Mariah stared at them and didn’t seem at all surprised or frightened. Jenny thought maybe everything she’d suffered had made her numb to fear, numb to all feeling, perhaps. She wore next to nothing—a purple camisole over tight white shorts. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a garish magenta that matched her lipstick. Her hair was long and black and, at the moment, in need of washing. Her eyes were calm, a little unfocused, and her lips hinted at a smile. A Raggedy Ann doll sat in her lap.
Here she was, the girl they’d been searching for, for whom they’d risked so much, risked everything. Jenny wanted to run to her, wrap Mariah safely in her arms, call her child, because with that doll in her lap that’s exactly what she looked like. Everything in Jenny that Stephen would have called nokomis urged her forward to save this lost little girl, which, for Jenny, had been the whole point of this hunt at first. But the hunt wasn’t over, she knew. It wouldn’t end until Windigo was taken or Windigo was dead.
The music inside was blaring, and Jenny’s father spoke loudly to be heard over it. “Where’s your partner, Brick?”
He was small and weasel-looking, not at all how the man who called himself Windigo had been described to them. Like her father, Jenny figured this was the guy Breeze had called Brick. Manny, in saving the life of his dog, had told them his real name was Bob Two Bears.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Brick said. “Who are you?”
“Robert Wilson French, that’s who I’m talking about. Aka Angel, aka Windigo.” Cork signaled to Daniel and Shinny. “Check the other rooms.”
They split off with their rifles in hand and moved through the trailer.
Mariah spoke: “Angel.” She said it as if she were speaking to the doll in her lap. The sound of the Allman Brothers almost drowned out her voice.
“Turn that off, Jenny.” Cork gestured toward an iPod docked in a compact speaker system.
She did as he asked. The trailer got quiet and, in an odd way, seemed somehow larger and more threatening.
“Yes,” Cork said to Mariah. “I want to know about Angel.”
“Angel comes, Angel goes,” she said, again to her doll. “Chop, chop, chop.”
Daniel came back. “Nobody.”
Shinny returned, accompanied by two girls no older than Mariah. They both wore T-shirts and skimpy underwear and nothing else. They were clearly Native and were clearly scared and confused.
Cork said, “Why don’t you two sit down?”
They did as he’d suggested and perched on a brown leather love seat. Their eyes jumped from him and his gun to Daniel and Shinny with their rifles, to the man on the floor, and finally to Jenny and Henry Meloux. They reminded Jenny of small birds ready to fly at the first opportunity.
“Chop, chop, chop,” Mariah said dreamily and to no one in particular.
Daniel laid his rifle down and seated himself on the sofa beside her. “Hello, Mariah.”
She studied him a long time and seemed confused. “Danny?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
She shook her head. “Dreaming.”
“Not a dream, Mariah.” He reached out and gently took her hand. “I’m real. I’m real, and I’m here, and I’m going to take you home.”
“He won’t let you.” Her eyes drifted to the man on the floor.
“He won’t stop us.”
“Angel will.”
“Where is Angel?”
“He was here.” She looked around, her eyes studying each of them as if they might prove to be Angel. “Gone now.”
“Where did he go?”
“Chop, chop, chop,” she replied and smiled.
Cork spoke to the girls. “Do you know where Angel is?”
From the floor, the man they knew as Brick said, “Keep your mouths shut, you know what’s good for you.”
The two girls said nothing.
“Is he hiding somewhere?” Cork asked.
“He just goes,” Mariah said. “Comes and goes. Like the wind.”
“Or like a windigo?” Cork said. He watched her closely for some reaction, but either the name meant nothing to her or she was too far gone in what Jenny had come to believe was a drug-induced state of disconnection to be able to respond coherently.
Cork glanced at Shinny. “Check outside. Be careful.”
Shinny nodded and left through the front door.
“Do you want to go home, Mariah?” Daniel asked.
“Too far,” she said. There was at last some emotion in her voice, a distant sadness, as if she were speaking of something lost to her a very long time ago.
“Not too far,” Daniel told her. “I’ll take you there.”
She closed her eyes and smiled and said, “Basketball.”
“Yes, Mariah. You can play basketball again.”
Cork spoke to the two girls. “Where do you want to go?”
Their eyes grew huge with surprise. They looked at each other in bewilderment.
