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  “I see.”

  “There’s one thing more . . . your hair. The way you keep your head shaved, with that scarf and all. Quite a few clients have gotten the impression that you’re undergoing chemotherapy, and to be honest with you, Lil, it doesn’t put them in a very upbeat state of mind.”

  “Oh. They think I have cancer? How depressing for them.”

  “I know. I know it doesn’t sound very caring. But if people think that their realtor has cancer, it doesn’t put them in a very buy-receptive state of mind.”

  “Bennie, shaving my head is a symbol. It’s a female-warrior thing. It’s a witch thing. It means that I’m determined to get my children back.”

  “I know that, Lil, and so does everybody else at Concord Realty. But we can’t afford to make our clients feel uneasy.”

  “So what are you suggesting? You want me to grow my hair back?”

  “It’s not just that, Lil. I think you need to take some time off. If you want to carry on with the Mystery Lake promotion, that’d be fine. But I think you need to stay home—concentrate on finding your kids and sorting your life out. Then we can talk about the way ahead.”

  “The way ahead,” Lily repeated, nodding her head. “Okay, Bennie, if that’s how you see it.”

  “Lily—you know how I feel about you, don’t you? I mean me personally—me—regardless of all of this trauma.”

  She didn’t answer, but lifted his hat from the banister post and handed it to him. “I’ll see you, Bennie. Thanks for dropping by. Good luck with the Starling property, huh?”

  John Shooks arrived at her door on the last reverberating stroke of eleven. Outside, a big black 1987 Buick Electra with green-tinted windows was parked at an angle in her driveway. Its engine was running and its exhaust was smoking in the cold.

  “Are you ready?” asked Shooks. “It’s only about an hour away—not even that.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Lily, closing the front door behind her and double-locking it.

  “Black Crow Valley, about six miles south of the Minnesota River. We’re going to be meeting my acquaintance George Iron Walker.”

  “And he’s the one who can find Tasha and Sammy for me?”

  “He’s the one who knows how to do it, yes.”

  Shooks opened the car door for her. It creaked on its hinges. Inside, the seats were covered in worn black leather and there was a strange pungent smell like Russian cigarettes. As they drew away from the curb, it started to snow, only lightly at first, but by the time they reached Bloomington it was coming down thick and fast.

  “So your friend’s agreed to help me?” asked Lily.

  “Let’s just say that he’s agreed to discuss what you want.”

  “I never visited a reservation before.”

  Shooks wiped the windshield in front of him with the sleeve of his coat. “You’re not going to visit one now. George Iron Walker—he’s not a hermit or anything like that, but he prefers to live way out on his own. He says that he needs the silence, so that he can hear the spirits all around him.”

  “Oh.”

  They drove for a while without talking. The highway ahead of them was so blinding white that Lily imagined she could see shapes dancing across it, like ghosts.

  After a while, she said, “How did you get to be a private detective, Mr. Shooks?”

  He sniffed. “By default, I guess. I used to be a newspaper reporter, for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but I always relished the investigation part of it more than the writing part of it.”

  He was silent for a while, smiling to himself. Then he said, “The trouble was, I relished it a little too much. I dug up a couple of juicy scandals involving city dignitaries and underage girls and I was politely but firmly told that my services to the media were no longer required. You have to play the game if you live in a city like Minneapolis, Mrs. Blake. All your readers want to know is how lucky they are to live in such a prosperous, happy, morally uplifting place.”

  “You have Native American blood in you. That’s really interesting.”

  “You think so? I’m only about an eighth Native. Like, my left leg is Sioux and the rest of me is German and Canadian. And I find it irksome, more than interesting.”

  “You can do that incredible thing with the voices.”

  “Oh, sure. And I can always tell when the wind’s going to swivel around, hours before it actually does. But my Sioux relatives all expect me to feel as resentful of the white man as they do, and my white relatives all think that I’m one-eighth inferior.”

