Windigo Island Read Online Free PDF

way, to her former life. She took care of Waaboo while Jenny oversaw Sam’s Place and Cork went about his business as a private investigator. She had no children of her own and seemed to relish every moment she had with the little guy. Every other weekend or so, Mal drove up from Evanston for a visit.
    In the gray light through the windows, Jenny crossed her arms and leaned against the kitchen counter. “Aunt Rose,” she said, “I need a favor.” She laid out the situation, and it was clear from the look on Rose’s face that she shared Jenny’s concern for the missing girl. Without a moment of hesitation, Jenny’s aunt agreed to give whatever was needed of her.
    That night Jenny put Waaboo to bed. Cork stood in the doorway of his grandson’s room and listened while Jenny sat in the rocker with Waaboo on her lap and explained that she would have to be gone for a little while.
    “To help find a little girl who’s lost,” she told him.
    “Is she scared?” Waaboo asked.
    “Would you be scared if you were lost?”
    “Not if I had Bart wiff me.” He clutched his stuffed orangutan.
    “She doesn’t have Bart. She doesn’t have anyone.”
    Waaboo was full-blood Anishinaabe. His hair was black, his eyes like cherrywood. He’d been born with a cleft lip and still bore a small scar where surgery had closed that split. He thought about what Jenny said and asked, “No mommy?”
    “Her mommy can’t help her. That’s why she needs me.”
    “Aunt Rose will be here?”
    “Yes. And I’ll be back very soon.”
    “’Kay,” he said, his concerns put to rest. He snuggled more firmly against Jenny. “Tell me a story, Mommy.”
    • • •
    Later, they sat around the kitchen table—Cork, Jenny, and Rose—and talked about what might be ahead. Trixie, the O’Connors’ mutt, lay in the corner near her food dish, looking bored or tired.
    “Do you think she’s still alive, Dad?”
    “I don’t know, Jenny. But once you ask yourself that question, you’ve got to do your best to find the answer.”
    Jenny held a mug of decaf coffee in her hands. She took a sip and frowned, as if the brew were distasteful. But Cork suspected it was not the coffee that displeased her.
    “How do we do that?” she asked.
    Cork got up from the table, walked to the coffeemaker on the counter, and poured a little more from the pot into his own mug. The rain had stopped and the clouds had passed, and the darkness beyond the kitchen window was night, plain and simple.
    He turned back to the table. “We talk to her family, her friends, her teachers, anyone who knew her. And we do the same for Carrie Verga. We talk to the officers in charge of the investigation of the girl’s death. We talk to anyone who might have some piece of information that leads to another piece of information. And, if we’re lucky, we put the puzzle together that way, piece by piece.”
    “That sounds awfully slow,” Jenny said. “Do we have that kind of time?”
    “I don’t know. But I also don’t know another way.”
    Jenny stared into her mug. “She was only thirteen when she ran away. What was she thinking?”
    “You used to run away all the time,” Rose told her gently. “Whenever I scolded you or your mom did or Cork, you’d run away across the street to the O’Loughlins’ house. Sue would let you in and give you milk and cookies, and after a while you’d decide to come back home.”
    “That was a different kind of running,” Cork said, returning to his chair at the table. “Kids who really run away are usually running from a bad situation. But most of them, like you, Jenny,come back eventually. Being alone on the street is incredibly hard. Home is still home, bad as that might be. It’s familiar. For a kid to stay away, the situation has to be really awful.”
    “Or someone’s preventing them from going home,” Jenny said.
    “That, too.” Cork looked at his watch. “If we’re going to meet Daniel in Bayfield at eight tomorrow