“I don’t see anything,” Stephen called back.
“A cave, behind the blackberry bushes. We’ll pull up to the right. There’s a kind of landing and some natural stairs in the rock.”
Rainy guided the canoe to the south end of the cliff, and just as she’d said, there was a narrow shelf above the waterline. Rugged, natural stair steps led up toward the blackberry brambles. None of this was obvious, and if you didn’t know it was there, you’d have easily missed it. Stephen stepped out of the canoe and held the bow while the others disembarked. Last of all, Jenny lifted out the ice chest.
“Listen,” Stephen said.
Aaron cocked his head. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly,” Stephen said darkly. “No more gunfire.”
They all exchanged glances, but no one said a word of what they were thinking.
“I’ll hide the canoe,” Aaron volunteered. “In that inlet over there. Then I’ll join you.”
“Do you know how to paddle?” Stephen asked.
“I spent five summers at Camp Winn-eh-bego. I can braid a lanyard, too.”
“Just follow the stairs behind the brambles,” Rainy told him. “You’ll find us.”
Aaron stepped back into the stern of the canoe, wrapped his hands around the paddle, and took off for the small inlet, which lay a hundred yards south.
By the time Rainy led the way up the cliff, the sun was low in the sky. Its rays glanced off Iron Lake and lit the face of the rock with intense brilliance. They brushed against their own shadows as they climbed, and it seemed to Jenny that they were being paced by a column of specters, of the dark and the doomed, and she tried to thrust that thought from her. At the brambles, they had to press themselves hard against the cliff and edge their way carefully in order to avoid the thorns. Then Rainy bent and disappeared. A moment later, Jenny came abreast of the opening. She laid the ice chest on the floor of the cave mouth, and Rainy grabbed hold and pulled it inside. Jenny crawled in after, and Stephen followed.
Except for the sunlight that lay at the opening, the cave was dark, and it took a few moments for Jenny’s eyes to adjust. The floor sloped down toward the entrance, so that any water that might have found its way in would have quickly drained. The chamber was small, fifteen feet in diameter, and edged with rock shelves. On the shelves lay many items, some that appeared to be quite old. Jenny could see no rhyme or reason to what had been placed there: a bow made of hard maple with a deer-hide quiver full of arrow shafts whose featherings had long ago turned to dust; a colorfully beaded bandolier bag; a rag doll; a muzzle-loader with a rotted stock and beside it a powder horn, still in good condition; a woven blanket; a coil of rope. There were knives and a tomahawk and what looked to be a collection of human scalps. There was, however, one item she recognized: a rolled bearskin. It had belonged to her father, but a few years ago had disappeared from the house.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Bimaadiziwin. It means ‘healthy living.’ A healthy way of life.”
“What are all these things?”
“Symptoms of sickness,” Rainy said.
“What do you mean?” Stephen said.
“These are the symptoms of illness in some people,” Rainy said. “These are symbols of the burdens that they could no longer bear and that made them sick, in body and in spirit. Hate. Anger. Revenge. Jealousy. Even love, I suppose. These things, these are reminders of what they hoped to leave behind in this place. They wanted to lead a different kind of life, an unburdened life, a life of wholeness and spiritual health.”
“Hoped to leave?” Stephen said.
“There’s powerful energy here,” Rainy replied. “But even that power can’t work unless the desire to be healed and whole is sincere. That’s what Uncle Henry has told me anyway.”
Jenny wondered what sickness it was that her father, in leaving the rolled bearskin, was trying to heal.
“Henry,” Stephen said, and his voice was only a wisp of a whisper and full of sadness. “Do you think he’s really . . .”
Jenny thought that her brother could not finish.
But Stephen drew himself up and said, “Do you think he’s on the Path of Souls now?”
“I don’t know,” Rainy said. “But if so, he was prepared to make that journey.”
Waaboo began to fuss, and Jenny picked him up from the bedding in the ice chest. “He’s hungry,” she said. “I wish I had a bottle.”
