Windigo Island (24 page)

Chapter 38

T
hey moved quickly after that.

Breeze told them about the situation in the trailer. There were two men—Windigo, whom she knew as Angel, and a guy called Brick. That was the only name she knew him by. She said he was mixed, Lakota and white, but not from Rosebud like her. She thought he might be from Standing Rock. There were three other girls, and Mariah was one of them. One of the other girls was also from Minnesota, White Earth, maybe. The other was from Pine Ridge. Because the men in the oil fields worked crazy hours, the girls had crazy, unpredictable schedules. They could be called out anytime, night or day. Like her, they were all under fifteen.

Breeze was clear: if they were really going to take down Angel and Brick, there was no way she was going back to that trailer. They didn’t want to leave her alone, so Shinny called his sister. He explained that he had an emergency and would she mind coming over to his place for a little while. She was there in ten minutes. Her name was Vonda Fox. She looked to be in her late forties, a big, commanding woman. Shinny had told them that Vonda pretty much raised him, worked now for the Three Affiliated Tribes social services, in their Child Care Assistance program, and could handle a girl like Breeze. He introduced them all and gave her a thumbnail idea of what was going down. She looked them over skeptically. “I think you need a bigger war party” was her only comment. Then she eyed Breeze. “That all you got to wear?”

“Yeah.”

To her brother, she said, “You go do what you gotta do. Breeze and me, we’re going to dig through some old clothes down at the office, find something decent to cover this girl’s ass.”

Shinny was a hunter. He took two rifles and a box of cartridges from a gun case in his bedroom. Jenny remembered that early on in their search for Mariah her father had said that he didn’t like the idea of firearms being involved, that he didn’t want anybody hurt. But when he saw the rifles now, he nodded and said to Daniel, “Bring your sidearm.”

When they left New Town, Jenny could hear the bell of a church calling the faithful to worship. It was Sunday, a day for rest and for reflection on the divine. Their day, Jenny suspected, would hold something entirely different, and she felt her gut already twisting at the dangerous unknown ahead.

It took almost an hour to reach the trailer. They drove through Williston on the way. Even though it was Sunday morning, the place felt like an anthill of activity. Dust everywhere, coating cars and buildings, choking the air. It was kicked up by a constant stream of trucks rumbling along the highways that intersected the town. All the roads seemed torn up, undergoing construction. The big rigs rolling over them hauled long pipes and great cement prefabbed structures and spider webbings of steel. They passed hotels, whose lots were completely filled, the spaces taken up by pickups and SUVs wearing coats of red dust. The town was eating into the prairie like an ugly cancer. The thrown-together communities that housed the men working the oil fields reminded Jenny of photos she’d seen of the spare, platted bases at the South Pole, and she couldn’t help wondering what became of human beings who lived too long without beauty.

South of Williston, they turned off the highway and took a dirt road east through hills still untouched by the blight of the town’s sprawl. After fifteen minutes, they mounted a crest and Jenny saw the Missouri River below. The river itself was a lazy, red-brown flow between hills covered with the baked, brown grasses of a late, dry summer. Along the banks there were green stands of cotton
woods and other thriving vegetation. In the distance, tall bluffs exploded out of the ground along the river’s course, dark against the broad, pale wash of the sky.

On top of the rise, the road divided and Cork braked to a stop at the fork. He pointed along the branch that headed southeast, toward a long, elevated finger of land nearly a mile distant, a promontory above the river, crowned with a copse of cottonwoods.

“It’s hard to see without binoculars,” he said, “but the trailer’s in those trees. If we come at it from this road, they’ll spot us long before we get there.” He nodded toward the southwest branch of the road. “Up there is where I parked last night and watched.”

Cork took the right fork, which climbed a slight ridge that paralleled the Missouri. The trees on the wooded promontory below them moved in and out of their sight line. After nearly a mile, he stopped again.

“My binoculars are in the glove box, Jenny. Will you hand them to me?”

