The William Kent Krueger Collection #4

by William Kent Krueger

  After nearly an hour of battering, the wind finally won. The stern anchor line broke and the bow line followed. The houseboat began to drift rapidly into the bay.

  “What now?” Rose said.

  “Get to shore,” Mal told her and pushed her toward the cabin door.

  “But the boat—”

  “Forget the boat, Rose! Get moving!”

  They went out onto the bow platform. Twenty yards of angry water separated them from the shore, and the distance was rapidly increasing. Waves swept over the decking under their feet and rain peppered them hard as pebbles.

  Inexplicably Mal stripped himself of his life jacket. “Take my hand!” he cried.

  She did and they hit the water together. She was surprised to find that her feet touched the rocky lake bottom, but they didn’t stay there long. The next wave lifted her and threatened to carry her out. Mal gripped her hand. Freed from the buoyancy of his own vest, he was able to hold himself against the waves, and he pulled her with him as he slogged to shore. They grabbed on to the pair of rocks where the stern anchor still sat wedged, and they watched the houseboat spin into the bay. A limb the size and thickness of an elephant’s leg flew from the island and crashed through the window next to the helm station. In the next instant, with a sinking heart, Rose saw the houseboat suddenly rise up in the grip of the storm. The windward pontoon cleared the water, and the boat began to flip.

  Then a miracle happened. Or what, afterward, Rose always thought of as a miracle. As quickly as it had come, the wind died. With a great splash, the lifted pontoon fell back onto the water, and the houseboat continued a placid drift into the lake.

  In the quiet that followed, Mal said, “Rose, I’m hurt.”

  “Where?”

  “My ankle. I turned it when we came in.”

  “Let me see.”

  She helped him lift his leg from the water. He wore shorts, and his feet, like hers, were bare. She saw the swelling immediately.

  “Does it hurt much?”

  “Like hell. But that’s not important. You need to get the boat, and we need to find the kids.”

  She looked toward the open water. The houseboat was already a hundred yards distant and drifting farther as she watched.

  “I’ll be back,” she said.

  “I’m counting on it.” He managed a brief smile.

  She hated to leave him but knew he was right. She kissed him once, then began to swim.

  FOUR

  It had been a hard year and she’d needed this vacation. She’d been content to let her father and Mal control where they were and where they were going. Lake of the Woods? Fine. One of the largest lakes in North America? No problem. In the middle of fucking nowhere? Terrific. No, I don’t want to know anything about the charts or the lake channels or the islands more numerous than the stars. I just want to relax.

  Until now, Jenny thought, staring at the lumps of wilderness she could see from the rocky beach where she stood. Now she wished she’d listened and taken note.

  Great journalist I am, she thought bitterly. All that useful information, in one ear and out the other.

  She had no idea where she was on that vast lake. No idea which direction she’d been going with her father or from which direction they’d come. She’d been too deep in her own goddamn worries to let go and be a real part of the gathering.

  And now she was lost. And her father was out there somewhere. Lost, too?

  She almost thought, Lost forever? but wouldn’t let herself go there. They weren’t lost, none of them. Not her father or Anne or Stephen or Rose or Mal. They were somewhere out there, safe.

  “But that’s exactly what you thought about Mom, and she’s dead.”

  She said this out loud, startled at the sound of her voice in all that numbed stillness. The effect was devastating. Her legs went weak, and she sat down on the little beach and didn’t feel at all the sharpness of the stones beneath her. She stared dumbly at the water, which was calm now and choked with debris.

  Yeah, she’d hoped along with everyone else—believed along with everyone else—that after her mother disappeared she would be found and she would be safe. But it hadn’t been that way. All their hoping, all their praying, all their believing had been in vain. From almost the moment she’d vanished, her mother had been dead.

  “Dad,” she said hopelessly, speaking toward the devastation of the lake. “Annie. Stephen.”

  And then she began to cry, deep, racking sobs that went on and on.

