Purgatory Ridge

by William Kent Krueger

  Near sunset, Cork stepped out and sat on the porch swing. Annie came, too, and sat with him. Rose drifted out, leaned against the railing, and stared west where thunderheads stumbled across the sky. Jenny joined them finally and stood on the porch steps with her arms crossed.

  “I have to do something,” she said. “I can’t just wait anymore.”

  “The question is what to do,” Cork replied.

  “I want to kill somebody.”

  “No, you don’t, Jenny,” Rose said.

  Jenny uncrossed her arms. “I do. I want to kill the people who’d do this kind of thing.”

  “Do you think they’re all right, Dad?” Annie asked.

  “Yes.”

  Jenny challenged him. “How do you know that?”

  “In the absence of proof, you believe.”

  “I wish you were sheriff,” Annie said.

  “Why?”

  “You could do something.”

  “Wally Schanno is doing everything he can.”

  “I trust you more.”

  “Thanks, Anne.” He put his arm around her. “Come here, Jen.”

  His oldest daughter sat beside him on the swing, and he had both daughters in his arms. It hadn’t been very long ago that he’d come near to losing his children, losing his whole family, losing everything he held most dear. They’d all had to struggle to hold together. He refused to believe that they’d come this far only to have happiness snatched away so cruelly. But then he’d never claimed to understand life. The only thing he knew absolutely was that he wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing himself for those he loved.

  “I’m tired of sitting, too,” he said. “I think it’s about time I did something.”

  “What?” Jenny asked.

  “I’m going to start by talking to someone.”

  “Who?” Annie looked up at him.

  “Henry Meloux.”

  “What can he do?”

  “He always surprises me.” Cork stood up.

  “May I come, too?” Jenny asked.

  “Me, too,” Annie put in.

  “I’d prefer someone to stay with Rose.”

  “That’s not necessary, Cork,” Rose said.

  “That’s okay.” Annie left the swing and put her arm around her aunt’s ample waist. “I think Dad’s right. I’ll stay.”

  Cork ruffled her hair affectionately. “Thanks, kiddo.”

  “It’s almost dark,” Rose pointed out. “You should go quickly.”

  Cork kissed his sister-in-law on the cheek. “Hold down the fort.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  The thunderheads had completely muscled out the stars by the time the Bronco left the town limits of Aurora. Lightning—a lot of it—played across the clouds, illuminating the face of a storm that had yet to break.

  Jenny leaned forward and looked up through the windshield. “How come it’s not raining?”

  Cork said, “Maybe the air’s too dry, or maybe it’s too hot. I don’t know.”

  They drove a while on a county road, the dark growing deeper around them, pierced only by the Bronco’s headlights and by the startling bursts of lightning that were growing more frequent by the minute.

  “When you and Mom split up,” Jenny said after a time, “I used to lie in bed at night thinking of ways to trick you into getting back together. Like, you know, faking a deadly illness or running away.”

  “You never did.”

  “I was never sure what was the right thing to do, what would work. Is that how you feel right now?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Jenny stared out at the darkness of the North Woods. “I wish you had your gun.”

  “Who would I shoot? It’s only Henry we’re going to be seeing.”

  “Just in case.”

  “Relying on your brain is better. First lesson I ever learned in law enforcement.”

  Jenny sat back and Cork felt her staring at him.

  “How did you feel when your dad was killed?” she asked.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “But you haven’t forgotten.”

  You never forget, he thought.

  His father was the youngest sheriff ever elected in Tamarack County, and the best remembered. He’d been killed when Cork was thirteen. An old curmudgeon of a woman deaf as a post had stepped into the middle of an exchange of gunfire between the sheriff’s people and some escaped convicts making for Canada. Cork’s father put himself between the old lady and a bullet from a stolen deer rifle. The clock on the tower of the courthouse was hit in the fracas, and the hands had not moved since. Cork had only to look at the clock to be reminded of a moment that had changed his life forever.

