She didn’t see the figure approaching her door.
She was thinking, maybe, about her grandson in Albuquerque, or her daughter in New York City, saddened that all her family had fled Tamarack County and moved so far away. She knew the reason. He was at home, probably staring at the clock, complaining aloud to the empty room that she’d been gone too long and had spent too much. And if it was, in fact, her husband she was thinking of, she probably wasn’t smiling and perhaps her chest hurt a little more. The windows were heavy with condensation, and maybe she felt suddenly isolated and alone, parked a block from the bustle of Center Street and the welcoming lights of the shops. So she finally reached out and turned on the engine. She was undoubtedly startled when the shadow loomed against the window glass near the left side of her face. And that damaged thumper of hers probably started hammering a little harder.
Then she heard the familiar voice. “Hey, Evelyn, you okay in there?”
She pressed the button, and the window glided down.
“Hello, Father Ted.”
It was the priest from St. Agnes, Father Ted Green, bending toward the window and blowing foggy puffs from where he stood on the curb.
“I saw you get in and then nothing,” he explained with a smile that conveyed both reassurance and concern. “I was afraid maybe you were having some difficulty.”
He was young and wore a black leather jacket, which looked good on him. To Evelyn Carter, there’d always been something a little James Dean about him (she was fond of saying so over coffee with her friends), and although that unsettled her a bit during Mass, she didn’t find it at all unpleasant.
“Just tired, Father,” she replied.
His gaze slid to the shopping bag in the passenger seat. “Busy afternoon, looks like. I hope you’re planning on going straight home and getting a little rest.”
“A little rest would be good,” she agreed.
“All right, then. See you Sunday. And please give my best to the Judge.” He straightened and stood erect, smiling a kind of benediction, and he watched as she pulled carefully into the street and drove slowly away. Later, when he reported this conversation, he would say how wan she looked, and that he continued to worry.
She headed past the high school and the gravel pit and took County 6 into the low, wooded hills west of town. The snow was coming down more heavily then, and maybe she was concerned that if it began to fall in earnest, the way it had so often that December, she’d be trapped, alone with her husband until the plows cleared the rural roads. If this was what she was thinking, there was a good chance she was frowning.
Two miles out of Aurora, she approached what everyone in Tamarack County called the Orly cutoff. It was washboard dirt and gravel, but it was the quickest way to get to the tiny crossroads known as Orly, if you were in a hurry. Evelyn Carter and her husband, Ralph, whom everyone except Evelyn called the Judge, lived on the cutoff, whose official name was 127th Street. Through a thick stand of birch and aspen long ago blown bare of leaves, Evelyn could see the lights of her home, which had been built a good hundred yards back from the road at the end of a narrow tongue of asphalt. Their nearest neighbor was a full quarter of a mile farther north, and to Evelyn, the lights of her home looked cold and isolated and uninviting. When the Judge finally passed away, she was planning to sell the house and move to New York City, to live where she had family and where there were people all around her instead of trees and emptiness.
As she approached her driveway, she slowed. It was a difficult angle, and the Buick was enormous and felt awkward in its maneuvering. She always took the turn with great care. When the Judge was with her, he usually complained that she drove like an old woman.
Once she’d negotiated the turn, she stopped abruptly. Someone was kneeling in the middle of the drive. In the headlights, the snow was like a gauzy curtain, and what lay behind it was vague and uncertain. She couldn’t quite make out who it was on his knees on the snow-packed asphalt, head bowed as if in prayer. But then she recognized the red wool cap she’d knitted for her husband the Christmas before, and although she couldn’t make sense of the whole scene, she relaxed and rolled down her window and called out, “What are you doing there, Ralph?”
The figure didn’t move or speak.
“For heaven’s sake, are you all right?” Evelyn was suddenly afraid. Not for her own safety, but for the well-being of her husband. The truth was that, as his faculties had declined and his reliance on her had increased, she’d often imagined his passing, imagined it as if it were the pardon of a long prison sentence. But faced with the actuality of some crisis, her natural response was concern. She unsnapped her seat belt, opened the door, and slid from the car, leaving the engine running as she hurried toward the kneeling figure.
Too late, she saw, in the glare of the headlights, the flash of the knife arcing upward to meet her. The blade, large and sharp and made for gutting deer, sliced easily through her fox-fur-trimmed coat and lodged deep in her belly, where the ice-cold steel quickly warmed. And although she was probably too stunned to speak, maybe with a final bewilderment in a life that she’d never really understood anyway, she looked into the face she knew well and asked herself the unanswerable question: Why?
Published 2014
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When relatives of Henry Meloux ask Cork O’Connor’s help in locating their runaway daughter, Cork finds himself navigating the dark world of human trafficking. The most issue-oriented and important work in my series, this is a novel the Native community in Minnesota encouraged me to write.
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CHARACTERS INTRODUCED
DANIEL ENGLISH: Rainy Bisonette’s nephew, member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe, employed as a game warden by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
MARIAH ARCENEAUX: An Ojibwe adolescent girl, missing for a year.
LOUISE ARCENEAUX: Mariah Arceneaux’s distraught but determined mother.
