Vermilion Drift (5 page)

“Have you looked at the earlier schematics?”

“What would be the point?”

“To be thorough,” Cork said. “It seems to me that there are three obvious possibilities for how someone managed to put graffiti on Level Three. One, it was someone who was down there officially and did something unofficial. But you tell me you’re certain that didn’t happen. Two, it was someone who accessed the mine unofficially through one of the known entrances, but you also say that’s impossible. And three, someone came into the mine another way, a way unknown to you and that doesn’t show on the recent schematics. Because there are earlier schematics that still haven’t been checked, this strikes me as the best possibility at the moment. I think it would be prudent
to go over them, just to be thorough. You want to be thorough, don’t you, Lou?”

“And if this possibility doesn’t pan out?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

They stepped back from the table, and Haddad said, “I’ll head to Ladyslipper right now. If I find something, I’ll let everyone know, and we can decide how we want to proceed. In the meantime, Marsha, what about the threats?”

Dross looked a little uneasy. “The truth is that they’re rather vague and unspecific. They don’t threaten you by name. And the graffiti in the mine tends to support the general nature of the statement. It could be argued that ‘we’ is the population at large, and if storage of radioactive waste here results in the death of that population, you, as a part of that population, die too.”

“You sound like a lawyer,” Cavanaugh said.

Dross shrugged. “I’m not sure what more I can do at this point, especially because, as I say, the threat is so vague. And, Max, most people in Tamarack County aren’t thrilled with the idea of Vermilion One being used for nuclear waste storage, so the pool of suspects is rather large. But until we know how someone got into the mine, my recommendation is that no one goes down there alone.”

“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Haddad assured her.

Dross said, “Let me know what you come up with after looking at the old schematics, Lou, and maybe we can figure something then. I’ll stay in touch.”

The sheriff bid them good-bye and left.

“I have work I can do back at my hotel room,” Kufus said. “Then I think I’ll do a mile in the lake.”

She looks like a swimmer
, Cork thought,
nicely toned
. “The water’s still pretty cold,” he cautioned.

“I warm up easily.” She gave Cork that disarming smile, and he thought,
Christ, she is flirting?
But she turned the same smile immediately on Cavanaugh. “Still on for lunch, Max?”

“Looking forward to it,” he replied.

She left the room and left Cork feeling awkward and uncertain, stupid in his understanding of women.

After Genie Kufus had gone, Haddad said, “Thanks for agreeing to help, Cork. As soon as I’ve had a chance to go over the old schematics, I’ll let you know what I’ve found.”

They shook hands, and Cork turned to Max Cavanaugh to take his leave.

“Sure you can handle… everything?” Cavanaugh asked.

“I’m sure. And I’ll stay in touch.”

Outside the gate to the Vermilion One Mine, the number of protesters didn’t appear to have increased. Only the hard-core dedicated were willing to endure the discomfort of the steady rain. He understood and sympathized with their cause. Tamarack County was his home, too, and he didn’t want a radioactive dump there any more than they did. Isaiah Broom was still a hulking presence, along with a number of other Shinnobs Cork knew from the rez. Broom flipped him the bird as he passed. The others just eyed him with looks of betrayal.

He’d almost reached the end of the gathering when he saw a photographer’s tripod up at the side of the road and covered with a rain hood. Bent to the eyepiece was an old woman with long, black hair, wet as a well-used mop. Cork pulled off the asphalt and stopped. He got out and walked to the photographer, who was so intent on her work that she didn’t realize she had company.

“
Boozhoo
, Hattie,” Cork said, using the familiar Ojibwe greeting.

She rose slowly from her camera, not because of her age, which was well over seven decades, but because she was a woman unconcerned with time. She smiled, sunshine in the middle of the rain. Her eyes were light almond and warm when she saw him.

“
Anin
, Corkie,” she replied. She was one of only a few people who ever called him Corkie. She and all the others who used the name had been his mother’s good friends. There were few of them still alive. She glanced down the line of protesters, many of whom were eyeing the exchange suspiciously. “Taking a chance, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think they’ll jump me, Hattie. But I expect they won’t be including me in their prayers tonight.”

