“To the top of the outcropping here. If someone comes, I want to know it.”
“Are you kidding? It’s so quiet you can hear the dark sliding down the sky. If anybody comes, you’ll know it, Dad.”
“Just want to be sure. Need anything before I go up top? Bottle cleaned or a diaper rinsed out? I did a lot of that when you were a baby.”
“We’ll be fine,” she said.
He picked up the hunting knife that Jenny had brought from the cabin and had almost plunged into his chest. “Keep this very close to you,” he said.
Although he wasn’t a tall man, he had to bend low as he left, and even then the needles of the boughs overhead scraped his shoulders. She watched him begin to climb the gray outcropping that had sheltered her in one way before and was now sheltering her in another. Her father wore khaki shorts and a dun-colored T-shirt with BOUNDARY WATERS printed in black across the chest. His hair was a dark red-brown and in need of cutting. He was an athletic man, a runner, a hunter from childhood, a fisherman. He was also, at least in her own experience, gentle. But she knew he’d killed men. And because he never talked about that and because she could not see it in his face or feel it in his touch or hear it in his voice, she didn’t quite know where to fit that truth into the puzzle that was her father. All she really knew at the moment was that she was grateful he was there.
TEN
Though ragged, a few cedars atop the outcropping had miraculously survived the fury of the storm. Cork stood among them and scanned the archipelago around him. The whole area had suffered tremendous damage. The only decent stand of trees was on a tiny island two hundred yards across the channel to the north. A long spine of upthrust rock seemed to have protected the pine copse. He figured that, if they were forced to desert the island, he might be able to construct some kind of raft, and they could float themselves and the baby over to the cover of those trees. At the moment, he had no idea what might be necessary.
Just before hard dark descended, he found out.
The sky was deep amethyst when the man came. In the quiet that was a natural part of evening and yet, in all the destruction of that day, still felt unnaturally profound, Cork heard the growl of a powerful engine. The maze of islands hid everything. A long few minutes passed before he spotted the craft. It was a sleek cigarette boat. Though capable of extraordinary speed, it moved at a snail’s pace, the result, Cork understood, of having to make its way through all the floating debris. The boat came slowly around an island to the south and up the channel in front of where Cork lay on his belly, glued to the top of the outcropping. He saw two big engines, a dark blue hull. The man at the wheel wore a ball cap that shielded his face. In the weak light of the waning evening, that was all Cork could see. The craft followed the shoreline, then the motors cut out, and the sleek vessel eased into a little cove near the cabin. Cork could barely make out the boat’s pilot as he jumped to shore and quickly disappeared among the tangle of debris. Cork spotted him once more just outside the cabin, then the man was gone.
He slid down the outcropping and went back to Jenny in the shelter. She held the baby in her arms. Even in the dark, he could see the fear in her eyes, and he knew she’d heard the boat.
“Are we rescued?” she asked.
Cork said, “I don’t know. Keep him quiet if you can.”
He quickly returned to his post atop the outcropping.
A few minutes later, the man emerged from the cabin. Again, he was lost from sight for a while, then Cork spotted him, searching the cabin’s perimeter. Next, he clambered up a rise that stood back of the cabin and had been balded by the storm. At the top, he became a silhouette, lean and black against the threadbare blue of the eastern evening sky. He turned in a circle, scanning the island. Finally, he raised a dark, silhouetted arm. Almost immediately the crack of three gunshots shattered the stillness that lay over the island. Cork figured those shots shattered as well his hope that this new arrival might mean rescue.
The man descended and reentered the cabin. He was inside a good while. The light in the sky faded, died, and Cork could no longer see anything. A glow blistered on the eastern horizon. The moon. It would be up within the hour. Cork stayed on top of the outcropping, watching. Eventually, the beam of a flashlight began to sweep the area near the cabin and then move steadily toward the cove, where it was lost from Cork’s sight. A couple of minutes later, the big engines kicked in. Cork thought the speedboat would head away. Not so. A powerful searchlight snapped on. The engines growled like a couple of hungry predators, and the boat crept along the channel, the searchlight sweeping the shoreline of the island. As the vessel neared the tiny cove where Jenny said the dinghy lay crushed, it slowed. Cork hoped that his daughter had done a good job in hiding the wreckage.
He held his breath and watched the crawl of the searchlight.
Jenny had heard the shots but had no idea what they meant. She’d hoped her father would come down from his observation post and say they were rescued, but he didn’t. A while later, she heard the boat returning and waited, and still her father didn’t come. The baby had gone back to sleep in his basket. If it was true, as her father had said, that the woman in the cabin had been dead a day, then the baby had probably cried himself out several times over the course of all those hours during which he had been so cruelly abandoned. Tired, hungry, thirsty, wrapped in a soiled diaper, his mother dead within a stone’s throw. In her head, Jenny knew that the baby had no concept of what had taken place in that cabin, but her heart broke for him nonetheless. She wondered if the child had been awake during any of it, had made the noises babies make, had drawn attention to himself. If so, whoever had killed his mother hadn’t cared. Had left the child to the elements, left him to die of dehydration or starvation, as cruel in its way as the death of the young mother. Jenny listened to the sound of the boat drawing nearer on the other side of the outcropping and wondered what kind of monster had visited that cabin.
