Windigo Island

  Much of the area they could see had once been, Jenny knew, filled with brothels and bars and flops, an area where all kinds of illicit trafficking occurred. It was still, according to Bea Abbiss, a place where men could buy almost anything they wanted from a woman. They continued walking until they reached the corner of Lake and Superior. A block north was the neon splash of the Fond-Du-Luth casino. Despite the cars along the curb, no one was on the street. Jenny wondered if maybe it was because they could feel the approaching storm.

  “Here?” Jenny said.

  “That’s what he told me. Corner of Lake and Superior.”

  Jenny’s phone sang again, Cyndi Lauper. Same number as before on the display.

  “Yeah?” she answered.

  “The girl’s mother, I said. Alone.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Jenny said. “You talk to us both. Or are you afraid of a couple of women?”

  “Ha. That’ll be the day. Move south on Superior. That’s to your left.” He broke the connection.

  “That way,” Jenny said, and Louise followed her.

  They walked away from the casino glare, into a rising wind, one that brought with it the first drops of rain. This was stupid, Jenny knew, walking into some fierce and terrible unknown. But wasn’t this exactly what Mariah and girls like her did? Walked into the dark time and time again, into horrific possibilities? The two women passed dark recesses where the doors were closed and locked against them, passed buildings deserted of life. Sometimes the pavement was lit by the splash from streetlights, and sometimes there was only the dark of that hour now long past midnight. The wind grew stronger. The rain began to fall more heavily, the drops big, hitting them like pellets.

  Where was he? Jenny wondered, thinking they needed to seek shelter. Where was this Windigo?

  And that’s when she heard it. Heard it call her name.

  They’d come to a corner where the wind funneled the rain between tall, dark buildings. Out of that storm came a high keening, a howl inside the wind. It was a voice filled with hunger, with hate, and it tore into her heart as if the sound itself had teeth. It was her name, only her name, but it was the most horrible sound she’d ever heard, and it shook her right down to her soul.

  “Jenny.” Louise looked at her with great owl eyes. “Did you hear that?”

  “You heard it, too?”

  “Hell, yes. Somebody screaming your name.” She stared into the wind, her face beaten by the rain. “Who was that? What was that?”

  “You bitches. You fucking bitches.”

  The man came at them out of an unlit recessed doorway, nearly faceless in the dark, big as a bear. He swung, and his fist caught Louise across the face. She went down hard against the sidewalk. He shifted toward Jenny, but the pry bar in her hand was already on its way. The steel connected somewhere near his right ear, and the big man fell back against the brick of the corner building. Jenny went at him again and again, raining blow after blow as he raised his arms in a feeble shielding. Then Louise was in the fray, using the end of her crutch to ram his gut. He retreated along the wall, and Jenny thought he would run, but he sprang at them instead, wrapped his enormous arms around Louise, and threw her against Jenny, knocking both women off balance.

  “Police!”

  The cry came from Superior Street, and Jenny caught sight of a running figure briefly illuminated beneath a streetlight. The big man saw it, too, turned and fled. A moment later the running figure passed, paused briefly, and said, “You guys okay?”

  It was Daniel English.

  “We’re fine,” Jenny said.

  “Stay here.”

  Daniel was off and running again in pursuit. Down Superior Street, around a blind corner.

  Despite the rain and the wind, the street seemed to drop into silence. Jenny stood breathing fast, the pry bar tight in her fist and the hammering of her own heart hard against her chest. Fire ran through her, the burn of adrenaline. Even though the man was gone and the danger past, she was still in the grip of a wild, mindless impulse to swing that pry bar again and again and again.

  Beside her, Louise said, “Hope we killed him.”

  “We did a lot of damage anyway.”

  The women stood together in the downpour, but neither of them seemed to notice the rain.

  “You okay?” Jenny asked.

  “My cheek’ll be sore for a while. Maybe a bruise. Won’t be the first time. But I swear it’s gonna be the last. You were pretty good with that pry bar.”

  “Terror,” Jenny said. “Total terror.”

  “Windigo?” Louise asked.

  “That would be my guess.”

  Louise stared down the empty street where the man had disappeared. “He wasn’t going to tell us about Mariah.”

  “Probably just wanted to scare you off.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen,” Louise said. Her hair hung in her face and she blinked against the cascade of rainwater off her brow. “Think he’ll hurt Mariah?”

  Jenny wanted to offer comfort, but they both knew the probable truth.

  “We gotta find her,” Louise said. “We gotta find her real soon.”

  They saw Daniel jogging toward them, returning from the chase, empty-handed.

  “He had an SUV parked next street up,” Daniel said. Like them, he was soaked to the bone, rain streaming down his face. “Too dark even to get a plate number.”

  “Where’d you come from?” Jenny asked.

  “Couldn’t sleep. I was out on the boardwalk, trying to figure a few things. I saw you two come out of the hotel. You’re hard to miss, Louise, with that leg and crutch. And you I’d know anywhere,” he said to Jenny.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but she liked the sound of it.

  “I thought maybe you were going to try to talk to some of the girls on the street,” Daniel went on. “Whatever it was you were thinking, seemed to me Superior Street at midnight wasn’t a great idea.”

