Windigo Island (25 page)

She went out with Daniel. Jenny followed, but hesitated at the door. “Dad? Henry?”

“You go,” Windigo said to her father. “But the old man, he stays. I have something to say to him.”

“We go together,” Cork replied.

“Fine. We all go together.” Windigo held up the lighter.

“You won’t,” Jenny said, but it was more hope than certainty.

Meloux looked into those empty eyes and gave a nod. “He will.”

“Get out, Jenny,” her father ordered.

“Dad—”

“Go!”

She went and heard the door of the trailer close behind her. She walked into the sunlight where Daniel and the others waited.

“Give me the key to the Explorer,” Daniel said.

She looked at him, uncomprehending.

“We should move it.” He meant a safe distance, in case the trailer blew up, but he didn’t say it.

Inside the vehicle, in the backseat, still cuffed, sat the man whose driver’s license identified him as Benjamin O. Baker. Next to him were the two girls. Because of the heat, the windows were down. She gave Daniel the key. He backed the Explorer nearer to the road and got out. Jenny led Mariah there, and Shinny joined them. They waited.

Fear, that hungry wolf, had come, and it gnawed at Jenny’s gut now. Her father and Henry Meloux, two of the people she loved most in this world, were inside that trailer with a man who, if Meloux had read him correctly, was entirely capable of carrying out his threat to blow them all to kingdom come. She could hear nothing from inside. Outside, in the slightest of breezes, she heard the leaves of the cottonwood trees rustling with a lovely, liquid sound. She smelled the dry grass of the hillsides that bordered the river, and mixed with that scent was the fragrance of sage. She touched her face, hoping the feel of her own flesh might bring her out of this terrible dream.

The door opened, and her father emerged. The door closed again at his back. He walked toward them. The flesh of his face was pulled so tight over the bone beneath that it seemed to Jenny she was looking at a skull.

“Henry?” she asked.

Her father turned and stared back at the trailer. She could see that he’d wedged Daniel’s sidearm in the waistband of his jeans. As powerful a weapon as that Glock probably was, Windigo had rendered it useless.

Her father spoke as if pronouncing sentence: “Henry said a hundred years was enough for any man.”

“What do we do?” The panic rising. “There must be something we can do.”

“We do what Indians have always done well.” Her father’s voice was leaden, dead. “We wait.”

But they didn’t wait long.

The sound was not what Jenny would have expected. It was not a cataclysmic explosion. It was, instead, a powerful
whooomp
, a blast of air and fire that blew out the trailer’s windows and door and sent some of the roof flying in embered pieces into the branches of the cottonwoods. Jenny fell back, more from the shock of the moment than from the shock of the blast itself. The others fell back, too, and they all watched as arms of yellow flame and black smoke reached through the empty openings and groped for sky.

Jenny stood paralyzed, but her father leaped into action immediately.

“Call nine-one-one,” he yelled and shot for the trailer opening where the front door had once been.

Jenny fumbled the phone from her pocket, where she’d slipped it when they rushed from the back of the Explorer. Her hands were shaking so bad she dropped it in the dirt. She bent, and when she came up with it and looked toward the trailer, saw her father falling back from the flames. A hell of fire and smoke lay beyond the gaping doorway inside the trailer. Daniel was right behind him,
reeling back, too, his arms raised to shield his face from the intense heat. The odd quiet of the initial explosion had been replaced now by the roar of the burn and the groan of metal remolding or melting in the blast-furnace heat. Shinny joined them, and they stood yelling to each other over the sound of the trailer fire. Jenny couldn’t make out their words. She was trying to find those three simple numbers on her phone pad, but her fingers kept hitting the wrong keys. She focused. Nine. One. One. Phone to her ear. When she looked at the trailer again, she saw that Daniel had grabbed a hose connected to an outside spigot. He’d turned on the water and was soaking her father.

“Williams County Dispatch.” A woman’s voice. “What’s your emergency?”

“There’s a fire,” Jenny yelled into the phone. “A trailer fire.”

“Where’s the fire, ma’am?”

“South of Williston. A road. I don’t know the name of it.” She ran to Shinny and grabbed his arm. “Does this road have a name?”

“The Old Garrison Road. Three miles east of the split from Highway Eighty-five.”

She repeated it into her phone.