“We won’t leave you here,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”
They gave him no reply, and Jenny couldn’t tell if they were too scared or if they simply had no answer to his question.
“No matter,” Cork said. “We can sort that out later.”
Shinny returned from outside. “Nothing,” he said. “I checked everywhere.”
“Okay.” Cork addressed the girls. “Gather your things. We’re leaving.”
They made no move to comply.
“Now,” he said sharply. “Shinny, go with them. Make sure they come back.”
The two girls rose and, with all the enthusiasm of people being marched to execution, headed off with Shinny at their backs.
“What about him?” Daniel said, gesturing to the man on the floor.
“Cuff him. We’ll take him with us.”
Daniel got up. “Roll over,” he said to Brick.
“Fuck you.”
“I said roll over.”
Daniel gave him a good kick in the ribs, which made Jenny wince, but it did the trick. Brick rolled over. Daniel took his cuffs from the belt where he’d hung them and cuffed the man’s wrists behind his back.
“Check his pockets,” Cork said.
Daniel frisked him and came up with a set of vehicle keys and a wallet. He opened the wallet. “And we thought his name was Brick or Two Bears,” he said. “According to this ID, he’s Benjamin O. Baker. Which do you suppose it is?”
“Could be none of them,” Cork said. “Take him outside, put him in the Explorer.”
Daniel hauled him off the floor none too gently and shoved him out the front door.
Shinny came back with the girls. Each carried a black plastic bag stuffed with her belongings. Neither bag was very full. They’d put on jeans and sneakers.
“Take them outside to the Explorer,” Cork said.
“Let’s go, girls.” Shinny herded them out.
Which left the rest alone with Mariah. And that’s when Jenny realized Henry Meloux had disappeared.
They looked at one another and around the trailer, what they could see of it. The situation reminded Jenny eerily of the meeting she’d had with Raven Duvall in the park in Duluth when Meloux had mysteriously vanished.
She called out, “Henry?” but got no reply. “He must be outside.”
Her father said, “I’ll check the rooms again.”
He left, and Mariah and Jenny were alone. She started toward the girl. Just as Jenny reached the sofa, Mariah seemed to spot something, and her eyes went huge with fright. At the same moment, Jenny heard the front door close and lock. She spun, and a great bear of a man loomed before her. He held an enormous pistol in his hand, pointed at her chest.
He was no more Indian-looking than Jenny. Reddish blond hair, a plain face, maybe a little broad because of his Anishinaabe genes, eyes the same indigo color of the sky she’d seen through the tinted windows of the Explorer. There was something about those eyes, though, that made them like none she’d ever seen. They were bottomless and absolutely empty. Nothing showed in them, not hate or love or fear or excitement. They were windows on a vacuum, an inhuman void. She was looking at a creature that she truly believed had no soul. And she understood why the girls—why anyone—would be terrified to cross him.
“Windigo,” she said, although it was more of a gasp.
He put a finger to his lips. A moment later, Cork returned and stopped dead in his tracks. He still held Daniel’s sidearm in his hand and, as if he’d practiced the move a thousand times, quickly trued the barrel on the heart of the man called Windigo.
“You shoot, I shoot, she’s dead,” Windigo said, as if it were a simple equation. He gave a slight nod to the gun he held. “Desert Eagle, forty-four Magnum. Hollow-point rounds. Hair trigger. Put a hole in her the size of Iowa. I may or may not be dead at the end, but she doesn’t stand a chance.”
“There are others outside,” Cork said.
“The important ones are right here.”
“You knew we were coming,” Cork said. “How?”
“I’m mythic. I know everything.”
“Where were you?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m here now. And I’m curious about you.”
“Family,” Mariah said dreamily from the sofa.
Windigo nodded. “Yeah, I know that. But it’s unusual. My girls, their families generally don’t care. Sell them to me like unwanted furniture.”
Jenny was becoming aware of an unpleasant odor in the trailer, so faint that its true nature didn’t yet register.
“How’d you find me?” Windigo asked.
“Your brother, Samuel,” Cork said. “Aka Manny, aka Maiingan. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“What? Give me up or you’d kill him?”
“I just threatened to kill his dog.”
