Windigo Island

by William Kent Krueger

  “What do we know?” Jenny asked.

  “Lindy was defensive. She knows more than she’s willing to say. Maybe she’s protecting Raven. Maybe she’s just afraid. I’m not sure which. But Red was right. It was clear we weren’t going to get answers from her. I didn’t want to push her too hard. Not at this point anyway.”

  “Maybe Henry?” Jenny suggested.

  “Maybe Henry,” Cork agreed. “If he’s willing to come here.”

  Arceneaux exited the building, and the gathered smokers made way for him. He looked unhappy as he approached the Explorer. “Puck’s not inside,” he said. “Appears he’s gone off with a couple of friends, down to the campgrounds on the lake. Drinking beer or smoking weed most likely. We can walk from here, if you want.”

  Bad Bluff was a small community. The campgrounds turned out to be just north of the casino, which was a stone’s throw from the community center. It was dark enough by then that the halogen lamps of the complex’s parking lot had come on, and they walked in that harsh neon glare.

  The campgrounds appeared to be nearly empty. A tent occupied one of the spaces along the lakeshore. A low fire burned in the pit there, but Cork saw no one around it. A few spaces south was an RV with a canopy spread above the site’s picnic table. The lights were on inside the RV, and Cork heard a radio tuned to a ball game. Arceneaux kept walking as if he could sense, even in the gathering dark, exactly where to find his son. And he did.

  It was the last site south in the campgrounds. Possibly because it was the site nearest the casino and hotel, it looked barely used. The fire pit contained no char, no ash, no evidence of a recent blaze. Tall grass had grown in the tent pad area. Just beyond, the ground sloped steeply to the lake. Arceneaux stood in the tall grass at the crest of the rise. Below him, a little fire had been kindled on a flat rock jutting into Superior. Three figures sat silhouetted there. A tiny orange spark traveled among them, and Cork caught the unmistakable aroma of burning pot.

  “Thought you were going to be listening to music, Puck.” Arceneaux slowly descended a path that was faint in the deepening dark.

  “Aw, shit. Busted.” The voice didn’t sound at all concerned.

  Arceneaux continued until he was close enough to distinguish faces in the firelight. “George, Connie,” he said.

  “Hey, Red.” The voice of a young man.

  “Evening, Mr. Arceneaux.” A young woman’s voice.

  “The music wasn’t good?” Arceneaux said.

  “It was fine, Red. We’re just taking a break.” This came from the first voice that had spoken, which Cork figured belonged to Arceneaux’s son. Cork found it interesting that he addressed his father by his given name. The kid turned, and Cork saw a face cut in half by firelight and the dark. “Who’d you bring with you?”

  “Those are the folks I told you about,” Arceneaux replied. “Mind going for a walk with us?”

  “I’m kind of occupied here, Red.”

  Cork said, “It’ll only take a minute, Puck. And it’s important.”

  Puck reached for the joint that was being passed. He took a hit, held it, and blew out the smoke. “Chill, guys. I’ll be back real soon.” He leaned over and kissed the girl, whose hair was gold in the firelight. He stood and climbed the slope.

  He was no longer the size and shape that had been the reason for the nickname he’d been given as a child. He was tall and slender and fit. The pupils of his eyes were large and dark. His hair was as black as a starless night. He wore a clean white T-shirt and clean jeans and new-looking, neon red, high-top sneakers. Although he’d worked a fishing boat all day, he didn’t smell of fish. He smelled of smoke, both wood and weed. He studied Cork, then English, and finally Jenny. He said “Hey” to them all in general.

  “Boozhoo,” Cork replied.

  Puck said, “Right.”

  “Mind if we take a little walk? Not long, I promise,” Cork told him.

  “This is about Mariah?”

  “It’s about Mariah.”

  He gave a whatever shrug and said, “Lead the way.”

  They didn’t walk far, just enough to be out of hearing range from the kids still by the fire, or anyone else who might be interested in listening to their conversation.

