ANNA RUDE: Young, precocious daughter of Jon and Diane Rude.
DEWEY QUINN: Owl Creek County, Wyoming, deputy sheriff.
LAME DEER NIGHTWIND: A Wyoming Arapaho, pilot for hire who’ll take just about any job without question so long as it pays enough.
BECCA BODINE: Wife of the missing pilot, Sandy Bodine, who believes powerfully in the integrity of her husband.
LIZ BURNS: Attorney representing the Bodine family, for whom justice isn’t always what’s found in a law book.
AN EXCERPT FROM HEAVEN’S KEEP
In the weeks after the tragedy, as he accumulates pieces of information, he continues to replay that morning in his mind. More times than he can count, more ways than he can remember, he juggles the elements. He imagines details. Changes details. Struggles desperately to alter the outcome. It never works. The end is always the same, so abysmally far beyond his control. Usually it goes something like this:
She waits alone outside the hotel in the early gray of a cloudy dawn. Her suitcase is beside her. In her hand is a disposable cup half-filled with bad coffee. A tumbleweed rolls across the parking lot, pushed by a cold November wind coming off the High Plains.
This is one of the details that changes. Sometimes he imagines an empty plastic bag or a loose page of newspaper drifting across the asphalt. They’re all clichés, but that’s how he sees it.
She stares down the hill toward Casper, Wyoming, a dismal little city spread across the base of a dark mountain like debris swept up by the wind and dumped there. As she watches, a tongue of dirty-looking cloud descends from the overcast to lick the stone face of the mountain.
She thinks, I should have called him. She thinks, I should have told him I’m sorry.
She sips from her hotel coffee, wishing, as she sometimes does when she’s stressed or troubled, that she still smoked.
George LeDuc pushes out through the hotel door. He’s wearing a jean jacket with sheepskin lining that he bought in a store in downtown Casper the day before. “Makes me look like a cowboy,” he’d said with an ironic grin. LeDuc is full-blood Ojibwe. He’s seventy, with long white hair. He rolls his suitcase to where she stands and parks it beside hers.
“You look like you didn’t sleep too good,” he says. “Did you call him?”
She stares at the bleak city, the black mountain, the gray sky. “No.”
“Call him, Jo. It’ll save you both a whole lot of heartache.”
“He’s gone by now.”
“Leave him a message. You’ll feel better.”
“He could have called me,” she points out.
“Could have. Didn’t. Mexican standoff. Is it making you happy?” He rests those warm brown Anishinaabe eyes on her. “Call Cork,” he says.
Behind them the others stumble out the hotel doorway, four men looking sleepy, appraising the low gray sky with concern. One of them is being led by another, as if blind.
“Still no glasses?” LeDuc asks.
“Can’t find the bastards anywhere,” Edgar Little Bear replies. “Ellyn says she’ll send me a pair in Seattle.” The gray-haired man lifts his head and sniffs the air. “Smells like snow.”
“Weather Channel claims a storm’s moving in,” Oliver Washington, who’s guiding Little Bear, offers.
LeDuc nods. “I heard that, too. I talked to the pilot. He says no problem.”
“Hope you trust this guy,” Little Bear says.
“He told me yesterday he could fly through the crack in the Statue of Liberty’s ass.”
Little Bear’s eyes swim, unfocused as he looks toward LeDuc. “Lady Liberty’s wearing a dress, George.”
“You ever hear of hyperbole, Edgar?” LeDuc turns back to Jo and says in a low voice, “Call him.”
“The airport van will be here any minute.”
“We’ll wait.”
She puts enough distance between herself and the others for privacy, draws her cell phone from her purse, and turns it on. When it’s powered up, she punches in the number of her home telephone. No one answers. Voice mail kicks in, and she leaves this: “Cork, it’s me.” There’s a long pause as she considers what to say next. Finally: “I’ll call you later.”
In his imagining, this is a detail that never changes. It’s one of the few elements of the whole tragic incident that’s set in stone. Her recorded voice, the empty silence of her long hesitation.
