Windigo Island (21 page)

“Where’s your brother?” Cork said.

“Williston.”

“North Dakota? What’s he doing there?”

“Man, you don’t know about Williston?”

“Tell me.”

“Fucking Wild West. In Williston anything goes. We have some girls there, my brother, me. We got a partner.”

“Is Mariah there?”

“Mariah? She calls herself Candi. With an
i
.”

“Is she there?”

“She’s there.”

“You have an address?”

“You really think you can take down my brother?”

“Give me the address, and we’ll see.”

The man called Wolf suddenly seemed not so eager to talk.

“Ember,” Cork said and once again leveled the sidearm at the old dog.

“A trailer south of Williston.” Wolf gave a highway number and the name of another road that, he said, branched off. “It’s in a stand of cottonwoods, sits up on a kind of bluff. You can see the Missouri River from the back.”

“You’ll draw me a map?”

“You let Ember go, I’ll take you there myself.”

“The map’ll do,” Cork said.

But the map wasn’t all Jenny’s father got from the man called Wolf. He got a real name—Samuel Leland French—and a real name for the man called Windigo—Robert Wilson French. He also got a brief history. Both born on the Red Lake Reservation. Mixed-blood alcoholic father, alcoholic mother, white. “She was Irish, like you, O’Connor,” he said with a sneer. Raised mostly in foster homes, sometimes placed together, sometimes separately. Didn’t matter, all the homes were bad. “But what the hell,” Samuel Leland French said, “that’s just what it is to be Indian, right, cousin?”

Elgin Manypenny was the one who responded, his voice ice-cold. “I grew up in foster homes. I don’t traffic girls or torture and kill them.”

“Then you’ve missed out on some fun, cousin.”

“What do we do with him?” Tom Blessing said.

Jenny saw murder in the eyes of the ex–Red Boyz, and as much as she hated the man called Wolf, she was horrified that, when she left, they might exact their own kind of justice. It was Meloux who, in his usual way, eased her mind. He said to all present in that small, smelly trapper’s cabin, “Keep him, but harm him no more. We will find his brother, this Windigo, and then we will decide what is just.”

“What about the dog?” Manypenny said.

“Let them be together,” Meloux replied. It sounded to Jenny less like a moment of generosity than like the granting of a final wish before execution. But Meloux had spoken, and Jenny knew that he would be obeyed and that Wolf and Ember would be there—alive—when they returned.

They gathered outside and said their good-byes to the ex–Red Boyz. Before they divided into their vehicles, Daniel drew Cork aside. Jenny saw something in his face that she hadn’t seen there before. A deeply troubled and distrustful look.

Daniel said, “Would you have killed that dog, Cork?”

Jenny’s father replied, “If the sacrifice of the dog might save the girl, what choice would you have made?”

Daniel said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“And you didn’t answer mine,” Cork replied.

Chapter 35

J
enny called ahead and asked a hard favor of Rose and Rainy.

When she and the others returned to the house on Gooseberry Lane, the two women had fed all the children breakfast and had taken them to play in a park. This was because Jenny couldn’t bear to see her precious little Waaboo again only to say good-bye once more.

It was, according to MapQuest, an eleven-hour drive from Tamarack County, Minnesota, to Williston, North Dakota. What Jenny knew of Williston was what most folks in Minnesota knew. It was an oil boom area. Men had flooded there to work the oil fields, where drilling companies seemed to be putting holes in the ground faster than a town of prairie dogs on speed. They’d seen the reports on the nightly news: the high wages, the wave of workers, the lack of adequate housing to meet the needs of this influx, the rising crime rate. Jenny remembered seeing a waitress at a restaurant there interviewed about the change in her hometown. The waitress said it was a place she barely recognized anymore. She’d grown up in a safe, small town. That was not Williston anymore. She was afraid to walk the streets at night. The men she served looked at her as hungrily as they looked at the food she delivered to their tables. They worked hard all day and had few comforts when they left the job, and she understood their loneliness and their needs. But they scared her. They scared her a lot.

Louise wanted to go with them, but Jenny’s father pointed out that they didn’t really know what they were getting themselves
into and would probably have to move quickly. He didn’t make any reference to her leg, but it was clear what he meant, and she accepted the situation. Jenny almost argued her case, because she understood how it would be staying back, waiting, wondering, worrying. But she saw Daniel nod his agreement with Cork, so she held her tongue.

Meloux said, “I will go.”

