Manitou Canyon

by William Kent Krueger

  “So?”

  “He led the fight against the dam your grandfather built.”

  The change came to his face slowly. Rose watched as his head cocked at an angle, and his mind went over things, and pieces fell into place.

  “The Boundary Waters. She knows the Boundary Waters well,” he said. “I figured it was just, you know, a coincidence. But when I think about it, she was on board with the whole thing really quick. She didn’t even question that I wanted to get closer to Grandpa John. And when he had to cancel the first date, she seemed really upset. More than me, and I was the one with everything to lose.” He shook his head. “Or so I thought.”

  The sheriff said, “Canada’s RCMP thinks the kidnapping of your grandfather and the apparent kidnapping of your sister are part of a broader conspiracy by First Nations people. We think”—she indicated Jenny and Rose—“that your sister is involved with them. Your part in this may well have been her manipulation.”

  “Lindsay?” He seemed ready to laugh at the idea. “She’s all Goody Two-shoes. She doesn’t have the brains or the balls for something like this. It was all my idea.” But his face changed and he suddenly seemed not so sure. “I mean, hell, if what you’re saying is true, why didn’t she just come out and tell me?”

  “Maybe she was trying to protect the people she’s working with. Or maybe she was trying to protect herself. If everything went south, the blame would rest on your shoulders alone, even in your own mind.”

  “No. That’s not Lindsay.” He thought about it some more. “That little bitch,” he finally said. “And to think I’ve been worried sick about her.”

  Which was not exactly how Rose would have characterized what she’d seen coming from the young man.

  The sheriff said, “Deputy Pender, take our guest back to his cell.”

  “Come on, Harris,” Pender said and escorted the man out.

  “What now?” Jenny asked.

  “I need to get this information to Lanny Russo,” Marsha said. “And we need to let your family know what they might be flying into.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Lindsay Harris stood with her arms crossed over her chest, as if protecting herself from harm. In the room where her grandfather had been held and brutally interrogated, she seemed to have lost all her courage.

  Cork said, “I thought you were extraordinarily calm, given our circumstances, something I was more than willing to chalk up to your strength of character. Because I see that kind of strength in you. But things felt off. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. That ridiculous cap you wore into the Boundary Waters that made you look like Waldo, for example. What a perfect beacon, even in a thick mist, for someone who might be watching for us. Then there was the night I tried to save you, and you stumbled and cried out. It could have been an accident, but not when your life might depend on it. It was done to alert the others.”

  Lindsay made no reply. Her grandfather simply gazed at her out of his damaged face.

  “When it looked as if we might be stuck out there with a kid who couldn’t walk, you came up with the idea of a travois. A good, reasonable suggestion. And one, I suppose, that could have come from a genuine concern over Bird’s condition, because I believe you really cared. But I think it was more that you wanted to be moving, to be out of there, because you had your own agenda.”

  She would not look at her grandfather or Cork. She stared at the floor and listened.

  “There’s clearly something between you and Mr. Brown out there. You have some history together. And finally, you accused them of being lying bastards. What did they lie to you about? What did they promise in return for your help?”

  She walked to the window and stood facing the glass. Outside, snow was falling. When she finally spoke, she kept her back to Cork and her grandfather.

  “You were supposed to give them what they needed, Grandpa John. You were supposed to tell them how to permanently disable the dam. They would have followed your instructions, the Manitou River would have been saved, you would have been set free, and no one would have been harmed.”

  Snowflakes settled on the windowpane and melted immediately, sliding down the glass like teardrops.

  When John Harris spoke, it wasn’t in anger. He simply sounded tired to the bone. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t have given them what they want. Which isn’t just to disable the dam, Lindsay. That maniac Fox wants to blow the whole thing up. That would send a thirty-foot wall of water down Manitou Canyon, moving at maybe sixty, seventy miles an hour. There’s a small town at the end of the canyon, Gordonville.”

  “We were there,” Cork said.

  “Then you could see that if that wall of water hit Gordonville carrying tons of rock and debris, it would seem like the end of the world to the people there. I’m not sure anyone would survive.”

  Lindsay turned, and the tears that ran down her cheeks were copious and real.

  “So they did this to you. Oh, Grandpa John, I’m sorry.”

  “How did you get involved in all this?” Harris asked.

  She wiped at her cheeks. “I met a man. A fine man.”

  “Mr. Brown,” Cork said.

  She nodded. “At Northland College, after I was arrested. We fell in love. He told me about his home, about the Manitou River, about the devastation your dam would cause.”

  “What devastation?” Cork asked.

  “The electricity that dam generates will power an enormous open-pit mine operation near the headwaters of the Manitou River,” Lindsay told him. “That mine will destroy the whole ecosystem there, and kill the river in the process.”

  “It never dawned on you what a coincidence it was that you and Mr. Brown should just stumble onto one another? You, the granddaughter of the man who designed the dam, and him, one of the people fighting against it?” Cork shook his head.

  “Kismet, I thought,” she replied feebly.

  “Love blinds, Corky,” Harris said.

