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morning, we’ll have to get off by four. I’m going to call it a day, get myself ready for bed, pack a few things in an overnight bag.”
    “I should do the same,” Jenny said. But she didn’t move.
    “You go on, Cork,” Rose said. “Jenny and I have some more talking to do, I think.”
    Cork rinsed out his mug and set it on the counter next to the sink. He said good night and headed upstairs, wondering what the two women still had to discuss. He was used to being in the minority in his house and sometimes excluded from the conversations of the women in his life. He didn’t like it, but he had no choice.
    He lay in bed that night thinking about Mariah and Carrie Verga and about the families they’d left behind. He didn’t know these people, not yet. He tried not to be disposed against them. But when he wore the badge—in Chicago as a cop and in Tamarack County as a deputy and as Sheriff—he’d seen all too often the horrific results of child abuse. That got him to thinking about Meloux’s statement when Daniel English had asked for his help. I have no patience with guilt that wears the face of grief. It sounded callous, but Cork thought he understood. Sometimes the tears that parents shed over their lost children couldn’t be trusted. For some, children were not a blessing but a burden. A child gone was just one less thing to worry about.
    Cork hoped that he would discover he was wrong in his thinking. But he fell asleep prepared for the worst.

Chapter 5
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    I t was four hours to Bayfield, Wisconsin, which lay near the tip of a squat peninsula that jutted north into Lake Superior and at whose end lay the exquisite archipelago of the Apostle Islands. Cork and Jenny left at first light, driving the Explorer, a thermos of hot coffee between them. Almost two hours later, they passed through Duluth and crossed the harbor of the Twin Ports on the Bong Bridge. They entered Superior, Wisconsin, under a heavy ceiling of overcast that completely blocked the morning sun. They took U.S. Highway 2 east and after another hour, turned north onto Wisconsin 13, a road that followed the outline of the peninsula and that was, at that early hour, nearly deserted.
    Cork thought Jenny might sleep. It had been a brief night, an early rising. But she was alert and talkative the whole way, and there was an excitement in her voice. She was a woman on a mission. For Cork, the day already held the gloomy feel of failure.
    They found the Bayfield Inn and, inside, the café Daniel English had told them about the night before. When Cork and Jenny walked in, they found the place was three-quarters full and noisy. English sat at a table on the far side of the room, next to a window that looked out toward Lake Superior. He wasn’t alone. A man as big as English himself sat with him. An Indian. English stood as they approached. The other man stayed seated and watched them without expression.
    “Thanks for coming,” English said. He shook their hands and nodded toward his companion. “This is Red Arceneaux, Mariah’suncle. Red, these are the folks I told you about. Cork O’Connor and his daughter Jenny.”
    Arceneaux was broad across the chest, heavy around the middle. His hands on the table were meaty and powerful. His face was hard, his eyes black iron. He didn’t rise to greet Cork, and there was no welcoming energy in the handshake he offered from his chair. He didn’t bother to shake Jenny’s hand at all, simply nodded when English introduced her. Beyond an Indian’s usual reserve around white people and strangers, Cork wondered what more was at work in this man’s thinking.
    They sat down, and Arceneaux said in a flat, deep voice, “I understand you’re a blood.” Which was the term sometimes used to designate a person of mixed racial heritage.
    “My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Anishinaabe,” Cork said.
    “And you’re a cop, too.”
    “Was a cop. Not anymore. I do private investigations now.”
    Arceneaux gave