Windigo Island (11 page)

“Once around the block,” he said to her. “Then it’s bedtime for both of us.”

Rose excused herself, said good night, and headed to her room. Cork got Trixie’s leash from the kitchen, and a little plastic baggie
to clean up her litter. When he returned to the porch, Jenny was standing alone at the railing, staring up at the stars.

“You should get some sleep,” he said. “I’m guessing tomorrow will be a long day.”

She didn’t move, didn’t take her eyes off the stars.

“I’m a writer,” she said. “Or I like to think of myself that way. A storyteller.” She gave a deep sigh. “I want to write about the world as I think it ought to be. If I were writing Mariah’s story, we’d find her in the end. She’d be alive, and we’d save her.”

“What makes you think we won’t?”

“Because more and more, I see the world as it is. And what’s bad about it is worse than anything anyone could imagine.”

She was right, but not completely so. Cork knew that hopelessness was not the answer. He dug deep inside himself, ignored the voice of reason that was part of what fed his own fear. “Know what Henry would say to that?”

“What?”

“The good things balance the bad, because there’s also more good than any of us can imagine. And you want to know something else?”

“You’ll tell me anyway, so go ahead.”

“You’re one of the very good things.”

He kissed her forehead lightly. Then he said to Trixie, “Come on, girl. Let’s get this business behind us.”

Chapter 19

T
hey pulled into Bad Bluff a few minutes after nine the next morning. Daniel English offered to drop Louise at her house so that she could see her boys and Red, but she wanted to be with Henry Meloux and Cork when they confronted Lindy Duvall. They parked on the street in front of the duplex they’d visited three days earlier. Jenny and English stayed in their vehicles. Louise walked with Cork and Meloux to the door, and it was she who knocked. Lindy Duvall answered, wearing gray sweats, no makeup, her hair an unbrushed tangle. Her face registered surprise.

“Louise.” Her eyes locked on Cork. “You again.” Then wordlessly she took in Meloux.

“Anin, noozhis,”
the old man said gently. Hello, my grandchild.

From the room behind her came the sound of a television, which, judging from the outlandish sound effects, was tuned to cartoons.

“We need to talk,” Louise said.

Duvall shook her head. “Not a good time.”

“My daughter’s in trouble, Lindy. And your daughter’s why. We need to talk.”

“I’m not talking to anybody.” Duvall tried to close the door.

Cork didn’t let that happen. He put himself in the threshold, his body an unyielding doorstop. Duvall stepped back.

Meloux spoke. “Granddaughter, it is a sad thing when The
People turn their backs on one another. It is a hard world, and alone there is only fear in us. Give me your hand, child.”

The old man reached out. The woman was clearly afraid. Of the man whose body kept her from closing her door. Of Louise Arceneaux with her ornate peg leg and the truth of what she knew about the pasts of them both. Of whatever it was hidden in her own heart. But clearly she was not afraid of the ancient Mide. Maybe because of his age. Or his size, small now, whittled away by time. Or his eyes, as soft as brown pillows. Or his voice, which promised understanding and acceptance and safety. She did as he asked, took his hand, and let them all inside.

Wade, the boy Cork had met on his first visit to the house, was in the living room, in front of the big, flat-screen television, watching Japanese anime and eating cereal from a bowl. His little sister, Shannon, was asleep in the playpen in the corner. The boy looked at them, and Cork could see that he was more curious than afraid.

“Lindy, could we go somewhere private to talk?” he asked.

“This is as far as you get in my house.”

“Granddaughter,” Meloux said. “We will not harm you. But what we want to talk about is not for the ears of children.”

“What do you want to know?”

“About Duluth and the boats and Raven,” Louise said.

“I don’t know anything.”

“What is your fear?” the old man asked.

“I’m not afraid.”

“We are all afraid. Louise Arceneaux is afraid for the daughter she loves. Corcoran O’Connor fears that he will fail the people who have put their faith in him.”

Which surprised Cork, though he knew it to be absolutely true.

“What about you?” Duvall asked. “What are you afraid of?”

“That I will not die a good death.”

When Cork heard the old man say this, he knew it was a truth, one he wanted to think about, but now was not the time.

“Let us go somewhere and speak truth to one another. It may save the life of your daughter, too.”

Lindy Duvall teetered, uncertain.

Then the old man said with great humility, “This I beg of you, granddaughter.”

She breathed out deeply, as if expelling something foul, and she turned.

