When John Harris had first gone missing, suicide had, of course, been one of the speculations. But there’d been no evidence of any personal or business difficulties or any history of suicidal ideation. His grandchildren claimed to have seen no indication of any mental distress when they’d gone into the Boundary Waters. So pretty much that possibility had gone to the bottom of the list. Apparently Harris had never seen any reason to talk to his grandchildren about his father’s death, so Cork decided that, at the moment, there was no reason for him to go into it either.
“It was a long time ago, and why would he talk about Aurora anyway?” Cork said. “A small memory in a life that’s been full of large accomplishment.” Cork took a big bite of a Saltine heaped with tuna fish and cheese and spoke while he chewed. “When I heard he was back in Aurora, I hoped we might connect. But he went straight out into the Boundary Waters with you and Trevor, and, then, well . . .” He didn’t say what was obvious. “What about your brother?”
“What about him?”
“He doesn’t seem much interested in roughing it.”
“Never his thing. He was always into more self-indulgent pursuits.” There was a bitter edge to her words.
“And you? What are you into?”
“Tree hugging.” She smiled. “I graduated from Northland College with a specialty in environmental humanities. I’m doing graduate work at McGill in Canada.”
“You’re in pretty good shape for an academic.”
“I hike a lot, camp out, canoe. Some of it for pleasure, some because of my studies. It all helps to keep me healthy.”
“Then you know you should drink a lot of water out here. You may not feel like it now, but you can easily dehydrate.”
“You sound like my grandfather.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.”
“That’s okay.” She took his advice and drank deeply from her water bottle. She looked up into the gray mist that fell. “We were supposed to be here the first week of September. My favorite time in the Boundary Waters.”
“Mine, too,” Cork said. “No people, no bugs, and the color’s gorgeous. What happened?”
“Grandpa John had to cancel. Dam business. His great African project.” She said it without trying to hide her sarcasm. “There’s always been some project more important than me and Trevor. In a stupid way, I hoped our time together out here might change that.”
For a few moments, she sat in the gray quiet, her eyes taking in that dismal scene.
“The truth is that I don’t really have family. My grandmother was an alcoholic, drank herself to death before I was old enough to really know her. Both my parents were alcoholics. Killed themselves driving drunk.”
“As I understand it, there can be a genetic component to addiction.”
“Trevor got that gene. He struggles.” She capped her water bottle, slipped it into her pack. “We’re not really close, my brother and I, not like siblings should be. And Grandpa John’s always been distant. So this”—and she opened her arms to everything around her—“this is home to me. This is family. Better than family. It never makes irrational demands. Never disappoints. It can be harsh, but never cruel. If you know how to accept it, even when it’s the most challenging, it’s still so awesome, so beautiful, so generous. You know?”
Cork understood. And he thought that if John Harris hadn’t vanished, who knew what gift the wilderness might have given them all?
* * *
When they broke from the portage that led to Raspberry Lake, they couldn’t see anything of the far shore or of the big island that normally would have dominated the scene. The water, flat and hard-looking as burnished steel, disappeared into the mist that was both a very light drizzle and fog. They set the canoe on the lake, reloaded the gear, and Cork shoved them off.
“It feels forbidding,” Lindsay said.
“The mist?”
“The whole place. This is where he disappeared. Just vanished. I saw a tabloid headline that said aliens abducted him, another that said only an alien could have designed the projects he’s built and he disappeared because he’s gone back to his home planet. Stupid bullshit.”
Cork had heard of folks who claimed to have seen UFOs hovering above the Boundary Waters. There were photographs of fuzzy, dark objects. He’d seen a lot of inexplicable things in the wilderness, but nothing like that. Long ago, when Cork was very young, Henry Meloux had offered him this sage observation: There are more things in these woods than a man can see with his eyes. More things than he can ever hope to understand. Things of this earth, Cork thought, or of the spirit world, maybe. But not from outer space. Whatever had happened to John Harris, it had nothing to do with extraterrestrials.
As if reading his thoughts, Lindsay said, “But if it wasn’t aliens, where did he go?”
She wasn’t really asking him. It was a question directed more to that dismal curtain hiding everything around them.
Cork led them unerringly to the site where Harris, his grandchildren, and Dwight Kohler, their guide, had set up camp when the man vanished. They unloaded their gear, erected their tents, and stowed their packs inside, except for the bear bag with the food in it. Cork walked a few yards away from the campsite and tied the bag to the trunk of a fallen pine.
“Shouldn’t you hang that?” Lindsay asked.
“Ursack bear bag,” Cork said. “It’s got a liner that seals in the smells. It’s tough, too. A bear could play soccer with it for hours and not get at the food inside. But I doubt bears will be a problem. Most of them have probably already found somewhere to hibernate.”
“What now?” Lindsay asked, looking toward the lake.