  “So you followed us.”

  He looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Yeah.”

  “We didn’t see you at all.”

  “I’m a game warden. I get paid for watching people without them knowing.” His eyes went to the pry bar in Jenny’s hand and then to the crutch Louise still held like a battering ram. “Not sure you needed my help.”

  “Migwech, Daniel,” Louise said. She put her hand on his shoulder, drew herself up, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  They returned to the hotel. When they parted ways, Jenny made Daniel promise he would say nothing to Cork or Henry. Morning, she insisted, was soon enough for that. She wasn’t looking forward to trying to explain to her father what she and Louise had believed they might accomplish. In their room, they changed out of their wet things and into dry sleep clothes. Louise propped her peg leg and her crutches against the wall. She eased herself under the covers, said, “Good night, slugger,” gave a quiet laugh, and was very quickly lost in sleep.

  Jenny wasn’t quite ready to close her eyes. She lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, the vast cold of Kitchigami just outside the window. She pondered the whole experience on Superior Street, trying to make sense of it. They’d been set up, but how? Bea Abbiss? Bea had been the only person to whom Jenny had given her cell phone number. But she’d had such a good feel from Bea, such a sense of her dedication that Jenny was inclined to dismiss this possibility. Their assailant had come by this information in some other way. But how? And had scaring them off been the only motive? And what would have happened in the end if Daniel hadn’t been there?

  Daniel. She recalled what he’d said—You I’d know anywhere. It seemed a simple thing but was, she understood, so much more complicated. She closed her eyes and saw him again as he’d been on that dark corner, big and wet and chagrined to have been caught following them. Louise had given him a kiss in grati
tude. Jenny wondered if she should have done the same, and then was sorry she hadn’t. Except, would it have been another thing that seemed simple but was, in fact, much more complicated?

  Finally she thought about what she’d been avoiding: a windigo had called her name. She tried to decide if it was something that, along with everything else about that night, she would have to tell her father. So far, he’d taken such a rational approach in their hunt that she figured he’d easily dismiss it as a phenomenon of the storm and her own vivid imagination.

  But she knew what she’d heard. And she knew what it meant when the windigo called your name. And the only person she could think of who might understand was Henry Meloux.

  Chapter 26

  * * *

  “Henry? Could I talk to you? Alone?”

  The old man was eating oatmeal, one of the complimentary breakfast items the hotel offered. He also had a small glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. He finished chewing, swallowed, looked at Jenny, studied her face, her eyes, and said, “You have seen something.”

  “No, Henry. I heard something.”

  Cork and Daniel were at the buffet area, dishing up eggs for themselves. Louise was still upstairs in their room, getting ready to come down. She’d told Jenny she could make it on her own and to go ahead. Which was a good thing, because Jenny wanted very much to talk to Henry and, as she’d told him, alone.

  Outside, the morning was gorgeous, a sky full of sun. The storm of the night before had moved somewhere far to the east, over Wisconsin or Michigan by now. Beyond the hotel windows, the water of Kitchigami was a deep blue. Sunlight struck the surface in a broad silver band, and shattered in a splash like a million diamonds.

  In reply to Jenny’s urgent request, Meloux simply gave a nod and said, “When I have finished my breakfast, we will talk.” He dipped his spoon into his oatmeal and resumed eating as if nothing had passed between them.

  Cork and Daniel drifted over, plates of food in their hands. Daniel wore a blue knit shirt and khakis. He looked showered and refreshed. He sat at the table and glanced at her. His face showed no emotion, but as he began buttering his toast, he said, “I don’t know about you, but I always have trouble sleeping in a strange bed.”

  She still felt unsettled from the night before, and she realized she must have looked it.

  Cork set his plate on the table next to Meloux. “Where’s Louise?”

  “She’s coming down on her own,” Jenny said.

  Henry Meloux went right on eating as if he were alone at the table, as if he and his food were the only two things in his universe. Jenny got herself a bowl of sliced fruit and a carton of yogurt and joined them. Louise came in, wearing her peg leg, a crutch under her arm. Although she’d had not much more sleep than Jenny, she looked better rested, as if she possessed the energy to face whatever this day might hold.

  She came to the table and nodded to Jenny in greeting. “You tell them?”

  “Not yet,” Jenny said.

  Cork stopped eating. “Tell us what?”

  At that fortuitous moment, Meloux finished his meal, stood up, and said, “Jennifer O’Connor, I would like a word with you.”

  She was still eating her fruit and yogurt, but the old Mide left the table abruptly. She had no choice except to follow. At the door, she glanced back. The others were staring, watching them go.

  Meloux walked into the sunlit morning. The double path along the lakeshore—one of asphalt, the other a wooden boardwalk—was already filling with walkers and joggers and skateboarders and strolling tourists. Meloux ambled along the boardwalk, in no hurry. Although he had to be nearing a hundred years old—Jenny didn’t know anyone who knew his exact age; she wasn’t sure if Meloux himself even knew—he walked with an upright gait, an almost regal bearing. She’d always thought that in his youth he must have been drop-dead gorgeous. He finally stopped and stood for a long time considering Kitchigami, which was radiant in the sunlight and in the diamond reflections off the water.