They followed her down a hallway to her bedroom. The bed was unmade. A pile of clothing lay in one corner, awaiting washing, Cork supposed. The walls were bare except for a big dream catcher above the bed and a photograph, cheaply framed, on the west wall. It was of Lindy Duvall with two children. The younger child was clearly Wade when he must have been about five. The older of the children was maybe twelve. She had long black hair and deep brown eyes and the lovely bone structure of the Ojibwe. The smile on her face looked as if it had been coerced. Behind them lay the blue of the lake and the sky and the green of one of the Apostle Islands.

“She is in danger,” the old man said without preface.

“Mariah?” Duvall asked.

“Raven,” the old man said. “You know this, and this is your fear.”

“She’s fine,” Duvall insisted.

“How can you battle a wolf if you turn your back on it, granddaughter? It will eat you for sure.”

“I don’t . . .” she began. “Raven’s . . .” But under the steady gaze of the old Mide, she couldn’t continue with whatever lies she was telling herself and was about to tell them.

“She’s working the boats in the harbor, isn’t she, Lindy?” Louise said. There was no accusation in it, just a statement of a sad truth.

“I don’t know about the boats,” Duvall said. Her strength seemed to desert her, and she sat down heavily on the bed.

Louise hobbled to her and sat beside her on the mattress. “She came and took Mariah and Carrie Verga. Is that what she does now? She brings in the young ones?”

“I don’t know. I don’t ask.”

Louise took the other woman’s hand. “Remember what it was like, Lindy?”

Duvall nodded.

“We never wanted that for our girls.”

Duvall dropped her head as if ashamed of the tears that had begun to fall. She said in a small voice, “She tells me they’re her family now.”

“They?” Cork said.

“Men. I don’t know who.”

“How did she meet them? Do you know?”

“Her father.”

“Your husband?” Cork asked.

“We never got married. He was an A-number-one asshole. Never cared about me. About us. Gambling and drinking, those were his loves. He got into trouble with some people. Owed them a lot of money. They threatened to hurt us all. One day I came home from working the casino—I cashier there. He was supposed to be watching the kids. Raven wasn’t here. He said not to worry about her. He said the debts were all cleared up, and we didn’t have to worry about that either. I screamed and called him a liar and plenty of other things. He laid into me good, beat me so I could barely move. He told me if I said anything to anyone, he’d beat me again, kill me the next time. Maybe Wade, too. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have no one to go to.”

“Is he still here, in Bad Bluff?”

“No. He left real soon after that. I don’t know where he is. I don’t care.”

“You’ve been in touch with Raven?”

“She finally called me, a little over a year ago. Said she was fine, not to worry. Had friends. Was working. Modeling, she told me. I asked her where she was. She said Duluth. Wouldn’t tell me any more. Said she was thinking of coming home for a visit.”

“And so she came,” Cork said.

Duvall nodded. “But she was different. Grown up. Dressed
real good. Drove this nice car. And she wasn’t even seventeen. Me, I was wearing things I got from the church thrift store. She was good, real loving to Wade, but she was real hard on me. Like I done something to her. I asked her about this family of hers. She said there were these guys who cared about her, took care of her. And she had sisters there. Wouldn’t say nothing else. Spent most of her time with younger girls on the rez. They were all googly-eyed cuz of how she dressed and her car and all. Then she was gone. Not a word to me. And I haven’t heard from her since. But she said one thing that scared me.”

“What was that?”

“I told her I wanted to come down to Duluth sometime, visit her and this family of hers. She got real freaked. She told me I shouldn’t ever do that. She said if I did we were both dead. That’s why when you came asking about her, I didn’t want to say nothing. I mean, there was Carrie Verga dead. I didn’t want nothing like that to happen to my girl.”

“Did she say anything to you about taking Carrie and Mariah with her?”

“She didn’t say nothing to me about nothing. She just up and left. Then I heard that Mariah was gone and later that Carrie Verga was gone, too. I knew they both spent a bunch of time with Raven when she was here. I put two and two together, but what could I say? I’m sorry, Louise. I just kept thinking about what she said. Don’t come looking for her or she’s dead. I kept hoping I’d hear from her again. Maybe she’d tell me they were all right, her and the girls. I didn’t want nobody hurting them.”

“She hasn’t called you since?”

“No. But she sends me money sometimes. She says it’s cuz of Wade.”

“How does the money come?” Cork asked.

“Money order in the mail.”

“Any return address?”

“No.”

“Do you have a photograph of Raven? Anything recent?”

She nodded. “I took a few pictures when she was here.”

“Could I have one?”

The fear was in her eyes again. “What for?”

“We want to find her, Lindy.”

“See, that’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

“Granddaughter,” Meloux said gently. He walked to where she and Louise sat together on the bed, and he took the frightened woman’s hands in his own. “I am an old man. I have seen much evil in this world. And what I know about evil is that it has no heart and its hunger is great. Sooner or later, because of this hunger and because it loves nothing, it will eat your child. We will try to find her before this happens. We need your help. Your child needs your help.”

