Windigo Island

  “What is it?” Jenny asked.

  Bea’s eyes flicked to Louise, then back to Jenny. “I’ve heard, only heard, that the girls in Windigo’s family disappear if they talk to anyone about any of this. They’re at risk even coming to us. I’m very afraid that might have been what happened to Melissa Spry.”

  “Disappear?” Louise looked frightened to death. “You mean they’re murdered. Is that what was supposed to happen to Carrie Verga? Is that what’s happened to my Mariah?”

  “I don’t know, Louise. I just want you to be aware of all the possibilities. I want you to be prepared.”

  In the quiet of the room, Jenny asked, “Do you know anything about this Windigo?”

  Late afternoon light came through the window at the back of the office and fell across Bea Abbiss. The window mullions cut the light into squares the color of blood oranges, and it made her look as if she were a prisoner behind dark bars. She shook her head slowly. “There’s not much anyone knows. We think he’s a Shinnob. Some of the girls have called him Angel. I don’t know if that’s his real name or just something he calls himself, like Win­digo. I’ve also heard that even the Crips and Bloods and the Native Mob keep out of his way. Apparently he has a brother, someone called Manny, who’s also part of this family.”

  “You can find Raven,” Jenny’s father said. He spoke as if it was a truth, not speculation. Jenny was afraid he was too blunt, too confrontational, and they might lose the goodwill of Bea Abbiss.

  “I haven’t heard from Sparkle since Melissa Spry disappeared. So I don’t know,” Bea said. “But I’ll try.”

  “How?” Jenny asked.

  “I know the Native community in Duluth. I have a pretty good ear on the streets. I know who to ask. I can’t promise anything, but like I said, I’ll try.”

  “Thank you,” Louise said. She looked in real pain.

  Bea gave her a reassuring smile. “We call our house Nishiime—‘little sister’—for a reason. We’re family here, real family, and we do our best to help one another.” She looked to Jenny. “This might take some time. If I find out something, how do I get in touch with you?”

  Jenny gave her cell phone number and Cork gave his. Bea walked them to the reception area, where the thin young woman with hair like cotton candy and a long scar across her cheek was still at work on her computer. She glanced up, her face twitched, and she smiled as they passed, an encouraging smile, Jenny thought, and liked her for that. At the door, Bea said, “I don’t want to give you false hope, but I think that hope is always a good thing to hold to. And please believe that I’ll do my best to help.”

  Henry took her much younger hand between his ancient, ancient palms, and he smiled in the way he had that was as if he was offering dawn to a dark world, and he said, “One kind thing is the seed from which a great goodness grows. It is not hope we hold to, Niece. It is belief in the power of that growing goodness. Migwech. Chi migwech.”

  The old man turned and began down the steps.

  Chapter 24

  * * *

  Jenny had always loved Duluth, its hills, its great mansions, its sense of grand history, its cultural crazy quilt, its location there against the largest and most beautiful freshwater lake in the world. When she was a girl, she and her mother used to drive from Tamarack County and spend the day doing what girls did together—shopped, ate, strolled through Canal Park. They bought ice cream cones at the DQ and stood licking them at the edge of the ship channel, while they watched the Aerial Lift Bridge rise and the huge boats pass beneath. Sometimes when they were in the city, they visited a spa or had their nails done, just for the fun of it.

  For the girls helped by Nishiime House, Duluth was a different place, and what they did there gave them no pleasure. After Bea Abbiss opened her eyes, Jenny realized how blind she’d been. The city seemed terribly different to her from what it had been before. She felt wounding all around her. She felt deceit, menace. And she might have succumbed to a sense of hopelessness in what they were attempting if it hadn’t been for the indomitable spirit of Henry Meloux. She loved that old man.

  The visit to Nishiime House had unwound Louise. Though all the activity of that day had clearly been exhausting, she’d held herself together well. When they left the brownstone, she was silent. She labored into the truck with Daniel and Henry and sat staring ahead, a distant look in her eyes. Jenny leaned in the window.