They heard a rustling from outside and froze. All except Waaboo, who’d begun to flail his arms and legs and emit unhappy little squeals. A moment later, the sunlight that filled the cave opening was eclipsed.
“You in there?” Aaron asked.
“Come in,” Rainy said. “It’s a little tight, but we’ll fit.”
Aaron crawled in, dripping wet.
“There’s no way to get to that little landing except by canoe or swimming,” he explained. “The lake’s pretty chilly. I hope we don’t have to hide out here for long.”
Stephen shot his hand up, signaling them to be quiet. Again, they all held still, except Waaboo, who was becoming more vocal in his insistence on being fed. From outside the cave and somewhere above them came voices. Angry men.
“I don’t know, but the signal was coming from somewhere around here. Then it was gone,” one of the voices said.
“There’s nothing here, Josh. Unless they jumped off the cliff.”
Waaboo fussed, and the sound seemed huge in the small cave and in its consequences. Jenny offered him her little finger as a pacifier, and she was thankful when he took it.
Please, God, she prayed, let him be quiet.
“They’re here somewhere,” the first voice said. “We’ll find them.”
In the cave, they barely breathed.
“How did they follow us?” Stephen whispered.
A question to which no one had an answer.
Waaboo pulled away, maybe sensing all the tension, and let out a cry.
God, please, Jenny prayed and slipped the tip of her little finger back into his mouth.
Stephen leaned near the opening of the cave. “They’re still above us,” he whispered.
Aaron went to his hands and knees and crawled toward the opening. “I’m going out there.”
“No,” Jenny said.
“I’ll try to lead them away.”
“Aaron, don’t.”
“I’ll be okay. Never told you this, but I was a champion hurdler in high school.” He kissed the top of her head, then crept into the cave mouth and slipped outside.
A moment later, Jenny heard a splash in the water.
“There! See him?”
“Yeah, come on.”
For several minutes, everything was quiet. Waaboo had settled, and Jenny hoped desperately that Aaron was successful and safe.
Then the evening stillness outside was shattered by gunshots. Several of them. Rainy took Jenny’s hand. Stephen put his head into the cave mouth and listened. They held that way for several minutes more.
Stephen drew back suddenly, and Jenny understood immediately why. She heard the scrape of boots on the rock face outside and the rustle of blackberry brambles.
Let it be Aaron, she prayed.
“All right, you have a choice,” came a voice from the mouth of the cave. “You can come out, or we’ll just spray the inside of this place with bullets. You have ten seconds to decide.”
They exchanged looks, and Jenny saw in the eyes of the others exactly what she felt, too: sudden and complete despair at the inevitability of what lay ahead.
“Wait,” Rainy said, in a tired voice. “We’re coming.”
One by one, they crawled out, Stephen first, then Jenny with Waaboo, and finally Rainy. Two men stood outside, one on either side of the cave opening, each holding a powerful-looking rifle.
“All right, Josh is going to lead the way,” said the man to Jenny’s right. It was his voice she’d heard before. He was tall, with a sharp jaw, long nose, a
nd eyes as blue as a cold winter sky. “You folks just follow him. And if you try anything, I’ll put a bullet through you as surely as I’m standing here.”
“Aaron?” Jenny asked.
“Your boyfriend?” said the man with the cold blue eyes. He shrugged. “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”
FIFTY-ONE
Just before sunset, the De Havilland approached Iron Lake. From above, the expanse of water appeared smooth and shiny in the late afternoon light, and the irregular shoreline gave it the look of a ragged piece of gold lamé torn from a dress. Cork saw the jut of Crow Point far ahead, and as they approached, Overturf put his hand to his headset, then lifted the radio mike and spoke into it.
“I read you, Deputy.”
He turned to Cork. “Says there’s a hostage situation in progress down there. He wants us to land on the northwest side of the point, well away from where the cabin sits. He’ll have somebody there to meet us.”
“A hostage situation?” Rose said at Cork’s back. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Cork replied. But it wasn’t good.
