Manitou Canyon (4 page)

“This isn't about Henry.”

He was quiet a long time, and she let him be with his thoughts.

“November,” he finally said.

She knew his history with that month, knew that for him the darkness of
Gashkadino-Giizis
wasn't about the clouds or the cold or even the bitter winter that would follow.

“Ghosts,” she said. “You need to let them go.”

“They come to me. I don't go looking.”

She stopped suddenly and turned to him. “Let me or Uncle Henry do a sweat with you before you go. It would be so good for you, and I'd feel better.”

“Like I told Henry, a lot to do to get ready for tomorrow.”

“Then go and get ready, but come back.”

He looked away from her, his eyes taking in the low, ragged clouds. “When this is done,” he said and walked away toward the line of trees where the path disappeared.

Though it tore her heart, she let him go.

C
HAPTER
6

I
n the dark of early morning, he left his bed and dressed. Downstairs he found a light on in the kitchen, coffee dripping into the pot, his sister-in-law, Rose, at the stove. She wore a red robe and white slippers and was scrambling eggs.

“Bread's toasting,” she said.

Long ago, she'd been a part of the O'Connor household, helping to care for her sister's children and contemplating a life as a nun when that responsibility was finished. But she'd met a man, Mal Thorne, a priest who'd lost his way. As they both were fond of saying, God gave them a new life together. She wasn't a classic beauty, but Cork thought her beautiful in many ways. Not the least of which was that generosity of spirit which had always been at the heart of who she was. When her sister, Jo O'Connor, was killed, she'd stepped in and had often filled the maternal shoes. Now, with Jenny's wedding so near, she'd come from her home in Evanston, mostly to help cover Waaboo while Jenny directed her energies toward the nuptials. Her husband, Mal, who ran a shelter for the homeless in Chicago, was planning to arrive just in time for the wedding.

“You didn't have to do this, Rose,” Cork said.

“Were you going to eat before you left?” she asked without turning from the stove.

“Figured I'd grab coffee and a breakfast sandwich from the Gas 'N Go.”

“You really want heartburn out there in the Boundary Waters? Pour yourself a cup of coffee, get a plate and silverware, and sit down. The eggs are almost ready.”

He did as she'd instructed.

“Two days,” she said. “Right?”

“Two days, maybe three.”

“Unless you find something.”

“Unless I find something.”

Rose began transferring the eggs to a serving bowl. “So you'll be back in plenty of time for the wedding.”

“Absolutely.”

“Good.”

She set the steaming eggs on the table. She'd mixed in onion, peppers, mushrooms, and cheddar cheese. The toast popped up. She pulled out the pieces and set them on his plate, then poured coffee for herself and sat down. She hadn't brushed her hair yet. and in places it sprang out from her head in rust-colored splashes.

“I looked at the ten-day forecast. Snow possible by Thursday.”

“They're predicting only flurries.”

“I'll offer up a few prayers in that direction.”

Jenny came into the kitchen, looking sleepy. She'd thrown on a robe over her pajamas, but her feet were bare.

“You didn't have to get up,” Cork said.

“Smelled the coffee.”

She yawned, poured herself a cup, and joined them at the table. They sat together in the bright light of the O'Connor kitchen. Beyond the windows, the world was still nothing but darkness.

“I don't know what to hope for,” Jenny said. “If you find something, I suppose that would be a good thing. But it'll keep you out there longer.”

“There's no way I'm going to miss the wedding,” Cork said. “I promise.”

“And you're nothing if not a man who keeps his promises.”

Cork heard her biting tone. “Suppose it was me out there and you really believed there was a chance I was still alive,” he said. “Wouldn't you want someone looking?”

“I suppose,” she admitted.

He finished his meal, took his plate and silverware, and set them in the dishwasher.

“Time?” Jenny said.

“Time,” he replied.

He took his leather jacket from where it hung on a peg next to the door. Jenny stood up and gave her father a hug.

“Come back as soon as you can, Dad. And be safe.”

“Give that grandson of mine a hug for me. Tell him I'll be back soon.”

“I'll do that.”

Rose took him in her arms. Into his ear, she whispered, “Godspeed.”

* * *

Lindsay Harris was waiting for him in front of the Four Seasons, the best hotel in town. It overlooked the marina and Iron Lake, a view totally unimpressive in the dark at six o'clock on an overcast November morning. As he'd instructed her, she had a full pack with a sleeping bag rolled and secured atop it. He took her gear and hefted it into the back of his Expedition.

