Windigo Island (6 page)

The kid got up, slid the crutches under his arms, and started to leave. Then he turned back.
“Migwech,”
he said and hobbled away.

Buffalo remained seated. He folded his paint-speckled hands on the tabletop and leaned toward Cork. “I’ve got a PhD, but I’m still Anishinaabe. I’ve lived on the shore of Kitchigami most of my life. I know there’s more to that great lake than I can ever imagine. If Kyle says he heard a windigo, he heard a windigo. If he says he saw Michi Peshu, he saw Michi Peshu.”

“Watch your son, Mr. Buffalo,” Cork warned. “Carrie Verga also heard a windigo call her name.”

For a long moment, the two men, two fathers, sat in the silence of that kitchen, knowing absolutely that there were monsters in the world, and knowing as well that they could not possibly protect their children from them all.

Chapter 11

T
he
Argos
came into the marina with its sails furled, moving smoothly under the power of its engine. Cork knew little about sailboats. This one looked to be about forty feet long, with a single mast and two sails. The hull was sleek white, and he suspected it was constructed of fiberglass but couldn’t say for sure. What he could say without doubt was that it cost a hell of a lot more than he would ever dream of paying for a boat. It eased into its slip. A young woman jumped lithely to the dock with rope in hand and tied off the bow to a cleat, then moved to the stern, where she was tossed a rope and did the same there. The engine died. A minute later, a compact, tanned man wearing a white ball cap and white shorts, a dark blue Polo shirt, blue boat shoes, and black Ray-Bans joined the young woman on the dock. Young woman? That was stretching it. Cork judged her to have been just out of high school, if that. She had long blond hair and wore dungarees and a beige linen shirt, unbuttoned, over a yellow bikini top. They kissed, and the man patted her behind and said something. She laughed and went back aboard the sailboat. The man walked the dock toward Cork.

“O’Connor?” he asked, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses.

“Mr. Verga?”

“Call me Demetri.” They shook hands. “Why don’t we go into the bar? I could use something cold.”

Inside, Verga took a table next to a window that overlooked the marina, where the masts of the sailboats stood white as bare
aspen trunks against the silvery blue of Chequamegon Bay. He finally removed his sunglasses, and Cork saw that his eyes were algae green. His face was broad and weathered, and the dark stubble of his cheeks made his skin there look charred. Cork put him at maybe fifty.

A waitress came immediately.

Verga said to Cork, “You want something?” As it had on the phone earlier, the man’s voice carried the hint of a Mediterranean accent.

“You have Leinenkugel’s?”

“We do,” the waitress said.

“I’ll take a Leinie’s.”

“Two, Mitzi,” Verga said, and the waitress vanished.

“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me, Demetri.”

Verga waved it away. “No big deal.”

“I hope I didn’t take you off the lake.”

“I’ll go back out later.”

“You seem to spend a good deal of time on that sailboat of yours.”

Verga held up his hands. The palms carried long scars that looked as if they may have been from rope burns. “I’m Greek. Sailing’s in my blood.” He leaned his forearms, muscled and knotted with veins, on the table. “So you’re trying to find Mariah Arceneaux. Good luck.”

“I’m sorry about Carrie.”

“Thanks. Except I kind of figured something terrible had happened, so I had time to prepare myself.”

“Why so sure something terrible?”

“Everybody I talked to when Carrie ran away told me kids come back. She never did.”

The beers were delivered, bottled and cold and dripping with condensation. Verga took a long draw, and when he’d swallowed, Cork asked him, “Did you have any sense at all where Carrie might have gone?”

Verga wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “None.
Clueless. I kept thinking I’d get a call from her when she ran out of money. She never called. Like she dropped off the face of the earth.”

Cork drank from his own bottle. The beer went down with a satisfying chill. “What did you think when Carrie’s body washed ashore?” he asked.

“I still don’t know what to think. I ask myself, Where the hell has she been all this time? Up here somewhere? Where would she hide, and why?”

“What was she like?”

“A terrific kid.” Verga took another long draw, belched, and didn’t bother to apologize. “Her mom used to waitress here. Lot of times while she was working, she didn’t have anybody to watch Carrie, so she brought her to the marina. Carrie was real good, real helpful. Used to hang out on the docks, always asking about sailing. So I started taking her and her mom out on the water occasionally. Carrie was a natural. A born sailor. Her mom, not so much. Prone to seasickness, real nervous about falling in. One thing led to another, and Christine and me got married. I adopted Carrie. We became a family.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three years.”

