Vermilion Drift

  Her eyes move past his father to the men at his back.

  “I won’t let them touch you, I promise. Let her go, return to your house, then leave this town forever. That’s the deal.”

  “I can leave?”

  “If you ever come back to Aurora, it will be your death, and that’s a promise, too.”

  She considers, considers a long time. And in that time, which seems now to stretch into forever, something in him snaps. He is released from the moment. He can feel himself floating, drifting away, numbed, mercifully removed from the reality of what is occurring. The incredible brightness of all the headlights. The knife blade glinting fire against the skin of his mother’s throat. His mother’s face not her face but a mask unreal because he can’t comprehend anymore what he sees there. It’s all a dream. But even in that dream he is aware, vaguely, that he’s wetting his pants.

  The woman finally speaks, and he hears it as if across a great distance. “All right. We have a deal.”

  The knife slides from his mother’s throat, and the woman steps away toward her car, still facing his father. So fast that it must be a part of the dream he’s sure he’s dreaming, his father’s hand clears the gun from his holster and he fires once. The woman drops immediately in a heap, and, in the brittle light, the dirt on the road turns black with her blood.

  In that same moment, he is in the dirt, too, staring up at sky whose stars he cannot see.

  His mother kneels at his side.

  “Cork?”

  He hears but can’t make himself reply, can’t make himself turn his eyes to look into her face.

  “Dead,” LeDuc says, from where the woman lies.

  “Henry, what’s wrong with him?” his mother cries.

  “Corcoran O’Connor?” The voice of Henry Meloux. It is a rope trying to pull him from the place where he can’t move.

  “Cork, are you all right? Why won’t he answer me, Henry?”

  “What do we do now?” Sam Winter Moon asks.

  “What you were going to do all along,” his father replies. His words are empty of feeling, his voice a ghost of a voice. “Put her where she’ll never be found.”

  “What about Cork, Henry?” his mother pleads.

  “I will talk with him,” Meloux replies. “I will guide him.”

  “Where?”

  “To a place where he won’t remember.”

  “You can do that, Henry?”

  “I can try.”

  “What about you, Liam?” Hattie says.

  He stands above his son, but he isn’t looking at his son. He’s looking at the gun that is still in his hand. “I guess I’ll have to live with this.”

  “What about Cork?” Hattie says. “He’s just a child, and children don’t keep secrets well.”

  “Henry, can you really make him forget?” his mother asks. She lowers herself and cups his face in her hands and speaks to him. It is like a mother in a dream speaking, a dream from which he would love not to wake. “Oh, Cork, can you ever forgive me? Can you understand?”

  He doesn’t. Not now. But his mind on some level is recording everything, though he’s too numb to process or to respond.

  “I don’t want him to remember this, Henry.” His father’s voice is no longer empty. What fills it now is something like loathing. “I don’t want him ever to know what I’ve done.”

  “Please make him all right, Henry,” his mother pleads, holding him tightly. “Oh, please, Henry.”

  Meloux replies, “I will do my best.”

  It is dark and hot, and he is naked. His small body drips sweat. The air is pungent with the scent of sage and cedar. He can hear Meloux’s voice chanting a prayer, a long invocation, which he doesn’t understand. The Mide’s voice rises and falls.

  There is something inside his chest. It feels like a fist pressing against his breastbone. His ears take in the prayer and the old Mide’s voice; his body absorbs the heat; his nose and mouth draw in the healing aromas. Ever so slowly, the fist opens. Ever so gradually, his eyes close against the dark. Ever so gently, he is drawn away from memory.

  “He killed her.”

  “Yes,” Meloux said.

  It wasn’t a hard thing to accept. Now.

  “He saved my mother, but it went against everything he believed,” Cork said.

  “It was a sacrifice he made for those he loved. But it was also a wound, and it hurt him deep. It came between him and everything he believed and everyone he cared about. You, your mother, your grandmother, Sam Winter Moon, The People. If he had not been killed, the wound he felt would have healed eventually. He died too soon. It was left open.”

  “Left open in us all, Henry.”

  “Do you feel wounded now, Corcoran O’Connor?”

  “No.”

  “Then it is finished.”

  The old man sounded exhausted. Cork helped him from the sweat lodge, and together they went to the lake and cooled and cleaned themselves there. Rainy had towels waiting, and they dried and dressed and walked slowly back to Meloux’s cabin, where Walleye had been patiently waiting. The old dog rose to his feet and greeted them with a lazy wag of his tail.

  “I need to rest,” Meloux said. His hands shook worse than Cork had seen before.

  They helped him to his bunk, where he lay down.

  “Migwech, Henry,” Cork said.

  “I have something for you, Corcoran O’Connor. Niece?”

  From the table, Rainy brought a small cedar box, opened it, and held it out to Meloux, who took from it an intricately beaded bracelet. He gave it to Cork, saying, “Your grandmother made this. She gave it to me when I thought I loved her.”

  Cork knew that long ago, when they were both very young, Meloux had courted Dilsey.

  “I give it to you now.”

  “Thank you, Henry. But why?”

