Olivia Hamilton came from money. Her father was a state senator, a politician in a long line of Minnesota legislators. His family’s wealth originated in the early days of mining as a result of shipping ore from the Iron Range across Lake Superior on carriers out of Two Harbors or Duluth. Olivia had grown up with money. Spoiled, most folks would have called it, but because she was a Hamilton, they more often used the less pejorative term, privileged. By the time she entered her teens, she’d been expelled from a number of private schools, both in the Twin Cities and out of state. In the spring, she’d gotten into some trouble driving with a suspended license and while intoxicated. A deal had been struck that forced her to spend the summer as a counselor at a youth camp near Aurora, the hope being that time in the great Northwoods and responsibility for others might shape her a bit more into the good girl her family, particularly her father, needed her to be.
But a few weeks into her “sentence,” as she termed it in text messages to her friends, she had sneaked away from the camp one night with another counselor, a kid named Harvey Green, who had a motorcycle. They’d gone to Yellow Lake, a community south of Aurora with a reputation for being on the rough side. Using fake IDs, they settled into a bar there, a place called the Howling Wolf, which was a notorious gathering spot for hard-drinking men—bikers, loggers, construction workers, and often the kinds of individuals who, except for their need to drink and carouse, typically opted to remain off the grid.
That night, there’d been a bunch of bikers hanging out at the Howling Wolf, the Kings, a group out of Fargo, on their way to a motorcycle rally in Duluth. There was also a local biker club, the Axemen, all of them loggers. In the course of a night of drinking, things got said and a fight broke out in the street in front of the bar. The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department responded. No serious injuries were reported, and no one was arrested. But a lot of names were taken.
Because of his own drinking, which, he claimed, had put him in a bit of an alcoholic haze, Harvey Green lost track of Olivia when the fight broke out. When he decided it was time to head back to the camp, she was nowhere to be found.
The next day, camp authorities reported her disappearance. A huge hunt was launched, involving Tamarack County Sheriff’s personnel, the state patrol, Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and, because of the Kings’ Fargo connection and the possibility that the girl had been abducted and taken out of state, the FBI. Everyone who could be identified in the bar the night the girl went missing, particularly the members of the two gangs, was hauled in and relentlessly questioned, to no avail. The bar had no security cameras, so no record of comings and goings. The town of Yellow Lake was turned upside down in the search for clues, evidence of what might have occurred.
There was hope of a ransom demand, but when nothing materialized, the family offered a reward of $50,000 for information that led to finding their daughter. Every call that resulted, and there were hundreds, was followed up but led nowhere.
The search had been ongoing for two weeks. They’d pinged her cell phone location, checked phone records, her text messages, social media posts. Everything ended the night she’d disappeared. They’d grilled Harvey Green and once again grilled everyone they could identify as having been in the bar that night. But until Waaboo stumbled upon a grave as he picked blueberries, there’d been no progress.
While Cork remained in the clearing, Daniel English took Waaboo and Stephen home, where he planned to call the situation in to the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. The drive took only half an hour, but because his son was unusually quiet, it felt like forever to Daniel.
“She must have been looking at the sun,” Waaboo finally said. “Her eyes looked hurt.”
“Nothing hurts her now,” Stephen said. “She’s walking the Path of Souls.”
Waaboo shook his head. “Not yet. She’s still lost.” And he was quiet again.
“What did she look like?” Daniel asked.
“Like you and me.”
“Ojibwe?”
Waaboo nodded.
At the house on Gooseberry Lane, Jenny O’Connor and Rainy Bisonette were painting the railing and front porch posts. Jenny was Waaboo’s mother, Rainy his grandmother. They waved as Daniel pulled into the drive, but when they saw the empty hands of the men and the boy, who approached them across the lawn, Jenny said, “No blueberries? What happened?”
Before Daniel could respond, Waaboo said, “I saw a dead woman.”
Jenny had been holding a brush filled with paint. Daniel saw that her clothes and her face were spattered with spots like white freckles. She gave him a dark look of concern and puzzlement.
“Waaboo, I think your grandma has some cold lemonade for you inside.” Daniel looked hopefully at Rainy, his aunt.
“Of course,” Rainy said. “And there are fresh chocolate chip cookies in the jar.”
“She can’t find the Path of Souls,” Waaboo said.
Rainy held out her hand to the boy. “Ondaas,” she said, using the Anishinaabe word that meant Come. Waaboo went with his grandmother into the house.
Jenny set the brush in the pan of white paint. “A dead woman?”
“What we believe is a grave,” Daniel said. “But our son saw her spirit.”
“Oh, god. Where?”
“In a blueberry patch.”
“Ours?” She looked doubly horrified.
“No,” Stephen put in quickly. “Somebody picked our patch clean. This one belonged to an old Finn Dad did some PI work for a while back, a guy named Erno Paavola. He paid in blueberries, and Dad had an idea about where the patch might be. We found it. And then Waaboo found the grave.”
“And saw her spirit?” Jenny put paint-stained fingers to her forehead as if trying to press an understanding into her brain. “He said she couldn’t find the Path of Souls.”
“We’ll figure out what he meant,” Daniel said. “Right now, I need to call the sheriff’s department. Then I’ll go back and guide them down to the patch. Your dad’s waiting there.”