Overturf brought the Beaver down smoothly onto the lake. A uniformed officer waved from the shore, and the pilot motored the plane to where he stood. Cork climbed out, and the others followed.
Overturf slid back the cockpit window and called, “I’ll stay here with the plane, Deputy. You figure you need me in some way, just let me know.”
“Ten-four, sir, and thank you.” The deputy was George Azevedo, a man Cork knew well. They shook hands, and Azevedo said, “This way.”
“What’s the situation, George?”
Azevedo spoke as they walked. “A standoff at the moment. As nearly as we can tell, your daughter and son and the baby are inside the cabin. We think that Meloux and his niece are inside as well, but that’s unclear. How many of the bad guys are in there is also unclear. We’ve got the cabin surrounded, so no one’s going anywhere. The sheriff and Captain Larson are trying to figure how to handle this. They’ll be glad to see you, I expect.”
They walked through the woods that edged the clearing until they came to the path that connected Crow Point with the county road. There they found Sheriff Marsha Dross and Captain Ed Larson, two of Cork’s old friends. They’d been his subordinates when he was sheriff of Tamarack County years before. Dross was in her early forties, Cork’s height, with a strong-boned look to her body. Like Azevedo and all the other officers present, she wore a blue Kevlar vest with TCSD stenciled on the back. In the cool evening light, he could see how drawn her face looked. The sheriff got immediately down to business.
“We have them contained, Cork, but that’s about it at the moment. We’re trying to get some communication established. So far, I’ve had no response with my bullhorn. I’d love to get an open line into that cabin.”
“George told me you’re sure that Stephen and Jenny and the baby are inside. True?” Cork asked.
“Deputy Pender was first on the scene,” she explained. “He had instructions to wait before approaching the cabin and to observe and assess the situation until the rest of us arrived. He spotted several people coming along the eastern shoreline. He ID’d Stephen and Jenny. Hell, we all know them. A woman was part of the group—Rainy Bisonette, we believe, but haven’t confirmed. Two armed men escorted them. The group entered the cabin before we had a chance to intercept.
“We were able to get two of our people into those rocks.” She pointed through the trees toward the outcropping around Meloux’s fire ring. “My guys found a body there, a male shot through the right eye. Driver’s license says his name is Able Denning. We’re assuming he’s one of the Seven Trumpets people. There’s another body lying on the path through the meadow grass about fifty yards out from the tree line. Male and there’s an assault rifle next to the body, so we believe it’s also one of the Seven Trumpets group. After I gave them the first call with the bullhorn, one of them attempted to make it to the rocks where my guys are positioned. They let him come and tried to subdue him when he got there. He resisted and they took him out. According to his driver’s license, he’s one of the Hornetts. Gabriel. If what you told us is accurate and there were five people who came from Stump Island, then there are only two left. We’ve got them penned in, and they know it, but they won’t respond to my attempts to communicate.”
A man shot through the right eye. Cork knew that, before Meloux’s hands began to tremble, the old Mide might still have been able to make such a difficult shot. But now?
“Any gunfire from the cabin?” he asked.
“No. Nothing but silence. Oh, by the way, we’ve got an update from the Northwest Angle. Before the Lake of the Woods sheriff’s people arrived, there’d been a significant exchange of gunfire on Oak Island between the Seven Trumpets people and some locals. There were casualties, but the situation’s under control.”
“Any ID on the casualties?”
“Not yet.”
Cork, of necessity, put aside his concern over those they’d left behind on Oak Island, closed his eyes, and thought out loud. “Three men down. That means Abigail Hornett is still alive and inside, along with the last man from Seven Trumpets. Did Pender get a look at the two guys with Jenny and Stephen?”
“Yeah. Black hair, lanky, maybe six feet. Once we ID’d Gabriel Hornett, Pender confirmed that he’d been one of the men. Pender also said the other guy looked a lot like him.”
“Joshua Hornett, his brother.”
