“I need to let you down,” he said. “Hook your arm over my shoulder. I’ll help you walk the rest.”
They hobbled out of the timber together like a pair of plane-crash survivors. Slowly they made their way along the shoreline to the canoe. Mike spied a log near their spot that would do for a bench. He helped her sit, then went to work hauling the canoe out of the brush, down to the water’s edge. He dropped the dead spotlight into the canoe and took out the single oar. When he was ready, he went back to Juliet.
Before he could say a word, she shook her head firmly, gripping her arms.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I don’t want to go back there.”
Aw, no, Mike thought. Not this now. Please.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s safe, I promise.”
She sensed she was being pushed and hugged her arms tighter.
“Juliet,” he said. “Listen.”
“Nope.” She shook her head again. “Definitely not going back there.”
Mike released a long, weary breath. He felt like he weighed hundreds of pounds, and all of them were sore.
With effort, he crouched down in front of her, assuming more or less the same position he’d taken back at the fallen pine tree. He patted her on the sides of her legs. He rubbed some warmth, or at least some friction, into her cold bare shoulders with his cold grimy hands.
She didn’t protest. After carrying her all that way with her hot breath on his neck, touching her in such a familiar way hardly seemed like a breach of personal space. In fact, it was starting to feel to Mike like they’d known each other longer than they had.
“Hey,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to go back there either.”
“I didn’t think I was going to be leaving that place at all,” she said. Her voice caught a tremble, but she took a breath and shook it out. “Do you know what that feels like?”
“I have some idea,” Mike said. “And that’s the God’s honest truth. If you want, I’ll tell you about it. When we’re on the road out of here.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “I’m sure as shit not going back.”
“Juliet. I get it,” Mike said. “But listen to me. You’re hurt, and right across this water there’s all the first-aid stuff we need. I can disinfect those cuts and wrap your ankle nice and tight, get you warm and dry. Patch you up.”
“I’m not going to die,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “Not tonight, you’re not. But.…”
“Where is he?”
“Where is who?”
“You know who I mean,” she said. “You said I don’t have to worry about him anymore. How do you know that?”
Mike realized he’d worked himself into a corner. What could he possibly tell her in this situation? Don’t worry about it, the guy’s a buddy of mine. I know I said I didn’t know him, but actually we go way back. He went a little nuts there for a minute, but I’m pretty sure he’s okay now.
He didn’t want to keep lying to her, but he didn’t want to be sitting here in the mud when the cops came roaring up the lane either. All Mike wanted was to get the hell across the lake, get a drink, boost her Subaru, and get them out of Rockhaven.
The lie that would best help him achieve this objective had already popped into his mind. He used it with a guilty conscience, if not with much hesitation.
“He’s dead,” he told her. “Okay? That’s how I know.”
Juliet Benson stared at him. But her shoulders loosened. She said, “He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“You … you killed him?”
“He had a gun, just like you said.” It sounded preposterous to Mike’s own ears, but it was working. “I did what I had to do.”
Her hands drifted into her lap. The knife dangled loosely in her fingers. She looked out across the water, toward the cabin. She looked at Mike. She said, “He’s still there?”
“You won’t have to see him,” Mike said, the impromptu fiction unfolding without conscious effort on his part. Had he already planned it out on some level, knowing they’d come to this conversation eventually? “Why do you think I took the truck around back?”
Juliet went limp. He had to reach out and steady her before she tipped facefirst off her log.
When she’d regained her composure, found her equilibrium again, he peeled a grubby clump of hair away from her eyes and said, “Easy does it.”
She looked right at him and said, “Who are you?”
At least he didn’t have to lie to answer that one. “I’m a very tired guy,” he said.
She surprised him then. She reached out and grabbed his hand.
Mike gave her hand a squeeze. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I’m ready.”
He helped her down to the water and into the canoe. When she was settled in the bow, he climbed in after her, grabbed the oar, and pushed them off the bank. In the gloom, he could still see the cut through the cattails, and he poled them through. In no time they were gliding in open water.
