Blood Hollow

  “What’s going on, Randy?”

  Gooding kept his eyes on Annie until she merged with all that was indistinct in the distance.

  “Randy?”

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have spoken to her that way. It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  “Look, it wasn’t Annie I was seeing. It was Nina.” He rubbed his temple with his fingertips and seemed genuinely pained. “You got a minute?”

  “I’ve got all the time it takes for a good explanation.”

  It was dusk and everything was bathed in hues of faded blue. Gooding shifted his feet, and the old boards of the dock squeaked under his weight. He pulled on the short red hairs of his beard and stared east where the evening star was already visible.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I grew up in a children’s home,” he said. “Most of us there were orphans.”

  “I didn’t know.” Cork’s anger softened and he said, “Must’ve been tough.”

  “It was okay, really. We felt like family, a lot of us. There was one girl in particular who was the nearest thing to a sister I ever had. Nina. Nina van Zoot. From Holland, Michigan. After we left, Nina and I kept in touch. She went to Chicago. I went briefly into the seminary, then finished school in Ann Arbor and decided to join the Bureau. I requested assignment to the field office in Chicago, mostly because Nina was there. They didn’t have an opening, so I ended up at the Milwaukee field office. That was fine. Couple of hours from Nina, I figured.

  “In her letters, she’d told me she was working for the church, but when I visited her, I found out that was a lie. She’d been telling me what I wanted to hear. The truth was that she was in the life. A prostitute. Broke my heart, Cork. I tried to help. Nina’s smart. She could have done anything she set her mind to. But she wanted none of it. Had herself a world-class pimp. Guy who told her she was gold, and she fell for it. My god, what a fall.”

  He paused a moment, looked down at the dock, shook his head.

  “When I saw Annie, all made up like that, for a moment all I saw was Nina.”

  “I guess I can understand.”

  Gooding’s face was soft blue, troubled in the evening light. “I left the seminary, stopped preparing for the priesthood because I didn’t have it in me to forgive. I still haven’t forgiven Nina. And that pimp of hers, I hope he rots in hell.”

  Cork waited a moment, then said, “I think you’re right. You probably would have made a terrible priest. But you’re a pretty good cop.”

  Gooding opened his hands. “What do I say to Annie now?”

  “Why don’t you let us do a little damage control first?”

  Gooding nodded, still looking bereaved. “God, I feel horrible.”

  “She’s young. She’ll recover.”

  Gooding took a step as if to walk away, but paused and, his voiced weighted heavily, said, “I wasn’t completely off base, Cork. You know it as well as I do. Even a good kid like Annie, looking like that, she’ll give men the wrong idea.”

  “We’ll talk to her, Randy.”

  “All right.” He walked slowly back to his Tracker.

  Cork closed down Sam’s Place immediately, and he and Jenny headed home. Jo met them at the door.

  “Annie here?” Cork asked.

  “She came in a few minutes ago, crying, ran upstairs. She’s locked herself in her bedroom. What happened?”

  “Randy Gooding said something.”

  “Randy? What could he possibly have said?”

  “She got her ears pierced today.”

  “I knew she was planning on it.”

  Jenny said, “Did you get a good look at her face, Mom?”

  “No. Why?”

  “She tried makeup. She looks like an extra from Night of the Living Dead. And she was dressed straight out of Slutsville.”

  “Randy took it on himself to tell her she was asking for trouble,” Cork said. “He wasn’t very diplomatic about it. Did you try to talk to her?”

  “I knocked. She told me to go away.”

  “What if I tried?” Cork said.

  “Give her a little time to herself.”

  There was a knock. Cork turned, saw Gooding on the front porch beyond the screen door, and he stepped outside. Randy stood there looking like a big, awkward kid.

  “Cork, I was wondering if you’d give something to Annie for me.”

  Randy handed him a large sheet torn from a sketch pad. In addition to the standard training offered all recruits, the FBI had tapped a special talent in Gooding and trained him as a sketch artist. These days he drew for his own pleasure. Although he called himself a hack, he was quite good and was sometimes convinced to give his drawings as gifts. What he handed Cork was a lovely charcoal sketch of Annie, sans makeup and earrings.

