Desolation Mountain Read online

  Stephen worked his way quietly through the woods to where gray-green rock outcrops, smaller versions of the mountain, began to appear. He wove among the rocks and around a small bog, where the ground began a sharp incline. There was no clear path up the eastern side of Desolation Mountain, and he chose his way carefully. He was in no hurry. Time wouldn’t change what drew him to Majimanidoo-oshkiinzhig.

  He entered the aspens that ringed the mountain just below the crown. The white trunks around him felt like a host of markers in a vast graveyard, testaments to the dark reputation of the mountain, and Stephen tried to shake the sense of dread that shadowed him.

  He broke from the aspens onto a broad, barren stretch that formed the granite apron of the mountaintop. From the edge of the aspens to the crown, the only life-form was simple lichen, which looked like cancer on the rocks. It was a desolate landscape, the reason for the name the whites had given it was easy to see. Above the apron, atop the crest, rose a circular outcrop darker than any of the rock around it. Stephen had seen aerial photographs of the formation and, in them, the justification for the Ojibwe name—Devil’s Eye—became clear. That crowning outcrop resembled perfectly a dark pupil set in a gray-green iris, a never-blinking eye staring skyward.

  He climbed to the base of the outcrop, a roughly circular formation ten feet high and thirty feet in diameter. If he’d scaled the rock all the way to the top, he would have had a full view of the mountain slope. The landscape was familiar, but not just because he’d been there many times over the course of his twenty years in Aurora. He understood now that each time the vision came to him, this was the place where the scene played out. He looked up. The sky was blue, with a few cotton ball puffs of white. In the vision, the sky was always a boil of dark clouds. The air around him was redolent with the fragrance of the Northwoods, of evergreens and fallen aspen leaves and the mineral smell of the hard rock beneath his feet, and even the clean scent of the lakes he could see from the mountain’s crest. In the vision, the air stank of burning fuel and seared flesh.

  Stephen was still struggling to understand.

  From his vantage, he could make out the bog where the broken wreckage of the plane had come to rest, a bare, circular area among the distant trees. On previous days, he’d tried to make his way there, but the woods continued to be alive with men still searching the crash site. From a case on his belt, he took out a pair of field glasses, put them to his eyes, and adjusted the lenses. The bog came clearly into view, and he saw a few searchers crawling like insects along the edges of the reedy water. The fuselage and other wreckage had been removed. Just a hair to the south were the trees where he’d stumbled upon the boy still strapped in his seat, his face obliterated, all the bones of his body shattered. He lowered the glasses, remembering the horror, the helplessness he’d felt. Time and again since that day, he’d imagined what it might have been like for the boy, his mother, his father, the aide, the pilots, as the plane fell. Through tiny windows, a view of the earth racing at them, the trees looming. The terrible realization, too fleeting to be spoken, of what would happen in the next instant. He’d imagined the mother—not the senator but the woman behind the title—turning her head toward her child, knowing that all she’d hoped for him, had dreamed his life might be, was gone. Worse than her own fate was what she must have understood of his.

  Every time Stephen imagined this, he felt anger at the uselessness of his vision.

  He put the glasses to his eyes again and moved the lenses to the north. He spotted the oval of blue water that was Little Bass Lake, where Monkey Love and his uncle Ned lived. He could make out the rustic cabin and even the tiny outhouse through whose opened door Monkey had watched the plane go down.

  Then he became aware of movement among the aspens ringing the mountain a hundred yards below him. He shifted the field glasses, adjusted the focus. The men who came into view wore military fatigues. They seemed to be conducting a quadrant search, an evidence-gathering technique described to him by his father, in which an area was divided into squares and covered methodically.

  A couple of other men in fatigues appeared on the worn path that came up the western slope from the barricaded road. They carried powerful-looking rifles and joined the men conducting the search among the aspens. Stephen couldn’t understand why they were searching the mountaintop when the plane had crashed far below. They seemed out of place, especially with the heavy weapons. Something felt terribly wrong.

