Vermilion Drift

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.