Her father, dripping water from every part of him, once more attempted to enter the trailer. He ducked low beneath the black, billowing smoke and disappeared.

“Fire personnel are on the way, ma’am. Is anyone injured?”

“Yes,” Jenny yelled.

“Are you hurt?”

“No. No.”

“What’s your name?”

She gave it.

“Stay on the line, ma’am.”

“I can’t,” Jenny said. “I have to help.” And she ended the call.

Daniel stood in front of the doorway, shooting a stream of water inside, in the direction her father had gone. Shinny, who no longer held a rifle, leaned close and said something to him.
Daniel handed over the hose, and Shinny soaked him, too, then Daniel headed toward the doorway. He didn’t make it inside. Jenny’s father stumbled out, coughing, hot vapor rising from his wet clothing. He fell into Daniel’s arms. Daniel helped him away from the trailer, then turned to go back. Jenny’s father grabbed his arm.

“It’s no good,” he yelled, then coughed a good ten seconds. “Can’t see a thing inside. All smoke and flame.”

Jenny was beside him, holding him as the coughing continued and racked his body. “Henry?” she said.

He’d doubled over from the exertion, but now he came up slowly. His eyes lingered on the trailer, then followed the black roil of smoke pouring upward from it, smudging the washed blue of the sky. One of the traditional beliefs of the Anishinaabeg was that the embers of a fire carried prayers to the Creator. Jenny looked up where her father looked, and understood.

Grief doesn’t come in the moment of loss. It comes in the quiet of the aftermath. As she stood watching the trailer burn, and that beautiful old man Henry Meloux with it, she didn’t feel grief. In a way, what she felt was simply emptiness. Her mind told her Meloux was dead. Her heart was not there yet.

“They’re gone,” Shinny said.

At first, Jenny thought he was stating the obvious, speaking of Meloux and the man called Windigo. She said, “We know.”

“I’m talking about that scumbag from Standing Rock and the girls,” Shinny clarified.

Jenny turned from the fire that had kept her attention and saw what Shinny had already seen. The Explorer was empty. The girls and Brick were gone. There was no sign of them on the road or on the barren hillside.

“What now?” Daniel asked.

Cork spoke without looking away from the conflagration, and he spoke without feeling. “You still have the keys you took off Brick?”

“Yeah,” Daniel said.

“Take Mariah and Jenny and Shinny. Go back to New Town and wait for me there. I’ll deal with this mess.”

“You got that,” Shinny said. “We’re outta here. Which vehicle?”

Daniel tossed him the key. “See which it fits.”

Shinny jumped into the nearest SUV, where bits of debris lay burning on the hood. The engine turned over.

“Let’s go,” he called. “I don’t want to be here when the uniforms arrive.”

“We can’t just leave you, Cork,” Daniel tried to argue.

Jenny’s father turned bloodshot eyes on him. “You really want Mariah to be a part of what’s going to happen here next?” Daniel didn’t reply; the answer was obvious. “Go on,” Cork said. “Get out of here. All of you.”

“Dad—” Jenny began.

“Now,” he said.

“Go, go, go,” Shinny called out.

Daniel ushered Mariah into the backseat of the SUV and got in beside her. Jenny walked to the front passenger door and opened it. She looked back at her father, who stood alone, framed by fire, and she knew she couldn’t leave him.

“Go on,” she said to Daniel and the others. “I made the nine-one-one call. If I’m not here, they’ll ask all kinds of questions.”

“Are you sure, Jenny?” Daniel said.

“We came to save Mariah. So save her.”

Daniel looked at her through the open window, and Jenny knew it killed him to leave. But what she said made sense, and he knew it. “I’ll be waiting in New Town.”

“I’ll be there,” she promised.

They pulled away, onto the dirt and gravel of what Jenny now knew was the Old Garrison Road, and sped off, trailing a long cloud of dun-colored dust. She went to her father and stood with him. They watched the trailer being consumed. The smoke was an ugly color and smelled nothing like the good fragrance that came from a campfire. These flames were fed by poisons, by all the unnatural elements that had gone into the manufacture of
that cheap construction. But as she watched the foul, black cloud crawling toward the blue vault of heaven, she understood that at its heart was the purest soul she’d ever known.