  “You okay?”

  “She’s with the devil,” Louise said in a small voice. “My girl is with the devil.”

  Which, in its way, was promising, Jenny thought. Promising because it meant Louise still held to the belief that Mariah was alive. Which was a tough thing for Jenny to do. In her own mind’s eye, she couldn’t help seeing Mariah’s little body draped, like Carrie Verga’s had been, across the broken rocks of Windigo Island.

  “We’ll find her,” Jenny said. “We’ll find her and take her from the devil.” Then she repeated those wonderful words Henry had spoken. “One kind thing is the seed from which a great goodness grows. We have that seed now, Louise.”

  Louise gave a small nod and managed a smile.

  They drove back to Canal Park and sat at a table in a little café on Lake Avenue. None of them seemed very hungry, but they ordered something to drink. Jenny ordered coffee, regular. She knew it would keep her awake that night, but she wanted to be alert. She stirred in cream and added Splenda and asked, “So what now?”

  “We wait,” her father said. He drank coffee, too. Regular, black.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “Something to break. Someone to call us. The dawning of an idea that hasn’t occurred to us before.”

  “That seems so . . . impotent.”

  She knew immediately it wasn’t the best choice of word in the presence of men, and she could tell that it needled her father.

  “Do you have a better idea?” he asked, a little sliver of iron in his voice.

  “I could try talking to the women on the street,” she suggested. “I’d be less threatening than you or Daniel.”

  She could see that didn’t sit well with him. She also saw something in Daniel’s expression, but it didn’t seem so much criticism as concern, maybe for her safety. She was beginning to like him, quite a lot. He was beautifully Shinnob. His cheeks were high. His eyes were the color of pecans. His skin reminded her of doe hide, soft and tanned. He was quiet, but when he said something, it was well considered and worth listening to. She was glad he was a part of this investigation, though she had no intention of telling him that.

  “I think we risk word getting back to Windigo,” Cork said. “And that strikes me as a bad idea on lots of levels.”

  “I don’t know. Wouldn’t it, like, flush him out?” Jenny had never been a hunter, but she heard herself use that hunting phrase—“flush him out”—as if what they were looking for was a quail or something. It sounded stupid, even as she said it, but she was trying to relate to her father on his terms.

  It was Henry who answered. He said, “There are two impor­tant rules in hunting, Jennifer O’Connor. The first: you always stay downwind of your prey. The moment a hunted thing catches your scent, it will disappear. Or worse, if it is also an animal of prey, it may turn on you, and the hunter becomes the hunted.”

  He paused, and Jenny waited. But he simply continued to stare at her placidly, until finally she blurted, “And what’s the second rule, Henry?”

  “Patience,” he said with a wry smile. “That is the second rule. It is also a hunter’s best friend.”

  Louise came to her rescue. “The longer we sit, the more chance this Windigo might hurt Mariah. Or worse.”

  “Unless he feels threatened, there’s no reason for him to do anything to Mariah,” Jenny’s father said.

  He spoke as if it was an obvious truth, and Louise seemed to accept this perception. She closed her eyes, and J
enny could see her face melting into exhaustion.

  “Should we think about a place to stay tonight?” Jenny said. “Because it doesn’t appear that we’re going to finish this business any time soon.”

  Cork said, “We’re an hour and a half from Aurora. We could drive back and wait there.”

  “No.” Louise’s eyes popped open, and her voice was strong. “I don’t want to leave here without Mariah.”

  Cork showed no reaction. He simply said, “Fine. Then we should get rooms somewhere.”

  Daniel nodded toward the north. “There’s a pretty good hotel next street over, on Canal Park Drive. You’re helping my family. The rooms are on me,” he insisted.

  “All right,” Cork said without argument.

