I made a phone call to a guy named Ed Larson, who’d worked as a deputy for me when I was sheriff in Tamarack County. He’d retired to Green Valley, south of Tucson. I told him what was up and asked if he could check things out in Cadiz, which wasn’t all that far from where he lived. Ed was only too happy to help. Rainy insisted I book a flight for us as soon as possible. The first plane out of the airport in Duluth was at six-thirty the next morning, and I bought two seats. Rainy had been trying to connect with Peter, but still no answer. She’d thrown on her robe and paced the room. Every few minutes, she punched in her son’s number on her cell phone, tapping the display screen hard as if squashing a bug there.
“Why isn’t he answering, Cork?”
“I have no idea, Rainy. It may be that he’s already been arrested, and they’ve taken his phone away.”
“They have to allow him one call, right?”
“That’s protocol, more or less, but it doesn’t have to be immediately. It depends on a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Where they picked him up, whether they actually intend to arrest him, whether it’s a custodial interrogation or they’re simply probing for information. Or maybe his phone just ran out of juice.”
“The moment after he called us?” She shook her head.
She was right. That would have been a huge coincidence, and I don’t put much stock in coincidence. His silence concerned me, too, but I’ve been in enough bad situations to know how to keep a rein on my worst fears. And I know how callous this sounds, but the reality for me was that he was my wife’s son, not mine, and so once removed from that place in my heart where a parent’s deepest fears are locked away. For Rainy, of course, it was different.
“He said they’re after him.” She gave me a dark look. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the police.”
“Let’s not assume anything until we know more. Maybe Ed can find out something helpful. In the meantime, do you know anyone down there you could call?”
She thought a long time. “He’s never talked about people, his friends.” It seemed a revelation to her, one that disturbed her, and the hard front she was putting up cracked a little. She closed her eyes. “It’s possible he’s using again.”
“Don’t do this to yourself. He got clean and he’s stayed clean. This is about something else.”
I said it as if it were an absolute. There are no absolutes, but sometimes, to keep fear at bay, you have to insist that there are.
My cell phone rang. I hoped it was Ed getting back to me. But it was my daughter Jenny calling.
“Dad, you and Rainy missed the fireworks. Where are you?”
I did a quick explanation, and she said, “We’ll be right there.”
Rainy stood in the middle of the room, and I could tell she’d come to some decision. “I have to talk to Uncle Henry.”
Henry Meloux is Rainy’s great-uncle, a man as old as time itself. For several years, Rainy had lived with Meloux in his isolation on Crow Point, a finger of land that juts into Iron Lake far north of Aurora. Like Rainy, he is Mide and was her mentor as she learned the ways of the Grand Medicine Society. After we married, Rainy had come to live in the house on Gooseberry Lane where I’d been raised and where I’d raised my children.
“He knows even less than we do about Peter’s situation,” I said.
“That’s not what I want from him.” She threw off her robe and began to dress.
We were both downstairs when the rest of the family returned home. It was hard dark by then, late. Five-year-old Waaboo, always in a rush of energy, came storming in. His legal name is Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. He’s half Ojibwe, Red Lake Band. His nickname is Waaboozoons, which in the language of the Anishinaabeg means “little rabbit.” We call him Waaboo for short.
“Baa-baa,” he cried, his name for me. Don’t ask; the explanation is a long one.
“Good fireworks?” I said.
His response was a terrible scowl. “You weren’t there.”
“Something came up, little guy.” I glanced at Jenny and she shook her head. She hadn’t explained.
But it was clear Daniel understood. “Does Peter have a lawyer?”
Daniel English is Rainy’s nephew, and like her, full-blood Ojibwe. He and Jenny had been married less than a year. In keeping with the tradition of the Anishinaabeg, and because they were saving money for a place of their own, after the wedding, they’d moved in with us. Daniel was a game warden for the Iron Lake Reservation and understood the necessity of good counsel when navigating all the unpredictable crosscurrents that were usually involved in a legal proceeding.
“We don’t know,” Rainy said. “He’s not answering his phone.”
“Could be a lot of explanations for that, Aunt Rainy,” Daniel said. Calm counsel. One of the reasons I liked him.
