Thunder Bay (Cork O'Connor Mysteries)

by William Kent Krueger

  “Where’s the other one?” Lima said to Wellington.

  “Henry’s uncle died last winter. Henry has agreed to work for us.”

  Lima’s dark, distrustful eyes did a long assessment of Henry. “You’ve grown,” he finally said and gave a nod as if he grudgingly approved.

  Wellington said, “What’s Maria doing here? I thought we agreed.” Lima shrugged. “You know her.”

  “This isn’t a trip for a girl, Carlos.”

  “She’s strong, Leonard. And pigheaded.”

  “You’re her father.”

  “You’ve never been a father. You don’t know.”

  The girl was near enough to hear the talk about her, but she seemed not to notice. Or maybe she simply didn’t care. What she did was to look frankly at Henry, who burned under the gaze of her dark eyes.

  “All right,” Wellington said, finally giving in. “Let’s get loaded. We have a long way to go.”

  Lima called to a man in a truck parked at the end of the dock. The man hopped from the driver’s seat and dropped the gate on the bed that was covered with a canvas tarp. He threw back the tarp, lifted a box, and headed toward the plane. Wellington went about refueling from metal barrels on the dock while Lima and Henry helped load supplies. Maria also stepped up to lend a hand, and at the back of the truck her shoulder brushed against Henry. He felt it as deeply as if she’d burned him with a hot coal.

  They organized the cargo area in such a way that there was a small space for Maria and Henry, who sat facing each other, seated on rolled tents. The plane was heavily loaded and seemed to struggle to rise off the lake. Once it did, it headed directly into the afternoon sun for a few minutes, then curled toward the vast green wilderness waiting to the northwest.

  They’d been introduced on the dock in a perfunctory way by Wellington. Maria Lima. She’d smiled, but not like her father, whose smile was a snake’s grin. Hers was genuine, though there was something hidden in it that Henry couldn’t decipher. To her chipper “How do you do?” he’d mumbled a reply.

  Now they sat facing each other in the belly of the plane, legs drawn up like two babies in the same womb. The machine bounced and shook and noisily rode the currents. Up front, Lima pulled a rolled map from a tube, spread it out before him, and he and Wellington talked. Henry caught snatches of their conversation, but not enough to follow the thread.

  To keep from staring at the young woman, Henry pretended to sleep, but he kept his eyes open a slit. He watched her take a notebook bound in leather from her canvas bag and spend a long time writing with a fountain pen.

  The plane dropped suddenly. The supplies in back shifted with a bump. Henry’s eyes flew open.

  “Air pocket,” Wellington said over his shoulder, shouting to be heard above the noise of the engine and rattle of the fuselage. “Happens sometimes, eh.”

  Maria put the notebook and pen back into her bag and took out a book. Henry couldn’t see the title. She opened it, then looked at Henry. She said something Henry couldn’t quite hear. He held up his hands in question.

  “Do . . . you . . . read?” she said, louder this time and speaking slowly.

  “I can read,” he answered.

  She laughed. It was odd that he could hear it amid all the other noises. It was a sound both beautiful and disconcerting. “I figured that. I asked do you read.”

  Henry hadn’t looked at a book since boarding school. With Woodrow, there’d been no need.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “It’s about bullfighting, about a matador named Pedro Romero, who is fighting a bull to impress a woman.” She spent a moment finding the right page, then read aloud, enunciating carefully.

  “ ‘Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon.’ ”

  She finished and looked hard at Meloux, in a way that made him uncomfortable. “He is killing the bull for her. For himself, too, yes, but it is also for her. Does that make sense?”

  Henry tried to think about it, but his brain was too full. Full of the young woman—her smell that was clean and flowerlike, her eyes that were like black bullets, the bones that fiercely shaped her face, the notes that made her voice sing. Her nearness, too, their knees almost touching.

  “It’s by a man named Ernest Hemingway,” she went on. “Have you heard of him?”

  Henry hadn’t. But he wished he had.

  “What I wonder is, do men really believe that that kind of brutality is impressive to a woman?”

  Henry stared at her, feeling dumb as a cow.

  “It takes place in Spain and in Paris, a city in France. I was there last summer. It’s a fine place, but...” She stopped and her eyes went to the window at the front of the plane. “I like it here much better. I think what people build can be very beautiful, but what God builds goes beyond beauty. You stand outside Notre Dame, say, and you marvel at the accomplishment, but you can’t really connect. It’s artificial, do you see? It’s only a representation of something. Spirit, holiness, maybe even God. But it’s not the thing itself. Out here, it’s all there before you, around you. You’re steeped in it, the real thing. Spirit. Holiness. God.”

