Vermilion Drift

  As quickly as it had come, the moment passed, and Cork found himself once again a man older than his father had ever been, alone on the trail. He stood paralyzed, wracked by terrible uncertainty. How could the man in that moment of golden memory have been the same man who knew about the hidden entrance to Vermilion One, whose sidearm had been a murder weapon, and yet who’d claimed bafflement at the Vanishings? How could he be the same man whom Cork, in his nightmares, had pushed again and again to his death?

  Meloux wasn’t at his cabin, but Rainy Bisonette was. She came to the door holding a book in her hand. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. Meloux, she said, was with someone at the moment and couldn’t be disturbed. Cork looked toward the rock outcroppings near the shoreline of Iron Lake and saw smoke rising beyond them. Without another word, he started in the direction of the smoke.

  “Wait!” Rainy called. “Damn it, come back.”

  He found Hattie Stillday and Meloux sitting at the fire ring, burning sage and cedar. At his approach, they looked up, but neither of them showed any emotion.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Henry,” Rainy said at Cork’s back. “I couldn’t stop him.”

  “Let him come,” Meloux said. “What is it that cannot wait, Corcoran O’Connor?”

  “I have something I need to tell Hattie.”

  “Then tell her.”

  Cork walked forward and knelt before the old woman. “Hattie, they’ve been able to identify most of the remains found in the Vermilion Drift. They’re certain one of the victims is your daughter, Abbie.”

  Her look didn’t change, not in the least. No surprise, no shock, not even the specter of sadness. And Cork realized that she already knew. How? Had Meloux, in that inexplicable way of knowing, understood the truth and revealed it to her? Had the news somehow reached the rez telegraph and traveled, as it often did, with unbelievable speed? Or—and this came to Cork in a sudden rush that nearly knocked him over—had she known from the beginning? Had Meloux?

  “What’s going on, Hattie?” She didn’t answer and Cork addressed Meloux. “What the hell is going on, Henry?”

  “You are intruding here, Corcoran O’Connor.”

  “I need answers.”

  “No, you want answers,” Meloux said. “Need is a different animal.”

  “What are you hiding? What are you all hiding?”

  Their eyes lay on Cork like winter stones.

  “I’ll find the truth, Henry, wherever it’s hidden.”

  “The truth is not hidden, Corcoran O’Connor. It has never been hidden. You simply are not yet ready to see it.”

  “Jesus Christ. For once, can you cut all the mystic bullshit, Henry, and just tell me straight-out what’s going on?”

  “Leave,” Meloux said, firmly but without harshness. “Your anger disturbs this place.”

  “Anger, Henry? You haven’t seen my anger yet.” Cork turned and began to march away.

  “I have seen your anger,” Meloux said at his back. “More than forty years ago I saw it in another man who was not yet ready to understand the truth.”

  Because he didn’t care what Meloux had to say, Cork gave no sign that he’d heard. He walked away from the circle of stones, from the fire at its heart, from the cleansing smoke of the cedar and sage, and from the man who held to the truth like a miser to his money.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was nearing sunset when Cork pulled into Ashland, Wisconsin, an old port city on Chequamegon Bay, a deepwater inlet of Lake Superior.

  He parked in the lot of the Hotel Chequamegon and headed to Molly Coopers, the hotel’s restaurant and bar. On the deck, which overlooked Lake Superior and was nearly empty, he spotted a man wearing a dark blue ball cap and a T-shirt that stretched tightly over twenty extra pounds of belly fat.

  “Father Brede?”

  The man looked up and smiled. “It’s been just plain Dan Brede for more than four decades. You O’Connor?”

  “Yes.” Cork shook the man’s hand and sat down. “Father Green didn’t have any trouble locating you.”

  “I haven’t tried to hide. From what Ted Green told me, you have some questions about the Vanishings. Nobody’s asked me about the Vanishings in over forty years.”

  “But you haven’t forgotten.”

  “A thing like that never leaves you.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind talking to me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Did Father Green tell you that the women who vanished have been found? Or what remains of them.”

  “He told me.”

  “And did he tell you that there’s been another, recent murder, and that the woman’s body was hidden with the others?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t want to talk about that?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Have a beer,” Brede said, signaling the waitress, who was already coming their way. “And then you can tell me about who you are.”

  Cork ordered a Leinie’s and watched a big motor launch back away from its slip in the marina behind the hotel, swing around, and head north up the deep blue bay.

  When his beer was delivered, Cork said to Brede, “You knew my parents, Liam and Colleen O’Connor.”

  “I remember them. And I remember you, too.”

  For Cork, the memory of the priest was fuzzy. He recalled a young man with a great deal more hair, and it hadn’t been gray. Brede had been thin then, Cork remembered.

  “In the year I knew you, you were a lot of trouble,” the ex-priest said.

  “Trouble?”

  “You have any idea how much your mother prayed for you? And your father?”

  This caught Cork off guard. He didn’t remember being a problem to them at all. “Not really.”

  Brede smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me. Kids, teenagers especially, are clueless.”

  “You work with kids a lot?”

