The William Kent Krueger Collection #4

by William Kent Krueger

  She spent an hour building a blind from all the waste of branches sheered off by the horrific wind. She constructed it around an uprooted pine on the far side of the rock outcropping that had protected her during the storm. The pine lay a fair distance from the wreckage of the boat, which she also tried to hide, and completely out of the line of sight from the cabin. She didn’t know if the girl’s killer or killers would be back, and she didn’t know if they would look the island over, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Against a firearm, she was almost powerless. When she finished, she created a little shelter in the lee of the fallen pine, whose roots were like a great claw spread toward the south. She wove a kind of roof of evergreen boughs overhead to provide shade from the sun. Finally, she spread boughs across the ground to give some softness there and overlaid them with the blanket she’d taken from the dead woman’s bunk. Inside this makeshift shelter, there was just room enough for her and the baby and the things she’d brought.

  She understood that most of this she was able to do because of her father. Even before she could walk, he’d taken her camping in the great woods north of Aurora, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Growing up, she’d learned how to survive. In her office in Iowa City, these skills had seemed distant and useless. Now she was grateful.

  But Iowa City had given her other skills that were important at the moment. During all her years of college, because her scholarships didn’t completely cover her costs, she’d worked in the nursery of a day-care center at the university.

  Her father had once told her that life was always preparing you for what lay around some corner in the future; smart people paid attention. She hoped that she was smart enough, because God only knew what lay around the curve just ahead.

  By the time Jenny had done all she could, the sun was low in the sky. She sat, very tired, and watched the sleeping child. Neglect was sometimes the inevitable result of teen pregnancy, she knew, but this child had obviously been loved and well cared for. She wondered how anyone could do the things someone had done to the child’s mother. It could have been cruelty, pure and simple. The sad reality was that some men fed on that. Or, she considered, it could have been that they wanted something from her she wouldn’t or couldn’t give them.

  “Like what?” she asked aloud.

  Even to begin to speculate on that one she would probably have to go back to the cabin and have a really good look around. And she had no intention of doing so.

  The evergreen boughs cast a shadow over the baby, but not completely. There were places where the needles didn’t quite mesh, and waning sunlight came through and fell on his face in soft tangerine splashes.

  “She was so young, your mother,” Jenny whispered to him, and she heard in her voice the imbroglio of sadness and anger. The young, she knew, were often the victims of the worst cruelties.

  Because the girl had been naked, Jenny wondered if she’d been raped. And that possibility sent more ice into her blood. She didn’t want to be anywhere near whoever had been there, whoever might return.

  The baby began to stir. Jenny took the cooking pot to the shoreline only a few yards distant and filled it with lake water. She lit a burner and set the pan on the stove. She made up a bottle of formula and set it in the heating water. By that time, the baby was fully awake and fussing.

  She picked him up, sat herself on the blanket, and cradled him. He was, despite his cleft lip, a lovely child, with fat cheeks and a broad little nose. He looked up into her face, and his dark eyes seemed to be searching for understanding. He’s wondering who I am, this stranger who smells nothing like his mother, Jenny thought. He lay quiet in her arms. She felt his breath break upward against her neck, and his heart beat against her own heart. He reached up a tiny hand and touched her chin.

  Jenny wondered how long the girl had been dead. How long had the child gone without food, without touch?

  She cooed to him. “There, there, little one. Don’t be afraid. I’m here for you. I’m here for you. No one will hurt you, I promise.”

  After the baby fed, he slept again. Jenny was hungry, starved in fact, and she opened a can of Spam and a can of pineapple slices. She diced them together in the same pan she’d used to heat the baby bottle, and she fried the concoction over the burner of the Coleman. The result was outrageously delicious.

  In the middle of cleaning up afterward, she stopped suddenly and listened. The wind had returned, but gently so, and the lake water shushed against the shoreline so that she wasn’t certain she’d really heard anything. She checked the baby, then left the little shelter and climbed to the top of the rock outcropping, where a few of the cedars, though ragged, still miraculously stood. The sun was just setting, and the islands to the west wore peach-colored halos; their faces were going dark. In the shadows, the water was silver-black. The lake surface rolled in the breeze, and all that floated there—trees and parts of trees and God alone knew what else—lifted and fell as if on the chest of a breathing thing. In the dimming light, it all seemed to be part of one living organism, one great, wounded creature. She listened again and heard only the water and the soft sigh of the wind among what remained of the cedar branches.

  She looked toward the far end of the island, where she could see the damaged cabin amid the rubble. Behind it rose the small, bare hillock where she’d stood that afternoon and had called in vain for the baby’s mother, a young woman who could not answer and was past caring. She was tired, and that moment seemed long ago now.

  She was about to leave the outcropping and return to the shelter when she took a last look at the lake, and she froze. There was movement in the water, movement out of sync with the easy rise and fall of the swells. Something, she couldn’t tell exactly what, was approaching. It came purposefully, propelled by a mechanism that, at the moment, she couldn’t discern. It was long and dark in the water, with a wide splay of what might have been antlers at the head. A buck? she wondered. But the body seemed much too long, so perhaps a moose. The creature pressed on, and as it neared the island, she realized with a sickening jolt what exactly she was looking at: a section of shattered tree, and the antlers were branches, and what propelled it was a man.

