Vermilion Drift Read online

  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.

  “Business.” It was clear that was all she would say on the subject.

  “Running the place alone since Lauren’s gone, that’s got to be tough.”

  “What are you doing here, Mr. O.C.?”

  It was what she’d always called him. O.C. for O’Connor.

  Ophelia was full-blood Ojibwe, a young woman with intense eyes and graceful movements. All her life she’d been a dancer, both traditional and modern. She’d performed the Jingle Dance at powwows and knew many dances from other tribes. She’d also studied dance at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, and her dream had been to create original choreography that combined the elements of native dance with more modern movement. Unfortunately, her dream had been cut short by a car that had run a stoplight in Minneapolis, broadsided Ophelia’s little Vespa, and crushed her right leg. Ophelia, the doctors predicted with surety, would never dance again.

  “Actually I came about Lauren.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “She’s not just gone, Ophelia. She’s gone missing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mind if I sit?”

  She gestured toward a chair near her desk, a piece that looked like it had been made in the days of Louis XIV.

  “It appears that no one knows her true whereabouts,” he said, after he was seated. “When did you last see her?”

  Ophelia sat back, folded her arms across her chest in a move that Cork, as a trained observer, might have taken as unconsciously defensive. He chose to ignore it.

  “A cocktail gathering,” she said. “Sunday, a week ago yesterday. The center was empty, and we met late into the evening with some of our volunteers in her private dining room to go over the roster of new artists and instructors coming Monday morning for the next residency.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Most of our artists come for a week. With each group we try to focus on the medium they’re most interested in. Watercolor, for example, or multimedia or photography. We bring in well-known working artists as instructors. It’s an intense program. We have room enough here for only seven artists and two instructors. Admission is very competitive. We do have one residency that’s different. It’s longer for one thing, anywhere from one month to three months, and it’s designed to highlight an artist Lauren feels is on the verge of a big career breakout and to help with that process. Currently, our long-term resident artist is Derek Huff. Very talented.”

  “How did Lauren seem that last night?”

  “Excited. She’s always excited at the prospect of a new group. She was positively ecstatic.”

  “Ecstatic?”

  “Effervescent. Ebullient,” she added.

  Which made Cork smile. Being around artists, he decided, was bound to rub off on you.

  Above the fireplace mantel hung a painting of Lauren Cavanaugh. It showed a beautiful woman in her early forties, with ash blond hair, green eyes, and flawless skin carefully drawn over the fine bones of a narrow face. Her lips seemed to hint at a smile, very Mona Lisaesque. She was stunning, but it was hard to tell what lay behind that beauty.

  When Cork was young, the Cavanaugh name had been synonymous with iron mining and with wealth. Both Max and his sister, Lauren, had been born in Aurora, but neither had been raised there. Their father had taken them away when they were quite young. When her brother returned to Aurora two years earlier, Lauren had followed. Because Max attended St. Agnes re
gularly, Cork knew him pretty well. But Lauren Cavanaugh didn’t go to church, and to Cork she was an enigma. She’d bought the Parrant estate, which had been empty for some time, and had established the Northern Lights Center for the Arts. She came with a cultural vision, a whirlwind of ideas that swept up a lot of people in Tamarack County. She proved to be a true patron of the arts. She’d organized and funded a lecture series that had brought in artists and thinkers with a broad range of interests. From what Cork understood, the size of the audiences that turned out for the events had been remarkable. According to things he’d read in the local paper, plans were being drawn for a complex that would include lofts, a gallery, and a theater for performing arts. Lauren Cavanaugh’s passion and conviction regarding the importance of art, even in a wilderness outpost like Aurora, was inspiring to a lot of Cork’s fellow citizens, and clearly to Ophelia.

  But what Cork saw in the painting above the mantel was a woman who looked down on him, and her hinted smile could easily have been one of contempt.

  “Did she ever talk to you about why she came back to Aurora?” he asked.

  “Simplicity,” Ophelia replied.

  “Where was she before?”

  “Where wasn’t she? Europe, Australia, India, South America.”

  “And now Aurora. For the sake of simplicity. It seems to me that what she’s set out to accomplish here is far from simple.”

  Ophelia gave a brief laugh. “Lauren isn’t a woman who can sit still. She’s a fountain of ideas and inspiration. She keeps a tape recorder with her all the time so that, whenever a new idea strikes her, she can record it and not risk forgetting. I’d love to listen to one of her tapes.”

  “So would I. Is that possible?”

  Ophelia looked taken aback. Offended even. “Absolutely not.”

  A delicate bell rang in the dining room.

  “Lunch,” Ophelia said. She stood up and reached for the cane that hung from the back of her chair.

  “Just a few more questions,” Cork said.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “I’ve been hired.”

  “Who?” Then it became clear to her. “Max.”

  “I’m not confirming that,” Cork said.

  She sat back down.

  “When you last spoke with Lauren, did she mention a trip at all?”

  “No,” Ophelia replied.

  “Did she talk about visiting someone, a friend?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Does she have friends? A special friend maybe?”

  “She has lots of friends.” She’d answered the last few questions with a look of impatience, but now she frowned and thought carefully. “No, she has lots of acquaintances. Her life is filled with people, but she doesn’t seem to have anyone especially close. At least not that she’s ever talked about.”

  “What about men?”

  “You mean like dating?”

  “Or whatever it’s called these days.”

  Ophelia laughed. “She’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s rich. Men make fools of themselves over her all the time.”

  “But does she date?”

  “Mr. O.C., I’m her colleague. Actually, I’m her employee. She doesn’t share every intimate detail of her life with me.”

  “Just asking.” Cork heard footsteps, lots of them, outside Ophelia’s office. Artists who’d worked up an appetite. “It’s my understanding that she hasn’t contacted anyone since she left. No e-mails from her personal account. Does she have an e-mail account she uses for business?”