  He finally said, “When I am in the presence of this great spirit, all that I worry about is like a pebble I can throw to that spirit and walk away.”

  “I can’t forget about Mariah, Henry.”

  The old man smiled at her, as if she were a child. “Not forget. Accept. We do what we can, and then we let go and accept that the hand of Kitchimanidoo, the Great Mystery, is at work in all things. In you, me, Mariah, this shining big water. And even in this Windigo, though we may not understand how this is so. Tell me what you heard, granddaughter.”

  She told him about the phone call, about going out with Louise, about the storm and how, inside the howl of the wind, she’d heard the voice of a windigo. She told about their battle with the big man who’d come at them from the dark.

  “You sent him running with his tail between his legs.”

  “With Daniel’s help,” she said.

  He laughed. “That is something, Jennifer O’Connor, I would give my left thumb to see.”

  “I’m afraid, Henry. I’m afraid I’m not strong enough for this.”

  “For what?” Meloux asked.

  “You save her,” Jenny replied.

  The old man studied her but made no reply.

  “That’s what you said to me, Henry. You knew about my vision, didn’t you?”

  “Your brother shared it with me.”

  “Is this what it means? Am I supposed to save Mariah? That’s how it feels to me.”

  “The vision is yours, Jennifer O’Connor. Only you know the true meaning.”

  “Should I be afraid?”

  “There is good reason to be careful. That does not mean you need to be afraid. The cry of a windigo is meant to strike fear, and then fear, too, becomes your enemy. But in calling your name, this windigo has revealed to you that you are the hunted. Surprise is no longer possible. This is, I think, a good thing, because you will be wary now. You will be vigilant. You will be ready.”

  Meloux closed his eyes, as if in sudden meditation. His ancient face was a stone fractured by a hundred lines, and there was something in it hard and, at the same time, yielding, an apparent contradiction that seemed to Jenny possible only with the old Mide.

  His eyes opened again, and she knew he’d come to some ­decision.

  “Your father, too, heard a windigo call his name.”

  “He did? When?”

  “Early in this hunt.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Just as you have said nothing to him.”

  “I will now.”

  “Yes,” the old man said.

  But when they returned, her father was no longer at the table with Louise and Daniel.

  “Your dad got a call on his cell phone and took it outside,” Daniel explained.

  “Who was it, do you know?”

  “The retired cop he talked to yesterday, I think. What was his name? McGinty?”

  “News, maybe?” Jenny said.

  “I guess we’ll find out.” Daniel nodded toward the door. “Here he comes.”

  She could tell already that the news from her father’s acquaintance wasn’t going to be good. Cork was frowning, deep, troubled lines across his forehead. When he saw them all looking, his face went unreadable.

  “McGinty says his guy in Duluth PD has nothing. The photos of Mariah didn’t ring any bells. As for Carrie Verga, that’s Bayfield’s jurisdiction. At the moment, of no interest here.”

  “Did you tell him about the man who calls himself Windigo?” Jenny asked.

  “Yes. Didn’t mean anything to him, but he said he’d check with his guy again. So, more waiting on that front.”

  “We should tell him,” Louise said.

  Cork eyed Louise, then his daughter, and waited.

  “Sit down, Dad.” When he had, Jenny related the events of the night befor
e, everything except the voice of a windigo calling her name. That was something she wasn’t ready to share.

  She was glad that, when she finished, her father made no effort to chew her out. He did, however, eye Daniel unhappily. “You didn’t say a word.”

  “I promised Jenny,” Daniel said. There was no note at all of apology in his voice. “It had to be Windigo.”

  “Probably,” Cork said. “But I’ve got bruises from Bad Bluff that’ll keep me concerned about what might have followed us from there. Whoever it is, we need to be even more careful, because it’s clear we’re being watched.”

  “You think the woman from Nishiime House gave us up?” Daniel asked.

  Jenny rose immediately to the defense of Bea Abbiss. “The only vibes I got from her were good ones.”

  “I got the same good feel from her,” Cork said. “We could be wrong, but I’m with you, Jenny. I’m guessing she had nothing to do with last night. If she tried to pass along your cell phone number, it could very well have ended up in anyone’s hands. When word goes out on the street, it’s like throwing crumbs to pigeons. They all feed. Could I see your phone?”

  She handed it to him. He checked recent phone calls, selected the number from which the call the night before had been made. He listened, broke the connection.

  “No answer. I’ll have McGinty check it out, but my guess is that it was a cheap throwaway. We’ll get nowhere tracing it.”

  “So what now?” Louise asked. She didn’t seem defeated in the least, and Jenny found herself taking courage from Mariah’s mother.

  “Let’s think about that life ring we found,” Cork said.

  Daniel said, “What about it?”

  “Once Louise told me her story of working the boats and about girls maybe going overboard, I got fixed on the idea that that life ring must’ve come from a freighter, which was probably a mistake. Because other vessels have life rings, right? So I think we should widen our search.”