.”

“Did you ask him about that final call from his sister?”

“Of course. He said she often called at the end of a day, just to talk. They were close. The phone records bear that out.”

“She said nothing about being shot?”

“I think he would have mentioned that, don’t you?”

“I agree with Ed, Cork,” Dross said. She faced them. “We need something substantial, and, until we have it, I’m not going to harass Max Cavanaugh.” She rubbed her forehead in a tired way. “You’ll have to bring me more.”

Larson pushed away from the wall. He arched his back. “Christ, I’m beat. I’d love to go fishing tonight, clear my head.”

Dross said, “I think we could all use an evening to ourselves.” She glanced at Rutledge. “You’re dying to be home for your son’s birthday tomorrow, Simon. Why don’t you go now?”

“What about Cavanaugh?” Rutledge asked.

“Let’s all give our brains a break,” Larson suggested. “Maybe we’ll come up with a bright idea.”

Rutledge seemed about to object, and Cork said, “Cavanaugh isn’t going anywhere, Simon. There’s always another day.”

Rutledge gave in. “You know how to reach me. Good luck with your fishing, Ed.”

They separated, all going their own ways. Cork walked to his Land Rover in the parking lot. He understood everyone’s exhaustion. He was tired, too. He was glad Simon Rutledge had decided to go home for his son’s birthday. A festive family affair, he imagined.

Cork headed home, too. Home to his big, empty house and to the only female in his life these days, a little spotted mutt who was always glad to see him.

FORTY-ONE

He unscrewed the cap on one of the Leinie’s Rutledge had brought earlier that day and checked the clock on the wall. Nearing five. He thought about heading to Sam’s Place to give a hand with the dinner rush but instead went out to the patio in the backyard, and drank the beer and threw the ragged tennis ball for Trixie. It was a pattern he’d followed since Stephen had left, and he was getting sick of it. He thought about calling one of his friends, or maybe doing a little fishing or, hell, even going out to the Pinewood Broiler for dinner. Nothing appealed to him. He felt stuck. Part of it was the general realization that as his children left he would have to redefine himself and his life, and he wasn’t even sure where to begin and the idea was overwhelming. But a part of it, too, was that he simply felt weighted by the burden of all the events of the past week and the questions about his own past that those events had raised and that still remained unanswered.

So mostly he just felt like getting drunk.

When the beer was empty, he went back inside. Instead of going to the refrigerator for another bottle, he went to the office and checked his e-mail. He was pleased to find messages from both his daughters. He read Annie’s first.

Dad,

I got a note from Jenny saying that some pretty horrible things have been happening back home. Bodies buried in a mine. Is that true? She said the press is speculating that it was the work of a serial killer a long time ago. Is that true, too? She also said that you’re involved in the investigation. I was like, duh. Can you tell me anything?

Buried bodies. Hard to imagine in Aurora. But that’s something people here in El Salvador are familiar with. During the civil war in this country, a lot of families had loved ones who disappeared in the night. Just disappeared. Whole villages vanished, too, I’ve heard. People still stumble onto mass graves in the jungle. Here, it’s about politics and economics. And the crimes are committed by the kinds of people you pass on the street every day. It’s easier to think that kind of atrocity is only committed by crazed serial killers. If it were only so.

Jenny says she’s coming home for a few days just before the Labor Day weekend. I’d like to be there, too. Will Stephen be back from camp? And could Aunt Rose and Mal come, too? It would be wonderful to have us all together, even if for only a few days.

Love and peace,

Anne

Cork sat back and stared at the screen. Without realizing it, Annie was keeping him grounded to the reality of the world. Which was that, as bad as things seemed in Aurora, in the world at large, these events were next to nothing. Death on an enormous scale was as common as rain.

A depressing thought, so he considered instead the enticing possibility of all the O’Connors being together for a little while at summer’s end, and that cheered him.

Jenny’s e-mail queried him further about what the hell was going on in Aurora and why hadn’t he called her back? For the moment, he held off replying. He didn’t want to think about it.

It was late afternoon, and dark was still a long way off. He took Trixie for another walk, and although he tried to keep his mind away from the investigation, his thinking kept coming back to Max Cavanaugh and the reception at the Four Seasons the night his sister was murdered.

Larson had said he’d questioned Lou Haddad, who’d confirmed that Cavanaugh was at the Four Seasons until after midnight, beyond the time Lauren Cavanaugh had been murdered. If that was true, Cavanaugh was off the hook. But if Ophelia was correct about the time of her own encounter with Lauren Cavanaugh, then Max had talked to his sister on the phone after she’d been shot. And what woman, having been grazed by a bullet, wouldn’t say something to her brother about it? Her silence made no sense. What made a great deal more sense was that Max Cavanaugh had lied to Larson about the content of that final conversation.

When he returned home, he went straight to the telephone in his office and punched in Haddad’s cell phone number.

“Lou, it’s Cork O’Connor.”

“Hey, Cork, what’s up?” What sounded like jazz was playing in the background.

“I just wanted to check to make sure you and Sheri are okay.”

“We’re fine. Down in the Twin Cities, staying at a fancy hotel, eating fancy food in fancy restaurants. Listening to some great jazz at the moment and drinking some good wine. And get this. Max told me all expenses are on the company. This has turned into a great getaway.”

“I’m glad.”

“Look, Cork, I know you didn’t call to chat.”

“Could I ask you a couple of questions, Lou?”

“Sure. About what?”

“The night of the reception for Kufus and her team.”

“Fire away.”

“What time did the reception at the Four Seasons break up?”

“Officially at around ten-thirty. But several of us headed to the bar and hung out there until after midnight.”

“Max Cavanaugh?”

“Yeah, he was with us.”

“The whole time?”

“Pretty much.”

“What do you mean by ‘pretty much?’”

“We all took trips to the head now and then. Alcohol does that, you know.”

“Did Cavanaugh take any long trips?”

“To the head? Nothing unusual, seems to me. He stepped outside for a smoke a couple of times.”

“Was he gone long?”

“Five, ten minutes, I think.”

“That’s all? You’re sure.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t keeping track. By that time, I’d had a few myself, and we were all having a pretty good time.”

“So he could have slipped away for longer than a few minutes and you might not have noticed?”

“Yeah, I suppose. Just a minute,” he said. He covered the mouthpiece for a few seconds. “Sheri says he went out for a while.”

“Does she remember when?”

Cork heard Haddad pose the question to his wife. Her reply was too faint to hear.

Haddad said, “A little after eleven o’clock. She remembers because he got a cell phone call, just as she was getting ready to call our babysitter and let her know we wouldn’t be home until after midnight.”

“Does Sheri remember how long he was gone?”

Haddad asked, then relayed the reply, “Twenty minutes, maybe.”

“Thanks, Lou. You guys just go on having a good time, okay?”

“What’s up with the investigation?”

“We have answers to some of the questions, but we haven’t nailed down a suspect in Lauren Cavanaugh’s death yet.”

“Is that why you’re asking about her brother?”

“No comment, Lou. Like I said, you guys just have a good time. And tell Sheri thanks for the information.”

He’d put the phone down and was a few steps away when it rang: Lou Haddad calling back.

“Cork, Sheri has something you might be interested in.” He gave the phone over to his wife, who said, “I don’t know if this is important, Cork, but I thought you might want to know. It was noisy in the bar at the Four Seasons, so I went outside to make my call to our babysitter. I saw Max leave the parking lot in his Escalade. And another thing. That evening he’d been wearing a knockout blazer. Armani, de la Renta, some expensive designer thing, I’m sure. Anyway, when he came back and joined us at the bar, he didn’t have it on anymore. He didn’t stay long, mostly just said good night, and went home.”

“How did he seem when he came back?”

“Distracted, I thought. I figured he’d had a bit too much to drink and he was a little, you know, distant. Maybe fuzzy-headed. Which was different from the way he’d been before he left. He was all charm then.”

“Anything else, Sheri?”

“Not that I can think of. Does this help?”

“A lot. Thanks. But, Sheri, why didn’t you tell someone all this before?”

“Nobody asked me,” she replied, a little curtly.

Haddad came back on the line. “Cork, you want us to come back and give statements of some kind, we’ll be happy to.”

“If that’s necessary, Lou. I’ll let you know.”

“All right, then. You take care.”

In Cork’s thinking, you needed three things to hang a crime on someone: opportunity, evidence that placed the suspect at the scene, and motive. Cavanaugh had left the bar around the time of the killing. So opportunity. When he returned, he’d removed his expensive blazer, perhaps because it was covered with bloodstains. If he was smart, he’d gotten rid of the blazer, but maybe there was residue on some of the other clothing he wore that night, or on his shoes. And maybe he still had the shoes and the other clothing. So physical evidence. But what about motive? That was the tough thing. Why would Cavanaugh kill his sister? From all indications, he’d taken care of her all his life. What happened that night that made a difference?

That was something only Max Cavanaugh knew.

FORTY-TWO

Cavanaugh was clearly surprised to find Cork at his door. He also didn’t seem pleased, but he was cordial.

“A business call, Cork? More questions?”

“Just something I need to get off my mind, Max. May I come in?”

“Be my guest.” Cavanaugh stepped aside.

The house was cool, and from another room came the sound of sitar music, something Cork hadn’t heard since the seventies. A glass of red wine sat on a table near the front door, and Cavanaugh lifted it as he passed.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” he asked.

“No thanks, Max. Okay if I sit?”

“By all means.”

Cork took one of the two wing chairs in the living room. It was upholstered in a green fabric soft as doe hide. Cavanaugh took the other.

“Ravi Shankar?” Cork said, with a slight nod toward the music.

“Nikhil Banerjee. I became familiar with his music while I was working in the Great North’s bauxite mine in central India. He’s dead now. This is a rare recording. Did you come here to talk music?”

“I came here to talk about Hattie Stillday.”

Cavanaugh nodded and looked concerned. “I’ve been thinking about her, too. What she did, it was so needless. Christ, there was plenty of money. I was angry with Lauren, I mean all the mismanagement, but I’d have given her what she needed to pay off Stillday.”

“Do you know Hattie?”

“Just her work.”

“A fine woman. Very Ojibwe in a lot of respects, especially in her disregard for the value of money. She didn’t think much of it, except for the good it could do others.”

“Apparently she thought enough to murder for it.” His tone had turned cold.

“See, Max, I have a problem with that. I don’t think Hattie did it.”

“She confessed. From what I understand, she knew everything about the murder.”

“Not everything.”

“Well, I suppose where murder’s involved a person’s thinking might not always be clear.”

“My sentiment exactly. You know, Max, you’ve always seemed to me to be a fair man.”

Cavanaugh didn’t respond. He swirled red wine in his glass and watched Cork.

“I’m wondering if you really intend to let Hattie Stillday go to prison.”

“That’s not my call, is it?” he said.

“Oh, but I think it is. Hattie Stillday didn’t kill your sister, and you know it.”

Cavanaugh said, “I do?”

“Max, I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m here to give you a chance to do the right thing, before it all turns ugly. And it will. All the dirty secrets will get dragged out, and the press will have a field day with you and your family.”

“You’re talking in riddles, Cork.”