  “So what do you want to know?” Puck asked when they stopped. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and stood tall, with his chest out.

  “Tell me about her,” Cork said.

  “Hell, I’m guessing everyone in Bad Bluff’s already told you about Mariah. What do you want from me that you didn’t get from them?”

  “What did you think of her?”

  “I liked her,” Puck replied without hesitation. “She was a good kid.”

  “Any idea why she ran away?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cork waited, then waited some more.

  Jenny broke the silence. “She was a good kid, then she changed. Do you know what I mean, Puck?”

  “I know exactly what you mean. When Red and me came here, Mariah was just a kid. Really pretty, you know, but a kid. Then, like you say, she changed. Started wearing all kinds of makeup, dressing slutty, trying to look older. I told her it wasn’t her. She told me it wasn’t any of my business.”

  “When did that change happen?”

  “A while before she ran off.”

  “What changed in her life?”

  “She began hanging with Carrie Verga for one thing.”

  “What did you think of Carrie?” Cork asked.

  “Trouble.”

  “How so?”

  “Like a festering boil. She kept it all in, whatever was bothering her, but you could see it was going to blow up sooner or later.”

  “You’re pretty sensitive to that kind of thing, are you?” Cork said.

  “That’s how I spent my life, mister.”

  “What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

  The young man looked at his father, those dark eyes bottomless. He spoke in a flat voice. “Being Indian’s never been much of a leg up for me. I don’t go in for all that powwow and drums and spirits in the lake shit. The truth is that this is a white man’s world. If you’re going to succeed, it’s going to be on the white man’s terms. I got that a long time ago.

  “When my dad was in prison, the county placed me with a foster family. White people. Very religious. I was their salvation project. They used to lock me in a closet. Never beat me. That’s something a social worker or somebody at a clinic could see. But they’d hold off feeding me for a while and beat me in other ways. In the name of God and for the sake of my eternal soul. You know what? I learned to play along. I learned to say whatever it took to get out of that closet, to get fed, to get clothed. I learned that it’s a white man’s world and the only God is the white man’s God. I learned to take all that crap they dished out with a smile, because one day I was going to be better than them. Richer than them. I was going to beat them at their own game. So I know about keeping stuff inside and what to look for. I saw it in Carrie Verga, in spades.”

  Daniel English spoke up for the first time. “How’re you going to beat them at their own game, Puck?”

  “I’ve been working my ass off, saving money for college,” the young man told him. “I’m going to UW–Superior in the fall. I’m going to major in business. You know who Dave Anderson is?”

  “The Dave Anderson who started up Famous Dave’s bar­becue?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s Ojibwe. I’m going to make it like he did. Do the white man’s thing in the white man’s world.”

  “With a white man’s heart?” English asked.

  Puck said, “The white man’s got no heart. And that’s his ­secret.”

  Cork was afraid of losing the kid to his bitterness. To bring the conversation back to what was necessary he said, “Carrie and Mariah may have run off w
ith the help of another girl. Raven Duvall. You know her?”

  “I didn’t really know her, just knew about her from what Mariah said. Drove a nice car. A model down in Duluth or the Twin Cities. Somewhere.”

  “Is that when the changes you talked about seeing in Mariah occurred?”

  “Naw, that happened before. In fact, she got better after she started hanging with Raven. I figured Raven, being a model and all, maybe showed her how to use makeup and how to dress nice, but not slutty.”

  “Know where we can find Raven?”

  “Nope. Haven’t seen her since Mariah took off.”

  “Puck,” Jenny said carefully, “what do you think of Mariah’s brother, Toby?”

  “Worthless, that one. And if you’re looking for reasons why Mariah might have run off, you should talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was hitting on her, him and those worthless shits he hangs out with.”

  “Hitting on his own sister?” Jenny said.

  Puck gave her a long look. “Welcome to the party. I threatened to beat the crap out of him if he didn’t lay off her.”

