“Your father was an astute judge of character.”
“That’s it?”
Brede laughed and took a swallow of beer. “You’re a cop all right. You require evidence.”
“My father was a cop, too. A good cop. I’m sure he asked for evidence.”
“He did. And I explained to him that I knew who’d planted the items that had incriminated me but that I couldn’t reveal the name.”
Cork said, “Because it was something you’d learned in confession?”
“The sanctity of which I firmly believed in then.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m a Methodist,” he said.
Cork drank from his own glass and waited. The ex-priest eyed the still water of the bay for a minute, then told his story.
At first the woman came to him in the normal way, confessing sins he’d heard before and for which he was fully prepared emotionally. An unclean thought. A coveting. A harmless lie to her husband. Hail Marys, he instructed her, and to pray for strength to resist these small temptations. He knew full well who she was. In a small parish, he knew the voices of all those who entered the confessional. As time went on, the sins she confessed began to change. They became darker, more disturbing. Sex with men other than her husband. Sex with women, too. Sometimes with both at once.
“Did you believe her?” Cork asked.
He didn’t know what to think. Surely there was no reason to lie about these things, especially for a woman in her particular position. He took her seriously and advised her to pray and to seek God’s guidance, and when that didn’t work, he urged her to seek professional help. She laughed at him, laughed seductively. And then she began the overtures. She often thought about them together, she said. She fantasized him forcing himself upon her in ways that disgusted him. He instructed her to banish such thoughts, but she swore she couldn’t. The images overwhelmed her and she masturbated thinking of them. This was beyond his ability to deal with, spiritually and emotionally.
The priest looked into the empty distance above the lake and shook his head. “The oddest part of it was that I saw her every Sunday in church, and she spoke to me cordially during our social hour afterward, and it was as if she’d never said any of those foul things to me in the confessional.”
Then she threatened him. She said if he didn’t have sex with her, she’d make him sorry. And very soon after that, the anonymous phone call had been made, and the incriminating items had been found. Although he couldn’t prove it was her, he knew that it was. Everything that had gone on, however, had been framed within the context of the confessional and her confessions, and he truly believed that he was bound to a sacred vow of silence. And the woman, if her name were made public, was so well thought of that he couldn’t be certain anyone would even believe him. So he’d said nothing. Yet Cork’s father had somehow divined his dilemma and had done his best to manipulate the public information so that the priest was never a part of the official investigation.
“How did he know?” Cork asked.
“Got me. He never said. But he saw to it that I was removed from the parish. Which,” Brede added philosophically, “was better for everyone in the long run.”
Cork said, “You’ve carefully avoided telling me the name of the woman.”
“I thought you might have guessed by now.”
Cork said, “A woman in, as you said, a particular position. Someone well thought of. Someone relatively new to the parish, I’m guessing. Young, intelligent, devious and deviant but able to hide it well, so probably sociopathic or maybe even psychopathic. Someone who, apparently, caused no problem for the priest who replaced you, Father Alwayne, who everyone said looked like Cary Grant. Which means that either Cary Grant wasn’t her type or she ended her behavior toward priests or, most likely, she herself was removed from the scene. Given all that, Monique Cavanaugh would be my guess.”
The former priest lifted his beer and said, “Cheers.”
TWENTY-TWO
Cork reached Aurora shortly before midnight. During the three-hour drive from Ashland, he’d examined everything he knew so far.
More than forty years earlier, four Ojibwe women had been abducted and murdered and their bodies concealed in an abandoned drift of the Vermilion One Mine. Monique Cavanaugh had also been abducted and murdered, and her body had been hidden in the drift with the others. Some Ojibwe undoubtedly knew about the secret entrance to the drift. According to Henry Meloux, Cork’s father also knew.
Two of the Ojibwe women were eager to leave the rez, and that may have contributed to their abduction. Two of the Ojibwe were quite young and vulnerable, and their naivete might have allowed them to be easily duped. The white woman was an outlier. So far as Cork knew, she was neither eager to quit Tamarack County nor naive. But she was abnormal, to say the least, in her behavior. And it was the kind of abnormal that could easily have put her at risk.
Because he was a cop, Cork’s thinking had been shaped in a way that made him skeptical of coincidence and always on the lookout for connections, no matter how thin they might appear to be at first. As a result, he found himself considering another possibility where Monique Cavanaugh was concerned. She’d been a woman with bizarre sexual proclivities. Worse than bizarre. Her behavior with the priest had been not only heartless but criminal as well. Could her appetites have been even more unsavory? Given the timing, could she also have been somehow involved in the Vanishings?
Cork let himself think along this line for a while and saw a problem. Although he couldn’t say about the first two victims, the second two-Naomi Stonedeer and Fawn Grand-had disappeared from the rez itself. If Monique Cavanaugh had been on the rez, trolling for vulnerable young women, she’d have been seen. A beautiful, rich white woman would have stood out like a polar bear. So how could she have snatched the girls without raising an alarm?
The only answer that made sense to Cork was that if Monique Cavanaugh was, indeed, involved, she wasn’t working alone. Whoever took the girls was probably someone who would have gone unnoticed on the rez.
Cork thought about all the people he knew on the Iron Lake Reservation, and that was almost everyone. He couldn’t think of many he’d call saints, but he also couldn’t think of anyone alive at the moment and old enough to have been involved in the Vanishings who struck him as deeply predatory. He didn’t know the history of the rez well enough to be able to finger a suspect from the past.
But there was someone he did know who, in his consideration of all the possibilities, he couldn’t overlook. And that was his father.
Liam O’Connor had been a regular visitor to the reservation, most often as a relative or friend rather than in his official capacity as sheriff. He could easily have come and gone without much notice at all. The priest had said that Cork’s father had somehow intuited his dilemma. Perhaps an intuitive understanding wasn’t the reason. Maybe the reason stemmed from his father’s deep involvement in the Vanishings. Involvement with Monique Cavanaugh herself, perhaps. It was, after all, probably his weapon that had killed the woman. Was it possible that, in the way she’d tried to seduce the priest, Monique Cavanaugh had succeeded in casting her seductive net over his father?
Cork arrived home thinking all these things and hating himself for it.
He took Trixie for a long overdue walk under a moon that was waning. And as they walked in the night shadows, he kept circling the facts in his head, jabbing at them, hoping he could get them to reveal the truth.
His father knew about the second entrance to the Vermilion Drift. His father had the unique ability, because of his position as sheriff, to make certain that any investigation could be thwarted. Someone had torn important pages from his mother’s journal. Henry Meloux and Hattie Stillday held some damnable secret. Someone was being protected, it was clear. Or the memory of someone.