Vermilion Drift (18 page)

Hattie had decorated her yard and home with artwork by other Indian artists, which she’d acquired over the years. On her lawn, never well kept and chronically crowded with dandelions, stood a tall, rusting iron sculpture meant to represent a quiver full of arrows. There was a chain saw carving, a great section of honey-colored maple topped with a huge bust of
makwa
, a bear. There were odds and ends that dangled and glittered and made music in the wind.

Cork knocked on the door and got no answer.

“Hey! Cork!”

He turned and spied old Jessup Bliss crossing the street. Because of his arthritic knees, Bliss walked slowly and with a cane.

“Lookin’ for Hattie?” Bliss called out.

“I am, Jess.”

Bliss walked up Hattie’s cracked sidewalk.

“Sheriff’s car was here earlier, looking for her, too, I guess.”

“You tell them anything?”

“Cops? You kiddin’?”

“Know where she is?”

“Sure. Went over to see Henry Meloux, way early this morning. Ain’t come back. Say, true what I heard? Buncha bones in that mine over to the south end of the rez? Buncha dead Shinnobs buried there?”

“It’s true.”

“Son of a bitch.” Bliss spit a fountain of brown tobacco juice into
the profusion of dandelions that yellowed Hattie’s yard. “When’ll white folks learn?”

“Learn what, Jess?”

“Us Indians are like them dandelions there. Don’t matter what you do to get rid of us, we just keep comin’ back.”

Cork cut across the rez on back roads and parked at the double-trunk birch that marked the trail to Meloux’s cabin on Crow Point. Hattie Stillday’s dusty pickup was parked there, too. He locked the Land Rover and began a hike through the pines. He’d been down this path so often and was, at the moment, so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see the beauty of that place. Thin reeds of sunlight plunged through the canopy of evergreen, and if Cork had taken even a moment to see, he would have realized they were like stalks whose flowers blossomed high above the trees. A moment to listen and he’d have heard the saw of insect wings and the cry of birds and the susurrus of wind, which was the music of unspoiled wilderness. A moment to feel and he’d have been aware of the soft welcome of the deep bed of pine needles beneath his feet. But all the confusion, the bizarre nature of the puzzle he was trying to solve, made him deaf and blind.

Then he stopped, brought up suddenly in the middle of a stand of aspens by the intoxicating fragrance of wild lily of the valley, a scent that reached beyond his thinking. In the mysterious and immediate way that smell connects to memory, he was suddenly transported to a summer day nearly fifty years in the past.

He was walking the trail with his father, headed toward Meloux’s cabin, feeling happy and safe. He recalled his father’s long, steady stride. He remembered watching that tall, wonderful man float through shafts of sunlight, illuminated in moments of gold. And he remembered how his father had stopped and waited and lifted him effortlessly onto his broad shoulders, and they’d moved together among the trees like one tall being.

As quickly as it had come, the moment passed, and Cork found himself once again a man older than his father had ever been, alone
on the trail. He stood paralyzed, wracked by terrible uncertainty. How could the man in that moment of golden memory have been the same man who knew about the hidden entrance to Vermilion One, whose sidearm had been a murder weapon, and yet who’d claimed bafflement at the Vanishings? How could he be the same man whom Cork, in his nightmares, had pushed again and again to his death?

Meloux wasn’t at his cabin, but Rainy Bisonette was. She came to the door holding a book in her hand. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. Meloux, she said, was with someone at the moment and couldn’t be disturbed. Cork looked toward the rock outcroppings near the shoreline of Iron Lake and saw smoke rising beyond them. Without another word, he started in the direction of the smoke.

“Wait!” Rainy called. “Damn it, come back.”

He found Hattie Stillday and Meloux sitting at the fire ring, burning sage and cedar. At his approach, they looked up, but neither of them showed any emotion.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Henry,” Rainy said at Cork’s back. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“Let him come,” Meloux said. “What is it that cannot wait, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“I have something I need to tell Hattie.”

“Then tell her.”

Cork walked forward and knelt before the old woman. “Hattie, they’ve been able to identify most of the remains found in the Vermilion Drift. They’re certain one of the victims is your daughter, Abbie.”