“Am I? Let me tell you how it went down that night. A few minutes after eleven, you received a call from your sister. She was upset. She’d been shot, but not seriously. She wanted you, needed your comfort, your protection, which you’d given her your whole life. You left the gathering at the Four Seasons, drove to the Northern Lights Center, and found her in the boathouse. There was a gun there, left by the person who’d shot her earlier. A kind of accident, really. You had an exchange with Lauren, a fight maybe. And you took the gun and killed her. When you realized what you’d done, you ran. You went back to the Four Seasons, spent a few minutes with the people you’d left, then you made your excuses and went home.

“I’m guessing,” Cork continued, “that you expected to hear about your sister’s death the next day, but that didn’t happen. Nor the next. And when it became clear that Lauren’s body wasn’t anywhere to be found and that her car was missing and there was no evidence of your crime, you were surprised and probably scared. What the hell happened to Lauren? And that’s where I came in.”

“I loved my sister,” Cavanaugh said.

“I’m not hearing you deny you killed her. What I don’t understand is why, Max.”

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this.” But he made no move to end it.

“I’m telling you things I shouldn’t, because I really don’t believe you’re the kind of man who’d let Hattie Stillday take the blame for something you did. And I’m doing it because, if I were you, I’d be eaten up inside by guilt. Everything will come to light sooner or later. Rutledge and Larson will be out with a search warrant. You’ve left tracks. Like you said, where murder’s involved, you don’t think straight. And don’t bother trying to figure out what tracks I’m talking about. We know too much. Come back to Aurora with me, Max. Talk to the sheriff. Get it all off your chest and be done with it.”

Cavanaugh stared at Cork, then said coldly, “You sound just like Lauren. Next you’ll be telling me I’ve got no other friend in the world but you.”

“Believe it or not, I am your friend. Come back with me, and I’ll stand by you, I promise.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, Cork. You’re going to leave and I’m going to finish my wine and have some dinner and a good soak in my tub and go to bed. And I think I’ll call my lawyer while I’m at it.”

“The longer you string this out, the more it will twist your gut. I’m just trying to help.”

“Your kind of help gets people hanged.”

Cork stood up. “Think about it. If you want to talk, call me.” He took a card from his wallet and held it out to Cavanaugh, who didn’t even look at it. Cork put the card on the coffee table and headed out the door, leaving Max Cavanaugh alone in the cool dark of his big house, listening to music played by a dead man.

FORTY-THREE

Marsha Dross lived alone on Lomax Street, in a little house with flower boxes on the front porch and green shutters on the windows. Her pickup was in the driveway when Cork pulled up and parked at the curb. Smoke drifted from the backyard, and the breeze carried the delicious aroma of barbecue and sizzling fat. He walked across the lawn and around to the back, where he found the sheriff on her patio, dressed in khaki shorts and sandals. She was turned away from him, and she had a beer in her hand. She wore earbuds that snaked up from an iPod cradled in the pocket of her khakis, and she was doing a line dance move as if the smoking Weber grill with its rack of ribs was her partner. Ed Larson fished to relax. Cork walked his dog. Marsha Dross, apparently, danced.

He hated what he had to do to her.

“Yo, Marsha,” he said, but not loudly enough, because she kept on dancing. “Marsha,” he said again.

This time she heard.

She had never been what most people would call pretty, and Cork seldom gave it much thought, but turning to him, she looked, for an instant, happy and relaxed, and Cork could see a kind of beauty in her that was common and good. When she saw his face and understood that she was probably not going to like what he had to say, she changed. She became, in the blink of an eye, the law.

She pulled off the earbuds and reached down to turn off the iPod and said, with a little brittleness, “What did you do now?”

“You could offer me a beer.”

“Tell me first, then I’ll decide about the beer.”

“Want to sit?”

“For Christ sake, just tell me.”

“I was out at Max Cavanaugh’s place. I told him I thought he killed his sister.”

“You did what?” She put the beer bottle down on her patio table, hard enough that a bit of the brew splashed out the longneck.

“Before you toss me on that grill with those ribs—which, by the way, look pretty good—just listen a minute.”

“This is what I get for bringing you in on a case. Jesus, it’s always the same. You never do things the way I ask or that you promise. You just go off and do whatever comes into your head. You’re not the sheriff anymore, Cork. Christ, you haven’t been in, like, forever.”

“I know. But just give me a minute to explain.”

“God, I thought for a little while, just a little while, I could relax.”

“He did it, Marsha. He killed his sister, and I can almost prove it.”

“Almost? Oh, that’ll sound good to a grand jury.”

“Hear me out.”

She huffed an angry breath, crossed her arms, gave him a killing look, and said, “All right, I’m listening.”

“I talked to Lou Haddad and Sheri this afternoon. Sheri told me that Cavanaugh got a cell phone call at the Four Seasons, after the official reception, when they were all gathered in the bar.”

“We know this already.”

“He went outside, and Sheri did, too, so that she could make a cell phone call to her babysitter. She saw Cavanaugh take off in his Escalade.”

Her eyes changed, the anger transformed in an instant to interest. “He left the Four Seasons?”

“He sure did, and we have a witness to that. According to Sheri, he was gone twenty minutes, enough time to drive to his sister’s boathouse and kill her. And get this: When he came back, he wasn’t wearing the designer blazer he’d worn all evening. According to Sheri, he seemed distant. ‘Fuzzy-headed’ was how she put it. He didn’t stay long.”

“Why did he take off his blazer?” she said. Then answered herself, “Bloodstains.”

“A pretty good speculation.”

“Did he get rid of the clothes, do you think?”

“A search warrant would answer that question.”

She sat down at the table, looking troubled. “Here’s one a search warrant won’t answer: Why?” She picked up her beer and idly sipped.

Cork sat down with her. “It was a risk talking to Max. I knew that, Marsha. But the truth is he’s not a bad guy. I think that what happened wasn’t premeditated. And I was hoping that when he understood what I suspected, he might want to talk about it. A thing like that, it’s got to weigh on his conscience. When I left, he looked pretty dismal.”

Dross thought for a while in silence. The fat from the ribs fell onto the coals and sizzled. Finally she stood up.

“I’m going to see if I can’t get a search warrant. It’s all pretty thin, but I’d like to try. Ed’s fishing at his cabin on Emerson Lake. He told me he was leaving his cell phone at home.”

“He usually fishes from his dock. I’d be glad to head over and give him the word.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry to interrupt your evening, Marsha.”

“If it means I can sleep tonight, I’ll forgive you.”

She took a long set of tongs, lifted the ribs off the grill and put them on a waiting platter, then headed inside to start making phone calls.

FORTY-FOUR

He was halfway to Emerson Lake when Max Cavanaugh called. Cork pulled over to the side of the road and answered his cell phone.

“I want to talk,” Cavanaugh said. “But only to you. Come alone. You’ve got twenty minutes.”

“Your place?” Cork said.

“No. I’m at the Ladyslipper Mine.”

“All right.”

“Twenty minutes,” Cavanaugh said. “Alone.”

“Max—” Cork began. But Cavanaugh had hung up.

He swung his Land Rover around, called Dross, and told her what was up.

“I’ll meet you there,” she said.

“He said alone, Marsha.”

“Fine, you meet with him alone, but I’ll be lurking in the general vicinity.”

“That’ll do.”

“Just before you have your talk, call me on your cell and leave the phone on, okay? I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

“Kind of like wearing a wire?”

“Make sure you get close to him.”

It was late, and the sun had set. From the eastern horizon a red smear was spreading across the sky, and the clouds that hung there became like bloodstained cotton. At the gate to the mine, the guard directed Cork to follow one of the roads into the great pit.

“Mr. Cavanaugh went down there himself maybe forty minutes ago.” The guard gave Cork a map and outlined the way. “Mine operation’s shut down for the night, so you don’t have to worry about being run over by one of them monster trucks or blown up in the blasting.”

Which was, in fact, a comforting piece of information.

Cork followed the road the guard had indicated. It was paved asphalt for a couple of hundred yards, then turned to hard-packed red dirt and curled south of the Great North office complex. It sloped into the pit and almost immediately cut sharply to the left, and Cork kept his Land Rover at a crawl as he negotiated the narrow switchbacks that angled toward the floor of the great excavation. Cork had seen the hole only from above; being inside was different. Above there was grandeur to the scale. Inside and up close, he could see the rugged scars of all the intimate battle that had taken place to open that great hole and tear the ore from the earth.

He turned the final switchback and came out onto the flat at the bottom of the mine, which was a broad plain of devastation as red and bare as Cork imagined the surface of Mars to be, and just as alien in its feel. Gargantuan machines stood idle amid great mounds of blasted rubble that lay waiting to be loaded and carried away. A quarter of a mile to the south, water had seeped in, and a small lake had formed in a depression there, a lake in which, Cork was pretty certain, nothing lived. He felt swallowed by the mine, dwarfed by the immensity of the excavation, and more than a little in awe of the enormity of the vision and enterprise necessary to create it.

He spotted Cavanaugh’s Escalade parked a hundred yards ahead. He slowed and turned on his cell phone.

“Can you hear me, Marsha?”

“There’s static, but I can still read you.”

“All right. Going undercover now.”

He slipped the phone beneath his shirt, where it lay cradled against the thin ridge along the top of his belt line.

“Can you hear me now?”

“Yes, and quit the clowning.”

Cavanaugh had parked fifty yards from an enormous Bucyrus electric shovel. With its long neck and open-jawed bucket, the machine reminded Cork of a great dinosaur ready to feed.

He parked near the Escalade. Cavanaugh got out and met him halfway between the two vehicles. Cork closed to within two feet of Cavanaugh, who looked weary, like a man who’d run a thousand miles.

“I’m here, Max.”

“You wanted to know why,” Cavanaugh said.

“Everything else I pretty much understand.”

Almost wistfully, Cavanaugh eyed the mine walls, which terraced toward the reddened evening sky. “My family made its fortune from this earth,” he said. “I know that a lot of people look at the damage that’s been done to the land here and judge us. Me, I look at this mine and I see the generations of families it’s supported. I see the enterprise it’s fed. I see the wars this nation fought and won because of it. It seems to me that sometimes you have to choose to do some harm in the hope—no, the belief—that it’s for a greater good. That’s how I’ve lived my life anyway, most of it in mines not much different from this one. That big shovel over there? I can work it. I can drive a truck that hauls three hundred tons. I’ve prospected and drilled and blasted. Mining’s been my life, and it’s been a good one.”

“What about taking care of Lauren?” Cork said. “That’s been a part of your life, too.”

Cavanaugh eyed him dourly but didn’t reply.

“It couldn’t have been easy covering for her all these years.”

“That’s what you do when you’re family.”

“What kind of family was she, Max? Hard to love, I imagine.”

“You’re wrong. She was easy to love. Too easy. She walked into a room and she brought the sun with her. She was full of life, ideas, energy. Next to her, most people were like pieces of wood.”

“Then why did you kill her?”

“I’m not entirely certain I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There are things you need to know first. Before he died, my father told me about my mother. Horrible things.”

Cavanaugh fell silent and looked down at the hard rock beneath his feet.

“Was she involved in the Vanishings, Max?”

He gave his head a vague shake. “My father couldn’t say for sure, but he suspected. She was capable of it, he believed. At least after they moved here.”

“What made this place different?”

“She met a man, a truly evil man.”

“Indigo Broom.”

