Windigo Island (12 page)

Chapter 21

D
uluth, Minnesota, has been called the Emerald City, the Zenith City, the Gem of the Freshwater Sea. It’s the world’s largest inland port, at one time surpassing even New York City in the oceangoing tonnage it handled. Built on hills that rise steeply out of the vast, cold water of Lake Superior, it’s a beautiful city in a beautiful setting, but its history is a harsh lesson in the reality of cultural friction.

The early inhabitants—the Gros Ventre, Menominee, Fox, and Dakota—were driven out by the Anishinaabeg, who found the area rich in resources, including an abundance of fur-bearing animals. The Anishinaabeg, in turn, were overwhelmed by the flood of whites, who were drawn to the area by all the economic possibilities there—the timber of the forests, the fur of the animals, the fish of the lake, the minerals of the earth. When the canal at Sault Sainte Marie opened the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and railroads opened the way to the Pacific, Duluth’s geographic position and its enormous natural harbor made it an ideal transportation center. Vast fortunes were made, and by the turn of the century, Duluth was home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country. With every new enterprise, there arrived a multicultural work force to supply the labor—French, Scandinavians, Finns, Italians, Poles, Irish, African Americans. And with all this unwieldy mix, there came the inevitable clash of culture. In 1918 a group calling itself Knights of Loyalty hauled Olli Kiukkonen, a Finnish immigrant, from his room in a board
inghouse, tarred and feathered and then lynched him, this as a warning to those who, in the opinion of the Knights, were not American enough in their patriotism. Two years later, three black men accused of raping a white woman were dragged from their jail cells by an angry mob, beaten, and lynched from a lamppost in the center of the downtown.

Cork O’Connor knew about these things. But death and degradation unremarked upon had been occurring on a regular basis in Duluth from the beginning. In this part of the Emerald City’s tarnished history, Cork and those with him were about to get a thorough education.

They passed over the Duluth–Superior harbor on the Blatnik Bridge. Spread below them along the harbor shoreline were rows of tall grain elevators and squat regiments of storage tanks and the hulking latticework of the iron ore loaders, and alongside these structures were the long fingers of the docks. Many of the docks lay empty, and Cork wondered if this was normal or simply the way it was in these days of economic uncertainty. They stopped for lunch at Grandma’s, a local landmark eatery. Grandma’s stood beside the shipping canal, which was a man-made passage between Lake Superior and the inner harbor large enough to accommodate the great freighters making port there. They sat under a big umbrella on the deck, where they could see both the Lift Bridge over the canal and the open water of the lake. It was a sunny Thursday afternoon. While they ate their walleye sandwiches and burgers, they watched a stream of small boat traffic traverse the canal.

Because he’d received no real help in his earlier contact with Duluth PD, Cork had called ahead and made arrangements to see an old friend, a homicide detective retired a couple of years from the city’s police force.

“I’d prefer to talk to Dan alone,” Cork told the others at lunch. “I don’t want him to feel like there’s a mob coming down on him.”

“What do we do in the meantime?” Jenny asked.

“Why don’t you see what you can find out about
Montcalm
?” Cork suggested.

“Any idea how to do that?”

“Your smart phone,” English suggested to her.

“Maybe there’s a harbormaster who would know what ships come and go here, or a port authority,” Cork said.

Jenny shook her head. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. Let’s try the library. This is their territory. They probably have resources we wouldn’t necessarily find on the Internet. And if they don’t have what we need, I’ll bet they know who does.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” English said.

Louise looked as if she wanted to say something, but then decided to remain silent.

Cork asked, “You okay with this, Louise?”

She shrugged. There was something going on with her, Cork could see, but he decided to let it go for the moment. He checked his watch. “I’m meeting Dan at Fitger’s at two. I’ll give you a call when I’m finished, and we can figure out where to go from there. Okay?”

They agreed, paid their bill, and went their separate ways, Cork alone in his Explorer, and the others with Daniel English in his crew-cab pickup.

Fitger’s was another Duluth landmark, one perched on a rise above the lake at the north edge of the downtown business district. A brewery for more than a century, it had long ago been converted to a hotel-retail complex with some pretty good restaurants. Cork found a meter out front and walked into the Brewhouse. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark, then he spotted Dan McGinty watching him from a stool at the bar. McGinty stood as Cork approached, and the men shook hands.