“Henry,” she said and could not now keep back the tears.

A moment later, her father looked toward the sky and echoed, “Henry.”

PART III

Corcoran O’Connor:

“To Be That Which We Destroy”

Chapter 40

T
he trailer was still burning when the fire engines screamed down the Old Garrison Road. Much had been consumed by then, but it still stood intact as a structure. Cork wondered how a thing so shoddy in its construction could hold itself together in the face of such fervent destruction. But logic had gone to hell when the man called Windigo blew himself to smithereens and Henry Meloux along with him.

There were no hydrants in that remote location, and the engines brought portable water tanks. Cork had moved his Explorer well away from the blaze and out of the way of the firefighters. He and Jenny watched as the long white blasts of water reached into the burned-out shell and quelled the flames.

The sheriff’s department had dispatched a deputy in a cruiser, a Chevy Tahoe coated in red dust. Cork and Jenny together told the story they’d prepared: how they’d been hired to find Mariah Arceneaux and had traced her to the trailer; how Cork had confronted the two men inside; how they’d smelled the gas, which Robert Wilson French, whom the girls knew as Angel and Windigo, had purposely allowed to pour into the trailer; how they’d run outside, all but French and the old man, Henry Meloux; how they’d watched as the trailer exploded and burned; and finally how the trafficked girls, all of them, had fled, along with French’s partner, Bob Two Bears, aka Benjamin O. Baker, aka Brick. Cork gave the deputy the wallet Daniel English had taken from the man but made no mention of English or Shinny Fox.

“How’d you get his billfold?” The deputy was a lanky, sun-browned guy, maybe Cork’s age. His name was Seekins. “I don’t imagine he just handed it over.”

“I was persuasive,” Cork said.

“Uh-huh.” The deputy wrote something in his notes. He studied what he’d written, glanced at the firefighters who were mopping up, and scratched a mole on his upper lip. “So the two of you and an old man got the jump on a couple of pimps, that’s what you’re telling me? And one of the men blew himself up, along with the old guy? And everyone but you two ran off?”

“In a nutshell,” Cork said.

Jenny nodded her agreement with that simple assessment.

“What was the old man doing with you?”

“He was a healer,” Cork said. “A traditional Ojibwe healer. He came to help the girl we were looking for, if we found her.”

“But she ran off, you say?”

“Yes.”

“So she wasn’t interested in being healed.”

“The explosion,” Cork said. “It sent everyone running.”

In addition to Cork’s driver’s license, the deputy had taken his PI license. He’d taken Jenny’s driver’s license, too. Cork had given him the name of Marsha Dross, the sheriff in Tamarack County, and the names of several of the deputies there, in case he cared to check on Cork’s credentials and character. Seekins said, “You folks just wait here a minute.”

He went to his cruiser and spoke for a while on his radio.

The fire had been extinguished, but there was still smoke rising up here and there from the trailer. A couple of firefighters were making their way carefully through the ash and char inside.

Jenny seemed to have collected herself, but she was quiet. Cork understood. He didn’t feel much like talking either. What he felt like was climbing one of the hills above the river all alone and giving himself over to the deep sadness that kept trying to break through the wall he’d put up to contain it. He’d held Jenny while
she wept, and the truth was he wanted to weep, too. But now was not the time.

Jenny’s cell phone rang. She took the call. Cork heard her say, “Yeah, a deputy’s here. Asking questions. Lots of them. You got our girl to New Town?” She listened, head down, staring at the dirt. “At least we have what we came for,” she said. “I need to go. We’ll talk later.”

She leaned to her father and spoke quietly. “Breeze is gone. Vonda took her down to her office, where she keeps a supply of donated clothing on hand. While Vonda was gathering up clothes possibilities, Breeze slipped away. Vonda caught her making a phone call. To her family, Breeze said, to let them know she was okay. She took the clothes Vonda gave her, went into the bathroom to change, was there a long time. Vonda finally knocked, got no answer. She went in to check. The bathroom window was open, screen off, Breeze nowhere to be seen. Damn. I thought we’d convinced her.”

“Too many broken promises,” Cork said. “Or just way too scared of our Windigo. Or maybe misplaced loyalty. Who knows? They’ve all been so damaged, is it any wonder they end up confused?”