“Your brother not bothering to see you off?” Cork asked.

“He's a late sleeper. And a little bit of a monster if you wake him too early.”

She wore a sweater under a quilted vest, long pants, Timberland boots, and an odd stocking cap, red and white striped, straight out of
Where's Waldo
?

“That stocking cap is something else,” he said.

She gave a little shrug. “A gift from my grandfather. Goofy, I know, but well, you understand.”

“Did you eat?”

“I arranged with the hotel for an early meal. Pretty hearty.”

“All right, then.”

Cork got in behind the wheel. Lindsay took the passenger side. He drove away from the lights of the hotel, down Oak Street, which was empty except for his Expedition. They were out of town in five minutes, rolling southeast along the shoreline of the lake.

“I don't think I slept a wink last night,” Lindsay said.

“Worried?”

“Troubled, I'd say.”

“By what?”

“Thinking this will be nothing but a wild-goose chase.”

“Then why go?”

“Trevor's dream. It sounds crazy, I know, but it's got to mean something. Right? I mean it was so specific. Stephen O'Connor. Did you talk to him about it?”

“Stephen's in Arizona, somewhere on Navaho land, hiking in the desert. No way to reach him.”

“Just like in Trevor's dream.” She sounded amazed and relieved. “I was ready to give up, and then that dream. I didn't know if you'd believe us. But then you're Indian, right? And Indians know about visions.”

“My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Anishinaabe. But there's a lot of stubborn Irish in my heritage, too, and I've never had a vision, so I'm more than a little skeptical.” Cork slowed in an area he knew to be a favorite crossing for deer. “I'll tell you up front that I don't think we'll find anything. So many of us went over the area so thoroughly.”

“But what about Trevor's dream? And that feeling you said you had that something wasn't right?”

“Maybe that's what the dream means. Maybe not. We've got a couple days to find out.”

They drove for an hour and a half, most of it on a gravel road that skirted the Iron Lake Reservation and took them north. A rat-gray light slowly suffused the sky and the thick ceiling of clouds. The Northwoods, dark and damp and forbidding, gradually emerged around them. Cork pulled into the parking area for their entry into the Boundary Waters. It was no surprise to him that his Expedition was the sole vehicle there. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was a vast tract, more than a million acres of unbroken forest, pristine lakes, fast rivers, and no human settlement. On the other side of the Canadian border was the Quetico Provincial Park, another million acres of the same wilderness.
People sometimes got lost out there. In summer, they had a decent chance of surviving until they were found. November and beyond, the odds became daunting.

They unloaded their packs and provisions, then Lindsay helped Cork slide the canoe from where it had been secured atop the Expedition. They carried it together down a short path to a small lake and set it in the water. They returned to the parking area, grabbed the paddles and the rest of their things, and loaded the canoe. Cork directed her to the bow. He took the stern and shoved them off.

It was a cold morning, but not bitterly so. The overcast moderated the temperature. The air was still, the water a perfect mirror of the gray sky. The lake was long and narrow, with a wall of dark rock running along the far side. In summer, the lake would have been home to loons and ducks and Canada geese, but all those birds had wisely fled long ago. The lake was silent now, except for the dip and swirl and occasional splash of their paddles.

Lindsay Harris was in good shape and knew her way around a canoe. In the stern, Cork guided them toward the first portage. There would be several more lakes and portages before they reached Raspberry. He tried to look ahead, wondering what they might find when they arrived, what they might see this time that had been missed before, and wondering deeply about the true meaning of the dream that was bringing them back to that place.

* * *

Rainy Bisonette woke with a start. She lay on her bed in her little cabin, beneath her blankets, shaken by a fear so sudden and deep that it had startled her from sleep. She stared up into a dark that showed no hint of morning yet. Her first thought was of Cork. She would have loved nothing more than to have him with her in that bed, each of them warmed by the nearness of the other. It was often that way. Cork was a regular visitor to Crow Point. He used to come mostly to see Henry, but now when he made that long hike in, it was more often for her.