She did as he asked, and he left the Explorer. They all got out with him, Meloux and Daniel and Shinny Fox and Jenny. They walked through the dry ground cover off the road, sending grasshoppers flying before them. The air smelled parched, and the dirt under their feet felt soft and dry as ash. Her father hunched and moved ahead a dozen yards and, with a gesture of his hand, signaled them to keep low. He brought the binoculars to his eyes and studied the scene below. From her vantage, Jenny could now see the clearing in the trees where the trailer sat. It was a good-size mobile home. Two dark SUVs were parked in front. There was a long, white, pill-shaped tank off to one side, which she figured contained propane. In Tamarack County, a lot of the rural homes used propane for heating and cooking, and those white tanks were a common sight.

It was going on ten o’clock by then. The sun was already high, the day hot and dry. Except for the buzz of the grasshoppers, there wasn’t a sound in the hills around them.

“Steel grates across the windows. To keep people out or to
keep them in?” Cork said. “Both SUVs are there. I think we have them all corralled inside. I don’t know how long that’ll last, so we should move fast.”

Shinny pointed toward a shallow fold that ran down the hillside below them. It was studded with rock outcrops that provided modest cover. “We could make our way down that little gulley there. They might not see us.”

“But if they did, they’d know exactly what we were up to.”

“What about coming at them from the back?” Daniel suggested. “The trees’ll provide ample cover.”

“That’ll take too long,” Cork replied. “One of them might head off by then, maybe with Mariah.”

“What do you suggest?” Shinny said.

Cork lowered his binoculars. “We drive up to the front door, and I knock.” He turned back toward the Explorer.

• • •

His plan was to play the same card he’d played earlier at the oil workers’ camp when he’d taken Breeze into his custody. That would get his foot in the door. The rest of them were to stay hunkered down out of sight in the Explorer. When he’d ascertained that Mariah was inside, he’d give the word, and Daniel and Shinny would come running.

“And how exactly are you going to give us the word?” Daniel asked. It was clear he wasn’t entirely on board with the plan.

“I’ll have my cell phone on and in my hand. You’ll be able to hear everything.”

“I think there should be two of us inside,” Daniel said.

“Why?” Cork had reached the fork and was preparing to turn onto the branch that led to the tree-capped promontory and the trailer.

“Better logistics,” Daniel replied. “Someone to make sure the door’s unlocked and open if you’re otherwise occupied.”

Cork glanced in his rearview mirror. “That would be you, I suppose?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Two men’ll scare them for sure. And if they have firearms inside, they might be prone to use them. One guy alone won’t be such a threat.”

“How about one guy and a woman?” Jenny said.

“No.” Her father shook his head. “Not you.”

He said it firmly. Jenny didn’t know if it was because she was a woman or if it was because she was his daughter. Either way, she could tell it was useless to argue.

“Nobody fears an old man,” Meloux said.

“I don’t know how I’d explain you, Henry,” Cork said.

“If necessary, I will explain myself, Corcoran O’Connor. Seeing me will confuse them, and it is always a good thing, is it not, to confuse your enemy? If you are, as my nephew has said, occupied, even an old man can hold open a door.”

The Explorer was stopped where the road forked. Behind the wheel, Jenny’s father eyed the distant cottonwoods and considered the old man’s offer.

“All right, Henry,” he finally said. “Everyone else in back and out of sight. Daniel, I’d like your weapon.”

Daniel handed over his sidearm and said, “You’re going in with it?”

“I like the leverage.” He pulled out his shirttail, leaned forward, and wedged the gun into the waistline of his pants at the small of his back. He tugged his shirttail down to cover it.

Daniel, Shinny, and Jenny lay down in the back of the Explorer. Cork left the rear door ajar so that they could exit quickly when necessary. Meloux sat up front. Cork called Jenny on his cell phone to open the line. “Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” she said.

“Okay. Here we go. Everyone stay cool.”