“I wondered how Windigo knew so much about us. I’ll bet the call she made was to him.”

“Couldn’t have been much before we came. We sure seemed to catch Brick by surprise, anyway.” Cork wasn’t certain how to put those pieces together, and he was too tired and too distracted at the moment even to try.

The deputy finally returned. “Warrants out on both the men you say were here in the trailer. The office made a call to Aurora, Minnesota, talked to your sheriff there. She’s vouched for you. Says you used to be law enforcement, too. Sheriff. That right?”

“A while ago,” Cork said.

“Then you’ll understand if I ask you to come back into the office in Williston and give us a full statement and maybe go through this interview again. Both of you.”

“We’d be happy to,” Cork said.

“I’d like your cell phone number, too.” He glanced at Jenny and said, “Got yours from the nine-one-one call.”

Cork gave him his number. As Seekins wrote it down, one of the firefighters approached. He greeted the deputy with a nod. “Tommy.”

“What’d you find, Walt?” Seekins asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you what we didn’t find. We didn’t find no bodies.”

“What?” Jenny had been leaning against the side of the Explorer, but this made her stand upright.

“My guys went through that whole damn trailer. Some hot spots still there, but nothing burning. They checked real careful. No bodies.”

The deputy said, “You sure, Walt?”

“I been fighting fires as long as you been giving tickets, Tommy. When I say there’s no bodies, there’s no bodies.”

Seekins looked at Cork and at Jenny. “You folks sure those two didn’t get out without you seeing them?”

Cork said, “Bars on the window, Deputy. And I checked the back door after the gas blew, thinking maybe I could go in that way. Locked. No way anyone could’ve got out of there.”

“Then you care to tell me where those two bodies went?”

“I don’t know.” Cork looked toward Jenny, but he could see that she was just as baffled as he was.

Seekins said, “We’ll impound this SUV, and I’ll have the office put out an APB for French and Two Bears. We’ll get them.”

“And Henry?” Jenny asked.

“No warrants on him. Don’t know what to tell you. Man old as you say he is won’t get far. He’ll turn up.” He gave them back their licenses. “Where you folks staying?”

“Friends on the Fort Berthold Reservation,” Cork replied.

Seekins eyed him curiously. “You Indian?”

“Anishinaabe.”

The name clearly didn’t register with the deputy.

“Ojibwe,” Cork said. “Chippewa.”

“Oh, like Turtle Mountain.”

“Yeah,” Cork said. “Like Turtle Mountain.”

“Well, could’ve fooled me, name like O’Connor, the way you look and all.”

“Fools a lot of people,” Cork said.

“All right, then. You coming into Williston now?”

“We’ll be along shortly,” Cork said. “Any problem if we stay here awhile? Got a few things to process, emotionally.”

“No hurry. I’ve got to track down who it is owns this place. That’ll take a while on a Sunday. Walt and his guys have got some cleaning up to do. Just see that you stay out of their way.”

The deputy returned to his Tahoe, made a U-turn, and headed north, back toward Williston.

Jenny said, “No bodies. How could that be?”

“I’m thinking,” Cork said.

By the time the fire engines finally pulled away, leaving the blackened, burned-out hull of the trailer, he had a thought. He waited until the big trucks were out of sight and the dust from their passing had settled and he was certain that he and Jenny were alone. The sun was high, the air still. Cork watched a couple of hawks circling high on the thermals that rose above the tree-capped promontory where the trailer—what was left of it—sat. The hawks reminded him of all the ash that had been aloft and scattered God knew where. He walked to the trailer through mud created by the water that had been sprayed in putting out the fire. He stood in the center of the destruction, in the wet char inside the gutted shell, and studied the floor.

“What are you looking for?” Jenny called from the safety outside the burnt shell.

“Remember what Mariah said about our Windigo? He comes and he goes. He was gone when we got here. And then suddenly he showed. Where did he come from?”

Moving carefully, Jenny joined Cork in the trailer.

“He was hiding,” she said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it. No bodies. Grates on the windows, doors locked, but he and Henry got out somehow.” He began walking slowly, kicking burnt debris clear of the floor as he went.

“You think there was some kind of trapdoor?”

“I think there was another way out, and I think the floor is the most reasonable consideration.”