  Cork thought this was an interesting statement coming from the man who, if what Lindsay had told him was true, had been unable or unwilling to give his grandchildren the love they’d craved from him.

  “How did these people approach you?” Cork asked. “Through Brown?”

  “His name is Isaac,” she said. “Isaac McQuabbie. One of his professors at McGill read about my arrest and sent him. He was supposed to, you know, woo me and seduce me into helping them. But we fell in love for real.”

  “Fox is that professor?” Cork asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “Robert Baker. He’s Wahta Mohawk. He promised no one would be hurt.”

  “And we’ve seen how well that’s worked out. Was the whole kidnapping thing his plan?”

  “We planned it together, him and Isaac and me. Isaac’s people were kept in the dark about my part in all this. No one outside the three of us was to know about my involvement. That way, when it was all over, Isaac and I could go back to our lives, go on fighting the good fight together for the things we believe in. It sounded right, you know. It sounded possible.”

  “Whose idea was it to have Aaron and the others kidnap you?”

  “Mine,” she admitted.

  “And your brother knew nothing about all this?”

  “He thinks it was all his idea. That was Fox’s suggestion. He knew about Trevor’s debts.”

  “How?”

  “They seem to know about everything. They’re very organized that way. Fox pointed out that if it all went south, it would be Trevor’s head on the block, and I’d still be free to fight for the things I believe are worthwhile. My brother’s never been about anything but himself. So it didn’t seem like a bad idea to me. That sounds terrible, I know, but I didn’t really think anything like this was going to happen.”

  “Why me?” Cork said. “Why involve me?�
�

  “When Fox communicated to me that Grandpa John wasn’t giving them the information they needed, I suggested they use me as leverage. But I couldn’t just vanish. For the same reason he couldn’t have just been taken. The motive might be too obvious. We needed time to prepare properly for disabling the dam. Fox hoped the obfuscation, as he liked to call it, of simply vanishing in the wilderness would keep anyone from looking in the right direction for a while. Enough time so that we could complete our mission.

  “Also, they knew about you and Grandpa John, friends a long time ago. Like I said, they know so many things. They thought you might give them another kind of leverage.”

  “Kill me first so that your grandfather would know how serious they are?”

  “That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. And we were up against the wall, in a way. All this was supposed to have been done two months ago, but Grandpa John couldn’t leave his precious project in Africa. The lake kept rising and pretty soon would be high enough to feed the generator turbines, and it would be too late.” Anger welled up and seemed to overpower her regret. “You told me once that spirit is at the heart of everything, and I’ve always believed you. What the hell is at the heart of your spirit now, Grandpa John? How could you build that monstrosity? It’s so wrong.”

  “I know,” he said.

  His reply clearly caught her by surprise. “Then why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When the people from Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources approached me about a dam across the Manitou Canyon narrows, I was deeply involved in a much bigger, more complicated project.”

  “The Okobongo Dam,” Cork said.

  “Exactly.” He shot his granddaughter a guilty look. “The kind of dam I thought could be my legacy to the world. I didn’t want to be bothered with something as small-scale as the Manitou Canyon project. So I gave it to one of my assistants. He did the on-site groundwork, created the design. I simply reviewed everything and signed off. My company built it, but it’s really another man’s dam.”

  “So you don’t know it well enough to know its weakness,” Cork guessed.

  “I told Fox there was no way they could blow up the dam. There’s so much concrete it would take a nuclear device.” He looked up at Cork. “But it may have a weakness. Not in the dam itself. The narrows is the problem, the rock that anchors the dam.”

  “Looked pretty solid to me when we flew over it,” Cork said.

  “It’s part of the Canadian Shield, the oldest and sturdiest exposed rock in North America. It’s igneous, of volcanic origin, and was the first part of this continent to rise above the sea. It’s been untouched by the subsequent encroachment of oceans in the nearly four billion years since. General thinking is that it would be a great anchor for a structure like a dam.

  “But the Manitou Highlands, which the canyon is a part of, is an anomaly. It’s experienced a more recent volcanic episode, a molten upthrust millions of years ago that lifted it above the surrounding area. In that uplift, the rock around the narrows of the canyon was significantly fractured. Its integrity was compromised.”

  “You’re saying the dam is anchored to broken rock?”

  “That’s a gross simplification, but essentially correct.”

  “No one knew this?”

  “They knew. They just didn’t care. The narrows of Manitou Canyon is the most convenient location for a dam to provide power to Caldecott’s Highland Mine, a hundred kilometers to the northwest. The mine’s scheduled to begin operation pretty much as soon as they can get the dam turbines running. So, when documentation was sent to the Ministry of Natural Resources, there was no mention of the fracturing.”

  “Who was responsible for the documentation?”