  “To remind you. Like the beads of that bracelet, all things are connected. The past, the present, the future. One long, beautiful work from the hand of Kitchimanidoo. You, me, those who have gone before us, and those who come after, we are all connected in that creation. No one is ever truly lost to us.” The old man lifted an arm weakly and waved him away. “Now go. It is finished.” Meloux closed his eyes.

  “One more question, Henry.”

  The old man’s eyelids fluttered open. “With you, it is always one more question.”

  “The vision I had on Iron Lake? The two wolves fighting?”

  “What about it?”

  “You never told me which one wins. Love or fear?”

  “It is the one you feed, Corcoran O’Connor. Always the one you feed.” The old man closed his eyes again. In another moment, he was sleeping.

  Outside, Cork stood with Rainy in the late afternoon sun. The wind blew across the meadow grass, bringing the scent of wildflowers and evergreen.

  “This was hard on Uncle Henry,” she said.

  “You’ll take care of him?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. Smiled beautifully. “I say that, but somehow I always end up feeling it’s the other way around.” She gave him an unreadable look. “I don’t know what occurred in the sweat lodge, but you seem different. Better. Healed.”

  “The blessing of that old man in there.” He looked away where the meadow grass rolled gently under the hand of the wind, then back at Rainy. “If that’s one of the reasons you’re here with him, I hope he passes his special gift on to you.”

  “That’s one of the reasons.” Rainy looked down for a moment. “I’m sorry I was so hard on you at first.”

  “I won’t hold it against you.”

  Cork studied the bracelet Meloux had given him. All things connected. Of course.

  “Could I tell you something?” he said. “It’s something I would have told Jo if she were alive, something I need to share with someone.”

  “I’d be happy to listen.”

  “Ever since Jo died, I’ve been having nightmares about my father’s death. I haven’t understood why, but maybe I do now. A v
ery wise woman recently suggested that the nightmares might have something to do with some essential quality in my father that I’ve felt was missing in me. I believe that’s true. I believe that at some level I remembered what my father did in order to save my mother’s life and to protect his friends. The behavior of The People during the Vanishings went against everything that as a lawman he embraced. But in the end, he did what was necessary for the woman he loved and for the people he cared about; it was a sacrifice, one that wounded him deeply, but he did it. I think maybe …” Cork faltered.

  “You’ve been wondering if maybe you could have done something that would have saved her, some sacrifice you weren’t willing to make?”

  Cork looked into the warm brown of her eyes. “Yeah.”

  “You’ve been blaming yourself for your wife’s death.”

  “I think maybe I have.”

  “And do you think it’s time you didn’t?”

  “That might take some work.”

  “When you’re ready, Henry’s here. And so am I.”

  “Migwech, Rainy.”

  “Take care of yourself, Corcoran O’Connor.” She took his hand, leaned to him, and lightly kissed his cheek. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  FIFTY

  Hattie Stillday listened, and when he finished, she said, “I’d kill for a cigarette right now, Corkie.”

  “Sorry, Hattie,” Cork said. He leaned toward her across the table in the interview room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. “All these years, you knew what happened, you and the others.”

  Hattie smiled gently. “We knew more than that. We knew what would happen. Henry said that someday the spirits in that old mine would reach out and herd you toward the truth. We all hoped it would be a time when you might be able to understand.”

  “For my sake?”

  “Ours, too. Hell, wasn’t any of us looking forward to what would happen if everything came to light. Some pretty dark doings.”

  “But you had nothing to do with them, Hattie.”

  “Wasn’t by design. I was fully prepared to end that woman’s existence. Your father just got there ahead of me. Ahead of us all. We were all guilty of intent.”

  She reached out and took his hands in her own, which were old but strong yet.

  “Corkie, what are you going to do?”

  “I have to tell them, Hattie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what happened. Because it’s the truth.”

  She shook her head in mild disapproval. “You’re so like your father. Except that everything he knew he took with him to his grave.”

  “He didn’t die a happy man, Hattie.”

  “Maybe not. But he died a good man. The whites back then, they wouldn’t have understood. The whites now, I don’t know.” She paused, and her dark, careworn eyes seemed to pierce him. “Do you understand, Corkie?”

  He knew what she was asking. He thought about the men and women involved in bringing an end to the butchery of Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh. He’d known them his whole life, known them as good people. The Vanishings had driven them to actions that most good people would have seen as unthinkable; yet he believed this hadn’t changed who they were at heart. Max Cavanaugh probably had it right. Sometimes, for the greater good, you chose to do harm and hope that you could find your way to forgiveness. His mother and Sam Winter Moon and Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday and the others, they’d found that way, and for the rest of their lives had chosen to feed a different wolf. His father had died too soon, died without coming to terms with what he’d done, with the things he thought too dark for his young son to have to deal with.

  “Yeah, Hattie,” he finally replied. “I do.”

  “Are you going tell them about Ophelia?”

  This was a question Cork had considered long and hard, and there was no easy answer. There was the law, which he’d worked to enforce most of his life. And there was justice, which he believed in deeply. And there was what was right according to his heart. And these were not the same things. Any decision he made would not satisfy them all.

  “No,” he said.