  She dropped to the ground and lay on the hard cap of the outcropping, watching the figure swim the log toward shore. In her mind flashed the horrible image of the naked girl who’d died so brutally less than a quarter of a mile from where she lay. She was dreadfully afraid for the baby. And she felt her own maddening helplessness in the face of all the terrible possibility ahead.

  The man let go of the log and slogged ashore. In one hand, he held a long, thin object that Jenny was certain had to be a rifle. He was a good hundred yards from where she lay, and because of the distance and the dim light, she couldn’t make out any detail except for the firearm he carried. She waited, barely breathing.

  He stood a long moment, as if catching his breath, then began to walk the shoreline in the direction of the cabin.

  From below and behind Jenny came the sudden bawling of the baby.

  The man stopped and turned.

  NINE

  Any fear Jenny had ever felt before was now dwarfed by her panic. She slid from the top of the outcropping and frantically descended. She slipped into the shelter and lifted the baby in her arms. He quieted almost immediately, but Jenny was certain it was too late. Her eyes shot toward all the items she’d brought from the cabin and settled quickly on the hunting knife that lay next to the Coleman stove. She grasped the black hard-rubber handle, brought the blade up, and readied herself. She wished it were a magnum handgun she held, but the five inches of razor-sharp steel would have to do.

  She waited a long time. Finally, with a measure of blessed relief, she began to think that maybe he’d changed his mind, though why in God’s name he would do that she couldn’t have said. Just as she was about to let herself relax, she heard the brittle crush of underbrush outside the shelter. Her heart became a hammering fist. She held the baby against her ches
t, thrust the blade in front of her, and tried to steady her shaking hand. She would do whatever was necessary to protect the child and herself. She knew it without a whisper of doubt. She would kill this man.

  Through the mesh of the drooping pine boughs, she saw the tall shape approaching. He came from behind the outcropping, from the darkening of the eastern horizon at dusk. She heard the squish of his boots still soaked with lake water and the draw of his breath from the effort of climbing through the debris. She caught a glimpse of the long black barrel of the rifle gripped in his right hand. She saw his left hand reach forward and pull aside a low-hanging bough. She crouched half a dozen feet away ready to spring at him.

  He bent and entered.

  Later, Cork would recount how his daughter had nearly killed him. How, when the bawling child had led him to her, she’d been like a tigress. How the blade of that marvelous Cutco knife was poised to carve out his heart. And how, at the last moment, she’d recognized him and had melted in tears of relief.

  The child, however, had screamed bloody murder.

  “I thought you were— I don’t know,” Jenny cried when she was finally able to speak. “I thought you had a rifle and were going to kill us.”

  “A rifle? You mean this?” He held up the staff in his hand, a thin, sturdy maple limb. “I’ve been using this to shove away debris when I swim. And I’ve been swimming most of the afternoon looking for you.”

  He spoke in a rasp that was barely above a whisper, and Jenny asked, “What happened to your voice?”

  “I think I strained my vocal cords calling for you all afternoon. I’d’ve yelled when I came ashore here, but I don’t have much voice left.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “Us?” Cork shook his head in disbelief at the screaming baby clutched to her breast. “How did you become ‘us’?”

  “It’s a long story, Dad, and a horrible one.”

  Seeing the great weariness in her face, he laid his maple staff on the blanket and said, “Tell me.”

  “First let me take care of this little guy.”

  Amazed, he watched her prepare a bottle from the astonishing array of supplies in her little makeshift shelter. Of course, he saw the baby’s upper lip, the wide cleft. But what was there to say about that? He said nothing.

  When the bottle was prepared and the baby feeding, she told him the story.

  Though he couldn’t see the cabin, he stared east where it stood. “I think I need to take a look.”

  “Wait,” she said. “How did you find us?”

  “Like I said,” he rasped, “I’ve been swimming from island to island all afternoon, hoping like crazy you and the boat made it somewhere safe.”

  “What happened to you? I looked back, and you were gone.”

  “The wind knocked me right out of the boat. Felt like a semi plowed into my back. Next thing I know I’m in the water, and the waves are all over me, and I’m thinking I’m a goner. And you, too, kiddo. I finally washed up on one of the islands and hunkered down until it was all over, then I came looking for you.”

  “Just luck you found us?”

  He shrugged. “I could’ve sworn I smelled something cooking.”

  “Spam,” she said and laughed. “I’ll fix you some.”

  “Later.” He stood up from where he’d been sitting on the blanket. “First I want to have a look at that cabin.”

  “I’d rather you stayed, Dad. I feel safer with you here.”

  “Safer?” He looked around him. “Kiddo, you’ve been doing just fine without me. I won’t be gone long, promise. Just keep that boy quiet if you can. He’s got a set of lungs on him, and until we understand what’s going on, I’d just as soon nobody knows we’re here.”

