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To all those who work for and with the Ain Dah Yung Center and the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center. Every day, these great hearts save Native lives.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Dave Rydeen, formerly of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who shook his head at my stupidity when I told him the story I wanted to write, but nonetheless helped me immensely in my understanding of dams.
Thanks, as always, to those early readers whose comments and insights improved the work tremendously—Danielle Egan-Miller, Joanna MacKenzie, Alec MacDonald, Abby Saul, and Libby Hellmann. Chi migwech to Deb Foster, who has been so generous in sharing her thoughts on the Native elements of this story.
A shout-out to those wonderful coffee shops who tolerated my long presences while this novel was being written—the Como Park Grill, the Underground Music Cafe, and Caribou Coffee.
And finally, acknowledgment of a great debt of gratitude to my longtime editor, Sarah Branham, whose insights have been indispensable in crafting so many of my stories. I’ll miss you, Sarah, and I wish you nothing but good fortune on the new path you’re traveling.
CHAPTER 1
In the gray of early afternoon, the canoes drew up to the shoreline of the island. The paddles were stowed. The woman in the bow of the first canoe and the kid in the bow of the second stepped onto the rocks. They held the canoes steady while the men in the stern of each disembarked and joined them. The kid grabbed a rifle from the center of the canoe he’d come in, then lifted a pack. He studied the island and the great stand of red pines that grew there.
“Where to?” he said.
“First, we hide the canoes,” the man who was the oldest and tallest said.
They carried the crafts from the lake a dozen yards into the trees. The tall man in the lead and the woman with him set their canoe behind a fallen pine, and the kid and the other man did the same.
“Want to cover them with boughs or something?” the kid asked.
“Break off boughs and someone will know we were here,” the tall man said. “This’ll do.”
They returned to the shore where they’d left their gear. The kid grabbed his rifle and reached for a pack.
The woman said, “I’ll carry that. You see to your rifle.”
She shouldered the pack, and the tall man started toward the interior of the island. The others followed, wordless and in single file.
On some maps, the island was called by its Ojibwe name: Miskominag. On others, it was called Raspberry. Words in different languages that meant the same thing. They walked inland through the pines, passed bushes that in summer would have been full of berries, but it was the first day of November, and all the plants except the evergreens were bare. They came to a great upthrust of rock, a kind of wall across the island, and the tall man began to climb. The others spread out and found their own ways up. The top of the outcropping stood above the crowns of the trees. From there, they could see the whole of the lake, a two-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped body of water three-quarters of a mile across at its widest point. The water of the lake was the same dismal color of both the sky above them and the rock outcropping on which they stood. The gray of despair.
“Where will he come from?” the kid asked, his eyes taking in all that water and shoreline.
“The south,” the tall man said. “Over there.” He pointed toward a spot across the lake.
The kid looked and said, “All I see is trees.”
“Try these.” The tall man unshouldered the pack he’d carried, set it down, and drew out a pair of binoculars. He handed them to the kid, who spent a minute adjusting the lenses.
“Got it. A portage,” the kid said. He returned the binoculars to the man. “What now?”
“We wait.”
The others unburdened themselves of their packs. The shorter of the two men—he had a nose that was like a blob of clay plopped in the middle of his face—took a satellite phone from his pack and walked away from the others.
The woman said to the kid, “Hungry?”
“Famished.”
She pulled deer jerky and an orange from her pack and offered them.
“Wouldn’t mind some hot soup,” the kid said.
“No fires,” the tall man told him.
“He won’t be here for a long time,” the kid said.
“The smoke would be visible for miles. And the smell would carry, too,” the tall man said.
The kid laughed. “Think there’s anybody besides us way the hell out here this time of year?”
“Out here, you never know. Enjoy your jerky and orange.”
The tall man walked away, studying the whole of the lake below. The wall fell off in a vertical cliff face, a tall palisade several hundred yards long. A few aspen had taken root and clung miraculously to the hard, bare rock, but they didn’t obscure the view. There was nowhere on the lake that wasn’t visible from that vantage. The woman followed him.
“He’s too young,” she said with a note of gall. “I told you.”
“He’s strong in the right ways. And a far better shot than me or you, if it comes to that.”
He looked back at the kid, who’d already eaten his jerky and was peeling the orange while intently studying the place along the shoreline where the trees opened onto the portage. The woman was right. He was young. Seventeen. He’d never killed a man, but that’s what he was there for. To do this thing, if necessary.
“When the time comes,” the tall man said, “if he has to do it, he’ll be fine.” He turned from the woman and rejoined the others.
The man with the formless nose said, “Sat phone’s a problem. These clouds.”
“Did you get through?”
“Only enough to say we made it. Then I lost the signal.”
“That’ll do.”