From where she lay, Jenny could see only sky that was indigo through the tint of the rear windows. The road was rough, and they bumped along, and she could smell and then taste the dry grit the tires kicked up. They were leaving a pretty good rooster tail of dust,
and she thought this was intentional. She figured her father wanted to be seen. He wanted there to be no sense of ambush.

She looked at Daniel. His face was intense, focused. She thought about what he’d told her the night before, about confronting men in the woods who carried rifles, and she wondered how you prepared for that. How did you make your heart stop galloping, slow your breathing, quell the fear? Until this moment, what they were doing had been a kind of hypothetical. What if they did this or that? Now they were doing it, and there was no going back.

The Explorer turned left and pulled to a stop. Out one of the windows, Jenny could see the upper branches of tall cottonwood trees.

“Let’s do this,” Cork said, and Jenny heard his door open.

Then she heard Meloux speak to him. “Corcoran O’Connor, there is something I want you to think about.”

Cork’s voice, in his reply, was terse. “Make it quick, Henry.”

“The windigo is a creature of darkness. Darkness feeds on darkness.”

Cork was quiet a moment. “Okay,” he finally replied, but his tone was a dismissive
Whatever.

Meloux could often be a mystery, but one thing Jenny knew was that you never dismissed lightly something he’d told you. She wanted to believe that her father had heard the old Mide, really heard him, but she suspected that he had not.

Meloux’s door opened, and both doors slammed shut simultaneously. Jenny put her phone to her ear. She heard the knock on the trailer door, a hollow sound. She also heard music, faintly, the whine of a slide guitar. A few moments passed, then another knocking.

“Williams County Social Services,” her father announced.

She was beginning to think the men inside simply wouldn’t respond, and what would they do then?

She heard the click of a latch and the sound of the door creaking open. The music was louder, and she recognized the Allman Brothers, Duane Allman doing licks on “Statesboro Blues.”

“Yeah?” A gruff, unwelcoming voice.

“Williams County Social Services,” her father said. Jenny heard the flap of a wallet and figured he’d flashed the same ID he’d used early that morning. “I’m following up on a report of runaway minors being housed in this trailer.”

“No one like that here.” Then, “Who’s that?”

“My granddaughter is in there,” Meloux said. “I just want to talk to her.”

“Your granddaughter ain’t here, old man. Buzz off.”

“I can come back with sheriff’s people, if you prefer,” Cork said. “All I want to do is talk to the girls.”

“And say what?”

“That we’re available to help them if they want help.”

“They don’t want your help.”

“So they’re here?”

“Get lost.”

Jenny heard the sound of a human collision, of a banging door, of a painful exhalation. Then her father spoke breathlessly, “Come on in, Jenny.”

They piled out the back of the Explorer and ran for the trailer. Meloux stood holding the door open. They rushed inside and found Cork looming over a man who lay sprawled on the floor. Cork held Daniel’s gun trained on the downed man.

On a green sofa on the far side of the room sat a girl. Jenny saw immediately that it was Mariah Arceneaux.

Chapter 39

M
ariah stared at them and didn’t seem at all surprised or frightened. Jenny thought maybe everything she’d suffered had made her numb to fear, numb to all feeling, perhaps. She wore next to nothing—a purple camisole over tight white shorts. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a garish magenta that matched her lipstick. Her hair was long and black and, at the moment, in need of washing. Her eyes were calm, a little unfocused, and her lips hinted at a smile. A Raggedy Ann doll sat in her lap.

Here she was, the girl they’d been searching for, for whom they’d risked so much, risked everything. Jenny wanted to run to her, wrap Mariah safely in her arms, call her child, because with that doll in her lap that’s exactly what she looked like. Everything in Jenny that Stephen would have called
nokomis
urged her forward to save this lost little girl, which, for Jenny, had been the whole point of this hunt at first. But the hunt wasn’t over, she knew. It wouldn’t end until Windigo was taken or Windigo was dead.

The music inside was blaring, and Jenny’s father spoke loudly to be heard over it. “Where’s your partner, Brick?”