  “Did it work?”

  “She ran away,” Puck said. Then he addressed Cork: “I’ve been thinking about Carrie, about her washing up on Windigo Island after all this time. That hump of rock out there’s too far to swim to, especially in this cold lake water, and it’s too small to party on.”

  “And?” Cork encouraged.

  “One thing I know because of the work I do: you want to get rid of something, you take it out and drop it in the lake.”

  “You think somebody dumped Carrie in Lake Superior?”

  “Every day we go out on the fishing boat, I see lots of other boats out there. Big sailboats, big powerboats, yachts, you know? Belong to guys from the Twin Cities, Chicago, places like that. Lots of money. I run across them sometimes when we come into dock. A lot of them seem to me like the kind of people who’d buy something, use it awhile, and when they’re tired of it, they just throw it away. Worth thinking about, you know. We done here?”

  Cork said, “If we wanted to talk to you again, Puck, would that be all right?”

  Arceneaux said, “He’ll talk to you.”

  Puck shook his head. “You’re just like a white man, Red. Always trying to tell me what to do.” To Cork he said, “You really think you can find Mariah, I’ll talk some more. But I don’t know anything I haven’t already told you. See you around.”

  The young man turned, and as he walked toward the little fire where his friends were waiting, his back was lit with the dull glow of the casino neon.

  Arceneaux watched him go, his face stone. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  They dropped Arceneaux at his sister’s house, returned to the hotel, and went to the casino bar for a beer and to talk things over. Daniel English reported that the big Shinnob had said almost nothing on the way home.

  “Like hauling a rock. A big, heavy rock,” he said.

  “A lot on his shoulders.” Cork sipped the Leinie’s that the barmaid had brought him. His mind was working fast and hard. “I keep thinking about something Puck said. People throw things from their boats when they’re done with them.”

  “You think that’s what happened to Carrie Verga?” Jenny asked. She’d ordered a Diet Coke, but it sat untouched on the table in front of her.

  “I’ve been trying to figure how someone might operate a prostitution business from up here. There are half a dozen marinas on the Bayfield Peninsula. It seems to me that catering to the men who dock their expensive boats here wouldn’t be a bad way to go about it.”

  “So,” Jenny said, “assuming circumstances had forced Carrie to be a part of something like that, then what? The john just got tired of her and threw her overboard?”

  “In that kind of situation, anything’s possible. Who knows what might have happened? But Kitchigami’s an ideal place to drop a body. That lake almost never gives up its dead.”

  “It gave up Carrie,” Jenny pointed out.

  English said, “I suppose prostitution might work in season, but it’s a short season up here. What about the rest of the year? Things slow to a crawl, I imagine. And we come back to the question of how Carrie could continue to be here and not be seen.”

  Cork lifted his beer. “I’m still working on that.”

  It was late when they climbed the stairs to their rooms. English said good night and closed his door. In their own room, Jenny went to the window and looked at the black water of the lake.

  Cork joined her and spoke to her reflection in the glass. “How come you didn’t tell Daniel that you’re a writer?”

  Jenny said, “The first question people ask you is, Have you published? Like that’s the be-all and end-all.”

  “You asked him what he read, and he was honest. Couple of those guys I never even heard of.”

  “Hemingway, Dad. He likes Hemingway.”

  Whatever that meant. Cork wasn’t a writer, and had never been much of a reader, and so had no idea. He said, “I’m going for a walk.”

  Jenny turned from her window reflection. “Not tired?”

  “A lot of snarls in my thinking. If I go to bed now, I’ll just lie there trying to pull them apart. Better if I walk. I won’t keep you awake that way.”

  “I won’t be lying down for a while. Aunt Rose promised to call before she went to bed and give me an update on her day with Waaboo.”