She heard the engines slow and thought that the boat must be passing the cove where she’d taken shelter. It was one of the few landing places along the channel. She waited to hear the sound of her father hailing whoever was at the wheel, but he remained silent. Not a good sign.
The baby began suddenly to stir and fuss, as if disturbed by a bad dream. She lifted him, and he turned his head immediately toward her breast. She tried to offer her pinkie as a pacifier, but he shook her little finger off and pressed his face adamantly to her breast.
The boat continued around the tip of the island. A beam of light suddenly appeared, sweeping along the shoreline. It illuminated the clawlike roots of the fallen pine where she’d built her blind and her shelter. The baby furiously nuzzled the thin cotton of her T-shirt, and she could tell that he was about to cry out in frustration. With desperate speed, she lifted her T-shirt, fumbled her breast free from the halter of her swimsuit, and pressed him to her. He took her nipple into his little mouth and was quiet.
Her hand shot to the hunting knife that lay beside the propane stove, and she grasped the handle, ready to defend with her life the life of the baby in her arms.
At that same moment, the light died. The engines kicked in powerfully, and the boat growled away into the distance.
A crackle of branch came at her back, and she spun, thrusting the knife threateningly before her.
“Whoa,” her father said. “Just me.”
She saw the astonishment on his face when he spied the baby sucking at her breast. She said, “He was about to cry, and I don’t have a pacifier.” She turned her back to him discreetly. “Would you fix me a bottle? There are some matches and a couple of candles mixed in with the canned stuff I brought from the cabin. You can use one of the candles for light to see by.”
Her father groped among the items she’d piled into the blanket, and a minute later, a candle flame illuminated the shelter.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“No idea.” She could hear the exhaustion in his croaky voice. Hell,
she was beat, too.
“He knew about the cabin, though,” her father said. “If he didn’t know about the body before, he knows now.”
“I heard shots.”
“I’m not sure what that meant. Maybe a signal to someone else out there on the lake. Maybe some kind of threat or warning, I don’t know. But once it was clear that he had a gun, I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“Will he come back?”
He didn’t reply immediately, and Jenny wondered if it was because it hurt him to talk, or if he was simply reluctant to answer. “If I were him, and I wanted to be sure of the situation here, I’d come back at first light, when I could see everything better.”
“What do we do?”
He spoke as if the answer was obvious. “We make sure we’re not here.”
ELEVEN
Mal navigated by moonlight. They were moving along a corridor he said was called Tranquil Channel. Fortunately, the running lights still worked. The storm had littered the lake with all kinds of debris, and Rose was posted forward with Stephen and Anne to watch for anything that might damage the bow at waterline. They all had flashlights, and the beams crisscrossed the tea-colored water ahead.
Stars lay on the sky like sugar tossed on an onyx plate. The moon, frost-colored and nearly full, was at their backs. The islands rose black all around them, their outlines visible from the way they blotted out the stars.
They’d been intent on their responsibilities, on keeping all eyes toward the lake in front of them, and for a long time they had not spoken. Rose was tired, tired physically and mentally, tired of considering all the tragic possibilities they might have to face. She’d lapsed into a long, silent prayer.
“I keep trying to figure that storm,” Stephen finally said, without looking away from the broad yellow oval where his flashlight beam met water. “I never saw anything like it before. Like a tornado except it was everywhere.”
“Straight-line winds,” Anne said. “We had a storm like that once at St. Ansgar. A bunch of trees on campus blew down. A lot of damage in town, too.”
“I wonder how far the damage goes here,” Stephen said. “All the way to the Northwest Angle, do you think? And back to Kenora?”
“That’s something we probably won’t know until we dock,” Anne said.
The progress of the houseboat, though measured, created a small breeze that felt cool against Rose’s face. Her eyes hurt from the intensity with which she scoured the lake and the darkness ahead. Mal had said that, as soon as they hit open water, he’d try to give the houseboat more throttle. Until then, it was best to proceed with utmost caution.
“Do you think they’re okay, Aunt Rose?” Anne asked.
Anne stood to her left. Rose tried to remember what that side of the boat was called. Starboard? Port?
“I really think that, yes,” Rose replied, trying to keep the exhaustion out of her voice.
Stephen stood to her right. He turned his face toward her sharply. In the moonlight at his back, half his features were brilliant, the other half in shadow. “Why?” he challenged.
“It’s simply what I choose to believe.”
“What if they were caught in open water?” he threw at her. “They’d never make it.”
“Then they weren’t caught in open water,” she said calmly. “They made it somewhere safe before the storm hit. Until I’m proven wrong, I’ll believe the best.”
“You actually think that way?” His tone suggested that she was more than a little foolish.
He had good reason to be skeptical of her philosophy. Almost two years earlier, when his mother had disappeared on a charter flight over the Rockies during a horrific snowstorm, they’d all held to an impossible hope that she would be found alive. It had been Stephen’s father who’d pursued the truth and brought it, like a slaughtered animal, home. All of them, Rose thought, in their own ways, were still reeling. And now this. This pushing through the dark again.