Cavanaugh lifted his gaze to Cork, apparently surprised that he knew the name. “Yes, Broom. My mother had had relationships before, a lot of them unconventional, but this was different. This was beyond bizarre. Where there’d been only, I don’t know, narcissism in her, there was cruelty, brutality. The change in her frightened my father. He was preparing to go to the police with his suspicions when she disappeared and the Vanishings stopped. For him, it was like being freed from hell. My grandfather was long dead, every family tie here ended, and so we left Aurora and all the awful memories behind.”

“But then you came back.”

“The worst decision I ever made.”

“Tell me about Lauren, Max.”

Cavanaugh looked away, and his gaze ran across the whole devastated landscape around him. “On his deathbed, my father made me promise to be responsible for her because she was, in many ways, like my mother.”

“What ways?”

“She was beautiful and smart, just like my mother, and just like my mother she had no heart. She loved no one.”

“Not even you?”

“She needed me, needed me desperately. But love? I don’t believe she understood the word. Not in the way you and I might understand it.”

“What about you? Did you love her?”

“I’m not sure I can explain. We shared blood, history, a lifetime of memories. That was part of it. But more important, I understood that she had no choice in who she was. Some people come into the world missing a limb or without sight or hearing. We don’t blame them for the way they’re born. How could I blame Lauren because she came into the world without a heart? She was her mother’s child.”

“You’re not like that.”

“Luck of the draw. It might just as easily have been me. Or both of us. What a curse that would have been for my father.” He let out a breath that may have carried a whisper of a laugh. “It was Dad who pointed out to me that I was the lucky one. He told me I had to share my heart with Lauren. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. Pick up the pieces, fix what she broke, mend the wounds she delivered. Hers was a lonely existence, really. She used people and threw them away, and afterward she was alone. Always alone.”

“Except for you. She came to you for companionship and comfort, yes?”

He breathed deeply, sadly. “She always came to me crying.”

“Manufactured tears?”

“Real enough. But always for her, never for anyone else. In her world, there was no one else worth crying over.”

“Not even you.”

“Not even me.”

“A hard love, Max. Is that why you killed her?”

“I told you. I’m not certain I did.”

“What happened that night?”

“First you have to understand something. Lauren was always self-centered, and I’d come to expect that. But when she moved here and moved back into that awful place we’d lived as children, she began to change. I saw her becoming cruel. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t care about other people, she began to enjoy inflicting pain.”

“Physical?”

“I don’t know. Emotional pain, certainly. But because of what my mother was, I began to be afraid.”

Evil finding evil, Cork thought.

“That night she called me at the Four Seasons, hysterical. I tried to calm her, but it was clear that she needed me. I left.”

“Without a word to anyone.”

“I thought a few minutes with her would be enough. Over the years, I’ve learned exactly what to say to her.”

“Did you know she’d been shot?”

“She said something about it, but she often lied to be certain I’d come when she needed me. When I got there, I saw that it wasn’t a lie. She’d bled, although she wasn’t bleeding anymore. She told me what happened, told me in a fury, told me she was going to kill the Stillday girl. She was a mess. Partly hysterical with tears, partly in a hysterical rage. She was waving a gun around. She kept a small firearm somewhere, but this wasn’t it. This one I’d never seen before. I had no idea where it came from. The gun scared me.”

Cavanaugh stopped talking. The entire sky had turned vermilion, and everything beneath it was cast in the same hue. If fire could bleed, Cork thought, this would be its color.

“I couldn’t get her to calm down,” Cavanaugh finally went on. “And I was angry, too. Angry at the disruption of my evening, angry at Lauren because, hell, she probably had gotten what she deserved, angry at a whole lifetime of bending to her selfish whims and putting up with her crazy, selfish behavior. It seemed to me in that moment that two crazy people were in the room, and I said that to her. God help me, I said, ‘We’re both better off dead.’”

Recalling it, Cavanaugh seemed stunned, and he fell silent.

“What did she do, Max?”

“Stopped her raving,” he said in a distant voice. “Walked to me. Walked to me with that gun in her hand. Pushed herself against my chest with the gun between us. Reached down and brought my hand up and put my finger over her finger on the trigger and whispered, ‘Do you want that, Max? Do you?’”

Cork waited, then pressed. “What happened?”

“The gun went off.” Cavanaugh turned his mystified eyes to Cork. “She looked up at me, and I couldn’t tell if it was surprise or relief I saw. And then she dropped at my feet. Just dropped. I went down to her. I called her name and she didn’t respond. There was blood all over her. I held her, but it was like holding a rag doll. I knew she was dead. I should have called someone, but instead I . . .”

By the end, Cavanaugh’s voice had dropped to a desperate whisper. To be certain that Dross on the other end of the phone had heard clearly, Cork said, “You killed her, Max?”

Cavanaugh shook his head with sudden fierceness. “I don’t know if I killed her. I don’t know if I pulled the trigger or she did, honest to God.”

“Then what happened, Max?”

“I went back and made excuses to the people at the Four Seasons and went home. I thought . . .” He hesitated, as if uncertain how to proceed. “I thought I would be free, but it didn’t feel that way at all. Does that make sense? If you’ve walked bound all your life and suddenly the ropes are gone, is that freedom? I didn’t quite know how to go on, Cork.”

“Why did you hire me to find her?”

“When no one reported her dead, Jesus, I thought maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she somehow pulled herself off that floor and went somewhere to recover and . . .”

“And what, Max?”

“And maybe she needed me.” His face held a look of bewilderment. “How sick is that? I realized that in some twisted way I needed her, too. And I realized one more thing, Cork, maybe the hardest lesson of all. Dead isn’t dead. The dead are always with us.”

“The second round of threatening notes, ‘We die. U die. Just like her.’ That was you, wasn’t it, Max?”

“After you found Lauren’s body, I got worried, afraid you might look my way. It was simply misdirection.” The tone of his voice indicated that to him it was a thing that hardly mattered now.

“Come back with me, Max. We can go to the sheriff, and you can explain.”

Cavanaugh gave his head a slight shake. “I never married, Cork. Never had children. Do you want to know why?”

“Because you had your hands full taking care of your sister?”

“Because I might have had a child like Lauren. Or worse, like my mother. It’s in my blood somewhere. But I’m the last of the Cavanaughs. When I’m gone, the blood curse is gone, too.”

“Come with me, Max.”

“You go on. I want to stay, keep company awhile with these rock walls. I feel comfortable here. You can tell the sheriff everything I told you. You will anyway, I suppose, and it’s all right with me.” He waited, and when Cork didn’t move, he said, more forcefully, “Go on, Cork. I want to be alone.”

“Max—”

“I can call a security person and have you escorted out.”

“No need. I’ll go.” But he didn’t, not right away. He said, “I’m sorry, Max.”

“For what?”

“Those ropes you talked about, I guess.”

Cavanaugh offered him a sad smile. “And I’d guess you have ropes of your own. Doesn’t everybody?”

Cork walked back to his Land Rover and got in. He looked back and watched Cavanaugh return to his Escalade.

He slid the phone from under his shirt. “You get all that, Marsha?”

“Loud and clear, Cork. I’m at the front gate now. I’ll pick him up when he comes out.”

Cork swung his vehicle around and started toward the incline that would take him along the switchbacks to the top. He figured he’d join Dross and together they would wait for Max Cavanaugh.

He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when he heard the explosion behind him, and the walls of the pit were lit as if by lightning, and he saw in the rearview mirror the Escalade consumed in an enormous blossom of red-orange flame.

FORTY-FIVE

He was home by midnight and in bed by one, but sleep stayed beyond his reach.

At three, he threw the covers back and went downstairs to check his e-mail, but there was nothing new from any of his children.

At four, he turned on the television in the living room and lay down on the sofa and surfed the channels, but nothing appealed.

At four-thirty, the birds began to chatter.

At five, he gave up, showered, dressed, and took Trixie for an early walk.

At six-thirty, he thought about breakfast but wasn’t hungry.

At seven, he called Judy Madsen, told her he would need her to cover for him at Sam’s Place for a while, got into his Land Rover, and headed to Crow Point to find Henry Meloux.

The dew on the meadow grass was heavy, and under the yellow morning sun Crow Point seemed strewn with sapphires. A breeze caught the smoke that rose from Meloux’s cabin and thinned it quickly to nothing against the morning sky. The cabin door was open. Near it, Walleye lay drowsing with his head on his forepaws. Cork, as he approached, smelled biscuits baking.

Rainy Bisonette stepped outside, shaded her eyes, and watched him come.

“We got word early this morning that Max Cavanaugh killed himself and that you were there,” she told him. “True?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Uncle Henry said you’d be here.”

“Where is he?”

“Preparing for you. Have you eaten?”

“A little. But those biscuits smell good.”

“I just made them. And I have coffee, if you’d like.”

“Thank you.”

They sat at the sturdy table Meloux had made for himself long before Cork was born. Cork looked around the simple, single room with affection and admiration.

“A person doesn’t need any more than this,” he said.

“Sometimes I think that, too. Other times, I’d kill for a lightbulb.”

“Thanks for the biscuit. It’s really good. Did you make this jam?”

“Yes.”

“It’s wonderful.”

“Since the kids have grown and gone, I don’t cook as much as I used to, or as much as I’d like. That’s been one of the best things about being here with Uncle Henry. Someone to appreciate my cooking.”

“How is he?”

“No worse. But I still haven’t got a handle on what’s going on.”

“There’s a pretty good hospital in Aurora. They could run tests.”

“Uncle Henry won’t go.”

Cork nodded. It figured.

The light through the open door was blotted by a sudden shadow, and Meloux walked in. He moved slowly, bent and looking tired. He sat with them at the table, ate a biscuit with jam, drank some coffee, and said to Cork, “You are ready for the end of your journey?”

“There are things I’ve forgotten, Henry, things that I have to know. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t think. I’ve always been proud to say that I was the son of Liam and Colleen O’Connor, but now I don’t know what that means. I’m not sure who they were, and I’m not sure anymore who I am.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes. I think there must be a good reason I don’t remember things, but I don’t care what that reason is. I have to know the truth.”

“Then I am ready to guide you to it. Niece?” He held out his hand, which trembled, and she helped him to his feet.

Every spring, in a small clearing on the eastern shore of the point, Meloux built a sweat lodge. The old Mide usually had help, Shinnobs from the rez, and some years Cork gave a hand. This year it had been mostly Rainy who’d assisted her uncle. They’d built the frame—a hemisphere eight feet in diameter and five feet high at the center—of willow boughs tied together with rawhide prayer strips, and had covered it with tarps overlaid with blankets.

When they reached the sweat lodge, Meloux turned to Cork.

“First you will fast,” he said.

“How long, Henry?”

“A day. You will fast and ask yourself if you really want to know the truth, for that is the end of this journey. If you are thirsty, drink from the lake. If you feel the desire or need, bathe there, too. We will come at moonrise to see if you want to go on, and if you do, we will come again before the rise of the sun to build the sacred fire. Do you understand, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“Yes, Henry.”

“Then sit here,” Meloux said and indicated a bare area that lay between the sweat lodge and the lake, “and let it begin. Come, Niece. You, too, old dog,” he said to Walleye, who’d padded slowly behind them from the cabin.

Meloux turned and headed back the way he’d come.

“Rainy?” Cork called.

