Vermilion Drift (34 page)

“Physical?”

“I don’t know. Emotional pain, certainly. But because of what my mother was, I began to be afraid.”

Evil finding evil
, Cork thought.

“That night she called me at the Four Seasons, hysterical. I tried to calm her, but it was clear that she needed me. I left.”

“Without a word to anyone.”

“I thought a few minutes with her would be enough. Over the years, I’ve learned exactly what to say to her.”

“Did you know she’d been shot?”

“She said something about it, but she often lied to be certain I’d
come when she needed me. When I got there, I saw that it wasn’t a lie. She’d bled, although she wasn’t bleeding anymore. She told me what happened, told me in a fury, told me she was going to kill the Stillday girl. She was a mess. Partly hysterical with tears, partly in a hysterical rage. She was waving a gun around. She kept a small firearm somewhere, but this wasn’t it. This one I’d never seen before. I had no idea where it came from. The gun scared me.”

Cavanaugh stopped talking. The entire sky had turned vermilion, and everything beneath it was cast in the same hue.
If fire could bleed
, Cork thought,
this would be its color
.

“I couldn’t get her to calm down,” Cavanaugh finally went on. “And I was angry, too. Angry at the disruption of my evening, angry at Lauren because, hell, she probably had gotten what she deserved, angry at a whole lifetime of bending to her selfish whims and putting up with her crazy, selfish behavior. It seemed to me in that moment that two crazy people were in the room, and I said that to her. God help me, I said, ‘We’re both better off dead.’”

Recalling it, Cavanaugh seemed stunned, and he fell silent.

“What did she do, Max?”

“Stopped her raving,” he said in a distant voice. “Walked to me. Walked to me with that gun in her hand. Pushed herself against my chest with the gun between us. Reached down and brought my hand up and put my finger over her finger on the trigger and whispered, ‘Do you want that, Max? Do you?’”

Cork waited, then pressed. “What happened?”

“The gun went off.” Cavanaugh turned his mystified eyes to Cork. “She looked up at me, and I couldn’t tell if it was surprise or relief I saw. And then she dropped at my feet. Just dropped. I went down to her. I called her name and she didn’t respond. There was blood all over her. I held her, but it was like holding a rag doll. I knew she was dead. I should have called someone, but instead I…”

By the end, Cavanaugh’s voice had dropped to a desperate whisper. To be certain that Dross on the other end of the phone had heard clearly, Cork said, “You killed her, Max?”

Cavanaugh shook his head with sudden fierceness. “I don’t know if I killed her. I don’t know if I pulled the trigger or she did, honest to God.”

“Then what happened, Max?”

“I went back and made excuses to the people at the Four Seasons and went home. I thought…” He hesitated, as if uncertain how to proceed. “I thought I would be free, but it didn’t feel that way at all. Does that make sense? If you’ve walked bound all your life and suddenly the ropes are gone, is that freedom? I didn’t quite know how to go on, Cork.”

“Why did you hire me to find her?”

“When no one reported her dead, Jesus, I thought maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she somehow pulled herself off that floor and went somewhere to recover and…”

“And what, Max?”

“And maybe she needed me.” His face held a look of bewilderment. “How sick is that? I realized that in some twisted way I needed her, too. And I realized one more thing, Cork, maybe the hardest lesson of all. Dead isn’t dead. The dead are always with us.”

“The second round of threatening notes, ‘We die. U die. Just like her.’ That was you, wasn’t it, Max?”

“After you found Lauren’s body, I got worried, afraid you might look my way. It was simply misdirection.” The tone of his voice indicated that to him it was a thing that hardly mattered now.

“Come back with me, Max. We can go to the sheriff, and you can explain.”

Cavanaugh gave his head a slight shake. “I never married, Cork. Never had children. Do you want to know why?”

“Because you had your hands full taking care of your sister?”

“Because I might have had a child like Lauren. Or worse, like my mother. It’s in my blood somewhere. But I’m the last of the Cavanaughs. When I’m gone, the blood curse is gone, too.”

“Come with me, Max.”

“You go on. I want to stay, keep company awhile with these rock walls. I feel comfortable here. You can tell the sheriff everything I told you. You will anyway, I suppose, and it’s all right with me.” He waited, and when Cork didn’t move, he said, more forcefully, “Go on, Cork. I want to be alone.”