She was crying, her deep fear leaking out of her in a stream of tears. “You can do this?”

“I will try.”

The distraught woman bowed her head. The old man didn’t release his hold on her hands. Cork saw her chest rise and fall, and her body changed. Relaxed. She lifted her face and looked into the eyes of Meloux and said, “All right.”

She stood, went to an old, beat-up dresser, and opened the top drawer. She pulled out a photograph and held it toward Cork. Before she gave it over, she said one final desperate word to him, to them all.

“Please.”

Chapter 20

E
nglish drove Louise to see her children and her brother, Red, but Meloux asked a favor of Cork that would take them in another direction.

“Before we leave, I would like to visit this Windigo Island, Corcoran O’Connor.”

“Why, Henry?”

“A place that calls the windigo to it, now that would be something to see.”

“I don’t think we have time.”

“There is a reason the spirits of Kitchigami delivered the body of the girl to that place. I would like to understand the reason.”

Cork knew it was pointless to argue with the old man. In the end, Meloux would have his way. “Let’s rent a boat then, and get this over with.”

At the marina in Bad Bluff, they hired out a small Lund with an inboard motor. Windigo Island was less than a quarter mile into the West Channel, due east of the reservation town. Basswood Island, vast in comparison, lay beyond it, a long shoreline of dense wood rising dark green against the azure sky. As Cork headed the little rented craft onto the water, a sleek sailboat slid past Windigo Island, its white sails cupping the wind, and Cork thought about Demetrius Verga, wondering how often the man had guided his own sailboat past that solitary landmark. Was he one of those who routinely threw unwanted things over the side?

“Bone,” the old man said.

“What was that, Henry?” Jenny asked.

Meloux squinted against the bright sun and the blinding reflection off the water. “It is an island of bone.”

Cork could see what the old man meant. By any standard, it was a tiny island, all rock broken into pieces by millennia of relentless pounding from the legendary storms that surged across Kitchigami. The rock was the gray of old bone. The only sign of life was the tall, ragged pine tree that rose from the island’s center. It wasn’t a healthy looking piece of timber, but somehow it had managed to put down roots in all that stone, and had held itself there long enough to have grown to a height of sixty or seventy feet. In its singleness and its unlikely existence on such unwelcoming ground, it stood out magnificently. And given that it rose up from what Meloux himself had seen as nothing but bone, Cork could understand why the Anishinaabeg of Bad Bluff thought of it as a beacon for evil.

As they approached, Cork spotted the message spray-painted on the flat face of a great rock:
KYLE B + LORI D
. He smiled, thinking,
The things we do for love.

He slowly circled the island, and no one spoke.

Then Jenny said, “What’s that?”

Cork saw it, too, a white donut wedged among rocks at the waterline. He carefully nosed the boat very near the rocks, spun the wheel, and brought them gently broadside, close enough that Jenny could jump ashore. She worked her way across boulders and broken stones, nabbed the item, and climbed back aboard.

It was a life ring, and there was a name on it:
Montcalm.

“What do you think?” Jenny said.

“I don’t know,” Cork replied.

“Junk?”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe Carrie Verga thought it would save her.”

“Maybe,” Cork said. “But she wasn’t wearing it when she hit Windigo Island. The cops would have taken it as evidence. I’m guessing it washed up afterward. Have you seen enough, Henry?”

The old man said,
“Mudjimushkeeki.”

Which Cork knew meant a place of sickness, of evil.

Then the old man said, “I am ready.”

They motored back to the marina. When they pulled up to the dock, the kid who’d rented them the boat wasn’t alone.

Cork said, “Morning, Captain Bigboy.”

“Heard you were back in town, O’Connor.” The cop stood watching as, one by one, they disembarked. “Morning, folks,” he said to the others. His tone was business. “You know, we have a lot more picturesque scenery than the little island out there.”

“I wanted to see it,” Meloux said.

“Yeah? And why was that, old-timer?”

The Mide didn’t flinch at the patronizing tone or the disrespectful appellation. He said, “It is a powerful place and fearful. But you know that.”

Bigboy tried to match the stone in the old man’s gaze, but he finally looked away, and his eyes settled with undisguised curiosity on the life ring Jenny held. “I’ll take that.”

Jenny made no move to comply. “We picked it up on the island,” she said. “You think it could be evidence?”

“Doubt it. Things wash up on these shores all the time.”

“Then you won’t mind if I hang on to it.”

“I mind. Like you said, could be evidence. Better safe than sorry.”