“Meloux came from there,” Jenny said, pointing to the north end of the trailer. “So wouldn’t it make sense that Windigo came from there?” Now she pointed south.

Cork began in the kitchen area, which was where Jenny had pointed last. He walked a grid across the bubbled, curled linoleum but found nothing that seemed promising. He moved out of the kitchen, down the short hallway to the bathroom. He came up empty there, too. He went to the bedroom. There’d been carpeting on the floor, but that had burned away. He slowly walked the perimeter, then worked his way across the rest of the room, around the blackened bed and mattress. The closet door stood open. A few shreds of clothing still hung from the metal hangers. A pair of leather shoes, cracked and hardened from the heat, sat in one corner. The carpeting had somehow remained mostly intact. Cork stepped inside. Immediately, he felt the floor give just a little under his weight. He bent and found a seam in the carpet. He pulled at the edge, and a flap curled back in his hand. Beneath lay the trapdoor of Jenny’s speculation. Cork grasped the steel pull and lifted the door, revealing a crawl space below. He peered into the hole. Along the back wall of the cinder blocks that were fitted as a skirting between the foundation and the bottom of the trailer, he saw a gap where sunlight shot into the dark.

“They got out this way.” Cork stood up. “Come on.”

Jenny followed him outside. He hurried to the rear of the trailer, where he found four cinder blocks lying beside a two-foot gap in the trailer’s skirting.

Cork said, “He crawled out here. See the handprints there.
And those deep, round indentations behind them, they’ve got to be knee prints.”

“What about Henry?” Jenny said.

“He dragged Henry out. See those shallow ruts? Plowed by Henry’s heels is my guess.” He walked away from the trailer into the sparse, dead grass of the clearing. “And then he carried Henry.”

“Why?”

“Only one set of footprints.”

“No,” Jenny said. “I don’t understand why he would carry Henry.”

“Most likely because Henry was unconscious.” He looked at her straight in the eyes. “Or Henry’s dead.”

“But, Dad, why would he cart off a dead man? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I think you’re right. So I think Henry’s still alive, though probably unconscious.”

“Why take him in the first place?”

Cork looked at the line in the dead grass Windigo had trampled in his flight. He looked toward the cottonwood trees a couple of dozen yards distant, where the footprints led. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine the mind of a man like Windigo.

“Two possibilities,” he finally said. “He took Henry as a hostage, in case we followed. Or he took Henry as bait, so that we
would
follow.”

“A trap?”

“Let’s take a look at the lay of the land.”

In the backyard was a gray chimenea with four canvas chairs nearby. There was also a stack of wood to burn in that outdoor fireplace. Not far away stood the stump of a cottonwood, cut flat with a chain saw. The surface of the stump carried dozens of scars where wood had been split for feeding to the fire, and the blade of the long-handled ax responsible for the splitting was sunk deep into the stump. Cork tried to envision Windigo or Brick chopping wood, preparing a fire so they could sit with their girls and enjoy one another’s company under the broad, starlit North Dakota sky.
It was impossible. That kind of domesticity in the sort of hellish relationship that must have existed in Windigo’s “family” Cork simply couldn’t imagine.

Then he realized the kindling around the stump was freshly split, and he thought he had the answers to a couple of questions that had puzzled him: Why did Windigo know they were coming but Brick didn’t?

“Chop, chop, chop,” he said to Jenny.

“What?”

“That’s what Mariah told us when I asked her where Angel was. ‘Chop, chop, chop,’ she said. He was out here, cutting wood for a fire tonight. That’s when he must have got Breeze’s call. But it came too late for him to do anything about it. He probably only had enough time to pop under the trailer before Shinny came around in back to check on things.”

“Enough time for that and to fill the trailer with propane gas.” She eyed the nearby cottonwoods. “Let’s find him.”

They followed the single set of prints into the trees. They made their way to the edge of the promontory, easily reading the trail Windigo had left in his passage. They stood looking down a steep slope covered, like the hills around them, with dry grass. At the bottom, a quarter mile distant, lay the silty brown flow of the Missouri River, bordered on the far side by a broad stretch of pale green wetlands.

“What do you think?” Cork said.

“He’ll stick with the Missouri,” Jenny replied. “Away from roads. There’s no cover on these hillsides, but there’s plenty along the river.”

“Where will he go?”