The kid sat on a rock and cradled his rifle in his lap. He leaned forward and looked at the lake, the trees, the shoreline, the place where the man would come.
“Does he have a name?” the kid asked.
“What difference does it make?” the woman said.
“I don’t know. Just wondered.”
“Everyone has a name,” the woman said.
“So what’s his?”
“Probably better you don’t know. That way, he’s just a target.”
The tall man said, “His name’s O’Connor. Cork O’Connor.”
The kid lifted his rifle, sighted at the shoreline.
Behind him, the woman whispered, “Bang.”
CHAPTER 2
April is the cruelest month. Some poet said that. Robert Frost was the only poet whose work Cork was familiar with, and it wasn’t Frost. Whoever it was, he was dead wrong. Corcoran O’Connor knew that November was the bastard of all months. Anyone who thought different had never been in Minnesota’s North Country in November.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the sun. Every day was like the one before it, the sky a hopeless gray, the hardwoods stripped of color, the water of Iron Lake flat and dull as an old tin roof. It felt as if all life had deserted Tamarack County, even the wind, and every morning dawned with the same dismal promise.
Some of this feeling, he knew, was because of his own unhappy history with that month.
His father, who’d been sheriff of Tamarack County four decades earlier, had been mortally wounded in the last week of October, had lingered for two days, and had finally succumbed in the first hour of the first day of a long-ago November. His wife had gone missing and, for all intents and purposes, was dead to him in a November not so long ago. His good and true friend George LeDuc had been murdered in that same November. For Cork, it wasn’t just a dreary month. It was a deadly one. Every year when it came around, it brought with it ghosts and regret.
“April, my ass,” he mumbled. Then he heard the car approaching.
He looked down from atop the ladder where he perched with a wire brush in his hand. He’d been cleaning dirt from an area on the roof of an old Quonset hut, which had been converted into a burger joint called Sam’s Place. He’d owned it for more than fifteen years. The Quonset hut stood on the shore of Iron Lake, at the edge of the small town of Aurora, in the deep Northwoods, in that part of Minnesota called the Arrowhead. There was a leak in the roof of the hut, and Cork wanted to get it patched before the snow came. He’d already cut a square of steel sheeting. On top of his toolbox on the ground at the base of the ladder lay a roll of double-sided butyl tape, his cordless Black & Decker drill, and a small box of metal screws.
He watched the car, a black Lexus, pull into the gravel lot and park. His visitors got out and walked to the ladder. They were a young couple, man and woman. He realized that he knew them. Or knew who they were anyway, though they’d never actually met.
“We’re looking for Cork O’Connor,” the woman called up to him.
Even if he hadn’t known them, he would have guessed that they were family, guessed brother and sister, probably even guessed twins, their features were so similar. Both were slender, had light brown hair, and were quite good looking. Very early twenties. She appeared to be a good deal more robust than her brother, whose complexion seemed pale in comparison. But maybe that was just the effect November had on the young man. Cork could understand.
“I’m O’Connor,” he said.
The young woman craned her neck upward. “Can we talk?”
“Give me a minute.”
Cork swept the roof with his gloved hand and was satisfied that the area was ready for the patch. He glanced up at the sky, a mottled gray that reminded him of bread mold, and started down the ladder.
“Lindsay Harris,” the woman said even before he’d finished descending. “And this is my brother, Trevor.”
Cork got his feet on the ground and turned to them. He pulled off his gloves and accepted the hand each of them offered.
“John Harris’s grandchildren,” he said.
The young woman nodded. “That’s right.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Find our grandfather,” her brother said.
Cork dropped his gloves on the toolbox. “I already tried. Me and a lot of other good people. I’m part of Tamarack County Search and Rescue.”
“We know that,” the sister said.
“So what is it you think I can do that hasn’t already been done?”
She wore a green down vest with a gold turtleneck beneath, jeans, good hiking boots. Her brother wore a dark gray car coat that looked expensive. The pants that showed beneath were gray slacks with a sharp crease. His shoes were black and polished and soft and out of place in the North Country.
“Could we go somewhere to talk?” the young woman asked.
“Inside.” Cork led the way.
In the early sixties, a man named Sam Winter Moon had bought the Quonset hut and revamped it into a place that became known for the quality of its food—burgers and fries, mostly, but also hot dogs and good, thick milk shakes. The Sam’s Special was renowned in Tamarack County, Minnesota. On his untimely death, Sam had willed the property to Cork, and the onetime lawman, whose badge had been taken from him, turned to flipping burgers. It was a vocation he’d come to love and a business he’d brought his children into. But he’d kept a finger in law enforcement in a way. He’d gotten himself a private investigator’s license.
