Windigo Island

A long, pale white scar began at the right corner of the young woman’s mouth and followed the jawline for nearly three inches. It looked as if someone had slit her cheek with a sharp knife. “I don’t think I can help you,” she said.

  “Are you in charge here?” Jenny asked.

  “No. That would be Bea Abbiss.”

  “Is she in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we talk to her?”

  The young woman looked beyond Jenny, at Cork and English, and it was clear that she was reluctant to agree. Cork thought about leaving, but Meloux spoke up.

  “Granddaughter,” he said. “You have been lost, too.”

  She eyed him. The muscles near her long scar flinched as if from an uncontrollable tic, but she didn’t reply.

  “And someone offered you their hand and that kindness brought you out of your lost place,” Meloux said. “Yes?”

  The young woman remained silent, but Cork could see in her eyes that Meloux had nailed it.

  “All we are asking,” Meloux went on, “is that you offer us your hand so that we can find our child and bring her home from the place where she is lost.”

  Her gaze once again swept them all, lingering on the two men near the front door. Then she decided. “Just a moment.” She picked up her phone, punched a button, and said, “Some people are here, Bea. They’re looking for their daughter. They’d like to talk to you.” She listened and gave a nod to whatever was said. “All right.” She put the phone back in its cradle. “Ms. Abbiss will be right out.”

  “Migwech,” the old man said.

  Cork heard a door open down the angled hallway. A moment later, a woman appeared, smiling cordially. She was a big woman with the features and coloring of a Native. She had black hair with little veins of gray, and dark, intelligent eyes. She wore a loose-­fitting, light blue blouse and jeans, a turquoise necklace and earrings that matched. She came directly to Louise Arceneaux, extended her hand, and said, “How do you do? I’m Bea Abbiss, director of Nishiime House.”

  “I’m Louise Arceneaux. This is Jenny O’Connor, Henry Meloux, Cork O’Connor, and Daniel English. We’re looking for my daughter.”

  “So I understand,” Bea Abbiss said pleasantly. “Why don’t we go back to my office and talk?” She glanced at the young receptionist. “No calls for a while, Gina.”

  The hallway was long. There was a window at the far end with stained glass, and the light that came through fell across the worn beige carpeting in vivid splashes of color. Abbiss stepped through an open doorway, and the others followed. It was a neat office but comfortable, with several plants, shelves of books, and lots of Native art on the walls.

  Abbiss slipped behind her desk and said, “I apologize. I only have two chairs for visitors. I hope some of you don’t mind standing.”

  “Louise,” Jenny said, indicating one of the empty chairs. “And, Henry, why don’t you take the other?” She stood between them, and once again, Cork and English remained in the background.

  “All right.” Abbiss folded her hands on her desk. “Tell me what you need.”

  Louise told her story. She began with her experience as, in her own words, “a boat whore.” She talked about her children, about Mariah. She confessed she hadn’t been a very good mother. She began to cry but kept on with her story. She told about Mariah disappearing with Carrie Verga and about the girl’s body washing up on Windigo Island. She told Bea Abbiss how scared she was for her daughter, how desperately she wanted to find her, to have another chance, to be a better mother this time.

  Cork didn’t know Abbiss’s tribal affiliation, but her reaction to all this was not the stone face he’d seen so often among the Anishinaabeg. The woman’s expression communicated compassion and understanding and empathy, and at the end, she left her chair, walked around the desk to Louise, bent, and gave Mariah’s mother a long, warm hug. She took Louise’s hands and said, “I’ll help in any way I can. But you have to understand, some of what I’m going to tell you will be difficult to hear.”

  “I know, Ms. Abbiss,” Louise said. “I know.”

  The woman seated herself again at her desk. She frowned a moment, as if trying to decide where to start. “The first thing is call me Bea. Everyone here does. The second thing, Louise, is that I want you to believe that you can let go of your guilt. What happened to you, what may have happened to your daughter, is an old, old crime, but you aren’t the criminals. You are victims of the crime. When people of European descent”—here she glanced at Cork and Jenny, the only ones among those present who didn’t look Ojibwe—“came to this area, they shattered our culture. Sometimes it was because of ignorance, but more often it was because of greed. And this brokenness, this wounding of our spirit as a people, has never been completely healed. We continue to struggle with it today. One of the terrible, terrible effects of that brokenness is violence, particularly against our women. Our men are sometimes a part of that violence, and white men are certainly a part of that violence. Our women have been sold from the beginning, traded as a commodity. We’re dealing with decades of trauma forced on our people.

  “What I’m saying, Louise, is that we have to heal ourselves, as women and as a people. And a huge part of that healing is to understand, to accept, to really believe that we have been victimized. We are not the criminals. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Louise said and nodded.

  “We see a lot of women here who are caught in that deep net of trafficking. They want to get out of it, but it’s not easy. And I’ll be honest with you, there’s only a certain amount that we can do. We’re a nonprofit. We depend on the charity of others, so our resources are limited. To really break away from the trafficking, women need to be assured of good housing, a job, continued support in so many ways until they’re able to stand on their own. We simply can’t do that, though I’d give my right arm to be able to. So we do a lot of referring, a lot of advocating, a lot of hand-holding. But in the end, we often see the women simply disappear.”