  They were driving due westward now, along the south side of the Minnesota River, though the blizzard was so intense that Lily could see nothing but the pines that bordered the highway, shaggy with snow. After twenty minutes, without any warning, Shooks turned off 101 and headed along a narrow, bumpy road that ran alongside an ever-thickening forest. The road looked as if it had been cleared that morning by a snow plow, but fresh snow was already beginning to drift across it and clog up the tire tracks.

  “Not too far now,” said Shooks, as the Buick bounced and creaked over the furrows.

  “It’s not getting there I’m concerned about,” said Lily. “It’s getting back.”

  “We’ll be okay. Besides, we could do worse things than spend the night in the company of George Iron Walker. He’s a fascinating man, George, especially when it comes to Native American culture. He knows it all: how the beavers all got together and made the world ready for men to live in—all that stuff.”

  “The beavers did that? I thought it was God.”

  “It’s just one of those Mdewakanton legends. But George takes it all very seriously. He’s very political, too, when it comes to Native American affairs. You know the casino at Thunder Falls? It was George who was mainly responsible for getting that built, and, believe me, the reservation was transformed overnight. All of those millions of dollars of gambling money . . . the Mdewakanton got themselves power, sewage, health centers . . . an indoor swimming pool. There’s even a George Iron Walker Orthodontic Clinic.”

  Lily looked out of the window. Ahead of them, on their left, the forest began to rise higher. It may have been an optical illusion, but she was sure that she could see ten or eleven pale-gray animals running between the trees.

  “Are those wolves?” she said.

  John Shooks peered in the direction that she was pointing. “I don’t see anything.”

  “I could have sworn they were wolves.”

  “Hmm, well. Maybe they were stray dogs. You get a lot of stray dogs around this area, scavenging for scraps.”

  “They looked way too big for dogs.”

  “Maybe they were witches.”

  “Witches?”

  “Many Native Americans used to believe that wolves were witches in animal form. In the Lakota language, the word for wolf and witch is the same.”

  The Buick began to slide sideways and he had to spin the wheel left and then right to correct it. Then he said, “Actually, we’d be much less at risk if they were wolves. There isn’t a single recorded instance in North America of a wolf killing a human being, ever. But there are plenty of stories in Native American mythology about witches who could burn down people’s lodges from fifty miles away, just by thinking angry thoughts about them, or skin human babies like rabbits.”

  Lily didn’t say anything. She didn’t like to talk about fire, or mutilated children. She still woke up in the middle of the night gasping for air, thinking that her skin was burning and her hair was frizzing. And she didn’t want to imagine what harm could be done to lost and defenseless children—especially children who had been snatched out of their beds in the middle of the night, and didn’t know how to get home.

  “You okay?” asked Shooks.

  At last they came to the top of a rise, and saw below them a low single-story house with a verandah running all the way around it. It had a single brick chimney, which was sullenly smoking into the falling snow. To one side of the house stood a rust-col
ored stable, with three pickup trucks parked around it, as well as a newish blue Subaru Forester.

  Shooks circled the car around in front of the house and blew a loud, dirge-like blast on his horn. Almost at once the front door opened and a tall man in a red checkered shirt and jeans appeared. He came bounding down the steps and opened Lily’s door for her.

  “Welcome to Black Crow Valley,” he said, holding out his hand. “My name’s George.”

  “Glad to know you, George,” said Lily, looking up at him and blinking against the snow. “I’m Lily.”

  As she climbed out of the car, she realized how tall George actually was—at least six feet four. He was also strikingly handsome, with short-cropped hair, a broad forehead, and a firmly defined jaw. His eyes had that knowing, confident twinkle that she had always liked in good-looking men, even though she would never have admitted it.

  Around his tree trunk of a neck he wore several tight silver necklaces and a dangling arrangement of feathers and bones and beads that looked like a dreamcatcher.