McGinty was compact and had been powerfully built in his days on the Duluth police force, but since his retirement, a lot of that muscle had gone soft. He was mostly bald. When he smiled, which was often, it was a gesture that involved his whole face, and his cheeks squeezed his eyelids nearly shut. His nickname was Squinty McGinty.

“Long time no see,” McGinty said as he sat back down.

“You look good, Squinty. Retirement seems to agree with you,” Cork said.

“Semiretirement,” McGinty countered.

“Still working the good causes, huh?”

McGinty, who was an Eagle Scout, had always been deeply involved in that organization. In addition, he donated a lot of time and energy to a relief organization called Feed My Starving Children. Because he was that kind of man, he was also, Cork had always believed, the kind of cop you could trust.

McGinty smiled. “The hungry will always be with us. You still playing Philip Marlowe?”

“When a case interests me.”

“And you’ve got one now?”

McGinty already had a beer. The barkeep asked Cork what he wanted. Normally Cork would have asked for Leinenkugel’s, but he was in the Fitger’s Brewhouse, so he ordered a pint of their North Country Pale Ale.

“Not a case so much as doing a favor for a friend,” Cork said when the barkeep had moved away. “Missing person. And probably murder.”

McGinty’s eyebrows humped like little silver caterpillars. “Tell me about it.”

Cork gave him the whole history. McGinty listened with the intensity of a guy used to keeping detailed mental notes. In the middle of the story, Cork’s beer arrived, but he didn’t touch it until he’d finished laying things out.

“You’re about to open a can of worms, my friend,” McGinty said.

Cork finally took a long pull on his beer. “How so, Squinty?”

“A lot of economic and political interest tied up in the boat traffic. Always been that way. Publicly, there’s a periodic outcry over the prostitution that goes along with being a port city. But privately, the policy, more or less, is to look the other way. The department’ll stage a sting now and then, nab a few johns, but
they mostly pick up clueless locals. Generally, they don’t touch the guys coming off the boats.”

“Coming off the boats? I understood that the women went to the clientele, pretty much bunk to bunk on the boats.”

“I’ve heard it used to be that way, but I can’t really confirm it. Definitely not that way now. Since nine-eleven, harbor security’s become way too tight. Getting women on and off the boats would be difficult. A lot of the prostitution now is done out of apartments near the water.”

“How do the boat crews find the women?”

“They just walk the streets of downtown. Or they find them on Backpage or Craigslist. Or they go to a strip club.”

“But Duluth PD doesn’t touch them?”

“That’s probably putting it a little strong. But think about it. These guys, a lot of them, come off salties. They’re foreign citizens.”

“Salties?”

“That’s what we call the boats that come all the way up from the Atlantic through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. They’re built different, designed, as I understand it, to take the beating the ocean can give a ship. All the other big boats are lakers, built specially to operate only on the Great Lakes. Those are domestic or Canadian. So imagine the red tape involved in arresting a bunch of sailors from places all over the globe. And imagine the ruckus. So there’s a lot of pressure from above just to look the other way. I mean, prostitution’s the oldest profession, right? Practically part of being human. So where’s the harm?”

“The harm, Squinty, is that girls get used and knocked around pretty badly and sometimes killed.”

McGinty shook his head. “You always were a backwoods cop at heart, Cork. The realities of urban life are different. In the grand scheme, prostitution is a fly, something circling around all the real shit you have to deal with as a cop, and you can’t waste a lot of effort trying to get that fly because the honest-to-God truth is that you know it’s never going away.”

“I won’t argue the big picture with you, Squinty. Right now, I just want to find one girl.”

“Got a photo?”

Cork took it from his wallet and slid it across the bar.

McGinty looked at it. “Jesus, she’s just a kid.”

“Yeah, Squinty. But probably a prostitute, so who cares, right?”

“Okay, okay,” McGinty said in a tone of contrition. “Can I keep this?”

“And do what with it?”

“I know the guy who heads up the Special Investigations Unit. They deal with vice, among other things. Let me show him, see if he can make an ID. Can I call you back at the number you called me from?”

“Yeah, that’s my cell.”

McGinty reached for his wallet.

“On me,” Cork said.