  Cork left the hotel and walked down to the lakeshore. He couldn’t see the campgrounds because of the dark, and he wondered if Puck and his friends were still there. He liked the kid. There was anger in Puck, which he’d channeled in a way that would drive him for a while. At some point, the anger wouldn’t be enough. He might well accomplish what he intended to do, outwhite the white man, but the cost would be great, Cork suspected. Then again, what did he know? He ran a burger joint and a second-rate detective business and had no ambition beyond that. Still, he considered himself a happy man, and who could put a dollar sign to that?

  Although the moon hung almost directly above him, everything to the east seemed oddly dark. Yet Cork discerned gradations in that darkness. The water of the West Channel was a soft, shifting black, like liquid ink. The sky, with its billions of stars, was a great piece of charcoal dusted with ash. Basswood Island, solid as coal, rose out of one of those blacknesses and stood silhouetted against the other. In a way, Cork thought, this was exactly where he was in his investigation, trying to sort out one dark from ­another.

  People were lying to him. Or maybe simply not telling him the truth of everything, which was different from lying, he supposed, but equally unhelpful in his investigation. Louise had not told him everything, he was certain. It was the same with Lindy Duvall. Captain Bigboy, in his assurances that child prostitution couldn’t possibly be occurring on the rez, may have simply been fooling himself about the community he was responsible for policing. Or maybe he had something to hide. And Demetrius Verga? He was a man clearly used to dishing up crap and calling it caviar.

  Even in the night, boats still cruised smoothly across the lake, their lights reflected in the liquid black of the water. Cork watched a big, gaudily lit power launch glide down the West Channel, and as he studied it, the lights winked out for a moment in succession, as if, one after the other, they were being turned off and then on again. For a moment, he was confused. Then he realized what he was seeing. Between him and the launch stood Windigo Island. Now he could discern the tall, solitary pine tree a couple of hundred yards offshore, rising out of that small humping of rock. He hadn’t noticed it in daylight, had been too intent on other things. But there it was, a couple of hundred yards from shore, the beacon for the spirits of the lake—the windigo and Michi Peshu. In a way, the heart of all this darkness.

  Kyle Buffalo was right to be afraid, as was his father. Th
ere were monsters in the world. They preyed on the vulnerable, so many of whom were children, and their greatest ally was fear. Whatever the truth that Louise Arceneaux and Lindy Duvall and everyone else was afraid to speak, Cork knew he had to get to the heart of it. Not only for Mariah, if she was still alive, but for the nameless others just like her.

  He started to turn away from the lake, and as he did, a wind came up out of nowhere, a torrent so cold, so sudden, so powerful that it almost knocked him over. Caught off balance and stumbling, he heard, or thought he heard, what had made Kyle Buffalo’s blood freeze in his veins. For the second time in his life, Corcoran O’Connor heard, or thought he heard, a windigo call his name.

  “O’Connor.” A human voice this time, male, coming from the shadow of a small shed at the edge of the parking lot near the water.

  The wind that had brought the windigo’s voice died as quickly and mysteriously as it had come.

  Cork tried to see into the shadow from which the human voice had spoken. “Who’s there?”

  “You want to know about the girl, right?”

  “Are you talking about Mariah Arceneaux?”

  “Her, yeah. I got information.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want nobody to see me. You come over here.”

  Cork moved toward the shed and its shadow. He was almost there when the blow caught him. It might have been a baseball bat; the impact came too quickly for him to see. Whoever wielded it used it like a cop would a nightstick and rammed the tip hard into his solar plexus. All the breath went out of him, and Cork went down. The next blow fell across his shoulder. He tried to curl into a ball to protect himself against more battering.

  “Hey! What’s going on over there?” The cry came from the direction where Puck Arceneaux and his friends had gathered.

  The man in the shadow leaned close to Cork’s ear. His breath smelled of beer and barbecued potato chips. “Get out of Bad Bluff, O’Connor. We don’t like chimooks who’re too interested in our girls.”

  Cork heard the slap of footsteps approaching across the parking lot pavement. The man in the shadow disappeared without a sound.