She turned back. “Could you call John and Sue O’Loughlin? They live across the street from me. Tell them I might be a while and ask them to feed and, if they’re willing, walk my dog until I get back?”

“I’ll do that,” Rainy promised.

Cork sat on the ground, crossed his legs, and waited.

The sun rose high and the day grew hot and Cork grew thirsty. He got up and walked to the lake, unsteadily because his legs had gone to sleep. As he knelt to drink, he saw a huge bird, a great blue heron, gliding over the lake, which was glass smooth and mirror perfect. The reflection of the bird crossed the reflection of the sky. Slowly, gracefully, the heron descended. In the mirror of the lake, its other self rose, and in a brief moment of rippling water, the two met. With a powerful sweep of wing, the great bird rose again and the other descended, and in a minute the sky and lake were clear again. The ripple of their meeting spread outward, however, and where Cork knelt at the lake’s edge, the water undulated gently.

Sometime in the afternoon, a dark-colored snake shot from the grass that edged the cleared area around the sweat lodge. Cork had been drowsing, and the dart of the snake startled him, and he sat bolt upright. The snake stopped, tested the air with its tongue, and for a fatal moment lay there, a black crack across the bare dirt a dozen feet from Cork. In the next instant, a goshawk swooped down, snagged the reptile, and, effortless as dreaming, carried it away.

These sights, or sights like them, Cork had seen before in the great Northwoods, and he could explain them. But at dusk, he witnessed something that he’d never seen and for which he had no explanation.

The sun had set, and the lake had taken on the look of melted lead. The shoreline was drifting into darkness, and the tops of the pine trees formed a ragged black outline that reminded him of the sharp teeth of a predator. The night birds had begun to call, and the tree frogs were just starting to sing. At a place a hundred yards distant, where Crow Point met the shoreline in a curve of brush and timber, Cork spotted movement, a stealthy creep of pale white, which he realized was a wolf. Then he spotted another wolf, this one a mottled gray, which seemed to mirror the movement of the first. They circled, facing each other in a threatening way. Suddenly they lunged and met in terrible canine battle. The sound of their yips and snarls echoed off the trees, and the birds and the frogs fell silent. The wolves separated, circled, and lunged again, gnashing teeth and tearing through fur into flesh. They went on this way until it was too dark to see them, and then the noise of their struggle finally ended. Cork sat wondering at what he’d witnessed and wondering what it meant.

At moonrise, as he’d promised, Meloux returned. Rainy was with him.

The sky was black, and through it ran the pale river of the Milky Way. The gibbous moon, as it rose, cast a glow that pushed long, faint shadows across the ground.

“What have you seen today?” the old Mide asked.

“A bird descended from the sky, Henry, and touched its reflection and flew away.”

“What else?”

“This afternoon, a snake crawled near me, and a hawk snatched it and carried it off.”

“What else?”

“Something I didn’t understand, and maybe didn’t really see.”

“What was that?”

“Two wolves fighting. Over there.” Cork pointed toward the curve in the shoreline.

“Ah,” Meloux said, as if this was important.

“What does it mean, Henry?” Cork asked.

“In every human being, there are two wolves. One wolf is love, from which all that is good in life comes: generosity, forgiveness, acceptance, peace. The other is fear, which creates all that is destructive: greed, hatred, prejudice, violence. These two wolves are always fighting.”

“Did I really see them?”

“Really?” In the dark, the crescent moon of a smile appeared on the old man’s face. “I don’t know what that question means, Corcoran O’Connor. Are you willing to continue your journey?”

“I am, Henry.”

“Then continue.” He turned as if to leave.

“Wait, Henry,” Cork said. “The two wolves fighting? Which one wins?”

But Meloux didn’t answer. He walked away, and Rainy followed.

Just before sunrise, Meloux and Rainy came again, and Walleye came with them. They brought two folded blankets.

Cork hadn’t slept, or been aware that he’d slept. The night had been long, and his thoughts had drifted widely.

“You are ready for the end of your journey?” Meloux asked.

Although he was weary, Cork replied, “I’m ready, Henry.”

“Help me with the fire, Niece.”

As Cork watched, Meloux and Rainy built the sacred fire, and when the blaze had produced a fine bed of glowing coals, the old man pointed Rainy toward a pitchfork that leaned against a nearby tree. Not far away was a stack of large rocks, which Cork knew were the Grandfathers, the stones that would heat the lodge. Rainy used the pitchfork to place the Grandfathers among the embers. Meloux burned sage and cedar in the fire and used an eagle feather to guide the smoke over Cork to further cleanse his spirit. He gave Cork tobacco, and Cork sprinkled it into the fire, asking the Great Spirit to guide him in his quest. Then Meloux told Rainy to put the blankets on the ground inside the lodge. When all was ready, he said to Cork, “It is time.”

The old man stripped off his clothing, and Cork did the same. Meloux went first and Cork followed. When they were seated on their blankets, Rainy carried in the Grandfathers, one by one, cradled on the tines of the pitchfork, and laid the red-hot stones in the hollow in the center. She used a pine bough to sweep away any lingering ash or embers from the stones. Last, she brought in a clay bowl that held a small dipper and was filled with water. Then she retreated and dropped the flap over the opening, plunging Cork and Meloux into darkness.

During a long period of silence, Cork’s eyes adjusted, and he saw Meloux reach for the dipper and pour water over the stones. Steam shot into the air, and Cork began to sweat, and the old Mide began a prayer, an Ojibwe chant whose words Cork didn’t understand.

The heat increased, and Meloux sprinkled more water on the stones and continued chanting.

After a while, Cork relaxed.

His weariness overwhelmed him.

And he began to dream.

FORTY-SIX

What do you see, Corcoran O’Connor?

He was outside himself, seeing himself, and he said so.

How old are you?

Thirteen, he said.

Tell me what is happening.

And this is what he told.

He’s lying on the sofa in the living room of the house on Gooseberry Lane. He’d thought he would watch television to take his mind off the worry that never left him these days, but he hasn’t bothered to turn the set on. Instead, he stares up at the ceiling and wonders if his father will ever find his cousin Fawn or Naomi Stonedeer, and if he does, will they still be alive. They’ve been taken, abducted, everyone on the rez is sure, but no one has any idea who would do such a thing, and everyone is afraid. The Vanishings. That’s what everyone is calling what’s happened.

The house is quiet. He’s alone. His mother is on the rez with Grandma Dilsey and Fawn’s mother, Aunt Ellie. His father is … well, his father could be anywhere these days. He’s gone a lot. During the day, he leaves in uniform. But at night he leaves in different clothing, and often he doesn’t come back until early morning, when Cork is asleep. But his mother doesn’t sleep, and his father’s sneaking out is something that concerns her. Because of his mother’s worry and because of his father’s inability to find Fawn and Naomi and, most of all, because of his father’s silence and odd behavior that clearly hurt his mother, Cork is angry with him, angry all the time. They barely speak these days. Sometimes Cork sees in his father’s eyes something like regret. And sometimes he longs to tell his father that he’s tired of his own anger and wants to let go of the worry and that all he really wants is for everything to be as it was before the Vanishings began.

He hears the kitchen door open, and a moment later he hears his mother’s voice.

“Damn it, Liam, why won’t you listen?”

“I have listened. To you and all your relatives and every other Shinnob on the reservation. And I understand your concern, and I wish to God that you’d trust me and let me do my job.”

“You leave almost every night and are gone until almost dawn and you won’t tell me where you go.”

“That’s the trust part, Colleen.”

“Trust works both ways, Liam. Tell me what’s going on. Trust that I’ll believe you or forgive you or whatever it takes.”

At first, his father offers only silence. Then he says, “Where’s Cork?”

Cork lies still as death to be sure he can’t be seen.

“I don’t know,” his mother replies. “Out, I suppose.”

“Sit down.”

Cork hears chairs scraping linoleum.

“A while back, Cy Borkman and I responded to a call from Jacque’s in Yellow Lake.”

“That’s a vile place, Liam.”

“Places like that are the reason I have a job,” he says. “It was an altercation over a woman, the kind of woman who looked like she wasn’t particular who shared her bed. I broke up the fight, and ended up escorting the woman to her vehicle. She made me the kind of offer an experienced streetwalker in Chicago might have come up with.”

“Does that happen often?” his mother says, in a brittle tone.

“People try to negotiate with me using all kind of tender. This is about trust, remember?”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“She called herself Daphne, and there was something familiar about her. Then it came to me. Beneath all that makeup and the wig and the slutty clothing was Peter Cavanaugh’s wife.”

“Monique?”

“Yep. Monique Cavanaugh.”

“You must have been mistaken, Liam.”

“No mistake. It was her.”

“Did you let her know you recognized her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was curious. What was a woman like her doing in a dive like Jacque’s dressed like a prostitute and behaving like one? Since then I’ve been watching the place to see if she might come again, and to see if I could figure what she was up to. She’s the wife of one of the richest men on the Iron Range, and I knew I needed to be careful in how I went about things. Last night, I saw her again. She was made up like Daphne, and she wasn’t alone. She came with someone familiar to us both.”

“Who?”

“Indigo Broom.”

“Mr. Windigo? God, just thinking about him gives me the creeps.”

“It gets creepier. I sit in my car in the parking lot most of the night waiting for them to come out. Finally Daphne does, but she’s not with Broom. She’s got a biker on her arm, some big, hairy ape of a guy who gets on his motorcycle and she gets on behind him. Before they take off, Broom comes out, gets in his truck, and when they leave, he follows them. I follow Broom. We end up at the North Pine Motor Court over on Long Lake. The biker and Daphne check in and take a room. Broom parks in the motor court lot, turns off his truck, sits. I park on the road and wait until almost dawn, then Daphne comes out. She gets into Broom’s truck and leaves with him. I pull out my badge and buckle on my gun belt and knock on the door of the room she left. Nobody answers. I knock again, then try the knob. Door’s unlocked. I go in. The biker’s on the bed, naked, tied up with a woman’s nylons and with a woman’s panties stuffed in his mouth and looking like he’s been attacked by a tiger, long bloody scratches everywhere. Bruises, too. I pull out the gag and cut the nylons, toss the guy his clothes, ask him what happened. ‘Nothing,’ he says. The badge gets me nowhere. I threaten to haul him in. He calls my bluff. The kind of guy who’s dealt with uniforms a lot and doesn’t scare. I tell him to get dressed, and I go to the motor court office, get us both some coffee, bring it back. He says he’ll talk but off the record. There’s something he wouldn’t mind getting off his chest, but not to a lawman. So I say, ‘Off the record.’ He tells me that at one point when she’s got him tied up, she pulls a knife from her purse, a switchblade, and says she’s going to cut his heart out and eat it. He laughs, but then she puts the blade to his chest, and for a moment he thinks she’s really going to do it. So I ask him, was it worth it? He says, ‘Mister, even though I thought for a minute I might die, the way she made me feel I almost didn’t care.’”

In the kitchen, it’s quiet for a long time.

Then his father says, “I look at Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh, who, as nearly as I can tell, are involved in some brutal and bizarre sexual behavior. I look at the Vanishings, and I get the feel of something brutal and bizarre there. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“That they took Naomi and Fawn?”

“I can’t say that. Not even unofficially. But there are connections. Broom knows the rez, knows the vulnerable girls, can move about without a lot of notice.”

