The William Kent Krueger Collection #4

by William Kent Krueger

  “No,” Mal said. “We have nothing to do with those people, except insofar as they can answer the questions we have about your sister and her baby.”

  “Why do you care?”

  Before anyone could speak further, the sound of a boat engine came from the lake. Through the windows behind Mal and Anne, Rose saw Kretsch’s boat arrive at the dock. They tied up, and Cork and Kretsch and a woman walked toward the lodge. No one inside moved an inch.

  The woman stepped in first. She stopped so abruptly that Cork nearly ran into her. He looked past Mal and Anne, who stood statue still; his eyes took in the situation, and he came forward slowly. Kretsch entered last. As soon as he saw Smalldog, he cleared his handgun from its holster and brought it up. He wavered, uncertain, and Rose understood that it was because he couldn’t fire without being sure that she would not be hit. For what seemed like forever, they faced one another in that standoff, and no one said a word.

  “I know you.”

  It was Smalldog speaking to Cork.

  “No,” Cork said. “You’ve only seen me. You don’t know me.”

  “You threw rocks at me.”

  “I didn’t have anything else.”

  “Still got the bruise on my rib. David and Goliath,” Smalldog said.

  “That’s pretty much the same thought I had out there,” Cork said. “I was kind of desperate.”

  Something in Smalldog’s voice had changed, and Rose felt the rage ebbing from his body. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but for some reason, the man had responded positively to Cork.

  “The woman who was with you?” Smalldog asked.

  “My daughter.”

  Smalldog was quiet a moment, putting things together. “She took the baby, trying to get to safety, and you stayed back to throw rocks and give them both a fighting chance.”

  “That’s the size of it,” Cork said.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why risk your lives for a child not even yours?”

  “We saw what was done to your sister.”

  “And you thought it was me and that I’d do something like that to her baby?” Smalldog sounded as if all the pieces were falling into place for him.

  “I didn’t know who you were, only that you were hunting us.”

  “And when you found out who I was, you still believed I could have done it.” Anger had returned to his voice and tension to his body. “You thought because I’m Indian I would do a thing like that to my own sister? Chimook.” He spat out the unkind Ojibwe word for a white man.

  “Anishinaabe indaaw,” Cork said. I am Anishinaabe.

  “You’re Shinnob?”

  “My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe.”

  “You don’t look Shinnob.”

  “And you look like a man who might have killed his own sister. How can either of us be sure?” Cork waited a moment. “It’s clear to me now that you thought we were the ones who killed Lily. Why would we do that?”

  “I didn’t know. I only knew she was dead, and there were two strangers out there with her baby. You tell me what you would have thought.”

  The tone of the conversation had become more reasonable, Rose believed, but the man still held the knife to her throat.

  “Did you think that we were part of the Seven Trumpets people?” Cork asked.

  “Or sent by them. You’ve been out to their island a lot the last couple of days.”

  “Put that knife down and we’ll talk,” Cork said. “I think we all want the same thing here, the safety of the child, and there’s a great deal we need to know.”

  The man didn’t move. Rose continued to feel the trickle of her blood. The room was deathly quiet, and she could hear the pound of her heart in her ears. She prayed silently, Dear Lord, please let this end well.

  At last, the blade came away. She felt the jerk of Smalldog’s body as he threw the knife. She watched it somersault in the air, and the blade sank deeply into the floorboard at Cork’s feet. The knife, frightfully large, quivered a moment, then was still.

  In the instant that followed, Rose heard the sound of boots fast at her back, and the grunt of Smalldog, and the man dropped beside her. Rose turned. Seth Bascombe stood behind her, his rifle poised in a way that made it clear he’d used the butt to take down the Ojibwe.

  “Spotted his boat in a cove the other side of the island,” Bascombe said. “Found his tracks on the trail there, headed this way. Figured he’d try something like this, sneak up and slit your throats. The son of a bitch.” The big man spat. He glared down where Smalldog lay on the floor, unmoving. “Hope I killed him.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Smalldog lay unconscious across the cushions of the sofa Bascombe kept in the small open area of the lodge. Anne, who’d received some nursing training during her stay with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in El Salvador, cleaned his wound and said, “We should get him to a hospital and have his head X-rayed. He’s got substantial swelling back there.”

  “Ice’ll take care of that,” Bascombe said without sympathy. “I think we should tie him up before he comes to.”

  Cork said, “I know your heart was in the right place, Seth, but you may have killed any hope we had of getting through to this man.”

  “We don’t need to get through to him,” Bascombe said. “We got him right where we want him. Now all we need to do is call the sheriff and have this piece of crap hauled away. Except I can’t do that.”

  “Why?” Mal asked.

  “I came in the back way, same as Smalldog. I saw that he cut my phone line. Tom, maybe you better get to the Angle, give your boss a holler.”

  Kretsch nodded. “If nothing else, we’ve got Smalldog on assault.”