“Ember? He dropped the dime on me for that old bag of bones?” He digested this, and it didn’t seem to sit well with his stomach. “We’ll discuss that next time I see him.”
The look in his eyes and the coldness in his voice made Jenny think of sharp icicles. She figured that conversation with Wolf, should it ever occur, would be one-sided and brutal.
The front doorknob rattled, followed by knocking. “Cork?” Daniel called.
“Tell him to stay outside,” Windigo instructed.
“Or what?”
“She’s dead. Then probably I’m dead. Which is neither here nor there for me. But you’re out a daughter.”
So he knew things about them. But how? At that moment, Jenny was more perplexed than she was afraid.
“Our Windigo has materialized,” Cork called to Daniel. “We’re having a conversation. You just stay where you are.”
“I’m here,” Daniel called back.
“We’re taking Mariah,” Cork said to Windigo.
“I should have killed her when she came back from the Apostles and told me what happened on that boat. Knew that whole thing would bite me in the ass eventually.” He shrugged. “Water under the bridge. As for taking her, be my guest.”
“I don’t suppose you’d come, too?”
“Not at the moment. I’ve got damage control to worry about. Then I’ll get things up and running somewhere else. Not hard. Kids like her, dime a dozen. After that, I’ll be along to deal with you. In my own good time.”
“I don’t like leaving that particular door open.”
“Then shoot me.”
They faced each other across that narrow width of flimsy aluminum housing. Jenny thought of mountains standing on either side of a valley. Neither man moved.
But something else did. Left of Windigo came movement so swift that Jenny couldn’t make sense of it at first. A blur of human form. In that same instant, she saw the arm holding Windigo’s .44 Magnum drop, and the big handgun fell to the floor. Then Henry Meloux—now she could see and understand—swung again. Windigo reeled backward, spewing blood from his face as he fell. The old Mide stood above him, a four-foot section of iron rebar in his fierce grip, poised to strike another blow.
“No more,” Windigo cried and held up a palm in surrender.
“His gun,” Cork said.
Meloux kicked the heavy piece of hardware across the floor, out of Windigo’s reach. He didn’t loosen his grip on the rebar.
“Where the hell did you come from, old man?” Windigo asked. He didn’t appear angry, just curious. Despite the blood streaming from the wound across his forehead, he didn’t seem much affected by the blows Meloux had delivered. He flexed his left hand, trying to assess, Jenny imagined, the damage the old Mide had done.
“You can always smell a windigo,” Meloux said, not really answering the question.
“Up.” With Daniel’s gun, Cork motioned for the man to rise, which he did. “Open the door, Henry. Let Daniel in.”
As big as he was, Daniel, when he entered, still had to lift his head to look into the face of the man called Windigo. Then he sniffed the air, and his own face took on a peculiar and startled look.
That’s when Jenny realized what she’d been smelling all along, the odor that had become stronger during their confrontation with Windigo, and that was now almost overpowering. Because she’d been focused on the gun barrel leveled at her chest and the standoff between her father and Windigo, she had ignored it. She couldn’t ignore it now. The odor of rotten egg, of sulfur, filling the trailer.
“Gas,” she said. She remembered the white tank she’d seen off to the side of the trailer. “Propane.”
“Outside.” Cork waved his pistol toward the door.
“Nope,” Windigo responded. “And I wouldn’t think about coercing me with that sidearm of yours. The muzzle blast’ll blow us all to smithereens.”
Before Meloux could move to hit him again with the rebar, Windigo pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket and held it out, his thumb on the striker.
“Like I said, you’re free to go. Me, I’m staying.”
“Jenny, Mariah,” Daniel said. “Let’s go.”
Mariah remained on the sofa, and Jenny couldn’t tell if she had any idea what was happening. She took Mariah’s arm and tried to ease her up. The girl pulled away.
“Danny?” Mariah said.
Daniel walked to her from the doorway. “Give me your doll, Mariah, and I’ll take you both outside.” He said it gently and without any hint that her life might depend on it. Or everyone’s, for that matter.
Mariah put Raggedy Ann into his hands and eased herself up. Daniel took her arm and led her toward the door. As she passed the man that she knew as Angel and that Jenny and the others called Windigo, she said, “You promised it would be nice.”
“Heaven is what I promised. In a while, little squirrel, I’d have got you there.”