  “Come inside,” he said. He took hold of her elbow so that she wouldn’t slip on the steps. “You couldn’t have picked a worse day to visit me, weatherwise. Forecast says it’s going to snow all night, and most of tomorrow, too.”

  “Those Canucks have a lot to answer for,” said John Shooks.

  “Don’t be too hard on them.” George Iron Walker smiled at him. “They don’t only give us their crappy weather. They come down here to gamble in their thousands, and they give us all of their crappy money, too.”

  He led Lily into his living room. It was wide and low and very warm, with a huge log fire blazing. The walls were hung with multicolored Native blankets, and with old framed photographs of notable Mdewakanton chiefs, and famous Sioux encampments. The furniture was antique, in the overweight Sears Roebuck style of the early 1900s, and every armchair and couch was heaped up with huge tapestry cushions.

  Next to the fire a girl was kneeling. She had high cheekbones and glossy black hair, which was beaded and braided all the way down her back. She was wearing a dark-red polo-neck sweater and tight jeans, and even though she was kneeling, Lily could see that she was very tall and long-legged.

  “Hazawin,” said George, and the girl turned toward them. She was almost beautiful, although Lily thought that her features were a little too asymmetric and a little too sharp. What was most striking about her, though, was her eyes, which were misty purple, and completely blind.

  “Hazawin, this is Lily. John Shooks you’ve met before.”

  The girl smiled sympathetically in Lily’s direction. “Glad to meet you, Lily. Sorry about the circumstances.”

  “I told her why you were coming,” George explained. “Hazawin can help us. She has a very close affinity to the spirit world.”

  “The spirit world?” asked Lily.

  Shooks said, hurriedly, “I haven’t really filled her in yet, George—not on the spirit stuff. I was hoping that you could do that.” He turned to Lily and said, “I’m not too good at this one-with-nature malarkey. Like I said, I’m only one-eighth Mdewakanton. Voices, yes. Weather forecasts, yes. Spirits, only so-so.”

  “Please,” said Hazawin, “why don’t you sit down and let me bring you some tea? Do you like herbal?”

  “Hey—wouldn’t say no to a Wild Turkey if you have one,” said Shooks. “Straight up, no ice. No umbrella.”

  With complete assurance, circumnavigating the furniture without once touching it, Hazawin stood up and walked out of the living room. Lily wondered if she ought to follow her into the kitchen and offer to help, but George came over and took off her coat and said, “Please . . . sit down.”

  She sat on the end of one of the couches, farthest from the fire. She was feeling awkward now, and she was beginning to wish that she hadn’t come, but she couldn’t really ask Shooks to drive her straight back to Minneapolis.

  George sat down opposite her. Not only was he wearing necklaces and feathers, but several silver bracelets, one of which was fashioned in the shape of twenty or thirty beavers, all swallowing each others’ tails. He jabbed at the fire with a long poker, so that it roared up even higher, and its light danced in his eyes.

  “John told me what happened to you, Lily,” he said. “There are very few feelings in life that are worse than being betrayed by somebody you thought you could trust—somebody who loved you.”

  “Well, you’re right about that,” Lily agreed. And he was right. Up until now, she had never been a vengeful person. She knew that she could be irritable, and lose her temper quickly, but her tempers never lasted for long, and in the end she had always been forgiving, and willing to compromise. Now, however, she wanted to see Jeff suffer. She wanted him to suffer just as painfully as she was suffering, or even more. Her hatred for him was so strong that it made her mouth dry, as if she had been trying to eat ashes.

  “I understand that the FBI still hasn’t been able to locate your children,” said George.

  Lily nodded. “Today is the sixty-ninth day, and they don’t even know if they’re still in the continental United States.”

  “John—you believe their father has probably taken them south? Mexico, maybe?”

  “That’s my surmise, George, yes.”

  George sat back, and stared at Lily for so long that she had to look away. Eventually, he said, “There is a way of finding your children, and bringing them back. When I first tell you what it is, you probably won’t believe me. But even if you don’t believe me, you can trust me.”