  He continued to scan the trees below. Except for the quadrant where the men in fatigues disturbed the peace, it was a lovely scene. The aspen leaves were shivering gold, the trunks stark white, sunlight breaking among the branches, the ground below dappled with shadows.

  Then he spotted the boy. Standing very still. Another shadow among the many shadows beneath the trees. The boy watched the men. Stephen watched the boy. A gentle wind rose up. The shadows of the trees shifted. The sunlight between them danced.

  In the next moment, the light faded as a brooding shadow crossed the mountain. Stephen glanced up. The sun had been obscured by a sudden convergence of clouds. When he put his eyes to the lenses again, the boy had vanished.

  He moved quickly off the mountaintop and risked a dash down the bare rock apron, across open ground toward the trees where he’d last seen the boy. As he ran, he heard a shout from the direction of the search area. To his right, two men with rifles rushed from the aspens. His gimp leg was on fire, and the burn ran up his back to the place where a bullet had once entered and lodged against his spine.

  The cloud passed and sunlight returned, a dazzle that once again laid down shadows among the trees. He caught a glimpse of something moving there. The boy? Run, he wanted to shout. Run.

  Instead he stopped dead still and turned to face the men with rifles. A decoy so the boy could escape. A sacrifice that deep inside him felt right.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  Sheriff Marsha Dross sat in her office, looking up at Cork with eyes so tired they made him want to lie down.

  “I’m not running for reelection next year,” she said.

  “Believe me, I understand.”

  “Sit.”

  Cork took the vacant chair on the other side of her desk.

  “I thought I’d been through it all. But the senator’s plane crash?” She raised her hands in surrender.

  “I understood you were out of the investigation.”

  “We are. Officially. I’ve still got a line of guys from a zoo of federal agencies coming in constantly, looking for assistance, local info. FBI, NTSB, Homeland Security. The wording I’m supposed to deliver to the media goes something like this: The investigation is out of my hands, but I see nothing to make me question the preliminary determination that the cause of the crash was pilot error.”

  “A lot of interest among a lot of agencies for a crash caused by simple pilot error.”

  “In the political environment today, a terrorist is behind every tragic event.”

  “I was finally interviewed by the FBI this morning.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Only just?”

  “They’ve been busy, the agent said.”

  “Yeah, fighting among themselves. I can’t tell who’s in charge.”

  “Nobody’s talked to Monkey or Ned Love yet.”

  She closed her eyes in frustration. “Is it any wonder we still don’t know who really killed Kennedy?”

  “Margaret told me at the contact desk that George Azevedo requested a leave.”

  “Asked for two weeks off. Claimed he couldn’t stand the badgering from the feds and the media. They were camped out at his house, following his family. He had to get out of Dodge.”

  “Not you, though?”

  “The buck stops here.”

  “How would you like to piss off the feds, Marsha?”

  “I’d like that quite a lot.”

  “Put your badge on and follow me.”

  “Where to?”

  “I think it’s ti
me somebody talked to Ned and Monkey.”

  Because Marsha Dross had never been to the Loves’ cabin, Cork drove. Also, he liked the idea that his unmarked vehicle wouldn’t attract as much notice. They skirted the southern end of Iron Lake and headed east onto rez land, where Cork took back roads he’d traveled all his life. Dross was in her second term as sheriff, but she wasn’t native to the area. Like a lot of white folks in Tamarack County, even those born there, when she was on the Iron Lake Reservation, she might as well have been in the Australian outback. Cork kept off the main route to Desolation Mountain, figuring that one or all of the interested federal agencies would still be monitoring the traffic. He eased through a couple of iffy bog areas, and finally Desolation Mountain came into view above the tops of the trees.

  “What do you know about Monkey Love?” he asked.

  “I heard he was trouble around here when he was a kid, but I’ve never had a problem with him.”