His visit the day before had been troubling in so many ways.
She'd seen him recently growing more and more taciturn, staring into the fires she or Henry built on Crow Point in the sacred ring, gone someplace he wouldn't allow her or anyone else to follow. Some of it, she suspected, was the season. Late fall. The approach of November. She knew about his terrible history with that month. But there was more to it, something that gnawed at his spirit, that little by little, over a long time, had eaten away a part of his heart. She'd tried to probe him gently, but he pretended that he had no idea what she was talking about. She and Jenny—and Rose, too, now that she'd come to help with the wedding—had discussed the darkness they all saw in him lately. She'd asked her great-uncle for his advice. Henry, as usual, had offered her only a riddle.

“When he is gone, he is in a place he must go alone. There is a battle coming, Niece. He prepares himself.”

“A battle, Uncle Henry? Who with? Why hasn't he said anything?”

“Because he does not realize it yet.”

“Have you warned him?”

“I do not know when this battle will come. I only know that I see him preparing. No one can help him until he sees this himself.”

“If I sweated and asked the spirits, would they tell me?”

“Only the spirits can answer that.”

And so she'd wrung the sweat from her body in great rivers, asked for answers, prayed for guidance, but the spirits had remained silent.

In the end, there was nothing for her but to wait.

As she lay awake in the dark of that morning, afraid for the man she loved, she whispered her desperate prayer:

“Creator, in this battle he's preparing for, give him strength and courage and wisdom. And when this battle is over, Creator, bring him back to me. Bring him back whole in heart, in mind, in body, and in spirit.”

And because she'd been raised Episcopalian on her home reservation in Wisconsin, she added something from her Christian tradition as well. She said, “Amen.”

C
HAPTER
7

T
he mist descended, a wet, gray curtain that blotted out the distant landscape. Shorelines loomed dark and vague, and if Cork hadn't had such a good sense of the country, he might have been easily lost. But he'd been this way many times, both before John Harris disappeared and during the weeks of searching afterward.

They put on their rain gear and ate lunch on an island in Bear Lake at one of the official Boundary Waters campsites Cork knew well. He recalled a summer day on the island when his children were young and Jo was alive. Stephen—Stevie, in those days—had caught his first walleye. The photo of him holding it proudly, like a whale in his little hands, hung on the wall in Sam's Place.

Cork tried the satellite phone Deputy Azevedo had given him, per the sheriff's request. It wasn't really necessary. They didn't expect him to check in until that evening. Mostly, he wanted to make sure the unit was functioning correctly. It wasn't.

“No signal?” Lindsay Harris asked.

Cork shook his head. “The clouds maybe. Maybe this particular location. Sat phones can be tricky. I'll try again tonight. You doing okay?”

“Fine,” she said.

“You're good with a canoe.”

“After my parents died, I pretty much grew up in a boarding school in the Twin Cities. But summers in high school, I worked at a YMCA camp at the edge of the Boundary Waters, a place called
Widjiwagan. My grandfather came to visit me there one of those summers. That's always been a special memory for me.”

“When I knew your grandfather, he was too busy to enjoy the Boundary Waters,” Cork said. “He was a lot older than me, but he kind of took me under his wing. Called me Corky. I called him Johnny Do. When I was ten, I helped him rebuild a vintage 1934 Packard Eight. Sweetest car you ever saw.”

“I never heard him talk about his childhood, his life here in Aurora.”

Cork knew there was good reason for that.

The trouble had happened the summer Cork was twelve. John Harris had just graduated from high school. Harris's father was an attorney. Cork remembered him as a gruff man who seldom smiled and always seemed to smell of whiskey. There was some kind of business trouble, serious questioning of how the man had handled his clients' monies. Suits were pending, and maybe criminal charges as well. Cork recalled how quiet Johnny Do was in that time. Then one day Mr. Harris went out fishing and never came back. His boat was found nudged against the shoreline of Iron Lake, empty, the electric trawling motor still running, an open bottle of Jim Beam among the gear. Also, the boat's anchor was missing. The search had been exhaustive, but Iron Lake was large and Cork's father had finally called an end to the effort. Rumors floated. Because the man had recently increased his life insurance policy substantially, there was a good deal of speculation about suicide. But the suicide provision would have made that policy useless. Mrs. Harris and Johnny Do kept to themselves, talking to no one. Then a couple of weeks later, Cork's father located the body. Publicly, he said it was dumb luck. But Cork had overheard his father explain to his mother how he'd gone about it.