“Barlowe Lake Ferry at your service,” he said between paddle strokes. He sounded like a cornball, but he didn’t care. He was feeling good now. “Reasonable rates, and we almost never capsize.”
Her chin appeared over her shoulder. “Barlowe?”
“My last name,” he told her. “Mike Barlowe.”
Her chin swiveled away, and he was looking at the back of her head again. She said, “Very glad to meet you, Mr. Barlowe.”
The general mood had taken quite a turn in the past few minutes. For both of them. “Pleasure having you aboard, Miss Benson,” he said.
They’d just reached the narrow middle of the peanut-shaped lake when the mood abruptly changed again.
Behind them, in the distance, there came a faint sound through the timber. As the sound grew louder, Juliet Benson shifted her whole body sideways in the bow seat and cocked her head, listening.
But Mike had already identified the sound they were hearing. It was, unmistakably, the sound of a vehicle coming up the lane, and he felt a strange combination of tension and release. This was the sound he’d been waiting for since he realized that he’d forgotten to call Hal back home at the Elbow. This, or the whop of helicopter blades.
He had just time enough to wonder why he didn’t hear sirens when the approaching vehicle emerged into view and took the long curve around the far end of the lake.
Mike felt his heart sink at the sight of the Power Wagon barreling toward the cabin. Already on alert, Juliet Benson went straight as a board, sitting up so quickly that the canoe bobbed.
Mike stopped paddling. For a free-floating moment they watched the truck together: his missing white pickup, not missing anymore. Not parked behind the cabin but gleaming like a beacon as it followed the lane, trailing exhaust and rock dust in the moonlight.
“You goddamn rotten fucker,” he heard her say, and all at once the canoe yawed violently starboard. When Mike looked to the bow, it was empty.
Instinctively, he swept the paddle wide through the water, righting his balance, even as he heard the splash off his port. It sounded like someone had heaved a steamer trunk overboard.
Next he heard a high, garbled cry. More splashing. Coughing. Sputtering.
He spotted her four or five feet out, flailing at the water, gasping for breath. The way she was struggling, she seemed to have no sense of her own orientation, and Mike knew exactly why.
The lake temperature at this time of year couldn’t have been much more than fifty degrees; the shock of jumping over your head into water that cold could make you forget your own name, let alone how to coordinate your limbs. Juliet Benson had just given herself a billion-odd-gallon dose of the same medicine Mike had given Darryl earlier, dumping that bucket of water in his lap.
“Christ,” he said, and got himself together. With one careful draw of the paddle, he angled the bow of the canoe so that he could slide near without plowing into her. “Juliet! Calm down. Grab the paddle.”<
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She didn’t seem to hear him. Mike braced himself in the canoe and reached out to grab her by the arm, trying to prepare himself for the quite likely possibility that he was about to end up in the lake with her.
He got her by the meat of her biceps, under her armpit. He propped his free hand on the gunwale, spread his legs as wide as he could manage, and pulled her toward the hull.
He felt a hot bite across the back of his wrist. A shock of pain went shivering up his arm. Mike sucked in a breath, letting her go and pulling his hand away from her out of reflex. He saw watery rivulets of blood already streaming from a gash across the outer knob of his wrist bone.
She cut me, he thought dimly. Despite the shock of the cold lake water, the girl had somehow managed to hang on to the knife. He almost couldn’t believe it.
And now she was swimming. Back toward the tree line, in the direction they’d come. Away from the cabin.
“Juliet!” he called out. “Hey!”
She didn’t stop to see what he wanted. On the cabin-side shore, Darryl parked and got out of the truck, turning toward the lake. His silhouette assumed a quizzical posture.
Perfect, Mike thought, and started paddling after Juliet.