He was small and weasel-looking, not at all how the man who called himself Windigo had been described to them. Like her father, Jenny figured this was the guy Breeze had called Brick. Manny, in saving the life of his dog, had told them his real name was Bob Two Bears.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Brick said. “Who are you?”

“Robert Wilson French, that’s who I’m talking about. Aka Angel, aka Windigo.” Cork signaled to Daniel and Shinny. “Check the other rooms.”

They split off with their rifles in hand and moved through the trailer.

Mariah spoke: “Angel.” She said it as if she were speaking to the doll in her lap. The sound of the Allman Brothers almost drowned out her voice.

“Turn that off, Jenny.” Cork gestured toward an iPod docked in a compact speaker system.

She did as he asked. The trailer got quiet and, in an odd way, seemed somehow larger and more threatening.

“Yes,” Cork said to Mariah. “I want to know about Angel.”

“Angel comes, Angel goes,” she said, again to her doll. “Chop, chop, chop.”

Daniel came back. “Nobody.”

Shinny returned, accompanied by two girls no older than Mariah. They both wore T-shirts and skimpy underwear and nothing else. They were clearly Native and were clearly scared and confused.

Cork said, “Why don’t you two sit down?”

They did as he’d suggested and perched on a brown leather love seat. Their eyes jumped from him and his gun to Daniel and Shinny with their rifles, to the man on the floor, and finally to Jenny and Henry Meloux. They reminded Jenny of small birds ready to fly at the first opportunity.

“Chop, chop, chop,” Mariah said dreamily and to no one in particular.

Daniel laid his rifle down and seated himself on the sofa beside her. “Hello, Mariah.”

She studied him a long time and seemed confused. “Danny?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

She shook her head. “Dreaming.”

“Not a dream, Mariah.” He reached out and gently took her hand. “I’m real. I’m real, and I’m here, and I’m going to take you home.”

“He won’t let you.” Her eyes drifted to the man on the floor.

“He won’t stop us.”

“Angel will.”

“Where is Angel?”

“He was here.” She looked around, her eyes studying each of them as if they might prove to be Angel. “Gone now.”

“Where did he go?”

“Chop, chop, chop,” she replied and smiled.

Cork spoke to the girls. “Do you know where Angel is?”

From the floor, the man they knew as Brick said, “Keep your mouths shut, you know what’s good for you.”

The two girls said nothing.

“Is he hiding somewhere?” Cork asked.

“He just goes,” Mariah said. “Comes and goes. Like the wind.”

“Or like a windigo?” Cork said. He watched her closely for some reaction, but either the name meant nothing to her or she was too far gone in what Jenny had come to believe was a drug-induced state of disconnection to be able to respond coherently.

Cork glanced at Shinny. “Check outside. Be careful.”

Shinny nodded and left through the front door.

“Do you want to go home, Mariah?” Daniel asked.

“Too far,” she said. There was at last some emotion in her voice, a distant sadness, as if she were speaking of something lost to her a very long time ago.

“Not too far,” Daniel told her. “I’ll take you there.”

She closed her eyes and smiled and said, “Basketball.”

“Yes, Mariah. You can play basketball again.”

Cork spoke to the two girls. “Where do you want to go?”

Their eyes grew huge with surprise. They looked at each other in bewilderment.

“We won’t leave you here,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

They gave him no reply, and Jenny couldn’t tell if they were too scared or if they simply had no answer to his question.

“No matter,” Cork said. “We can sort that out later.”

Shinny returned from outside. “Nothing,” he said. “I checked everywhere.”

“Okay.” Cork addressed the girls. “Gather your things. We’re leaving.”

They made no move to comply.

“Now,” he said sharply. “Shinny, go with them. Make sure they come back.”

The two girls rose and, with all the enthusiasm of people being marched to execution, headed off with Shinny at their backs.

“What about him?” Daniel said, gesturing to the man on the floor.

