Windigo Island Read online

  He wore black boxer shorts and nothing else. He was licorice-­stick thin, and his black hair was a mess. He was a good-looking seventeen-year-old, and he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and gave his mother a killing look. Then he gave the same look to the others. Except Daniel English, to whom he said, “’Sup, cuz?”

  English said, “This man wants to ask you some questions, Toby.”

  Toby eyed Cork as if he had his number. “Cop.”

  “No.”

  He seemed surprised that he was wrong. “What kind of ­questions?”

  “About your sister, Mariah.”

  “What about her?”

  “I’d like to find her, if I can.”

  “Well, good luck with that.”

  “Any idea where she is?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any idea why she ran off?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any idea who her friends were?”

  Toby yawned, maybe from lack of sleep or maybe from boredom. “Nope.”

  “Do you care if she ever comes back?”

  His lips formed the word again, but he stopped himself and actually considered the question. In the end, all he offered was a shrug. Then he yawned again and scratched his belly.

  “Did you know Carrie Verga?” Cork asked.

  “Not really. Saw her around.”

  “What about Mariah’s other friends? Know any of them?”

  “I never paid much attention.” He sounded truly bored now.

  It was clear to Cork he would get nowhere with the kid. “Could I see her room?” he asked Louise.

  “Her room?” A look that Cork couldn’t quite interpret crossed the woman’s face. It may have been fear or guilt or some combination thereof. “Why?”

  “It might give me a better feel for Mariah.”

  Louise’s hands rose from her lap and gripped the arms of her wheelchair. “Not much left. We’re kinda crowded here, so that’s Toby and Puck’s room now.”

  “Puck?” Cork asked. Because Arceneaux had neglected to mention anyone named Puck.

  “My son,” Arceneaux said. “Him and me, we’re staying here with Louise. Temporarily.”

  Which was another detail Arceneaux had neglected to mention. Cork could see only two bedrooms—the one where the boys played their video game and the one from which Toby had just emerged. He wondered where Louise and Arceneaux slept.

  “Puck?” Jenny asked. “Like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  “No,” Arceneaux said. “Like in the little round thing hockey players hit. His real name’s Paul. When he was a kid, he was short and round and loved watching hockey on television. So I called him Puck. It stuck.”

  “How long have you been living with Louise?” Cork asked.

  “Little over a year. But I have a line on another place. Puck graduated from high school in the spring. He’ll be leaving soon. Going to college. I’ll be moving out then.”

  “Is Puck here now?” Cork asked.

  Arceneaux shook his head. “He’s working. Got himself a summer job on one of the fishing boats out of Bayfield.”

  “You need me for anything else?” Toby asked.

  “No,” his mother said, her voice flat and hopeless. “Go on back to bed.”

  In departing, the kid said nothing else to anyone. The door, when he closed it behind him, did not close gently.

  Louise fell silent, stared at the floor in front of her. When she looked up, her eyes glistened with tears. “I miss her so much,” she said. “And I swear if she comes back everything will be different.”

  Different how? Cork wanted to ask. Was it more than just the dirt and the disarray and the dysfunction? Which, clearly, this family could abide.

  Jenny, who’d been oddly quiet, said, “Go see Henry Meloux, Louise. Whatever that takes. I think he can help.”

  Louise reached out and impulsively took Jenny’s hands. “But I don’t know what he wants from me.”

  “Mariah’s most precious possession,” Jenny said. “Think about it. Take some time. My dad and I have some more people to see, but we’ll be back.”

  “All right.” Louise seemed stronger now, as if she’d taken some of Jenny’s strength, the strength of another woman who understood, into herself. “All right,” she said again and released her hold on Jenny’s hands.

  Cork said, “We’re going to talk with Carrie Verga’s family. And also the Bayfield County Sheriff’s Office. And I’d like to talk to Puck. Louise, is there anyone else you think we should see?”

  “Mariah talked about her basketball coach a lot.”

  “I know her,” English said. “We’ll talk to her, Louise.”

  The woman lifted her dark eyes, and Cork saw something that hadn’t been there when he’d first come in. It was something that worried him. Because what he saw was hope. And it worried him because so far he could see no reason to hope. He thought false hope was a far crueler thing than no hope at all.

  “Thank you,” Louise said to them all.

  Red Arceneaux said to them, “Migwech,” which meant “thank you.”

  Once outside, they gathered at English’s pickup. “Why don’t we leave one of the vehicles here?” he suggested. “No reason to take two. You okay driving, Cork?”

  “I’d rather we used yours,” Cork said. He put his hand on the mud-spattered old pickup. “It’ll stand out less on the rez. And if folks here see you driving up, well, a guy who’s clearly Shinnob has a better chance of getting a reasonable reception. You okay with that?”

  “Sure,” English said. “Makes sense.” He looked back at the little, thrown-together house. “When I was a kid, if we saw Louise it was because she came down to Hayward to visit us. We never came up here. Pretty clear why.”

  “Yeah,” Jenny said. “I think this visit told us a lot.”

