Manitou Canyon

by William Kent Krueger

  Cork said, “I took on a couple of new clients this afternoon. John Harris’s grandkids hired me to find him.”

  “You already looked for him pretty thoroughly, didn’t you? You and just about everyone else in this county?”

  “They want me to have another go.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Probably be pissing in the wind, but it’s their money.”

  “I know you didn’t agree with the decision to pull the plug on the search. But is there something else now that’s reason enough to go back out there?”

  “Yeah,” he said and filled her in on Trevor Harris’s dream.

  She took a small bite of what was left of her cookie and considered as she chewed. “I admit it seems compelling on the surface. But before he went into the desert, Stephen posted all about it on his Facebook page. Pretty much anybody interested could have seen it.”

  “Agreed. Do you remember him and his ‘monthterth’ under the bed?”

  “Sure, that speech thing he had when he was kid. And, boy, was he always afraid of monsters.”

  “According to Trevor Harris, Stephen told him, and I quote ‘There are monthterth under the bed.’ What do you make of that?”

  She sipped her milk. “It does get curiouser. You’d have to know us pretty well to know that. Still, they could have done their homework.”

  “To what end? They clearly want me to find their grandfather. And they’re willing to pay me good money to try. If it’s a manipulation, I can’t see the dark twist to it. They just seem like grandchildren very concerned about their grandfather. And maybe I owe it to Johnny Do.”

  “Johnny Do?”

  “That’s what I called him when he lived across the street. He was a hardworking kid, had himself a little enterprise. He hired out to do anything, any odd job. Called his business Johnny Do-All. He tacked up business cards all over town. I just called him Johnny Do.”

  “You didn’t talk much about any of this while you were searching for him.”

  “No reason to, really. He and his mother left Aurora a long time ago, after his father died. They moved to California, and I lost track of him.”

  In fact, until Harris disappeared, Cork hadn’t known much about the life of Johnny Do after Aurora, except for the result, which had been wealth and world renown. The news accounts, in covering the search effort, had filled him in quite well.

  Harris had married young, only a year after leaving Aurora, and had become a father almost immediately thereafter. Although it was never spelled out, it sounded like a shotgun wedding. He put himself through night school, supporting his family by working heavy construction during the day. He was an exceptional student and went on to the Stanford graduate School of Engineering on a full scholarship. As a geotechnical engineer, he’d joined the firm of Alwon and Gale, a large construction company based in San Francisco that specialized in big projects—roads, bridges, dams. Very early on, Harris had designed what had been considered an impossible road across one of the most rugged sections of the Andes. He’d gone on to specialize in creating the designs for projects others considered impossible—roads, dams, bridges in some of the most remote areas of the world. At age thirty, he’d founded Harris International, and his star had done nothing but rise. Although a great success in business, he had a difficult personal life. His projects kept him away from home for long periods of time, and when his daughter was ten, his wife had divorced him. He’d never remarried. By all accounts, his daughter had been a rather wild and reckless youth, married, like her father, in her teens, and a mother before she was twenty. She’d been killed in an auto accident, along with her equally wild and reckless husband, who’d been driving drunk. In his late forties, John Harris had become the guardian of two young grandchildren.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go back into the Boundary Waters, to Raspberry Lake, see what I can find.”

  Jenny looked a little disturbed. “When?”

  “We leave tomorrow.”

  “We? You and Harris’s grandkids?”

  “Just his granddaughter.”

  “Dad, do I have to remind you that you’re walking me down the aisle in two weeks?”

  “I’ll go in, stay a couple of days, then come out. I’ll be back in time for the nuptials.”

  Her face was one huge scowl. “So you agreed to all of this just for the sake of good old Johnny Do, a man you haven’t seen in, what, forty years?”