She reached inside her yellow rain jacket, pulled out a pack of Newports, plucked a cigarette, and fed it to the corner of her mouth, where it dangled while she struck a match.

“Love the gray of this day,” she said. “The pall it casts. My film’s going to love it, too. Just look at that composition.”

She pointed toward the stretch of road that led to the gate: the protesters huddled on one side, the mine fence on the other, and between them the no-man’s-land of wet asphalt. To Cork it was just a dreary scene, but to Hattie Stillday it was dramatic composition. Hers was the eye to trust. For longer than Cork had been alive, she’d been framing the nation in black-and-white stills. The main thrust of her work had been those moments when cultures collide. She’d photographed steelworkers’ strikes in Pennsylvania in the early fifties. She’d been on all three marches from Selma to Montgomery in the sixties. She’d chronicled on film the White Night gay riots in San Francisco in ’79. Every November, she was a part of the peace vigil held before the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the training of Latin American soldiers by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the organization that for years had been known as the notorious School of the Americas. This was one activity that moved her to do more than snap photos. She’d been arrested a couple of times, fingerprinted, booked. Only her age and reputation had saved her from actual prosecution. Her work hung in the Guggenheim and the Getty and the Art Institute, and had been reproduced in beautifully bound volumes. Hattie Stillday was famous, but to look at her on that wet morning, an old woman with black strands of hair plastered to her cheeks and mud caking her hiking boots and a cigarette dancing in the corner of her mouth as she talked, you’d never know it.

“So the poop is true? You’re working for the mine people?”

“‘Fraid so, Hattie.”

She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and flicked ash onto the wet ground. “I think your grandmother just turned in her grave, Corkie. But I suppose everybody’s got to make their buck.”

There was a great deal more to it than that. Like the power of the composition Cork didn’t quite see, there were elements of this situation to which Hattie was undoubtedly blind. He could have tried to explain, but Corkie didn’t feel like arguing with this fine, old woman.

“Care to pose for a famous photo?” she asked.

“Infamous you mean. And no thanks. I’ve got business to attend to. Actually, I’m on my way to talk to your granddaughter.”

“Ophelia?” Her eyes turned cold. “What the hell for?”

“I can’t say.”

“This mine business? She’s got nothing to do with it. You go dragging her name into this, Corkie, and get her into trouble, you’ll answer to me, do you understand?”

“I’m always discreet, Hattie.”

“Discreet like brass knuckles. You’re just like your father.”

Cork spotted Isaiah Broom coming their way. He’d already had all the conversation with the man that he wanted for the day. He leaned and kissed the old woman on her cheek and tasted the rain there. “I’ll be gentle with her, Hattie. I give you my word.” He turned, crossed the road, got back into his Land Rover, and drove away. Behind him the protest vanished into the gray curtain of the rain.

H
e headed first to Sam’s Place, the burger stand he owned in Aurora.

Sam’s Place was, in a way, the vault of his heart. It held good memories, treasures that reached back over forty years. It had been bequeathed to him by the man who’d built the business, a Shinnob named Sam Winter Moon, who’d been his father’s good friend and then Cork’s. With the help of his children and their friends, Cork had managed the business by himself for years. But his older daughter, Jenny, was gone now, maybe for good. She’d graduated from the University of Iowa and had been accepted in the Writers’ Workshop, the graduate program there. In Iowa City, she’d met a young man who was both a poet and a farmer. No matter how Cork looked at Jenny’s future, coming back to Aurora didn’t seem part of it.

His second daughter, Anne, was in El Salvador, on a mission program sponsored by St. Ansgar College, where she’d just finished her sophomore year. After St. Ansgar, it was his daughter’s intention to become a preaffiliate with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and to prepare to become a nun, a path Cork was pretty certain would not lead back to the North Country of Minnesota.

His youngest child, Stephen, who was fourteen, had gone away for the summer to work on a cattle operation, courtesy of Hugh Parmer, an exorbitantly wealthy man from West Texas whom Cork had befriended and who had, in return, befriended the O’Connors. In the infrequent communications Cork had received from his son, Stephen’s response to the world outside Aurora was nothing short of an intoxicating romance. Cork could see the writing on the wall.