  “Oh?” Cork said. “What exactly did it tell us?”

  “It’s awfully late for her to worry about being a good mother, don’t you think, Dad? I mean, Christ, if I were Mariah, I’d’ve run away from that.”

  “I doubt it. That’s home,” Cork said. “That’s what she grew up with. Dirt and noise and crowding. She was used to it. No, I think something else made her run.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s keep talking to people. Maybe we’ll find out.”

  He opened the door of English’s pickup and gestured for Jenny to get in.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  They drove south out of Bad Bluff. The road ran beside Chequamegon Bay, a long, broad inlet of Kitchigami. The landscape was hills covered with a mix of deciduous and evergreen, checkered here and there with orchards and meadowland. The gloomy overcast had finally broken. Although there seemed to be no wind, the clouds were fast becoming dwindling islands of gray afloat in a vast ocean of blue sky. Below, the water of the bay lay flat and silver-blue in the morning sun.

  English was at the wheel of his pickup. Cork sat on the far passenger side. Jenny straddled the middle.

  “What exactly do you do as a game warden, Daniel?” she asked.

  “Mostly deal with guys trying to take what they’re not supposed to take or taking something when they’re not supposed to take it. Pretty straightforward.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “You have to be careful. Most men’ll be unhappy with a citation, but a few get outright hostile. I carry a sidearm. Never had to use it.”

  “You like your job?”

  “I like that I get paid to be outside, in the woods or on a lake. And I think what I do is important.”

  “What do you do when you’re not patrolling? Or whatever you call it.”

  “We call it patrolling. My time off, mostly I relax. Sit on the porch of my cabin. Read maybe.”

  “Read what?”

  “Wh
atever.”

  “Hunting and fishing magazines?”

  Cork suspected his daughter said this in a deliberate attempt to get English to be more forthcoming. If so, she seemed to have failed. The big Shinnob was silent and seemed deadly intent on the road ahead. But after half a mile and a good half minute had slipped by, he replied, “Billy Collins. James Welch. David Foster Wallace. Sherman Alexie. Hemingway.”

  “Whoa,” Jenny said. “Impressive. But Hemingway?”

  Daniel gave his huge shoulders a small shrug. “Flawed human being, but he’s always seemed to me a guy who understood the profound impact the natural world can have on the human spirit.” Then he asked in a flat voice that, to anyone who didn’t know the Ojibwe well, might have sounded devoid of any real interest, “Aunt Rainy says you write.”

  “Not really,” Jenny replied too quickly. “When I’m not being a mom, I pretty much run Sam’s Place. Keeps me plenty busy.”

  Her tone was easy to interpret, and the conversation took a fatal nosedive.

  They entered Washburn, a pretty little town perched on hills above the lake. They found the sheriff’s department, part of a new-looking county government complex. At the public contact desk inside, they asked to speak with the sheriff and were told that he was out at the moment. The young woman on duty, who wore no uniform or name badge and was, Cork suspected, simply a clerical employee, asked if there was something she could do for them. They explained their situation. She told them to take a seat and she’d get the officer who’d been in charge of investigating Carrie Verga’s death.

  They sat in black plastic chairs in the small public waiting area. In a couple of minutes, a man who looked like an NFL linebacker stepped into the waiting area. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, blue tie, and khakis.

  “Lieutenant Joe Hammer,” he said, offering his hand.

  Cork introduced them all and once again explained their ­pre­sence.

  “Why don’t you folks come on back, and we’ll talk.”

  They followed Hammer down a short corridor to his office. It was little more than a cubbyhole, but neatly kept. On the desk sat three stacks of file folders, like watchtowers. On one of the walls hung two framed photographs. One was of a younger Hammer with a woman in a yellow bikini on a beach that might have been Hawaii. In the other, Hammer stood with the same woman, this time on a lakeshore, both of them older and each holding the hand of a young child. Hammer took the chair at his desk. With a wave of his huge hand, he indicated that Jenny should take the only other chair. Cork stood behind his daughter, and English leaned against a tall green file cabinet with a stuffed owl atop it that looked down on the gathering with an indifferent, glassy eye.

  After he’d ascertained their interest in the case, Hammer gave them some of the pertinent details.

  “Cold-water immersion and drowning,” he explained. “That’s the official probable cause of death. There was a high level of alcohol and also traces of heroin in the girl’s bloodstream. I haven’t come up with any witnesses, anybody at all who’d seen Carrie Verga in the last year. So it’s puzzling.”

  “There were bruises on her body,” Cork said, recalling the photograph English had shown him the day before.

  “Yes. She was treated pretty badly before she died. And lacerations, too, although our coroner concluded those were postmortem and probably occurred when the body washed onto the rocks of the island.”

  “Any indication of sexual assault?”

  “Our coroner didn’t find any, no. Of course, the body had been in the lake, so a lot of evidence could have been washed away.”

  “How long was she in the water?” English asked.

  “That’s a tough one. The frigid temperature of the lake tends to preserve a body. So it could have been a week or it could have been a month.”

