Windigo Island Read Free Page B

whatever it was they’d discussed was probably the reason for Rainy’s call. Cork was deeply interested in that reason and in why Rainy’s voice had been so urgent. But the Anishinaabeg never rushed anything, and so he resigned himself to patience.
    Rainy poured coffee for the two new visitors, and Meloux suggested they smoke together. From a cupboard, he pulled a cedar box that held a small leather pouch and a pipe that was, Cork knew, carved from stone quarried at a site in southwestern Minnesota sacred to many tribes in the upper Midwest. Henry filled the bowl, but before he lit the tobacco, he took a pinch and made an offering of gratitude to the spirits of each cardinal direction. They passed the pipe and smoked in silence and listened to the rain, and then Henry said, “There is trouble, Corcoran O’Connor. Trouble in my family.”

Chapter 3
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    H enry Meloux sat at the table he’d made himself from birchwood long, long ago. Cork sat across from him. The chairs were birchwood, too, also of Meloux’s construction. The old man slid a photograph across the tabletop. Cork lifted and studied it. A shot of a body, a girl’s body, naked except for a pair of pale blue panties. She lay facedown on a rocky shoreline, her torso draped over broken rock. Everything below her waist was in water so clear it obscured nothing. Her arms were thrust out above her, as if she’d clawed her way to that place, crawled as far out of the water as she possibly could before she gave up the ghost. Her dark hair lay splayed across her shoulders and back. There were dark discolorations along her ribs—bruises. She was small. And young. There was no perspective, really, that told Cork her age. He simply sensed it. What he was looking at, he knew, was the body of girl still not quite a woman. Now she would never be.
    “Her name,” Daniel English said, “is Carrie Verga. She’s Bad Bluff Chippewa, from near Bayfield in Wisconsin. Ran away from home a year ago. No one’s seen her since. Then last week, her body washed up on a small island in Lake Superior near the Bad Bluff Reservation. Some boys who were out there to paint graffiti found her.”
    “I read about that in the News Tribune ,” Cork said. “Is she family?”
    “No,” English replied. “But when she left Bayfield, she didn’tleave alone. A girl named Mariah Arceneaux went with her. She’s family. My cousin.”
    And so kin to both Rainy and Meloux. Cork understood Rainy well, and understood now the urgency in her voice when she’d called him to come to Crow Point. But the ancient Mide was an enigma in so many ways. He was a man whose life was dedicated to the healing of others, yet he’d chosen to spend it in solitude far from any community. People sought him out, but he seldom went seeking others. He had family, but they’d been scattered to the winds long ago. When they were children, he and his two sisters had been taken from the Iron Lake Reservation and forced to go to Indian schools, odd nomenclature for places whose primary purpose was to drive everything Native out of their charges. Meloux had been sent to Flandreau, South Dakota. His sisters went to the government boarding school on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Wisconsin. Meloux had simply walked away from the Flandreau school one day and returned to Iron Lake. His sisters had stayed in Wisconsin, married, and created many additional branches in the family tree. As far as Cork knew, Meloux seldom saw them. But Cork also knew that Meloux’s idea of family had nothing to do with blood or tribal affiliation or skin color. Anyone who came to him in need and with an honest heart was kin. Still, looking at the old man’s face, Cork could see nothing there. Not concern, compassion, even interest.
    Jenny stared over her father’s shoulder at the photograph. “She’s just a kid.”
    “Fourteen now,” English said. “Same age as my cousin.”
    “Has anyone heard from your cousin?” Cork