  “Over the years. And I have two of my own.”

  “You said you haven’t been Father Brede for over forty years. You stopped being a priest not long after the Vanishings then.”

  “A year after I was yanked from St. Agnes.”

  “Yanked?”

  “The Church reassigned me. To a little parish in southern Indiana where nobody cared or really even knew about the Vanishings. Two things about it bugged me. That I was found guilty without a trial and without any chance to defend myself. And that, finding me guilty, they simply reassigned me. I’m not sure which trespass of conscience I objected to more.”

  “Will you tell me about the Vanishings, what you remember?”

  “Why are you interested? I understand that you were a cop once, like your father, but you’re not anymore. Ted Green said that you’re a private investigator. Who are you working for?”

  “The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. As a consultant.”

  “They know you’re here?”

  “Is that important?”

  He laughed. “People who have something to hide often respond to a question with a question. What is it that you’re hiding, O’Connor?”

  “There are aspects of this case, old and new, that are very personal for me. Although I intend to share everything I find with the sheriff and her investigators, I need to put a few things in perspective for myself first. I think my father knew more about the Vanishings than he officially revealed.”

  “I know he did. For one thing, he knew about me.”

  “Why didn’t he say anything?”

  “Most people who know about his silence believe it was out of loyalty or respect for the Church.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  He shook his head. “He knew I was innocent.”

  “How?”

  “Your father was an astute judge of character.”

  “That’s it?”

  Brede laughed and took a swallow of beer. “You’re a cop all right. You require evidence.”

&nb
sp; “My father was a cop, too. A good cop. I’m sure he asked for evidence.”

  “He did. And I explained to him that I knew who’d planted the items that had incriminated me but that I couldn’t reveal the name.”

  Cork said, “Because it was something you’d learned in confession?”

  “The sanctity of which I firmly believed in then.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m a Methodist,” he said.

  Cork drank from his own glass and waited. The ex-priest eyed the still water of the bay for a minute, then told his story.

  At first the woman came to him in the normal way, confessing sins he’d heard before and for which he was fully prepared emotionally. An unclean thought. A coveting. A harmless lie to her husband. Hail Marys, he instructed her, and to pray for strength to resist these small temptations. He knew full well who she was. In a small parish, he knew the voices of all those who entered the confessional. As time went on, the sins she confessed began to change. They became darker, more disturbing. Sex with men other than her husband. Sex with women, too. Sometimes with both at once.

  “Did you believe her?” Cork asked.

  He didn’t know what to think. Surely there was no reason to lie about these things, especially for a woman in her particular position. He took her seriously and advised her to pray and to seek God’s guidance, and when that didn’t work, he urged her to seek professional help. She laughed at him, laughed seductively. And then she began the overtures. She often thought about them together, she said. She fantasized him forcing himself upon her in ways that disgusted him. He instructed her to banish such thoughts, but she swore she couldn’t. The images overwhelmed her and she masturbated thinking of them. This was beyond his ability to deal with, spiritually and emotionally.

  The priest looked into the empty distance above the lake and shook his head. “The oddest part of it was that I saw her every Sunday in church, and she spoke to me cordially during our social hour afterward, and it was as if she’d never said any of those foul things to me in the confessional.”

  Then she threatened him. She said if he didn’t have sex with her, she’d make him sorry. And very soon after that, the anonymous phone call had been made, and the incriminating items had been found. Although he couldn’t prove it was her, he knew that it was. Everything that had gone on, however, had been framed within the context of the confessional and her confessions, and he truly believed that he was bound to a sacred vow of silence. And the woman, if her name were made public, was so well thought of that he couldn’t be certain anyone would even believe him. So he’d said nothing. Yet Cork’s father had somehow divined his dilemma and had done his best to manipulate the public information so that the priest was never a part of the official investigation.

  “How did he know?” Cork asked.

  “Got me. He never said. But he saw to it that I was removed from the parish. Which,” Brede added philosophically, “was better for everyone in the long run.”

  Cork said, “You’ve carefully avoided telling me the name of the woman.”

  “I thought you might have guessed by now.”

  Cork said, “A woman in, as you said, a particular position. Someone well thought of. Someone relatively new to the parish, I’m guessing. Young, intelligent, devious and deviant but able to hide it well, so probably sociopathic or maybe even psychopathic. Someone who, apparently, caused no problem for the priest who replaced you, Father Alwayne, who everyone said looked like Cary Grant. Which means that either Cary Grant wasn’t her type or she ended her behavior toward priests or, most likely, she herself was removed from the scene. Given all that, Monique Cavanaugh would be my guess.”

  The former priest lifted his beer and said, “Cheers.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cork reached Aurora shortly before midnight. During the three-hour drive from Ashland, he’d examined everything he knew so far.

  More than forty years earlier, four Ojibwe women had been abducted and murdered and their bodies concealed in an abandoned drift of the Vermilion One Mine. Monique Cavanaugh had also been abducted and murdered, and her body had been hidden in the drift with the others. Some Ojibwe undoubtedly knew about the secret entrance to the drift. According to Henry Meloux, Cork’s father also knew.