  “A year?” Cork asked.

  “I thought about that and asked the coroner. He said he didn’t think so. Thought it was much more recent, although he couldn’t really say how recent.”

  Cork said, “Carrie and Mariah Arceneaux disappeared at the same time, probably together. Who investigated that disappe­arance?”

  “That would be me. But it wasn’t a disappearance, as such. When their families reported them gone, I looked into the situation. Became clear pretty quick that the girls had run away. They’d been talking about it for a while, and they didn’t leave empty-handed. They packed suitcases. May have got a ride out of town with a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Never was able to get a name. You ever try getting information from folks on a reservation? They close ranks.”

  “Any idea where they were headed?”

  Hammer shrugged. “Indian kids when they run off generally go to a relative’s place. I checked and that’s not where these kids went. So I notified Ashland and Duluth PD and all the shelters in the area. Also in the Twin Cities. Those are the places where kids up here usually run to if they’re serious about running. I gave their information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I questioned the kids’ parents. I continued to ask around at their school and on the reservation. I didn’t come up with anything useful except that the girls had talked to some of their friends about getting out of here, going somewhere more exciting. If I’d been concerned that Carrie and Mariah were abducted, that would be one thing. But like I say, it was pretty clear they’d just taken off on their own. It’s been my experience that, more often than not, runaways come home eventually. It’s a hard life out there on the street.”

  Cork nodded his agreement with that last statement. “When her body washed up on Windigo Island, what did you think then?”

  “Honestly, I’ve been wondering if she’d been around here somewhere the whole time, just didn’t want to be seen. Runaway and all. I mean, the home life of some of these kids is pretty bad. They want to get away from it, but not away completely from what’s familiar, you understand?”

  “Is that possible up here?” English asked. “To hide for a year without being spotted? Seems to me like an area where people would recognize each other.”

  “Generally speaking, I think that’s true. But with Indian kids . . .” Again, Hammer shrugged. “The autopsy showed that the girl had been using. Dressed as she was when we found her, it’s not hard to guess what she might’ve been up to.”

  “Which was?” Jenny asked.

  “In my experience, a young Indian girl who’s into drugs and who doesn’t have a lot of money also doesn’t have a lot of choice in how she gets those drugs.”

  Jenny leaned forward, and Cork was afraid she was going to spring at the detective. “Prostitution? That’s what you’re saying? It could only be prostitution?”

  “Pretty much that’s what I’m saying, yes.”

  “Because she’s Ojibwe.”

  “Okay,” Cork jumped in quickly, “how does a kid prostitute herself up here? I mean, without being seen and recognized? Even an Indian kid.”

  “We’re not on the moon. We have the Internet. So, Craigslist, for example.”

  “Did you check Craigslist?”

  “Yes. And Backpage. That’s another way they do this kind of thing.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t find anything, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. She probably used information that wouldn’t identify her. Look, it’s upsetting, I know,” Hammer said, addressing his comment directly to Jenny. “Think it doesn’t bother me? I’m supposed to be the one keeping kids like her safe. Even Indian kids.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Considering what’s happened to Carrie, how are you proceeding with Mariah?” Cork asked.

  “We’re not. We have no information, no new leads, no nothing.”

  “If Carrie could hide up here for a year,
couldn’t Mariah?” English said.

  “Of course. But if nobody saw Carrie, who’d see Mariah? We don’t really have anything to go on. Look, one of our big problems is that nobody on the reservation is eager to talk to a cop, even one who’s wearing a Bad Bluff uniform.” He eyed English. “Are you Chippewa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad Bluff?”

  “Lac Courte Oreilles, down near Hayward.”

  Hammer didn’t look hopeful. “Maybe they’ll open up to you, but I doubt it. You’re not Bad Bluff. It’s a close community, the reservation.”

  “I understand,” English said.

  “But look, promise me this. When you’re poking around, if you find information that ought to change my thinking or that’ll give us something substantial to go on, you’ll let me know.”

  “We’ll do that,” English told him.

  Hammer opened his empty hands toward them all. “We’re not uncaring here. We’re just human and limited.”

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  Lieutenant Hammer had given them Carrie Verga’s home address, as well as the telephone number. He also gave them the cell phone number of the girl’s stepfather. He’d told them Demetrius Verga was a widower. His wife had died in a boating accident a couple of years earlier. If they didn’t find him at home, he advised them to check the Port Superior Marina. Verga was an avid sailor and was often on the water.

  They tried calling the house but got only voice mail. Same result with the cell phone number. Jenny keyed in the address on the Garmin app of her smart phone. The home, they discovered, was situated south of Bayfield, high on a hill with a gorgeous view of some old apple orchards and, beyond them, the broad water of Chequamegon Bay. A lovely gazebo stood on the sloping front lawn. A little way above the gazebo was a swimming pool filled with water so clear it looked like air and on which there was not a leaf or a ripple. The home sat against a great stand of hardwoods and was old and grand and beautifully maintained. In an elegant and inviting way, everything about it said money.