  A short time later they found themselves checked in to the Canal Park Lodge. Cork, Henry, and Daniel shared a suite. Louise and Jenny took a room with two queen beds. It was early evening by then. Jenny stood at the window, looking out at the lake, which was only a stone’s throw from the hotel. Behind her, Louise lay on her bed, her wooden peg removed and propped against the nearby wall, along with her crutches. She’d given herself an insulin shot, then exhaustion had overwhelmed her. She was already sound asleep. Jenny had called Rose and had talked with little Waaboo. He said he missed her. He wanted to know if she had found the girl who was lost and when would she be home. “Soon,” Jenny told him, which was purposely vague, and what did soon mean anyway to a boy who couldn’t tell time and kept no track of days?

  The color of Lake Superior was changeable, and not just with the weather. Henry Meloux believed, and Jenny did, too, that everything had spirit. Kitchigami wasn’t just a great hollowed bowl of rock filled with water. It was a living thing and had moods. She’d seen it silver and calm, black and angry, nearly turquoise and coquettish. That evening, under a sky laced with ragged clouds, it was like fabric washed so many times the blue had faded to almost white, and the lake seemed tired. In her hand, she held one of the copies they’d made of Mariah’s photograph in order to show it around. She looked down at that young face, a child’s face, and felt a deep stab of fear. How could a child stand against the kind of man Bea had described that afternoon? What chance did she have? Jenny thought of Mariah’s Facebook postings, of her telling anyone who cared to read about it that she was learning to play her new guitar on the lakeshore of the Bad Bluff Reservation, telling of the eagle that had flown overhead, and that was a good sign, wasn’t it? She knew so little of the world then, but, oh, Christ, she’d had an education since.

  You save her. That’s what Waaboo’s murdered birth mother had said in Jenny’s vision.

  And now she thought of Waaboo and how she’d pulled him out of the reach of people as bad as Windigo, pulled him from the very hands of death. But she hadn’t saved his mother, who wasn’t much older than Mariah. Was that what she was supposed to do now? Save this child, this little girl in the photograph she held. Even if it was not what was meant in her vision, it was what she wanted. She wanted it for Mariah, and for Louise, whose exhausting fear Jenny understood so well, and for herself, too, because she cared so deeply now.

  You save her.

  “I will try,” Jenny said, as if someone were listening.

  There was a knock at the door. Louise didn’t stir. Jenny opened up, and her father stood there. “We’ve ordered pizza,” he said. “It’ll be here in half an hour.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You two doing okay?”

  She glanced back at Louise. “This is taking such a toll.”

  “She’s strong,” Cork said. “She wasn’t, but she is now. She has to be.” He smiled, genuine and happy. “By the way, I got a call from Stephen and Annie. They took a walk today. Not a long walk but a real one. Stephen thinks he’ll be coming home within a week or so.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Jenny said, a bit too loud. On the bed behind her, Louise made a sound but didn’t wake. Jenny whispered, “Let me know when the pizza comes. I’ll see if Louise is up to eating.”

  Cork didn’t turn away immediately. He looked deep into her eyes. “I don’t think I’ve told you, but I should have. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re a part of this. At least for now.”

  He kissed her forehead, turned, and was gone.

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  The sky all day had been relatively clear, but after dark, thick clouds stumbled over the hills above Duluth and obscured the stars. It felt like rain, though nothing came for the longest time. The hour was late and no word yet from Bea Abbiss or Dan McGinty. Sleep was out of the question for Jenny. At home when she couldn’t sleep, she usually got up and wrote. And so now she sat at the desk in her hotel room with a small, opened notebook in front of her and a Bic ballpoint in her hand. She stared at her own reflection in the window glass of the room, at the face of a woman who thought of herself as a writer. She could see the lights along the boardwalk behind the hotel and, beyond them, the big dark of the water. She was thinking about this hunt they were on, and the terrible men who were a part of what they hunted. Her hand moved across the blank notebook page. She wrote: Downwind of the Devil. Which, according to Henry Meloux, if they wanted to hunt a windigo, was where they were supposed to stay. She wrote: Mariah. She wrote: Lost, Alone, Afraid. She wrote: Child. She wrote: You save her.