  “Nobody’s sure who his father was. His mother died when he wasn’t much more than a toddler. His uncle took him in, raised him for a long while. Ned Love’s a good man, but he’s always kept to himself out here in the woods. Monkey grew up comfortable not being around people.”

  “I can’t recall seeing either of them in Aurora more than half a dozen times in the last few years.”

  “Like I said, comfortable in their isolation. When Monkey was twelve, his aunt, Beulah Love, that’s Ned’s sister, decided he wasn’t being raised right, got Social Services involved. They took Monkey from Ned and placed him with her. She lives in Allouette. A well-meaning woman, I’m sure, but one hell of a Bible thumper. Monkey was an odd kid. Odd looking and socially backward. Threw in with a bad crowd, despite all the preaching of his aunt Beulah. He started using, committed a bunch of petty crimes. Shoplifting, boosting cars, a string of B & Es. Got himself sent to the juvenile detention center in Bemidji. Once he came of age, I ran him in a lot for D & D. Then he tried armed robbery using a pellet gun. Did a couple of years in Sandstone.”

  “Serving time straightened him out?”

  “Not exactly. A guy in Sandstone introduced him to the White Bison program. It’s a movement that, among other things, helps incarcerated Native men and women get sober. The program didn’t take when he was inside, but it finally clicked for him after he was released. Henry Meloux had a lot to do with that. Monkey moved back in with his uncle five years ago, been there since. Still odd, but he seems a lot more comfortable with who he is.”

  Cork was following two barely visible ruts. Low-hanging tree branches and the wild undergrowth scraped audibly along the sides of the vehicle.

  He finally pulled to a stop in front of the old, one-room cabin that had been home to Monkey Love when he was a kid, and was home to him again.

  Dross peered through the windshield. “So, just Monkey and Ned out here?”

  “Got themselves an old bluetick hound they call Cyrus, in honor of Monkey’s grandfather. Used to be a good hunting dog, but he’s old now, years past his prime, arthritic. Mostly he lies in the shade and barks a warning when anyone comes around.”

  “I don’t hear him barking.”

  Ned Love’s old pickup was parked next to the cabin. Beyond it lay the road the Loves took when they came and went, a narrow lane that in winter could be snow-choked and impassable. In the spring melt, when the ground was often nothing but a wet, black mire, it could be just as difficult to traverse. When either Ned or Monkey wanted to go into Allouette, they were often forced to walk, taking the path Cork had just followed, a five-mile trek each way.

  Cork and Dross got out of the vehicle and approached the cabin.

  Ned Love was a hunter, and beside his front door lay a pile of jumbled deer antlers. Cork knocked, a little surprised that no one had stepped out to see who’d come calling. Cork was pretty sure the Loves got few visitors. At the very least, Cyrus should have been barking up a storm.

  “Ned, Monkey, it’s Cork O’Connor!”

  He glanced at Dross and reached for the door. Few people on the rez used locks, and the door swung open. Inside, the place was furnished simply: an old woodstove at the center, two bunks with their heads against the far wall and between them a chest of drawers, a small table next to the single eastern window with two chairs shoved under, two kerosene lanterns—one on the table and one on the chest of drawers. A wooden counter ran along the south wall; the shelves above it held dry and canned goods and cooking utensils. On the counter itself sat a hand mirror, a white enamel basin, a straight razor. Considering it was the home of two bachelors, the cabin was neatly kept. And empty. Just that. Empty. Nothing sinister. Yet Cork felt something wasn’t right.

  “Where do you suppose they’ve gone off to?” Dross spoke just above a whisper, as if their presence was a trespass. Which, technically, it was.

  “Hunting maybe. That’s mostly how Ned keeps the larder filled.”

  “They must have taken the bluetick with them.”

  Outside they checked the shed, which was empty except for the axes, saws, splitter, and other tools Ned and Monkey used to gather and prepare the firewood they sold. The only other structure was the outhouse. Cork walked to it. The door was closed, but he heard a scratching on the other side. He reached for the wooden latch and paused. The scratching ceased. Dross had come up next to him, her sidearm out and in her hand. Cork yanked open the door.