  Abbiss took a deep breath. Cork suspected what she’d just told them was a truth she often had to deliver, but it was not one she wanted to accept. And he couldn’t help but wonder if, as a Native woman, she’d experienced herself the horrible truths she was laying out.

  “Okay, let’s talk about Mariah,” Abbiss went on. “I don’t know a girl by that name. We see so many young Native women here, and very often they don’t give us their real names. And that man you told me about—Smiley—the one who trafficked you when you worked the boats? That’s not a name I know either, and I know a lot about the traffickers. Probably he got pushed out by the gangs—the Crips, the Bloods, the Native Mob. They all have a hand in it now. But back to your daughter. Do you have a ­photograph?”

  From her purse, Louise took out two photos of Mariah, one before her transformation and the other the photo she’d posted on Facebook just before she disappeared. Abbiss looked at them both carefully. Then she shook her head.

  “I haven’t seen her here,” she said.

  Jenny reached into her purse and brought out another photo. “Here’s a picture of Carrie Verga, the girl she left with, the one who’s dead now.”

  Abbiss studied this photograph with the same result.

  Cork said, “I have another picture, this one of the woman we believe may have been responsible for the girls running off in the first place.”

  He stepped forward with the photo Lindy Duvall had given him of her daughter Raven.

  Bea Abbiss took the photograph in her hands, and the moment she looked at it her face changed. Darkness swept across it in a fury.

  “Oh, Christ,” she said. “Oh, dear Christ.”

  PART II

  Jennifer O’Connor:

  “Can the Devil Speak True?”

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  Men never talked. Not about themselves, anyway, not really. They t
alked about what they’d done, what they were doing, what they intended to do, but they didn’t talk about what was at the heart of them, why they did these things. That’s what Jennifer O’Connor believed, and she believed it in large measure because that was what she’d seen in her father all her life.

  Her brother, Stephen, believed that everyone was born with a purpose to serve. Stephen was very Ojibwe in so many ways, and he believed that every human being was a part of the plan of Kitchimanidoo, the Great Mystery, the Creator. He believed that their father was born ogichidaa, which was someone who stood between his people and evil. Stephen himself was born Mide, a healer. Although in the Ojibwe clan tradition the O’Connors were makwa, or bear, Stephen claimed that Anne’s spirit was that of a bird, or bineshii. The bird flew in the spiritual realm, and was the teacher of spiritual ways. Stephen firmly believed that Anne had been born to be a nun. And Jenny? She was always meant to be nokomis, which literally meant “grandmother.” She was a nurturer, Stephen believed, and Jenny didn’t argue.

  So Cork O’Connor was a man born ogichidaa, chosen to stand against evil. Which he’d done time and again, often at great risk to himself. Yet he’d failed twice in this purpose, and although he never spoke of it in this way, Jenny believed these failures cut him to the bone.

  It had been nearly half a decade since her mother had been killed, an innocent victim in a grand and brutal plan intended to make a very few men very rich. As a part of that scheme, the charter plane she was on had been lost in a snowstorm in a wilderness in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming. Jenny’s father had gone searching for her. With difficulty and danger, he’d found the truth, but he’d been too late to save his beloved wife. And only seven months ago, a madman who bore a grudge against her father had, in revenge, tried to kill Stephen. In this instance, too, her father had uncovered the truth too late to stand between the evil of that man and his own son.

  Jenny believed her father suffered because of what he saw as his failure, but she didn’t believe this because he revealed himself by talking about who he was deep inside. In that way, he was like a stone. Instead, she saw it in his face, heard it in his silence, felt it sometimes in his touch. Across the course of her life, this was always how she’d known him.

  In the small office in Nishiime House, she watched her father’s reaction to all that Bea Abbiss laid out, and she never saw a flicker of emotion on his face. He probably would have told her wryly that it was the Ojibwe in his blood. Partly true, Jenny thought, but she was pretty sure that it also had a lot to do with the Y chromosome he carried in every part of him.

  When Bea looked at the photograph of Raven Duvall, and fear and anger and fury exploded on her face, and she said, “Oh, Christ. Oh, dear Christ,” Cork didn’t bat an eye. Nor did Daniel or Henry. Jenny, on the other hand, felt everything inside her go cold and afraid, and she knew that her own eyes grew as huge as eggs.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  Bea looked up from the photo. “I know this woman. What did you say her name was?”

  “Duvall,” Cork replied. “Raven Duvall.”

  “I don’t know her by that name,” Bea said. “To me, she’s always been Sparkle. Just Sparkle.”

  “How do you know her?” Louise asked.

  “Through our street workers.” She laid the photograph on the desk in front of her and shook her head. “We have staff here whose job is just to walk the streets looking for the runaways, the lost kids, the vulnerable ones. We try to get to them before the predators do. Our people go out with what we call Green Bags, full of things that someone on the street might need. Blankets, toiletries, tampons. We don’t try to wrangle kids in here. They might be scared and desperate, but they’ve also been lied to and betrayed and used in so many ways that trust is an enormous issue. So, we just try to make sure they know we’re here and that we want to help.”

