Vermilion Drift (24 page)

Cork believed that a forest was a living thing and that people who paid attention heard its voice and smelled its breath and knew its face. He realized very quickly that Millie Joseph had been right. In that place, the forest was sick. Not with blight caused by beetle or fungus, but suffused with a sense of malice.

Mudjimushkeeki
, he thought. Like the Parrant estate, this was a place of very bad medicine. Although he couldn’t remember ever having been there, the way seemed oddly familiar to him, and the deeper he went into the trees, the more powerful became his own sense of resistance.

After fifteen minutes, feeling far weaker than the distance and the effort should have made him, he came to a place almost devoid of undergrowth. It was backed by a ragged wall of bare, slate-colored rock. The place was dead quiet. He couldn’t hear the call of a single bird among the trees or see the dart of a single insect in the air. He felt a little nauseated and realized that his stomach was knotted in a way that usually only happened when he was very afraid.

What was there to be afraid of?

Cork stood momentarily paralyzed. He thought about the fact that he’d spent a good deal of his life in places where great trauma or tragedy had occurred, arenas where death was a regular contender. Yet he’d never before felt what he felt from the clearing in which he now stood, where even the sunlight seemed sucked dry of its energy.

He started toward the rock wall and within moments saw the outline of a cabin foundation in the dirt, a black rectangle of half-buried, charred logs. A dozen yards to the north was the foundation of another burned structure, much smaller than the cabin. Cork paused before
he crossed the boundary of the cabin logs. He fought against the urge to turn and run. Finally he stepped inside the rectangle.

The ground was bare, with a deep covering of soil dry as ash. Cork’s boots left clear impressions as he walked. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but wished he’d brought a shovel or something suitable to turn the dirt, to sift the past. He could tell the basic layout of the cabin. One large room, two smaller rooms. Beyond that, the ruin told him very little. He knelt, lifted a handful of the dry earth, and let it slide between his fingers. It left a gray residue that Cork wiped on his pant leg. He stepped out of the outline of the cabin and went to the smaller structure. A storage shed perhaps? A garage? The ground there was ash-dry as well, and Cork saw boot tracks. They were clean, the edges still well defined. Not much time had passed since they’d been made. He turned in a circle, scanning the trees around the clearing, the top of the rock wall. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t being watched. He realized his gut had knotted even more. He didn’t like this place, didn’t like it one bit.

But he’d come for a reason, and he turned back to his purpose. He began to kick through the layer of dry soil in the smaller ruin, searching for a clue to the purpose of the original structure. The toe of his boot hit metal. Cork bent, felt in the dirt, and his fingers touched rusted iron. He dug and got a grip and pulled from its grave a long and heavy chain with an open iron cuff at each end. He rose slowly and realized he was holding a set of manacles.

He laid the piece down, knelt, and began to scrape through the dirt, using his fingers as a rake. It took him five minutes before he came across the bones.

There was nothing large, only chips and fragments. And a tooth. He knew that fire burned flesh and muscle and cartilage completely, but even a crematorium couldn’t get rid of all the bone in a body or any of the teeth. Who’d died in the fire here almost fifty years ago? Indigo Broom? Was this the reason for his disappearance? And if so, who was it that caused him to disappear in this way?

He was so engrossed in his thinking that he didn’t hear until it was too late the soft patter at his back of someone in a rush. He tried
to turn, but not quickly enough, and the morning exploded, brighter than sunlight, followed by a darkness more than night.

He came to feeling as if his skull had been split open across the back. His right cheek pressed against the ground, and the taste of dirt was in his mouth. He lifted himself slowly, waiting a moment on his knees for everything around him to stop spinning. He spit wet, black grit and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He tried to stand, returned to his knees, gathered himself, and finally came to his feet. He realized he was no longer inside the foundation of the smaller structure. He’d been dragged outside the ruin. Inside, the ash-dry dirt carried rake marks. The whole area had been carefully gone over. He checked his watch and realized that he’d been out for nearly two hours. He could have dug some to check for anything that might still have remained, but he doubted he’d find anything. Besides, he wasn’t seeing particularly well at the moment and was worried about the pain in his head. He turned and stumbled away, eager to be clear of the sickness of that place.