“Max—”

“I can call a security person and have you escorted out.”

“No need. I’ll go.” But he didn’t, not right away. He said, “I’m sorry, Max.”

“For what?”

“Those ropes you talked about, I guess.”

Cavanaugh offered him a sad smile. “And I’d guess you have ropes of your own. Doesn’t everybody?”

Cork walked back to his Land Rover and got in. He looked back and watched Cavanaugh return to his Escalade.

He slid the phone from under his shirt. “You get all that, Marsha?”

“Loud and clear, Cork. I’m at the front gate now. I’ll pick him up when he comes out.”

Cork swung his vehicle around and started toward the incline that would take him along the switchbacks to the top. He figured he’d join Dross and together they would wait for Max Cavanaugh.

He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when he heard the explosion behind him, and the walls of the pit were lit as if by lightning, and he saw in the rearview mirror the Escalade consumed in an enormous blossom of red-orange flame.

H
e was home by midnight and in bed by one, but sleep stayed beyond his reach.

At three, he threw the covers back and went downstairs to check his e-mail, but there was nothing new from any of his children.

At four, he turned on the television in the living room and lay down on the sofa and surfed the channels, but nothing appealed.

At four-thirty, the birds began to chatter.

At five, he gave up, showered, dressed, and took Trixie for an early walk.

At six-thirty, he thought about breakfast but wasn’t hungry.

At seven, he called Judy Madsen, told her he would need her to cover for him at Sam’s Place for a while, got into his Land Rover, and headed to Crow Point to find Henry Meloux.

The dew on the meadow grass was heavy, and under the yellow morning sun Crow Point seemed strewn with sapphires. A breeze caught the smoke that rose from Meloux’s cabin and thinned it quickly to nothing against the morning sky. The cabin door was open. Near it, Walleye lay drowsing with his head on his forepaws. Cork, as he approached, smelled biscuits baking.

Rainy Bisonette stepped outside, shaded her eyes, and watched him come.

“We got word early this morning that Max Cavanaugh killed himself and that you were there,” she told him. “True?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Uncle Henry said you’d be here.”

“Where is he?”

“Preparing for you. Have you eaten?”

“A little. But those biscuits smell good.”

“I just made them. And I have coffee, if you’d like.”

“Thank you.”

They sat at the sturdy table Meloux had made for himself long before Cork was born. Cork looked around the simple, single room with affection and admiration.

“A person doesn’t need any more than this,” he said.

“Sometimes I think that, too. Other times, I’d kill for a lightbulb.”

“Thanks for the biscuit. It’s really good. Did you make this jam?”

“Yes.”

“It’s wonderful.”

“Since the kids have grown and gone, I don’t cook as much as I used to, or as much as I’d like. That’s been one of the best things about being here with Uncle Henry. Someone to appreciate my cooking.”

“How is he?”

“No worse. But I still haven’t got a handle on what’s going on.”

“There’s a pretty good hospital in Aurora. They could run tests.”

“Uncle Henry won’t go.”

Cork nodded. It figured.

The light through the open door was blotted by a sudden shadow, and Meloux walked in. He moved slowly, bent and looking tired. He sat with them at the table, ate a biscuit with jam, drank some coffee, and said to Cork, “You are ready for the end of your journey?”

“There are things I’ve forgotten, Henry, things that I have to know. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t think. I’ve always been proud to say that I was the son of Liam and Colleen O’Connor, but now I don’t know what that means. I’m not sure who they were, and I’m not sure anymore who I am.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes. I think there must be a good reason I don’t remember things, but I don’t care what that reason is. I have to know the truth.”

“Then I am ready to guide you to it. Niece?” He held out his hand, which trembled, and she helped him to his feet.

Every spring, in a small clearing on the eastern shore of the point, Meloux built a sweat lodge. The old Mide usually had help, Shinnobs from the rez, and some years Cork gave a hand. This year it had been mostly Rainy who’d assisted her uncle. They’d built the frame—a hemisphere eight feet in diameter and five feet high at the center—of willow boughs tied together with rawhide prayer strips, and had covered it with tarps overlaid with blankets.

When they reached the sweat lodge, Meloux turned to Cork.