The ex-cop nodded. “Tell you what. This crusade of yours pays off, I’ll buy the next round.”

They shook hands and McGinty left. Cork signaled the bartender for the tab, laid down payment, and walked away.

Instead of heading directly back to his Explorer, he strolled along the deck behind the big complex, which overlooked Lake Superior. Three great freighters, each longer than two football fields, all of them dark against the blue water, lay anchored outside the harbor. Cork had no idea if they were waiting for permission to enter, or waiting for some dock facility inside the harbor to become free, or simply idling for reasons only sailors would know. He watched a white yacht, large by most standards, glide past the nearest freighter, and the craft was dwarfed by the great monster. Despite what McGinty had told him, he couldn’t help imagining Mariah on an enormous boat like that, a small child in the belly of a huge beast, and his gut fisted in an angry way.

His cell phone rang, Jenny calling.

“We came up empty, Dad,” she said. “The librarian suggested we check the
Duluth News Tribune
. The paper reports all the com
ings and goings of the freighters every day. And not just here but in all the local commercial ports in the area. We checked issues as far back as the beginning of the shipping season and, like I said, came up with nothing. How’d you do?”

“Not much better. Why don’t we regroup and figure what next?”

“Where?”

“I suppose the library’s as good a place as any. I’ll meet you there in ten.”

Cork took one last look at the lake. The sun in its afternoon decline was at his back, and there was no wind that he could feel. A high, white haze hung on the horizon. Against it, the surface of Superior looked hard and cold as a sheet of steel. He couldn’t help wondering if the body of a young girl lay somewhere below that unyielding surface, waiting for the spirits of Kitchigami to decide if she would remain there forever.

Chapter 22

T
he Duluth Public Library had been built in the shape of a great ore boat, a grand nod to the commerce that had helped establish the Zenith City. Cork found the others waiting in the shade of the enormous portico in front. Vertically down the huge central column that supported the portico roof were painted the spines of a quirky selection of literary offerings, from
Charlotte’s Web
to
The Great Scandinavian Baking Book
. Jenny, Meloux, Louise, and English were all gathered in the shade in front of the spine for
The Catcher in the Rye.

It was going on four o’clock, and Cork could see weariness in all their faces. They’d been on the road since well before dawn, and as nearly as he could tell, they were at a dead end. Until he heard from McGinty, he didn’t have a good suggestion what to do next. He considered the possibility of simply waiting until dark, when according to McGinty, the girls came out on the streets near the harbor to sell themselves. If he showed Mariah’s photo around or Raven’s, maybe one of the girls would recognize them. Or maybe it would be better to hit the strip joints, wherever they were, and do the same. He suspected it would prove useless, and he was tired, too, and out of ideas at the moment. Reluctantly, he told the others so.

“If we offered the girls money for information, would that make a difference?” English asked.

Cork said, “There’s no guarantee what they told us would be the truth. The other problem is that word’ll get around, and
if Mariah is being trafficked, whoever is handling her will make sure she disappears.”

“Shelters?” Jenny suggested.

“Maybe,” Cork said, but he had trouble being hopeful there, too.

“Corcoran O’Connor,” Meloux said. “I think you should listen to her.” The old man nodded toward Louise Arceneaux, who stood leaning her bulk wearily against the great painted spine of J. D. Salinger’s classic story of a lost youth.

“Is there something you want to say, Louise?” Cork asked.

The woman’s face, normally the color of wet sand, was red from all the exertion of the day, the struggle to move her large body on one leg and a wooden peg. But looking at Meloux, she seemed to gather strength. “Yes.” She pushed herself from the column. “But I don’t know if it will help.”

“Go ahead, Louise,” Jenny urged her gently.

“Forget about your cops, Cork,” Louise told him bluntly. “All I ever got from them was trouble. And if you just go putting questions to the girls on the street, you’re going to get nowhere. Don’t take this wrong, but you look and sound and smell like a cop.” She eyed English. “You both do.”

“Okay,” Cork said. “So what do we do?”

Louise said, “I’ve been thinking for a while now about something else. See, there used to be an organization here when I worked the boats. It was called Nishiime House. The people there helped women like me. Well, those who wanted help back then. I wasn’t one of them, but some of the other girls went there. I heard they were very understanding and kept everything confidential and kept the cops out of it. Those people might have an idea how we can find Mariah. If they’re still around.”