“I’ll come, too,” Stephen said.
“No,” Jenny said. “I need you here, Stephen. I have so many questions.”
“Stay,” Daniel told his brother-in-law. “Cork and I have got this.”
It was noon now. Daniel stood with Cork and Sheriff Marsha Dross beside the grave Waaboo had found. The sun was directly overhead, creating dark pools of shadow under Daniel and the other two. Daniel stared at his own shadow, wondering how the day, which had begun with his son on such a bright note, could end so darkly.
“It might be Olivia Hamilton,” Dross said. “We can’t really say how old this grave is.”
“To me, those shoots coming up look like they might be thimbleweed,” Cork said, nodding toward a bit of green showing through the dirt on the mounding. “It would take more than a couple of weeks for seed to have taken root.”
“You’re not an expert on burials,” Dross said. “Or thimbleweed.”
“No,” Cork admitted.
Dross looked down at the grave. “I’d hoped she would call home, or just show up, maybe ashamed, or full of guilt and scared of what her parents might say. Something befitting a teenager who simply made a bad choice.”
“Two weeks is a long time for shame or guilt to keep her disappeared,” Cork said.
“She’d run away before and had come back. I was hoping it might be how this played out.” Dross gave her head a single, hopeless shake.
“She had a wild streak, Marsha, that was clear.”
“What teenager doesn’t rebel a bit?”
“You sound like you’re making excuses for her.”
“I was kind of wild as a teenager,” Dross said.
Daniel asked. “Did you ever run away?”
“Threatened it a few times.”
“Olivia Hamilton was last seen drinking with a bunch of bikers and loggers. Did you go out drinking with bikers and loggers?”
“Some lumberjacks. But I knew them.”
Cork said, “This girl, if it is Olivia Hamilton, didn’t know those loggers and bikers.”
“It’s not Olivia Hamilton,” Daniel said.
Cork and Dross both gave him a puzzled look.
“Waaboo told me she looked Ojibwe. It could be Crystal Two Knives. She’s still missing.”
Dross’s puzzled look morphed into one of deep skepticism. “I’m not basing any assumptions on what a seven-year-old boy believes he’s seen in a vision.”
“Stephen had visions when he was that young,” Cork reminded her. “There have been times when those visions have proved very helpful to you. There’s a whole lot more to this world than you’ll find in a textbook on law enforcement, Marsha. And like I said, the grave does look older than two weeks.”
“Doesn’t do any good speculating,” Dross said. “We won’t know a thing until we exhume a body.”
Deputy George Azevedo came down the trail that led from Erno Paavola’s cabin to the clearing and the blueberry patch. “BCA is on their way. They want us to make sure nothing’s disturbed.”
“Of course nothing’s being disturbed,” Dross shot back. “Do they think we’re rubes?”
“Just telling you what they said, Sheriff.”
“Go on back to the road. When they arrive, show them the way down here.”
“Sure thing, Sheriff.” Azevedo headed away.
Dross took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “This is going to be a shitstorm.”
“Everybody cares about Olivia Hamilton,” Daniel said. “There was no shitstorm when Crystal Two Knives went missing.”
“That was different.”
“Because she’s Indian?” Daniel’s words fell like stones from his mouth.
“Because Crystal is a troubled kid with a long history of running away. We’ve picked her up a number of times for underage drinking, shoplifting, driving without a license, you name it.”
Daniel felt his blood begin to rise. “So, when she went missing it was easy just to blame it on her own reckless behavior?”
“On a history that told me she’d show up again. She owned a vehicle, Daniel. She just drove away one day. There’s been no report of her car being found anywhere. At the moment, there’s no reason to believe that she’s been the victim of any kind of violence, no reason to pursue an investigation any further than we have already,” Dross said sharply.
“No reason except a grandmother who worries herself sick every night.”
“Let it go, Daniel,” Cork said.
Daniel’s jaw went tight as he bit back the words of an old argument born from an old inequity. He understood Cork’s quiet advice. If this was a grave—and he was almost certain it was—it didn’t matter who was buried here. This wasn’t the time or place to argue the issue. Instead, he looked at the pines that walled off the clearing. “Somebody knew about this blueberry patch but must have figured that no one else did. Burying a body here probably seemed safe.”
“What do you know about Erno Paavola, Cork?” Dross asked.
“That he was dead long before this grave was dug.”
“I mean, any relatives that you’re aware of, someone who might know this place?”
“The PI work I did for him was to track down a niece and a nephew.”
“Where?”
“Cloquet.”
“Why?”
“Erno didn’t say.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“He hired me to find them, that was all. He paid me in blueberries. Told me they came from his secret patch, which was guarded by gnomes. You saw them.”
“I wonder who else he might have told,” Daniel said.
“You’ve got your work cut out for you, Marsha,” Cork said, then added, “I don’t envy you. A lot of press coverage already around Olivia Hamilton. Until we know who’s buried here, the media’ll be dogging you every step of the way.”
Another deputy approached from the direction of Paavola’s cabin.
“What is it, Foster?” Dross said.
“New communication from BCA. The Feds are on their way, too. And they don’t want you making any statements to the press before they have a chance to work the scene.”
Daniel eyed Dross, whose face seemed to have grown a decade older in the past half hour. “And so the shitstorm begins,” he said.