“First you will fast,” he said.

“How long, Henry?”

“A day. You will fast and ask yourself if you really want to know the truth, for that is the end of this journey. If you are thirsty, drink from the lake. If you feel the desire or need, bathe there, too. We will come at moonrise to see if you want to go on, and if you do, we will come again before the rise of the sun to build the sacred fire. Do you understand, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“Yes, Henry.”

“Then sit here,” Meloux said and indicated a bare area that lay between the sweat lodge and the lake, “and let it begin. Come, Niece. You, too, old dog,” he said to Walleye, who’d padded slowly behind them from the cabin.

Meloux turned and headed back the way he’d come.

“Rainy?” Cork called.

She turned back. “Could you call John and Sue O’Loughlin? They live across the street from me. Tell them I might be a while and ask them to feed and, if they’re willing, walk my dog until I get back?”

“I’ll do that,” Rainy promised.

Cork sat on the ground, crossed his legs, and waited.

The sun rose high and the day grew hot and Cork grew thirsty. He got up and walked to the lake, unsteadily because his legs had gone to sleep. As he knelt to drink, he saw a huge bird, a great blue heron,
gliding over the lake, which was glass smooth and mirror perfect. The reflection of the bird crossed the reflection of the sky. Slowly, gracefully, the heron descended. In the mirror of the lake, its other self rose, and in a brief moment of rippling water, the two met. With a powerful sweep of wing, the great bird rose again and the other descended, and in a minute the sky and lake were clear again. The ripple of their meeting spread outward, however, and where Cork knelt at the lake’s edge, the water undulated gently.

Sometime in the afternoon, a dark-colored snake shot from the grass that edged the cleared area around the sweat lodge. Cork had been drowsing, and the dart of the snake startled him, and he sat bolt upright. The snake stopped, tested the air with its tongue, and for a fatal moment lay there, a black crack across the bare dirt a dozen feet from Cork. In the next instant, a goshawk swooped down, snagged the reptile, and, effortless as dreaming, carried it away.

These sights, or sights like them, Cork had seen before in the great Northwoods, and he could explain them. But at dusk, he witnessed something that he’d never seen and for which he had no explanation.

The sun had set, and the lake had taken on the look of melted lead. The shoreline was drifting into darkness, and the tops of the pine trees formed a ragged black outline that reminded him of the sharp teeth of a predator. The night birds had begun to call, and the tree frogs were just starting to sing. At a place a hundred yards distant, where Crow Point met the shoreline in a curve of brush and timber, Cork spotted movement, a stealthy creep of pale white, which he realized was a wolf. Then he spotted another wolf, this one a mottled gray, which seemed to mirror the movement of the first. They circled, facing each other in a threatening way. Suddenly they lunged and met in terrible canine battle. The sound of their yips and snarls echoed off the trees, and the birds and the frogs fell silent. The wolves separated, circled, and lunged again, gnashing teeth and tearing through fur into flesh. They went on this way until it was too dark to see them, and then the noise of their struggle finally ended. Cork sat wondering at what he’d witnessed and wondering what it meant.

At moonrise, as he’d promised, Meloux returned. Rainy was with him.

The sky was black, and through it ran the pale river of the Milky Way. The gibbous moon, as it rose, cast a glow that pushed long, faint shadows across the ground.

“What have you seen today?” the old Mide asked.

“A bird descended from the sky, Henry, and touched its reflection and flew away.”

“What else?”

“This afternoon, a snake crawled near me, and a hawk snatched it and carried it off.”

“What else?”

“Something I didn’t understand, and maybe didn’t really see.”

“What was that?”

“Two wolves fighting. Over there.” Cork pointed toward the curve in the shoreline.

“Ah,” Meloux said, as if this was important.

“What does it mean, Henry?” Cork asked.

“In every human being, there are two wolves. One wolf is love, from which all that is good in life comes: generosity, forgiveness, acceptance, peace. The other is fear, which creates all that is destructive: greed, hatred, prejudice, violence. These two wolves are always fighting.”

“Did I really see them?”

“Really?” In the dark, the crescent moon of a smile appeared on the old man’s face. “I don’t know what that question means, Corcoran O’Connor. Are you willing to continue your journey?”