“I understand your wife drowned in the lake.”

“Yeah. Terrible, terrible thing. We’d sailed out to Cat Island, all of us. Anchored there for the night. Christine never drank while we were sailing, but once I lowered the canvas, she usually made up for lost time. That night, she really put it away. We went to bed, woke up in the morning, and she was gone. Just gone. Me and Carrie looked all over for her. Finally radioed the Coast Guard. They found her on the bottom of the lake not far from the boat, wearing what she was wearing when we went to bed. As near as I can figure, she got up in the night, went up on deck, God knows why, and stumbled overboard. She wasn’t much of a swimmer. And with all that alcohol in her . . .” He finished with a fatalistic shrug and another draw from his beer.

“You never heard her call out?” Cork asked.

“Never heard a thing. Neither did Carrie.”

“That must’ve been quite a blow.”

“It was tough on both of us.”

“You’re still sailing, I see. What about Carrie? I mean before she ran away.”

“Didn’t keep her off the lake at all. Affected her in other ways, though. She got real quiet.”

Cork sipped his Leinie’s. Verga’s eyes had shifted away from the table, and Cork saw that he was watching the waitress, Mitzi, who was a redhead, tattooed and big-breasted and no more than twenty-one.

“Were you surprised when she ran away?”

Verga brought his attention back to the table. “Yeah, it hit me hard.”

“Any idea why she ran?”

“Anyone who says they understand teenagers, Mr. O’Connor, is a damn liar.”

“Did you try to find her?”

“Of course I did. I pushed the sheriff’s people down in Washburn to look into it. I talked to everybody I could think of who knew her. Went over to the reservation and asked around. That’s when I learned that Mariah was gone, too. That’s all I learned. Those people wouldn’t say shit to me.”

“How did you know she ran away? Couldn’t she have been abducted?”

“She packed up. Took everything with her that meant anything. My housekeeper, Bibi, told me another girl picked her up in a car.”

“What girl?”

“Bibi couldn’t say. Never saw her before.”

“Mariah Arceneaux?”

“Not her. Bibi knew Mariah. She’d been to my house before and had gone sailing with Carrie and me. This was someone else.”

“What did she look like? Did your housekeeper give any description?”

“Indian. That’s about it.”

“Young? Old?”

“A kid, like Carrie. But Bibi did say she was driving a nice set of wheels. Kind of unusual for a kid from Bad Bluff. I told all this to Joe Hammer, the investigator from the sheriff’s office. He didn’t get anywhere with it.”

Cork’s statement was a tough one, and he was quiet while he considered how to couch it.

“I talked to Hammer, too. Considering the state in which Carrie was found, one of his speculations is that she might have been involved in sex traffic.”

“You mean like a prostitute? Carrie?” Verga’s eyebrows came together, storm clouds colliding. Anger stirred in the algae-green eyes beneath. “He never said that to me.”

“You think he’s wrong,” Cork said, stating it as fact.

“I think when I see him next, I may have to put my fist down his throat. Spreading garbage like that about Carrie. Who the hell does he think he is?”

“Does the name Raven Duvall mean anything to you?”

“Nothing. Why? Should it?”

“It’s possible that’s the name of the girl who drove off with Carrie.”

“And you know this how?”

“It’s the kind of thing I get paid to find out.”

“You said you’re working for Mariah’s family, yes?”

“I said I was investigating on their behalf.”

Verga eyed him a long time and with suspicion. “Someone else footing the bill?”

“Client confidentiality,” Cork replied.

“What does it cost to hire you?”

Cork told him.

Verga said, “I hire you, you’ll share anything you find out with me?”

“I already have a client.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. The Arceneaux family. For them, you’re finding Mariah. But for me, you’ll be looking for someone else.”

“Who?”

“The son of a bitch who killed Carrie.”

“Officially, her death was an accident.”

“You believe that?”

“At this point, I don’t really know what to believe.”

“So what about it? You’ll work for me?”

“Let me think on it, okay? The ethics might be tricky.”

“Ethics.” Verga finished his beer, set it hard on the tabletop with a crack of glass against wood, and said, “Fuck ethics.”

Chapter 12

A
s Cork drove into Bayfield, his cell phone rang. He pulled off the road, but not in time. He checked the display. The call had come from Jenny.

“Charged your battery?” Cork said.

“At the library,” Jenny confirmed. “We finished there a while ago. Where are you?”