“Any luck?” LeDuc asks when she rejoins the others.
She shakes her head. “He didn’t answer. I’ll try again in Seattle.”
The van pulls into the lot and stops in front of the hotel. The small gathering of passengers lift their luggage and clamber aboard. They all help Little Bear, for whom everything is a blur.
“Heard snow’s moving in,” Oliver Washington tells the driver.
“Yep. Real ass kicker they’re saying. You folks’re getting out just in time.” The driver swings the van door closed and pulls away.
It’s no more than ten minutes to the airport where the charter plane is waiting. The pilot helps them aboard and gets them seated.
“Bad weather coming in, we heard,” Scott No Day tells him.
The pilot’s wearing a white shirt with gold and black epaulets, a black cap with gold braid across the crown. “A storm front’s moving into the Rockies. There’s a break west of Cody. We ought to be able to fly through before she closes.”
Except for Jo, all those aboard have a tribal affiliation. No Day is Eastern Shoshone. Little Bear is Northern Arapaho. Oliver Washington and Bob Tall Grass are both Cheyenne. The pilot, like LeDuc, is Ojibwe, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles band out of Wisconsin.
The pilot gives them the same preflight speech he delivered to Jo and LeDuc the day before at the regional airport outside Aurora. It’s rote, but he throws in a few funny lines that get his passengers smiling and comfortable. Then he turns and takes his seat at the controls up front.
They taxi, lift off, and almost immediately plow into clouds thick as mud. The windows streak with moisture. The plane shivers, and the metal seems to twist in the grip of the powerful air currents. They rattle upward at a steep angle for a few minutes, then suddenly they’ve broken into blue sky with the morning sun at their backs and below them a mattress of white cloud. Like magic, the ride smoothes out.
Her thinking goes back to Aurora, to her husband. They’ve always had a rule: Never go to bed mad. There should be a corollary, she thinks: Never separate for a long trip with anger still between you.
In the seat opposite, Edgar Little Bear, not a young man, closes his purblind eyes and lays his head back to rest. Next to him, No Day, slender and with a fondness for turquoise and silver, opens a dog-eared paperback and begins to read. In the seats directly ahead of Jo and LeDuc, Washington and Tall Grass continue a discussion begun the night before, comparing the merits of the casinos on the Vegas strip to those on Fremont Street. Jo pulls a folder from the briefcase at her feet and opens it on her lap.
LeDuc says, “Hell, if we’re not prepared now, we never will be.”
“It helps me relax,” she tells him.
He smiles. “Whatever.” And like his old contemporary Edgar Little Bear, he lays his head back and closes his eyes.
They’re all part of a committee tasked with drafting recommendations for oversight of Indian gaming casinos, recommendations they’re scheduled to present at the annual conference of the National Congress of American Indians. Her mind isn’t at all on the documents in her hands. She keeps returning to the argument the day before, to her final exchange with Cork just before she boarded the flight.
“Look, I promise I won’t make any decisions until you’re home and we can talk,” he’d said.
“Not true,” she’d replied. “Your mind’s already made up.”
“Oh? You can read my mind now?”
She’d used the blue needles of her eyes to respond.
“For Christ sake, Jo, I haven’t even talked to Marsha yet.”
“That doesn
’t mean you don’t know what you want.”
“Well, I sure as hell know what you want.”
“And it doesn’t matter to you in the least, does it?”
“It’s my life, Jo.”
“Our life, Cork.”
She’d turned, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and rolled it away without even a good-bye.
She’s always said good-bye, always with a kiss. But not this time. And the moment of that heated separation haunts her. It would have been so easy, she thinks now, to turn back. To say “I’m sorry. I love you. Good-bye.” To leave without the barbed wire of their anger between them.
They’ve been in the air forty-five minutes when the first sign of trouble comes. The plane jolts as if struck by a huge fist. LeDuc, who’s been sleeping, comes instantly awake. Washington and Tall Grass, who’ve been talking constantly, stop in midsentence. They all wait.