Cork studied the old man a long time, and Jenny figured that she knew the variables he was weighing: Meloux’s age and health and the likelihood of the old man somehow holding them back. Finally he said, “All right,” but with obvious reservation.

They planned to take two vehicles—the Explorer and Daniel’s pickup. Cork said he wanted lots of flexibility in Williston. He also said, “I don’t like the thought of going into this blind.”

“Maybe we don’t have to,” Daniel told him. “I know a guy. Shinny Fox. He’s Mandan, out of Fort Berthold. Met him at the United Tribes International Powwow in Bismarck a couple of years ago. We both drum, and we played against each other in the three-on-three basketball tournament. We’ve stayed in touch.”

“You’ll give him a call?”

“Sure, right now.”

“This needs to stay unofficial, Daniel. No law enforcement, at least not yet.”

“No cops? What Indian would object to that?”

Raven and her mother came downstairs. Raven moved gingerly, but she was clearly feeling better. The girl took Jenny’s hand and gripped it tightly.

“Angel’s worse than Manny,” she warned. “He’s smarter. Real smooth, you know. He can make you believe anything. Don’t listen to him. Under his skin, he’s nothing but ice.”

“We’ll be careful,” Jenny promised. Then she turned to Louise and made another promise, one that felt sacred to her. “We’ll bring Mariah home.”

It was almost noon when they left Aurora. They hoped to reach Williston by midnight.

Meloux accompanied Cork, and Jenny rode with Daniel. They drove all afternoon, passing through the Leech Lake Reservation and skirting the edge of White Earth. At Grand Forks, shortly before five o’clock, they crossed the Red River of the North and left Minnesota behind. Because it was such a long journey and she was uncomfortable with silence, Jenny finally decided to talk about books, a safe middle ground, she figured. She was blown away by the extent of Daniel’s knowledge, which was even broader than her own. He spoke quietly and never at length, but he was clearly passionate about the written word. She didn’t ask him about his writing, nor did she mention her own. That was something still too personal.

Finally he said, “About that kiss.”

“What kiss?” Jenny said.

“Oh.” He seemed willing to let it go. But not without reluctance, it also seemed.

“Look, maybe I should apologize,” Jenny said.

“For what?” He stared at the white lines firing at them down the middle of the highway. “I liked it.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He offered her a smile out of that broad, honest face. “When all of this business is behind us, could we think about doing things in a more normal way?”

“I’m not sure what normal is, but, yeah, I’d like that.”

“Me, too,” he said.

They were among rolling fields of sunflowers when the moon rose at their backs. They had not stopped except for gas, sandwiches, coffee, and restroom breaks. Jenny and Daniel had traded off at the wheel, but her father had driven the whole way. Now Jenny followed his Explorer in the growing dark, wondering about him and worrying. There was a word that kept running through her head:
ogichidaa.
She believed that about her father, that he’d come into the world already chosen for a hard and dangerous duty, to stand between evil and his people. She knew he’d killed three men. She couldn’t say why exactly, but she had a sense there
were others she didn’t know about. This wasn’t something her father spoke of, ever, and it wasn’t something she intended to ask, ever. Everyone had their terrible secrets. But as she followed his taillights, which seemed to stare back at her like little red demon eyes, she wondered about the toll it took, what it cost her father to be the man he was, to do the duty they all expected of him and that he expected of himself.

She’d thought Daniel was sound asleep, but in the darkness somewhere in the middle of nowhere, he said something that made her think he’d read her mind. He said, “Your father.”

She waited.

“He’s . . . intense,” Daniel said cautiously.

“I’ve never seen him quite like this before,” she admitted.

A hawk rose up suddenly from some mutilated roadkill along the shoulder of the highway, a bright flash of gold feathers in the headlights, then it was lost in the night.

Daniel said, “In the woods, I face guys carrying rifles who don’t appreciate the laws I’m paid to enforce, but even they don’t worry me like your dad does at the moment. Today in that cabin?” He shook his head. “A helpless old dog.”

Jenny felt as if she should defend her father, and she pointed out, “He got what we needed.”

“But a little something died there. It wasn’t Ember but something. Maybe you’d call it faith or trust. I’m concerned about where he might draw the line. There are places I won’t go, Jenny.”

“You don’t know him like I do.”

“You just said you’ve never seen him like this before.”

He was right, but she trusted her father, didn’t she? Wasn’t that what you did with people you loved? You gave them more rope than you’d give others?

“You know the word
ogichidaa
?”

