Vermilion Drift

“When was the last set created?”

“Just before the mine closed in the sixties.”

“Any chance something was missed in the update?”

Haddad shook his head. “I checked the old schematics against the new set myself. They’re identical.”

Cork thought a moment. “Do you have anything before the sixties?”

“Yes. Archived at the Ladyslipper Mine. When Vermilion One closed, everything was moved there for storage.”

“Were they the basis for the schematics done when the mine closed?”

“No. A complete and independent survey was carried out at that time. They wanted an accurate blueprint of the mine as it existed then.”

“Have you looked at the earlier schematics?”

“What would be the point?”

“To be thorough,” Cork said. “It seems to me that there are three obvious possibilities for how someone managed to put graffiti on Level Three. One, it was someone who was down there officially and did something unofficial. But you tell me you’re certain that didn’t happen. Two, it was someone who accessed the mine unofficially through one of the known entrances, but you also say that’s impossible. And three, someone came into the mine another way, a way unknown to you and that doesn’t show on the recent schematics. Because there are earlier schematics that still haven’t been checked, this strikes me as the best possibility at the moment. I think it would be prudent to go over them, just to be thorough. You want to be thorough, don’t you, Lou?”

“And if this possibility doesn’t pan out?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

They stepped back from the table, and Haddad said, “I’ll head to Ladyslipper right now. If I find something, I’ll let everyone know, and we can decide how we want to proceed. In the meantime, Marsha, what about the threats?”

Dross looked a little uneasy. “The truth is that they’re rather vague and unspecific. They don’t threaten you by name. And the graffiti in the mine tends to support the general nature of the statement. It could be argued that ‘we’ is the population at large, and if storage of radioactive waste here results in the death of that population, you, as a part of that population, die too.”

“You sound like a lawyer,” Cavanaugh said.

Dross shrugged. “I’m not sure what more I can do at this point, especially because, as I say, the threat is so vague. And, Max, most people in Tamarack County aren’t thrilled with the idea of Vermilion One being used for nuclear waste storage, so the pool of suspects is rather large. But until we know how someone got into the mine, my recommendation is that no one goes down there alone.”

“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Haddad assured her.

Dross said, “Let me know what you come up with after looking at the old schematics, Lou, and maybe we can figure something then. I’ll stay in touch.”

The sheriff bid them good-bye and left.

“I have work I can do back at my hotel room,” Kufus said. “Then I think I’ll do a mile in the lake.”

She looks like a swimmer, Cork thought, nicely toned. “The water’s still pretty cold,” he cautioned.

“I warm up easily.” She gave Cork that disarming smile, and he thought, Christ, she is flirting? But she turned the same smile immediately on Cavanaugh. “Still on for lunch, Max?”

“Looking forward to it,” he replied.

She left the room and left Cork feeling awkward and uncertain, stupid in his understanding of women.

After Genie Kufus had gone, Haddad said, “Thanks for agreeing to help, Cork. As soon as I’ve had a chance to go over the old schematics, I’ll let you know what I’ve found.”

They shook hands, and Cork turned to Max Cavanaugh to take his leave.

“Sure you can handle … everything?” Cavanaugh asked.

“I’m sure. And I’ll stay in touch.”

Outside the gate to the Vermilion One Mine, the number of protesters didn’t appear to have increased. Only the hard-core dedicated were willing to endure the discomfort of the steady rain. He understood and sympathized with their cause. Tamarack County was his home, too, and he didn’t want a radioactive dump there any more than they did. Isaiah Broom was still a hulking presence, along with a number of other Shinnobs Cork knew from the rez. Broom flipped him the bird as he passed. The others just eyed him with looks of betrayal.

He’d almost reached the end of the gathering when he saw a photographer’s tripod up at the side of the road and covered with a rain hood. Bent to the eyepiece was an old woman with long, black hair, wet as a well-used mop. Cork pulled off the asphalt and stopped. He got out and walked to the photographer, who was so intent on her work that she didn’t realize she had company.

“Boozhoo, Hattie,” Cork said, using the familiar Ojibwe greeting.

She rose slowly from her camera, not because of her age, which was well over seven decades, but because she was a woman unconcerned with time. She smiled, sunshine in the middle of the rain. Her eyes were light almond and warm when she saw him.

“Anin, Corkie,” she replied. She was one of only a few people who ever called him Corkie. She and all the others who used the name had been his mother’s good friends. There were few of them still alive. She glanced down the line of protesters, many of whom were eyeing the exchange suspiciously. “Taking a chance, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think they’ll jump me, Hattie. But I expect they won’t be including me in their prayers tonight.”

She reached inside her yellow rain jacket, pulled out a pack of Newports, plucked a cigarette, and fed it to the corner of her mouth, where it dangled while she struck a match.

“Love the gray of this day,” she said. “The pall it casts. My film’s going to love it, too. Just look at that composition.”

She pointed toward the stretch of road that led to the gate: the protesters huddled on one side, the mine fence on the other, and between them the no-man’s-land of wet asphalt. To Cork it was just a dreary scene, but to Hattie Stillday it was dramatic composition. Hers was the eye to trust. For longer than Cork had been alive, she’d been framing the nation in black-and-white stills. The main thrust of her work had been those moments when cultures collide. She’d photographed steelworkers’ strikes in Pennsylvania in the early fifties. She’d been on all three marches from Selma to Montgomery in the sixties. She’d chronicled on film the White Night gay riots in San Francisco in ’79. Every November, she was a part of the peace vigil held before the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the training of Latin American soldiers by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the organization that for years had been known as the notorious School of the Americas. This was one activity that moved her to do more than snap photos. She’d been arrested a couple of times, fingerprinted, booked. Only her age and reputation had saved her from actual prosecution. Her work hung in the Guggenheim and the Getty and the Art Institute, and had been reproduced in beautifully bound volumes. Hattie Stillday was famous, but to look at her on that wet morning, an old woman with black strands of hair plastered to her cheeks and mud caking her hiking boots and a cigarette dancing in the corner of her mouth as she talked, you’d never know it.

“So the poop is true? You’re working for the mine people?”

“ ‘Fraid so, Hattie.”

She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and flicked ash onto the wet ground. “I think your grandmother just turned in her grave, Corkie. But I suppose everybody’s got to make their buck.”

There was a great deal more to it than that. Like the power of the composition Cork didn’t quite see, there were elements of this situation to which Hattie was undoubtedly blind. He could have tried to explain, but Corkie didn’t feel like arguing with this fine, old woman.

“Care to pose for a famous photo?” she asked.

“Infamous you mean. And no thanks. I’ve got business to attend to. Actually, I’m on my way to talk to your granddaughter.”

“Ophelia?” Her eyes turned cold. “What the hell for?”

“I can’t say.”

“This mine business? She’s got nothing to do with it. You go dragging her name into this, Corkie, and get her into trouble, you’ll answer to me, do you understand?”