  She was Lima’s daughter. Henry could see traces of the father in her—the slight shadow of the skin, the black hair, the slender nose— but Henry thought her mother must have been terribly beautiful. She didn’t speak like Lima. There wasn’t the odd roll to her language. She sounded little different from the whites Henry had known all his life. He wondered about that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Sometimes I go on and on. You’re tired, I’m sure. You probably want to sleep.”

  Henry wasn’t tired, and he liked hearing her talk. But he felt tense and awkward and had a pressing need to escape for a while.

  “Yes, I am tired,” he said. He closed his eyes.

  He did, in fact, sleep. He woke as he heard the engine throttled back and felt the plane descending. They landed on a lake surrounded by forest, and Wellington guided the plane to shore, where a small cabin and dock had been built. The men got out, then Maria and Henry. A scruffy man who looked Indian in his features greeted Wellington, and they talked briefly, then set about refueling the plane from a metal barrel. Maria spoke to her father, who pointed toward an outhouse near the cabin. Henry walked into the woods and relieved himself. In a few minutes, they were in the air again.

  It was late afternoon by the time they finally glided to rest on the shore of an immense lake contained on three sides by steep ridges. They unloaded the equipment and set up their tents. There was one for each of them. Lima and Wellington set up their own tents, located next to each other. Henry put up Maria’s. She asked for it to he as far from her father as possible because she said he snored terribly. Henry erected his own tent a bit away from the others. By the time he’d finished, the treetops had punctured the sun, and it was sinking fast. Henry canvassed the area for wood and quickly built a fire. Wellington opened a big tin of soup from the supplies that Lima had brought and heated it directly on the coals. Shortly after dark they all crawled into their tents.

  Henry lay awake that night, and though he was in the middle of a vast Canadian wilderness, the sounds he heard were as familiar to him as his own breathing. The chirr of crickets and tree frogs. The creak of branches stirred by the wind. The lap of the lake against the shoreline. The smell was like home, evergreen pitch and clean water. But he was as far from home as he’d ever been, and he felt it. This was not like the government boarding school where the trees were spare and the land was flat and cultivated and smelled of manure. This was a different distance. He had the sense that he’d embarked on a long journey, without any idea of his destination.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  At first there was routine to the days
.

  After breakfast, Wellington and Lima took off with their packs full of instruments. Sometimes they used the collapsible boat they’d brought in the plane, which they called a Folbot; sometimes they struck out on foot. Always they headed toward the ridges. Usually they were gone until late afternoon, often until almost dark.

  Henry’s principal job was to feed the expedition and see to the safety of the camp—and Maria. Henry didn’t wonder that Lima trusted him to be alone with his daughter. He understood clearly that Lima thought of him as little better than a stock animal—a horse or an ox, say—something to be worked hard, put up for the night, and forgotten. That his daughter might look at Henry in a different way probably never occurred to Lima. That was fine with Henry. On the plane he’d been intrigued by the young woman. When he discovered that she was his responsibility, he was no happier with the arrangement than she. Lima forbade her leaving camp unless Henry accompanied her. And Henry was forbidden to leave her alone. He was eager to explore the area and to hunt game, but when she walked in the forest, Maria made more racket than a wounded moose. Henry hated taking her with him. For several days he confined himself to camp. He dug three pit toilets—one for the white men, one for Maria, and one for himself—and constructed rudimentary seating for each using a sturdy section of limb lashed to supporting Y branches. He built a shelter suitable to eat under when it rained. Much of the rest of his time was passed fishing for walleye and trout from the lake. Maria spent the bulk of her time reading or writing in her journal and looking bored or unhappy.

  “I’m sick of fish,” she declared on the fourth day, after her father and Wellington had left. “And I’m sick of sitting.” She squatted on a flat rock, half hidden by leatherleaf, at the edge of the water, and she looked across the lake at the tallest ridge. “I’m hiking up there today.”

  “There are wolves,” Henry said.

  It was true. He’d heard the howl of a pack at night. Mostly, though, he said it to scare her.

  “Wolves don’t hunt in the day. And they won’t attack unless they believe you’re sick or infirm.”

  “You read that in one of your books?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  Henry had his hands in a bucket full of leeches he’d collected for fishing. “If they’re hungry, wolves will attack a bull moose in broad daylight. They’ll tear it apart.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Henry shrugged.

  “I’m going.” She put down the book she’d been reading and stood up.

  “I’m not ready to go,” he said.

  “I don’t care.” She stomped off, following the shoreline.

  Henry sighed and waited. When she was out of sight, he took up his rifle and followed, keeping himself hidden.