  “I was angry,” he finally replied to Jenny’s question. “I wanted to kill the men who’d killed him.”

  Jenny looked straight ahead. “That’s how I feel.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  He turned off the county road and onto a narrow track of dirt and gravel.

  “Do you think Henry Meloux will know what to do?” Jenny asked.

  “Not necessarily. But I’m hoping that after I talk with him, I will.”

  By the time Cork parked next to the double-trunk birch that marked the trail to Henry Meloux’s cabin, black clouds had gobbled the moon. Except for those frequent moments when lightning made the trees jump out at them, Cork thought it was the darkest he’d ever seen the woods. He took a flashlight from the glove compartment and gave it to Jenny.

  “Go ahead and light the way. Just follow the path. I’ll be right behind you.”

  The lightning was all around them by now. Cork knew there could be a lot of ground strikes. With the woods tinder dry, he believed that unless a good rain came with the storm, things could be bad. Unfortunately, the clouds didn’t seem inclined to offer anything but the lightning that jabbed at the night and the forest. Cork stayed close behind Jenny as she made her way along the path. He was surprised at how quickly and nimbly she moved. A wind swept in with the clouds, and it shoved against the trees so the trunks bent as if something big walked among them. Although he didn’t want Jenny to know, he was becoming very concerned about being in the woods.

  When they stepped out of the trees and onto Crow Point where Meloux’s cabin stood, Cork felt a moment of relief. In the flashes of lightning, he could see the dark cabin a hundred yards ahead. They’d gone less than a dozen strides in that direction when he heard a dull roar growing behind them. He puzzled for a moment, but as the sound grew in nearness and intensity, he suddenly understood.

  “Run for the cabin,” he shouted to Jenny, and he pushed her forward.

  His daughter didn’t question him. She took off at a hard run, the beam of the light she carried bouncing crazily ahead of her, mostly missing the trail. Twenty yards from the cabin, she stumbled and fell. The flashlight flew from her hand and when it hit the ground, the light went dead. Cork could hear the roar almost upon them. He grasped Jenny and pulled her to her feet. As they bolted over the last stretch of dark ground, the hail overtook them.

  The stones were larger than any Cork had ever seen, big as his fist, and had plummeted thousands of feet. They hit with a force like hard-thrown baseballs. Jenny screamed and put her arms over head. She stopped dead still so that Cork, coming up fast from behind, almost knocked her down. He lifted her up and carried her forward. The hail struck Meloux’s cabin with a deafening clatter that seemed to put into question the ability of the thick logs to withstand such a beating. Cork threw open the door and, shoving his daughter before him, stumbled into the dark inside. He grabbed an oil lantern from a wooden peg next to the door and a match from a box that sat on a small shelf next to the peg, and he quickly gave the cabin some light. Finally, he slammed the door against the hail. Still the stones came inside, breaking through the panes on the windows, bouncing across the old plank floor before finally coming to rest near the stove or under Meloux’s bunk.

  “Are you all right?” he called ou
t to Jenny over the din of the stones striking the roof and the walls and the windows.

  She looked dazed, but she gave him a slow nod.

  Cork glanced around the cabin, a place he’d often spent time. The walls were hung with trappings collected over the long life of a man of the woods—a bearskin, a deer-prong pipe, snow-shoes, a toboggan. It was all familiar but somehow strange at the same time, for Meloux was missing.

  As abruptly as it had struck, the hailstorm ended. The cabin grew very quiet.

  “Is it over?” Jenny asked.

  “For us,” Cork said.

  Jenny looked around. “Where’s Henry Meloux?”

  “I don’t know. Henry gets around pretty good for an old man. He could be anywhere.” He said it lightly, as if, of course, there were no reason to expect Henry Meloux to be waiting for them. Except Cork had every reason to expect it. Henry was always there when he was needed. It was part of the old mide’s magic. “But it’s odd that Walleye’s gone, too. Walleye never leaves.”

