Vermilion Drift (19 page)

The former priest lifted his beer and said, “Cheers.”

C
ork reached Aurora shortly before midnight. During the three-hour drive from Ashland, he’d examined everything he knew so far.

More than forty years earlier, four Ojibwe women had been abducted and murdered and their bodies concealed in an abandoned drift of the Vermilion One Mine. Monique Cavanaugh had also been abducted and murdered, and her body had been hidden in the drift with the others. Some Ojibwe undoubtedly knew about the secret entrance to the drift. According to Henry Meloux, Cork’s father also knew.

Two of the Ojibwe women were eager to leave the rez, and that may have contributed to their abduction. Two of the Ojibwe were quite young and vulnerable, and their naïveté might have allowed them to be easily duped. The white woman was an outlier. So far as Cork knew, she was neither eager to quit Tamarack County nor naïve. But she was abnormal, to say the least, in her behavior. And it was the kind of abnormal that could easily have put her at risk.

Because he was a cop, Cork’s thinking had been shaped in a way that made him skeptical of coincidence and always on the lookout for connections, no matter how thin they might appear to be at first. As a result, he found himself considering another possibility where Monique Cavanaugh was concerned. She’d been a woman with bizarre sexual proclivities. Worse than bizarre. Her behavior with the priest had been not only heartless but criminal as well. Could her appetites have been even more unsavory? Given the timing, could she also have been somehow involved in the Vanishings?

Cork let himself think along this line for a while and saw a problem. Although he couldn’t say about the first two victims, the second
two—Naomi Stonedeer and Fawn Grand—had disappeared from the rez itself. If Monique Cavanaugh had been on the rez, trolling for vulnerable young women, she’d have been seen. A beautiful, rich white woman would have stood out like a polar bear. So how could she have snatched the girls without raising an alarm?

The only answer that made sense to Cork was that if Monique Cavanaugh was, indeed, involved, she wasn’t working alone. Whoever took the girls was probably someone who would have gone unnoticed on the rez.

Cork thought about all the people he knew on the Iron Lake Reservation, and that was almost everyone. He couldn’t think of many he’d call saints, but he also couldn’t think of anyone alive at the moment and old enough to have been involved in the Vanishings who struck him as deeply predatory. He didn’t know the history of the rez well enough to be able to finger a suspect from the past.

But there was someone he did know who, in his consideration of all the possibilities, he couldn’t overlook. And that was his father.

Liam O’Connor had been a regular visitor to the reservation, most often as a relative or friend rather than in his official capacity as sheriff. He could easily have come and gone without much notice at all. The priest had said that Cork’s father had somehow intuited his dilemma. Perhaps an intuitive understanding wasn’t the reason. Maybe the reason stemmed from his father’s deep involvement in the Vanishings. Involvement with Monique Cavanaugh herself, perhaps. It was, after all, probably his weapon that had killed the woman. Was it possible that, in the way she’d tried to seduce the priest, Monique Cavanaugh had succeeded in casting her seductive net over his father?

Cork arrived home thinking all these things and hating himself for it.

He took Trixie for a long overdue walk under a moon that was waning. And as they walked in the night shadows, he kept circling the facts in his head, jabbing at them, hoping he could get them to reveal the truth.

His father knew about the second entrance to the Vermilion Drift. His father had the unique ability, because of his position as sheriff, to make certain that any investigation could be thwarted. Someone had
torn important pages from his mother’s journal. Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday held some damnable secret. Someone was being protected, it was clear. Or the memory of someone.

For most of Cork’s life, his father had existed as a memory, an accumulation of memories. But memories were unreliable. Cork understood well that, although they came from the fabric of fact, more often than not his own were a weave of the way things had been and the way he desired them to be. His father had died in the fall, not long after the Vanishings had ended. Cork was only thirteen years old. Was the man he had always believed his father to be simply the construct of a boy’s desire and a boy’s imagination?