  “It’s a kind of apology,” he explained.

  “Is this recent?”

  “A while ago. I’ve done sketches of most of the kids in the youth group, just for my own enjoyment, but I’ve never given any of them away. I screwed up big time, and I wanted to do something special for Annie.”

  “I’ll see that she gets it.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “I’m guessing her mascara’s run all the way down to her chin.”

  “Man, I’m so sorry. But look, there’s something that might help cheer her up. I have it on good authority that Damon Fielding has been trying to work up the nerve to ask her out.”

  “Damon Fielding?”

  “Brad and Cindy Fielding’s son.”

  “I know who he is. Set a conference record for stolen bases last year. Fast kid. How do you know he’s interested in Annie?”

  “He’s treasurer of the youth group, and he’s horrible at keeping secrets.”

  “Nice kid,” Cork said.

  “They don’t make ’em any nicer.”

  “I’ll let her know. But you still owe her a personal apology.”

  “She’ll have it.”

  Gooding walked down the steps into the deepening gloom as night overtook Aurora.

  Cork went back to the living room, where Jo and Jenny were waiting. “I’m going up to talk to Annie. Okay?”

  “I think it would be all right now,” Jo said.

  Upstairs, he tapped at her door. At first there was no answer. Then Annie called out in a small voice, “Yes?”

  “It’s Dad. May I come in?”

  “Just a minute.”

  He waited. In her room, there was a tiny click and a little welcome mat of light slipped under her door. A moment later, she opened up.

  He hadn’t exaggerated to Gooding. Black mascara ran down each of Annie’s cheek in a wide, crooked line. The whites of her beautiful brown eyes were red from crying. Her hair was a mess. She left the doorway, went to her bed, and sat down, all slumped over. Cork sat beside her and put Gooding’s sketch facedown on the floor.

  “I just talked with Randy Gooding.”

  “Here?” She seemed alarmed.

  “He came by to apologize.”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”

  Cork put his arm around her. “He won’t.”

  “Oh, Daddy.” She fell against him and buried her face in his chest. “I messed up.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She pulled away and reached toward her ears. “I’m going to take these awful things out. I’m never going to wear them again.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Cork gently gripped her wrists, restraining her. “Your mother has pierced ears. Do you think that’s so awful?”

  “No.” She lowered her hands and Cork let go.

  “Before you ran into Randy, were you happy with what you’d done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then stick with it.”

  Annie thought it over. “You think I should?”

  “Absolutely.” He reached out and blurred one of the black mascara lines with his finger. “You might want to talk to Jenny. Get
some pointers on makeup.”

  She shook her head adamantly. “I’m not wearing makeup anymore.”

  “Not a bad choice,” Cork said. “You’re beautiful without it.”

  “Really?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  Annie kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks.”

  “Randy left this for you.”

  He gave her the drawing, and her face broke into a wonderful smile.

  “One more thing,” Cork said. “I have it on good authority that Damon Fielding wants to ask you out.”

  “Damon?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  Her eyes danced. “Radical.”

  Cork left her sitting on her bed, with Gooding’s offering in her hands and the prospect of Damon Fielding in her thinking.

  After Gooding’s reaction to Annie, Cork thought a lot about Charlotte Kane, considered if maybe something had gone terribly wrong with a quiet young woman’s attempt to be desirable, and, as Gooding had feared, she’d become involved in something way over her head and dangerous, perhaps with the married man Solemn believed she was seeing. He wanted to talk more with Solemn about that possibility, but the young man had vanished completely. From discussions with Dorothy Winter Moon, Cork knew that she’d given her son nothing. She claimed not to have seen Solemn at all since his disappearance. If she was telling the truth, Solemn was flat broke. His truck was still in the impound lot, so he had no transportation. He had no clothes but those he’d been wearing when Cork had last seen him. So what had become of Solemn Winter Moon?