“Stephen,” Anne said, “it will be all right.”
Her voice was gentle, but the strength in it was undeniable, something annealed in the fire of her heart. Several years earlier, when she was eighteen, she’d stood toe-to-toe with death during the rampage of a high school shooting. Bloodied, she had cradled the dying in her arms, had walked out of that hell a different person, had followed a road many would have called pointless. She was preparing to be a nun.
“Okay,” Stephen said, though he didn’t sound fully convinced. “But say they didn’t make it all the way to the Northwest Angle. Where would they have put in?”
“There are probably a thousand islands they could choose,” Anne replied.
“How would we know which one?”
“A signal fire?” Rose suggested.
“Maybe they simply waited it out and then went on to the Angle,” Anne said.
“No,” Stephen said. “They’d have come back to check on us after the storm passed.”
He was right, Rose knew. But nothing of the dinghy had been seen or heard since Cork and Jenny motored away hours ago.
“So, they took shelter on an island,” Rose said, “and they’re stranded, and the boat’s damaged. Okay?” She looked toward Stephen.
This seemed to be a scenario he could accept. He nodded. “The fire would be difficult,” he said, thinking it through. “Everything’s wet. Did they take matches?”
None of them knew.
“He’s got gasoline in the outboard,” Stephen went on, as much to himself as to the others. “He could soak a bunch of the wood and all he would need would be a spark to get it going. Once he did that, he would just have to keep feeding it.” He looked north toward a long island that was like a black caterpillar on the shimmering surface of the lake. “We could probably see it a long way off.”
“Or someone could,” Anne said.
“What do you mean someone?”
“I’m sure there are folks out searching for people lost in the storm. The Coast Guard, the sheriff’s office, the provincial police.”
“And locals giving a hand,” Rose threw in.
Stephen scanned the empty horizon. “Why haven’t we seen anyone?”
“It’s a big lake,” Rose said. “But they’re out there, I’m sure.”
She realized that her words weren’t just for Stephen. They helped her hold to her own hope.
They were all quiet again. Again, for a long time.
From the east came a sound like a buzz saw working through wood. All their heads turned in that direction, and six eyes scanned the liquid silver that was the lake.
“A boat?” Anne asked.
“Yeah,” Stephen said. “Powerful. Look, there it is!”
He poked a finger into the wall of night, pointing directly toward the moon, where a broad avenue of silver lay across the water, and where, for a few moments, the black silhouette of a boat was visible.
“A cigarette boat!” Stephen cried.
“What’s a cigarette boat?” Rose asked.
“A long, fast powerboat,” he replied. “They’re called cigarette boats because they’ve been used a lot to smuggle cigarettes into Canada. They were designed to outrun the boats the Coast Guard and customs people have.”
“How can you tell it’s a cigarette boat?”
“Gordy Hudacek’s father has one. I ride in it all the time on Iron Lake. They have a different look and sound to them, and, man, can they fly.”
The boat was gone in almost the same instant she’d seen it.
“I can’t tell which way it’s going,” Rose said.
Stephen listened. “North,” he said. “It’s headed away from us.”
“I don’t see running lights,” Anne said. “Aren’t you supposed to use running lights at night?”
“Not if you’re smuggling,” Stephen said.
“But it’s going so fast in all this . . . this garbage,” Rose said, indicating with a sweep of her hand the debris they were slogging their own way through.
Stephen shrugged. “Desperate, maybe.”
Desperation, Rose thought. That was something they all knew about. She listened to the sound of the boat growing distant. It was good to know that they were not alone on the lake. She said a little prayer for whomever it was so desperate that they risked speeding across treacherous water, prayed for their safety.
Then she prayed once again for Cork and Jenny.
TWELVE
Jenny said, “Where are you going?”
The moon had been up for an hour, and the island was like a charcoal etching, black shapes against white light.
“Back to the cabin,” Cork replied.
“Jesus, what for, Dad?”
Cork stood bent at the edge of the little shelter, peering out at the blasted landscape. In the moonlight, it seemed to him to be an island made of bone. He spoke in a whisper in order not to disturb the baby.
“If I’m going to build a raft to get us off this island, I’ll need some things I don’t have now.”
“Like what?”
“Rope, for starters. I saw a clothesline at the cabin.” He stepped outside into the clear night and brought himself upright.
Jenny moved away from the where the baby lay on the blanket, left the shelter, and stood beside her father. “Isn’t there something else we could use? Tear strips from our clothing or something.”
“Rope’s better,” he said.
“What else?”
He was looking at the lake now, at the tall islands around him, black as char. The powerboat had gone away, far enough that the sound of the engines had faded to nothing. Cork hoped that somewhere in the hard dark he might see a light—a campfire or lantern or flashlight—something that would indicate they weren’t completely alone, though he knew in his heart that was exactly what they were.
“What do you mean ‘what else’?” he said.
“You said ‘for starters.’ ”
“Oh. Maybe a flashlight.”
“Or maybe a gun,” Jenny said, nailing his real thought. “You told me you’d never touch a gun again.”
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