She was a good swimmer. But she was also exhausted, and the water was cold. And he doubted she could kick very well with her bad ankle. Even buoyed by adrenaline, after twenty meters she was running out of gas in a hurry, and Mike grew concerned. All this trying to swim away, he yearned to explain, was actually robbing her of body heat instead of generating it, her heart pumping blood from her core to her extremities, to be quickly cooled by the April lake water.
He took a wide arc and piloted the canoe a meter or so in front of her, across her path. “Juliet, come on,” he said. “This is nuts.”
He half-expected her to go underwater and try to swim beneath him, but she changed course instead, now moving parallel to shore. She wasn’t thinking anymore. Only fleeing. Another bad sign.
Mike sighed and paddled along with her. “Come on,” he said. “Knock it off.”
“Screw you!” she called back. She swallowed a mouthful of lake water and came up sputtering and coughing again. “Stay away from me.”
“Let me help you into the boat before you drown,” he said.
“You goddamn liar!”
“Fine, I lied to you,” he said. “But I can explain.”
“Go die. Liar.” She was accomplishing little more than treading water by now. But she wasn’t giving up yet.
Mike steered the canoe in front of her again.
Again, she changed directions. Back the other way.
It was unbelievably frustrating. He brought the cumbersome rig about and paddled to catch up. They went on like this for an impossibly long time, Juliet trying to find her way past him, Mike turning her away with the hull of the canoe as if herding a wounded otter. He tried to imagine what they must look like from dry land.
At last she began to founder. Her strength was gone, and in a blink their absurd choreography transformed into a critical situation. She was in trouble.
“Juliet, goddammit,” he said. He reached out with the oar and said, “Grab it. Please.”
Still she resisted, sinking below the water for seconds at a time, gagging as she surfaced.
He was getting ready to dive in for her, hoping like hell he had the strength himself to get the two of them to shore, when she succumbed at last. Juliet grabbed the oar above the paddle with one hand, holding on for all she was worth. Still holding the damned knife in her other hand. It was a wonder she hadn’t cut her own nose off by now.
Mike leaned back and pulled, hauling her toward the canoe and the canoe toward her. When they met in the middle, she let go of the oar and grabbed on to the gunwale. Her fingers were all but useless, and her grip slipped immediately.
Mike caught her wrist. At the same time, in desperation, she flung the knife into the canoe with a clatter and grabbed the gunwale with her other hand.
Mike took care to place the oar down beside him; it wouldn’t do to drop it overboard and watch it float away. Without feeling his busted knuckle or the bone-deep cut on his wrist, Mike reached over her, plunged his hand into the icy water, and got a grip on her by the back of her jeans.
With the help of some miracle and no doubt the most hellacious wedgie Juliet Benson had ever sustained, he managed to haul her up out of the water and over the gunwale without flipping the whole canoe upside down on top of them.
She collapsed in a pile. Her sprained ankle struck the bow-side bench with such a sickening thunk that Mike flinched at the sound of it.
Juliet didn’t seem to notice. She laid there in the bottom of the canoe, coughing and panting for breath, the lake water from her clothes and hair making new puddles out of her own blood, long dried on the aluminum beneath her. She was beyond spent.
Mike sat, doubled over, catching his own wind. It took a couple of minutes.
Meanwhile, Juliet Benson stopped moving. At first he was worried that she’d lost consciousness.
Then, slowly, he saw a pale hand work its way out from under her body. While Mike watched, she reached out as far as she could. Reclaimed the knife. Brought it back close.
Mike shook his head. Unbelievable.
He picked up the oar and paddled them the rest of the way home.
* * *
He carried her to the cabin in his arms as if she were a feverish child. As he was getting her settled on the couch, both of them dripping water all over everything, Darryl came in, carrying an armload of firewood. He said, “Some timing, huh?”
Mike looked at him. “What happened to waiting for me at the lake road?”
“I ran out of cigarettes.”
“Gee. You must have been terrified.”
“Dude, you were taking forever.” Darryl walked past them, dumped the firewood on the hearth, and knelt down to slide open the fireplace screen.