  She studied her face in the window. What she saw now was a comfortable woman who knew nothing of what Mariah or the other girls enslaved by Windigo and his brother might really feel. What was it like to be alone on the street at night? What was it really like to have no one to turn to except monsters?

  Her cell phone played the first few notes of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” She took it from her purse and read the display. An unfamiliar number. She answered with “This is Jenny.”

  “I want to talk to the Shinnob woman.” The voice was male, growly.

  “Louise? She’s sleeping at the moment.”

  “Wake her up. It’s about her kid.”

  “Mariah?”

  “Wake her up.”

  “Hold on.” Jenny went to the bed where the woman lay in a dead sleep. She shook Louise gently, then when she got no response, more vigorously. “Louise,” she said. “Louise, wake up. It’s about Mariah.”

  Louise’s eyes snapped open instantly, but they were unfocused. She said, “Huh? What?”

  “Someone’s on the phone for you. He says it’s about Mariah.”

  “Okay,” Louise said, drawing herself upright. “Okay.” She blinked a few times, trying to become alert, then reached for the cell phone in Jenny’s hand. She put it to her ear. “This is Louise Arceneaux.” She listened, squinted as if to focus more intently, nodded. “Is she all right? Just tell me that.” She listened. “Okay. I understand.” She kept the phone to her ear a few moments more, lowered it, and stared at Jenny.

  “What is it, Louise?”

  “I have to go out.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  She swung herself around on the mattress and settled her good leg on the floor. She reached for the peg propped against the wall next to the bed, along with her crutches.

  “Who was that, Louise? Where do you have to go?”

  “No time. I have to go now.”

  “Wherever it is you’re going, I’m going with you.”

  “No. He said alone.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said he can tell me about Mariah.”

  “Wait a minute, Louise. Just wait a minute.”

  The woman was fitting the saddle of the peg leg against her stump. Jenny put a restraining hand on her arm. Louise shook it off and gave her a killing look. “Leave me alone.”

  “Think, Louise. Whoever it is, he doesn’t have your best interest in mind. Or Mariah’s. It could very well be Windigo. Hell, it probably is.” r />
  “I don’t care who it is, I’m going to meet him.” She finished strapping on her carved appendage and reached for her crutches.

  “You’re going out like that?”

  Louise looked down at herself. She wore a big wrinkled T-shirt and gray sweatpants hand-cut into shorts. “Okay,” she said, finally pausing to breathe. “All right. Will you help me?”

  “Only if you’ll let me go with you.”

  “He said alone.”

  “I don’t think two women will scare Windigo off. And I definitely think it’s safer.”

  “All right. But let’s go. He said fifteen minutes.”

  Shortly after midnight, they walked out of the hotel and onto Lake Avenue. Jenny had tried to convince Louise to bring Cork, Daniel, and Henry into this, but the woman was iron in her resolve. The best Jenny could do was to take the extra set of keys she had for her father’s Explorer, and while Louise waited impatiently, Jenny rummaged through the toolbox in back and grabbed a box cutter and a metal pry bar just over a foot long. She slid the box cutter into the back pocket of her jeans. The pry bar she carried at the ready in her hand.

  The night seemed heavy with the anticipation of some dramatic change. A storm, maybe. Or something else. Jenny thought she could actually feel the colliding of two forces—the warm, moist air from the southwest and the cool wall that rose up from the deep, deep cold of the lake. She walked beside Louise toward Superior Street, less than a quarter of a mile from the hotel, their way lit by streetlamps. They crossed the overpass above I-35. Although most people didn’t know this, that interstate route was a part of the Pan-American Highway, part of a road that began at the tip of South America and ran north all the way to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. Jenny took a moment on the bridge to look south down the asphalt corridor, which was empty now. She couldn’t help thinking that it was a long journey, indeed, from that place near the bottom of the world to the place near the top, but it was not as long a journey as Carrie Verga had made.