  Cork felt a little uneasy being in Meloux’s cabin without the old man there, without his consent. But he also felt something prickling, an old cop instinct. He stepped to Meloux’s table, an ancient construction of birch. Laid out on the table were several large, soot-blackened stones.

  “What are they?” Jenny asked.

  “They’re madodo-wasinun. Stones for a sweat. You know that Henry Meloux is a mide.”

  Jenny looked at him, not comprehending. “A mighty what?”

  Cork smiled. “Not mighty—mide. One of the midewiwin. A member of the Grand Medicine Society. It looks as though Meloux has taken someone through a purification recently.”

  “What for?”

  “A sweat can be for a lot of reasons. Atonement, for example. To help a spirit return to a state of harmony.”

  “Henry Meloux’s spirit?”

  “Maybe.” But he wasn’t thinking at all that it was Henry. He was remembering the visit Joan of Arc of the Redwoods had made to Meloux only a couple of days before. Had she come seeking the old mide’s help? His guidance, perhaps, in her effort to atone? Atone for what? The death of Charlie Warren?

  “What do we do?” Jenny asked.

  “We go back home.”

  He could tell from the look on her face that it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but she accepted it. Maybe like him, she felt too beat to fight it anymore.

  Outside, the clouds were moving east. The sky to the west had cleared and above Iron Lake stars were reappearing. Cork found the flashlight Jenny had dropped. He tried the switch, but the light didn’t come on. As they started back along the path, the moon slipped out from behind the bank of clouds and lit the way for them. It was moonlight, as moonlight had existed for millions of years, but it seemed, like everything else that used to be familiar, to have an eerie quality to it now. The ground was thick with melting hailstones, and when Cork reached the Bronco, he found its body pocked with dents. He started the engine and made a U-turn. Jenny switched on the radio. As they headed back toward Aurora, the news came on, and with it, a report that Forest Service authorities feared the lightning might have set new fires in the North Woods.

  Cork shook his head. Henry Meloux had always told him that everything had purpose, that the Great Spirit oversaw all life with a profound wisdom. At that moment, Cork found it hard to believe. What in the hell could Kitchimanidoo be thinking?

  32

  SHE HEARD THE THUNDER coming from a long way off, and her first thought was Rain. She let herself imagine the feel of it, cool against her face, running down her festering back, quenching the fire there. She lifted her head, as if to greet the raindrops, and pain shot through the stiff muscles of her neck and shoulders.

  Time and pain. They were two strands of what bound her. The hours dragged. Her body seemed to chronicle each minute with a new aching. She couldn’t sleep, refused to let herself. She needed to be aware, even if it meant feeling everything. She needed to believe something might break for them, even if there seemed nothing she herself could do. Vigilance and hope. What other allies did she have?

  The thunder grew nearer, big cracks that sounded as if they were splitting the earth. Blind, she pictured the forest shattered where the lightning hit, the ground scarred black. It wasn’t a pleasant image and she tried to shake it. A strong wind rose in advance of the storm. She could feel the air pushed through the gaps in the old cabin, and she could hear the creak and groan of the trees as they bent. If there were rain, she knew it wouldn’t be gentle.

  The storm overtook the cabin. Lightning flashed so brightly that even through the disgusting cloth across her eyes she could see the night illuminated. Immediately after each bolt, thunder made the ground tremble as if, compared with what the heavens wielded, the earth under Jo was nothing. The lightning seemed to strike all around the cabin, frighteningly close. Although she’d thought that after what she’d already been through, nothing could scare her further, she was terrified.

  Between the claps of thunder, she heard a growing roar, like a huge wave sweeping toward her. A few minutes later, hail hit the cabin. The din as the stones pounded the old roof and walls was deafening. The end of the world would be no less terrible, Jo thought. As frightened as she was, her greatest concern was for Stevie, for whom even a normal thunderstorm was a nightmare. She longed to be holding him, comforting him.