  In the end, she had no choice but to pull herself together. She wiped away her tears, forced her legs to lift her upward, beat her brain into thinking clearly. She had no idea how widespread the devastation of the storm might be, but judging from the islands around her, all of which looked like they’d been at the epicenter of a nuclear blast, the area was large. The lake water was full of uprooted trees and shattered trunks and sheared off limbs and strips of bark. A boat trying to get through that mess would have to move at a snail’s pace. It would be a long time before anybody got to her, if anybody ever did.

  “Dad!” she tried again, calling his name a dozen times as she turned in a complete circle. She got nothing in return.

  “You’re alone, kiddo,” she said to herself. “You’ve got only you.”

  She walked to the place where the dinghy lay under a fallen pine. She worked her way through the mesh of branch and needle and groped beneath the crumpled seat in the bow of the wreckage. Her fingers found wet nylon. She gripped the material and pulled it with her as she eased herself free.

  The knapsack was stained with pine resin and pungent with the scent of evergreen. She dug inside and pulled out packages of cheese and crackers and some trail mix and two bottled waters, completely smashed and emptied of their contents. She found her camera intact, then her cell phone, which was also undamaged.

  “Hey, girl, finally a little bit of luck,” she said, as if it was someone else speaking to her.

  She powered up the phone, and the display came on and told her the device was searching. After a minute, it gave up. No signal.

  “Shit,” she said and was tempted to add the phone to all the other crap in the water. Instead, she slid it back into the knapsack. And then some journalistic instinct kicked in and she brought out her digital camera, turned it on, and shot a full panorama of the destruction around her.

  “Great for the documentary when they find your desiccated body,” she said.

  She reviewed the photos she’d just taken and accidentally went one farther back, to an earlier shot. And there was Aaron.

  From the beginning, she’d had a bad feeling about this trip. Her father had proposed it, a rare gathering of family at summer’s end. He’d just finished working a case involving a decades-old serial killing that had ended in the suicide of a wealthy man. She could tell it had affected him deeply, for reasons he wouldn’t go into, but he’d been almost desperate to have the whole family together again. Anne had come home from her mission in El Salvador, Stephen from a summer of cowboying on Hugh Parmer’s ranch in Texas, Mal and Aunt Rose up from Evanston. And from Iowa City, she and Aaron. Except that Aaron couldn’t come right away. He was committed to teaching a poetry workshop at a conference in the Black Hills and couldn’t get free until three days into the trip. The plan had been to pick him up at Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle that afternoon.

  She’d been worried about him. They’d been a couple for almost a year and, in June, had moved in together. She didn’t know what to call him exactly. Friend? He was way more than that. Boyfriend? Oh, God, how teenager was that? Lover? Way too explicit. Partner? For the moment, yes, but they hadn’t talked much about what was beyond the moment. Significant other? He was significant, sure, but what a clumsy epithet. So she’d simply refrained from calling him anything except Aaron. This was going to be the first time the family would meet him, and she was concerned. Things between her and Aaron hadn’t been exactly smooth lately.

  She looke
d across the littered water and wondered if he’d made it safely to the Northwest Angle before the storm swept through. She wondered if he was all right. And if he was, was he worried about her?

  Or, she thought in a sudden acid moment of honesty, was he relieved?

  At last she dropped the camera back into the knapsack, shouldered the bag, and turned to explore the island onto which fate had cast her.

  The nearly total destruction made it impossible to go inland, so Jenny began to walk the shoreline. The water was shallow, the bottom mostly rock, and she moved easily, though carefully, over the irregular stones. The sun was out, as bright as ever, and the sky was a soft blue, as if no storm had ever crossed its placid face. To one degree or another, all the islands, those she could see anyway, showed the devastation of the storm. All except for one across the channel, a small island that was composed mostly of a single tall rock outcropping with a cliff facing the direction from which the storm had come. All the trees that stood in the lee of that rock rise were undamaged. As Jenny watched, a small brown animal, something weasel-like, swam to the shore, climbed out of the water, shook itself, and scampered into the undergrowth and trees.

