“Does it really matter what I think or Uncle Henry? You’ve already decided to go. So what is it you really want?”
He looked from her to the old man. “I want to know what we missed. I want to know what I’m looking for. How can a man just disappear and leave no trace, not even his scent for a dog to find?”
“Why do you ask me, Corcoran O’Connor?” Henry said. “I was not a part of your search for this man.”
“You understand more about hunting in those woods than anyone I know.”
The old man lapsed again into silence, and the whole of that tiny cabin seemed consumed by it. Rainy could feel, just as Henry had said, the wariness in Cork and could plainly see how rigidly he held himself. She wanted very much to be able to offer him something that would help.
“Do not look for an answer out there, Corcoran O’Connor,” her great-uncle finally said. “Let the answer find you.”
“How do I do that, Henry?” His voice was harsh, urgent. “Are you suggesting I just go out there and sit?”
“Not sit. Sift. Sift all that comes to you. The answer is what is left in your hands after everything else has slipped through your fingers.”
“That’s it, Henry? That’s all you’ve got?”
“As my niece has said, finding is never about seeking. It is about opening yourself to what is already there.”
Cork stood and pulled on his jacket. “Migwech,” he said. Thank you. But Rainy could tell from his tone that he didn’t mean it.
“Don’t leave so soon, Cork,” she said.
“I’ve got a lot to do to get ready for tomorrow.”
Rainy drew on her own coat and said, “Let me walk with you a bit, then.”
Outside, under the gray canopy of the sky, they walked together, past Rainy’s small cabin and onto the path through the stiff, browned meadow grass and the dry stalks of dead wildflowers. Dead only to the eye, Rainy knew. They would rise again in the spring. She took Cork’s arm and could feel his resistance.
“What’s going on, Cork? Why are you so hard, so impatient? It’s not like you.”
“I love him dearly, Rainy, but sometimes he frustrates the hell out of me. Why does he have to speak in riddles? Why can’t he ever just give me a straight answer?”
“This isn’t about Henry.”
He was quiet a long time, and she let him be with his thoughts.
“November,” he finally said.
She knew his history with that month, knew that for him the darkness of Gashkadino-Giizis wasn’t about the clouds or the cold or even the bitter winter that would follow.
“Ghosts,” she said. “You need to let them go.”
“They come to me. I don’t go looking.”
She stopped suddenly and turned to him. “Let me or Uncle Henry do a sweat with you before you go. It would be so good for you, and I’d feel better.”
“Like I told Henry, a lot to do to get ready for tomorrow.”
“Then go and get ready, but come back.”
He looked away from her, his eyes taking in the low, ragged clouds. “When this is done,” he said and walked away toward the line of trees where the path disappeared.
Though it tore her heart, she let him go.
CHAPTER 6
In the dark of early morning, he left his bed and dressed. Downstairs he found a light on in the kitchen, coffee dripping into the pot, his sister-in-law, Rose, at the stove. She wore a red robe and white slippers and was scrambling eggs.
“Bread’s toasting,” she said.
Long ago, she’d been a part of the O’Connor household, helping to care for her sister’s children and contemplating a life as a nun when that responsibility was finished. But she’d met a man, Mal Thorne, a priest who’d lost his way. As they both were fond of saying, God gave them a new life together. She wasn’t a classic beauty, but Cork thought her beautiful in many ways. Not the least of which was that generosity of spirit which had always been at the heart of who she was. When her sister, Jo O’Connor, was killed, she’d stepped in and had often filled the maternal shoes. Now, with Jenny’s wedding so near, she’d come from her home in Evanston, mostly to help cover Waaboo while Jenny directed her energies toward the nuptials. Her husband, Mal, who ran a shelter for the homeless in Chicago, was planning to arrive just in time for the wedding.
“You didn’t have to do this, Rose,” Cork said.
“Were you going to eat before you left?” she asked without turning from the stove.
“Figured I’d grab coffee and a breakfast sandwich from the Gas ’N Go.”