When he pulled the box from the attic, it was layered thinly with dust. He took it to the office downstairs, switched on the desk lamp, and sat down. He removed the lid. Inside, jumbled without any order, were dozens of family photographs his mother had kept with the idea that someday she would organize them into scrapbooks. She’d never quite gotten around to it, and, after her passing, they’d fallen to Cork. It had been a good long while since he’d handled the photos, always a nostalgic experience. This time he was concerned that the experience would be different.

His father hadn’t been a handsome man, but in the photographs he was always smiling and there was something boyishly charming in his aspect. Cork picked up a photo of his father in his youth in Chicago, a black-and-white of a boy, maybe nine years old, squinting into the sun and grinning big, with a ball glove on his right hand. In the background was a vacant lot and in the distance, miragelike, the city skyline. Cork recalled his father talking about his boyhood, and although it had been in the days of the Depression, he’d spoken of that time with warmth. There was a photograph of his father in an army uniform. He’d served in the 82nd Airborne Division and had been wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He’d kept the Purple Heart in the top drawer of his dresser. There was a photo of him holding a baby who was Cork. Although memory could lie, photos seldom did, and it
was abundantly clear how proud and happy a father he was. There were photos with his deputies and his friends on and off the rez. There were photos with Cork’s mother and with Cork—camping and fishing and picnicking. In them all, his father was a man clearly happy with his life and surrounded by people who looked on him with admiration and love.

Could the man in those photographs have fooled his family and his friends all his life? Could there have been a dark depravity to him that he ably hid? Cork tried very hard to accept the possibility, but it simply didn’t fit. It felt so god-awful wrong, not only in his own memory but in all the evidence he had from the memories of others and from the photos in the box.

His father had not been the one responsible for the abductions of those young women from the rez almost fifty years before, but there was something about his father’s involvement in the Vanishings that was necessary to keep hidden. What could that have been?

And if his father had not made those women vanish, who had?

M
ax Cavanaugh agreed to see him, and, at 9:30 the next morning, Cork was shown into Cavanaugh’s very large office by an administrative assistant, a young man whose round glasses made him look like Harry Potter. Cork shook hands with Cavanaugh, who turned to Harry Potter and said, to Cork’s great amusement, “Coffee for both of us, Harry.”

“Is that really his name?” Cork asked after the young man had left.

Cavanaugh shook his head. “It’s Howie, but no one calls him that. He’s okay with the Potter thing. Sit down.”

They took cush chairs near the window, which overlooked the great red wound that was the Ladyslipper Mine. Cork began with a condolence, sympathy over the news that Cavanaugh’s mother was one of the bodies found in the Vermilion Drift.

“It was a long time ago,” Cavanaugh replied. “But it does answer a question left hanging in the air all my life.”

“What do you remember about your mother?” Cork asked.

“Not much. I was only five when she disappeared.” He caught and quickly edited himself. “When she was murdered.”

“Do you have any early impressions?”

“Of course. But why are you asking?”

“I’m just trying to build a profile of all the women involved in the Vanishings. The more we know about the victims, the better chance we have of understanding the crime.” He wasn’t proud of himself, stringing Max along this way, but he also knew he couldn’t simply blurt his suspicions.

Cavanaugh thought a moment. “She was beautiful. Smart. Vivacious.”

Which were things people said about her, but was that the way a five-year-old would have remembered her?

“Was she an attentive mother?” Cork asked.

“Attentive?”

“Do you have a lot of memories of doing things with her?”

“Not really. But as I said, I was only five. And she was a very active woman in community affairs.”

“That was certainly true in Aurora. What about before you moved here?”

“I don’t remember anything before Aurora.”

“Your parents lived in New York City after they were married, is that right?”

“My father was an attorney for the Great North office there. It’s where I was born, and Lauren. When my grandfather became ill, we moved back here.”

“What about after your mother’s disappearance? Where did you go?”

“My father returned to New York City and raised us there.”

“And turned management of Great North over to others?”

“Yes, it ceased being the family-run operation my grandfather had hoped to continue. It wasn’t at all a bad decision. From New York, my father helped expand Great North into a global concern.”

