Windigo Island

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  For my publicist, David Brown,

  who manages to do the impossible on my behalf,

  and

  for Sue Trowbridge,

  the angel without whom I would be faceless to so many

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  * * *

  The Nishiime House in this story does not exist, but places like it do. For desperate Native women and for young, homeless Native youths, they provide shelter in a harsh world. All of us, regardless of our ancestry, need to support these organizations, which do nothing less than save lives.

  I am indebted to the generosity of the staff at Saint Paul’s Ain Dah Yung Center, particularly its director, Deb Foster. These are people who, every day, find a way to work miracles with lost Native kids. Chi migwech also to the friends of Ain Dah Yung, Eileen Hudon and Christine Stark, who helped open my eyes to the cold realities of being a Native woman in a White world.

  Another thank-you goes to Suzanne Koepplinger and Linda Eagle Speaker of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center in Minneapolis. Without their guidance, wisdom, and support, I probably wouldn’t have written this story.

  To Sergeant Grant Snyder of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Child Abuse Unit I owe a big debt of gratitude for his clear-eyed but compassionate understanding of the heartbreaking situation of sexually trafficked women and children in Minnesota.

  And finally, my thanks to the Anishinaabe people, who are among the strongest and most generous human beings I know.

  In 2009 the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center published a report they’d commissioned, which is called Shattered Hearts: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota. In 2011 the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition in conjunction with Prostitution Research and Education published their own report, titled Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota. These groundbreaking documentations of the appalling reality of life for many Native women and girls are must reading for anyone with a social conscience. Our willing blindness to the truth is the greatest enemy of change.

  PART I

  Corcoran O’Connor:

  “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  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 body 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.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  The storm had knocked out power, and Sam’s Place lay in the dark, lit only by frequent flashes of lightning. It was two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, but it felt like evening. There were no customers waiting at the serving windows. The violent weather had driven folks to shelter, in their homes or their hotel rooms or their rented summer cabins. Iron Lake was an empty shiver of restless gray water deserted by fishing boats and pleasure boats alike. Aurora, Minnesota, deep in the great Northwoods, hunkered down and watched and waited for the storm to pass.

  Heavy rain hammered the metal roof of the old Quonset hut called Sam’s Place, and inside, the O’Connors readied for a period without electricity that could, they knew from experience, last hours or even into the next day. Cork had hauled the gas generator from the cellar, filled it, and got it running. It powered the essentials: the freezer, the refrigerator, the ice milk machine, the lights and outlets of the prep and serving areas. Cork didn’t think there would be many customers until after this weather had passed, but he wanted to be ready, just in case. And God forbid that any of the perishables should go bad. In a small town like Aurora, in a close-knit area like Tamarack County, any hint of food poisoning could sink a food enterprise for good. It may have been only a burger joint, but Sam’s Place had a sterling reputation, and Cork intended to keep it that way.

  When they’d prepared for the worst, Jenny O’Connor, Cork’s older daughter and officially in charge that day, brought out her notebook and sat at one of the serving windows. While rain cascaded down the awning outside, she wrote. Judy Madsen, a retired school administrator who’d just come on and would close up Sam’s Place that night, worked the day’s crossword puzzle in the Duluth News Tribune. Cork stood near Jenny, looking out at the dismal sheets of rain. He had paperwork waiting in the back section of the Quonset hut, which was the office for his business as a private investigator, but without lights or power to his computer, there wasn’t much he could do.

  Marlee Daychild, one of their teenage summer help, sat on a stool near the freezer, talking on her cell phone. She was seventeen, pretty, Ojibwe. She laughed and said into the phone, “No way.” She listened and said, “You want to talk to them?” Then she said, “I love you.”

  She hung up and said, “Stephen says hello. He says he’ll call you tomorrow. He has a surprise.”

  Stephen was Cork’s son, also seventeen, and Marlee was his girlfriend. At the moment, Stephen was in the Twin Cities, where in recent weeks, he’d been working with physical therapists at the Courage Center. A bullet fired by a madman last winter had damaged his spine. The folks at the Courage Center believed they could help him walk again. Anne, Cork’s younger daughter, had gone with him as company, cheerleader, and liaison with the folks back home. Cork would have chosen to be there himself, but because of the way the tragedy had occurred and because her own particular spiritual journey had prepared her, Anne believed this was a responsibility that lay on her shoulders. Her reports to Cork and the others in Aurora had been full of hope.