W
hen they heard how long Cork had been unconscious, the ER staff at Aurora Community Hospital immediately took X-rays and then did a CT scan. The results showed no fracture and nothing more serious than minor swelling to the area outside the skull where the blow had landed. They were frankly amazed.

“My hard Irish head,” Cork joked.

They wanted to keep him overnight for observation; he told them no, he had things to do. They argued, but in the end sent him home with lots of Tylenol and a printed sheet of symptoms that might indicate more serious developments later. He stripped his clothes off and showered the dirt from his body, fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and, against medical advice, popped the cap on a cold bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer.

He sat on the patio, where he tossed a tennis ball for Trixie to chase, nibbled on his sandwich, drank his beer, and tried to figure who’d blindsided him.

When Jo was alive, he’d often consulted with her, tossed questions and speculations her way to get her response. She’d had a fine mind and was somehow able to think logically without losing sight of the human element and its unpredictability and to remember always the need for compassion in any of Cork’s considerations. Left to himself, Cork tended to be easily influenced by his prejudices and selfish concerns, and he wasn’t certain he could trust any of his own conclusions.

But there was no other option, so he thought alone through the things that troubled him.

Someone had been there ahead of him. The boot tracks inside the
smaller foundation told him that. How long before his own arrival, he couldn’t say, but it was entirely possible that, whoever it was, his coming had surprised them, and they’d slipped into the trees and simply waited for their chance to bushwhack him. He’d seen no other vehicles on Waagikomaan. Did that mean they’d hiked in, or they’d parked somewhere out of sight? And what were they after? Cork hadn’t known exactly what he’d find, but his assailant had brought a rake and so must have had a pretty good idea of what was there. Bones and teeth. They could have been from additional victims of Broom’s savagery, or they could have been the remains of Broom himself. Because he hadn’t learned of anyone else who’d gone missing over forty years earlier except those discovered in the Vermilion Drift, and because the burning of the cabin coincided with the disappearance of Indigo Broom, Cork was inclined to think they belonged to the man Millie Joseph had darkly referred to as “Mr. Windigo.”

Who would have known about Broom’s death?

Sam Winter Moon must have known because the story he’d spread about Broom leaving the rez to be with relatives somewhere else had clearly been a lie.

Did Cork’s mother know? His father? Henry Meloux? And if they knew, what had been their part in getting rid of Broom?

The night before, after the nightmare of his father dying, he’d lain awake thinking about what Meloux had said, that Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh had behaved like Windigos, cannibalizing their victims. Which was probably the reason for the cuts Agent Upchurch had found on the bones from the Vermilion Drift. But something that gruesome had to be well hidden, carried out in great secrecy, and where could that have been? Which had got Cork to wondering about where Indigo Broom had lived. When Millie Joseph told him it was a cursed place, he’d been almost certain he had the answer he was seeking. And when he’d found the manacles, he knew absolutely it was a place of horrific incident.

Cork sipped his beer and watched Trixie romping in the afternoon sun, and he puzzled over Broom and Monique Cavanaugh, who came from two very different worlds but in the darkness of their souls were united. How did they connect? How did evil find evil?

The Internet might have been a way, but 1964 was decades too early. A personal ad in the
Aurora Sentinel
? Cork could just imagine:
MWF with bloodlust seeks like companion
. Finally Cork decided there might have been another way, an age-old way of connecting.

He went inside and looked up a telephone number in his address book, then dialed.

He ordered Leinie’s for them both, and when the beers came, he slid one of the frosted mugs over to Cy Borkman.

“Thanks, Cork. Been too long since we tipped brews together.” Borkman tapped Cork’s mug, then took a long draw from his own and wiped foam from his upper lip. “How’s the investigation going?”

“Plodding along,” Cork said.