  “My man. The engineer who designed the dam. He no longer works for me, by the way. After construction began and I heard about the protests from the Odawa, I came up here myself for an on-site inspection. It didn’t take me long to see evidence of the fracturing. You have to know what to look for, but it’s there. I pinned my man to the wall, and he admitted that he’d been paid well by Caldecott to ignore the fracturing issue, to falsify the reports. I went to Toronto, talked myself blue at the ministry, submitted a formal report warning of the danger the dam presented if the rock gave way. I was totally ignored. The influence of Caldecott, I assume. So they completed the dam over my objections.”

  “It’s going to give way at some point?” Cork said.

  “I can’t say for sure, but the possibility is certainly there. I wanted to do further geologic testing, further inspections, but every attempt was thwarted.”

  “Caldecott’s greed,” Lindsay said, two words filled with so much anger that the air in the room seemed poisoned by them.

  “So the dam may give way eventually,” Cork said. “Is there anything these people could do that might help that along? Sounds like they have a good stockpile of explosives.”

  “I suppose they could plant significant charges on either side of the narrows. It might further the fracturing already there, enough that the pressure of the backed-up water would shatter the rock and take the dam down with it. It’s a very long shot.”

  “Maybe we should offer it to them,” Cork said.

  “What?” Lindsay gave him a shocked look.

  “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “To disable the dam, yes. Not sign the death warrant for everyone in Gordonville.”

  “All right, here’s the situation,” Cork said. “I’m already dead. I’ve seen and heard way too much. But the minute your grandfather’s blindfold came off, he was dead, too. He saw everyone, can identify faces. And now he knows everything. If we leave this room and offer them nothing, they’ll carry through with their threats. They’ll kill me first. Then they’ll put the gun to your head, Lindsay. And because there is, in fact, a remote possibility of accomplishing what they set out to do here, my guess is that your grandfather will give them the information they want. They’ll do what they set out to do. And then they’ll kill you both. Probably Indigo and Fox will kill everyone involved here, just to make sure they leave no loose ends.”

  Silence was their uncomfortable companion. The snow fell harder, and the window glass became a flood of melted flakes.

  Then Cork said, “I have no intention of letting them carry through with their plan. But if we play along, we might buy us some time while we figure a way out of this.”

  CHAPTER 52

  They flew north along the edge of the heavy cloud cover. Daniel sat up front with Bud Bowers. Henry and Rainy occupied the two seats behind them. Stephen sat in the very back.

  There’d been little talk since they taxied away from the marina in Aurora and lifted off from the sparkling surface of Iron Lake. They’d watched the cloud bank to the west spill toward them across the sky. The air had become turbulent, buffeting the little de Havilland. Periodically, Bowers checked in with Thunder Bay, the nearest weather reporting frequency, and kept his passengers updated.

  “Kenora’s already snowed in,” he reported. “The storm’s moving really fast. I don’t know if we’re going make it to White Woman Lake before everything there is socked in.”

  Rainy stared out her window. They’d long ago crossed the Canadian border, but the nature of the land below had changed little. It was a great arboreal wilderness, and the boundary lines politicians had drawn on maps were meaningless. Those lines might change. Who knew? But the land itself had been as it was for millions of years and would continue for millions more. There was comfort in this, in the knowledge that whatever humans did, in the very long run their impact was small when compared with the vast patience that was the spirit of the earth. But it was only small comfort when she thought about the danger Cork was in. Cork and Lindsay Harris and her grandfather.

  She saw Bowers put a ha
nd to his headset.

  “This is Alpha Bravo three four seven. Go ahead.”

  Bowers listened for a while. The plane made a sudden lurch to the left. Bowers dropped both hands to the control yoke.

  “I read you, Sheriff. I’ll let them know.”

  Over his shoulder, Bowers said, “I’ve got some interesting information to pass along. Seems the sheriff believes that Lindsay Harris may have been in on this from the beginning. In cahoots with whoever took her grandfather. The sheriff’s advising a good deal of caution in your dealings with her.

  “Also, we’re diverting. We’re going to make our landing at Gordonville, which is a little town east of White Woman Lake. A contingent from RCMP will meet us there. They don’t want us going to White Woman Lake on our own. A direct order from the Canadian authorities.”

  “Screw the authorities,” Stephen said.

  “Not gonna happen,” Bowers said. “We’re already in hot water. If we ignore that order and something really bad goes down, who knows what we might be looking at? Jail time? At the very least, there goes my job. Gordonville is only forty miles from White Woman Lake. If the RCMP and the weather allow it, we fly there. If not, you’ll have to find alternate transport. Sorry, folks. Best I can do.”

  “How much longer to Gordonville?”

  “Half an hour more or less.” Bowers looked toward the looming cloud bank to the west. “May be nip and tuck with that storm.”

  The turbulence got worse, and Bowers had his hands full. Rainy began to wonder if the little plane might be torn apart by the forces outside. She glanced at her great-uncle. Henry bounced lightly, like a twig on water, and nothing in his ancient face looked disturbed. She marveled at the strength that kept him so anchored to a peaceful center. She studied the sky. To the east, it was still clear, the sun bathing the land below. To the west lay an angry rush of roiling clouds painted in shades of black and gray. Life, she thought. Always a clash of opposites. Was there ever any real end to that great conflict?