“Cuff him. We’ll take him with us.”

Daniel got up. “Roll over,” he said to Brick.

“Fuck you.”

“I said roll over.”

Daniel gave him a good kick in the ribs, which made Jenny wince, but it did the trick. Brick rolled over. Daniel took his cuffs from the belt where he’d hung them and cuffed the man’s wrists behind his back.

“Check his pockets,” Cork said.

Daniel frisked him and came up with a set of vehicle keys and a wallet. He opened the wallet. “And we thought his name was Brick or Two Bears,” he said. “According to this ID, he’s Benjamin O. Baker. Which do you suppose it is?”

“Could be none of them,” Cork said. “Take him outside, put him in the Explorer.”

Daniel hauled him off the floor none too gently and shoved him out the front door.

Shinny came back with the girls. Each carried a black plastic bag stuffed with her belongings. Neither bag was very full. They’d put on jeans and sneakers.

“Take them outside to the Explorer,” Cork said.

“Let’s go, girls.” Shinny herded them out.

Which left the rest alone with Mariah. And that’s when Jenny realized Henry Meloux had disappeared.

“Where’s Henry?” she asked.

They looked at one another and around the trailer, what they could see of it. The situation reminded Jenny eerily of the meeting she’d had with Raven Duvall in the park in Duluth when Meloux had mysteriously vanished.

She called out, “Henry?” but got no reply. “He must be outside.”

Her father said, “I’ll check the rooms again.”

He left, and Mariah and Jenny were alone. She started toward the girl. Just as Jenny reached the sofa, Mariah seemed to spot something, and her eyes went huge with fright. At the same moment, Jenny heard the front door close and lock. She spun, and a great bear of a man loomed before her. He held an enormous pistol in his hand, pointed at her chest.

He was no more Indian-looking than Jenny. Reddish blond hair, a plain face, maybe a little broad because of his Anishinaabe genes, eyes the same indigo color of the sky she’d seen through the tinted windows of the Explorer. There was something about those eyes, though, that made them like none she’d ever seen. They were bottomless and absolutely empty. Nothing showed in them, not hate or love or fear or excitement. They were windows on a vacuum, an inhuman void. She was looking at a creature that she truly believed had no soul. And she understood why the girls—why anyone—would be terrified to cross him.

“Windigo,” she said, although it was more of a gasp.

He put a finger to his lips. A moment later, Cork returned and stopped dead in his tracks. He still held Daniel’s sidearm in his hand and, as if he’d practiced the move a thousand times, quickly trued the barrel on the heart of the man called Windigo.

“You shoot, I shoot, she’s dead,” Windigo said, as if it were a simple equation. He gave a slight nod to the gun he held. “Desert Eagle, forty-four Magnum. Hollow-point rounds. Hair trigger. Put a hole in her the size of Iowa. I may or may not be dead at the end, but she doesn’t stand a chance.”

“There are others outside,” Cork said.

“The important ones are right here.”

“You knew we were coming,” Cork said. “How?”

“I’m mythic. I know everything.”

“Where were you?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m here now. And I’m curious about you.”

“Family,” Mariah said dreamily from the sofa.

Windigo nodded. “Yeah, I know that. But it’s unusual. My girls, their families generally don’t care. Sell them to me like unwanted furniture.”

Jenny was becoming aware of an unpleasant odor in the trailer, so faint that its true nature didn’t yet register.

“How’d you find me?” Windigo asked.

“Your brother, Samuel,” Cork said. “Aka Manny, aka Maiingan. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

“What? Give me up or you’d kill him?”

“I just threatened to kill his dog.”

“Ember? He dropped the dime on me for that old bag of bones?” He digested this, and it didn’t seem to sit well with his stomach. “We’ll discuss that next time I see him.”

The look in his eyes and the coldness in his voice made Jenny think of sharp icicles. She figured that conversation with Wolf, should it ever occur, would be one-sided and brutal.

The front doorknob rattled, followed by knocking. “Cork?” Daniel called.