  Periodically, Cork visited the old cabin on Widow’s Creek, looking for an indication that Solemn might have returned to the place where he’d spent good times with Sam. Early one sunny Sunday morning in the middle of May, he drove to the rez, through Alouette, and up north toward Widow’s Creek. The wild grass was high on the narrow track that led between the pines to Sam’s old cabin. Cork parked and went inside. The place smelled musty and abandoned. He saw that a spider had spun a web in one of the kerosene lanterns and had already trapped and bound in silk a bounty of tiny prey. As he stood in the middle of the empty cabin, he heard a scurrying under the bunk. He understood. The cabin was gradually being taken over. In the end, the woods would reclaim the land and the materials Sam had borrowed to build his little home.

  He walked to the creek. The snowmelt was over, and the water was clear now, fed by a spring that bubbled from a rocky hillside about a mile northeast. Sam had erected his cabin beside a little waterfall below which the creek widened into a pool a dozen feet across. The water Sam drew from the pool he used for everything—drinking, cooking, bathing. All winter long, even when the deep cold put a hard shell of ice over the creek, Sam kept a hole cleared in the pool. The bucket with which he carried water was still there, sitting upright on a flat rock on the bank. Cork glanced inside. A black snake lay coiled at the bottom. It lifted its head toward Cork. The fork of its tongue tasted the air. It was a harmless racer, not dangerous at all. Still, its presence in the bucket startled Cork and left him feeling uneasy.

  He looked around once more and was about to return to his Bronco when something caught his eye and his ear. A couple of hundred yards south along the creek, a dozen crows circled, dropped, and rose. They cawed furiously in the way of those scavengers when they were squabbling over carrion. Their cries grated against the stillness of the woods and added to Cork’s sense of disquiet. He began to make his way through the bog myrtle that grew thick along the banks of Widow’s Creek. It didn’t take him long to realize he was following a faint trail that had recently been broken through the thorny shrub growth.

  Everything about the scene felt a degree off, as if the whole compass of that place had been shifted. His uneasiness deepened into a true sense of menace, and he found himself wishing he’d brought his rifle.

  The crackle of the brush as he pushed through alerted the crows. At his approach, they scattered. They’d been feeding on something at the center of a patch of ostrich ferns grown a yard high. Cork could see an outline of crushed greenery, but the growth was too thick and too high for him to be able to make out immediately what was there. The size, however, was about right for a human body. He caught a glimpse of soft tan like a leather coat, and almost immediately was assaulted by the smell of rotting flesh. He steeled himself and went forward.

  It was death, all right, but not exactly as he’d anticipated. The carcass of a yearling whitetail lay on a bed of bloodied ferns. Its throat had been shredded, its stomach cavity ripped open, emptied. Cork suspected it had been brought down by wolves who’d feasted and left the rest for scavengers. He stood awhile looking down at the raw flesh that was so thick with flies it appeared to be covered by rippling black skin. What was it he’d expected? What was it he’d feared? That it would be Solemn he’d find there? And why was that? Because death would have explained easily how Solemn had been able to drop so completely off the face of the earth. And because a shadow had come over all of Cork’s thinking now, a darkness that shaded all his expectations with foreboding.

  The crows cried at him bitterly from the branches in the pines where they’d fled. Cork left the place and walked back to his Bronco, unable to shake the sense that in these woods there was a great deal that wasn’t right.

  14

  CORK’S SENSE OF UNEASINESS PERSISTED. Because it had arisen in the woods, and because it seemed to be something that came out of a place in his own sensibility that defied logic, he finally decided to seek counsel with a man who understood such things.