  “He’s the only family these two kids have, Jenny. Remember when your mother went missing, all the hell we went through not knowing what had happened to her? I imagine that’s what these folks are feeling right now, don’t you?” He saw her relax just a bit, relent. “I probably won’t find anything that we didn’t find before, but I have to try, and it has to be now. If I wait, the snow’s bound to come, and it’ll cover every trace that might still be out there.” He pushed away from the table. “I’m heading to Crow Point. I want to talk to Henry.”

  “Why? He was involved in the search?”

  “No, but he understands those woods better than any man I know. Maybe he can give me a clue to what I ought to be looking for, something we all might have missed.”

  “Back for dinner?”

  “Yeah. I’ll need to pack the gear for tomorrow. By the way, where’s Rose?”

  He was speaking of his sister-in-law, who’d come from Evanston, Illinois, to help with the wedding preparations. In the absence of Jenny’s mother, Rose had often stepped in to fill the matriarchal shoes.

  “Working out at Curves. She says she wants to look svelte for the wedding.”

  “But it’s all about the bride, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, you are so male.”

  “Come on, Baa-baa,” Waaboo cried from the other room.

  “I’ll explain to him,” Jenny said. “You go do what you have to do.”

  Cork said, “I can spare fifteen minutes for my grandson.” He stood to take care of the most pleasant business he’d seen to in that whole dismal day.

  CHAPTER 5

  Henry Meloux lived on a point of land well north of Aurora, at the very edge of the Iron Lake Reservation. To reach it, Cork parked his Expedition along a gravel county road, near a double-­trunk birch that marked the beginning of a trail through a forest of mixed hardwood, spruce, and pine. He locked his vehicle, tugged on his gloves, turned up the collar of his leather jacket against a chill wind that had risen, and set off down the well-worn path. It was a hike of nearly two miles, one that, over the course of his life, Cork had taken more times than he could count or ever hope to remember.

  The trees lining the path felt like dark walls that day, and the narrow strip of sky above was like a ribbon torn from some soiled and shabby fabric. Cork hunched his shoulders and walked, lost in brooding thought, oblivious to the beauty that, in a different mood, he might have appreciated. He was thinking now of his daughter’s impending marriage, which he greatly approved of. He liked the man she’d chosen and who’d chosen her. He liked that Waaboo would have a father. What he didn’t like was that they’d chosen to wed in November, a month that promised nothing but disappointment and, if he allowed himself to sink into melodrama, doom.

  Had he said anything to Jenny about his concern? No. It wasn’t his place. The wedding was theirs, and the date they set was a decision that belonged to them alone. But it was a thorn in all his thinking. Just one of many these days. And it seemed to him as if they’d all begun to fester at once. As he walked the path toward Crow Point, he felt the poison in every part of him.

  * * *

  “We have a visitor, Niece,” the old man said. “Corcoran O’Connor.”

  Rainy Bisonette had been making bread at the table in her great-uncle’s cabin. She looked up from her floured hands, out the window, across the dead grass of the meadow where the trail broke from the tre
es. She saw nothing but the emptiness of a land preparing for the long sleep of winter. November—Gashkadino-­Giizis, which meant the Freezing Over Moon in the language of her people, who were called Anishinaabe or Ojibwe—was always a busy month for her and for Henry. Their cabins on Crow Point had no electricity or running water. The little structures were heated by cast-iron stoves and lit by propane lanterns. There were important preparations to complete before the deep snow of winter began its work of isolation. Cord after cord of cut and dried wood had been laid up. The roof of Henry’s cabin, which had been constructed nearly a century earlier, had been repaired with new cedar shakes. The herbs that both the old man and Rainy would need for the medicines they prepared had been gathered and dried and stored. They were Mide, members of the Grand Medicine Society, traditional healers. Even in winter, even with snow as deep as a man’s thigh and cold so bitter that it froze your eyeballs, the people who needed their skills would come to them.

