Windigo Island

by William Kent Krueger

  He accepted this with a careless little shrug.

  Jenny began with his family, and he was clearly proud on the home front. She moved to his work with the orchestra, and it turned out he was a musician himself, a clarinetist. He also liked the theater and had been asked to be on the board of directors for a community repertory company. He’d declined; lack of time. And then she asked about his love of sailing.

  “I’m originally from California,” he said. “Long Beach. I grew up with a tiller in my hand. I could tie a bowline before I could tie my shoes.” He laughed, a very pleasant sound, and ran a hand through his sandy blond hair.

  “You love to race, is that true?” she asked.

  His brow furrowed a bit. “I’m actually not big on racing. Mostly I just love being on the water. The feel of the wind and the way, on a good day, the boat just seems to fly. Do you sail?”

  “No,” she said.

  “If you’d like, I’d be happy to take you out.” He glanced at Cork. “You’d get some great photos, Liam.” Jenny had introduced her father as Liam McKenzie. Liam was his middle name. ­McKenzie was her mother’s maiden name.

  “I’m on board,” Cork said and snapped a photo of Wesley.

  “You don’t like racing?” Jenny said. “But didn’t you recently participate in the Grand Superior yacht race?”

  “That’s a horse of a different color,” he replied. “It’s only once every two years, and really I do it at the insistence of my boss. He considers it a morale builder. And you know how it is. Your boss says let’s have some fun, you can’t very well say no.”

  “You were part of a crew made up of other men who work for Turner, right?”

  She thought she saw a little cloud come into his look, a little shadow of concern. But he held his smile when he answered, “Yes.”

  “You must work well together. Montcalm took second place in its class.”

  “Best result we’ve had in that race yet.”

  “Your skipper must have been pleased.”

  “He was pretty happy.”

  “Did you celebrate?”

  The smile slowly faded, and it was clear that they’d entered dangerous territory.

  “A little, I suppose.”

  “There was a banquet of some kind to give out the sailing trophies, wasn’t there?”

  He brightened again. “Yes. A couple nights after the race.”

  “Did your wife go with you?”

  He shook his head. “She and the kids are out in South Dakota visiting her folks.”

  “Still?”

  “They go every summer for two or three weeks. My in-laws own a ranch near Rapid City. The boys have a great time.”

  “They’re not sailors?”

  “Oh, they love to sail. But they also love to ride horses. What boy doesn’t?”

  They were back on easy ground, and he was relaxed. Jenny thought maybe it was time to surprise him. “You ever sail to the Apostle Islands?”

  He hesitated too long. “Sure. It’s a great trip.”

  “There and back in a day, yes?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “Do you ever stay overnight?”

  “I have on occasion.”

  “A favorite anchorage?”

  His face had gone slack, his blue eyes troubled. He said, “Is this all going to be a part of your article?”

  “I ask a lot of questions, and then I sort through for the information that’s relevant. When you finished the yacht race, did you sail back to the Apostles with your boss and the rest of the crew?”

  He dropped any pretense of civility. “Who are you?”

  Jenny glanced at her father, and he produced two photos. One was of Carrie Verga lying dead across the rocks on Windigo Island. The other was of Mariah Arceneaux. He put them on the desk in front of Wesley.

  Jenny gave him time to study them well, then said, “When you and all your friends on the Montcalm headed off for a little celebratory sail after the race, you weren’t alone, were you?”

  “I want you to leave my office,” he said. “Now.”

  “What happened on the Montcalm, Simon?” Cork said.

  “Get out. Now.”

  “We know the Montcalm left its slip at Barker’s Island the day after the race and was gone for a night,” Cork said. “A couple of days later the body of a girl washed up on a little pile of rocks in the Apostles, a place called Windigo Island. Maybe you read about it. And yesterday we found a life ring on that island, a life ring from the sailboat you were on.”

  Jenny watched the man’s face go ashen. He said feebly, “How do you know there’s any connection?”

  Which was not a denial.

  Cork said, “This is how it’s going to play, Simon. Either you talk to us, or we go immediately to the police with everything we know. It won’t be hard to connect all the dots, and it will become public and ugly really fast. Do you want that? Or would you like some time first for personal damage control? Either way, it’s all coming out. We’re giving you a chance at the only measure of control you might have in this. The choice is yours.”

  Wesley’s breathing had quickened. He took up a pen and tapped his desktop. He glanced out the window of his office. The view was across Lake Superior toward the long sand spit of Park Point, which stretched seven miles toward the east, creating the safe harbor that had made the port city famous.

  “Who are you?” He could barely croak out the words. “Really, who are you? Because you’re not from the magazine.”

  Cork brought out his license and flashed it and said, “I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired by the family of that girl”—he put his finger on the photograph of Mariah Arceneaux—“to find her. I know she was on the Montcalm with you.”

  Jenny was surprised at this, then realized he was bluffing.

  Wesley hooked his eyes on her with a desperate, pleading look. “I can’t tell you anything. I honestly can’t.”

  “But not because you don’t know anything,” she said, as coldly as she could. “You were there. You know what happened to Carrie Verga.”