  She walked nearly half a mile, calling out her father’s name every few minutes like a kind of distress signal, before she rounded the far end of the island. She’d seen nothing helpful, destruction everywhere.

  “Will anyone ever come by here?” she wondered aloud.

  She pretty well knew the answer. The man who’d rented them the houseboat in Kenora had told them that it was possible to motor among the islands for days and never see another soul. When Jenny had asked if he knew the Lake of the Woods well, he’d answered cryptically, “Nobody really knows this lake.”

  If the others were all right, would they come searching for her? Of course they would, but it wouldn’t matter. They would have no idea where to look. Her father had been circumspect about their excursion on the way to Young’s Bay Landing to pick up Aaron. He’d told her he wanted it to be something special between the two of them. The children in the pictographs, she understood now. His not very subtle way of asking about her own intentions in that regard. Well, it had probably seemed like a good idea to him at the time.

  She looked up and saw a couple of bald eagles circling, searching in vain, she speculated, for a nest that no longer existed.

  The island was narrow—generally only a couple of hundred yards wide—and humped with two hillocks of smooth, white rock, one near either end. The shoreline was pocked with little coves and inlets, now clogged with fallen timbers.

  She looked up at the blazing sun and said, “At least it’s hot. I won’t freeze. And I have plenty of clean water, if I’m willing to risk a little giardia.”

  She was speaking of the parasite that, she knew, sometimes inhabited the water of the North Country and that, if ingested, could play hell with her digestive tract. But it was infinitely preferable to dying of thirst.

  Food was a different matter. She hoped she was rescued before that became an issue. She was glad she’d had both a hearty breakfast and lunch.

  As she moved up the other side of the island, Jenny caught sight of something in the interior. She shaded her eyes against the brilliant sunlight and squinted. It was a small cabin amid the debris. Hope, a kind of spiritual adrenaline, ran through her. She turned quickly inland.

  The going was far more difficult than she’d imagined. She worked her way laboriously over dozens of fallen trunks—pine, spruce, and poplar. Climbing and crouching and slithering, she took ten exhausting minutes to go only a hundred yards. She stood at last before a small structure built of logs and with a roof that was made of cedar shakes covered with birch bark. Each side ran maybe fifteen feet in length. Windows had been cut in each wall and were covered with soiled oilcloth. An enormous red pine had toppled in the storm and cleaved the roof, causing much of the back wall to tumble. It had come to rest on the top cross log of the front wall.

  She’d seen such structures before, old trapper cabins or abandoned hunting camps in the woods of Tamarack County, north of Aurora. She walked to the door, lifted the latch, and entered.

  It was a single room. The huge, fallen pine had invaded much of the area inside, creating a kind of labyrinth of sharply needled branches. The logs of the toppled back wall also cramped the room, and what open space was left felt tiny. Against the wall to her right, clear of the wreckage of the back wall and untouched by the pine boughs, was a bunk with bedding. Except for fallout from the damaged roof and the wetness from the rain that had come through, the bedding looked relatively clean. Toward the back, crushed under a couple of tumbled logs, was a rough-hewn table, with two broken chairs. In the center of the room stood a cast-iron potbellied stove. A long section of stovepipe had come down when the pine hit the roof, and it lay on the floor amid a shadowy splash of soot.

  She ducked under the trunk of the protruding pine, and the far side of the cabin was revealed to her.

  “Well, well,” she said, pleased. “At least I won’t starve.”

  Against the wall of the cabin, cardboard boxes stood stacked waist high. On the side of each box was printed the contents, which included canned peaches, canned lima beans, canned peas, canned Hormel chili, canned Spam, and half a dozen other edibles. A long, slender table had been shoved against the cabin wall next to the boxes. The tabletop was maple, planed smooth and cleanly varnished. On it sat a Coleman propane stove, open and ready for business. A little way down the table were neatly stacked cooking pots and two cigar boxes, one filled with utensils and the other with candles. There were kitchen matches in a sealed Ball jar. Near the end of the table lay a stack of folded towels. Arranged against the wall beneath the table were a dozen plastic, two-gallon jugs of distilled water.