  This year the month of the Freezing Over Moon had special meaning. Daniel English, Rainy’s nephew, and Jenny O’Connor, Cork’s daughter, were to be married. The wedding was going to be held in the house on Gooseberry Lane. It would be a ceremony drawn from two traditions—Anishinaabe and Catholic. Father Ted Green from St. Agnes in Aurora would preside over the Catholic part; Henry was to handle the traditional Ojibwe elements. Rainy’s spirits were running high. The prospect of the marriage excited her, and she was happy for Daniel and Jenny, two people she loved fiercely. She also happened to love Jenny’s father pretty fiercely, too. And so, when Henry spoke his name, she watched for him happily out the window. But he didn’t appear.

  “I don’t see him, Uncle,” she said, though she knew that when the old man predicted a visitation of this kind he was seldom wrong. She’d asked him time and again how he knew this thing, but his only answer was “I listen to the spirits.”

  She had no doubt that he did.

  Henry Meloux was a hundred years old, give or take a couple of years. His hair was long and as white as moonbeams. His face was as cracked as dried desert mud. His eyes were dark brown, but there was no hardness to them. They were eyes in which you could lose yourself and let go of all fear, eyes soft with understanding.

  Henry was grinding herbs with a pestle in a clay bowl. Ember, an old Irish setter whose former owner Cork had helped put an end to, and whom Henry, out of pity, had adopted, lay at his feet, drowsing. Without looking up from his work, Henry said, “He is slow. He comes like a turtle in the mud, with no energy. Expect him to be no lover, Niece. This cabin is the only thing he will enter today.”

  “Uncle Henry!” she said.

  The old man laughed and went on grinding.

  She saw him then, just as her great-uncle had predicted, trudging out of the woods, crossing the meadow. He wasn’t looking her way. His head was down, his eyes on the worn path. She could see from his whole aspect that he carried some crushing weight. And she thought that maybe Henry was wrong about one thing. Maybe she would take this burdened man to her bed, and in that ancient, carnal way, offer him some comfort.

  She opened the door before he arrived, and before he could say a word, she kissed him.

  “Boozhoo, love,” she said in greeting and with such enthusiasm she hoped it would light a warming fire in him.

  He smiled, but not with his heart, she could see. “Is Henry here?”

  “Come into my home, Corcoran O’Connor,” the old man spoke from inside. “You and whatever trouble you bring.”

  Cork stepped into the doorway. “What makes you think I’ve brought trouble, Henry?”

  “You hold yourself stiff, like a wary deer. But come inside. I do not mind your trouble.”

  Cork did as the old man said, and Rainy closed the door. Ember struggled up and trotted to meet the visitor. Cork gave him a halfhearted patting, and the Irish setter went back to his place at Henry’s feet.

  “Would you like some coffee, Cork? It’s a chilly day out there,” Rainy said.

  “No, thanks. I just need to talk.”

  “Not yet,” the old man said. “Sage, Niece. We will smudge this troubled man and this place where he has brought his trouble.”

  Rainy took a sage bundle from the store in one of Henry’s cupboards, dropped it into a shallow clay bowl, lit it with a match, and waved the cleansing smoke over Cork, Henry, herself, and around the cabin saying, “Migwech, Nimishoomis. Thank you, Grandfather. Migwech, Nokomis. Thank you, Grandmother, for the beauty of this day, for the life you have given us, and for the wisdom that comes when we listen to your voices on the wind and in the water and singing among the trees. We pray for guidance from the Creator and the spirits. Let our hearts be open to all you offer us.”

  When she’d finished, her great-uncle brought out one of his pipes and a pouch of tobacco. He filled the pipe, then offered tobacco to the spirits of the four directions. He put a match flame to the tobacco, and they sat together at his table and shared the pipe.

  Only when they’d completed these preparations did Henry finally say, “And what is this trouble you bring, Corcoran O’Connor?”

  Cork explained about the two clients he’d just taken on and about the vision Trevor Harris claimed to have experienced and about what he intended to do.

  The old man nodded but said nothing.