“Just coming into town. Where do you want to meet?”

“We should think about a place to stay for the night.”

“How about the casino hotel?” Cork suggested.

“Meet you there.”

The Shining Waters casino and hotel complex was modest compared to many of the Indian casinos Cork had seen in Minnesota. It sat on the shore of Kitchigami with a broad, lovely view of Basswood Island across West Channel. The parking lot wasn’t particularly full, and when they asked at the reception desk inside, they had no trouble securing accommodations. Cork and his daughter took a lake-facing room with two queen beds. English took a room with a king, same view. They carried their bags up and agreed to meet at the hotel bar to share information. Jenny wanted to call home and check on Waaboo, so Cork went down ahead of her and found English sitting at a table next to a window.

“Got a call from Red,” English told him. “Invited us to dinner at Louise’s place.” He was quiet a long few moments, then said, “It’s an important gesture.”

“Did he give you a time?”

“In an hour. Said Louise had something important she wanted to tell us.”

“He didn’t say what?”

“Not a word.”

“Maybe she’s finally figured out the answer to Henry’s riddle.”

“Good luck to her,” English said, “because we didn’t get much.”

“What did you find?”

The bar wasn’t hopping, and the noise of the casino machines was distant enough that it masked nothing they said, so English spoke quietly. “She was just a kid. Just a regular kid. Her earliest Facebook postings were about Justin Bieber. And horses. That was three years ago, when she was turning eleven. She posted some poetry about wolves. Pretty good, I thought. She talked a little about being Shinnob, but not much. She wasn’t very proud of her heritage, I think. I would love to have had a chance to work with her on that.”

“But you almost never saw her.”

“And I’m regretting it. I feel like we deserted her. Like we deserted all of them up here. They’re family, but they’re also so much of what the white world expects of Indians.”

“What the white world made of Indians,” Cork said.

“Some Indians,” English replied, and Cork acknowledged that truth with a nod.

Jenny appeared and sat down with them, and a barmaid finally came and took their drink orders. Cork thought his daughter seemed subdued. In fact, he thought she might have been crying.

“Everything okay at home?” he asked.

“Waaboo and Aunt Rose are getting along just fine.”

“So why the long face?”

“How do you do it, Dad?”

“Do what?”

“Get all tangled up in people’s lives and people’s problems without it tearing you apart.”

“Who says it doesn’t?”

“You always seem so unemotional about an investigation.”

“And that’s hard for you?”

“Jesus, I spent the last couple of hours steeped in Mariah’s life. I feel like she’s my little sister.”

“Nishiime,”
Cork said.

Jenny shot him a questioning look.

English said to her, “Means ‘little sister’ in Ojibwe. I get what you’re saying, Jenny. I was just telling Cork the same thing.”

That made her nod, in agreement or sympathy or alliance. Whatever it was, Cork felt she saw herself—and maybe English—on one side of a line of behavior and he was on the other. He decided not to push it.

“What did you learn?” he asked her.

“I was hoping she might have posted what it was she loves most. You know, so we can help Louise answer Henry’s riddle. It’s the kind of thing kids put on Facebook.”

“But she didn’t?”

Jenny shook her head.

“Did you find out anything?”

Her gloom continued. “That she’s a reader. She liked
The Hunger Games
. That she got a guitar for her twelfth birthday and was learning to play. Home was too noisy and confused, so she would go down to the lakeshore to practice. The first day she did that, she saw an eagle soaring overhead. She thought maybe it was a good sign, but didn’t really know what it meant. She doesn’t understand the place of eagles in her culture. She said she knew they’re important and wanted to know more. She has a friend who’s really into being Anishinaabe and who’s learning the jingle dance. She envies her because she’s proud of being Indian. She hates her big brother, Toby. She thinks he’s mean and doesn’t do anything and hangs out with mean boys. But she really likes her cousin Puck. He’s more a big brother to her than her real big brother. And she likes her uncle Red. He’s kind of mean sometimes, too, but not to her. She understands that’s because he was in jail, and things are hard for him. When she goes into Bayfield, people treat her cold sometimes, just because she’s Indian.”

Jenny spoke as if Mariah were still in their midst, still present in Bad Bluff. Still alive.