“Let’s find out.” Jenny pulled out her iPhone and spent a couple of minutes accessing the Internet. “They’re still here. On Fourth Street, at the edge of downtown.”

Louise nodded and said, “Then we should go.”

She turned toward English’s pickup, which was parked at a
meter along the curb. Using a single crutch and with Jenny at her side, she made her way there.

Cork shrugged and said to English and Meloux, “I’m in. Let’s go.”

They drove a few blocks from the library and parked in front of an old brownstone on a block of old brick and brownstone buildings. A small sign on a wrought-iron stand set in the front yard bore the name Nishiime House.
Nishiime,
in Ojibwemowin, meant “little sister.” Below that was a single word:
zahgidiwin
. It meant “love.”

They entered through a heavy wooden door. Inside was a large room whose scuffed wooden floor was overlaid with a braided area rug. There were armchairs, a love seat, a table and a lamp, all looking like thrift store purchases. The windows were leaded glass, recalling a day when the building might have been the residence of an upper-class business family, before the Iron Range mines closed and the flow of ore stopped and the number of ships making port in Duluth dwindled to a fraction of what it had once been. A hallway angled to the right, and just beyond that was a stairway. A woman sat at a reception desk, typing into a computer. She was thin and young and had short hair the color of cotton candy. She looked up and smiled when Louise and Jenny came in. Her eyes flicked down to the carved wooden peg below Louise’s right knee, but her expression didn’t change. This was clearly a young woman who had seen much. But her smile faded when she caught sight of the men entering behind them.

“Yes?” she asked.

Cork and English hung back, but Meloux went forward and stood with the others. He said to Louise, “Go on, Niece.”

Louise said, “I’m looking for someone. I’m looking for my daughter.”

A long, pale white scar began at the right corner of the young woman’s mouth and followed the jawline for nearly three inches. It looked as if someone had slit her cheek with a sharp knife. “I don’t think I can help you,” she said.

“Are you in charge here?” Jenny asked.

“No. That would be Bea Abbiss.”

“Is she in?”

“Yes.”

“Could we talk to her?”

The young woman looked beyond Jenny, at Cork and English, and it was clear that she was reluctant to agree. Cork thought about leaving, but Meloux spoke up.

“Granddaughter,” he said. “You have been lost, too.”

She eyed him. The muscles near her long scar flinched as if from an uncontrollable tic, but she didn’t reply.

“And someone offered you their hand and that kindness brought you out of your lost place,” Meloux said. “Yes?”

The young woman remained silent, but Cork could see in her eyes that Meloux had nailed it.

“All we are asking,” Meloux went on, “is that you offer us your hand so that we can find our child and bring her home from the place where she is lost.”

Her gaze once again swept them all, lingering on the two men near the front door. Then she decided. “Just a moment.” She picked up her phone, punched a button, and said, “Some people are here, Bea. They’re looking for their daughter. They’d like to talk to you.” She listened and gave a nod to whatever was said. “All right.” She put the phone back in its cradle. “Ms. Abbiss will be right out.”

“Migwech,”
the old man said.

Cork heard a door open down the angled hallway. A moment later, a woman appeared, smiling cordially. She was a big woman with the features and coloring of a Native. She had black hair with little veins of gray, and dark, intelligent eyes. She wore a loose-fitting, light blue blouse and jeans, a turquoise necklace and earrings that matched. She came directly to Louise Arceneaux, extended her hand, and said, “How do you do? I’m Bea Abbiss, director of Nishiime House.”

“I’m Louise Arceneaux. This is Jenny O’Connor, Henry
Meloux, Cork O’Connor, and Daniel English. We’re looking for my daughter.”

“So I understand,” Bea Abbiss said pleasantly. “Why don’t we go back to my office and talk?” She glanced at the young receptionist. “No calls for a while, Gina.”

The hallway was long. There was a window at the far end with stained glass, and the light that came through fell across the worn beige carpeting in vivid splashes of color. Abbiss stepped through an open doorway, and the others followed. It was a neat office but comfortable, with several plants, shelves of books, and lots of Native art on the walls.

