Vermilion Drift

by William Kent Krueger

  “You never answered Marsha’s question, Lou,” Cork said above the noise of the cage rattle. “What do you think about using Vermilion One to store nuclear waste?”

  “A while back, Germany went with the idea of a waste isolation facility, which they created in a deep abandoned salt mine,” Haddad said. “They’ve discovered that it leaks. It’s been leaking for years.” He shook his head dismally. “The plan at the moment is to use the Yucca Mountain facility, but because of some of the potential difficulties there, other sites need to be considered. The question remains: What do we do with the nuclear waste we’ve created? Nobody in their right mind wants it in their backyard.”

  It took a couple of minutes to reach the third level. When the cage stopped, Haddad threw back the gate and led Cork and Dross out. They were in a large excavation where two tunnels, each ten feet high and ten feet wide, led off to the left and to the right. The area around the cage station was lit with electric lights strung along the ceiling, but the tunnels were black. Up top the temperature was in the low seventies, but in the mine the air was twenty degrees cooler and Cork wished he’d brought a sweater. Dross was hugging herself for warmth.

  “Over here,” Haddad said. He moved to a wall not far from the cage. Spray-painted in red across the old mining scars were the words “We die. U die.” The message had been carefully done so that it looked very much like the printed messages Haddad and the others had received. The words seemed to drip blood.

  “When did you discover this?” Cork asked.

  “I didn’t,” Haddad replied. “It was Genie Kufus, yesterday. She came down to inspect this level, and there it was.”

  “She was alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time anyone was down here before that?”

  “On this level specifically, a week ago. I sent a couple of men down to make sure the pumps were working. They checked every level except the last five.”

  “Pumps?”

  “Water. It leaks into the mine and has to be removed. The lowest levels are still flooded. It’ll be a while before we get those cleared for inspection.”

  “They didn’t report anything?” Dross asked.

  “No.”

  “Could they have simply missed it?”

  “Would you miss that?” Haddad replied.

  Cork said, “So this was done sometime between last Sunday and yesterday. How would they have gotten access to this level?”

  “Coming down the Number Six shaft is the only way.”

  “There are seven other shafts, though, right?”

  “All of them have been capped and sealed. I checked them myself yesterday after Genie reported what she’d found. None of them have been monkeyed with. Besides, none of the other shafts connect with the drifts that run off Number Six.”

  “Was anyone else in the mine at all during that time, on any level?”

  “Yes. Mike Chernokov and Freddie Brink. They’ve been working on the ventilation and the water pumps. And we had a small tour group in from the state legislature on Friday. They wanted to see for themselves what the DOE found so attractive about this site. I led it myself.”

  “Did you visit Level Three?”

  “No, I confined the tour to Level One, the Vermilion Drift.”

  “Vermilion Drift?”

  “In a mine, a vertical excavation is called a sink. An excavation that runs horizontally off a sink is called a drift.”

  “So mine shafts are sinks and tunnels are drifts?” Cork said.

  “That’s right. The Vermilion Drift was the first underground mining done in this location, and I thought it was appropriate for the group.”

  “Your two guys and the legislature group, that’s it?”

  “And Genie.”

  “Did you talk to your guys?” Dross asked.

  “Believe me, I talked.”

  “What did they say?”

  “That they went down, completed their work, came back up. They didn’t do anything, they didn’t see anything.”

  “Do you trust them?” Cork asked.

  “Listen, good-paying jobs on the Range aren’t that plentiful. Those guys are family men. They’d have to be stupid, which they’re not, or ideologically fanatic, which they also are not, to jeopardize their employment that way.”

  “Okay,” Cork said. “I saw a ladder running down the framework on the side of the shaft. Is it possible somebody from your tour group slipped away and climbed down here?”

  “There were only five in the group. All of them were in my sight the entire time.”

  “What about Kufus?” Dross threw out.

  Haddad looked surprised, then looked as if he was about to laugh. “Why would she do it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You said she was alone when she found this. When she reported it, how did she seem?”

  “Disturbed. If you’re looking at storing nuclear waste in Vermilion One, the issue of security is going to be huge. She seemed genuinely surprised and upset.”

  “Okay, let’s work on the premise that no one who was down here legitimately is responsible,” Cork said. “That would mean someone was here who wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “No way someone who wasn’t authorized could get down here,” Haddad replied.

  “If you accept my premise, that’s not true.”

  “Which means what?” Haddad asked.

  Dross eyed Cork and smiled with perfect understanding. “There’s got to be another way in.”

  FOUR

  Up top, Haddad separated and went to his office, while Cork and Dross returned to the conference room. Cavanaugh and Kufus were deep in a conversation that stopped the moment Cork and the sheriff walked in. From the looks on their faces and the abruptness with which the conversation ended, Cork had the distinct impression that it wasn’t business they were discussing.

  Haddad came in a few moments later and dropped a book in the middle of the table. The tome—nearly a foot wide, eighteen inches long, eight inches thick, and bound in heavy material that looked a lot like leather—hit with the thump of a fallen body.

  He said, “These are the schematics for every level of the mine, all twenty-seven. Every shaft, every drift, every foot of the fifty-four miles of excavation. I’ve gone over them so many times they visit me in my nightmares. I’m telling you, aside from Number Six, which is the only shaft still open, there is no other way in. Why would there be?”

  “I don’t know,” Cork said. “Enlighten me.”

  “I just did. Another entrance would mean another sink, and, believe me, cutting a shaft into rock is no Sunday drive in the country. It requires equipment, explosives, time, money. We’d know if someone did that. For one thing, they’d make a hell of a racket.”

  Cork opened the book. The pages were made of a thin, waxy material. The drawings on them reminded Cork of town plats, precise lines and corridors with lots of numbers indicating sizes and distances. All this was laid against a background that showed the county section lines for the ground above. In the lower right-hand corner was a legend that contained the scale and explained the markings on the map: stopes, raises, drifts, shafts, drill holes. Under the legend was a notation: “Prepared by Engineers Office, Granger, MN.” Beneath that was a date.

  “These are recent,” he said.

  “I requested them as soon as I knew about the DOE inspection,” Cavanaugh said. He nodded toward Kufus. “I wanted Genie and her people to have the most accurate information possible.”

  “How were they prepared?”

  Haddad said, “I took the last full set of schematics—they’re in pretty bad shape—and had them redone.”

  “When was the last set created?”

  “Just before the mine closed in the sixties.”

  “Any chance something was missed in the update?”

  Haddad shook his head. “I checked the old schematics against the new set myself. They’re identical.”

  Cork thought a m
oment. “Do you have anything before the sixties?”

  “Yes. Archived at the Ladyslipper Mine. When Vermilion One closed, everything was moved there for storage.”

  “Were they the basis for the schematics done when the mine closed?”

  “No. A complete and independent survey was carried out at that time. They wanted an accurate blueprint of the mine as it existed then.”

  “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 discree
t, 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.

  FIVE

  He 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.