“With the clouds and the mist, dark’ll come early. We’ll be lucky if we have a couple of hours of light. Best get started.”
Cork headed toward the canoe, which they’d tipped on the shoreline. They each grabbed an end and settled the craft back on the water. Once again, Lindsay took the bow and Cork the stern, and they shoved off.
“Where to first?” Lindsay asked over her shoulder.
“West. That’s where he went when he disappeared.”
He guided them in that direction. It wasn’t long before a great dark shape loomed to their left, behind the dim curtain.
As they passed, Lindsay said, “Shouldn’t we check the island?”
“Tomorrow,” Cork replied. “We’ll have to do some climbing. I’d rather wait for more light and maybe a little drier conditions. Those rocks can be treacherous when they’re wet.”
They swung around to the north end of the horseshoe-shaped lake. Cork lifted his paddle from the water and laid it across the gunwales. When she realized what he’d done, Lindsay followed his lead. They drifted silently until their momentum dissipated, then they sat dead in the water.
Lindsay said, “This is where we found his canoe.”
“Yes.”
“Is there a reason we’re just sitting here?”
“I’m waiting for something to come to me,” Cork said.
“You mean like an inspiration?”
“A man I know and trust told me not to look for an answer here. His advice was to let the answer come to me.”
She held to silence for a few minutes, then said, with a clear note of impatience, “So, we just sit here?”
“A lot of eyes went over this lake already, every inch of it. We had divers in the water, cadaver dogs on the shore. We brought in the Border Patrol, some of the best trackers you’ll find anywhere. I’m thinking there may be a better way to find what we’re looking for.”
She said, “So you’re what? Listening?”
“Sensing is more like it. The Ojibwe believe that everything is invested with spirit. This lake has spirit, and spirit is awareness. Spirit remembers. If something happened to your grandfather here, the spirit knows.”
“And will t
he spirit here speak to you?”
He thought she was suppressing a smile, and he understood. “I guess we’ll find out.”
After a while, he said, “Do you smell it?”
“What?”
“Orange.”
“The fruit?”
“Yes.”
She lifted her nose high into the air. “I get nothing.”
“Orange,” Cork said, mostly to himself and in a puzzled way.
“I don’t know that I believe in spirits,” the young woman said. “But what I do believe is that in the absence of sufficient stimulation, the senses can fool themselves.”
“Hallucinations?”
“Mirages, that kind of thing.”
“Like oranges in the middle of the wilderness?” Cork laughed quietly. “Maybe you’re right. Let’s go.”
They paddled until they reached a place where the lake fed out in a little stream. The stream meandered through a boggy area full of tamaracks. When the search for John Harris had first begun, the needles had been bright yellow, and every tamarack was like a flaming torch. Now the needles had been shed and the trees had become skeletal.
“They searched that bog,” Lindsay said.
“A man can disappear in a bog and never be found.”
“And searchers, if they’re not careful, can disappear there, too. You’re not planning to go in, are you?”
“No. And I don’t think your grandfather went in either. At least not of his own accord.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“That from everything I know about him, he was a pretty savvy guy. And savvy guys don’t go strolling in dangerous bogs.”
“Unless?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
She turned and looked at him. “You have a mind like my grandfather.”
“Meaning?”
“He looks at a situation from all the usual angles, then he steps back and considers the unusual. It’s part of what’s made him so successful, I think.”
The mist and fog had turned everything around them the color of ash from a fire. Cork said, “We should be getting back to camp. It’ll be dark soon. We’ll go over this whole lake tomorrow.”
“Sensing?”
“Until I have a better idea.”
They swung the canoe around and headed back the way they’d come. When they passed the island, Lindsay paused in her paddling and studied the great gray shape.
“Makes me think of some kind of prehistoric place where monsters lurk, like in King Kong,” she said.
“No monsters there,” Cork assured her. Then added, “Or monthterth either.”
CHAPTER 8
Rose Thorne stood at the kitchen counter, at work on the roasted potatoes that would go with the meat loaf she already had in the oven. From the living room came the sound of Waaboo and his mother reading a story together. Waaboo loved to read and be read to. Currently, he was into a Junie B. Jones. Before that, it had been trains. And before that, monsters, thanks to Maurice Sendak. He’d passed out of that phase, but Rose supposed he would come back to even scarier things at some point, ghosts and werewolves and the other creatures that went bump in the night. Maybe boys were especially prone to that. She remembered Stephen going through a period when he was about Waaboo’s age during which he clamored for a scary story every night. They’d given him nightmares. Or that’s what she’d thought then. Later, she thought the nightmares, at least some of them, had come from a different place.
The telephone rang, and she called, “I’ll get it.”
As if she’d conjured him with her thinking, it was Stephen on the other end of the line.
“Aunt Rose!” His voice was scratchy, as if he were speaking to her from the moon.
“Stephen! Where are you?”