His wife, Jo, had died—been murdered—a little over a year and a half earlier, and it seemed to Cork that more and more the time he’d spent as husband and father had begun to recede from him, a train departing the station, leaving him alone on the platform.

Financially, Cork was set these days. He’d sold land along the lakeshore to Hugh Parmer, who’d intended to build a tasteful condominium community surrounding Sam’s Place. But Parmer had chosen instead to donate the land to the town of Aurora, with the stipulation that the area be kept in its natural state in perpetuity. He’d done this in honor of Jo O’Connor. Cork was grateful to his friend, because every time he looked from Sam’s Place down the wild and beautiful shoreline of Iron Lake, in a way, he saw Jo.

His PI business had succeeded beyond all his expectations and took up so much of his time that he couldn’t effectively operate Sam’s Place on his own. So he’d hired a woman named Judy Madsen, a retired school administrator who knew how to handle kids, to run the business.

He parked in the gravel lot, went inside, and opened the door to the serving area. “How’s it going, Judy?”

Without turning from the prep table where she was slicing tomatoes, Madsen said, “We need change. And we’re low on chips. Driesbach”—the route man who delivered most of the packaged food items—“called and said he’s sick as a dog and won’t be by today.”

“All right. I’ll hit the IGA and pick up some chips. Anything else?”

“Yeah. When are you going to sell me this place?”

A chronic question. And not asked in jest. Judy wanted Sam’s Place, and she wanted it bad.

“It’s my legacy to my children, Judy.”

“I’m the one wearing an apron.”

“They’ll be back,” he said.

She straightened up from the prep table and gave him a level look. “If you say so.”

It wasn’t until a few minutes before noon that Cork walked into the Northern Lights Center for the Arts. The organization occupied the old Parrant estate on North Point Road, a prime piece of property
situated just outside the town limits, at the end of a pine-covered peninsula that stuck like a crooked thumb into Iron Lake. The house was an enormous brick affair with two wings, mullioned windows, and dark wood framing, which gave it the look of a country place an English baron might have maintained. It was separated from the road by a tall wall constructed of the same brick as the house. The lawn was a football field of manicured grass that sloped down to the lakeshore, where a boathouse stood. A sailboat was tied to the boathouse dock, its mast a bare white cross against the deep blue of the lake.

Judge Robert Parrant was long dead. There had been other occupants before and after the judge, but because of the man’s infamy and unseemly demise, the people of Tamarack County still tied his name to the property.

Cork had an unpleasant history with the place. Ten years earlier, he’d found Judge Parrant dead in his office there, brains splattered across the wall, the victim of a murder that had been made to look like a suicide. In that same office four years later, Cork had found two more dead men, a murder-suicide committed with a shotgun. There were other deaths, and although they occurred elsewhere, they occurred somehow in the shadow cast over Tamarack County by that cursed place.

There was a word in the language of the Ojibwe.
Mudjimushkeeki
. It meant “bad medicine.” To Cork’s mind, that acre at the end of North Point Road, regardless of its beauty, was a place of
mudjimushkeeki
.

He walked in without knocking and found himself in the foyer of what had once been a living room but was now a large common area for the artists in residence at the center. A lot of clatter came from the dining room, where Emma Crane, the cook, was setting the table for lunch. Cork went to the center’s office, which was the same room where, years before, all the blood had been spilled. The door was open, and Ophelia Stillday was at her desk. She looked up, and, like everyone else Cork had seen that day, she looked gray.

“Hey, kiddo, why the long face?” he asked.

He’d known Ophelia her whole life. She’d been raised by her grandmother Hattie after her own mother had died of a drug overdose
in a crack house in L.A. Ophelia and his daughter Jenny had been best friends, and there’d been so many sleepovers at the O’Connor house that she’d become like another member of the family. She’d gone on camping trips with them and joined them for a long cross-country drive one year to Disneyland. Hattie Stillday needn’t have warned him about treating her kindly; he felt almost as much affection for her as he did for his own children.