“And he takes Fawn and Naomi and then what, Liam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, God, I hate to think.”

Cork hears a kitchen chair slide back and hears his father pacing.

“Liam, how do we find out?” There is a different tone to her voice. Solid. Resolved.

“If I pull him in and interrogate him, I might lose the only advantage I have, which is that he doesn’t know I’m looking his way.”

“What about her?”

“Right. I haul in the wife of Peter Cavanaugh and interrogate her regarding the missing girls and mention the fact that she loves to dress like a whore and have kinky, dangerous sex with hairy bikers. That’ll go over real big with my constituency. Hell, she wouldn’t say a word to me without a lawyer there, anyway. And if I start asking her questions, I lose that same advantage I have with Broom, which is that she doesn’t know I’m watching her.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

“Just you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liam, let’s talk to Sam Winter Moon and George LeDuc. And maybe Henry Meloux.”

“To what end?”

“Maybe they can help.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But they’ll be more likely to believe you than almost any white person in Tamarack County.”

“There’s that,” he says.

Where are you now?

At Grandma Dilsey’s.

Who else is there?

You.

Who else?

Grandma Dilsey. My mother and father. Aunt Ellie. Becky Stonedeer. Sam Winter Moon. And George LeDuc.

He’s supposed to be swimming in the lake, but he has sneaked back and is sitting against the side of the house below the kitchen window, and he can hear them talking inside.

“Never liked that man. Never trusted him,” Sam Winter Moon says.

“Indigo Broom,” Meloux says. “There is a powerful spirit there. Dark like bog water.”

“I have no proof of anything,” Cork’s father reminds them.

“Proof? I know how to get proof,” LeDuc says. “Liam, you know what the word ‘Ojibwe’ means? To pucker. We used to roast our enemies until their skin puckered.”

“I hope you’re joking, George.”

“Our children are missing, Liam. About this, I don’t joke.”

“What do we do?” his mother asks.

“We go to his cabin, Colleen,” LeDuc says. “If he’s there, we talk to him. If he’s not, we wait until he comes back.”

“Talk to him?” Cork’s father says. “Or pucker him?”

“Whatever it takes, Liam.”

“I can’t let you do that, George. That’s not why I came here.”

“Doesn’t matter why you came.”

“Now wait a minute,” Sam Winter Moon says. “There’s got to be something we can do short of torturing the man.”

Grandma Dilsey says, “If we make him suffer and we’re wrong, can we live with that?”

“Hell, I can,” LeDuc says.

“Unless you silence him for good, George, he’ll sue you for everything you’ve got.”

LeDuc laughs. “That’s the white man’s revenge, Liam. On the rez, he’ll just wait in the dark and slit my throat. I’m willing to take that chance.”

“I think we should watch him,” his mother says. “There are enough eyes out here that he can’t hide. The moment he tries something, we grab him, and then, George, you can do all the puckering you want.”

“What about the woman?” Meloux says.

“Would she do anything without Indigo Broom?” Becky Stonedeer asks.

“I don’t know,” his father replies. “Henry, these are not normal people. God alone knows what they will or won’t do.”

“Can she be watched?” Meloux asks.

“I can’t put any of my men on her. I’d have to do some explaining, and I don’t know how I’d do that. And I can’t watch her myself night and day.”

“I think,” Meloux says, “that I would like to talk to this woman. Indigo Broom, I know. This woman is a stranger.”

His father says, “Got any idea how I can arrange that, Henry?”

“I have an idea,” his mother says. “She gives a lot of money away. What if Henry and I approach her about an Ojibwe charity?”

“What charity?” his father asks.

The kitchen is quiet. Then his mother says, “The Missing Child Fund.”

Now? Where are you now?

It’s night. Late. He has slipped from his house and ridden his bike ten miles to the southern edge of the rez. The moon is up, and Waagikomaan is a river of gray dirt winding among the trees. He knows from what he’s overheard that Indigo Broom is being watched, and he’s careful. There is only one way to Broom’s cabin, and he’s on it. He walks his bike and has tuned all his senses to the forest that presses in on either side of the road.

There are crickets and tree frogs, and then there is a deeper sound, unnatural, in the trees to his right. The sound, he realizes, of a man snoring.

He creeps past the sleeping man and, a hundred yards farther, remounts and rides to an old logging road that cuts south toward Mr. Windigo’s cabin. He lays his bike at the side of Waagikomaan and starts up the logging road. The trees blot out the moon, and the woods are dark. He can barely see.

He’s here because … because he’s a boy on the edge of manhood, and he wants to be a part of this important effort to find his cousin and Naomi, to find the truth of the Vanishings, and he hopes that somehow in the dark of that night, or of another, he will find the way.

His whole life he has lived in the community of the great Northwoods. He has spent nights alone in a tent or in a sleeping bag under the stars, and the darkness itself doesn’t frighten him. But there is something about the place under his feet now that is different, that fills him with dread. There are no night sounds here. No crickets. No tree frogs. Only silence. It is a dead place, he thinks. And he thinks he should not be there.

But he forces himself to go on.

The cabin is a dark shape visible against a wall of stone that catches moonlight and seems to glow. There is another building as well, smaller and set off to one side and a little back from the cabin. There is a pickup truck parked near the second structure.

He goes to the cabin first, crouching in his approach, his Keds tennis shoes making no sound in the soft dirt. He peers carefully in at a window, cannot see a thing except his own faint reflection peering back. He circles the cabin, stealing a peek in every window, and in every window there is only his own, intense face. He lopes to the other building, which has no windows. He tries the door. It isn’t locked. He opens it, and something—an ill wind, a malign spirit, a palpable evil—rushes out. He stands a moment, staring into the darkness, paralyzed by the malignancy he senses. He has brought with him a flashlight, which is clipped to his belt. He pulls the flashlight free, turns it on, and scans the interior of the small building.

At first, he thinks it is simply a toolshed. Many kinds of implements hang on the walls. Saws, axes, shovels, pry bars, a wheelbarrow, a coiled water hose. The beam, where it hits the wall, forms a round yellow eye, and he keeps it tracking to the right until suddenly in the middle of that eye is something he can’t explain. A chain bolted to the wall with an iron cuff at each end. He creeps forward, circling a long, rough-hewn table in the center of the room, holding the light steady, more or less, on the chains. He reaches out and fingers a cuff. The metal is cold and, he thinks at first, rusted. Then he realizes the color is not from rust, and he yanks his hand back. His heart pounds furiously and his breath comes in shallow little gasps and he wishes he weren’t there, but he is and he turns and the eye of the flashlight finds the tabletop and he sees manacles there, too, and dark mosaic stains soaked into the wood.

He hears a noise, a long intake of air, and shoots the beam of the flashlight toward the door where Mr. Windigo stands grinning.

FORTY-SEVEN

The old man touched his shoulder, and Cork came out of the dream to the wet heat of the sweat lodge on Iron Lake. He was tired beyond measure.

“I want to go on,” he said to Meloux.

“First, we refresh. We cool ourselves in the lake.” Meloux called to Rainy, who drew back the cover of the opening.

Sunlight cracked the dark inside the lodge, and Cork blinked at the sudden glare. He followed Meloux clockwise around the pit where the Grandfathers lay cooling. When he was outside, he saw that Rainy was standing ready with the pitchfork to remove the stones and replace them with others she’d set among the embers of the sacred fire to heat. Cork walked with Meloux to the lake and plunged in. The cold water was a slap and brought him fully awake and refreshed him.

When they came out of the water, the old man walked slowly, and Cork wondered about Meloux’s strength.

“Henry, you don’t have to go on,” he offered.

“A long time ago I guided you from an evil place. I always knew that someday I would have to guide you back. We will go together.”

They reentered the lodge. Rainy had removed the cooled stones. When the two men were seated, she brought in stones newly heated, filled the hollow in the middle of the lodge, and retreated, dropping the cover over the opening and plunging the inside of the lodge again into darkness. Cork heard the hiss of water as the old Mide sprinkled the Grandfathers. The steam rose, and Meloux began again a prayer chant, and in a few minutes Cork was overtaken again by dreaming.

* * *

He is alone in the dark of Indigo Broom’s foul little structure, and the cuffs dig into his skin.

For hours, he’s tried to pull himself loose, and his wrists bleed.

He’s scared. Oh, God, is he scared. He knows now, knows with a deep, abiding terror the fate of his cousin Fawn and Naomi Stonedeer. And unless he can somehow free himself, he knows his own fate, too.

The door opens, and early sunlight, a kind of false hope, enters the room. With it comes Mr. Windigo. He’s not alone. A woman is with him. A beautiful woman. They walk together, bringing with them the fresh scent of morning evergreen. It is the best thing he’s ever smelled.

She touches his cheek gently with long, soft fingers. “What are you doing here?”

“I was just looking, that’s all. Just looking.”

“Curiosity?”

“Yeah. That.”

“A child’s simple curiosity. How convenient.”

“He ain’t no child,” Mr. Windigo says.

Her hand drifts from his cheek, and a fingernail painted deep red traces a line down his throat, his chest, his stomach, his belt, to his crotch, which she cups in her palm. “No,” she agrees. “Not a child.”

She squeezes hard and it hurts and he cries out.

“Curiosity? Only that?” she asks calmly, not relaxing the vise grip of her hand.

“Please,” he pleads.

She releases him, but the terrible ache between his legs is unrelieved.

“Keep him,” she says. “When I’m back from Duluth tonight, we’ll see.”

“They’ll miss him.”

“They’ve missed the others. It hasn’t mattered.”

She kisses Mr. Windigo. Kisses him a long time and in a way that isn’t about love. He knows no word for what that kiss is about.

“We’ll have fun,” she says and smiles. Her lips are deep ruby and frame the ice white of her teeth like two perfect razor cuts. She turns and leaves with Mr. Windigo at her side.

He left home without sleeping. It has been a long time since he’s slept. There is a darkness before him so terrible that he can’t begin to comprehend it, and his deep weariness and his deep desire to turn away from what he can’t escape make his eyes too heavy to hold open and he sleeps.

He comes awake to the sound of something heavy thrown against the wall of the shed. In the next moment, the door flies open and sunlight blinds him. They have returned, he knows. Mr. Windigo and the woman with the razor cut lips. And he knows the business that he slept to escape can be escaped no longer.

“Jesus!”

He hears the familiar voice of Sam Winter Moon, and he cannot keep himself from crying with relief.

“You sadistic bastard.” It’s the voice of George LeDuc.

Something hits the wall again.

Sam Winter Moon lifts him, and the cuffs no longer cut into his wrists.

“Where’s the key, Broom?” demands LeDuc.

“Peg. On the wall.” Mr. Windigo sounds as if he’s being choked.

In a moment, he can feel the cuffs released, and he falls into the good, safe arms of Winter Moon.

“Bring him out.” It is the voice of Henry Meloux, calm and compassionate.

He’s carried into the light.

“Are you hurt anywhere?” Meloux asks.

He shakes his head. He cannot speak, not yet. His throat is choked with gratitude.

“What about him?” LeDuc has a powerful arm around Mr. Windigo’s throat, and the evil man’s eyes look ready to pop from his head.

“Take him back inside,” Meloux instructs.

