One long, beautiful work from the hand of Kitchimanidoo. You, me, those who have gone before us, and those who come after, we are all connected in that creation. No one is ever truly lost to us.” The old man lifted an arm weakly and waved him away. “Now go. It is finished.” Meloux closed his eyes.
“One more question, Henry.”
The old man’s eyelids fluttered open. “With you, it is always one more question.”
“The vision I had on Iron Lake? The two wolves fighting?”
“What about it?”
“You never told me which one wins. Love or fear?”
“It is the one you feed, Corcoran O’Connor. Always the one you feed.” The old man closed his eyes again. In another moment, he was sleeping.
Outside, Cork stood with Rainy in the late afternoon sun. The wind blew across the meadow grass, bringing the scent of wildflowers and evergreen.
“This was hard on Uncle Henry,” she said.
“You’ll take care of him?”
“Of course.” She smiled. Smiled beautifully. “I say that, but somehow I always end up feeling it’s the other way around.” She gave him an unreadable look. “I don’t know what occurred in the sweat lodge, but you seem different. Better. Healed.”
“The blessing of that old man in there.” He looked away where the meadow grass rolled gently under the hand of the wind, then back at Rainy. “If that’s one of the reasons you’re here with him, I hope he passes his special gift on to you.”
“That’s one of the reasons.” Rainy looked down for a moment. “I’m sorry I was so hard on you at first.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
Cork studied the bracelet Meloux had given him. All things connected. Of course.
“Could I tell you something?” he said. “It’s something I would have told Jo if she were alive, something I need to share with someone.”
“I’d be happy to listen.”
“Ever since Jo died, I’ve been having nightmares about my father’s death. I haven’t understood why, but maybe I do now. A very wise woman recently suggested that the nightmares might have something to do with some essential quality in my father that I’ve felt was missing in me. I believe that’s true. I believe that at some level I remembered what my father did in order to save my mother’s life and to protect his friends. The behavior of The People during the Vanishings went against everything that as a lawman he embraced. But in the end, he did what was necessary for the woman he loved and for the people he cared about; it was a sacrifice, one that wounded him deeply, but he did it. I think maybe …” Cork faltered.
“You’ve been wondering if maybe you could have done something that would have saved her, some sacrifice you weren’t willing to make?”
Cork looked into the warm brown of her eyes. “Yeah.”
“You’ve been blaming yourself for your wife’s death.”
“I think maybe I have.”
“And do you think it’s time you didn’t?”
“That might take some work.”
“When you’re ready, Henry’s here. And so am I.”
“
“Take care of yourself, Corcoran O’Connor.” She took his hand, leaned to him, and lightly kissed his cheek. “Don’t be a stranger.”
FIFTY
Hattie Stillday listened, and when he finished, she said, “I’d kill for a cigarette right now, Corkie.”
“Sorry, Hattie,” Cork said. He leaned toward her across the table in the interview room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. “All these years, you knew what happened, you and the others.”
Hattie smiled gently. “We knew more than that. We knew what
“For my sake?”
“Ours, too. Hell, wasn’t any of us looking forward to what would happen if everything came to light. Some pretty dark doings.”
“But you had nothing to do with them, Hattie.”
“Wasn’t by design. I was fully prepared to end that woman’s existence. Your father just got there ahead of me. Ahead of us all. We were all guilty of intent.”
She reached out and took his hands in her own, which were old but strong yet.
“Corkie, what are you going to do?”
“I have to tell them, Hattie.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what happened. Because it’s the truth.”
She shook her head in mild disapproval. “You’re so like your father. Except that everything he knew he took with him to his grave.”
“He didn’t die a happy man, Hattie.”
“Maybe not. But he died a good man. The whites back then, they wouldn’t have understood. The whites now, I don’t know.” She paused, and her dark, careworn eyes seemed to pierce him. “Do
He knew what she was asking. He thought about the men and women involved in bringing an end to the butchery of Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh. He’d known them his whole life, known them as good people. The Vanishings had driven them to actions that most good people would have seen as unthinkable; yet he believed this hadn’t changed who they were at heart. Max Cavanaugh probably had it right. Sometimes, for the greater good, you chose to do harm and hope that you could find your way to forgiveness. His mother and Sam Winter Moon and Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday and the others, they’d found that way, and for the rest of their lives had chosen to feed a different wolf. His father had died too soon, died without coming to terms with what he’d done, with the things he thought too dark for his young son to have to deal with.
“Yeah, Hattie,” he finally replied. “I do.”
“Are you going tell them about Ophelia?”
This was a question Cork had considered long and hard, and there was no easy answer. There was the law, which he’d worked to enforce most of his life. And there was justice, which he believed in deeply. And there was what was right according to his heart. And these were not the same things. Any decision he made would not satisfy them all.
“No,” he said.
“You can live with that, but you can’t live with the truth of what your father did, is that it?”
“I know you don’t understand, Hattie. But I think my father would.”
She let go of his hands, sat back slowly, and Cork couldn’t read the look on her face. “Yesterday, I had a visitor. Isaiah Broom.”
“Broom came here? What did he want?”
“To talk to me about the Vanishings. And about his mother.”
“He knows the truth?”
“Part of it. The part that will help him understand who she was and that she loved him and would never have deserted him. That was important for him to know. And something else, Corkie.”