From up front, the pilot calls back to them in an easy voice, “Air pocket. Nothing to worry about.”
They relax. The men return to their conversation. LeDuc closes his eyes. Jo focuses on the presentation she’s put together for Seattle.
With the next jolt a few minutes later, the sound of the engines changes and the plane begins to descend, losing altitude rapidly. Very quickly they plunge into the dense cloud cover below.
“Hey!” No Day shouts toward the pilot. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Fasten your seat belts!” the pilot calls over his shoulder. He grips the radio mic with his right hand. “Salt Lake, this is King Air N7723X. We have a problem. I’m descending out of eighteen thousand feet.”
The folder that was on Jo’s lap has been thrown to the floor, the pages of her careful presentation scattered. She grips the arms of her seat and stares out at the gray clouds screaming past. The plane rattles and thumps, and she’s afraid the seams of rivets will pop.
“Goddamn!” No Day cries out. “Shit!”
LeDuc’s hand covers her own. She looks into his brown eyes. The left wing dips precariously, and the plane begins to roll. As they start an irrevocable slide toward earth, they both know the outcome. With this knowledge, a sense of peaceful acceptance descends, and they hold hands, these old friends.
Her greatest regret as she accepts the inevitable—Cork imagines this, because it is his greatest regret as well—is that they didn’t say to each other, “I’m sorry.” Didn’t say, “I love you.” Didn’t say good-bye.
Published 2010
* * *
When the bodies of several murdered women are discovered in an abandoned mine shaft, longtime residents of Tamarack County recall the Vanishings, a series of unsolved disappearances dating back to the time when Cork O’Connor’s father was sheriff. The revelation that one of the women was killed by a bullet from his father’s gun sends Cork on a quest for truths buried more than forty years before.
* * *
CHARACTERS INTRODUCED
RAINY BISONETTE: Great-niece of Henry Meloux, a woman in midlife, searching for a new path.
MAX CAVANAUGH: Owner of the Vermilion One Mine, a man who understands the responsibility of great power and the danger that comes with it.
LOU HADDAD: Mine engineer and an old friend of Cork O’Connor.
GENIE KUFUS: Department of Energy mine inspector, a woman of science but with appetites of the flesh.
HATTIE STILLDAY: An irascible Ojibwe artist.
OPHELIA STILLDAY: Talented, confused granddaughter of Hattie Stillday.
AN EXCERPT FROM VERMILION DRIFT
That early June day began with one of the worst wounds Cork O’Connor had ever seen. It was nearly three miles long, a mile wide, and more than five hundred feet deep. It bled iron.
From behind the window glass of the fourth-floor conference room in the Great North Mining Company’s office complex, Cork looked down at the Ladyslipper Mine, one of the largest open-pit iron ore excavations in the world. It was a landscape of devastation, of wide plateaus and steep terraces and broad canyons, all of it the color of coagulating blood. He watched as far below him the jaws of an electric power shovel gobbled eighty tons of rock and spit the rubble into a dump truck the size of a house and with wheels twice as tall as a man. The gargantuan machine crawled away up an incline that cut along the side of the pit, and immediately another just like it took its place, waiting to be filled. The work reminded him of insects feeding on the cavity of a dead body.
At the distant end of the mine, poised at the very lip of the pit itself, stood the town of Granger. The new town of Granger. Thirty years earlier, Great North had moved the entire community, buildings and all, a mile south in order to take the ore from beneath the original town site. Just outside Granger stood the immense structures of the taconite plant, where the rock was crushed and processed into iron pellets for shipping. Clouds of steam billowed upward hundreds of feet, huge white pillars holding up the gray overcast of the sky.
Although he’d viewed the mine and the work that went on deep inside many times, the sight never ceased to amaze and sadden him. The Ojibwe part of his thinking couldn’t help but look on the enterprise as a great injury delivered to Grandmother Earth.
“Cork. Good. You’re here.”