“Then around a year ago, a little while before she ran away, her posts began to change. Listen to this, Dad.” From her purse, she pulled a slip of paper on which she’d written, “ ‘Dogs wander the woods along the lake north of my town. I think they used to be pets but got abandoned or something. They don’t belong to anybody, and they always have this hungry look. I don’t know if they’ll attack or not, so I try to stay away from them. Old guys look at me the same way.’” Jenny set the paper down and lifted her sad, blue eyes to her father. “It wasn’t long after that she changed the picture on her Facebook page to the one that’s so scary. And then she stopped posting altogether. I think something very bad happened to her before she ran away.”

“Any clue what that was?”

She balled her right fist and cupped it in her left hand, and it reminded Cork of a sheathed weapon. “If I had to guess, I’d say someone abused her. After I saw the dramatic change in her Facebook picture and her posts, I had my suspicions, so I Googled symptoms of sexual abuse. From everything we’ve heard, it seems clear to me she was exhibiting a lot of that behavior before she left. The sudden disinterest in her studies, in basketball. The change in her appearance. Those expensive, sexy underthings Leslie Littlejohn found in her locker.”

“If that’s true, any clue about the abuser?”

Jenny glanced at English. Apologetic, accusatory, Cork couldn’t say. “Family is usually the first place you look.”

English replied, “If we need to turn over rocks, we turn them over. Red’s invited us to dinner at Louise’s house. Maybe it’s time we asked the hard questions. But I can tell you this. If there are shameful secrets, getting anyone to talk about them will be like asking a tree to speak.”

Cork leaned nearer and said quietly, “If she was abused, it might not have been by her family. I just talked with Demetri Verga, Carrie’s father. There’s a man I’m not much inclined to
like. And I heard and saw things that make me think digging deeper into the dynamic of that particular family would be a good idea.”

Their drinks arrived. When the barmaid had gone, Cork related his interview with Verga.

After he’d finished, Jenny said, “Her mother drowned and only Verga and Carrie were around? Only their word about what happened? But if there was something fishy about her death, wouldn’t Carrie have said so?”

“Maybe she didn’t know anything. Or maybe she had reasons of her own for not coming forward. But I find it uncomfortably coincidental that both Carrie and her mother died in the same lake in the same way.”

Lines of concern cut across English’s broad smooth brow. “You think Demetri Verga is a man capable of killing? Maybe killing twice?”

“What I believe is that, under the right circumstances, anyone is capable of anything. Verga told me quite a lot, but what of it was true I couldn’t say for sure. It all sounded rehearsed. He got mad when I told him that Hammer thinks Carrie might have been trafficked, but even that didn’t ring true. He tried to hire me, ostensibly to find who killed Carrie. I’m thinking it was more a question of trying to keep track of what I discover. So I’d like to know more about Demetrius Verga. Particularly in light of Mariah’s post about old guys looking at her hungrily.”

“Where do we go from here?” Jenny asked.

“Dinner with Red and Louise,” Cork said. “And I’d like to talk to Puck Arceneaux, if he’s around. I’d also like to see if we can track down the family of Raven Duvall.”

“Raven? The girl Mariah and Carrie were hanging with toward the end here? You found out her last name?” Jenny finally sounded a hopeful note.

“They weren’t just hanging around with her. I think she might have been their way out. According to Verga, a girl picked up Carrie the day she disappeared.”

“Hammer didn’t say anything about that when we talked to him this morning,” English said.

“Maybe he didn’t investigate as thoroughly as he tried to make us believe,” Cork replied.

Jenny said, “Verga told you Raven’s last name?”

Cork shook his head. “He claimed not to know who it was that had picked up Carrie. But like I said, I don’t know what was true and what was bullshit. The chief of the Bad Bluff police told me Raven’s last name. I thought it might be a good lead, so I made a call to Tamarack County and asked Marsha Dross—our sheriff and a good friend of mine,” he explained to English, “to check on a driver’s license. She got back to me pretty quick. Said no license had been issued in that name in either Wisconsin or Minnesota. So a dead end there. But I keep coming back to Bigboy, the Bad Bluff police chief. In the end, he didn’t really give me much. Seemed awfully protective of his town.”

“What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

“In my experience, a small town is like a family,” Cork said. “Nobody wants to air the dirty laundry in public. And although they may all know the dirty secrets, even among themselves they don’t talk about it. But, you know, I got a bad feeling from Bigboy that didn’t necessarily have anything do with being protective, so there may be more to dig into on that front.”

Jenny looked perplexed. “If nobody talks, how do you get your questions answered?”

“Two ways. You find the right arms and you twist really hard.”

“Or?” English said.

“In a place like this, you get Henry Meloux to ask the questions.”