  “No hints?” Jenny asked.

  “He wants to tell you himself.”

  “He’s walking?” Cork said.

  “I can’t tell you. He made me promise. But it’s good,” she said.

  Even though the day was bleak, Cork felt a profound glimmer of hope.

  They went back to what they’d been doing before. Jenny was working on the manuscript for a novel. Her second attempt at a manuscript. The first, she insisted, was “a total piece of crap,” and it gathered dust bunnies on a shelf in her bedroom closet. Jenny was twenty-seven. She had a BA in journalism and an MFA from the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She was the mother of an energetic three-year-old and was also the managing force behind Sam’s Place these days. Cork and Judy Madsen also took turns running things, but for all intents and purposes, the operation was Jenny’s. She was terrific at it, yet Cork knew a career in food service, even if it was the family business, wasn’t where her heart lay. Every free moment she was able to carve out for herself, she bent to her writing.

  “Have you called home, Jenny?” Cork asked.

  She didn’t answer, so deep into her writing now that she didn’t hear. Cork made the call to home himself from his cell phone. Rose, his sister-in-law, answered.

  “Yes,” she said, responding to his question. “The power’s out here, too. Waaboo and I both have flashlights and we’re making sure all our stuffed animals know that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Waaboo was Jenny’s child, Cork’s grandson. His real name was Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. His Ojibwe name was Waaboozoons, which meant “little rabbit,” but everyone called him Waaboo. He’d been adopted, and the heart of every O’Connor held a special place for the little rabbit. They’d all, every one of them, put their lives on the line for him.

  “If the outage lasts until dinner, come on up to Sam’s Place,” Cork suggested. “I’ll put something together up here.”

  “A Sam’s Special and a milk shake,” Rose said. “Heck, we might do that even if we get power.” She turned away from the receiver and said, “It’s your grandpa.”

  “Baa-baa,” Cork heard his grandson say. Which was what Waaboo had always called him.

  “Thanks, Rose,” Cork said.

  “You know it’s no problem. We’ll see you later.”

  Cork ended the call, and Jenny finally looked up from her notebook. “How’s my guy?” she asked.

  “Giving comfort to all his stuffed animals.”

  “Very nurturing,” she said.

  “How’s it going?” Cork nodded toward her notebook.

&
nbsp; “It goes,” she replied. Which, when it came to her writing, was how she always answered him.

  His cell phone was still in his hand, and the ringtone played the first few notes of the chorus from “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees. He glanced at the number on the screen, smiled, and took the call.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said.

  At the other end of the line, Rainy Bisonette said, “Flattery will get you almost anywhere. But right now, I need you here.” Her voice was stern and urgent. Also a little broken up because reception where she was, a remote spot called Crow Point, could be spotty.

  “What’s wrong?” Cork said. “Is it Meloux?”

  Her next few words were lost in static, then Cork heard her say, clearly and definitely, “Just get out here and you’ll understand.”

  “I’m on my way.” Cork slipped the phone back into the holster on his belt. “Hold down the fort. I’m heading out to Crow Point.”

  “What is it?” Jenny asked. “Is everything okay? Henry?”

  “I’m not sure, but it sounds serious. I’ll let you know.”

  Jenny studied the rain outside, which fell without any sign of letup. She closed her notebook. “I’m going with you.” She looked toward Judy Madsen. “Okay?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Judy said. “Marlee and me, we’ll handle the hordes, won’t we?”

  The teenager gave a whatever kind of shrug and went back to playing a game on her cell phone.

  • • •

  Henry Meloux lived at the end of a long finger of meadowland called Crow Point that jutted into Iron Lake several miles north of Aurora. Meloux was old. Exactly how old no one, not even Meloux himself, really knew. Somewhere in his nineties was Cork’s best guess. Since he was a boy, Meloux had lived in a one-room cabin he’d built with his uncle, and for most of those years, he’d lived alone. He was a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society, a healer of body and spirit. In his youth, he’d been a hunter of great renown. He’d also been a fierce warrior in defense of those who sought his protection. Many of them had been Anishinaabe, his own people. But Meloux’s eyes were color-blind when it came to skin. Cork was one of those who owed their lives to Meloux, and even more important, his children were among them, too. Whatever Meloux needed from him, Cork was prepared to give.