“Yeah, after you talked to me, Simon Rutledge looked me up, covered the same ground about the priest. You guys really ought to coordinate better.”

“We’re trying, Cy. Which is one reason I called.”

“I figured.” Borkman smiled. “What do you need?”

They sat at the bar of the Four Seasons with a view of the marina through a long bank of windows off to their right. When Cork was a kid, the Four Seasons hadn’t been there and the marina had been a simple affair with three short docks where maybe a dozen boats were tied up at any given time. Now it was a forest of masts with sailboats too numerous to count, a summer port to ostentatious powerboats and small yachts that often sat idle in the water for weeks on end, playthings for the rich who looked on Aurora as a place of diversion and looked with thinly veiled disdain on those who called the town home.

Cork said, “Back in your early days with the department, was there a bar somewhere that had a particularly unsavory reputation? Someplace that catered to, I don’t know, a clientele like the Hells Angels maybe? The kind of place prone to trouble but the owner maybe preferred to handle it on his own.”

“Here in Aurora?”

“Probably not. Maybe not even in Tamarack County, but close enough that someone from Aurora could patronize it if they wanted to.”

“Oh, sure. Used to be a place like that in Yellow Lake. Jacque’s. Christ, there was a dive. Story was that the guy who built it was descended from one of the Voyageurs and his ancestor’s name was Jacque something or other. Pretty quiet in the winter, but come summer that place really jumped. Full of loggers and miners, big guys who could get pretty mean when they were drinking. A magnet for lowlifes, too, troublemakers of every kind. Bikers. Indians. Prostitutes. The joint had a little postage stamp of a stage and a strip show. Guy who owned it last, let’s see, his name was Fredricks or Fredrickson, something like that, he used to keep a loaded Mossberg behind the bar. Discharged that bad boy on a number of occasions, never at anyone, just to, you know, get everybody’s attention. That was when Hal Sluicer was chief of police in Yellow Lake. He never seemed to take much notice of what went on down at Jacque’s. Turned out Fredrickson, or whatever his name was, was paying Sluicer off. Eventually Sluicer got his ass fired. Yellow Lake went for a spell without a regular police presence and contracted with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement during that time.”

“You ever get a call down there?”

“Oh, yeah. That place kept us plenty busy.”

“Ever run into an Indian there name of Indigo Broom?”

“Broom? From the rez? Sure, Broom was right at home.”

“How about Monique Cavanaugh?”

Borkman seemed surprised. “What would a woman like her be doing in a place like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That lady had class. No way she’d be caught dead in a joint like that.”

“Maybe if she wore a wig and called herself something else?”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. Forget it.”

“Naw, you asked. Why?”

“The truth is, Cy, that I’m thinking there was some connection between Monique Cavanaugh and Indigo Broom. But they moved in
such different circles, I can’t figure out how they would have stumbled onto each other. I thought a place like Jacque’s might have provided the opportunity.”

“A woman like her with a guy like Broom? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t. Forget I said anything.”

Borkman sat quietly for some time sipping his beer. Cork watched a sailboat back from its slip, come around, and head out into the lake under the power of its engine. When it cleared the marina, a sail went up, an explosion of white against the blue of the sky, and the vessel tilted in the grip of the wind and glided east across the water.

“Jesus,” Borkman said. “Oh, Jesus.”

Cork turned on his stool. “What?”

Borkman looked at him, and his eyes were big circles of wonderment.

“What is it, Cy?”

Borkman didn’t answer immediately. Cork could tell he was working through something in his head.

“Your father was a good man,” Borkman finally said, but so softly that Cork had to lean to him. “But he wasn’t a perfect man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, I shouldn’t be telling you this, you of all people.”

“Don’t crap out on me now, Cy.”

“It was decades ago, so I suppose…” Borkman gripped his beer with both hands, as if the mug was all that anchored him. “Look, your father was seeing another woman.”

“What?”

Borkman said, “It wasn’t that he didn’t love your mother. It’s just that sometimes a man, well, you understand.”

“No, Cy, I don’t. Enlighten me.”