“Why New York City? Couldn’t he have accomplished the same thing here?”

“Although he was born on the Range, he didn’t really feel at home here. He was a city guy at heart.”

“What about you, Max? You’ve worked mines in India, South Africa, Australia, Germany, Chile. You feel at home here?”

“The truth is I never feel at home anywhere except in a mine. I love the work of mining, Cork. It’s a battle of sorts, and involves all kinds of strategy to get the rock to release what it holds. Done well, it’s an art.”

“From what you’ve told me, you don’t spend much time in the pit these days,” Cork pointed out. “Why’d you come back here to take an office job? I mean why now?”

“The economy,” he said with a shrug. “It’s lousy, and making this
mine profitable—hell, making any mine on the Range profitable these days—is a challenge, but it’s one I’m good at. Second, when I learned that the DOE was interested in Vermilion One, I figured I wanted to be here to oversee that process personally. Honestly, I felt I had an obligation to do what I could to discourage the government. The Range has been good to my family. And I feel my family has an obligation to the people here. I don’t want what we created with Vermilion One to end up the death of this place or these people. Literally.”

“What about your sister?”

“What about her?”

“Did she love mining?”

Cavanaugh looked surprised at the question. “She knew absolutely nothing about mining.”

“But as nearly as I can tell, she followed you everywhere, to every mine location, and finally here. Any particular reason?”

“We were close all our lives,” Cavanaugh said. “Neither of us were married, and really we only had each other.”

It was a closeness that seemed more than a little unusual to Cork, but he let it go.

“Did your father ever talk about your mother?”

“No. At least not that I recall.”

“Did that trouble you?”

“Why should it?”

“No reason. Did he remarry?”

“No.”

“He was still a young man, relatively speaking, when he lost your mother, yet he went the rest of his life without marrying again. Any reason that you’re aware of?”

There was a knock at the door, and Harry Potter returned with coffee: two white mugs on a tray with a small container of cream, a little bowl of sugar, some packets of Splenda, two spoons, and a couple of napkins.

“Thank you, Harry,” Cavanaugh said, and the young man left.

Cavanaugh handed Cork a mug, then stirred cream and sugar into his own coffee.

“What do you know about my father, Cork?”

“I’m beginning to think not enough.”

“For starters, he wasn’t exactly the son my grandfather wanted.”

“Why not?”

Cavanaugh sipped his coffee, then said casually, “For one thing, he was homosexual.”

Cork didn’t bother to hide his surprise.

“I’m not telling you any secrets. Most people who knew him in later life were well aware of it. But he hid it well in his early years here. Hell, he probably didn’t even acknowledge it to himself then. The war broke out and he enlisted, and after that he went to college, Yale and then Harvard Law, and by that time his life and what he was willing to accept had changed, I guess. New York City was a reasonable place to be gay in the fifties. But he still needed a good cover for the sake of business and my grandfather. My mother gave him that cover.”

“She knew?”

“Of course.”

“But they had children.”

“To keep the families happy and at bay and to maintain the façade.”

“Did you always know?”

“No. They had separate bedrooms, but I was a kid then, and what did I know? They also had very separate lives, but I don’t suppose that was unusual either. My father was a good man, Cork, and a good father. He loved Lauren and me tremendously.”

“And your mother?”

“Love wasn’t at all what their relationship was about.”

“I meant did she love you.”

“I think we were like expensive vases in the living room, something for people to look at and admire, part of a perfect life. Or the image of a perfect life.”

“But it wasn’t perfect?”

“What I remember wasn’t awful. It was just”—he thought a moment—“a vacancy. Air where a mother should have been. But why all these questions about my parents? That’s ancient history. What about Lauren? Shouldn’t you be asking questions that will solve her murder?”

“Your mother and your sister were killed with the same weapon. That would tend to suggest they were killed by the same person. So, if we could solve the earlier murder we might solve your sister’s murder as well. Theoretically.”