  “All right,” she said, but he could hear her reluctance.

  He followed her directions and found the cabin without difficulty. The destroyed tree cover made the small structure easy to see once he knew where to look. He could tell that before the storm the cabin would have been invisible from the lake. Probably a good place to hide, if that’s what you were hoping for.

  In the blue light of dusk, he entered. The place was just as Jenny had described it. He spent a few moments taking stock of the layout, then went to the tumbled logs from the damaged rear wall and slipped through the gap his daughter had created earlier. The girl lay just as Jenny said she’d left her, on her back with her dead eyes to the twilight sky visible through the rend in the cabin roof.

  Though he was absolutely certain he’d find no pulse, he pressed her neck, the carotid artery there. Her skin was cold. He examined the bruises and the burns Jenny had described. The girl had suffered before she died. There were a couple of short lengths of nylon cord on the floor nearby, and Cork checked her wrists and ankles. He found bruising and figured she’d been bound, maybe to the chair that lay tipped over near her body. In the end, she’d been killed with a single bullet to her brain. Entry wound in her forehead, no exit wound. Small caliber. A .22 probably, chosen for the execution because the bullet wouldn’t penetrate the back of the head and would ricochet several times inside the girl’s skull, making Swiss cheese of her brain in the process. It was sometimes the way people who killed for a living operated.

  He rolled her onto her stomach, which was how she’d been positioned when Jenny found her. He retreated from the body and tried to return the fallen logs to the way they’d probably been before Jenny had disturbed them. He looked the cabin over and knew there was no way to disguise the fact that someone had been there and had taken things.

  But it was what it was.

  He left the cabin and scoured the area outside for anything additional that might be important. He found a washtub and a clothesline, and finally an old wooden outhouse destroyed in the storm. At last, he headed through the twilight back toward the shelter, where Jenny and the child were hiding.

  * * *

  She was changing the baby when her father returned.

  “So?” she said.

  “Someone wanted something from her.” He sat down against the fallen pine log that ran along one side of the shelter. “I don’t know if they got it before they killed her. Whatever it was, they didn’t think it was in the cabin.”

  Jenny was wiping the baby’s bottom. He endured her ministrations without complaint. “Why do you say that?”

  “They didn’t toss the place. Except for the damage from the storm, everything was pretty orderly.”

  “Were they looking for the baby, maybe?”

  “Possible, I suppose.”

  “It’s also possible that they weren’t looking for anything. Maybe they just did it to her out of pure psychotic cruelty,” she said bitterly.

  “That’s possible, too,” he said. “Except that the killing itself looked professional, like a hit.”

  “Who would want to execute a teenage girl? And why?”

  “I’ve got no answers, Jenny. But the whole reason she was there was to keep her hidden.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There was a perfectly good woodstove in the cabin, but it hadn’t been used in forever. Why? My guess is so that there wouldn’t be any smoke rising up to give away the cabin’s location. Only one bunk in the room, and that just large enough for one body, so she lived there alone. But it’s clear that someone’s been keeping her supplied. They could’ve been helping her stay hidden. Or,” he added, “they could have been keeping her prisoner.”

  “No bars that I saw,” Jenny said.

  “The confusion of this lake itself is probably enough to keep someone trapped here, especially if there’s a baby to consider and no boat available to get you safely away.” Her father shook his head, clearly troubled, then went on. “There’s another thing. It looked like her breasts were full of milk. Out here, breast-feeding would make the most sense. So why all the baby formula?”

  “Maybe he was allergic to her milk,” Jenny offered. “It happens sometimes.”

  “I thought about that,�
�� he said. “But there’s another possibility. It could be that whoever kept her here needed a way to feed the child after she was dead.”

  “They planned on killing her but leaving him alive? Why?”

  “Why any of this? Your guess is as good as mine.” He sounded angry. He rubbed his eyes a moment, seemed to gather himself, then spoke more evenly. “I’d say she’s been dead a day, more or less.”

  “Which means this little guy didn’t eat for a long time. No wonder he’s been so ravenous.”

  She’d finished the changing and took the baby in her arms, where he nestled easily against her breast.

  Her father watched her and nodded. “You have a way with kids. Your mother did, too. She could take a crying baby, anybody’s baby, in her arms, and within a minute, that kid was all gurgles and smiles.” He thought a moment and added with a laugh, “She could take opposing counsel apart pretty ruthlessly in about the same amount of time.”

  Jenny glanced from the baby to her father. The darkness in the shelter was growing deeper with the approach of night, and he was darkening with it. “How long?” she asked. “Until someone comes?”

  “I don’t know. I just hope, when they show up, they’re the good guys.”

  “What if they aren’t?”

  He turned his face in the direction of the damaged cabin, invisible on the other side of the outcropping. “You’ll need to be able to keep the baby quiet.”

  “Babies are unpredictable, Dad.”

  “The kinds of men who do the kinds of things done back there in that cabin aren’t. They hear that baby, they’ll come for us all.”

  “Maybe they won’t be back.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  He stood, though not fully because of the low pine bough canopy.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.