RED ARCENEAUX: Mariah Arceneaux’s uncle and faltering protector of his family.
BEA ABBISS: Director of the Nishiime House, dedicated to saving the lives of young Native women who’ve fallen into the hands of the worst kinds of predators.
RAVEN DUVALL: A rebellious, sexually trafficked Ojibwe runaway.
AN EXCERPT FROM WINDIGO ISLAND
Fear is who we are.
Cork’s old friend Henry Meloux had told him that. Though not quite in that way. And it was only part of what the ancient Ojibwe Mide had said. These were his exact words: In every human being, there are two wolves constantly fighting. One is fear, and the other is love. When Cork had asked which of the wolves won the battle, Meloux’s answer had been: The one you feed. Always the one you feed.
In his own life, Cork had known more than his share of fear. He carried scars from multiple gunshot wounds and was scarred, too, in ways that never showed on skin. He’d lost his wife to violence, lost friends in the same manner. More than once, men whose hearts were black holes of hate had targeted his children, and he’d come close to losing them as well. In all this, fear had sometimes been the wolf he’d fed. But as Meloux had wisely observed, love also shaped the human spirit, and it was this element of his being that Cork had consciously done his best to feed. In far more ways than fear, this wolf had shaped the man he was.
There were different kinds of fear, Cork knew, and some had nothing to do with violence. They were sought out purposely, sought for the sake of excitement, an adrenaline rush—a roller-coaster ride, for example, or a ghost story. When he finally began his investigation, Cork discovered that it was the desire for this kind of fear that had brought the three boys to the cursed place the Anishinaabeg called Windigo Island.
When they set out that moonlit night, this was what the boys knew, what all the local kids knew: On Windigo Island, death came in the dark. It came in the form of an awful spirit, a cannibal beast with an insatiable craving for human flesh. Sometimes the beast swept in with the foul odor of carnage pouring off its huge b
ody and a bone-chilling scream leaping from its maw. Sometimes it approached with stealth and wile, and in the moment before it ripped your heart from your chest, it cried your name in a high, keening voice. It could be unpredictable, but one thing was certain: to set foot on Windigo Island in the dead of night was to call forth the worst of what the darkness there held.
They’d shoved off in their kayaks a few minutes before midnight from the marina on the shore of Lake Superior. It was late July, hot, and there was not a breath of wind. A gibbous moon had risen over the Apostle Islands. The water of Kitchigami was black satin, smooth and shiny. Behind them, the lights of the reservation town of Bad Bluff curved along the shoreline of that greatest of the Great Lakes, and the three boys paused in their paddling and turned back to admire the sequined hills. Then wordless, because it was night and an excursion that called for silence, they pushed on, following the path the moonlight burned in silver across the water.
Ahead of them rose the island. It wasn’t much to look at in daylight. A rough circle a couple of dozen yards in diameter, all of it broken rock, an island so tiny it appeared only on detailed nautical charts. From its center rose a tall, ragged pine, a tree that had somehow managed to put down roots in that humping of stone and had held to it tenaciously through season after season of November gales. The Ojibwe believed the pine was a lightning rod of sorts, a beacon attracting the evil spirits of Kitchigami to that cursed island. Not just the windigo but Michi Peshu, too, a monster that lived in the depths, a creature with horns and the face of a panther and razor-sharp spikes down its back and, some said, the body of a serpent. To the boys on that night, the tree looked like a black feather rising stiffly from the head of a skull almost completely submerged. They approached in silence, the only sound the dip of their double-bladed paddles and the burble of water as they stroked. They came at the island from the west and eased their kayaks up to the rocky shoreline. They disembarked one at a time, drew their crafts out of the water, and laid them carefully across the broken stone. The moonlight was intense, casting shadows of the ragged pine boughs across the boys like a black net, and they stood a moment, caught in the eerie mystique of the island.
Then one of the boys farted. The long, low growl broke the spell, and they laughed, released from the grip of their own fear.
“Dude,” one of them said. “You let the windigo know we’re here.”
“Dude,” the offending boy replied, “that was to keep him away.”
The third boy waved a hand in front of his face. “If that smell doesn’t drive him off, nothing will.”
“Okay, what now?” the first asked.
The third boy reached into the opening of his kayak and brought out a knapsack. From it he pulled a can of white spray paint. “We find the biggest rock that faces town.”
Which they did. It stood a good four feet high and had a nice flat vertical surface. In the daylight, it would have been dull gray, but in the shadow of the pine that night, it was as black as char.
The third boy knelt in front of the rock, as if praying, gave the can a good shake, then carefully sprayed his message: KYLE B + LORI D.
“How’s she going to see it?” the second boy asked.
“Binoculars, dude, binoculars. I told her I was going to come out here to do this thing and the hell with the windigo.”
The first boy stood back and admired the other’s work. “Awesome. Totally.”
And that’s when the wind hit.
On a lake like Superior, weather can develop suddenly. That night the wind came out of nowhere, sweeping in from the vast open water. The limbs of the pine began flailing wildly, and waves rose up and crashed against Windigo Island and ate the rocks. No storm cloud obscured the stars or the unblinking eye of the moon, nothing to account for the phantom torrent of air that carried with it a frigid cold churned up from the depths. There was something in this wind that was terrible, something unnatural, and the boys could feel it. They stood frozen, feeding the wolf of fear suddenly prowling inside them.