His father, like everyone else, believed the man had killed himself. And he thought if that was the case, and he were Harris and concerned about the well-being of his family, he'd try to hide the fact of the suicide. Which meant doing the deed somewhere out of sight. The trawling motor had been fixed with rope so that
it would travel in a straight line. Cork's father simply followed that line across Iron Lake, island to island, and finally found the body in ten feet of crystal-clear water off Bear Island. Publicly, he said he'd discovered the body tangled in the anchor line, clearly an accident, probably as a result of judgment badly impaired by the Jim Beam. The coroner, who at that time was also the town's mortician, ruled the death accidental drowning. The widow, Mrs. Harris, was paid the life insurance. Shortly thereafter, she and her son left Aurora, and Cork had not seen Johnny Do since.

When John Harris had first gone missing, suicide had, of course, been one of the speculations. But there'd been no evidence of any personal or business difficulties or any history of suicidal ideation. His grandchildren claimed to have seen no indication of any mental distress when they'd gone into the Boundary Waters. So pretty much that possibility had gone to the bottom of the list. Apparently Harris had never seen any reason to talk to his grandchildren about his father's death, so Cork decided that, at the moment, there was no reason for him to go into it either.

“It was a long time ago, and why would he talk about Aurora anyway?” Cork said. “A small memory in a life that's been full of large accomplishment.” Cork took a big bite of a Saltine heaped with tuna fish and cheese and spoke while he chewed. “When I heard he was back in Aurora, I hoped we might connect. But he went straight out into the Boundary Waters with you and Trevor, and, then, well . . .” He didn't say what was obvious. “What about your brother?”

“What about him?”

“He doesn't seem much interested in roughing it.”

“Never his thing. He was always into more self-indulgent pursuits.” There was a bitter edge to her words.

“And you? What are you into?”

“Tree hugging.” She smiled. “I graduated from Northland College with a specialty in environmental humanities. I'm doing graduate work at McGill in Canada.”

“You're in pretty good shape for an academic.”

“I hike a lot, camp out, canoe. Some of it for pleasure, some because of my studies. It all helps to keep me healthy.”

“Then you know you should drink a lot of water out here. You may not feel like it now, but you can easily dehydrate.”

“You sound like my grandfather.”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to.”

“That's okay.” She took his advice and drank deeply from her water bottle. She looked up into the gray mist that fell. “We were supposed to be here the first week of September. My favorite time in the Boundary Waters.”

“Mine, too,” Cork said. “No people, no bugs, and the color's gorgeous. What happened?”

“Grandpa John had to cancel. Dam business. His great African project.” She said it without trying to hide her sarcasm. “There's always been some project more important than me and Trevor. In a stupid way, I hoped our time together out here might change that.”

For a few moments, she sat in the gray quiet, her eyes taking in that dismal scene.

“The truth is that I don't really have family. My grandmother was an alcoholic, drank herself to death before I was old enough to really know her. Both my parents were alcoholics. Killed themselves driving drunk.”

“As I understand it, there can be a genetic component to addiction.”

“Trevor got that gene. He struggles.” She capped her water bottle, slipped it into her pack. “We're not really close, my brother and I, not like siblings should be. And Grandpa John's always been distant. So this”—and she opened her arms to everything around her—“this is home to me. This is family. Better than family. It never makes irrational demands. Never disappoints. It can be harsh, but never cruel. If you know how to accept it, even when it's the most challenging, it's still so awesome, so beautiful, so generous. You know?”

Cork understood. And he thought that if John Harris hadn't
vanished, who knew what gift the wilderness might have given them all?

* * *

When they broke from the portage that led to Raspberry Lake, they couldn't see anything of the far shore or of the big island that normally would have dominated the scene. The water, flat and hard-looking as burnished steel, disappeared into the mist that was both a very light drizzle and fog. They set the canoe on the lake, reloaded the gear, and Cork shoved them off.

“It feels forbidding,” Lindsay said.

“The mist?”

“The whole place. This is where he disappeared. Just vanished. I saw a tabloid headline that said aliens abducted him, another that said only an alien could have designed the projects he's built and he disappeared because he's gone back to his home planet. Stupid bullshit.”

Cork had heard of folks who claimed to have seen UFOs hovering above the Boundary Waters. There were photographs of fuzzy, dark objects. He'd seen a lot of inexplicable things in the wilderness, but nothing like that. Long ago, when Cork was very young, Henry Meloux had offered him this sage observation:
There are more things in these woods than a man can see with his eyes. More things than he can ever hope to understand.
Things of this earth, Cork thought, or of the spirit world, maybe. But not from outer space. Whatever had happened to John Harris, it had nothing to do with extraterrestrials.