  “Carrie Verga? I don’t know who that is.”

  She jammed her finger onto the photograph of the dead girl. “That’s her. Fourteen-year-old Carrie Verga.”

  “Fourteen? Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ.” He sat back, as if exhausted. Beaten.

  “What happened on the Montcalm?” Jenny said.

  His eyes had fluttered closed, but now they opened, tired and scared. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I swear I didn’t.”

  “Tell us what happened, Simon.” The tone of her father’s voice had changed, become almost comforting. He sounded like Father Green, their parish priest, when giving permission in the confessional to speak the worst of what was in your heart.

  Wesley looked at them a good long while, then said, “It was J.B.’s idea. The whole thing.”

  “J.B.? As in John Boone Turner?”

  He nodded, slack-faced. “When J.B. tells you you’re going to do something, you don’t say no. He called me up the day after the race and said we were going for a celebratory sail. I love to sail. Mary and the boys were gone, so I said great. I didn’t know about the girls until I climbed aboard at Barker’s Island. Fourteen,” he said and shook his head. “I would never have guessed.”

  “They were already on the boat?” Cork said.

  “Yeah. J.B. had arranged it.”

  “How?”

  “No idea. J.B. knows how to get what he wants.”

  “So you all sailed out to the Apostles,” Cork said, a statement not a question.

  Wesley nodded again. “We anchored off Oak Island, a place I know, a good, protected spot. We’d been drinking, sailing, enjoying the lake. The girls seemed to be having fun. J.B. had brought along a pretty good larder—cav
iar, pâté, cheese, champagne, really good stuff. Three of the guys, they disappeared belowdecks with her.” He pointed toward Mariah’s photograph. “J.B., he went below with her.” He indicated Carrie Verga. “It was dark by then. I stayed up top because . . . well, because I didn’t want to be a part of what was going on down below. I’m a family man.” He drilled Jenny with a desperate look. “I am a family man.”

  “I understand,” Jenny said quietly. “You were offended by J.B.’s actions.”

  “You better believe it. But like I said, nobody says no to J.B.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I stretched out in a deck chair and fell asleep. Honestly, I figured I’d just spend the night like that. But about two in the morning, a storm came up, a big, thundering, howling thing. No rain, just wind and lightning. We were leeward of Oak Island, but the water was still pretty rough. I was checking the anchor line when I thought I heard screaming. I couldn’t be sure because of the wind and thunder, and I was having trouble because we were dragging the anchor, so I was pretty focused there. When I got us secured again, I went back to my deck chair. J.B. was standing at the railing looking into the dark. I asked him if everything was okay. He said, ‘She’s gone.’ I asked him who was gone. ‘Misty,’ he said,” at which point Wesley nodded toward the photograph of Carrie Verga. “That was what she called herself. I panicked, yelled at him, asked him if she’d gone overboard. He said, and I apologize for the language, ‘The fucking little bitch jumped ship.’”

  “What did you do then?” Jenny asked.

  “Hit our spotlight, swung it all over that wild water. She wasn’t anywhere. I screamed at J.B. that we had to find her. I hollered to the other guys belowdecks, and we got to it. We hit the engine and sailed all over that lake in that wind. We never found her.”

  “You didn’t notify the Coast Guard?”

  “I wanted to, but J.B. forbid it. ‘The scandal,’ he kept saying.”

  “She was beaten before she died. Did you know that?” Jenny said.

  “Oh, God.” He seemed genuinely devastated. “I didn’t.”

  “What happened to Mariah?” Jenny asked.

  “Mariah?”

  “The other girl.”

  “Oh, her. She called herself Candi. When we sailed back to Barker’s Island Marina, some guy met us there and took her away.”

  “What did the guy look like?” Cork asked, taking up the questioning for a while.

  Wesley shrugged. “Big.”

  “Indian?”

  “Didn’t look Indian.”

  “How was she doing? Mariah?”

  “Upset. Real upset.”

  “Did she know what happened?”

  “Yeah. She was on deck when we were cutting back and forth trying to find her friend.”

  “It was J.B. who arranged for the girls, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you don’t have any idea who he contacted?”

  “No. It’s not the kind of thing I do. Ever.”

  “Has J.B. sailed to Duluth before?”

  “Every other year for the Grand Superior.”

  “So if this is the kind of thing he does, he’s probably done it here before.”

  “I don’t know. This was the first time my family was away during the race, the first time he’d invited me on his little pleasure excursion. I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of outing. Honest to God, I didn’t.”

  Cork sat back, studied Wesley, then said, “Okay, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to contact your boss and do your level best to get out of John Boone Turner the name of his contact in Duluth who arranged for the girls. And you’re going to do that without tipping him off to what’s going on here. Understand?”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “You’re a smart man, Simon. You’ll think of something. I need that information this afternoon. If you get it, I’ll make sure that when all this is in the hands of the police and breaks to the media—and it will, big-time—you’ll be the one bright spot in the whole shitty mess.”

  “You can do that?” His eyes lit up, as if he was treading water in the middle of an empty sea and had suddenly spotted a life raft.