  A squirrel shot past them, a blur of gray fur that darted up the nearest pine.

  A wooden dock, rickety-looking, jutted out into Little Bass Lake a few yards from the shoreline, just enough to tie up a boat or land a canoe. There was nothing tied at the dock, but Cork strolled out to its end and stood gazing across the lake, which was oval-shaped and only a few hundred yards wide. Reflected on the still, silver-blue surface was the upside-down image of Desolation Mountain, which rose beyond the trees on the far shoreline.

  “I didn’t see their rifles anywhere,” he noted. “So maybe they did go hunting.”

  Dross bent down and inspected the warped, weathered dock boards. With the tip of her index finger, she touched a spot that had caught her interest, one of a spattering of dark spots at the edge of the dock.

  “I wouldn’t bet the farm, but I’d wager this is blood,” she said.

  She stood and looked across the lake, which was as empty as the cabin, and took in the sight of Desolation Mountain, its crown bare and gray against the blue wall of the sky.

  “Marsha,” Cork said quietly.

  She looked where he was looking, into the water just off the end of the dock. The lake was four feet deep there and crystal clear. From the bottom, Cyrus, the bluetick hound, stared up at them with open, dead eyes.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  Stephen sat in a chair in the lodge of a resort on Iron Lake, south of Aurora. The resort—North Country Cabins—had been closed for three years. Stephen wasn’t sure what the issue was, why exactly it had closed, except that during the recession a lot of resorts in the area had suffered. The cabins had stood empty since. Until now. The lodge room where Stephen sat with a good view of the lake was full of electronic equipment and bankers’ boxes containing file folders. Topographic maps of Tamarack County and the Iron Lake Reservation hung on the walls, with pins of various colors stuck in patterns Stephen couldn’t decipher.

  He was afraid, but not with the kind of fear that always accompanied his vision. It was broad daylight, and the men who’d brought him there appeared to be with the government and bound, he believed, by laws. It wasn’t like he was a terrorist.

  He’d been questioned, twice. First by the men on top of Desolation Mountain. Hoping they would let him go, he’d told them he was just curious. Instead, they’d brought him down to the lodge. Since the plane crash, there’d been a great deal of activity in Tamarack County, lots of official outsiders poking around. Nobody seemed to know much about the nature of all that effort, beyond trying to get to the bottom of what caused the crash. Which, if you believed the N
TSB briefings, had already been pretty much determined to be pilot error.

  But if that were the true reason for the crash, Stephen asked himself as he sat, what was it they were looking for among the aspens on Desolation Mountain?

  He wasn’t alone in the room. A man who called himself Gerard was with him. Gerard was military, Stephen had guessed—because of the man’s bearing, which was stiff, his clipped way of talking, the hardness with which he eyed Stephen. Also the camo and the crew cut.

  They’d stopped conversing. Stephen had stuck to his story about just being curious. You know, a kid. He’d smiled when he said that. Gerard’s reply had been that twenty years old was not a kid. Younger men were in uniform, dying for their country.

  In his questioning, Gerard had kept hammering at Stephen about a camera. Was he taking pictures? Stephen had maintained that he wasn’t.

  In the empty silence after the questions had ended, a woman entered the room. She was tall, blond, and carried herself with the same kind of bearing as Gerard, very military. They spoke in low voices, and Gerard turned to Stephen.

  “We’ve brought your Jeep down. It’s parked outside. You’re free to go. But, Mr. O’Connor, if we find you in that restricted area again, there will be charges. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Show him out, Craig.”

  Before Stephen left the room, he asked one final question: “Who exactly are you?”

  “We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now . . .” Gerard stopped and waited, as if expecting something from Stephen. Then he looked disappointed. “Don’t know that poem? ‘In Flanders Fields,’ a great piece about sacrifice. You want to know who we are, kid? We’re the ones willing to put it all on the line so you sleep safe and warm in your bed at night. We stand between you and the enemy.”