As if reading his thoughts, Lindsay said, “But if it wasn't aliens, where did he go?”

She wasn't really asking him. It was a question directed more to that dismal curtain hiding everything around them.

Cork led them unerringly to the site where Harris, his grandchildren, and Dwight Kohler, their guide, had set up camp when the man vanished. They unloaded their gear, erected their tents, and stowed their packs inside, except for the bear bag with the food
in it. Cork walked a few yards away from the campsite and tied the bag to the trunk of a fallen pine.

“Shouldn't you hang that?” Lindsay asked.

“Ursack bear bag,” Cork said. “It's got a liner that seals in the smells. It's tough, too. A bear could play soccer with it for hours and not get at the food inside. But I doubt bears will be a problem. Most of them have probably already found somewhere to hibernate.”

“What now?” Lindsay asked, looking toward the lake.

“With the clouds and the mist, dark'll come early. We'll be lucky if we have a couple of hours of light. Best get started.”

Cork headed toward the canoe, which they'd tipped on the shoreline. They each grabbed an end and settled the craft back on the water. Once again, Lindsay took the bow and Cork the stern, and they shoved off.

“Where to first?” Lindsay asked over her shoulder.

“West. That's where he went when he disappeared.”

He guided them in that direction. It wasn't long before a great dark shape loomed to their left, behind the dim curtain.

As they passed, Lindsay said, “Shouldn't we check the island?”

“Tomorrow,” Cork replied. “We'll have to do some climbing. I'd rather wait for more light and maybe a little drier conditions. Those rocks can be treacherous when they're wet.”

They swung around to the north end of the horseshoe-shaped lake. Cork lifted his paddle from the water and laid it across the gunwales. When she realized what he'd done, Lindsay followed his lead. They drifted silently until their momentum dissipated, then they sat dead in the water.

Lindsay said, “This is where we found his canoe.”

“Yes.”

“Is there a reason we're just sitting here?”

“I'm waiting for something to come to me,” Cork said.

“You mean like an inspiration?”

“A man I know and trust told me not to look for an answer here. His advice was to let the answer come to me.”

She held to silence for a few minutes, then said, with a clear note of impatience, “So, we just sit here?”

“A lot of eyes went over this lake already, every inch of it. We had divers in the water, cadaver dogs on the shore. We brought in the Border Patrol, some of the best trackers you'll find anywhere. I'm thinking there may be a better way to find what we're looking for.”

She said, “So you're what? Listening?”

“Sensing is more like it. The Ojibwe believe that everything is invested with spirit. This lake has spirit, and spirit is awareness. Spirit remembers. If something happened to your grandfather here, the spirit knows.”

“And will the spirit here speak to you?”

He thought she was suppressing a smile, and he understood. “I guess we'll find out.”

After a while, he said, “Do you smell it?”

“What?”

“Orange.”

“The fruit?”

“Yes.”

She lifted her nose high into the air. “I get nothing.”

“Orange,” Cork said, mostly to himself and in a puzzled way.

“I don't know that I believe in spirits,” the young woman said. “But what I do believe is that in the absence of sufficient stimulation, the senses can fool themselves.”

“Hallucinations?”

“Mirages, that kind of thing.”

“Like oranges in the middle of the wilderness?” Cork laughed quietly. “Maybe you're right. Let's go.”

They paddled until they reached a place where the lake fed out in a little stream. The stream meandered through a boggy area full of tamaracks. When the search for John Harris had first begun, the needles had been bright yellow, and every tamarack was like a flaming torch. Now the needles had been shed and the trees had become skeletal.

“They searched that bog,” Lindsay said.

“A man can disappear in a bog and never be found.”

“And searchers, if they're not careful, can disappear there, too. You're not planning to go in, are you?”

“No. And I don't think your grandfather went in either. At least not of his own accord.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“That from everything I know about him, he was a pretty savvy guy. And savvy guys don't go strolling in dangerous bogs.”

“Unless?”

“That's what I'm trying to figure out.”

She turned and looked at him. “You have a mind like my grandfather.”

“Meaning?”

“He looks at a situation from all the usual angles, then he steps back and considers the unusual. It's part of what's made him so successful, I think.”

The mist and fog had turned everything around them the color of ash from a fire. Cork said, “We should be getting back to camp. It'll be dark soon. We'll go over this whole lake tomorrow.”