Her look didn’t change, not in the least. No surprise, no shock, not even the specter of sadness. And Cork realized that she already knew. How? Had Meloux, in that inexplicable way of knowing, understood the truth and revealed it to her? Had the news somehow reached the rez telegraph and traveled, as it often did, with unbelievable speed? Or—and this came to Cork in a sudden rush that nearly knocked him over—had she known from the beginning? Had Meloux?

“What’s going on, Hattie?” She didn’t answer and Cork addressed Meloux. “What the hell is going on, Henry?”

“You are intruding here, Corcoran O’Connor.”

“I need answers.”

“No, you want answers,” Meloux said. “Need is a different animal.”

“What are you hiding? What are you all hiding?”

Their eyes lay on Cork like winter stones.

“I’ll find the truth, Henry, wherever it’s hidden.”

“The truth is not hidden, Corcoran O’Connor. It has never been hidden. You simply are not yet ready to see it.”

“Jesus Christ. For once, can you cut all the mystic bullshit, Henry, and just tell me straight-out what’s going on?”

“Leave,” Meloux said, firmly but without harshness. “Your anger disturbs this place.”

“Anger, Henry? You haven’t seen my anger yet.” Cork turned and began to march away.

“I have seen your anger,” Meloux said at his back. “More than forty years ago I saw it in another man who was not yet ready to understand the truth.”

Because he didn’t care what Meloux had to say, Cork gave no sign that he’d heard. He walked away from the circle of stones, from the fire at its heart, from the cleansing smoke of the cedar and sage, and from the man who held to the truth like a miser to his money.

I
t was nearing sunset when Cork pulled into Ashland, Wisconsin, an old port city on Chequamegon Bay, a deepwater inlet of Lake Superior.

He parked in the lot of the Hotel Chequamegon and headed to Molly Coopers, the hotel’s restaurant and bar. On the deck, which overlooked Lake Superior and was nearly empty, he spotted a man wearing a dark blue ball cap and a T-shirt that stretched tightly over twenty extra pounds of belly fat.

“Father Brede?”

The man looked up and smiled. “It’s been just plain Dan Brede for more than four decades. You O’Connor?”

“Yes.” Cork shook the man’s hand and sat down. “Father Green didn’t have any trouble locating you.”

“I haven’t tried to hide. From what Ted Green told me, you have some questions about the Vanishings. Nobody’s asked me about the Vanishings in over forty years.”

“But you haven’t forgotten.”

“A thing like that never leaves you.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind talking to me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Did Father Green tell you that the women who vanished have been found? Or what remains of them.”

“He told me.”

“And did he tell you that there’s been another, recent murder, and that the woman’s body was hidden with the others?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want to talk about that?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“What are you saying?”

“Have a beer,” Brede said, signaling the waitress, who was already coming their way. “And then you can tell me about who you are.”

Cork ordered a Leinie’s and watched a big motor launch back away from its slip in the marina behind the hotel, swing around, and head north up the deep blue bay.

When his beer was delivered, Cork said to Brede, “You knew my parents, Liam and Colleen O’Connor.”

“I remember them. And I remember you, too.”

For Cork, the memory of the priest was fuzzy. He recalled a young man with a great deal more hair, and it hadn’t been gray. Brede had been thin then, Cork remembered.

“In the year I knew you, you were a lot of trouble,” the ex-priest said.

“Trouble?”

“You have any idea how much your mother prayed for you? And your father?”

This caught Cork off guard. He didn’t remember being a problem to them at all. “Not really.”

Brede smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me. Kids, teenagers especially, are clueless.”

“You work with kids a lot?”

“Over the years. And I have two of my own.”

“You said you haven’t been Father Brede for over forty years. You stopped being a priest not long after the Vanishings then.”

“A year after I was yanked from St. Agnes.”

“Yanked?”

“The Church reassigned me. To a little parish in southern Indiana where nobody cared or really even knew about the Vanishings. Two things about it bugged me. That I was found guilty without a trial and without any chance to defend myself. And that, finding me guilty, they simply reassigned me. I’m not sure which trespass of conscience I objected to more.”