Winter Moon helps LeDuc wrestle Mr. Windigo into the shed. There are the sounds of a scuffle, of Mr. Windigo cursing, of chains rattling. Then the two men return.

“We’ve got him on the table, Henry.”

Meloux nods and looks down at him with dark, somber eyes. “We have work. It is not work you need to see.”

Finally able to speak, he says, “I’m not leaving.” He sits up. “He killed Fawn and Naomi. Him and the woman.”

Meloux asks, “You saw the woman?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know her?”

He shakes his head. “She looks pretty but she’s not. Not inside.”

“What did she say?”

“That she’d be back tonight. She’s going to Duluth.”

“He can’t stay for this, Henry,” Winter Moon says.

“I’m not leaving, Sam!”

Meloux considers. “He will stay. But he will not see.” He points toward the wall of rock that forms a backdrop to the setting of the cabin and the shed. “Up there, Corcoran O’Connor. You will wait up there. You will give us warning if you see someone coming. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Henry.”

“Good.” Meloux helps him up. “Go now.”

He makes his way to the top of the ridge, which places him fifty feet above the scene below. He can see the roof of the cabin, which is covered in black shingles and has no chimney, only a stovepipe. He can see the roof of the shed, which is cedar shake and slopes toward the rock wall where he sits. He can see the cut of the old logging road that divides the trees. And he sees his bicycle, which he’d laid beside Waagikomaan in the dark of the night before. Someone had found it, maybe the guy sleeping among the trees, and the men had come.

The cries, when they begin, startle him. Not only because of their wretchedness but because they are the only sounds in that vile part of the forest.

The cries go on and on.

At first, he doesn’t mind. He’s glad for the hurt being given Mr. Windigo.

But the longer the screams continue, the more they cut into his resolve. He wishes the sound would end. Finally, he puts his hands over his ears, but he can still hear.

And then the screams stop. Stop suddenly. But the silence that returns holds no relief. The echo of the screams goes on in his head.

The men step from the shed. They’re carrying the water hose that had hung inside. They walk to a spigot that protrudes from the side of the cabin wall, connect the hose, turn on the water, and wash their hands and arms all the way above their elbows.

Meloux climbs the wall and sits beside him.

“Mr. Windigo is dead?” he asks the Mide.

“He was a thing incomplete, Corcoran O’Connor. A thing never really alive.”

“He sure screamed like he was.”

“Pain delivers us into this world. Pain is often the way we leave. That man—no, that half-formed thing—will not feel pain or give pain ever again.”

“That’s a good thing.”

Meloux thinks on this. “It is a necessary thing.”

“Henry,” Winter Moon calls from below. “We need to talk about what now.”

“Come.”

Meloux rises, and together they descend. They join the others in front of the cabin. The men all look down at him.

“You understand, Cork, that nothing of this can ever be told,” Winter Moon says.

He knows and shows them with a serious nod.

LeDuc eyes him with uncertainty. “I don’t know, Henry.”

“We will think about that later,” the Mide advises. “Let us think about what is next.”

“His folks are worried,” Winter Moon says. “I’ll send word he’s with me and he’s fine. I’ll say that he was with me all night. A lie, but considering Liam and all, I don’t know a way around it.”

“His father needs the lie,” LeDuc says. “But tell his mother to come to Dilsey’s place. She’ll understand.”

Winter Moon asks, “What about the bodies Broom said they stuffed in the mine? We can’t just leave them there.”

“Their spirits have already walked the Path of Souls,” Meloux says. “Moving them would be a dangerous thing. Broom told us what was done to them. For those who loved them, to look now on what is left, I think that would be too hard. The earth will take the bodies back. For that, one hole is as good as another.”

“We just leave them?”

“We will honor their memory. But, yes, we will leave them.”

“That doesn’t seem right, Henry.”

“In this business, what does?”

LeDuc says, “Cork said the woman will be coming here tonight. What do we do? Just wait?”

Meloux looks at the cabin and the shed and seems to listen to the dead silence of that evil place. “We burn,” he says.

FORTY-EIGHT

She holds him a long time, and then she looks into his eyes, and her own eyes are brown flowers dripping dew.

“Oh, God,” she says. “What he might have done to you.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

“He killed Fawn, and he killed Naomi,” he tells her.

“We’ve been to the mine tunnel,” LeDuc says. “He killed more than just them.”

His mother stands fully erect in his grandmother’s living room and turns to the men. “Who else?”

“Hattie’s girl Abbie. And Leonora Broom. Hell, we all thought they just ran off. Indigo Broom, that man was a monster. Christ. Him and the Cavanaugh woman.”

“Windigos,” Winter Moon says.

“We know how to deal with Windigos,” LeDuc says.

Grandma Dilsey, who has seen much in her life, offers, “What we do, we must do carefully. There are laws not our own to consider.”

They all look at his mother. It’s clear they’re thinking about his father.

“Liam can’t know,” she says. “What we’ve done, he won’t understand.”

“Or what we still have to do,” LeDuc says.

She turns to her son. “What I have to ask, Cork, there’s no way I can justify it. But it’s the most important thing I’ve ever asked of you. You can’t tell your father what happened at Indigo Broom’s cabin. You can’t tell him ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he says. And he absolutely does and has absolutely no intention of ever saying anything to his father.

“Good,” she says. “It would be a disaster on so many levels.” She turns to the others. “Where’s Henry?”

“With Hattie Stillday. He wanted to talk to her himself,” Winter Moon replies.

“What about tonight?” she asks.

“We have a plan,” says LeDuc.

He came out of the dream on his own.

“You do not want to go on?” Meloux asked.

“The truth is I’m afraid,” Cork replied.

“The truth is you have always been afraid. That is why long ago I helped you not remember.”

“You?”

“I cannot explain. If you are to understand completely, you must remember.”

“I have to go back?”

“You have to go back.”

“Will you be there, Henry?”

“I have always been there.”

It is night. He is at his grandmother’s house with the others: Meloux, Winter Moon, LeDuc, Becky Stonedeer, Grandma Dilsey, Aunt Ellie, Hattie Stillday, his mother. The men have rifles. His mother is armed as well. She has brought his father’s revolver, the .38 Police Special, which she took from the lockbox in their bedroom closet and has filled with cartridges. The firearm looks awkward in her hand. When Grandma Dilsey saw it, she’d questioned, “Do you need that?”

“I don’t know what I need to kill a monster, but this is what I have.”

She holds the gun at her side, so weighty that it seems to throw her body off balance.

He is in the back bedroom, where they made him go before they began their discussion. They closed the door. He’s opened it a crack so that he can see and hear.

“I’ve checked,” Winter Moon says. “This thing she’s at in Duluth is supposed to finish up around ten. A couple of hours to get back here, and she should hit Broom’s cabin around midnight.”

“The remains of Broom’s cabin, you mean,” LeDuc says.

“We should be there early,” Winter Moon advises.

“She comes,” Hattie says bitterly, “and then what?”

“And then justice,” LeDuc says.

“We just kill her?” Grandma Dilsey asks.

“She didn’t just kill our children,” Hattie says with acid bitterness. “She tortured them first.”

“You’re saying we should torture her, Hattie?”

“If you can’t, I’ll be more than happy to do it for you, Dilsey,” Hattie replies.

Meloux says, “To end her life isn’t a cruelty. Her life is an unnatural thing. But to drag out that end would be cruel.”

“I’m just fine with that, Henry.”

“Now, maybe. But your life will be long, Hattie, and someday you will regret your cruelty to this creature.”

“I’m willing to live with it.”

“Me, too,” LeDuc throws in.

Meloux considers them, and his voice, when he replies, is a placid pool. “We must think with one mind, speak with one voice, act with one heart. If we are not together, we will crumble.”

“I want her dead,” Aunt Ellie says quietly, “as much as anyone here. But I don’t want her to suffer. I don’t want to become a Windigo, like her.”

“To kill a Windigo, you must become a Windigo,” LeDuc throws at her.

“And feed on her heart, George?” Grandma Dilsey replies. “There will be no satisfaction. That’s the thing about a Windigo. It’s always hungry.”

“One heart, one voice, one mind,” Meloux reminds them.

They stand in a loose circle. From where he watches through the crack in the door, he can see them eye one another, and although they don’t speak, it’s as if they’re talking.

LeDuc finally says, “All right. We end it quickly. And do what with her body?”

“We put it with the bodies of those she’s killed,” Meloux says.

“No!” Hattie cries. “I don’t want her anywhere near my Abbie.”

“It will not be her. It will be only her flesh and her bone,” Meloux replies. “Her deformed spirit will be on the Path of Souls.”

Aunt Ellie offers, “Hattie, our girls will be like guardians. They won’t let that monster harm anyone else.”

“And she won’t be found there,” LeDuc adds.

Hattie lowers her head, considers, and says at last, “All right.”

“We should go,” Meloux tells them. “Prepare.”

“Someone needs to stay with Cork,” his mother says.

“I’ll stay,” Grandma Dilsey tells her. “But I won’t let you leave with that gun, Colleen.” She reaches out her hand. “There are guns enough already to do what must be done.”

Into Grandma Dilsey’s hand, his mother delivers the firearm. Grandma Dilsey walks to an old rolltop desk, slides open a drawer, and puts the gun inside.

FORTY-NINE

Grandma Dilsey is outside watching night push across the sky. She has been quiet and tense. He sits beside her on the porch steps, looking where she looks, but probably not thinking what she’s thinking. He’s thinking something else, he’s pretty sure. When night has settled fully on both earth and sky, he says, “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down in the bedroom.”

She puts her arm around him. Her face, dark from the blood of The People that runs through her body and darker still from the night, comes near his own. Her eyes are soft and full of pain. “I’m sorry, Mishiikens.” She uses the Ojibwe word for “little turtle,” an affectionate name by which she sometimes calls him. “These things, you should have been spared.”

“I’m all right, Nokomis,” he replies, using the Ojibwe word for “grandmother.” “Just tired. I think I should rest for a while.”

“Go,” she says. “Lie down.”

Inside the house he walks to the desk where Grandma Dilsey has put his father’s handgun. Soundlessly, he slides the drawer open and removes the weapon. He goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind him. At the window, he takes off the screen. He’s just about to ease himself through the opening when the door opens at his back and his father enters the room. Grandma Dilsey is with him. Her face is defiant and at the same time afraid.

“Where are you going, Cork?”

His father’s voice is colder than he has ever heard.

“Nowhere,” he replies.

“Give me the gun.”

He walks to his father and holds the heavy firearm out to him. His father takes the weight from the small hand and fills the empty holster on his own belt.

“Where have they gone?” his father asks, his voice still like something frozen in winter.

He looks at his Grandma Dilsey and understands that she hasn’t told. He wants to be like her, to hold his tongue even against the frigid power of his father. He says nothing.

His father reaches out and grabs his arm. His fingers are like the iron of the manacles in Mr. Windigo’s shed. “You’ll tell me what’s happening. You’ll tell me where they’ve gone. And you’ll tell me now.”

“Liam,” Grandma Dilsey cries. “Don’t hurt him.”

“Then you tell me,” he says, turning on the old woman.

“All right, all right. Just let him go.”

The grip is released. And Liam O’Connor listens stone-faced as Grandma Dilsey tells him everything.

