He faced her. In daylight, her hair was so blond it was nearly white. When she was a little girl, there were times that her windblown hair had reminded him of the silky fibers of milkweed. Her mother’s hair had been the same color and texture. Jenny was like her mother in many ways, Cork thought. Lovely, smart, perceptive. But her mother was dead, and Jenny was very much alive, and Cork meant to keep her that way, whatever it took.
“I told you I’d never fire a gun again at a human being,” he said.
“When you were sheriff, you told me, and I quote, ‘Never aim a firearm at someone without being fully prepared to use it.’ End quote.”
“Journalists,” he said. Then he said, “Yes, I’d prefer to be in possession of a firearm at this moment.”
“I’d prefer that, too,” she said. She looked deeply and sadly into her father’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Not your fault,” he replied. “I’ll be back, and then we’ll throw something together to float ourselves off this island.”
She unscrewed the cap on the Ball jar, took a handful of matches, and gave them to him. “There are more candles in the cabin, in a cigar box,” she told him. She also handed him the knife. “You’ll need this to cut the clothesline.”
He kissed the top of her head, threw a glance at the child, and left. He began to make his way to the other side of the outcropping, where he intended to follow the shoreline until he reached the cove near the cabin.
The moon had risen to a point roughly forty-five degrees above the horizon, so bright that he could see much of the detail, if not the color, of those island features within a few dozen yards of his position. Whenever he glanced back toward the outcropping to gauge his progress, he found his shadow floating behind him on the water, a familiar companion in all that was so strange.
He did something dangerous as he slogged along. He thought. Not about his current situation, which he’d already spent enough time considering that he had a working plan. He was thinking about Jenny and how startled he’d been when he saw her with the baby sucking at her breast. He’d stood paralyzed for a moment, but it wasn’t because of the odd circumstance. What shocked him was that for a brief instant it wasn’t Jenny he’d seen. In the dark, with her white-blond hair and her slender body and her protective pose, it had been Jo, Jenny’s mother, holding the baby in her arms. And now Cork couldn’t shake the confusion of emotions that vision had brought with it. Paramount among them was a relapse into grief, which he thought he’d put behind him.
Grieving wasn’t only useless, it was dangerous, especially now, when he needed to focus. From grief he slid easily into anger, all directed at himself. What had he been thinking, bringing everyone he loved here, isolating them at the end of the earth, putting them in such great danger? This was his fault, all of it. And all because he wanted his family to be happy. Christ, how stupid, how selfish was that?
He tried to shake off his black mood with some useful thinking. He considered Anne and Stephen and Rose and Mal, imagining what their situation might be. He thought about the anchorage of the houseboat when he and Jenny had left. He visualized its orientation with regard to the approach of the storm. He decided that someone on the boat would have seen the monster front sweeping across the lake, and they would have steered into the bay of the little island and tied up somewhere in the lee of the ridge. And if they were even only a little bit lucky, they would have emerged from the fury in good shape.
That’s what he wanted to believe, decided to believe.
And if that were true, then they would probably try to get Jenny on her cell phone, and when that didn’t work, they’d radio Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle to find out if he and Jenny had arrived safely to pick up Aaron. When they had their answer, they would begin motoring toward Young’s Bay, keeping an eye out along the way, maybe in conjunction with a search mounted from the Angle itself.
And if all this were true, then a signal fire would be the best way for him and Jenny to be found. But a signal fire could alert the wrong people. The man in the cigarette boat, if he was responsible for the young woman’s death, or if not him, then whoever it was who’d inflicted the cruelties.
A gun, Cork thought. If only I had a gun.
Which was a thought of enormous and uncomfortable weight, because Jenny was right: Cork had taken a vow never again to raise a firearm against another human being. In too many ways, his history was written in blood. The blood not only of enemies but more especially of those he loved. He’d lost his wife to a bullet. He’d lost his father that way as well, and also Sam Winter Moon, the man who’d taken the place of his father in so many ways. He’d lost friends and allies. He’d seen the carnage of mindless, brutal killing in the streets of South Side Chicago and in school hallways and in what should have been the heaven of the great north wilderness he called home, violent death that, even when it was perpetrated in the name of things sacred, ended the same pointless way.
And so, he’d given up his firearms and promised himself that his part in the killing, which would doubtless continue in the world just fine without him, was over.
How very strange, he thought now, his mood still bleak, that circumstance kept bringing him back to the place where his hand ached for the grip of a gun. The destinies of some men and women, he’d decided long ago, were bound to the sulfur stink of cordite and the iron odor of blood. He’d tried his best not to be one of them. Yet here he was again.
At the cove, he turned inland and, with the help of moonlight, made his way through the web of branch and timber to the damaged cabin. The door stood open. Inside, moonbeams shot through the shattered roof and gave definition to what would otherwise have been utter dark. He carefully navigated the labyrinth of the boughs thrust down from the fallen pine. At the tumble of logs from the destroyed back wall, he peered through the opening where he’d first spotted the dead girl in a pool of blood. A splash of bleached-white light illuminated the area. He saw clearly the pooling of dried blood, but the woman’s body was no longer in it.