She went out with Daniel. Jenny followed, but hesitated at the door. “Dad? Henry?”
“You go,” Windigo said to her father. “But the old man, he stays. I have something to say to him.”
“We go together,” Cork replied.
“Fine. We all go together.” Windigo held up the lighter.
“You won’t,” Jenny said, but it was more hope than certainty.
Meloux looked into those empty eyes and gave a nod. “He will.”
“Get out, Jenny,” her father ordered.
“Dad—”
“Go!”
She went and heard the door of the trailer close behind her. She walked into the sunlight where Daniel and the others waited.
“Give me the key to the Explorer,” Daniel said.
She looked at him, uncomprehending.
“We should move it.” He meant a safe distance, in case the trailer blew up, but he didn’t say it.
Inside the vehicle, in the backseat, still cuffed, sat the man whose driver’s license identified him as Benjamin O. Baker. Next to him were the two girls. Because of the heat, the windows were down. She gave Daniel the key. He backed the Explorer nearer to the road and got out. Jenny led Mariah there, and Shinny joined them. They waited.
Fear, that hungry wolf, had come, and it gnawed at Jenny’s gut now. Her father and Henry Meloux, two of the people she loved most in this world, were inside that trailer with a man who, if Meloux had read him correctly, was entirely capable of carrying out his threat to blow them all to kingdom come. She could hear nothing from inside. Outside, in the slightest of breezes, she heard the leaves of the cottonwood trees rustling with a lovely, liquid sound. She smelled the dry grass of the hillsides that bordered the river, and mixed with that scent was the fragrance of sage. She touched her face, hoping the feel of her own flesh might bring her out of this terrible dream.
The door opened, and her father emerged. The door closed again at his back. He walked toward them. The flesh of his face was pulled so tight over the bone beneath that it seemed to Jenny she was looking at a skull.
“Henry?” she asked.
Her father turned and stared back at the trailer. She could see that he’d wedged Daniel’s sidearm in the waistband of his jeans. As powerful a weapon as that Glock probably was, Windigo had rendered it useless.
Her father spoke as if pronouncing sentence: “Henry said a hundred years was enough for any man.”
“What do we do?” The panic rising. “There must be something we can do.”
“We do what Indians have always done well.” Her father’s voice was leaden, dead. “We wait.”
But they didn’t wait long.
The sound was not what Jenny would have expected. It was not a cataclysmic explosion. It was, instead, a powerful whooomp, a blast of air and fire that blew out the trailer’s windows and door and sent some of the roof flying in embered pieces into the branches of the cottonwoods. Jenny fell back, more from the shock of the moment than from the shock of the blast itself. The others fell back, too, and they all watched as arms of yellow flame and black smoke reached through the empty openings and groped for sky.
Jenny stood paralyzed, but her father leaped into action immediately.
“Call nine-one-one,” he yelled and shot for the trailer opening where the front door had once been.
Jenny fumbled the phone from her pocket, where she’d slipped it when they rushed from the back of the Explorer. Her hands were shaking so bad she dropped it in the dirt. She bent, and when she came up with it and looked toward the trailer, saw her father falling back from the flames. A hell of fire and smoke lay beyond the gaping doorway inside the trailer. Daniel was right behind him, reeling back, too, his arms raised to shield his face from the intense heat. The odd quiet of the initial explosion had been replaced now by the roar of the burn and the groan of metal remolding or melting in the blast-furnace heat. Shinny joined them, and they stood yelling to each other over the sound of the trailer fire. Jenny couldn’t make out their words. She was trying to find those three simple numbers on her phone pad, but her fingers kept hitting the wrong keys. She focused. Nine. One. One. Phone to her ear. When she looked at the trailer again, she saw that Daniel had grabbed a hose connected to an outside spigot. He’d turned on the water and was soaking her father.
“Williams County Dispatch.” A woman’s voice. “What’s your emergency?”
“There’s a fire,” Jenny yelled into the phone. “A trailer fire.”
“Where’s the fire, ma’am?”
“South of Williston. A road. I don’t know the name of it.” She ran to Shinny and grabbed his arm. “Does this road have a name?”
“The Old Garrison Road. Three miles east of the split from Highway Eighty-five.”
She repeated it into her phone.