  “I can do that,” Cork promised. “But John Boone Turner goes down.”

  Wesley took a deep breath, looked away from us, let it out. “This’ll ruin him.”

  “A girl’s dead, Simon,” Cork shot back. “She was beaten, and probably she jumped from that sailboat to get away from the man who was beating her. Hell, yes, his life is ruined. And, hell yes, it ought to be. But you? You can still salvage something if you do the right thing now.”

  Jenny’s father stood, and she with him. He pulled out his wallet and plucked a card from it, which he laid on the desk. “Call my cell when you have what I need.” Jenny turned to leave, but her father wasn’t quite finished. “If you get cold feet, or if you think there’s some way you might still weasel your way out of this, there isn’t.”

  He took from his shirt pocket the small tape recorder they’d purchased at the same time they’d bought the camera.

  “I have your full confession on tape, Simon. I own your ass.”

  They walked out, leaving Simon Wesley in his office, alone, staring out across the vast blue of Lake Superior and probably seeing nothing on the horizon but the end of his world.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  The sun was hot, the day sultry, the tourists on Canal Park Drive as busy and numerous as flies on a carcass. It was Friday afternoon. Only the previous Sunday, Daniel English had come to Tamarack County seeking help, but it seemed to Jenny like a good deal more time had passed than just five days, and she felt, too, that somehow they had all gone a great distance, though they weren’t really far from home and never had been. She missed her son. She missed the routine of Sam’s Place. She missed, in a sad and selfish way, the naïveté of her life in Tamarack County before that week. When they’d all risked their lives for little Waaboozoons, she thought she’d seen the darkest of spirits. But the more she learned about the world that Mariah Arceneaux and Carrie Verga and Raven Duvall were caught up in, the more she realized she was still just standing at the threshold to all the twisted corridors that wound their way through the human heart.

  Her father was unusually quiet as they drove back from their meeting with Simon Wesley. His jaw worked and his face was held tense, as if he were chewing on something hard and bitter. She didn’t know what to say. She was thinking they were making headway. Although they still didn’t have Mariah safely in their grasp, they’d answered a lot of questions about her disappearance and knew much of the truth behind Carrie Verga’s death. That seemed like progress. But she watched her father’s hands choking the steering wheel, and she had the feeling she sometimes did when the sky above Tamarack County filled with clouds that were sick green and she listened for the tornado sirens.

  Her father had always been a complicated man who seldom shared what went on deep inside him. Her mother had been the viaduct, the way internal knowledge had flowed from him to his children and from them to him. With her death, that natural channeling had ended, and they’d had to try to create something new. It wasn’t always easy or infallible, and they weren’t always on the same page, but what she realized was that at the heart of it was trust. Trust had always been there. And trust meant love. And love was the wolf to feed. So whatever was going on with her father, she told herself to trust that it was necessary for him, necessary for the way he worked, and she didn’t push or pry.

  They hadn’t eaten since breakfast. They bought sandwiches at a deli on the way to the hotel and ate them quickly. At the hotel, they gathered with the others in the room that Jenny shared with Louise, and Cork filled them in on what they’d learned from Wesley.

  “You didn’t call the cops on him?” Louise said at
the end. She sat on her bed, her back pillowed against the wall, her legs covered with the white bedspread. Her hands were balled into angry fists. “Him or his boss or those other bastards on that boat? You didn’t call the cops on them?”

  Jenny’s father stood at the window, dark against the light beyond the glass pane. “We need one more thing from him before he turns himself in,” he said.

  “What?” Louise shot back.

  “The name of whoever put Carrie and Mariah into the hands of a man like John Boone Turner. That name and a way to contact him. When we have that, I’ll tell Simon Welsey to turn himself in to the police.”

  “Turn himself in? How the hell are you going to make him do that?”

  “We hold all the cards, Louise. Or at least he believes we do. Most especially, we have his confession captured here.” Cork held up the tape recorder.

  “What if he can’t get what you want from Turner?” Daniel asked. He’d turned a chair around and sat with his arms draped across the back. “Worse, suppose he tips off these guys, and they all go underground, including this Windigo.”

  “The men on the Montcalm won’t run,” Cork said. “They’re too visible. They have lives they can’t just drop and leave. They’ll fight it, but in the end they’ll go down. Windigo?” He cupped his hand like the claw of a raptor. “I’ve almost got him. I can feel it.”

  Jenny saw Henry Meloux studying her father. His eyes were dark and intent, but he said nothing.

  Her cell phone rang. She checked the display. The call was coming from Nishiime House.

  “Jenny, it’s Bea Abbiss. I need you to come here as soon as you can.”

  “Just me?”

  “Maybe you should all come.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just come. You’ll understand when you get here.”

  “We’re on our way,” Jenny said. “Ten minutes.”

  “What is it?” Louise asked. “Is it about Mariah?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny said. “That was Bea Abbiss. She wants us at Nishiime House, all of us. Now.”

  They took both vehicles and parked in front of the old brownstone. There was no one at the reception desk. The place felt ­deserted.