“Tell him to stay outside,” Windigo instructed.

“Or what?”

“She’s dead. Then probably I’m dead. Which is neither here nor there for me. But you’re out a daughter.”

So he knew things about them. But how? At that moment, Jenny was more perplexed than she was afraid.

“Our Windigo has materialized,” Cork called to Daniel. “We’re having a conversation. You just stay where you are.”

“I’m here,” Daniel called back.

“We’re taking Mariah,” Cork said to Windigo.

“I should have killed her when she came back from the Apostles and told me what happened on that boat. Knew that whole
thing would bite me in the ass eventually.” He shrugged. “Water under the bridge. As for taking her, be my guest.”

“I don’t suppose you’d come, too?”

“Not at the moment. I’ve got damage control to worry about. Then I’ll get things up and running somewhere else. Not hard. Kids like her, dime a dozen. After that, I’ll be along to deal with you. In my own good time.”

“I don’t like leaving that particular door open.”

“Then shoot me.”

They faced each other across that narrow width of flimsy aluminum housing. Jenny thought of mountains standing on either side of a valley. Neither man moved.

But something else did. Left of Windigo came movement so swift that Jenny couldn’t make sense of it at first. A blur of human form. In that same instant, she saw the arm holding Windigo’s .44 Magnum drop, and the big handgun fell to the floor. Then Henry Meloux—now she could see and understand—swung again. Windigo reeled backward, spewing blood from his face as he fell. The old Mide stood above him, a four-foot section of iron rebar in his fierce grip, poised to strike another blow.

“No more,” Windigo cried and held up a palm in surrender.

“His gun,” Cork said.

Meloux kicked the heavy piece of hardware across the floor, out of Windigo’s reach. He didn’t loosen his grip on the rebar.

“Where the hell did you come from, old man?” Windigo asked. He didn’t appear angry, just curious. Despite the blood streaming from the wound across his forehead, he didn’t seem much affected by the blows Meloux had delivered. He flexed his left hand, trying to assess, Jenny imagined, the damage the old Mide had done.

“You can always smell a windigo,” Meloux said, not really answering the question.

“Up.” With Daniel’s gun, Cork motioned for the man to rise, which he did. “Open the door, Henry. Let Daniel in.”

As big as he was, Daniel, when he entered, still had to lift his
head to look into the face of the man called Windigo. Then he sniffed the air, and his own face took on a peculiar and startled look.

That’s when Jenny realized what she’d been smelling all along, the odor that had become stronger during their confrontation with Windigo, and that was now almost overpowering. Because she’d been focused on the gun barrel leveled at her chest and the standoff between her father and Windigo, she had ignored it. She couldn’t ignore it now. The odor of rotten egg, of sulfur, filling the trailer.

“Gas,” she said. She remembered the white tank she’d seen off to the side of the trailer. “Propane.”

“Outside.” Cork waved his pistol toward the door.

“Nope,” Windigo responded. “And I wouldn’t think about coercing me with that sidearm of yours. The muzzle blast’ll blow us all to smithereens.”

Before Meloux could move to hit him again with the rebar, Windigo pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket and held it out, his thumb on the striker.

“Like I said, you’re free to go. Me, I’m staying.”

“Jenny, Mariah,” Daniel said. “Let’s go.”

Mariah remained on the sofa, and Jenny couldn’t tell if she had any idea what was happening. She took Mariah’s arm and tried to ease her up. The girl pulled away.

“Danny?” Mariah said.

Daniel walked to her from the doorway. “Give me your doll, Mariah, and I’ll take you both outside.” He said it gently and without any hint that her life might depend on it. Or everyone’s, for that matter.

Mariah put Raggedy Ann into his hands and eased herself up. Daniel took her arm and led her toward the door. As she passed the man that she knew as Angel and that Jenny and the others called Windigo, she said, “You promised it would be nice.”

“Heaven is what I promised. In a while, little squirrel, I’d have got you there.”