“We’re flying down first thing in the morning,” Rainy said. “But right now, I want to talk to Uncle Henry.”
I could see that Jenny and Daniel understood. The old man might not be able to advise on specifics, but Rainy needed grounding, and at one time or another we’d all gone to Meloux for the solace of his company.
“It’s late,” Daniel offered cautiously. “Dark.”
“I can find Crow Point blindfolded,” Rainy said, no idle boast.
“Can I go?” Waaboo pleaded.
“The only place you’re going is to bed,” Jenny said and kissed the top of his head.
We left them to the nighttime rituals and drove north out of Aurora.
* * *
If you have never been outside a city at night when there is no moon, then you don’t know darkness. Without streetlamps and neon and all the ambient glow in any town or city, night can be impenetrably black. Even a million stars won’t illuminate a path through a forest. We drove the county road along the shore of Iron Lake and saw the occasional porch light of a cabin or the dull luminescence from behind a curtained window as we passed, but without the headlights on my Expedition, we’d have been stone blind. Rainy stared ahead and held to silence, deep in her anxious thinking, her own terrible imaginings. I could have tried to ease her worry, but it would have done no good. She needed Henry Meloux.
I parked off the gravel road beside the double-trunk birch that marks the beginning of the trail to Crow Point. The path cuts through thick woods of pine and spruce mixed with stands of poplars. It’s well worn. For most of his hundred years, Henry Meloux has lived in virtual isolation. To my knowledge, he’s never discouraged anyone from visiting him, but because he’s a hell of a lot more difficult to get to than your family physician, you have to want his help pretty bad. That well-worn path was a clear indication that a lot of people did.
By flashlight, we made our way two miles through the woods, crossing at some point onto land that belonged to the Iron Lake Ojibwe. When we broke from the trees onto Crow Point, the whole sky opened before us, and against the haze of a billion stars, I could see the dark shapes of two cabins. The older was Meloux’s, which he and his uncle had built more than eighty years before. The other had been Rainy’s once, and I’d helped build that one. Rainy’s aunt, Leah Duling, lived under its roof now.
There has never been electricity on Crow Point, but I could see light in both cabins, kerosene lamps. I’d expected to have to wake Meloux, but in his mysterious way, he was probably already expecting us. My suspicion was confirmed when, just before we knocked, I heard his melodious old voice call out, “Leah, they are here.”
Rainy’s aunt opened the door and welcomed us both with a hug. Leah was just into her seventies, and most folks would have called her old, but compared to Henry Meloux, she was a spring chicken. She’d spent her life in difficult places all over the world, the wife of a missionary. She maintained that until she came to Crow Point, she’d never known a place where she felt she belonged. But in Meloux’s cabin, which smelled of tea, blackberry, and sage, she seemed beautifully at home.
Meloux sat at the table, one he’d made himself so long ago that he claimed even he couldn’t remember exactly when. The walls of his cabin held mementos from his past—a deer-prong pipe, a bear skin, a bow whose string was made of snapping turtle sinew. The old man sat straight and tall, his hair a long fall of white over his shoulders, his face more lined than the shell of a map turtle, his brown eyes bright even at that late hour. Though it was a hot night, a steaming mug sat in front of him.
“He told me a storm is coming,” Leah said as she handed us each a mug of tea.
“But not from the sky.” Meloux’s eyes settled on Rainy. “What troubles you, Niece?”
How the old Mide always knew when turmoil was coming was only one of the many mysteries in the puzzle that was Henry Meloux.
We sat at the table.
“I got a call from my son, Uncle Henry, a desperate call.” Rainy gave him the details, and the old man sipped his tea as he listened.
“And you are afraid,” Meloux said at the end.
“Yes.” Which was something she hadn’t admitted to, not even with me.
“What is there to be afraid of?” Meloux asked.
“He’s in trouble.”
“What is there to be afraid of?” the old man asked again.
“That he’ll be arrested, that he’ll be charged with murder, that he’s alone in all this.”
“And are these things really so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you do not know what there is to be afraid of. There is only what you imagine.”
“I can guess how these things usually go, Uncle Henry.”
“Suppose,” Meloux said, “you imagined something different.”
“Like what?”
“What would give you comfort?”
“To believe that it’s all some terrible mistake.”