Cork turned as Max Cavanaugh closed the door. Cavanaugh was tall and agreeable, a man who easily caught a lady’s eye. In his early forties, he was younger than Cork by a decade. He was almost the last of the Cavanaughs, a family whose name had been associated with mining since 1887, when Richard Frankton Cavanaugh, a railroad man from St. Paul, had founded the Great North Mining Company and had sunk one of the first shafts in Minnesota’s great Iron Range. Cork saw Max Cavanaugh at Mass every Sunday, and in winter they both played basketball for St. Agnes Catholic Church—the team was officially called the St. Agnes Saints, but all the players referred to themselves as “the old martyrs”—so they knew each other pretty well. Cavanaugh was normally a guy with an easy smile, but not today. Today his face was troubled, and with good reason. One of his holdings, the Vermilion One Mine, was at the center of a controversy that threatened at any moment to break into violence.
The two men shook hands.
“Where are the others?” Cork asked.
“They’re already headed to Vermilion One. I wanted to talk to you alone first. Have a seat?”
Cork took a chair at the conference table, and Cavanaugh took another.
“Do you find missing people, Cork?”
The question caught him by surprise. Cork had been expecting some discussion about Vermilion One. But it was also a question with some sting to it, because the most important missing person case he’d ever handled had been the disappearance of his own wife, and that had ended tragically.
“On occasion I’ve been hired to do just that,” he replied cautiously.
“Can you find someone for me?”
“I could try. Who is it?”
The window at Cavanaugh’s back framed his face, which seemed as gray as the sky above the mine that morning. “My sister.”
Lauren Cavanaugh. Well known in Tamarack County for her unflagging efforts to bring artistic enlightenment to the North Country. Two years earlier, she’d founded the Northern Lights Center for the Arts, an artists’ retreat in Aurora that had, in a very short time, acquired a national reputation.
“I thought I read in the Sentinel that Lauren was in Chicago,” Cork said.
“She might be. I don’t know. Or she might be in New York or San Francisco or Paris.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Is what I tell you confidential?”
“I consider it so, Max.”
Cavanaugh folded his hands atop his reflection in the shiny tabletop. “My sister does this sometimes. Just takes off. But she’s always kept in touch with me, let me know where she’s gone.”
“Not this time?”
“Not a word.”
“Nothing before she left?”
“No. But that’s not unusual. When she gets it into
her head to go, she’s gone, just like that.”
“What about Chicago?”
He shook his head. “A smoke screen. I put that story out there.”
“Is her car gone?”
“Yes.”
“When did you last hear from her?”
“A week ago. We spoke on the phone.”
“How did she sound?”
“Like she always sounds. Like sunshine if it had a voice.”
Cork took out the little notebook and pen that he generally carried in his shirt pocket when he was working a case. He flipped the cover and found the first empty page.
“She drives a Mercedes, right?”
“A CLK coupe, two-door. Silver-gray.”
“Do you know the license plate number?”
“No, but I can get it.”
“So can I. Don’t bother.”
“She hasn’t charged any gas since she left.”
“How do you know?”
“I oversee all her finances. She also hasn’t charged any hotel rooms, any meals, anything.”
“Any substantial withdrawals from her bank account before she left?”
“Nothing extraordinary.”
“Is it possible she’s staying with a friend?”
“I’ve checked with everyone I can think of.”
“Have you talked to the police?”
“No. I’d rather handle this quietly.”
“You said she does this periodically. Why?”
Cavanaugh looked at Cork, his eyes staring out of a mist of confusion. “I don’t know exactly. She claims she needs to get away from her life.”
As far as Cork knew, her life consisted of lots of money and lots of adulation. What was there to run from?
“Is there someplace she usually goes?”
“Since she moved here, it’s generally the Twin Cities or Chicago. In the past, it’s been New York City, Sydney, London, Buenos Aires, Rome.”
“For the museums?”
He frowned. “Not amusing, Cork.”
“My point is what does she do there?”