The front of the Quonset hut had been given over to the food business, but the rear Cork had kept as a kind of office in which he conducted much of his security and investigation work. Before beginning his repair of the roof that morning, he’d made a pot of coffee, and there was still plenty left to offer his visitors. He poured mugs for them all, and they sat at the old, round, wooden table where he often met with clients.
“Your sign outside says ‘closed for the season,’ ” Trevor Harris said.
“That’s just for Sam’s Place,” Cork told him. “A lot of us who cater to tourists close up in November. Once the color’s gone, the flow of leaf peepers dries up. After the snow comes, we’ll get snowmobilers and cross-country skiers, but for a while, things’ll be pretty quiet here in Aurora. What you’ve come to me for, that business is open year-round.” Cork took a long swill of his coffee. “We looked for your grandfather for two weeks solid. Tamarack County Search and Rescue. The U.S. Forest Service. We brought in trackers from the Border Patrol, K-9s, cadaver dogs. So I’ll ask again, what do you think I can do to find him that hasn’t already been done?”
Cork had been right about the brother. Under the car coat, he looked dressed for a date or church or a funeral. In the Twin Cities, he’d have been just fine for a business meeting. But in this neck of the woods, he stood out like a peacock in a chicken coop.
“We’ve read about you,” the young woman said. “Your wife went missing, but you didn’t give up looking, and you found her.”
“If you know that much, then you know that when I found her she was dead.” Although their bringing up the incident had caught him by surprise and made his gut twitch with that November regret, he kept his tone flat.
“It must have been hard,” she went on quickly, as if sensing the thin ice onto which she’d ventured. “But at least you had closure. At least you know. We’ve been left with nothing but questions.”
In the middle of October, John W. Harris, head of Harris International, one of the largest construction design firms in the country, had entered the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with his two grown grandchildren and a local guide. The second day out, on a lake called Raspberry, John Harris had disappeared. That morning, grandfather and grandson had gone on some kind of fishing competition, each taking his own canoe and heading in a different direction. Lindsay Harris and the guide, a kid named Dwight Kohler, had stayed behind at the campsite. Trevor Harris had returned an hour later with a near-trophy walleye. His grandfather never returned.
The grandchildren and the guide went looking. They found his empty canoe floating in the middle of the lake, all his fishing gear still in it, but no sign of Harris. They checked the whole of the shoreline and the big island that rose near the center of the lake. There was only a single portage, which was a trail for carrying canoes between lakes, going in and another going out. They followed the portages and checked the lakes at either end. They waited a night, spent the next day searching again all the areas they’d already covered. Then Dwight Kohler went back to the entry point, a graveled lot where they’d parked their cars and launched themselves into the wilderness, driven into Aurora, and alerted the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Because of who John W. Harris was, the resulting search was one of the most thorough Cork had ever been a part of. Two days ago, the sheriff had called an official end to the effort.
“And just because I found my wife, you think I can find your grandfather?” Cork said.
“We don’t want to give up on him,” Lindsay said. “And we’ve heard you didn’t want to either. We heard that you didn’t agree with the decision to end the search. You don’t think my grandfather just vanished out there. Is that true?”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is if it’s true. Is it?”
/> Cork scratched an eyebrow, considering. “You do the best you can in a search effort. But there’s always a limit to the resources, the time, the manpower, the budget. The sheriff decided she’d exhausted all of those. It wasn’t an unreasonable decision. In her place, I might have done the same.”
“But it’s true that you didn’t agree with it?”
“In my opinion, there were still too many unanswered questions.” Cork sipped his coffee. “Your grandfather grew up in Aurora.”
Lindsay nodded, a piece of information not new to her. “Did you know him?”
“He lived across the street from my house. He was kind of like the big brother I never had. I had a feeling even then that he was destined for great things.”
“He never talks about his childhood here,” Trevor said.
There was good reason for that, Cork knew. But this wasn’t the time to go into it.
“You said there were still too many unanswered questions,” Lindsay said. “Like what?”
“Okay, one of the speculations was that he had a heart attack and fell into the water. We went over that lake bottom with divers. Nothing. And that takes care of another speculation, that he committed suicide. If he did, where’s the body? Here’s another speculation, that he had some kind of stroke and wandered off. If that was the case, why didn’t the dogs pick up and follow his scent? And here’s another one, off the wall, maybe, but not unheard of. A man sometimes gets to some dark point in his life when he might think that just ending it is the answer. Or rather, ending what his life is and starting over somewhere as someone different, burying himself somewhere where no one expects anything of him. Your grandfather’s a very wealthy man. If he wanted a new life for himself, I imagine he could arrange that. When I knew him forty years ago, he didn’t strike me as a guy who’d run from trouble and try to hide. Has he changed?”
“Grandpa John run?” Trevor said. “Christ, no. Not from anything.”