He stands there ashamed, knowing that, but for him, his grandmother would never have told. He hates himself and he hates his father and even when his father turns and something different is in his face now, something afraid, he goes on hating him.

“Stay here,” his father says to him. His voice is stern but softer.

Grandma Dilsey stands barring the door. “Liam, it has to be done.”

“Not this way, Dilsey. Not if I have anything to say about it.” He shoves her aside, and his boots shake the floorboards as he leaves.

Grandma Dilsey follows, and he can hear her calling from the porch, “Liam, please understand.”

He is alone and takes the opportunity to slip through the screenless window and drop to the ground, and as he sees the headlights of his father’s car barrel into the dark, he lopes to a stand of paper birch thirty yards away and makes his way silently among the trees. He reaches the highway well out of sight of the house and heads south following where his father has gone, following toward Waagikomaan, toward the road the Cavanaugh woman must take that night to get to the place where Indigo Broom’s cabin stands in smoldering ruin.

It’s several miles, and he alternates between a brisk walk and a run. The night is quiet. The road is practically empty. Whenever he hears the approach of a vehicle and sees headlights, he slips among the trees and underbrush that edge the old potholed asphalt.

He is thinking: They’ll be at the place where the logging road to Mr. Windigo’s cuts off from Waagikomaan. They’ll be waiting for her, hiding in the trees there.

He’s not thinking what he will do when he gets there. He’s simply thinking that it is because of him that his mother’s people are in jeopardy now and he has a responsibility to them. And because of what happened to him in Mr. Windigo’s shed, he has a right to be a part of whatever may occur.

He comes to the juncture, the place where the dirt and gravel of Waagikomaan branch off from the highway. The moon has risen by then. It’s like a great hole in the dark sky that lets the light of some brighter place shine through.

He turns toward the full moon and has walked a hundred yards, heading in the direction he believes the others will be hiding and waiting, when a car whose engine is huge and quiet glides from the highway onto Waagikomaan and headlights brighter and harsher than the moon illuminate him.

He spins. The car stops in a little spray of dust. The headlights remain on. For a long moment, he’s facing a beast with two glaring eyes and a low growl of a voice. Then the headlights blink out and the engine dies. The dark and the quiet of the night return. The door opens. She steps out.

She walks toward him in a way that makes him think of a sleek animal—a panther maybe—or maybe it’s because she’s wearing a sleek black dress. In the moonlight, her face is silver, and her hair, yellow in daylight, is now like a spill of angry white water. She stops two feet from where he stands. And she smiles.

“What are you doing here?” she asks in a friendly tone that suggests everything he believes about her is wrong. “Did you get away from Indigo? You naughty boy.”

She reaches out a silver hand and ruffs his hair. Then her fingers become talons and her grip becomes a torture. She pulls as if to rip away his scalp.

“You goddamned little snot,” she says through clenched teeth, bone white. “You could have spoiled everything.”

“Let him go!”

It is his mother’s voice, coming from the dark at the side of the road. She steps into the glare of the headlights and confronts the woman. Winter Moon is with her. Only those two. The others, he realizes, must be at the place where the road to Broom’s branches off. Winter Moon is holding a rifle, which is pointed at the woman’s breast.

The woman releases her hold.

Winter Moon lifts his rifle and fires a single shot into the air.

“Cork.” His mother waves him to her side, and he obeys. His head hurts from the viciousness of the woman’s grip.

The woman doesn’t seem to be afraid. Instead what he sees in her face is anger. “What now?” she asks.

“We wait for the others.”

The sound of vehicles comes from the direction of Broom’s cabin, and she looks past them down the moonlit road at their backs.

“Indigo?”

“He won’t be coming to your rescue,” Winter Moon replies.

“Ah,” she says. “Dead?” No one replies, and she gives a nod. “A little native justice? Is that what’s in store for me?” She changes in an instant. Her body changes, becomes smaller somehow, fragile and vulnerable. Her face changes, becomes suffused with terror. And her voice changes, becomes such a desperate cry for pity that it’s hard not to be moved. “Please, I haven’t done anything, I swear. Please, don’t hurt me.”

She moves toward his mother, her hands out in supplication. “Oh, God, please. I’m a mother like you. I have children that I love and who need me.” Tears run down her cheeks. “Please, just let me go back to my children.”

The vehicles are close now, pulling to a stop not far behind him, their own headlights adding to the surreal brilliance in which he stands with Winter Moon and his mother and the woman who is suddenly too near. Her arm is like a whip, fast and deadly, and wraps itself around his mother and pulls her from his side. In the same instant, he sees the silver flash of a knife blade that has materialized in the woman’s hand and is poised at his mother’s throat. She draws back, pulling his mother with her and using her as a shield against Winter Moon’s rifle.

“I’ll kill her,” she says calmly.

Doors slam behind him, and he hears the thud of boots on the packed dirt of Waagikomaan. The woman’s eyes move there.

“I’ll kill her,” she repeats.

His father is suddenly, magically at his side. He steps toward the woman with the knife.

“If you kill her, you will yourself die,” he says, matching her incredible calm. “What is it you want?”

“To go home.”

“I’ll come for you there.”

“I think not,” she replies slyly. “What I think is that you’ve all murdered Indigo and if I go to the gas chamber, you’ll go with me. I think that if I make it home, I’m safe.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Monique, you’re safe now. I won’t let anyone harm you, I promise.”

His mother’s eyes are wide and he can feel her fear and it hurts him as if the slash across her throat is already a real thing. He’s paralyzed. He absolutely cannot move.

The woman edges her way toward her car, forcing his mother with her, foot by foot.

“This is the deal, Monique,” his father says, matching her retreat with his own advance, foot by foot. “You release her unharmed, and I’ll let you go. No one will touch you. You have my word.” His hands are in front of him, held away from his gun belt in a way that makes it clear they’re empty of both firearm and intention. “Not another step, Monique, until we have a deal.”

“I have all the cards,” she points out.

“You cut her throat and I kill you. I kill you here or kill you in your house or I kill you on the street, I still kill you. You let her go and I swear you go free. As you say, we have every reason to keep all this quiet.”

“I’ll keep her with me until I’m away, then I’ll let her go.”

“That’s not the deal because I don’t believe you.”

“How can I believe you?”

“Because I’ve never broken a promise.”

His father has said it, and the truth of it would be clear even to the worst lying snake that ever lived. He believes his father absolutely, and he prays the woman will, too.

Her eyes move past his father to the men at his back.

“I won’t let them touch you, I promise. Let her go, return to your house, then leave this town forever. That’s the deal.”

“I can leave?”

“If you ever come back to Aurora, it will be your death, and that’s a promise, too.”

She considers, considers a long time. And in that time, which seems now to stretch into forever, something in him snaps. He is released from the moment. He can feel himself floating, drifting away, numbed, mercifully removed from the reality of what is occurring. The incredible brightness of all the headlights. The knife blade glinting fire against the skin of his mother’s throat. His mother’s face not her face but a mask unreal because he can’t comprehend anymore what he sees there. It’s all a dream. But even in that dream he is aware, vaguely, that he’s wetting his pants.

The woman finally speaks, and he hears it as if across a great distance. “All right. We have a deal.”

The knife slides from his mother’s throat, and the woman steps away toward her car, still facing his father. So fast that it must be a part of the dream he’s sure he’s dreaming, his father’s hand clears the gun from his holster and he fires once. The woman drops immediately in a heap, and, in the brittle light, the dirt on the road turns black with her blood.

In that same moment, he is in the dirt, too, staring up at sky whose stars he cannot see.

His mother kneels at his side.

“Cork?”

He hears but can’t make himself reply, can’t make himself turn his eyes to look into her face.

“Dead,” LeDuc says, from where the woman lies.

“Henry, what’s wrong with him?” his mother cries.

“Corcoran O’Connor?” The voice of Henry Meloux. It is a rope trying to pull him from the place where he can’t move.

“Cork, are you all right? Why won’t he answer me, Henry?”

“What do we do now?” Sam Winter Moon asks.

“What you were going to do all along,” his father replies. His words are empty of feeling, his voice a ghost of a voice. “Put her where she’ll never be found.”

“What about Cork, Henry?” his mother pleads.

“I will talk with him,” Meloux replies. “I will guide him.”

“Where?”

“To a place where he won’t remember.”

“You can do that, Henry?”

“I can try.”

“What about you, Liam?” Hattie says.

He stands above his son, but he isn’t looking at his son. He’s looking at the gun that is still in his hand. “I guess I’ll have to live with this.”

“What about Cork?” Hattie says. “He’s just a child, and children don’t keep secrets well.”

“Henry, can you really make him forget?” his mother asks. She lowers herself and cups his face in her hands and speaks to him. It is like a mother in a dream speaking, a dream from which he would love not to wake. “Oh, Cork, can you ever forgive me? Can you understand?”

He doesn’t. Not now. But his mind on some level is recording everything, though he’s too numb to process or to respond.

“I don’t want him to remember this, Henry.” His father’s voice is no longer empty. What fills it now is something like loathing. “I don’t want him ever to know what I’ve done.”

“Please make him all right, Henry,” his mother pleads, holding him tightly. “Oh, please, Henry.”

Meloux replies, “I will do my best.”

It is dark and hot, and he is naked. His small body drips sweat. The air is pungent with the scent of sage and cedar. He can hear Meloux’s voice chanting a prayer, a long invocation, which he doesn’t understand. The Mide’s voice rises and falls.

There is something inside his chest. It feels like a fist pressing against his breastbone. His ears take in the prayer and the old Mide’s voice; his body absorbs the heat; his nose and mouth draw in the healing aromas. Ever so slowly, the fist opens. Ever so gradually, his eyes close against the dark. Ever so gently, he is drawn away from memory.

“He killed her.”

“Yes,” Meloux said.

It wasn’t a hard thing to accept. Now.

“He saved my mother, but it went against everything he believed,” Cork said.

“It was a sacrifice he made for those he loved. But it was also a wound, and it hurt him deep. It came between him and everything he believed and everyone he cared about. You, your mother, your grandmother, Sam Winter Moon, The People. If he had not been killed, the wound he felt would have healed eventually. He died too soon. It was left open.”

“Left open in us all, Henry.”

“Do you feel wounded now, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“No.”

“Then it is finished.”

The old man sounded exhausted. Cork helped him from the sweat lodge, and together they went to the lake and cooled and cleaned themselves there. Rainy had towels waiting, and they dried and dressed and walked slowly back to Meloux’s cabin, where Walleye had been patiently waiting. The old dog rose to his feet and greeted them with a lazy wag of his tail.

“I need to rest,” Meloux said. His hands shook worse than Cork had seen before.

They helped him to his bunk, where he lay down.

“Migwech, Henry,” Cork said.

“I have something for you, Corcoran O’Connor. Niece?”

From the table, Rainy brought a small cedar box, opened it, and held it out to Meloux, who took from it an intricately beaded bracelet. He gave it to Cork, saying, “Your grandmother made this. She gave it to me when I thought I loved her.”

Cork knew that long ago, when they were both very young, Meloux had courted Dilsey.

“I give it to you now.”

“Thank you, Henry. But why?”

“To remind you. Like the beads of that bracelet, all things are connected. The past, the present, the future. One long, beautiful work from the hand of Kitchimanidoo. You, me, those who have gone before us, and those who come after, we are all connected in that creation. No one is ever truly lost to us.” The old man lifted an arm weakly and waved him away. “Now go. It is finished.” Meloux closed his eyes.