  Henry Meloux was one of the Midewiwin, a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. He was an old man, very old, who lived alone in a cabin on a section of the rez far north on Iron Lake. Late one sunny afternoon when he’d enlisted the help of both Annie and Jenny to run Sam’s Place, Cork drove north out of Aurora, along back highways, until he reached a place at the edge of a graveled county road where a double-trunk birch marked the entrance to a footpath through the pines. Cork parked his Bronco, got out, and began to walk the trail. After a while, he knew he’d passed from land under control of the U.S. Forest Service onto that which belonged to the Iron Lake Ojibwe. Three-quarters of a mile in, he danced across a string of rocks that spanned a stream called Wine Creek. The name came from the color of the water, a reddish hue due to the iron-rich area through which it flowed and the seepage from bogs along its banks. A few minutes later, he broke from the trees into a clearing that extended all the way to a narrow peninsula called Crow Point that jutted into Iron Lake. Cork could see Meloux’s cabin on the point. The structure was as old as Meloux and just as sturdy. It was built of cedar logs, with a board roof covered with birch bark. The bark worked as well as shakes or shingles and was easier to replace. Smoke came from a stovepipe that thrust up from the roof, and even at a distance, Cork could smell the spices of a stew.

  The cabin door stood wide open.

  “Henry?”

  He received no answer and he stepped inside. Meloux’s cabin was a reflection of time itself. The walls were adorned with many items that harkened to an earlier day. A bow strung with the sinew of a snapping turtle, a deer-prong pipe, a small toboggan. There was also a cheesecake calendar, circa 1948, from a Skelly gas station. Nailed to a post near the potbellied stove was a color Polaroid of Henry Meloux standing with the activist Winona LaDuk. And lying on Meloux’s bunk was the most recent Lands’ End catalogue

  The stew simmered in a cast-iron pot on the stove. Fish, wild rice, onions, and mushrooms, spiced with sage and pepper. The table was set with two bowls and two spoons. Cork wasn’t surprised that Meloux had set a place for him. The old man had an uncanny knack for knowing when he was going to receive a visitor.

  The barking of a dog came from somewhere near the end of the point. Walleye, Henry Meloux’s old yellow hound. The barking became louder, and Cork figured Meloux was on his way up from the lake. He stepped outside. The low afternoon sun shone directly in his eyes, and for a moment, he was blinded. H
e put up his hand to block the light, and he saw two silhouetted figures walking together with the dog trotting alongside them. Meloux was obvious, small and just a little stooped, but the other wasn’t clear to Cork. As they came nearer, Cork saw exactly who it was that accompanied the old man, and he let his surprise show.

  Solemn Winter Moon smiled when he saw Cork in the doorway. He nodded and said, “It must be time.”

  Meloux put another bowl and spoon on the table and dished up stew. The men ate without speaking, Meloux filling the quiet of the one room with the sound of his slurping as he sucked from his spoon. He’d tossed Walleye a big ham bone, and the dog gnawed contentedly in the corner. When they’d eaten, Cork took a pack of Lucky Strikes he’d bought at the Food ’N Fuel on his way out of Aurora and held the cigarettes out to Meloux. The old Mide accepted the offering. Without a word, he stood up, and Cork and Solemn followed. Meloux walked outside, led them down a path toward the lake, between two rock outcroppings to a place where sooted stones ringed a circle of ash. The lake spread before them, water the color of apricots, reflecting a sky full of the afterglow of sunset. Meloux sat on a maple stump, the other two on the ground. Walleye, who’d trotted along, circled tightly a couple of times and, with a tired groan, eased himself onto the dirt near his master. From the pack Cork had given him, Meloux took one cigarette. Carefully, he tore open the paper and let the tobacco fall loose into his palm. He pinched the tobacco and sprinkled a bit to the west, to the north, to the east, and to the south. He took another pinch and offered it to the sky, and then a final sprinkling offered to the earth. When this was done, he took another cigarette for himself, then passed the pack to the others. Meloux wedged a wrinkled hand into the pocket of his bib overalls and drew out a small box of wooden matches. One after another, the men lit up and smoked for a while, letting the silence that had begun with the meal linger. In the apricot light, Cork studied Solemn’s face.

  There was something very different about the young man. Since Sam’s passing, the muscles around Solemn’s eyes were always tense, wary, waiting, expecting the approach of something bad. That tension was gone now. Cork had the feeling he was finally seeing Solemn’s eyes clearly. And they were beautiful eyes, dark brown and sparkling.