himself, Cork tended to be easily influenced by his prejudices and selfish concerns, and he wasn’t certain he could trust any of his own conclusions.
But there was no other option, so he thought alone through the things that troubled him.
Someone had been there ahead of him. The boot tracks inside the smaller foundation told him that. How long before his own arrival, he couldn’t say, but it was entirely possible that, whoever it was, his coming had surprised them, and they’d slipped into the trees and simply waited for their chance to bushwhack him. He’d seen no other vehicles on Waagikomaan. Did that mean they’d hiked in, or they’d parked somewhere out of sight? And what were they after? Cork hadn’t known exactly what he’d find, but his assailant had brought a rake and so must have had a pretty good idea of what was there. Bones and teeth. They could have been from additional victims of Broom’s savagery, or they could have been the remains of Broom himself. Because he hadn’t learned of anyone else who’d gone missing over forty years earlier except those discovered in the Vermilion Drift, and because the burning of the cabin coincided with the disappearance of Indigo Broom, Cork was inclined to think they belonged to the man Millie Joseph had darkly referred to as “Mr. Windigo.”
Who would have known about Broom’s death?
Sam Winter Moon must have known because the story he’d spread about Broom leaving the rez to be with relatives somewhere else had clearly been a lie.
Did Cork’s mother know? His father? Henry Meloux? And if they knew, what had been their part in getting rid of Broom?
The night before, after the nightmare of his father dying, he’d lain awake thinking about what Meloux had said, that Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh had behaved like Windigos, cannibalizing their victims. Which was probably the reason for the cuts Agent Upchurch had found on the bones from the Vermilion Drift. But something that gruesome had to be well hidden, carried out in great secrecy, and where could that have been? Which had got Cork to wondering about where Indigo Broom had lived. When Millie Joseph told him it was a cursed place, he’d been almost certain he had the answer he was seeking. And when he’d found the manacles, he knew absolutely it was a place of horrific incident.
Cork sipped his beer and watched Trixie romping in the afternoon sun, and he puzzled over Broom and Monique Cavanaugh, who came from two very different worlds but in the darkness of their souls were united. How did they connect? How did evil find evil?
The Internet might have been a way, but 1964 was decades too early. A personal ad in the
He went inside and looked up a telephone number in his address book, then dialed.
He ordered Leinie’s for them both, and when the beers came, he slid one of the frosted mugs over to Cy Borkman.
“Thanks, Cork. Been too long since we tipped brews together.” Borkman tapped Cork’s mug, then took a long draw from his own and wiped foam from his upper lip. “How’s the investigation going?”
“Plodding along,” Cork said.
“Yeah, after you talked to me, Simon Rutledge looked me up, covered the same ground about the priest. You guys really ought to coordinate better.”
“We’re trying, Cy. Which is one reason I called.”
“I figured.” Borkman smiled. “What do you need?”
They sat at the bar of the Four Seasons with a view of the marina through a long bank of windows off to their right. When Cork was a kid, the Four Seasons hadn’t been there and the marina had been a simple affair with three short docks where maybe a dozen boats were tied up at any given time. Now it was a forest of masts with sailboats too numerous to count, a summer port to ostentatious powerboats and small yachts that often sat idle in the water for weeks on end, playthings for the rich who looked on Aurora as a place of diversion and looked with thinly veiled disdain on those who called the town home.
Cork said, “Back in your early days with the department, was there a bar somewhere that had a particularly unsavory reputation? Someplace that catered to, I don’t know, a clientele like the Hells Angels maybe? The kind of place prone to trouble but the owner maybe preferred to handle it on his own.”
“Here in Aurora?”
“Probably not. Maybe not even in Tamarack County, but close enough that someone from Aurora could patronize it if they wanted to.”
“Oh, sure. Used to be a place like that in Yellow Lake. Jacque’s. Christ, there was a dive. Story was that the guy who built it was descended from one of the Voyageurs and his ancestor’s name was Jacque something or other. Pretty quiet in the winter, but come summer that place really jumped. Full of loggers and miners, big guys who could get pretty mean when they were drinking. A magnet for lowlifes, too, troublemakers of every kind. Bikers. Indians. Prostitutes. The joint had a little postage stamp of a stage and a strip show. Guy who owned it last, let’s see, his name was Fredricks or Fredrickson, something like that, he used to keep a loaded Mossberg behind the bar. Discharged that bad boy on a number of occasions, never at anyone, just to, you know, get everybody’s attention. That was when Hal Sluicer was chief of police in Yellow Lake. He never seemed to take much notice of what went on down at Jacque’s. Turned out Fredrickson, or whatever his name was, was paying Sluicer off. Eventually Sluicer got his ass fired. Yellow Lake went for a spell without a regular police presence and contracted with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement during that time.”
“You ever get a call down there?”
“Oh, yeah. That place kept us plenty busy.”
“Ever run into an Indian there name of Indigo Broom?”
“Broom? From the rez? Sure, Broom was right at home.”
“How about Monique Cavanaugh?”
Borkman seemed surprised. “What would a woman like her be doing in a place like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That lady had class. No way she’d be caught dead in a joint like that.”
“Maybe if she wore a wig and called herself something else?”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. Forget it.”
“Naw, you asked. Why?”
“The truth is, Cy, that I’m thinking there was some connection between Monique Cavanaugh and Indigo Broom. But they moved in such different circles, I can’t figure out how they would have stumbled onto each other. I thought a place like Jacque’s might have provided the opportunity.”
“A woman like her with a guy like Broom? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t. Forget I said anything.”
Borkman sat quietly for some time sipping his beer. Cork watched a sailboat back from its slip, come around, and head out into the lake under the power of its engine. When it cleared the marina, a sail went up, an explosion of white against the blue of the sky, and the vessel tilted in the grip of the wind and glided east across the water.
“Jesus,” Borkman said. “Oh, Jesus.”
Cork turned on his stool. “What?”
Borkman looked at him, and his eyes were big circles of wonderment.
“What is it, Cy?”
Borkman didn’t answer immediately. Cork could tell he was working through something in his head.
“Your father was a good man,” Borkman finally said, but so softly that Cork had to lean to him. “But he wasn’t a perfect man.”
“What do you mean?”
“Christ, I shouldn’t be telling you this, you of all people.”
“Don’t crap out on me now, Cy.”
“It was decades ago, so I suppose …” Borkman gripped his beer with both hands, as if the mug was all that anchored him. “Look, your father was seeing another woman.”
“What?”