  Henry expected her to tire quickly, but he was surprised by her endurance. The lake snaked for more than two miles to the west and Maria followed the shoreline at a steady pace. She stopped several times to drink from small streams and once to relieve herself. Henry looked away. By noon she’d reached the base of the ridge. She paused for a while, taking the measure of the height and looking, Henry supposed, for the best route up. Finally she began her ascent.

  Henry gave her a little head start, then slung his rifle over his shoulder and started up himself. He stayed a couple of hundred yards west of her and downslope, keeping to the scrub jack pines and black spruce whose roots dug tenaciously into the cracks in the rock. The bare stone often had a thin skin of slippery green-gold lichen, making the climb more treacherous. The crest of the ridge was a good three hundred feet above the lake. Maria clambered up quickly and steadily. Between his own climbing and his tracking of Maria, Henry had his hands full.

  In twenty minutes, Henry neared the top. Maria wasn’t far below and he pushed hard to be there ahead of her. He positioned himself in a copse of aspen whose leaves in that early autumn were gold as new doubloons. Maria stood on a jut of gray rock, smiling in the sunshine, looking at the scene below her. The ridges that cupped the lake lay at the meeting of two topographies. South, the land was folded in a series of rugged hills; north, the forest ran flat all the way to the horizon. The deep ravines of the hills were lined with ragged outcrops that erupted from the earth like fractured bone through flesh. It reminded Henry of Noopiming, the woods that Woodrow had taught him to love.

  Maybe it was the beauty of the scene and the way it lightened his heart, or maybe it was because he saw that Maria had been moved by it, too; whatever the reason, he found himself walking toward her, purposely making just enough noise that she would hear. She turned and did not look happy.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What I’m paid to do.”

  “You followed me. I should have known.”

  He wanted to say something to her, something soothing, but the words wouldn’t come. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I’ll wait below.” He turned away.

  “No,” she said to his back. Then more gently, “Stay.”

  They stood together, for a long time silent, drinking in the magnificence of what lay before them.

  “Why don’t you want me with you when you go into the woods?” Maria asked.

  “You make too much noise. You scare the game.”

  “I don’t mean to. You could teach me how to be quiet. I learn quickly.”

  He liked the sound of her voice. It reminded him of water pushed by wind.

  “Why did you come?” he asked.

  Instead of answering she said, “Do you have family?”

  “My parents are gone. Two sisters are in school in Wisconsin.”

  “I’ve heard my father and Leonard talk about someone named Woodrow.”

  “My uncle. He is gone, too.”

  She nodded, and her eyes rested on the deep green that reached to the horizon. “My mother died when I was a little girl. Since then I’ve lived in boarding schools, mostly in the States.”

  “I know about boarding schools,” Henry said.

  “Nuns.” Maria made a sour face, and Henry laughed. “You don’t do that much,” she told him.

  “What?”

  “Laugh.”

  He thought about it. Woodrow could make him laugh. Since his uncle had passed away, Henry hadn’t felt like laughing.

  She sat down on the rock and hugged her knees. Henry sat down and laid his rifle on the ground.

  She said, “They’re hunting gold, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Leonard is a geologist. He knows where to look, but he doesn’t have the money to prospect. My father foots the bill. They met in a casino in Havana. My father was probably throwing away money, as usual. He loves to gamble. I’m sure that’s part of the attraction of looking for gold. They’ve found it twice already. First in Australia, but it turned out not to be a very rich strike. Then again in South America, but they lost that claim somehow. They won’t talk about it. Anyway, I thought maybe if I came with him this time, it might be a chance to get to know him.”

  Henry didn’t like her father and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to know him better. Family made a difference, he supposed.

  “I should be in college, a place called Bennington. It’s in Vermont. My second year there. But I have no interest in it. Not right now.”

  “What now?” Henry heard himself asking.

  She smiled and it made him burn with happiness. She opened her arms. “This. Something that’s not Paris or New York or Havana. Something ... transcendent.”

  Henry didn’t know what the word meant, hut her voice told him and he understood.

  Her face glistened with a sheen of sweat from the hike and the climb. Henry’s body was damp, too. The wind pushed over the ridge and fanned him cool. Maria’s hair rippled like black water, and she closed her eyes.

  “Would you like to hunt with me?” Henry asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever seen an animal killed?”

  “In Cuba once. I watched a pi
g slaughtered for roast.”

  “To your eyes it might not be pretty.”

  “I can take it. What will you hunt?”

  “We passed through a meadow on our way here. I saw rabbit droppings.”

  She stood eagerly. “Hasenpfeffer for dinner?”

  Henry looked up at her dumbly.

  “Fancy roast rabbit,” she said.

  “I don’t know about fancy.” He smiled and rose beside her.