  Two of the Ojibwe women were eager to leave the rez, and that may have contributed to their abduction. Two of the Ojibwe were quite young and vulnerable, and their naïveté might have allowed them to be easily duped. The white woman was an outlier. So far as Cork knew, she was neither eager to quit Tamarack County nor naïve. But she was abnormal, to say the least, in her behavior. And it was the kind of abnormal that could easily have put her at risk.

  Because he was a cop, Cork’s thinking had been shaped in a way that made him skeptical of coincidence and always on the lookout for connections, no matter how thin they might appear to be at first. As a result, he found himself considering another possibility where Monique Cavanaugh was concerned. She’d been a woman with bizarre sexual proclivities. Worse than bizarre. Her behavior with the priest had been not only heartless but criminal as well. Could her appetites have been even more unsavory? Given the timing, could she also have been somehow involved in the Vanishings?

  Cork let himself think along this line for a while and saw a problem. Although he couldn’t say about the first two victims, the second two—Naomi Stonedeer and Fawn Grand—had disappeared from the rez itself. If Monique Cavanaugh had been on the rez, trolling for vulnerable young women, she’d have been seen. A beautiful, rich white woman would have stood out like a polar bear. So how could she have snatched the girls without raising an alarm?

  The only answer that made sense to Cork was that if Monique Cavanaugh was, indeed, involved, she wasn’t working alone. Whoever took the girls was probably someone who would have gone unnoticed on the rez.

  Cork thought about all the people he knew on the Iron Lake Reservation, and that was almost everyone. He couldn’t think of many he’d call saints, but he also couldn’t think of anyone alive at the moment and old enough to have been involved in the Vanishings who struck him as deeply predatory. He didn’t know the history of the rez well enough to be able to finger a suspect from the past.

  But there was someone he did know who, in his consideration of all the possibilities, he couldn’t overlook. And that was his father.

  Liam O’Connor had been a regular visitor to the reservation, most often as a relative or friend rather than in his official capacity as sheriff. He could easily have come and gone without much notice at all. The priest had said that Cork’s father had somehow intuited his dilemma. Perhaps an intuitive understanding wasn’t the reason. Maybe the reason stemmed from his father’s deep involvement in the Vanishings. Involvement with Monique Cavanaugh herself, perhaps. It was, after all, probably his weapon that had killed the woman. Was it possible that, in the way she’d tried to seduce the priest, Monique Cavanaugh had succeeded in casting her seductive net over his father?

  Cork arrived home thinking all these things and hating himself for it.

  He took Trixie for a long overdue walk under a moon that was waning. And as they walked in the night shadows, he kept circling the facts in his head, jabbing at them, hoping he could get them to reveal the truth.

  His father knew about the second entrance to the Vermilion Drift. His father had the unique ability, because of his position as sheriff, to make certain that any investigation could be thwarted. Someone had torn important pages from his mother’s journal. Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday held some damnable secret. Someone was being protected, it was clear. Or the memory of someone.

  For most of Cork’s life, his father had existed as a memory, an accumulation of memories. But memories were unreliable. Cork understood well that, although they came from the fabric of fact, more often than not his own were a weave of the way things had been and the way he desired them to be. His father had died in the fall, not long after the Vanishings had ended. Cork was only thirtee
n years old. Was the man he had always believed his father to be simply the construct of a boy’s desire and a boy’s imagination?

  When he pulled the box from the attic, it was layered thinly with dust. He took it to the office downstairs, switched on the desk lamp, and sat down. He removed the lid. Inside, jumbled without any order, were dozens of family photographs his mother had kept with the idea that someday she would organize them into scrapbooks. She’d never quite gotten around to it, and, after her passing, they’d fallen to Cork. It had been a good long while since he’d handled the photos, always a nostalgic experience. This time he was concerned that the experience would be different.

  His father hadn’t been a handsome man, but in the photographs he was always smiling and there was something boyishly charming in his aspect. Cork picked up a photo of his father in his youth in Chicago, a black-and-white of a boy, maybe nine years old, squinting into the sun and grinning big, with a ball glove on his right hand. In the background was a vacant lot and in the distance, miragelike, the city skyline. Cork recalled his father talking about his boyhood, and although it had been in the days of the Depression, he’d spoken of that time with warmth. There was a photograph of his father in an army uniform. He’d served in the 82nd Airborne Division and had been wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He’d kept the Purple Heart in the top drawer of his dresser. There was a photo of him holding a baby who was Cork. Although memory could lie, photos seldom did, and it was abundantly clear how proud and happy a father he was. There were photos with his deputies and his friends on and off the rez. There were photos with Cork’s mother and with Cork—camping and fishing and picnicking. In them all, his father was a man clearly happy with his life and surrounded by people who looked on him with admiration and love.

  Could the man in those photographs have fooled his family and his friends all his life? Could there have been a dark depravity to him that he ably hid? Cork tried very hard to accept the possibility, but it simply didn’t fit. It felt so god-awful wrong, not only in his own memory but in all the evidence he had from the memories of others and from the photos in the box.