He found the cigar box with the candles and lit one with a kitchen match. He searched the cabin thoroughly, looking for the firearm he hoped like hell he might find. When he’d satisfied himself that the woman had none, or if she had it had been taken, he blew out the candle and headed back outside. In the moonlight, he located again the clothesline he’d discovered when he first explored the area. He cut the nylon where it was knotted around the aspen saplings, coiled it, and started back toward the shelter to rejoin Jenny and the baby.
Before he reached the little cove, he turned and took a last look at the ruined cabin. He felt tired beyond belief, heartsick with an aching weariness that came from the understanding that he was deep into another chapter of his life that would probably be inked in blood.
Half an hour after her father walked away, Jenny left the baby sleeping in the shelter and climbed the outcropping, where she sat among the ragged, twisted cedars that remained. Tough little trees, she marveled. They’d wedged their roots into the crevices and held tenaciously to what seemed solid rock. They reminded her of Manidoo Gihiiganze, what many white people called the Witch Tree, a gnarled cedar that had been growing for centuries out of the bare stone above Lake Superior near Grand Portage and was sacred to the Ojibwe, sacred in part because of the impossibility of its location. Many things existed where they should not, she thought, and she considered the baby’s mother, alone on this island. How long had she been here and why had she come? Was this place refuge or prison? Had the man in the powerboat been friend or keeper?
Anishinaabe blood ran in Jenny’s veins. Her great-grandmother had been true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. Her father was a man of very mixed heritage, with strong ties to both the Anishinaabe and white communities in Tamarack County, where he’d lived almost his entire life. Jenny, however, had been raised with a decidedly Anglo sensibility. She never denied the Ojibwe part of her ancestry, but neither did she much celebrate it. She’d been to powwows, but they
remained exotic to her. She was more at home with a folk festival or a poetry slam. She had friends from childhood who were Ojibwe, but with her they’d usually shared their lives on other, more general levels. Still, alone atop that rock, bathed in moonlight, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as the young woman in the cabin, focusing not just on the slender thread of Ojibwe blood that precariously bound them but also on the more common grounding of their gender.
She experienced two incredible emotions. First was an overwhelming, almost consummate joy that came from the company of the child. She recalled the feeling when the baby had sucked at her breast, how unifying it seemed and how she’d never experienced anything quite like it before. And second, she felt a deep isolation, a loneliness whose origin she couldn’t explain.
She opened her eyes and saw a small, flickering light in the cabin. Her father, she figured, searching for a gun. In the dark of that isolated island, even a small light made a great impression. She turned her eyes toward the southwest. The stars there came right down to where sky met earth.
As she stood watching, she realized that some of the stars were moving. A boat. Not the powerboat, which had run without lights and had moved with reckless speed. Maybe a houseboat? Oh, God, if she could just signal it. She thought frantically but came up with nothing. If only they’d prepared wood for a fire, something she could set a match to.
And then what, Jenny? Use a blanket to send smoke signals? And what if the man in the powerboat came instead?
She heard the rational voice in her head speaking words her father might have spoken, and she watched the lights vanish behind the blind of other islands.
She returned to the shelter, fighting the urge toward discouragement, a fight made easier whenever she saw the baby. He was awake, but not crying. He lay caught in a netting of moonlight that fell through the cracks in the evergreen boughs above. He looked at her silently as she knelt beside him, his dark little eyes intense. She reached out and took his small hand. He gripped her thumb with a strength that surprised her.
She’d almost had a baby once. And when she didn’t, she’d worked very hard at not imagining what that might have been like. She’d struggled to close the wound in her heart.
“Don’t you worry, little guy,” she said gently. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”
She took him in her arms and carried him out of the shelter and stood looking down at the little white moon of his face, and she couldn’t help but smile. She heard a cricket chirping somewhere near, the first sound of life from the island since the storm.
“See?” she said to the child. “Everything will be just fine, don’t you worry.”
She heard underbrush and branch breaking not far away. She turned, knowing it was too late to hide, and she waited. Her father appeared and seemed surprised to see her in the open with the baby.
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
“Just fine,” she replied. “We both are.”
“Wonderful,” her father said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
THIRTEEN
Cork searched the shoreline until he found two snapped trees suitable to his purpose. They were poplar, the broken sections eight inches in diameter. One was roughly ten feet long, the other six. He’d have preferred them to be more or less the same length but knew he had to make do. He hauled the trunks to the rocky cove in the lee of the outcropping and worked by the light of the moon. Using the hunting knife, he cut away as many of the branches as he could and put the trunks side by side. The fit was far from perfect, but it would have to do. He cut the fifteen feet of clothesline cord he’d taken from the cabin into two equal sections and lashed the broken trees together. The result was a long raft just barely wide enough for the baby and some of the items from the shelter. He dragged his construct into the water and was satisfied with its buoyancy. When he was finished, he returned to the shelter.
Jenny had prepared things there. The stove was closed and latched. The blanket was tied in a bundle with the most necessary things inside—diapers, formula, bottle, some canned goods.
