“You flew into Duluth?” Cork asked.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you call us? We’d have come down to get you.”

“It was easier to Uber here,” Annie told him.

Cork sipped his ice water. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he’d become, and the water ran down his throat in a long, cooling stream. “So, you got in this morning?”

Annie exchanged a look with her companion. “Actually, yesterday. I rented a canoe from Sorley’s Outfitters, and Maria and I spent the night on Still Island. I wanted it to be her introduction to Minnesota.”

“It was a very beautiful place,” Maria said. “Very calming.”

“You’re Guatemalan, yes?” Cork said.

“My people are Mayan,” Maria replied with a note of pride.

“And how did you two become friends?”

It wasn’t the question Cork really wanted to ask. Growing up, Annie O’Connor had aspired to be two things: (1) the first female pitcher starting for a professional baseball team and (2) a nun. She’d been a star athlete in high school and after that had become a postulant with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. In a period of personal and spiritual crisis, she’d stepped away from the formal pathway to becoming a part of the order and had gone to Guatemala to work in a school run by the Sisters there. Cork had thought at first that it was a form of running away. He knew his daughter was struggling to accept that she was what the Ojibwe called a two-spirit person. She’d fallen in love with another young woman, and it had ended badly. But as Annie had continued to communicate from a distance, it had become obvious that in Guatemala she’d found two significant things—purpose in her service to the poor there and a special person. Still, she’d always been a little circumspect when she mentioned Maria. Although he wondered about the depth of his daughter’s relationship, Cork wasn’t about to pry.

“I met Maria at a clinic where I’d taken an injured child. Maria’s a nurse.”

Cork said to Maria, “Rainy’s also a nurse.”

“Yes, and a Mide, as well, I understand,” Maria added. “An Ojibwe healer.” She smiled at Rainy. “We have healers in the Mayan culture. We call them curanderos.”

“We also have missing women in Guatemala,” Annie said, shifting the timbre of the conversation with dramatic suddenness. “And we also have buried bodies, so many of them.”

“Annie,” Maria said. “Este no es el momento ni el lugar.”

“She’s telling me this isn’t the time or place for this discussion.”

“Perhaps she’s right,” Rainy said.

“We keep talking about Olivia Hamilton,” Daniel said. “Have we already forgotten Crystal Two Knives?”

“Crystal Two Knives?” Annie said. “Is she any relation to Cece Two Knives?”

“Her granddaughter,” Daniel said.

“How long has she been missing?”

“Almost six months.”

Annie considered that, then asked, “How about Olivia Hamilton?”

“Two weeks. The search has been pretty intensive.”

“The authorities in Guatemala don’t do much searching when a Mayan woman is reported missing,” Annie said.

“It’s the same here with Ojibwe women.” Daniel’s words carried the identical acid note Cork had heard in Annie’s voice.

“Could we talk about something else?” Jenny said. “Like maybe Stephen and Belle’s wedding. That’s what’s brought Annie and Maria here.”

Cork saw a look pass between his daughter and her friend, the kind of look that made him wonder if the wedding was the only reason they’d come.

CHAPTER 5

Two agents showed up that evening. One was federal, FBI. The other was state, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They were hard to distinguish from one another. White shirts, ties, dark suits, shiny shoes. Cork figured they hadn’t been to the blueberry patch. They were just grunts with names of people to question. In his time as sheriff, Cork had worked significantly with both agencies, and he’d come to know men he respected. These two were new to him and seemed too young and too officious. And they didn’t play well together either. They stumbled over each other in their questioning, and the looks that often passed between them were less than collegial. Mostly they were interested in Cork’s knowledge about the location of the blueberry patch. He explained about Paavola and being hired to find his niece and nephew. Then he explained about the payment in blueberries.

“Blueberries?” the FBI agent said. “Seriously?” He gave a chuckle, not humorously but derisively, as if this kind of rural barter was unbelievably backward.

The BCA agent asked about the niece and nephew.

“I have their information at my office,” Cork said.

“And where would that be?”

He told them that he operated out of Sam’s Place.

“Sam’s Place?”

He explained about the hamburger joint he owned, which was housed in an old Quonset hut in Aurora. That brought smirks to both agents’ faces. He offered to supply them with the information, but they assured him they would find it on their own. Stephen and Daniel couldn’t add much. In the end, the agents asked for the shoes the men and boy had been wearing that morning in order to use Sirchie impression cards to help eliminate them from consideration of any prints found at the scene. Cork and Daniel had already anticipated this and had the shoes ready.

“Have they exhumed a body?” Cork asked.

“They’re excavating the site now,” the BCA agent said. “That’s all we know.”

Cork saw them to the door. As the agents descended the porch steps, he heard one of them say, “Blueberries.” And both men laughed.

After they’d gone, Rainy said, “That didn’t seem to get us anywhere. Anyone want coffee, decaf?”

Cork said, “I think I’ll have a beer. We got any Leinie’s?”

Shortly after the agents had arrived and it had become obvious that they considered the possibility of a vision unlikely, if not downright ridiculous, Jenny had taken Waaboo upstairs. After the men had gone, Daniel headed up to join her in Waaboo’s bedroom. From the hallway, he could hear his son’s laughter. Daniel thought it odd that his son should be so lighthearted after what he’d discovered in the blueberry patch that day. But he knew that Stephen had talked to Waaboo about visions and had, perhaps, helped the little boy understand what he’d seen.

“Everything okay?” he asked, stepping through the door.

Jenny and Waaboo sat together on the bed, their backs against the headboard. Waaboo was smiling broadly. In her hands Jenny held a book, James and the Giant Peach.

“The giant peach just squashed the mean aunts’ house,” Waaboo said with delight. “Now it’s rolling away.”

“Have they gone?” Jenny asked.

Daniel nodded. “If there’d been one more of them, they could have done a pretty good imitation of the Three Stooges.”

“Just doing their jobs, I suppose,” Jenny said. Then she asked Waaboo, “What did she look like? The woman you saw in the patch.”