  At first, she considered that maybe this was a seasonal camp, but it looked as if someone had been there for a while and was planning to be there for a while longer. A semipermanent residence. There was only one bunk, and unless a couple of toothpicks slept in it, it was only large enough for a single body.

  “Where did he go?” she said to herself and decided the cabin’s resident had fled before the storm.

  She spotted a cardboard box that was not stacked with the others but had been placed specially under the long maple table. The name on the box was familiar to her, and surprising. Similac.

  “Baby formula?” she said to herself.

  In the quiet of the moment that followed, from somewhere outside the cabin, came the whimper of what sounded very much like an infant.

  FIVE

  The wind was gentle, but the houseboat was large. Its broad side acted as a sail. Despite Rose’s best and desperate efforts, the boat drifted farther and farther beyond her ability and her endurance. For what felt like hours, she swam through the debris the storm had littered on the surface of the water. She finally stopped, exhausted, and watched the boat scoot out of the little bay and into the great expanse of open water.

  She kicked and pivoted so that she could see the shoreline where she’d been forced to abandon Mal. He sat against one of the big rocks. He appeared small and vulnerable, a consequence of the distance and his situation and Rose’s love for him. She looked across the bay toward the beach where the kids had been. Still abysmally empty. She was exhausted. But for the life vest she wore, she would have had trouble staying afloat.

  She laid her head back against the collar of the vest and stared up at the lie that was blue sky. It had promised calm that morning, promised heaven. It had delivered hell. Rose, who never swore, swore viciously, “God damn you!” Her anger was directed at the sky and the situation and herself for her helplessness. And some of it, she accepted, was directed at God.

  Eventually she became aware of a distant cry: Mal calling to her. She peered at him and realized he was gesturing wildly toward the channel. Turning, she saw what he meant. The houseboat had stopped moving.

  Rose looked up again. “Sorry, Lord.”

  And she b
egan to crawl her way out of the bay.

  It took another ten minutes of constant stroking. The whole time she feared the boat would begin to drift again, but it didn’t. She reached the swim platform and climbed onto the aft deck. She bent over the railing and studied the clear water along the edge of the leeward pontoon. Rocks. The houseboat had come to rest against a submerged reef.

  She headed to the control station in the cabin. She took the seat there and stared at the console, a dashboard that held a confusion of gauges and toggle switches. Whenever Mal and Cork had started the engines, she’d paid only vague attention. Because of the protruding key, she recognized the ignition. She also recognized the steering wheel, which Mal called the “helm.” She knew about the throttle. But putting everything together in a process that would get the boat moving was another matter. After a few moments of hesitation, she turned the key to the On position. Nothing happened. She twisted the key to Start. To her great relief, the outboards fired and caught. She reached for the throttle handle and gently pulled it into reverse. The houseboat didn’t move. She eased the throttle farther back, and a frightful scraping came from the pontoon wedged against the reef. She returned the throttle to the neutral position, left the station, ran out, and leaned over the bow railing. She could see that the wind had nudged the pontoon solidly onto the reef, which lay eighteen inches below the surface. Rose considered her options briefly, then hurried to the swim platform. She entered the water, swam to the shoal, and climbed onto the rock. She walked carefully to a spot that was roughly midship, where she spread her hands against the hull of the houseboat. She wedged her bare feet against the reef beneath her and pushed. Nothing happened. She tried again, harder this time. The houseboat would not budge. She realized that, once again, the wind, though gentle, was her enemy. She knew, too, that if she didn’t get the damn boat off the damn rock, people she loved might be lost to her forever. She turned herself and squatted and this time laid her back against the hull. She put all her strength into the effort. Her legs quivered and her muscles burned. She saw black for a moment and then felt the boat slip into the clear.