“Ready?” Cork asked.
“Do we really need to do this?”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want to take any chances. Do you?” He pointedly eyed the baby she held.
“No,” she agreed.
“Bring the little guy. I’ll get the other things.”
The moon was directly above them, and they walked in puddles of their own shadows. Crickets chirped all around now, a hopeful sound, Cork thought, as he led the way to the cove.
When Jenny saw the raft he’d built, she said, “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Dad, that won’t hold us.”
“Not us, but it will hold him and the other things. You and I are going to swim.” He pointed across the channel to the little island with the stand of trees still intact. “I figure it’s maybe a couple of hundred yards, that’s all.”
He made it sound like no big deal, though he knew there was great potential for danger. If the baby got fussy or restless and kicked around a lot and ended up in the lake. If another storm whipped up out of the blue and caught them in open water. If the cigarette boat returned while they were making their passage.
Jenny said, “And if he falls in? Or if that guy comes back in the boat while we’re crossing?”
He laughed, despite himself and their precarious situation, because Jenny, in her own thinking, was right there with him, neck and neck.
“All right,” he said. “I admit it’s got its risks, but I don’t have a better offering at the moment. Are you game, or do we stay here and wait it out and hope cigarette boat man doesn’t come back looking for us? You have an equal vote in this.”
She rocked back and forth as she held the baby. He’d fallen asleep again, cradled in her arms. Cork was a little disturbed at how natural it seemed to see them both this way.
“Okay,” she finally said. “But we swim on either side of him. Everything else can go to the bottom of the lake, but we make sure he’s safe.”
“Of course,” Cork said. “Give me the basket.”
He’d left a few branches in the center of the raft as a kind of cradle. He placed the wicker basket there. Ahead of it, he put the stove and Jenny’s knapsack and, behind it, the blanket bundle and the jug of distilled water. He stripped to his swimsuit and laid his dry clothes on top of the blanket. He held the baby while Jenny did the same, then handed the little guy back. She took him, waded into the lake, and carefully laid him down in the basket. He didn’t wake.
“You ready?” Cork asked.
“Let’s go,” she answered.
They shoved off, carefully guiding the raft between them. The lake was cool but calm. Each held to the makeshift float with one hand and with the other pulled through the water. As they swam, they pushed away the debris that clogged the channel. Their movements created a profound disturbance. Undulations crawled away in all directions, and the surface of the water became mercurial in the moonlight, silver along the crests and black in the troughs.
Cork had grown up on Iron Lake, the crown jewel of Tamarack County, and he’d been a swimmer all his life. He’d taught his children to swim almost before they could walk. So he didn’t worry about Jenny. A couple of hundred yards was nothing. Unless the baby gave them trouble. But the child was quiet, riding comfortably as young Moses might have in his basket of woven reeds. Cork wondered just a little at the child’s apparent complacency, which all things considered, seemed unusual, maybe even a little unnatural. His own children, as he recalled, had all been light sleepers, and he and Jo had spent long hours at night walking them. On the other hand, his children, when they were babies, had never been left alone for a full day without food or liquid, had never cried hour after hour until sleep came only with complete exhaustion. Which was how he imagined it had been for this baby boy. The child was still recovering, still bone weary, Cork decided. When he regained his strength, maybe
he wouldn’t be so placid.
They were a little over halfway across when Cork heard the distant sound of powerful outboards.
Jenny heard it, too. “Dad,” she said quietly, but with a trace of panic.
“Just keep moving.”
“Maybe it’s not him,” she said.
“It’s him.”
They kept stroking, kept the same measured pace, which helped maintain the stability of the thrown-together raft and avoided jostling the sleeping baby too dramatically. Cork was concerned that very soon it wouldn’t be the motion of the raft that would waken the infant but the sound of the big outboards as the cigarette boat made its way through the debris of the channel. He tried to formulate a plan, some way of heading off the disaster that was approaching. When the boat swept past, the roar of the engines might be loud enough to drown out any noise the child would make. But once the engines cut out, it would be a different story. The baby’s crying would carry forever in the calm of that night. Cork thought that if he were the man in the cigarette boat, he’d come back slowly, perplexed by the child’s presence in the middle of the channel. He’d use his searchlight to sweep the water. And what would happen then?
Cork decided, and he knew he was getting a little desperate here, that when the light snapped on, he and Jenny would loose their hold and go under and swim away. They would resurface at a distance, perhaps using some of the debris as a shield, and maybe, just maybe, when the boat eased up to the raft, Cork could somehow surprise the man at the wheel.
All this thinking took place in the course of less than a minute. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Jenny whispered from the other side of the raft, “If he comes, you swim away. I’ll try to keep him focused on me and the baby, and maybe if he’s distracted you’ll have a chance of surprising him.”
Which, except for the obvious danger in which it put his daughter, wasn’t a bad idea. Better, probably, than his own. Because if Jenny stayed with the raft, she would make sure that the baby, in his flailing, didn’t tumble into the lake.
The William Kent Krueger Collection #4 Page 39