  Rainy said, “Jenny and Daniel’s wedding is coming up fast, Cork.”

  “I’ll be in and out, Rainy. I don’t imagine I’ll find anything at Raspberry Lake that wasn’t found before.”

  “Then why go?”

  “They need help.”

  “No, they need comfort, closure. If you find nothing, which is what you seem to be expecting, how does that help them?”

  “I’m not convinced we won’t find anything. The whole time we were out there, I had the feeling we were missing something. I still can’t quite put my finger on it. There’s no harm in giving it one more try.”

  “Is this really about them, Cork?”

  He looked surprised. “I sort of think it is.”

  “Are you sure it’s not more about you?”

  “Well, I’m certainly a part of it.” His voice was hard, which was unusual for this man she knew and loved.

  “I’m only pointing out that if in the end you really can’t offer them any comfort in this way, you’re only delaying the inevitable.”

  “And the inevitable would be?”

  “Acceptance. Opening their hearts to the pain and the grief. And then to the healing.”

  “They want to be sure. I can understand that.”

  “And if you don’t find him, how will that help them to be sure?”

  Meloux had been quiet, but now he spoke to Cork. “Your father found his father.”

  Rainy looked confused. “What have I missed?”

  “Many years ago, the father of John Harris disappeared in much the same way that he has now. Liam O’Connor found him, Niece.”

  “I thought his father died in a boating accident,” Rainy said. “That’s what I read in the papers when Harris disappeared.”

  Cork shrugged. “There were things the papers missed, back then and now.”

  “So what really happened?”

  “They discovered his empty boat run aground,” Cork said. “They searched the whole of Iron Lake but couldn’t find him. Dad was sheriff then. He finally pulled the plug, but he didn’t give up looking. A week or so later, he located the body. It was tangled in the anchor rope of Harris’s boat in ten feet of water off Little Bear Island. He’d most probably killed himself, but that part never made it into the papers. Not then, not now.”

  “And you’re going to find John Harris, just like your father found his father?”

  “I can try.”

  “I thought they searched every inch of Raspberry Lake. Used divers, right?”

  “Maybe his body’s not in t
he lake. Maybe there is no body. Maybe he’s still out there wandering around in those woods. Or maybe there’s an explanation that will reveal itself to me.”

  It was clear his mind was made up, and she didn’t want to argue, so she said, “What have you come for?”

  Cork looked at the old man. “Henry’s advice. And yours, Rainy. What do you think about Trevor Harris’s vision?”

  Henry said nothing and looked instead to Rainy.

  She said, “Are you wondering if it’s real? How can we say? Stephen’s in the middle of the Arizona desert. Is it possible that his spirit communicated with Trevor Harris? Your son’s remarkable in many ways, so maybe. Have you asked him?”

  “He’s incommunicado,” Cork said. “No cell phone out there while he’s seeking whatever he’s seeking.”

  Nearly two years earlier, when Stephen was seventeen, a madman had put two bullets into him. One of them had damaged his spinal cord, and whether he’d ever walk again had been a serious concern. He’d spent a long time in rehabilitation, and the work of his therapists and his own determination had yielded great results. He did, indeed, walk. With crutches at first, then a cane, and finally with nothing except a very noticeable residual limp. He would never be an Olympic runner, he was fond of saying, but he’d never wanted to be one anyway. He was supposed to have entered college in September, but he’d put that on hold, and instead had decided on a kind of pilgrimage, a solitary sojourn in the emptiness of the Arizona desert.

  “He isn’t seeking, Cork. Nothing has been lost to him. He’s just trying to open himself to what’s always been inside him. His own strength, his own knowledge.”

  “Okay, so let’s leave Stephen out of the equation. What if Harris’s vision is real, how should it be interpreted?”

  “That’s up to the dreamer, Cork.”

  “The dream seems pretty clear to me.”

  “Seems, yes.”

  “You sound skeptical.”