Her father, dripping water from every part of him, once more attempted to enter the trailer. He ducked low beneath the black, billowing smoke and disappeared.
“Fire personnel are on the way, ma’am. Is anyone injured?”
“Yes,” Jenny yelled.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. No.”
“What’s your name?”
She gave it.
“Stay on the line, ma’am.”
“I can’t,” Jenny said. “I have to help.” And she ended the call.
Daniel stood in front of the doorway, shooting a stream of water inside, in the direction her father had gone. Shinny, who no longer held a rifle, leaned close and said something to him. Daniel handed over the hose, and Shinny soaked him, too, then Daniel headed toward the doorway. He didn’t make it inside. Jenny’s father stumbled out, coughing, hot vapor rising from his wet clothing. He fell into Daniel’s arms. Daniel helped him away from the trailer, then turned to go back. Jenny’s father grabbed his arm.
“It’s no good,” he yelled, then coughed a good ten seconds. “Can’t see a thing inside. All smoke and flame.”
Jenny was beside him, holding him as the coughing continued and racked his body. “Henry?” she said.
He’d doubled over from the exertion, but now he came up slowly. His eyes lingered on the trailer, then followed the black roil of smoke pouring upward from it, smudging the washed blue of the sky. One of the traditional beliefs of the Anishinaabeg was that the embers of a fire carried prayers to the Creator. Jenny looked up where her father looked, and understood.
Grief doesn’t come in the moment of loss. It comes in the quiet of the aftermath. As she stood watching the trailer burn, and that beautiful old man Henry Meloux with it, she didn’t feel grief. In a way, what she felt was simply emptiness. Her mind told her Meloux was dead. Her heart was not there yet.
“They’re gone,” Shinny said.
At first, Jenny thought he was stating the obvious, speaking of Meloux and the man called Windigo. She said, “We know.”
“I’m talking about that scumbag from Standing Rock and the girls,” Shinny clarified.
Jenny turned from the fire that had kept her attention and saw what Shinny had already seen. The Explorer was empty. The girls and Brick were gone. There was no sign of them on the road or on the barren hillside.
“What now?” Daniel asked.
Cork spoke without looking away from the conflagration, and he spoke without feeling. “You still have the keys you took off Brick?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said.
“Take Mariah and Jenny and Shinny. Go back to New Town and wait for me there. I’ll deal with this mess.”
“You got that,” Shinny said. “We’re outta here. Which vehicle?”
Daniel tossed him the key. “See which it fits.”
Shinny jumped into the nearest SUV, where bits of debris lay burning on the hood. The engine turned over.
“Let’s go,” he called. “I don’t want to be here when the uniforms arrive.”
“We can’t just leave you, Cork,” Daniel tried to argue.
Jenny’s father turned bloodshot eyes on him. “You really want Mariah to be a part of what’s going to happen here next?” Daniel didn’t reply; the answer was obvious. “Go on,” Cork said. “Get out of here. All of you.”
“Dad—” Jenny began.
“Now,” he said.
“Go, go, go,” Shinny called out.
Daniel ushered Mariah into the backseat of the SUV and got in beside her. Jenny walked to the front passenger door and opened it. She looked back at her father, who stood alone, framed by fire, and she knew she couldn’t leave him.
“Go on,” she said to Daniel and the others. “I made the nine-one-one call. If I’m not here, they’ll ask all kinds of questions.”
“Are you sure, Jenny?” Daniel said.
“We came to save Mariah. So save her.”
Daniel looked at her through the open window, and Jenny knew it killed him to leave. But what she said made sense, and he knew it. “I’ll be waiting in New Town.”
“I’ll be there,” she promised.
They pulled away, onto the dirt and gravel of what Jenny now knew was the Old Garrison Road, and sped off, trailing a long cloud of dun-colored dust. She went to her father and stood with him. They watched the trailer being consumed. The smoke was an ugly color and smelled nothing like the good fragrance that came from a campfire. These flames were fed by poisons, by all the unnatural elements that had gone into the manufacture of that cheap construction. But as she watched the foul, black cloud crawling toward the blue vault of heaven, she understood that at its heart was the purest soul she’d ever known.
“Henry,” she said and could not now keep back the tears.
A moment later, her father looked toward the sky and echoed, “Henry.”