“Hey, you guys,” the first boy hollered over the cry of wind. “Did you hear that?”
“What?” the third boy shouted.
“I heard it,” the second boy called back. His voice was a high screech because, in his terror, his throat had closed nearly shut. He stared wide-eyed at the third boy. “Your name. It called your name.”
The third boy turned from his companions, turned his face into that furious wind, and listened. He didn’t hear what they’d heard, but he saw something that made his blood run cold. In the black roil of the lake, just beneath the surface, a figure, luminescent white under the glare of the moon, swam toward them.
“Oh, God,” the first boy cried. “Michi Peshu!”
He spun and fled, stumbling over the broken rocks toward his kayak. The second boy was close on his heels. The third boy turned, too, but caught his foot in a crevice between two stones and his ankle gave in an agonizing twist. He went down with a cry of pain that was snatched away by the wind. His companions didn’t hear. They were already on the water, already digging the blades of their paddles into the swells. The boy cried out for them, but they didn’t look back.
Then he heard it. What they’d heard. His name. His name called in a high, keening voice that was carried inside the howl of wind. And he saw the white form sliding toward him in the black water, the monster Michi Peshu coming, and he watched it slither onto the rocks, and he knew a fear such as he’d never known before.
The wolf inside him opened its hungry mouth and prepared to feed.
Published 2016
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A man has gone missing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The official search, which turned up nothing, has been terminated. The man’s family hires Cork to return to that vast wilderness to continue the search. But when Cork himself goes missing, it falls to those who love him to unravel the mystery at the heart of these disappearances. Although none of them could possibly know it, not only is Cork’s life at stake but the lives of hundreds of innocent people also hang in the balance.
* * *
CHARACTERS INTRODUCED
LINDSAY HARRIS: A staunch environmentalist and graduate student, and a young woman very concerned about her grandfather, who has gone missing in the Boundary Waters.
TREVOR HARRIS: Lindsay’s brother, resident of Las Vegas, a sometime actor more interested in the action on a blackjack table than in the welfare of his family.
JOHN W. HARRIS: The missing man, a renowned and wealthy geotechnical engineer, architect of some of the world’s great modern dams, born and raised in Aurora, Minnesota, and at one time a good friend and mentor to Cork O’Connor.
LEAH DULING: Rainy Bisonette’s aunt, an important and resentful figure out of Henry Meloux’s past.
AARON COMMANDA: Traditional chief of the White Woman Lake Odawa.
BIRD COMMANDA: Aaron’s young nephew, a kid eager to prove his manhood.
MRS. GRAY: An Odawa conspirator and terrible traveling companion.
AN EXCERPT FROM MANITOU CANYON
In the gray of early afternoon, the canoes drew up to the shoreline of the island. The paddles were stowed. The woman in the bow of the first canoe and the kid in the bow of the second stepped onto the rocks. They held the canoes steady while the men in the stern of each disembarked and joined them. The kid grabbed a rifle from the center of the canoe he’d come in, then lifted a pack. He studied the island and the great stand of red pines that grew there.
“Where to?” he said.
“First, we hide the canoes,” the man who was the oldest and tallest said.
They carried the crafts from the lake a dozen yards into the trees. The tall man in the lead and the woman with him set their canoe behind a fallen pine, and the kid and the other man did the same.
“Want to cover them with boughs or something?” the kid asked.
“Break off boughs and someone will know we were here,” the tall man said. “This’ll do.”
The woman said, “I’ll carry that. You see to your rifle.”
She shouldered the pack, and the tall man started toward the interior of the island. The others followed, wordless and in single file.
On some maps, the island was called by its Ojibwe name: Miskominag. On others, it was called Raspberry. Words in different languages that meant the same thing. They walked inland through the pines, passed bushes that in summer would have been full of berries, but it was the first day of November, and all the plants except the evergreens were bare. They came to a great upthrust of rock, a kind of wall across the island, and the tall man began to climb. The others spread out and found their own ways up. The top of the outcropping stood above the crown of the trees. From there, they could see the whole of the lake, a two-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped body of water three-quarters of a mile across at its widest point. The water of the lake was the same dismal color of both the sky above them and the rock outcropping on which they stood. The gray of despair.
“Where will he come from?” the kid asked, his eyes taking in all that water and shoreline.
“The south,” the tall man said. “Over there.” He pointed toward a spot across the lake.
The kid looked and said, “All I see is trees.”
“Try these.” The tall man unshouldered the pack he’d carried, set it down, and drew out a pair of binoculars. He handed them to the kid, who spent a minute adjusting the lenses.
“Got it. A portage,” the kid said. He returned the binoculars to the man. “What now?”
“We wait.”
The others unburdened themselves of their packs. The shorter of the two men—he had a nose that was like a blob of clay plopped in the middle of his face—took a satellite phone from his pack and walked away from the others.
The World of Cork O'Connor Page 8