“One more question, Henry.”

The old man’s eyelids fluttered open. “With you, it is always one more question.”

“The vision I had on Iron Lake? The two wolves fighting?”

“What about it?”

“You never told me which one wins. Love or fear?”

“It is the one you feed, Corcoran O’Connor. Always the one you feed.” The old man closed his eyes again. In another moment, he was sleeping.

Outside, Cork stood with Rainy in the late afternoon sun. The wind blew across the meadow grass, bringing the scent of wildflowers and evergreen.

“This was hard on Uncle Henry,” she said.

“You’ll take care of him?”

“Of course.” She smiled. Smiled beautifully. “I say that, but somehow I always end up feeling it’s the other way around.” She gave him an unreadable look. “I don’t know what occurred in the sweat lodge, but you seem different. Better. Healed.”

“The blessing of that old man in there.” He looked away where the meadow grass rolled gently under the hand of the wind, then back at Rainy. “If that’s one of the reasons you’re here with him, I hope he passes his special gift on to you.”

“That’s one of the reasons.” Rainy looked down for a moment. “I’m sorry I was so hard on you at first.”

“I won’t hold it against you.”

Cork studied the bracelet Meloux had given him. All things connected. Of course.

“Could I tell you something?” he said. “It’s something I would have told Jo if she were alive, something I need to share with someone.”

“I’d be happy to listen.”

“Ever since Jo died, I’ve been having nightmares about my father’s death. I haven’t understood why, but maybe I do now. A very wise woman recently suggested that the nightmares might have something to do with some essential quality in my father that I’ve felt was missing in me. I believe that’s true. I believe that at some level I remembered what my father did in order to save my mother’s life and to protect his friends. The behavior of The People during the Vanishings went against everything that as a lawman he embraced. But in the end, he did what was necessary for the woman he loved and for the people he cared about; it was a sacrifice, one that wounded him deeply, but he did it. I think maybe …” Cork faltered.

“You’ve been wondering if maybe you could have done something that would have saved her, some sacrifice you weren’t willing to make?”

Cork looked into the warm brown of her eyes. “Yeah.”

“You’ve been blaming yourself for your wife’s death.”

“I think maybe I have.”

“And do you think it’s time you didn’t?”

“That might take some work.”

“When you’re ready, Henry’s here. And so am I.”

“Migwech, Rainy.”

“Take care of yourself, Corcoran O’Connor.” She took his hand, leaned to him, and lightly kissed his cheek. “Don’t be a stranger.”

FIFTY

Hattie Stillday listened, and when he finished, she said, “I’d kill for a cigarette right now, Corkie.”

“Sorry, Hattie,” Cork said. He leaned toward her across the table in the interview room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. “All these years, you knew what happened, you and the others.”

Hattie smiled gently. “We knew more than that. We knew what would happen. Henry said that someday the spirits in that old mine would reach out and herd you toward the truth. We all hoped it would be a time when you might be able to understand.”

“For my sake?”

“Ours, too. Hell, wasn’t any of us looking forward to what would happen if everything came to light. Some pretty dark doings.”

“But you had nothing to do with them, Hattie.”

“Wasn’t by design. I was fully prepared to end that woman’s existence. Your father just got there ahead of me. Ahead of us all. We were all guilty of intent.”

She reached out and took his hands in her own, which were old but strong yet.

“Corkie, what are you going to do?”

“I have to tell them, Hattie.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what happened. Because it’s the truth.”

She shook her head in mild disapproval. “You’re so like your father. Except that everything he knew he took with him to his grave.”

“He didn’t die a happy man, Hattie.”

“Maybe not. But he died a good man. The whites back then, they wouldn’t have understood. The whites now, I don’t know.” She paused, and her dark, careworn eyes seemed to pierce him. “Do you understand, Corkie?”

He knew what she was asking. He thought about the men and women involved in bringing an end to the butchery of Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh. He’d known them his whole life, known them as good people. The Vanishings had driven them to actions that most good people would have seen as unthinkable; yet he believed this hadn’t changed who they were at heart. Max Cavanaugh probably had it right. Sometimes, for the greater good, you chose to do harm and hope that you could find your way to forgiveness. His mother and Sam Winter Moon and Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday and the others, they’d found that way, and for the rest of their lives had chosen to feed a different wolf. His father had died too soon, died without coming to terms with what he’d done, with the things he thought too dark for his young son to have to deal with.

“Yeah, Hattie,” he finally replied. “I do.”

“Are you going tell them about Ophelia?”

This was a question Cork had considered long and hard, and there was no easy answer. There was the law, which he’d worked to enforce most of his life. And there was justice, which he believed in deeply. And there was what was right according to his heart. And these were not the same things. Any decision he made would not satisfy them all.

“No,” he said.

“You can live with that, but you can’t live with the truth of what your father did, is that it?”

“I know you don’t understand, Hattie. But I think my father would.”

She let go of his hands, sat back slowly, and Cork couldn’t read the look on her face. “Yesterday, I had a visitor. Isaiah Broom.”

“Broom came here? What did he want?”

“To talk to me about the Vanishings. And about his mother.”

“He knows the truth?”

“Part of it. The part that will help him understand who she was and that she loved him and would never have deserted him. That was important for him to know. And something else, Corkie.”

“What?”

“He told the sheriff he’s known about the crosscut in the mine tunnel for years, ever since he was a kid. He told them he’d passed that information to me a good long time ago. They think that’s how I knew where to put the woman’s body.”

“Did he say how he knew?”

“He told them about what happened to him down there with his uncle when he was a boy. A horrible thing to have to tell anyone, any time. He told them his uncle had showed him the crosscut tunnel, which wasn’t yet full of bodies but would contain his if he ever told anyone what Mr. Windigo had done to him.”

Cork said, “Did they believe him?”

“Apparently. Corkie, it explains a lot that you wouldn’t have to.”

Cork thought about Broom, and figured Isaiah, too, had decided to start feeding a different wolf.

“Hattie, what did you do with my father’s gun?”

“Like I said, I threw it in the lake.”

“And you honestly don’t remember where?”

“Do you really want to go looking for it, Corkie?”

He didn’t. Whatever part the firearm was meant to play in his life, he hoped it was finished.

“Look, I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen to you,” he said. “But considering Max Cavanaugh’s confession and his sister’s eccentricities, I’m guessing they’ll go pretty easy.”

“As long as no one touches Ophelia, I can handle whatever they decide about me.”

“Do one thing for me, Hattie, okay?”

“Anything.”

“Get her out of there.”

“The Northern Lights Center?”

“The old Parrant estate, yeah. It’s a sick place.”

She reached out and took his hands again and gave them an affectionate squeeze. “I don’t pretend to understand you, Corkie, but so long as you keep her out of this, I’ll do whatever you want.”

* * *

Marsha Dross was waiting for him in her office. “You look rested,” she said.

“You don’t look so bad yourself. I heard Broom talked to you, told you what happened to him down there in the Vermilion Drift when he was a kid.”

“Close the door,” she said. “Sit down.”

Outside a horn blared on the street and someone shouted. Dross got up and closed her window.

“A hard thing for him to tell, I imagine,” Cork said.

“But it explained how Ms. Stillday knew where to dump Lauren Cavanaugh’s body, which was something she was dead set against telling us herself.” She sat down again and leaned back, relaxed. “Once I heard Broom’s story, I understood. So long as he wanted it kept secret—and who could blame him for not wanting a thing like that known publicly—Hattie Stillday wasn’t going to say anything. I can appreciate that.”

Cork said, “I have a story you need to hear.”

“I’m all ears.”

He told what had come to him during the sweat. But with two exceptions. He left out Henry Meloux’s hand in the fate of Indigo Broom, and he didn’t mention Hattie Stillday at all. He saw no purpose in dragging his old friends into this business. When he was finished, Dross was quiet. She simply stared at him.

“You have any proof of this, Cork?”

“The bodies in that mine tunnel, aren’t they proof enough?”

“Christ, if I told this story to the media, do you have any idea how crazy they would make it sound?”

“A guaranteed made-for-television movie,” Cork said with a smile.

Dross got up from her desk and paced the room a few moments, finally ended up at the window she’d closed, and stood staring out. “A story remembered under the influence of a—forgive me, Cork—witch doctor. A story for which there is no proof.”

“The bodies,” Cork said.

“A bizarre mystery more than forty years old. Everyone associated with it dead. The media will keep poking, but I don’t see any purpose in feeding their curiosity.” She turned back to him. “I’m inclined to keep this to myself.”

“I was witness to a homicide.”

“A justifiable homicide,” she said. “If what you’ve told me is the truth.”

“There’s also the murder of Indigo Broom,” Cork said.

“Did you actually see what those men did to him?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t really say, can you?”

“I can’t, no.”

“We don’t have a body. No witnesses. All the principals are dead.” Dross came and stood over him. “We have Max Cavanaugh’s confession, so we know who killed his sister. Hattie Stillday’s part in it she’ll have to answer for, but I don’t think any judge or jury will go hard on her. As for the bodies placed there more than forty years ago, those are cold crimes. This department doesn’t have the time or the resources to pursue that investigation. The media already think we’re a hayseed operation. I can live with that. What I can’t live with is the uproar that would be caused by your story, a story conjured up during some hallucinogenic Ojibwe ritual, being made public.”

“Wait a minute, Marsha—”

“I’m not finished.” She leaned down to him, very near and in a way not at all friendly. “The Great North Mining Company has deeper pockets than this county. Hell, probably deeper than this whole state. What if they chose to sue you or me or Tamarack County for libeling the Cavanaugh name with accusations of serial killings and cannibalism?”

He started up, out of his seat. “The law—”

She pushed him back down. “Screw the law. Let’s talk justice. It seems to me that justice has already been served. Do you not agree?”

He sat, chewing on her question. Finally he said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

“All right, then.”

“It’s not that simple,” Cork cautioned. “You’re taking a big risk, Marsha.”

“There’s a lot I admire about you, Cork, but you always make things more complicated than they need to be. You keep your mouth shut and let me worry about this, okay?”

For a moment, Cork held to an unrelenting sense of responsibility.

“Okay?” Dross said, more forcefully.

Cork finally let go, and that release felt very good.

“Okay,” he said.

EPILOGUE

He still sometimes dreams his father’s death.

As Dr. Faith Gray continues to tell him, the mind is complicated, and the connections between conscious understanding and subconscious beliefs are difficult to unravel and take patience to reknit.

Nights, when he’s awakened by the nightmare, he often walks the quiet hallways of the house in which he has spent his life. It’s comfortable territory, and although the place has seemed dismally empty since Jo left him—or he abandoned her; it’s a connection whose understanding still eludes him and on which he’s still at work—he knows that, in truth, he’s surrounded by good spirit. It is as Meloux said: All things in Kitchimanidoo’s beautiful creation are connected. Cork and his children and Jo. And also those who have come before and those who will come after.

And so, on those difficult nights, he will sometimes speak to the spirit of his father. He thanks him for saving his mother’s life. He asks his forgiveness for not praying his young heart out when Liam O’Connor lay dying. And he assures him that he loves him.

But most important, he tells his father that he understands.