Abbiss slipped behind her desk and said, “I apologize. I only have two chairs for visitors. I hope some of you don’t mind standing.”

“Louise,” Jenny said, indicating one of the empty chairs. “And, Henry, why don’t you take the other?” She stood between them, and once again, Cork and English remained in the background.

“All right.” Abbiss folded her hands on her desk. “Tell me what you need.”

Louise told her story. She began with her experience as, in her own words, “a boat whore.” She talked about her children, about Mariah. She confessed she hadn’t been a very good mother. She began to cry but kept on with her story. She told about Mariah disappearing with Carrie Verga and about the girl’s body washing up on Windigo Island. She told Bea Abbiss how scared she was for her daughter, how desperately she wanted to find her, to have another chance, to be a better mother this time.

Cork didn’t know Abbiss’s tribal affiliation, but her reaction to all this was not the stone face he’d seen so often among the Anishinaabeg. The woman’s expression communicated compassion and understanding and empathy, and at the end, she left her chair, walked around the desk to Louise, bent, and gave Mariah’s mother a long, warm hug. She took Louise’s hands and said, “I’ll help in any way I can. But you have to understand, some of what I’m going to tell you will be difficult to hear.”

“I know, Ms. Abbiss,” Louise said. “I know.”

The woman seated herself again at her desk. She frowned a moment, as if trying to decide where to start. “The first thing is call me Bea. Everyone here does. The second thing, Louise, is that I want you to believe that you can let go of your guilt. What happened to you, what may have happened to your daughter, is an old, old crime, but you aren’t the criminals. You are victims of the crime. When people of European descent”—here she glanced at Cork and Jenny, the only ones among those present who didn’t look Ojibwe—“came to this area, they shattered our culture. Sometimes it was because of ignorance, but more often it was because of greed. And this brokenness, this wounding of our spirit as a people, has never been completely healed. We continue to struggle with it today. One of the terrible, terrible effects of that brokenness is violence, particularly against our women. Our men are sometimes a part of that violence, and white men are certainly a part of that violence. Our women have been sold from the beginning, traded as a commodity. We’re dealing with decades of trauma forced on our people.

“What I’m saying, Louise, is that we have to heal ourselves, as women and as a people. And a huge part of that healing is to understand, to accept, to really believe that we have been victimized. We are not the criminals. Okay?”

“Okay,” Louise said and nodded.

“We see a lot of women here who are caught in that deep net of trafficking. They want to get out of it, but it’s not easy. And I’ll be honest with you, there’s only a certain amount that we can do. We’re a nonprofit. We depend on the charity of others, so our resources are limited. To really break away from the trafficking, women need to be assured of good housing, a job, continued support in so many ways until they’re able to stand on their own. We simply can’t do that, though I’d give my right arm to be able to. So we do a lot of referring, a lot of advocating, a lot of hand-holding. But in the end, we often see the women simply disappear.”

Abbiss took a deep breath. Cork suspected what she’d just told
them was a truth she often had to deliver, but it was not one she wanted to accept. And he couldn’t help but wonder if, as a Native woman, she’d experienced herself the horrible truths she was laying out.

“Okay, let’s talk about Mariah,” Abbiss went on. “I don’t know a girl by that name. We see so many young Native women here, and very often they don’t give us their real names. And that man you told me about—Smiley—the one who trafficked you when you worked the boats? That’s not a name I know either, and I know a lot about the traffickers. Probably he got pushed out by the gangs—the Crips, the Bloods, the Native Mob. They all have a hand in it now. But back to your daughter. Do you have a photograph?”

From her purse, Louise took out two photos of Mariah, one before her transformation and the other the photo she’d posted on Facebook just before she disappeared. Abbiss looked at them both carefully. Then she shook her head.

“I haven’t seen her here,” she said.

Jenny reached into her purse and brought out another photo. “Here’s a picture of Carrie Verga, the girl she left with, the one who’s dead now.”

Abbiss studied this photograph with the same result.

Cork said, “I have another picture, this one of the woman we believe may have been responsible for the girls running off in the first place.”

He stepped forward with the photo Lindy Duvall had given him of her daughter Raven.

Bea Abbiss took the photograph in her hands, and the moment she looked at it her face changed. Darkness swept across it in a fury.

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Oh, dear Christ.”