Jenny still held on to the life ring. “You’ll make sure it gets to the Bayfield County sheriff’s people?”

“It’ll get to the right people.”

Cork said, “We’ll check with Hammer, the detective down in Washburn, tomorrow and see what he thinks. Any objection?”

“Free country, cousin. You make all the calls you want.”

Jenny glanced at her father. Cork gave a brief nod, and she handed over the ring.

“Something I didn’t ask you the other day,” Cork said, then added, “cousin. How many other girls have gone missing from the rez?”

Bigboy held the life ring in the crook of his arm. “Like I told you. Kids here run away. They usually come back. I don’t keep track of every kid who decides to make it permanent.”

“One more question,” Cork said. “You like barbecued potato chips?”

“Is that a joke of some kind, O’Connor? Because I’m not getting the punch line.”

“Forget it,” Cork said.

The cop put a finger to the bill of his cap. “You folks be careful going back. We get some pretty mean fog here on occasion. Can swallow you like the whale did Jonah. I’d hate to lose you.”

“Thanks,” Cork said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

Bigboy walked back to his cruiser, a black-and-white with the Bad Bluff insignia on the door. He threw the life ring in the backseat, got behind the wheel, gave them one more long look, then drove away.

“Why the question about barbecued potato chips, Dad?” Jenny asked.

“The guy who worked me over in the casino parking lot, his breath reeked of them.”

“Bigboy, you think?”

“He’s not the most welcoming cop I ever met. Could be a reason for it that has nothing to do with his less than sterling personality.”

“Do you think he’s involved in all this?”

“If not this, maybe something else no better, Jenny.” Cork turned to Meloux. “Did you get all you wanted, Henry?”

“Mudjimushkeeki,”
the old man said, staring at Windigo Island. “A black mole on the face of all this beauty. I have seen more than enough, Corcoran O’Connor. It is time to go.”

• • •

They drove to the home of Louise Arceneaux. She, her brother, and Daniel English were gathered around the dining table. It seemed to Cork that some progress had been made in cleaning
the clutter from the house, but the place was still a masterpiece of disorder. In their bedroom, the two young boys, Cal and Denny, were already hard at their video games. The door to the room that Toby shared with Puck was closed. Cork introduced Meloux and Red to each other, then filled the Arceneauxs in on what they’d found on Windigo Island, and what he suspected as a result.

“You really believe that life ring is somehow proof that Carrie Verga jumped off a freighter, or was thrown off?” English asked.

“I know it sounds like an unbelievable coincidence,” Cork replied. “And I’m the first to say I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Why do you call it coincidence, Corcoran O’Connor?” Meloux asked.

“The only thing that makes sense to me, Henry, is that Carrie Verga went off a boat called
Montcalm
with a life ring, maybe hoping it would help her get to safety. Or, maybe she went over the side and someone threw it to her. In any event, the same current that brought her to Windigo Island must have brought that life ring. It’s a stretch, but it’s the only way I can account for them both ending up there.”

“Corcoran O’Connor,” the old man said with great disappointment, “do you not believe in
majimanidoog
?” Meloux used an Ojibwe word that meant evil spirits, or more loosely, devils.

“I’m willing to believe in almost anything, Henry.”

“Then why not believe that place calls evil and the product of evil to itself?”

“The
majimanidoog
, the evil spirits? They had a hand in this?”

“Is that harder to believe than coincidence?”

Cork laughed. “I don’t suppose so, Henry.”

Red Arceneaux said, “You think Bigboy might be involved?”

“I have a feeling he’s got things to hide, Red.”

Louise said, “If he had anything to do with Mariah being gone, I’ll kill him.”

“That might not be what he’s hiding, Louise,” Cork said. “Let’s figure this out before we challenge any guy wearing a badge.”

“So what now, Dad?” Jenny asked.

“I think we should go to Duluth. I’m pretty convinced that’s where Raven Duvall took the girls. And while we’re there, we can check out this ship
Montcalm
.”

“All of us?” English glanced at Meloux, who already looked weary.

“You up for this, Henry?” Cork said.

“To the end,” the ancient Mide replied, then added with a broad grin, “Even if that end is my own.”

“I’m not going to let that happen, Henry.”

The old man weighed Cork’s words. “You made that promise to me once when you were a boy. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“We were hunting medicine herbs, you and me. A storm came on us suddenly, a very bad storm. The lightning was all around us, and the thunder hurt our ears. You told me not to be afraid. You told me that you would let nothing harm me. Do you remember what happened?”

“No, Henry.”

“I found a cave to shelter us both.” The old man wryly cocked one feathery white eyebrow. “In this trouble now, I wonder who will save who.”