  “Yes, but if you’re hoping to look at it, you’re out of luck. It’s password protected, and I don’t have the password. Are you always this pushy?”

  Cork smiled. “This is just inquisitive, kiddo. When I’m pushy, believe me, you’ll know it. Could I see her living quarters?”

  “Living quarters? This isn’t a barracks, Mr. O.C. But I suppose it wouldn’t be a problem for you to see her residence.”

  Ophelia’s cane was of beautiful design, polished hickory with an eagle’s head carved into the handle. She leaned on it heavily as they left her office and turned down the hallway, which was blocked by a door that hadn’t been there the last time Cork was in the house. Ophelia used the crook handle of her cane to knock. She tried the knob, which turned, and she pushed the door open. Beyond lay the first floor of the north wing, several rooms that had become the private residence of Lauren Cavanaugh: a study, a parlor, a small dining room, a bedroom, a bathroom. She hadn’t carved out a lot of the house for her own use, but what she occupied she’d done in style. Every room was beautifully furnished and impeccably cleaned. The parlor was decorated with stunning artwork—paintings and photographs—of the area, taken by a variety of the North Country’s finest artists.

  “Your grandmother’s work,” Cork said, pointing toward a series of framed photographs.

  “And mine, too,” Ophelia said proudly, pointing to some images that hung near her grandmother’s.

  Fate having taken away from her the chance to dance, Ophelia had turned to her grandmother’s art. Cork didn’t know a lot about photography as an art form, but he thought—and did not say—that Ophelia had a distance to go before her work approached the quality of her grandmother’s.

  The bedroom looked in perfect order, the bed neatly made.

  “Does someone clean for her, make up her bed?” he asked.

  “Our housekeeper, yes. But Joyce hasn’t been in here for several days. There’s been no need.”

  The closet was a large walk-in hung with so many outfits that it was impossible to tell if anything was missing.

  “She likes shoes,” Cork said, noting what seemed to him to be an inordinate number of pairs.

  “She has a weakness for expensive Italian footwear,” Lauren said, with only the slightest note of censure.

  Cork checked her dresser. Sachet in the drawer that held her delicates, and everything was neatly—obsessively—folded.

  “Who does her laundry?” he asked.

  “Joyce.”

  “Does Joyce fold the laundry?”

  “Lauren is particular.”

  “Clearly.”

  Outside the rain had stopped and the clouds were beginning to break. Through the broad bedroom window, Cork could see Iron Lake. Here and there, the gray surface was splashed with pools of glittering sunlight.

  “I heard that she had the boathouse remodeled,” he said.

  “Yes. A little retreat where she can get away from all that goes on in the big house here.”

  “May I take a look?”

  Ophelia glanced at her watch.

  “It’ll take just a minute,” Cork said. “Promise.”

  She accompanied him out a side door and along a path constructed of flagstone. She walked awkwardly, relying heavily on her cane. It was a painful thing to see, especially when Cork recalled the grace with which she’d moved before her accident. Ophelia knocked on the boathouse door. No one answered and she tried the knob. The door was unlocked and she opened it.

  “Lauren?” she called, but clearly only for the sake of propriety.

  It was a comfortable little nest Lauren Cavanaugh had created for herself, one very large room that included a small sitting area and a bed. Through an opened door in the far corner, Cork saw a tidy little bathroom with a shower. The place was done in rustic tones and had a very intimate feel to it, even more so than her private residence in the large house. It struck Cork as the kind of retreat that might be perfect for trysting.

  “Look, Mr. O.C., I’m really uncomfortable with this.”

  Cork walked to the bed and pushed down on the mattress. His hand sunk into the bedding and disappeared.

  “God, I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Ophelia said, “but I’d like you to leave.”

  “Why? I haven’t taken any of her silver.” Cork gave her his most serious look. “The woman is missing, Ophelia. I’ve been hired to find her. If I’m going to do that, I’ll need
your help. And your discretion. It would be best if everything we’ve discussed here today stays between us.” Cork started for the boathouse door. “I think I saw a computer in her study back in the house. I’d like to have a look at it.”

  “No. I think it’s time you left.”

  He smiled, pleased, despite himself, at the iron in her will. Before he could move or speak, someone outside called, “Lauren!”

  A moment later, a young man stepped into the doorway.

  “What is it, Derek?” Ophelia said.

  “I saw the open door and thought maybe. … Any word from Lauren when she might be back from Chicago?”

  Derek was tall, athletic, good looking. His blond hair was sun bleached nearly white. He had a tan, too deep to have come from the North Country, and carried himself with the easy grace Cork associated with California surfers. Cork’s and Ophelia’s presence in Lauren Cavanaugh’s little retreat was obviously a surprise to him.

  Ophelia said, “No word yet.”

  He looked Cork over, his ocean blue eyes lazy and sure. “If you hear anything, will you let me know?”

  “Of course,” Ophelia said.

  Derek flashed them a smile made of perfect white teeth and left.

  “One of the new residents?” Cork asked.

  “One of the old ones. Derek is here for three months. He’s nearing the end of his residency.”

  “Nice looking kid.”

  “I suppose.”

  “He seemed pretty familiar with the boathouse.”

  “He’s a little relaxed with protocol. It’s a California thing, I think.”

  “Maybe.”

  But Cork, ever the detective, wondered if there might be more to it than that.

  SIX

  Ophelia saw Cork to the front gate, where she said, “I got an e-mail from Jenny yesterday. She sounds happy.”

  “Ecstatic? Effervescent? Ebullient?”

  She laughed. “Aaron seems like a nice guy.” She was speaking of the farmer-poet whom Jenny was dating. “I’m envious.”

  “There are good men here, too,” Cork said.