Boundary Waters by William Kent Krueger Read Free Book Online

don’t have much time.” Arkansas Willie’s long face seemed longer, drawn down by the weight of his worry.
    Cork reached out and put a hand reassuringly on his shoulder. “We’ll find her, Willie.” He started through the sliding door, but turned back. “One more thing.”
    “Yes?”
    “Do you smoke cigars?”
    “No. Vile habit. Why?”
    “Just wondered. Lock up,” he said, and tapped the latch on the glass door.
    Almost a year before, Cork had been a heavy smoker, more than a pack a day. But he’d made a promise to someone he’d loved very much that he would reform. Now he ran every day, and he hadn’t had a cigarette in nine months. He’d become supersensitive to the smell of tobacco smoke. It had been faint in Raye’s bedroom, but definite. Whoever it was who’d been there, they had a fondness for cigars.

7
    C ORK DROVE NORTH OUT OF AURORA , passed the Chippewa Best Western, Johannsen’s Salvage Yard, and finally the last streetlamp of town. Three miles farther, he turned right onto a county road that followed the shore of Iron Lake. In another ten minutes, he came to a graveled access that led to an old resort hidden among the trees. A long time had passed since he’d been out that way, and he slowed as he approached the access, then stopped, killed the engine, and stepped out.
    The moon above the dark pines was waning, lopsided, like a balloon leaking air. The night was still and without a sound. Cork couldn’t see the buildings of the old resort, but he knew how they lay. The big cabin set back from the shoreline. Six small cabins flanking the lane down to the lake. And there, where the black water met the sand, the sauna. All of it had been built by the old Finn Able Nurmi, Molly’s father, and left to Molly when he died. When Molly died, there’d been no one to pass it on to, and now the old resort just sat, disintegrating with each season, the wood going soft with rot so that it would all collapse someday and go back to the earth and there would be no sign that Molly Nurmi had ever been. In the time before the cold science of the whites came to Iron Lake, the Anishinaabe believed the water was bottomless. There was a tradition among the Iron Lake Ojibwe. Before they were married, a couple would take strands of their hair and braid a cord. On the day they were wed, they tied the cord around a stone, canoed to the middle of the lake, and dropped the stone into the water. The stone descended forever, they believed, its spirit bound by the braid of their hair, and forever there would be a thing that bore the memory of them together. In a way, that’s how Cork thought of Molly and him. Forever bound in spirit. As long as he had memory, Molly would always be.
    He drove on, putting the old resort behind him. Two miles farther, he came to a double-trunk birch off to the right of the road. He pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. From the glove compartment, he took a flashlight, locked up the Bronco, and headed toward the birch, which marked the trail into the woods to the cabin of Henry Meloux.
    Meloux was a midewiwin, an Ojibwe medicine man. He was also said to be a tschissikan, or magician, although that was a claim Meloux himself never made nor admitted to. He was the oldest man Cork had ever seen, and he had seemed that old for as long as Cork could remember. As far as Cork knew, except for his dog Walleye, Meloux had always lived alone in his cabin on a small rocky peninsula on Iron Lake called Crow Point.
    Although Cork brought the flashlight, he didn’t turn it on. The trail was easy to follow, lit by the moon and beaten nearly bare by the feet of others who, like Cork, had sought out the old man for his succor and advice. Cork walked for half an hour in the stillness of the woods, crossing at some point from national forest land onto the reservation of the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe. As he approached the cabin, he could see light through the windows and he smelled wood smoke. He paused,