“Chinle, Arizona. The nearest place I could get a phone signal.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Aunt Rose. How are things there?”
“We’re all good.”
“You’re sure? Everyone’s okay?”
“Stephen, what’s this all about?”
“Look, Aunt Rose, I’ve had this feeling I can’t shake that something’s wrong. It’s really become oppressive. I came to the desert to unburden and suddenly all I’m feeling is this big weight. Is Dad there?”
“No, Stephen, he’s not. He’s in the Boundary Waters. We think he’ll be back by Tuesday.”
“The Boundary Waters? What’s he doing out there?”
“Looking for John W. Harris.”
“The search is still going on?”
“The official search ended a few days ago. His family hired your father to go back in and take another look.”
Stephen’s end of the line fell silent.
“Are you still there?” Rose asked.
“When did he go in?”
“This morning.”
“Has anyone heard from him?”
“He’s got a satellite phone, and he’s supposed to be checking in with the sheriff.”
“Has he checked in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you find out, Aunt Rose?”
“I’ll try.”
“Then call me back. I’ll be waiting.”
“Who was it?” Jenny stood in the doorway, a book in her hand.
“Your brother.”
“What did he want?”
“He’s had one of his feelings.”
Jenny said, “That’s never good.”
“He wants us to find out if Cork’s checked in on the satellite phone. You mind making that call?”
“If you’ll take over Junie B. Jones.”
They read together, Waaboo helping sometimes, Rose doing most of the heavy lifting. She kept an ear to the kitchen, where she could hear some of Jenny’s end of the conversation. Five minutes later, Jenny came back out.
“Hey, little guy,” she said to Waaboo. “I think it’s Lego time.”
“We haven’t finished reading,” he protested.
“Go get your Lego box and bring it down here. We’ll build a pirate ship together, okay? But I need to talk to your aunt Rose first.”
The pirate ship, one of his favorite constructions, won him over. He jumped from the sofa and hit the stairs at a run.
“What is it?” Rose asked.
“They haven’t heard a thing from Dad at the sheriff’s office, but they aren’t expecting him to check in until this evening. They went ahead and tried to raise him. Nothing. They said the cloud cover’s heavy and that can interfere. They said not to worry.”
“You should call Stephen.”
“I already did. I told him about the vision Trevor Harris had. I thought maybe that might explain the heaviness he’s feeling. He’s pretty freaked out. He’s heading to Phoenix, and he’ll catch the first flight home.”
“Seems a little extreme, doesn’t it?”
“If we hear from Dad tonight, we’ll let him know. But, Aunt Rose, don’t forget that before he was shot, Stephen had a vision of the man who would do it. If this dark feeling has him worried, I don’t care what the people at the sheriff’s office say. I’m worried, too.”
* * *
Although her great-uncle thought it odd and unnecessary, Rainy kept her cell phone with her at all times. She charged it with a small, portable generator that Cork had given her on her last birthday. Cell phone service on Crow Point could still be a bit spotty, but more often than not, the phone kept her in touch with a world that was usually on the far side of Iron Lake, beyond the wall of the great Northwoods.
She was in Henry’s cabin, preparing a stew for dinner that included wild rice, carrots, potatoes, and leeks she’d harvested from the garden she’d planted near her cabin. She’d thrown in some
walleye she’d smoked earlier in the fall. Henry was sleeping on the straw-and-wild-grass-filled mattress of his little bed, snoring loud enough to scare off a bear. Ember lay curled beneath the cabin’s small table, not sleeping but looking comfortably idle. It was dark beyond the cabin windows, the overcast and drizzle having brought night even earlier in that season of early dark.
She was thinking of Cork, always thinking of Cork these days. Love was a troublesome emotion. She’d been married once and had been in love at the beginning of that disaster. Then she’d watched a good man go down a destructive road. For far too long, she’d stayed by his side. Before they’d all been destroyed, she’d left with her children, but they’d already been terribly wounded. The healing was still going on. Her daughter, Kari Chantelle, had followed her mother into the field of public health and worked as a nurse in an Inuit community in Alaska. Rainy seldom saw her more than once a year, though they texted and talked often. Her son, Peter, battled addictions. He’d been through treatment three times. The last time had been at a clinic in Arizona, and Rainy had left Tamarack County to do what she could to help. In the time she’d been gone, there’d been more than a physical distance between her and Cork, and she’d been afraid that she’d lost him. Somehow they’d held on, held together, and her time with him now she counted among her most blessed days.
Still, the scars from her early marriage sometimes ached, reminding her that the hardest blows came only when you let love lull you into dropping your guard.
Her cell phone rang, a soft chime she used so as not to disturb Henry. She wiped her hands on her jeans, reached into her pocket, and saw it was Jenny calling. She hoped it was to talk about the wedding, but the moment she heard the young woman’s voice, she let go of that hope.
“What is it, Jenny?”
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