“How come you didn’t tell me this earlier?” Dross said.
“Because I wasn’t sure.”
“What makes you sure now?”
“Two things. Those shoes on her feet. They’re expensive Italian jobs. There’s a whole closet full of their cousins at her residence in the old Parrant estate. And that big ring on her left hand. She’s wearing it in a portrait I saw today.”
“Who hired you to find her?”
“Her brother.”
“Did he say when she’d gone missing?”
“A week ago.”
“And he didn’t report it?”
“He wanted the matter looked into discreetly,” Cork said.
“If it is her, there won’t be anything discreet about this now,” Rutledge said.
Dross said to no one in particular, “How did she come to be here with these older remains?”
“Maybe when we identify the remains we’ll have our answer,” Ed Larson responded.
“How soon might that be?” Dross addressed her question to Upchurch.
“I’d like everything in here documented in detail with photographs and video,” the BCA agent replied. “Once that’s done, I’ll examine each of the remains in situ, then remove them to my lab in Bemidji, where I can study them more carefully.”
“That’ll take a while.”
“Quite a while,” Upchurch said.
“When will you have results?”
“I’ll get started as soon as the first remains are in the lab. Tomorrow maybe, and then I’ll have something preliminary to offer.”
“What about the new body?” Rutledge asked Dross.
“I told Tom Conklin that I’ll need the autopsy done ASAP.” Dross was speaking of the medical examiner.
“Handle the corpse carefully,” Rutledge advised. “It’s at a delicate stage. The skin’ll shift around. And be especially vigilant with the head. The hair will come off easily.”
“We’ll be careful, Simon.”
During all this exchange, Cork had noticed something in the crosscut-small metal cones that littered the floor around one of the skeletons-and his mind made a very old connection. “Agent Upchurch, is there any possibility that these corpses are over forty years old?”
“They may well be. I can’t really tell yet. Why do you ask?”
“The remains in the corner to the right. See those items littering the floor around it?”
“The things that look like little rusted cones?”
“Yeah, those. I think they’re jingles.”
“Jingles?”
“From a jingle dress. It’s traditionally worn for a healing dance.”
“Jingles,” Larson said. He gave Cork a pointed look. “The Vanishings, you think?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” Cork said. “The Vanishings.”
EIGHT
Naomi Stonedeer was the first to vanish. Cork had known her well. She was seventeen, with black hair that hung to her waist and hazel eyes. She was bright and lovely and an accomplished Jingle Dancer.
The Jingle Dance was an Ojibwe healing ritual performed by women in long dresses adorned with a couple of hundred jingles sewn closely together and attached in rows. The jingles were traditionally made from snuff can lids or tin can lids rolled into cones. When the dancers performed their steps, the jingles brushed together and created the unique sound that gave the ritual its name. Though it continued to be one of the most esteemed and sacred of the Ojibwe ceremonies, it was also a dance performed competitively at powwows.
In the summer of 1964, Naomi lived near Cork’s grandmother in Allouette, the larger of the two communities on the Iron Lake Reservation. Cork was thirteen and had a terrible crush on her. Whenever he visited Grandma Dilsey, he always found a way to pass the little BIA-built house where Naomi lived with her mother and her aunt. He concocted scenarios in which he played the hero and saved her from a dozen iterations of doom. But when the real thing occurred, he was powerless.
She disappeared in late June. She’d gone to the old community center in Allouette, which had once been the schoolhouse where Cork’s grandfather and his grandma Dilsey taught the children of the rez. Naomi had joined a lot of other women to practice the Jingle Dance in preparation for a powwow that was to be held in Winnipeg in July. She left the community center around 9:00 P.M., wearing her jingle dress. It was still daylight, and her house was only a quarter mile away, but she never made it home. Her mother called everyone in Allouette, and, when no one knew Naomi’s whereabouts, she called Cork’s mother, who was her good friend. Cork’s mother enlisted his father, who was sheriff of Tamarack County.
His father’s first reaction was that probably the girl had simply run away, something a lot of Ojibwe kids did. Poverty was not an unusual circumstance on the rez, nor were the unpleasant domestic situations that frequently resulted. Kids often took off, heading to the safety of a relative who lived somewhere else, or to Duluth or the Twin Cities, looking for a different-they hoped better-life. Naomi’s home life was just fine, Cork’s mother insisted. The young woman had no reason to run.
Cork’s father went to Allouette and that night began a fruitless investigation, which lasted for weeks. He contacted relatives, authorities on other reservations and in the Indian communities in Duluth and the Twin Cities. Word went out to teen shelters all across the Upper Midwest.
Naomi’s father, who’d long ago abandoned his family, lived in Crosby, a good eighty miles from Aurora, where he worked as an auto mechanic. Cork’s father questioned him repeatedly. Although the man couldn’t supply a decent alibi for the night Naomi went missing, there was no evidence that he’d been anywhere near Allouette at the time, and eventually Cork’s father stopped badgering him.
In the end, the search was abandoned, and no trace of Naomi Stonedeer was ever found.
The next vanishing occurred later that summer, in August. Cork remembered it well because it was a great tragedy in his family.
His mother’s sister, Ellie Grand, lived with Grandma Dilsey. Ellie had two daughters. Marais, the elder daughter, had already left home to seek her fortune in country music. That left Fawn at home, and Fawn was special. She was a gentle spirit, a girl who smiled all the time and would probably never grow sophisticated in her understanding of the world. Cork’s grandmother once told him that Fawn offered the Iron Lake Ojibwe a gift. The gift was her simplicity. It was her acceptance, with inexhaustible delight, of the everyday blessings that Kitchimanidoo showered on The People. Fawn laughed at snowflakes, was delighted when a dandelion puff exploded on the wind, cried with excitement when a fish leaped from Iron Lake and sent a spray of water into the air like pearls thrown against the sky. The Ojibwe on the rez watched over her. But even their protectiveness failed to keep her safe that summer day.
Shortly after lunch, she’d told her mother that she was going for a swim in Iron Lake. Fawn was a good swimmer and often went into the lake alone. She left in her swimsuit, carrying a towel, and her feet were bare.
Allouette had a small beach area next to the old dock where men who gillnetted and spearfished kept their boats. Jon Bruneau was at the dock that day, working on his Evinrude outboard. He swore that he never saw Fawn at the beach the whole afternoon.
Fawn’s disappearance was a blow that knocked the breath out of Cork’s family. Over the next few weeks, his mother spent much of her time with Aunt Ellie and Grandma Dilsey. Other Ojibwe women visited as well. As had often been the case in its turbulent history, the reservation came together around tragedy.
His father exhausted himself in the search for Fawn. He sent divers into the lake off the shore at Allouette, just in case Jon Bruneau had been wrong. He also had divers in the water at Sunset Cove, which was south of Allouette and a place that Shinnobs sometimes went for a swim. He grilled Bruneau mercilessly. He pressed his own good friend Sam Winter Moon to question the whole Ojibwe community. He thought maybe the Anishinaabeg would be more responsive to questions coming from one of their own than from a uniformed white man, even though he was considered a friend of the rez. No one saw anything. No one knew anything. Fawn, like Naomi Stonedeer, had simply dropped off the face of the earth.