  Lily looked back at him for a long moment, and then she said, “All right, then. I trust you.”

  “Good. But first of all, we have to reach an understanding.”

  “You mean you want me to pay you some money?”

  “Not in this particular case. But it does involve something of very significant value.”

  “Go on.”

  He stood up and walked across to a dark oak bureau in the far corner of the living room. He opened it up, took out a folded map, and brought it back to the fireside.

  “Here,” he said, spreading the map across the couch. “Do you know where this is?”

  Lily frowned at it. It showed a lake, with surrounding forests. She thought she recognized the shape of it, but she couldn’t quite be sure. After a while, George rotated the map counterclockwise and said, “How about this? Does this make any sense?”

  “Oh, yes. Now I know where it is: Mystery Lake.”

  “Your company is marketing some land there, I understand.”

  “That’s right, yes we are. It’s going to be a very profitable development, eventually. I think the official description is ‘a superior lakeside community for active professionals.’ In other words, an upscale enclave for lawyers and doctors and entrepreneurs, with a yacht marina and a Tom Fazio golf course.”

  “Mystery Lake is a sacred place for the Mdewakanton,” said George.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t have expected you to. The spirits leave no traces that white men can see. But it was here that Haokah appeared to Little Crow and warned him that his land was going to be dragged away from under his feet, like a blanket. And so it was, of course, in the Treaty of 1851, when Little Crow surrendered the north side of the Minnesota River to the white men and the Mdewakanton were forced to leave the hills and the lakes that had been theirs since the time before time.”

  “I see.” Lily paused, and blinked at him. “Well, actually, to tell you the truth, I don’t see.”

  “Do you know who Haokah is?” asked George. “Haokah is the god of thunder, and the god of the hunt. He cries when he is happy and he laughs when he is sad.”

  George pointed to a hook-shaped spit of land that extended into the lake on the northwest side. “This is the place where Haokah appeared to Little Crow. They were both reflected in the water so that they appeared to occupy two worlds at once—the world of men and the world of spirits, simultaneously.”

 
; He waited for a moment, obviously expecting Lily to ask him something, but she didn’t know what he expected her to ask.

  In the end, he said, “I want this place.”

  “Excuse me? You want this place? This little piece of land here? You mean—if you can find my children, you want me to buy it for you?”

  “That is the price.”

  Lily blew out her cheeks. “I don’t know, George. I don’t have the development plan here with me, but if my memory serves me, that’s exactly where they’re thinking of building the jetty for the yacht marina.”

  “I know that. I’ve seen the plans for myself.”

  “That piece of real estate, George . . . I couldn’t tell you what it’s worth, not off the top of my head, but—”

  George lifted his hand. “To the Mdewakanton, Lily, it is worth far more than money. To the Mdewakanton, it is priceless.”

  Lily studied the map with a concentrated frown. Maybe—if the yacht marina were to be built a hundred yards farther to the east, and some concrete pilings put into the lake to construct a new jetty—well, it would obviously cost a whole lot more, but maybe not too much more. Quarter of a million dollars? Her house was worth at least $450,000 and she could always remortgage. And if Bennie helped her, like he had promised . . .

  “Okay,” she said. She knew how rash it was to offer him a piece of real estate that wasn’t even hers, and she could feel her cheeks flushing. “If you can bring my children back to me, unharmed—”

  “You swear? You realize what the consequences could be, if you don’t?”

  “I swear, George. When Tasha and Sammy are safely sleeping in their beds at home, this piece of land will be yours.”

  “Very well,” said George. He folded up the map and put it aside. “This will be an historic moment for the Mdewakanton people.”

  “Well, I’m glad about that,” said Lily. “But how exactly are you going to get my children back?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hazawin brought in a tray of herbal tea, in hand-decorated mugs. The tea smelled like nothing that Lily could put a name to, yet for some reason it reminded her of something. A room. A garden. A face turning to smile at her.