  “You can live with that, but you can’t live with the truth of what your father did, is that it?”

  “I know you don’t understand, Hattie. But I think my father would.”

  She let go of his hands, sat back slowly, and Cork couldn’t read the look on her face. “Yesterday, I had a visitor. Isaiah Broom.”

  “Broom came here? What did he want?”

  “To talk to me about the Vanishings. And about his mother.”

  “He knows the truth?”

  “Part of it. The part that will help him understand who she was and that she loved him and would never have deserted him. That was important for him to know. And something else, Corkie.”

  “What?”

  “He told the sheriff he’s known about the crosscut in the mine tunnel for years, ever since he was a kid. He told them he’d passed that information to me a good long time ago. They think that’s how I knew where to put the woman’s body.”

  “Did he say how he knew?”

  “He told them about what happened to him down there with his uncle when he was a boy. A horrible thing to have to tell anyone, any time. He told them his uncle had showed him the crosscut tunnel, which wasn’t yet full of bodies but would contain his if he ever told anyone what Mr. Windigo had done to him.”

  Cork said, “Did they believe him?”

  “Apparently. Corkie, it explains a lot that you wouldn’t have to.”

  Cork thought about Broom, and figured Isaiah, too, had decided to start feeding a different wolf.

  “Hattie, what did you do with my father’s gun?”

  “Like I said, I threw it in the lake.”

  “And you honestly don’t remember where?”

  “Do you really want to go looking for it, Corkie?”

  He didn’t. Whatever part the firearm was meant to play in his life, he hoped it was finished.

  “Look, I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen to you,” he said. “But considering Max Cavanaugh’s confession and his sister’s eccentricities, I’m guessing they’ll go pretty easy.”

  “As long as no one touches Ophelia, I can handle whatever they decide about me.”

  “Do one thing for me, Hattie, okay?”

  “Anything.”

  “Get her out of there.”

  “The Northern Lights Center?”

  “The old Parrant estate, yeah. It’s a sick place.”

  She reached out and took his hands again and gave them an affectionate squeeze. “I don’t pretend to understand you, Corkie, but so long as you keep her out of this, I’ll do whatever you want.”

  * * *

  Marsha Dross was waiting for him in her office. “You look rested,” she said.

  “You don’t look so bad yourself. I heard Broom talked to you, told you what happened to him down there in the Vermilion Drift when he was a kid.”

  “Close the door,” she said. “Sit down.”

  Outside a horn blared on the street and someone shouted. Dross got up and closed her window.

  “A hard thing for him to tell, I imagine,” Cork said.

  “But it explained how Ms. Stillday knew where to dump Lauren Cavanaugh’s body, which was something she was dead set against telling us herself.” She sat down again and leaned back, relaxed. “Once I heard Broom’s story, I understood. So long as he wanted it kept secret—and who could blame him for not wanting a thing like that known publicly—Hattie Stillday wasn’t going to say anything. I can appreciate that.”

  Cork said, “I have a story you need to hear.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  He told what had come to him during the sweat. But with two exceptions. He left out Henry Meloux’s hand in the fate of Indigo Broom, and he didn’t mention Hattie Stillday at all. He saw no purpose in dragging his old friends into this business. When he was finished, Dross was quiet. She si
mply stared at him.

  “You have any proof of this, Cork?”

  “The bodies in that mine tunnel, aren’t they proof enough?”

  “Christ, if I told this story to the media, do you have any idea how crazy they would make it sound?”

  “A guaranteed made-for-television movie,” Cork said with a smile.

  Dross got up from her desk and paced the room a few moments, finally ended up at the window she’d closed, and stood staring out. “A story remembered under the influence of a—forgive me, Cork—witch doctor. A story for which there is no proof.”

  “The bodies,” Cork said.

  “A bizarre mystery more than forty years old. Everyone associated with it dead. The media will keep poking, but I don’t see any purpose in feeding their curiosity.” She turned back to him. “I’m inclined to keep this to myself.”

  “I was witness to a homicide.”

  “A justifiable homicide,” she said. “If what you’ve told me is the truth.”

  “There’s also the murder of Indigo Broom,” Cork said.

  “Did you actually see what those men did to him?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t really say, can you?”

  “I can’t, no.”

  “We don’t have a body. No witnesses. All the principals are dead.” Dross came and stood over him. “We have Max Cavanaugh’s confession, so we know who killed his sister. Hattie Stillday’s part in it she’ll have to answer for, but I don’t think any judge or jury will go hard on her. As for the bodies placed there more than forty years ago, those are cold crimes. This department doesn’t have the time or the resources to pursue that investigation. The media already think we’re a hayseed operation. I can live with that. What I can’t live with is the uproar that would be caused by your story, a story conjured up during some hallucinogenic Ojibwe ritual, being made public.”

  “Wait a minute, Marsha—”

  “I’m not finished.” She leaned down to him, very near and in a way not at all friendly. “The Great North Mining Company has deeper pockets than this county. Hell, probably deeper than this whole state. What if they chose to sue you or me or Tamarack County for libeling the Cavanaugh name with accusations of serial killings and cannibalism?”