“Yes.”

“Henry Meloux says that my dad was born
ogichidaa
.”

“Okay.”

“Has Rainy or anyone else told you about my mother or my brother?”

“No.”

“My mother was killed several years ago, collateral damage in a scheme that involved a lot of money. Long story. I’ll tell you the whole thing someday. But I think my father has always believed he should have saved her, although there was no way he could have.”

“And your brother?”

“He’s in the Twin Cities, at the Courage Center. He’s struggling to walk again.”

“What happened?”

“Last Christmas, a crazy man put two bullets in him. One of those bullets damaged his spine. We were afraid he’d never walk again.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I think my father believes he should have been able to keep that from happening, too. I could be totally wrong because it’s not something he’ll ever talk about. But I’m thinking that maybe he’s come to see Mariah as a way to atone.”

Jenny stared where the headlights illuminated only a microscopic part of the dark around them.

“I understand,” Daniel said.

“There’s more,” Jenny said. “I remember my mother used to argue with Dad about the risks he took. I thought maybe it was just because she was worried about him being hurt or killed. But now I think there was more to it. I think she saw the toll it took on him, what it did to his spirit, and I think that any risk he took worried her.”

“And it worries you,” he said.

“My father almost killed the guy who fired those bullets into my brother. He would have except for my sister, Annie. She pretty much put herself between that madman and the barrel of the gun my father held. I’ve never talked to Dad about this, but I’ve talked to Annie. She told me she saw something in him,
something absolutely cold and emotionless. The killing he was contemplating wasn’t motivated by anger or vengeance, but was simply the answer.”

“To what?”

“How to deal with someone like that man. When Annie told him she wouldn’t let him commit murder—that’s what it seemed to her—my father told her that if he didn’t, the guy would find a way to come back and finish what he’d started. Someday he’d return and kill Stephen. Or Annie or me or Waaboo.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think you ever kill someone because of what they might do in the future. Do you?”

Daniel didn’t answer immediately. They approached a field that ran north away from the road. There was a moving light in the middle of it, a piece of machinery. Jenny wondered what a farmer would be doing among his crops so late at night. She knew nothing about farming. In all that black land, she wasn’t sure she knew much about anything.

“I don’t know,” Daniel said. He stared out the window and watched as they passed the solitary light in that big field. “If I really believed it, maybe.”

“No,” Jenny said and couldn’t help feeling disappointed in him.

“It’s a hypothetical,” he said. “Honestly, in your dad’s shoes, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“You wouldn’t kill a dog, would you? Not like that. No one in his right mind would.”

Daniel seemed to think it over but, in the end, didn’t respond.

They were in the dark again, following Cork and Henry. Jenny thought about what Daniel had said.
Maybe
. Although she’d given him a knee-jerk reaction, she wondered if she was being naïve and he was right. If she really believed someone was going to kill one of the people she loved, what would she do? And taking that a step further, if she really believed someone was going to kill a child like Mariah Arceneaux, really believed it, what would she do?

“Life Saver?” Daniel held out a roll of the candy.

“No, thanks.”

He took one for himself. “Why are you doing this?”

She knew what he meant.

“Because I started,” she said. “Because I’m in the deep of it. Because I want to see it to the end.”

“Why do you care so much? Mariah isn’t family to you. And forgive me for saying it, but even though you’ve got Shinnob blood in you, you’re not really Shinnob.”

“Mariah’s not just a name to me, Daniel. I know her now. I know her mother, and I know what Louise is going through as a mother. I’m as deep in this as you or anyone else, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be left behind.”

Daniel said, “You’ve got a son back in Minnesota. Things might get rough out here.”

“I’ve been in some pretty rough situations before.”

“I know. I was there on Superior Street.”

“Long before that.”

She told him the whole story of how she’d found little Waaboo hidden in a hole on an island destroyed by storm, of fleeing desperately from people who wanted to kill them both. She told of holding a knife in her hand, prepared to kill to defend the abandoned child, whom she’d instantly fallen in love with. She told of rappelling down a cliff face with the child bundled to her and with a killer above.

He listened, rigid and intent, and at the end he sat back. He was quiet for a long moment, then said, a little amazed, “And I thought I’d been through a lot.”

They drove and drove, tunneling through the huge dark, keeping themselves awake with talk. Looming over it all was the uncertainty of what awaited them in Williston. And following her father deeper and deeper into that night, Jenny wondered if there might be more than just Windigo they needed to fear when they arrived.