“You really want heartburn out there in the Boundary Waters? Pour yourself a cup of coffee, get a plate and silverware, and sit down. The eggs are almost ready.”
He did as she’d instructed.
“Two days,” she said. “Right?”
“Two days, maybe three.”
“Unless you find something.”
“Unless I find something.”
Rose began transferring the eggs to a serving bowl. “So you’ll be back in plenty of time for the wedding.”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
She set the steaming eggs on the table. She’d mixed in onion, peppers, mushrooms, and cheddar cheese. The toast popped up. She pulled out the pieces and set them on his plate, then poured coffee for herself and sat down. She hadn’t brushed her hair yet. and in places it sprang out from her head in rust-colored splashes.
“I looked at the ten-day forecast. Snow possible by Thursday.”
“They’re predicting only flurries.”
“I’ll offer up a few prayers in that direction.”
Jenny came into the kitchen, looking sleepy. She’d thrown on a robe over her pajamas, but her feet were bare.
“You didn’t have to get up,” Cork said.
“Smelled the coffee.”
She yawned, poured herself a cup, and joined them at the table. They sat together in the bright light of the O’Connor kitchen. Beyond the windows, the world was still nothing but darkness.
“I don’t know what to hope for,” Jenny said. “If you find something, I suppose that would be a good thing. But it’ll keep you out there longer.”
“There’s no way I’m going to miss the wedding,” Cork said. “I promise.”
“And you’re nothing if not a man who keeps his promises.”
Cork heard her biting tone. “Suppose it was me out there and you really believed there was a chance I was still alive,” he said. “Wouldn’t you want someone looking?”
“I suppose,” she admitted.
He finished his meal, took his plate and silverware, and set them in the dishwasher.
“Time?” Jenny said.
“Time,” he replied.
He took his leather jacket from where it hung on a peg next to the door. Jenny stood up and gave her father a hug.
“Come back as soon as you can, Dad. And be safe.”
“Give that grandson of mine a hug for me. Tell him I’ll be back soon.”
“I’ll do that.”
Rose took him in her arms. Into his ear, she whispered, “Godspeed.”
* * *
Lindsay Harris was waiting for him in front of the Four Seasons, the best hotel in town. It overlooked the marina and Iron Lake, a view totally unimpressive in the dark at six o’clock on an overcast November morning. As he’d instructed her, she had a full pack with a sleeping bag rolled and secured atop it. He took her gear and hefted it into the back of his Expedition.
“Your brother not bothering to see you off?” Cork asked.
“He’s a late sleeper. And a little bit of a monster if you wake him too early.”
She wore a sweater under a quilted vest, long pants, Timberland boots, and an odd stocking cap, red and white striped, straight out of Whe
re’s Waldo?
“That stocking cap is something else,” he said.
She gave a little shrug. “A gift from my grandfather. Goofy, I know, but well, you understand.”
“Did you eat?”
“I arranged with the hotel for an early meal. Pretty hearty.”
“All right, then.”
Cork got in behind the wheel. Lindsay took the passenger side. He drove away from the lights of the hotel, down Oak Street, which was empty except for his Expedition. They were out of town in five minutes, rolling southeast along the shoreline of the lake.
“I don’t think I slept a wink last night,” Lindsay said.
“Worried?”
“Troubled, I’d say.”
“By what?”
“Thinking this will be nothing but a wild-goose chase.”
“Then why go?”
“Trevor’s dream. It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s got to mean something. Right? I mean it was so specific. Stephen O’Connor. Did you talk to him about it?”
“Stephen’s in Arizona, somewhere on Navaho land, hiking in the desert. No way to reach him.”
“Just like in Trevor’s dream.” She sounded amazed and relieved. “I was ready to give up, and then that dream. I didn’t know if you’d believe us. But then you’re Indian, right? And Indians know about visions.”
