“I have an idea,” his mother says. “She gives a lot of money away. What if Henry and I approach her about an Ojibwe charity?”
“What charity?” his father asks.
The kitchen is quiet. Then his mother says, “The Missing Child Fund.”
It’s night. Late. He has slipped from his house and ridden his bike ten miles to the southern edge of the rez. The moon is up, and Waagikomaan is a river of gray dirt winding among the trees. He knows from what he’s overheard that Indigo Broom is being watched, and he’s careful. There is only one way to Broom’s cabin, and he’s on it. He walks his bike and has tuned all his senses to the forest that presses in on either side of the road.
There are crickets and tree frogs, and then there is a deeper sound, unnatural, in the trees to his right. The sound, he realizes, of a man snoring.
He creeps past the sleeping man and, a hundred yards farther, remounts and rides to an old logging road that cuts south toward Mr. Windigo’s cabin. He lays his bike at the side of Waagikomaan and starts up the logging road. The trees blot out the moon, and the woods are dark. He can barely see.
He’s here because … because he’s a boy on the edge of manhood, and he wants to be a part of this important effort to find his cousin and Naomi, to find the truth of the Vanishings, and he hopes that somehow in the dark of that night, or of another, he will find the way.
His whole life he has lived in the community of the great Northwoods. He has spent nights alone in a tent or in a sleeping bag under the stars, and the darkness itself doesn’t frighten him. But there is something about the place under his feet now that is different, that fills him with dread. There are no night sounds here. No crickets. No tree frogs. Only silence. It is a dead place, he thinks. And he thinks he should not be there.
But he forces himself to go on.
The cabin is a dark shape visible against a wall of stone that catches moonlight and seems to glow. There is another building as well, smaller and set off to one side and a little back from the cabin. There is a pickup truck parked near the second structure.
He goes to the cabin first, crouching in his approach, his Keds tennis shoes making no sound in the soft dirt. He peers carefully in at a window, cannot see a thing except his own faint reflection peering back. He circles the cabin, stealing a peek in every window, and in every window there is only his own, intense face. He lopes to the other building, which has no windows. He tries the door. It isn’t locked. He opens it, and something—an ill wind, a malign spirit, a palpable evil—rushes out. He stands a moment, staring into the darkness, paralyzed by the malignancy he senses. He has brought with him a flashlight, which is clipped to his belt. He pulls the flashlight free, turns it on, and scans the interior of the small building.
At first, he thinks it is simply a toolshed. Many kinds of implements hang on the walls. Saws, axes, shovels, pry bars, a wheelbarrow, a coiled water hose. The beam, where it hits the wall, forms a round yellow eye, and he keeps it tracking to the right until suddenly in the middle of that eye is something he can’t explain. A chain bolted to the wall with an iron cuff at each end. He creeps forward, circling a long, rough-hewn table in the center of the room, holding the light steady, more or less, on the chains. He reaches out and fingers a cuff. The metal is cold and, he thinks at first, rusted. Then he realizes the color is not from rust, and he yanks his hand back. His heart pounds furiously and his breath comes in shallow little gasps and he wishes he weren’t there, but he is and he turns and the eye of the flashlight finds the tabletop and he sees manacles there, too, and dark mosaic stains soaked into the wood.
He hears a noise, a long intake of air, and shoots the beam of the flashlight toward the door where Mr. Windigo stands grinning.
FORTY-SEVEN
The old man touched his shoulder, and Cork came out of the dream to the wet heat of the sweat lodge on Iron Lake. He was tired beyond measure.
“I want to go on,” he said to Meloux.
“First, we refresh. We cool ourselves in the lake.” Meloux called to Rainy, who drew back the cover of the opening.
Sunlight cracked the dark inside the lodge, and Cork blinked at the sudden glare. He followed Meloux clockwise around the pit where the Grandfathers lay cooling. When he was outside, he saw that Rainy was standing ready with the pitchfork to remove the stones and replace them with others she’d set among the embers of the sacred fire to heat. Cork walked with Meloux to the lake and plunged in. The cold water was a slap and brought him fully awake and refreshed him.
When they came out of the water, the old man walked slowly, and Cork wondered about Meloux’s strength.
“Henry, you don’t have to go on,” he offered.
“A long time ago I guided you from an evil place. I always knew that someday I would have to guide you back. We will go together.”
They reentered the lodge. Rainy had removed the cooled stones. When the two men were seated, she brought in stones newly heated, filled the hollow in the middle of the lodge, and retreated, dropping the cover over the opening and plunging the inside of the lodge again into darkness. Cork heard the hiss of water as the old Mide sprinkled the Grandfathers. The steam rose, and Meloux began again a prayer chant, and in a few minutes Cork was overtaken again by dreaming.
* * *
He is alone in the dark of Indigo Broom’s foul little structure, and the cuffs dig into his skin.
For hours, he’s tried to pull himself loose, and his wrists bleed.
He’s scared. Oh, God, is he scared. He knows now, knows with a deep, abiding terror the fate of his cousin Fawn and Naomi Stonedeer. And unless he can somehow free himself, he knows his own fate, too.
The door opens, and early sunlight, a kind of false hope, enters the room. With it comes Mr. Windigo. He’s not alone. A woman is with him. A beautiful woman. They walk together, bringing with them the fresh scent of morning evergreen. It is the best thing he’s ever smelled.
She touches his cheek gently with long, soft fingers. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just looking, that’s all. Just looking.”
“Curiosity?”
“Yeah. That.”
“A child’s simple curiosity. How convenient.”
“He ain’t no child,” Mr. Windigo says.
Her hand drifts from his cheek, and a fingernail painted deep red traces a line down his throat, his chest, his stomach, his belt, to his crotch, which she cups in her palm. “No,” she agrees. “Not a child.”
She squeezes hard and it hurts and he cries out.
“Curiosity? Only that?” she asks calmly, not relaxing the vise grip of her hand.
“Please,” he pleads.
She releases him, but the terrible ache between his legs is unrelieved.
“Keep him,” she says. “When I’m back from Duluth tonight, we’ll see.”
“They’ll miss him.”
“They’ve missed the others. It hasn’t mattered.”
She kisses Mr. Windigo. Kisses him a long time and in a way that isn’t about love. He knows no word for what that kiss is about.
“We’ll have fun,” she says and smiles. Her lips are deep ruby and frame the ice white of her teeth like two perfect razor cuts. She turns and leaves with Mr. Windigo at her side.
He left home without sleeping. It has been a long time since he’s slept. There is a darkness before him so