“Will you tell me about the Vanishings, what you remember?”

“Why are you interested? I understand that you were a cop once,
like your father, but you’re not anymore. Ted Green said that you’re a private investigator. Who are you working for?”

“The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. As a consultant.”

“They know you’re here?”

“Is that important?”

He laughed. “People who have something to hide often respond to a question with a question. What is it that you’re hiding, O’Connor?”

“There are aspects of this case, old and new, that are very personal for me. Although I intend to share everything I find with the sheriff and her investigators, I need to put a few things in perspective for myself first. I think my father knew more about the Vanishings than he officially revealed.”

“I know he did. For one thing, he knew about me.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“Most people who know about his silence believe it was out of loyalty or respect for the Church.”

“But it wasn’t?”

He shook his head. “He knew I was innocent.”

“How?”

“Your father was an astute judge of character.”

“That’s it?”

Brede laughed and took a swallow of beer. “You’re a cop all right. You require evidence.”

“My father was a cop, too. A good cop. I’m sure he asked for evidence.”

“He did. And I explained to him that I knew who’d planted the items that had incriminated me but that I couldn’t reveal the name.”

Cork said, “Because it was something you’d learned in confession?”

“The sanctity of which I firmly believed in then.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m a Methodist,” he said.

Cork drank from his own glass and waited. The ex-priest eyed the still water of the bay for a minute, then told his story.

At first the woman came to him in the normal way, confessing sins he’d heard before and for which he was fully prepared emotionally. An unclean thought. A coveting. A harmless lie to her husband.
Hail Marys, he instructed her, and to pray for strength to resist these small temptations. He knew full well who she was. In a small parish, he knew the voices of all those who entered the confessional. As time went on, the sins she confessed began to change. They became darker, more disturbing. Sex with men other than her husband. Sex with women, too. Sometimes with both at once.

“Did you believe her?” Cork asked.

He didn’t know what to think. Surely there was no reason to lie about these things, especially for a woman in her particular position. He took her seriously and advised her to pray and to seek God’s guidance, and when that didn’t work, he urged her to seek professional help. She laughed at him, laughed seductively. And then she began the overtures. She often thought about them together, she said. She fantasized him forcing himself upon her in ways that disgusted him. He instructed her to banish such thoughts, but she swore she couldn’t. The images overwhelmed her and she masturbated thinking of them. This was beyond his ability to deal with, spiritually and emotionally.

The priest looked into the empty distance above the lake and shook his head. “The oddest part of it was that I saw her every Sunday in church, and she spoke to me cordially during our social hour afterward, and it was as if she’d never said any of those foul things to me in the confessional.”

Then she threatened him. She said if he didn’t have sex with her, she’d make him sorry. And very soon after that, the anonymous phone call had been made, and the incriminating items had been found. Although he couldn’t prove it was her, he knew that it was. Everything that had gone on, however, had been framed within the context of the confessional and her confessions, and he truly believed that he was bound to a sacred vow of silence. And the woman, if her name were made public, was so well thought of that he couldn’t be certain anyone would even believe him. So he’d said nothing. Yet Cork’s father had somehow divined his dilemma and had done his best to manipulate the public information so that the priest was never a part of the official investigation.

“How did he know?” Cork asked.

“Got me. He never said. But he saw to it that I was removed from
the parish. Which,” Brede added philosophically, “was better for everyone in the long run.”

Cork said, “You’ve carefully avoided telling me the name of the woman.”

“I thought you might have guessed by now.”

Cork said, “A woman in, as you said, a particular position. Someone well thought of. Someone relatively new to the parish, I’m guessing. Young, intelligent, devious and deviant but able to hide it well, so probably sociopathic or maybe even psychopathic. Someone who, apparently, caused no problem for the priest who replaced you, Father Alwayne, who everyone said looked like Cary Grant. Which means that either Cary Grant wasn’t her type or she ended her behavior toward priests or, most likely, she herself was removed from the scene. Given all that, Monique Cavanaugh would be my guess.”