“My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Anishinaabe. But there’s a lot of stubborn Irish in my heritage, too, and I’ve never had a vision, so I’m more than a little skeptical.” Cork slowed in an area he knew to be a favorite crossing for deer. “I’ll tell you up front that I don’t think we’ll find anything. So many of us went over the area so thoroughly.”
“But what about Trevor’s dream? And that feeling you said you had that something wasn’t right?”
“Maybe that’s what the dream means. Maybe not. We’ve got a couple days to find out.”
They drove for an hour and a half, most of it on a gravel road that skirted the Iron Lake Reservation and took them north. A rat-gray light slowly suffused the sky and the thick ceiling of clouds. The Northwoods, dark and damp and forbidding, gradually emerged around them. Cork pulled into the parking area for their entry into the Boundary Waters. It was no surprise to him that his Expedition was the sole vehicle there. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was a vast tract, more than a million acres of unbroken forest, pristine lakes, fast rivers, and no human settlement. On the other side of the Canadian border was the Quetico Provincial Park, another million acres of the same wilderness. People sometimes got lost out there. In summer, they had a decent chance of surviving until they were found. November and beyond, the odds became daunting.
They unloaded their packs and provisions, then Lindsay helped Cork slide the canoe from where it had been secured atop the Expedition. They carried it together down a short path to a small lake and set it in the water. They returned to the parking area, grabbed the paddles and the rest of their things, and loaded the canoe. Cork directed her to the bow. He took the stern and shoved them off.
It was a cold morning, but not bitterly so. The overcast moderated the temperature. The air was still, the water a perfect mirror of the gray sky. The lake was long and narrow, with a wall of dark rock running along the far side. In summer, the lake would have been home to loons and ducks and Canada geese, but all those birds had wisely fled long ago. The lake was silent now, except for the dip and swirl and occasional splash of their paddles.
Lindsay Harris was in good shape and knew her way around a canoe. In the stern, Cork guided them toward the first portage. There would be several more lakes and portages before they reached Raspberry. He tried to look ahead, wondering what they might find when they arrived, what they might see this time that had been missed before, and wondering deeply about the true meaning of the dream that was bringing them back to that place.
* * *
Rainy Bisonette woke with a start. She lay on her bed in her little cabin, beneath her blankets, shaken by a fear so sudden and deep that it had startled her from sleep. She stared up into a dark that showed no hint of morning yet. Her first thought was of Cork. She would have loved nothing more than to have him with her in that bed, each of them warmed by the nearness of the other. It was often that way. Cork was a regular visitor to Crow Point. He used to come mostly to see Henry, but now when he made that long hike in, it was more often for her.
His visit the day before had been troubling in so many ways. She’d seen him recently growing more and more taciturn, staring into the fires she or Henry built on Crow Point in the sacred ring, gone someplace he wouldn’t allow her or anyone else to follow. Some of it, she suspected, was the season. Late fall. The approach of November. She knew about his terrible history with that month. But there was more to it, something that gnawed at his spirit, that little by little, over a long time, had eaten away a part of his heart. She’d tried to probe him gently, but he pretended that he had no idea what she was talking about. She and Jenny—and Rose, too, now that she’d come to help with the wedding—had discussed the darkness they all saw in him lately. She’d asked her great-uncle for his advice. Henry, as usual, had offered her only a riddle.
“When he is gone, he is in a place he must go alone. There is a battle coming, Niece. He prepares himself.”
“A battle, Uncle Henry? Who with? Why hasn’t he said anything?”
“Because he does not realize it yet.”
“Have you warned him?”
“I do not know when this battle will come. I only know that I see him preparing. No one can help him until he sees this himself.”
“If I sweated and asked the spirits, would they tell me?”
“Only the spirits can answer that.”
And so she’d wrung the sweat from her body in great rivers, asked for answers, prayed for guidance, but the spirits had remained silent.
In the end, there was nothing for her but to wait.