“Real soldiers of God,” Ed Larson said. The first words he’d spoken, and it was as if he’d spit. He was a man nearing sixty, slender and with grayed temples. He wore wire rims. Although he headed up major crimes investigation for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, he looked as if he’d be more at home in a college classroom. “True believers. The worst kind.”
“Gabriel Hornett, for sure,” Cork said. “But from what I understand, not so much his brother, right, Sarah?”
Sarah Hornett stood by herself. Among the gathering of law officers, she’d looked helpless and a little dazed. When Cork spoke to her, she seemed grateful to be able to offer something.
“Joshua’s not like the others,” she told them. “He doesn’t really believe all that crap. He’s just weak and won’t stand up to them. He scares pretty easy.”
Anne and Rose and Mal stood near Cork. The two women held hands. Cork glanced at them, wanting to offer assurance, but at the moment, he had none.
“You have a plan?” he asked Dross, and then shot a look at Larson. Their too long delay in replying told him everything he needed to know.
“We’ve got a call into Bemidji BCA for a hostage negotiator,” Larson said.
“It’ll take hours for him to get here,” Cork said. “And that’ll only work if you can get those Seven Trumpets people talking.”
What he was afraid of but didn’t say because of the proximity of Anne and Rose was that in a situation like this, with Abigail Hornett, the truest of the believers, inside, she might well choose the road of martyrdom over negotiation, go out in a flame of religious fervor and a hail of bullets and take the hostages with her. She was the person probably responsible for the torture and murder of Lily Smalldog. God alone knew the full horror of her capabilities.
“Who’s in the rocks?” he asked.
“Morgan and Pender.”
That was good. Aside from Meloux when he’d been a young man, Cork didn’t know anyone who was better with a rifle than Howard Morgan.
“What did you issue Morgan?”
“The Remington M-Twenty-four.”
“All right,” Cork said, thinking fast. “Meloux’s cabin has a window in the west wall. It looks out at the rocks where you’ve got Morgan and Pender. If we can get Abigail Hornett to the center of that room, Morgan’ll have a good chance of taking her out.”
“How do we do that?” Larson said. “If those two Seven Trumpets people have half a brain, they’re not going to do anything that’ll give us a clear shot.”
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“We leave that up to Meloux,” Cork told him.
“If he’s still alive,” Larson said.
Which was a possibility Cork hadn’t considered. And decided not to.
He explained what he had in mind and ended with “If it doesn’t work, they won’t be any worse off in that cabin than they are now.”
But if they were lucky, he thought to himself, if God or Kitchimanidoo or simple luck were on their side, Jenny and Stephen and the others might have a chance.
“If Morgan is able to take out the woman, that still leaves one of the Seven Trumpets inside,” Larson said.
“Cut off a snake’s head and the body dies,” Cork said. “It’s Joshua Hornett with her. If what Sarah says is true, he’s different from his mother. She’s the head; he just follows.”
“It’s true,” Sarah insisted.
Dross shook her head faintly, not convinced.
“Look, Marsha, those are my children in there, my friends,” Cork argued. “And Abigail Hornett, she’s already tortured and killed a young girl and was more than willing to skin that baby alive if it got her what she wanted. To her, they’re all doomed anyway, all part of the army of Satan. And in her deranged thinking, she’s the good guy. I believe she wouldn’t hesitate to kill them all, negotiator or no. The sooner we get her out of the picture, the better chance we have of getting everyone else out of there alive. Believe me, Marsha.”
He knew this was one of the most difficult decisions she’d ever had to make, but he was determined she would.
“Make the call,” he said.
She looked toward the cabin and said mostly to herself, “If it doesn’t work, they’re no worse off.”
“That’s right,” Cork agreed quietly, as if he were the voice of her conscience.
She turned to Larson. “Call Morgan,” she said. “Explain it to him. Tell him to be ready to take the shot when the opportunity comes. Don’t wait for our okay.”
“There are two other women in there,” Cork reminded Larson. “You tell Morgan to make absolutely certain of his target before he fires.”
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