“My bad,” Mike said, disarming the girl carefully. At this point, half conscious at best, she didn’t seem to notice the knife leaving her grip.
He grabbed a wool blanket from the back of the nearest armchair and wrapped her up in it. He found an old T-shirt in Darryl’s rucksack and tied the fabric tight around his sliced wrist with his free hand and his teeth. When he saw Darryl watching, he raised his eyebrows.
“That’s okay,” Darryl said. “You can keep it.”
24
By two in the morning, Maya estimated that volunteers on the ground outnumbered sworn personnel by a ratio of three or four to one. They worked in groups, combing the timber in overlapping swaths between the freeway and the riverbank.
It was cold and the ground was soggy from the rains. After an hour, Maya tried telling herself that the conditions—unpleasant as they became in no time at all—were still preferable to heat and bugs. Had Juliet Benson been abducted in the middle of August instead of early April, they’d be dealing with overnight temps in the eighties, steam-bath humidity, and mosquitoes the size of Black Hawk helicopters.
It worked for a while, but eventually she ran up against the truth: She was in the worst shape of her life. There had been a time when Maya hit the gym faithfully after work, no matter how late the hour, but it had been too much gin and not enough stair-stepper these past couple of years; slogging off path through the woods, trying to hold her place in line, proved far more demanding than churning out script at her desk. She wasn’t prepared for it.
It didn’t help that the overall vibe from the supervising officers did not exactly pulse with optimism. Judging by what she overheard, catching occasional low snippets of conversation between cops, many of them seemed to have settled on the notion that the whole thing was little more than a snipe hunt in progress.
After all, the dogs had yet to find so much as a whiff of scent to follow, even with Juliet Benson’s clothing items for aid. If she was in the creek—possibly even carried to the river by now—they weren’t going to find her until she washed up or
until someone broke out the scuba gear, whichever came first.
Either way, what kind of kidnapper would have taken time to stuff the girl’s coat and shoes—along with her cell phone, conveniently—into a drainpipe? Just off a major freeway? And for what possible reason if not as a decoy, a way to keep everybody busy playing grab-ass in the trees for a while?
After three hours, seeing her lime-green clown shoes radiate in the darkness below the cinched elastic of her yellow sweatpants, Maya began to feel like a character in an off-kilter cartoon. Her overtired brain started up its own batty Dr. Seuss narration in the back of her head: The searchers kept searching. They kept searching for more. They searched and they searched ’til their search feet were sore.
So far she’d personally found half a dozen discarded snack wrappers, the random beer can, a child’s pink sock, what looked like a used rubber, countless deer turds, and no sign whatsoever of Wade Benson’s missing daughter.
She’d tripped a hundred times and had fallen to her hands and knees twice. Her palms were scraped raw. The knees of her sweatpants had turned into wet, muddy circles. Her search feet were sore.
She ran across Buck Morningside and his crew several times along the way. Eliott Martin pretended he’d never seen her before, and who knew? Maybe he didn’t realize that he had. Maya watched the young producer stumble along with his clipboard through the underbrush and wondered where he saw himself five years from now. She wondered where he’d seen himself this morning.
At one point, Morningside himself sidled up alongside her, touched the brim of his hat, and said, “You changed clothes, darlin’.”
“Oh, these?” she said.
“Word around the campfire is you went and quit your job too.” He nudged her with an elbow. “Was it something I said?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Hell, I’m too old for flattery. Here’s an idea: Why don’t you come work PR for me?”
Maya might have laughed if she’d had the energy. “Thanks anyway,” she said. “But I’m sure Twin Cities Public Television has a capable publicity department.” Thinking: They’d better.
“Who said anything about public television?” Morningside looked both ways in front of them as if checking for traffic. “Between you and me, I’d already had lines in the water with that Spike channel on cable. Couple others too. Let’s say we’ve had nibbles. I’d guess this oughta turn some of ’em into bites.”
Lake Country Page 16