  “And Raven? Or Sparkle rather?” Daniel said. “She’s come to you?”

  “No. But she has sent girls to us from time to time, ones ready to get out of the kind of life Sparkle leads.”

  “You were clearly shocked when you saw her photograph,” Cork said. “What’s that about?”

  “It’s not about Sparkle. It’s about the men Sparkle works for. They’re what, if you talked to her, she would call her family. And one of the most tragic things in all of this is that she would mean it.”

  “Tell us about her family,” Jenny said.

  “Most of the girls who are trafficked here are handled by men.”

  “Pimps,” Cork said.

  “That’s not how the girls see them. It works this way. A girl runs away from home, from the rez, from a situation that’s intolerable or threatening. Maybe it’s parents who are alcoholics or addicts, or a situation of sexual abuse. She ends up here, or in some other city, a place where she’s just another stranger. More often than not, she knows no one. So she’s on the street. I don’t know how they find her so quickly, but the predators are on her in no time. They offer her food, shelter, protection, all the things she needs. They’re kind, like big brothers or good uncles. And for a while they do exactly as they’ve promised. They take care of her. This is what we think of as grooming.

  “Then these predators begin with the real agenda. They point out that they’ve given her everything, and they need to have something in return. Sex is certainly part of that, which the girls are too often already familiar with and not so very reluctant to give to the men who’ve been, in a way, their saviors. Then it involves more. This new family might say that they need them to do some stripping. Nothing wrong with a little stripping. And their young bodies are so beautiful, they ought to be proud to show them off. And after that, it’s maybe private parties and lap dances, and eventually it’s sex for money, which is where all the grooming was meant to lead in the first place. And by then it’s too late for the girls. Often, they’ve become hooked on drugs, another way for the family to control them. And they’re emotionally bound, because they know their family loves them and needs this from them. But also they’re afraid, because they’ve seen—or even experienced themselves—the punishment for refusing to do what’s asked of them.”

  “They’re beaten?” Jenny said.

  “Oh, yes, and worse. But even though terrible fear has become a part of the whole dynamic, they believe that they only got what they deserved, because family comes first. It’s brainwashing, and the men who do it are very good at it.”

  Louise said, “But Mariah didn’t just run away. Raven brought her here.”

  Bea nodded. “That’s another way this happens. Girls who are older—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—become procurers. They go back to the rez, looking successful—nice clothes, nice car, jewelry—and like the Pied Piper, they get much younger girls to follow them.”

  “Why so shocked when you found out we’re looking for Raven?” Jenny’s father asked, coming back to that point. “What’s so unusual about her family?”

  Bea stood up and went to a file cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and brought out a folder labeled WINDIGO.

  “What you’re going to see is pretty bad,” she warned them. “You might not want to look.”

  No one turned away. Bea opened the folder, pulled a photograph from inside, and laid it on her desk. The girl’s face was a mass of bruises and swelling. Her lower lip was torn open, showing the white of teeth beneath. She was holding up a hand on which none of the fingers extended from the palm in a natural way.

  “Her name is Melissa Spry. Windigo and his brother did this to her.”

  “Why?”

  “One night she told them she was too sick to turn any tricks for them.”

  “Did she come here?”

  “Yes. Sparkle dropped her off.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “She wouldn’t let us. She said if we did, she’d just leave. She told us she deserved what had bee
n done to her. She really believed that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We took her to a clinic and got her treated. She’s Grand Portage Ojibwe. I returned her to the rez myself, delivered her into the hands of a social worker we have a relationship with there.”

  “She’s okay?” Jenny asked.

  “Within a couple of weeks, she’d run away again. We heard on the street that she’d gone back to this Windigo.” She tapped the folder. “I have other photos of other girls just like this one in here if you want to see them, all girls that have been part of this Windigo’s family.”

  “Windigo?” Henry spoke in a way that made Jenny think they were old enemies.

  “That’s what he calls himself and that’s how many of the girls refer to him,” Bea said. “You all know the story of the windigo, right? Once a man, then through dark magic he became a monster, a cannibal with an insatiable hunger for human flesh and a heart made of ice. We see girls who’ve been trafficked by Crips and Bloods and the Native Mob. But Windigo is the worst.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Louise said. “You’re not telling me that Mariah is part of this Windigo’s family?”

  “If Sparkle—Raven—is involved, that’s probably the case.” Bea spoke in an even tone, but couldn’t disguise the concern in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “How do we find her? Raven, I mean,” Jenny said.

  “That would be very difficult. As I understand it, she’s not actually out there being trafficked at the moment. She acts as a sort of big sister to the other girls.”

  “Some sister,” Daniel said.

  “I know. But understand where her head is at. She’s deep in thrall to Windigo. And give her credit. She’s taken chances sending girls who really need help to us.” She nodded toward the file containing the horrible photographs.

  “Do the police know about this?” Cork said.

  “Yes, but there’s not much they can do. The girls don’t trust cops. Most of them have grown up believing law enforcement is their enemy. So they won’t speak a word against Windigo.” She started to say something more but hesitated, as if very reluctant to go on.