As she lay awake in the dark of that morning, afraid for the man she loved, she whispered her desperate prayer:
“Creator, in this battle he’s preparing for, give him strength and courage and wisdom. And when this battle is over, Creator, bring him back to me. Bring him back whole in heart, in mind, in body, and in spirit.”
And because she’d been raised Episcopalian on her home reservation in Wisconsin, she added something from her Christian tradition as well. She said, “Amen.”
CHAPTER 7
The mist descended, a wet, gray curtain that blotted out the distant landscape. Shorelines loomed dark and vague, and if Cork hadn’t had such a good sense of the country, he might have been easily lost. But he’d been this way many times, both before John Harris disappeared and during the weeks of searching afterward.
They put on their rain gear and ate lunch on an island in Bear Lake at one of the official Boundary Waters campsites Cork knew well. He recalled a summer day on the island when his children were young and Jo was alive. Stephen—Stevie, in those days—had caught his first walleye. The photo of him holding it proudly, like a whale in his little hands, hung on the wall in Sam’s Place.
Cork tried the satellite phone Deputy Azevedo had given him, per the sheriff’s request. It wasn’t really necessary. They didn’t expect him to check in until that evening. Mostly, he wanted to make sure the unit was functioning correctly. It wasn’t.
“No signal?” Lindsay Harris asked.
Cork shook his head. “The clouds maybe. Maybe this particular location. Sat phones can be tricky. I’ll try again tonight. You doing okay?”
“Fine,” she said.
“You’re good with a canoe.”
“After my parents died, I pretty much grew up in a boarding school in the Twin Cities. But summers in high school, I worked at a YMCA camp at the edge of the Boundary Waters, a place called Widjiwagan. My grandfather came to visit me there one
of those summers. That’s always been a special memory for me.”
“When I knew your grandfather, he was too busy to enjoy the Boundary Waters,” Cork said. “He was a lot older than me, but he kind of took me under his wing. Called me Corky. I called him Johnny Do. When I was ten, I helped him rebuild a vintage 1934 Packard Eight. Sweetest car you ever saw.”
“I never heard him talk about his childhood, his life here in Aurora.”
Cork knew there was good reason for that.
The trouble had happened the summer Cork was twelve. John Harris had just graduated from high school. Harris’s father was an attorney. Cork remembered him as a gruff man who seldom smiled and always seemed to smell of whiskey. There was some kind of business trouble, serious questioning of how the man had handled his clients’ monies. Suits were pending, and maybe criminal charges as well. Cork recalled how quiet Johnny Do was in that time. Then one day Mr. Harris went out fishing and never came back. His boat was found nudged against the shoreline of Iron Lake, empty, the electric trawling motor still running, an open bottle of Jim Beam among the gear. Also, the boat’s anchor was missing. The search had been exhaustive, but Iron Lake was large and Cork’s father had finally called an end to the effort. Rumors floated. Because the man had recently increased his life insurance policy substantially, there was a good deal of speculation about suicide. But the suicide provision would have made that policy useless. Mrs. Harris and Johnny Do kept to themselves, talking to no one. Then a couple of weeks later, Cork’s father located the body. Publicly, he said it was dumb luck. But Cork had overheard his father explain to his mother how he’d gone about it.
His father, like everyone else, believed the man had killed himself. And he thought if that was the case, and he were Harris and concerned about the well-being of his family, he’d try to hide the fact of the suicide. Which meant doing the deed somewhere out of sight. The trawling motor had been fixed with rope so that it would travel in a straight line. Cork’s father simply followed that line across Iron Lake, island to island, and finally found the body in ten feet of crystal-clear water off Bear Island. Publicly, he said he’d discovered the body tangled in the anchor line, clearly an accident, probably as a result of judgment badly impaired by the Jim Beam. The coroner, who at that time was also the town’s mortician, ruled the death accidental drowning. The widow, Mrs. Harris, was paid the life insurance. Shortly thereafter, she and her son left Aurora, and Cork had not seen Johnny Do since.
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