“The gnomes,” Cork said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Daniel said.
“Erno seemed pretty serious.”
“I’ll find them.” Waaboo ran ahead, bounding through the tall grass.
“Spread out,” Cork said.
The men fanned out, but before they’d taken more than a few steps, Waaboo cried, “Here they are!”
At the edge of the tree line stood two little gnomes, each four feet high, carved from the stumps of a couple of hardwood trees cut down long ago. They’d been brightly painted at one time but now wore only the faintest tatters of color.
“And there’s the path,” Cork said.
“Not much of a path,” Stephen noted.
“Let’s go.” Waaboo started quickly ahead.
They followed the little boy along the faint trace of a trail through the evergreens. A few minutes later, they came to another clearing, where the sun smiled down on a field of scrub undergrowth, a mix of pine seedlings and June grass and lupines. Among the other wild flora were squat green bushes on which berries hung like tiny bulbs on Christmas trees.
“Blueberries!” Waaboo said.
“Move carefully,” Daniel cautioned. “We don’t want to destroy any of the plants.”
“I’ll be careful,” Waaboo promised and wandered into the patch.
“Quite a find,” Stephen noted.
Cork grinned. “Wouldn’t have known where to look except for those gnomes.”
“And a drunk and cash-strapped Finn,” Stephen said.
They’d picked for a few minutes when Cork noticed Waaboo, who was a dozen yards away, kneeling on the ground beside his bucket, staring straight ahead, his lips moving as if he were talking with someone. Then the little boy stood and came to his father, who was not far from Cork.
“Daddy, she’s lost,” Waaboo said.
“Who?” Daniel replied.
Waaboo pointed to where he’d been picking. “The lady. She’s lost and she’s sad.”
They were alone in the clearing, the men and the boy.
“Wait here.” Daniel walked to where Waaboo had left his bucket, looked around a bit, then down at the ground. In a voice that spoke trouble, he said, “Cork, you need to see this.”
Cork joined him, and Stephen came, too. The men stood at the edge of a small, mounded area that was almost clean of vegetation. The mound was five feet long and a couple of feet wide.
“Is that what I think it is?” Daniel said.
A few moments of silence passed, then Stephen ventured, “Olivia Hamilton?”
Cork slowly scanned the blueberry patch and the clearing, then the azure arch of the sky above. It was such a lovely scene, so peaceful, at least on the surface. He forced himself to look again at the mounding of earth at his feet.
“We won’t know until we dig,” he said. “I’d best call our sheriff.”
CHAPTER 3
Olivia Hamilton came from money. Her father was a state senator, a politician in a long line of Minnesota legislators. His family’s wealth originated in the early days of mining as a result of shipping ore from the Iron Range across Lake Superior on carriers out of Two Harbors or Duluth. Olivia had grown up with money. Spoiled, most folks would have called it, but because she was a Hamilton, they more often used the less pejorative term, privileged. By the time she entered her teens, she’d been expelled from a number of private schools, both in the Twin Cities and out of state. In the spring, she’d gotten into some trouble driving with a suspended license and while intoxicated. A deal had been struck that forced her to spend the summer as a counselor at a youth camp near Aurora, the hope being that time in the great Northwoods and responsibility for others might shape her a bit more into the good girl her family, particularly her father, needed her to be.
But a few weeks into her “sentence,” as she termed it in text messages to her friends, she had sneaked away from the camp one night with another counselor, a kid named Harvey Green, who had a motorcycle. They’d gone to Yellow Lake, a community south of Aurora with a reputation for being on the rough side. Using fake IDs, they settled into a bar there, a place called the Howling Wolf, which was a notorious gathering spot for hard-drinking men—bikers, loggers, construction workers, and often the kinds of individuals who, except for their need to drink and carouse, typically opted to remain off the grid.
That night, there’d been a bunch of bikers hanging out at the Howling Wolf, the Kings, a group out of Fargo, on their way to a motorcycle rally in Duluth. There was also a local biker club, the Axemen, all of them loggers. In the course of a night of drinking, things got said and a fight broke out in the street in front of the bar. The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department responded. No serious injuries were reported, and no one was arrested. But a lot of names were taken.
Because of his own drinking, which, he claimed, had put him in a bit of an alcoholic haze, Harvey Green lost track of Olivia when the fight broke out. When he decided it was time to head back to the camp, she was nowhere to be found.
The next day, camp authorities reported her disappearance. A huge hunt was launched, involving Tamarack County Sheriff’s personnel, the state patrol, Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and, because of the Kings’ Fargo connection and the possibility that the girl had been abducted and taken out of state, the FBI. Everyone who could be identified in the bar the night the girl went missing, particularly the members of the two gangs, was hauled in and relentlessly questioned, to no avail. The bar had no security cameras, so no record of comings and goings. The town of Yellow Lake was turned upside down in the search for clues, evidence of what might have occurred.
There was hope of a ransom demand, but when nothing materialized, the family offered a reward of $50,000 for information that led to finding their daughter. Every call that resulted, and there were hundreds, was followed up but led nowhere.
The search had been ongoing for two weeks. They’d pinged her cell phone location, checked phone records, her text messages, social media posts. Everything ended the night she’d disappeared. They’d grilled Harvey Green and once again grilled everyone they could identify as having been in the bar that night. But until Waaboo stumbled upon a grave as he picked blueberries, there’d been no progress.
While Cork remained in the clearing, Daniel English took Waaboo and Stephen home, where he planned to call the situation in to the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. The drive took only half an hour, but because his son was unusually quiet, it felt like forever to Daniel.
“She must have been looking at the sun,” Waaboo finally said. “Her eyes looked hurt.”
“Nothing hurts her now,” Stephen said. “She’s walking the Path of Souls.”
Waaboo shook his head. “Not yet. She’s still lost.” And he was quiet again.
“What did she look like?” Daniel asked.
“Like you and me.”
“Ojibwe?”
Waaboo nodded.
At the house on Gooseberry Lane, Jenny O’Connor and Rainy Bisonette were painting the railing and front porch posts. Jenny was Waaboo’s mother, Rainy his grandmother. They waved as Daniel pulled into the drive, but when they saw the empty hands of the men and the boy, who approached them across the lawn, Jenny said, “No blueberries? What happened?”
Before Daniel could respond, Waaboo said, “I saw a dead woman.”
Jenny had been holding a brush filled with paint. Daniel saw that her clothes and her face were spattered with spots like white freckles. She gave him a dark look of concern and puzzlement.
“Waaboo, I think your grandma has some cold lemonade for you inside.” Daniel looked hopefully at Rainy, his aunt.
“Of course,” Rainy said. “And there are fresh chocolate chip cookies in the jar.”
“She can’t find the Path of Souls,” Waaboo said.