  God, she prayed, more desperately than she ever had, please help us.

  And the hail left. As suddenly as it had come.

  In the quiet that followed, she heard Stevie whimpering softly.

  “Are you sleeping,” she hummed to him. She was relieved to hear his quivering little echo.

  More time passed. Hours, it seemed. She was afraid for Scott. She thought she could hear him, his shivering almost audible. Was he coming back, the man who’d given them food and a bit of hope? His concern had seemed genuine, and his promise to return with the insulin had seemed sincere. Still, a man capable of kidnapping was probably capable of almost anything despicable. Maybe it was part of the plan, a sort of good cop–bad cop scenario. One terrorizes, the other gives hope, and in that way they keep the hostages caught in indecision, incapable of escape. The man who’d brought them to the cabin was vile, there was no doubt in Jo’s mind. He was fully capable of the cruelty he promised. But the other was an unknown. And even if he meant well, what control did he have over anything?

  She could barely keep her eyes open. For a moment, she closed them.

  She was dreaming instantly. Of walking through a strange house. Looking for Cork, but unable to find him. She opened a door and something black leaped at her and she woke.

  The dream turned her thinking to the house on Gooseberry Lane. It was the only place she’d ever lived that she let herself love. She could see Cork and Rose and the girls gathered at the kitchen table. She could see the worried look on all their faces. Imagining their helplessness made her want to weep, and she yanked herself away from that weakness. Instead, she imagined her family in council, considering action. Cork wouldn’t sit by and let this happen. Jo didn’t know what he would do exactly, but she knew that somehow he was working his way toward her. She wrapped all her hope around the solid belief that somehow he would come.

  She was dreaming again. This time it was a horrible dream full of fire. She woke with a start and found that the air she breathed was full of smoke, so thick she could feel the texture of it in her nostrils when she breathed. She listened. No tree frogs or crickets. None of the usual night sounds. The only noise from outside the cabin was a dry crackle that sounded like a thousand feet marching across a bed of brittle branches. The march was accentuated now and then by the boom of a big bass drum.

  Fire.

  She began working her wrists desperately over the ragged edge of the post, trying to cut the duct tape that bound her. The smoke grew thicker, and the sound that only minutes before had seemed distant rose to a constant roar punctuated by the boom of trees exploding. The fire was
moving rapidly toward them. She felt the current of the air shift as it was drawn in to feed an immense body of flame.

  Please, God, no. Not this way.

  Behind her back, her wrists covered a territory of only inches as she strained, twisting against the ropes. Then she felt the slight resistance as the tape snagged on a big splinter. She tried to calm herself, to focus on the delicate trick of notching the tape, for she knew that if she pulled too hard, the splinter would simply break off. She began to cough, and she could hear Grace and the boys coughing, too. The cough made it hard to be delicate with the tape. Sweat soaked the bandanna across her face. The air was growing hotter and moving faster as it was sucked in to feed a monster that was almost at the doorstep.

  Please, God. Over and over again as she struggled, she prayed that simple, desperate prayer. Please, God.

  But it seemed God had not listened, because the splinter broke away from the post, and Jo screamed through the tape that sealed her mouth, cursing an end that was too cruel to believe.

  Then she felt a hand on her ropes.

  “Don’t move.”

  Jo recognized the voice of the man who’d gone for the insulin.

  A knife blade slipped between her breasts and quickly severed the rope. Jo leaned forward and his hands were at her wrists, cutting them free. He moved to her ankles as she pulled the bandanna from her face. The cabin was filled with smoke made luminous by a pulsating glow that came through the doorway. The man moved to Grace and Scott. As he freed them, they pulled the hoods off their heads. Last, he bent over Stevie, who ripped the strip of cloth from his eyes as soon as his hands were free.

  “Come on,” the man shouted over the roar and boom of the fire. He headed out the door.