“Then why not imagine that?”
“Because he was so afraid.”
“That is his fear. It does not have to be yours. If you feed his fear with your own, what do you have?”
“It’s hard, Uncle Henry.”
“I did not say it was easy.” He eyed her with great compassion. “You have helped others do this.” A gentle reminder of her own training and work as a Mide.
Rainy took a deep, calming breath.
“Leah,” the old man said. “Light sage and smudge this room, cleanse the air and cleanse our spirits.” He reached across the table and took Rainy’s hands in his own callused, wrinkled palms. “You have work ahead of you, Niece. It will probably be hard work, work that will test you. That is one of the things love does. It tests us in difficult ways. But love is also fear’s worst enemy. In what is ahead of you, hold to your love and not your fear. And when you imagine, imagine the best of what might be.” He smiled and offered a little shrug. “What harm can it do?”
* * *
As we walked the long path back, I could tell that Rainy was comforted, and I marveled, as I often did, at the wisdom of Henry Meloux. What had he told her, really, that she didn’t already know? This was one of the old Mide’s greatest gifts, I thought, his ability to guide people to the place of their own wisdom, helping them see the truths they already knew but had lost sight of. He’d been right. With what little we knew about Peter’s situation, what could we do but imagine, and so why not imagine the best? That it was all some great misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. When everything was revealed to us and we knew all the facts, if the situation turned out to be different, we could deal with that. In the meantime, I thought, we would hold to love and to love’s companion, which is hope.
Rainy took my hand as we walked, following the light our flashlights threw on the ground.
“Migwech,” she said, which is the Ojibwe word for “thank you.”
“What for?”
“There are so many people alone in this world, but I have you. Whatever’s ahead, I have you.” She put her arms around me and lifted her face to mine and kissed me.
It was nearing 1:00 a.m. when we returned to the house. Jenny and Daniel were waiting up, sitting at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee in front of them.
“Annie called to wish us a happy Fourth of July,” Jenny said.
Rainy and I joined them at the table. “And you told her about Peter?”
She nodded.
Annie is my second daughter, younger than Jenny by nearly two years. She was living in San Francisco.
“If you need her help, you have it,” Jenny said.
“We’ll see what happens.”
“And she insisted I call Stephen and keep him in the loop.”
My son, Stephen, is the youngest of my children. He was in West Texas, helping out on a cattle ranch owned by a family friend. Punching cows was something Stephen had done in past summers. It was that or working at Sam’s Place, the burger joint I own on Iron Lake. Given a choice between flipping burgers and pushing around that meat on the hoof, Stephen had often opted for the life of a cowpoke.
“Did you get him?”
She shook her head. “Apparently, he’s out driving cattle somewhere cell phones don’t reach.”
“What did Uncle Henry say?” Daniel asked.
“That until we know the whole truth, it’s best not to imagine the worst,” Rainy said. “Pretty simple but absolutely true.”
My cell phone rang. Ed Larson. He told me he’d made some calls to a deputy he knew with the Coronado County Sheriff’s Department, which was located in Cadiz. Peter wasn’t on law enforcement’s radar there. Ed assured me he’d been discreet in his inquiry, and if I wanted, he could do some more checking, broaden his search. I told him we were flying down in the morning. He offered to help when we arrived. I said I’d call if I needed him.
“We should pack, Rainy,” I told her, “and try to get a couple of hours of sleep before we head off.”
We left Jenny and Daniel the task of turning out the lights. Upstairs, Rainy and I pulled our suitcases from the closet and filled them. I could tell something was still eating at her, but I waited until we were in bed to ask. She sat with her back to the headboard and drew her knees to her chest as if to protect herself. The streetlamp outside our window threw light into the dark room, and in the glow I studied Rainy’s face. For a very long time, she said nothing. Then, without looking at me, she reached out and took my hand.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There are things you don’t know about me, Cork.”
“I know the important things.”
“I hate Arizona,” she said.
“Well, that’s one I didn’t know.”
She turned her face to me fully. Despite all the calm Henry Meloux had done his best to offer her, I could see the storm coming.
“Here it is,” she said and took a deep breath. “Peter’s not the only Bisonette who’s killed a man there.”