  “He didn’t hurt me,” Rose threw in quickly. “I think he was only concerned about the safety of the child, same as us.”

  Cork held up the knife that Smalldog had pressed against Rose’s throat. “He let her go, Tom. He threw this away. To me, that says we need to talk to him and listen to what he has to say.”

  Bascombe looked astounded, stared at them all as if he were dealing with a group of imbeciles. “You may be Ojibwe, Cork, but you’re also former law enforcement. Can’t you tell a manipulative, psychopathic liar when you meet one? I say Tom and me haul him to the mainland, call the sheriff, and turn him over.”

  “He’s injured,” Anne said.

  “Let the sheriff worry about that,” Bascombe shot back. “We need to cuff him and transport him before he wakes up. When he opens his eyes, he’ll be plenty mad and not easy to control.”

  “Before we move him, we should let him wake up,” Anne argued. “We should make sure he’s in shape to travel.”

  “What if he doesn’t wake up?” Bascombe spoke as if the idea appealed to him.

  Cork said, “Tom, maybe you should head to the Angle and bring Lynn Belgea back so she can take a good look at Smalldog. You could call the sheriff while you’re at it.”

  “Cuff him first,” Bascombe said.

  “Probably a good idea,” Kretsch agreed. He took the handcuffs from his duty belt and clamped them over the Ojibwe’s wrists. He handed the key to Cork. “Until we have a chance to talk to him, we ought to assume the worst, so keep a good eye on him, okay?”

  “Will do,” Cork said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Bascombe offered.

  “No need,” Kretsch told him.

  “I want to get someone out here to fix my phone ASAP,” Bascombe replied. “And we’re getting low on food. I’ll pick up a few necessities while I’m there.”

  Kretsch shrugged. “All right.”

  Sarah stood quietly in a corner, as if trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Cork had briefly introduced her but hadn’t had time to fill the others in on the reason for her presence.

  Bascombe nodded in her direction. “Maybe we should bring her along. Get her safely to the Angle and out of reach of those religious zealots.”

  “No,” the wo
man said. “I want to stay here.”

  “Suit yourself,” Bascombe said. “Ready, Tom?”

  “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” Kretsch promised.

  The two men headed out, and Cork watched them pull away in Kretsch’s boat. At his back, he heard Rose ask, “Would you like some coffee?” He turned and saw that she’d approached Sarah and was smiling gently at the woman.

  Sarah looked Rose over carefully and finally said in a soft voice, “Yes.”

  Rose went to fetch the pot from the kitchen.

  Cork said, “Sarah, why don’t you sit down and tell the others your story, if you’re willing.”

  She moved like a ghost, silently and as if she had no substance. She seemed to Cork a woman used to being invisible. She sat in one of the chairs at the table, and Rose set a mug in front of her and filled it from the pot. She picked it up, closed her eyes, and sipped, then drank greedily.

  “I haven’t tasted coffee in years,” she said. “Those people, they believe it’s an evil.”

  “Those people?” Rose said. “Isn’t one of them your husband?”

  Cork said, “Why don’t you tell them everything, Sarah?”

  And he listened as she told again the story he’d first heard on Kretsch’s boat. She stared down at her hands and began hesitantly, in a way that made Cork think she was unused to speaking to so many people at once.

  “My father, see, he was a pretty hard man, real disappointed in life. My mother died when I was a kid, and my father and me, we just kind of drifted around. He was a drunk. He’d earn a little, drink a lot, get mad at the world, beat me up. He blamed me and everyone and everything else for what he called his misfortune.”

  She risked a look up, as if to gauge some criticism she thought might be leveled at her for being that kind of victim. Cork hoped what she saw in their faces would only comfort her.

  “Go on, Sarah,” he said gently. “Well, when I was sixteen, we found ourselves in Spokane, Washington, listening to a man named Reverend Jerusalem Hornett talk about the end of the world, which he believed was right around the corner. He said it was the responsibility of the righteous to be prepared to fight the armies of Satan. In his mind, that was the government and the Jews and the liberals and pretty much anybody who wasn’t a member of his church. For a preacher, he didn’t say hardly nothing about love. Everything he read from the Bible was all about killing and vengeance. My father, he just ate that up. Before you could snap your fingers, we were signed up with Reverend Hornett’s church.”

  She stopped and drank the last of the coffee in her mug and asked timidly, “Could I have some more?”

  Rose obliged, and Sarah watched the coffee pour as if it were gold.

  “So you joined the church,” Cork said.

  She nodded. “The Reverend had three sons. Joshua, he was youngest, was real good-looking and quiet and sweet, not like the other Hornetts, and if I didn’t particularly like the kind of people Reverend Hornett’s sermons drew to his church, I sure liked the look of his son. And he liked me, I could tell. The Reverend was married to a woman just as hate-filled as him, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued and sharp-witted like some kind of, I don’t know, vicious hunting animal. I’m telling you, she had a razor blade for a soul. It was like somebody broke a chunk off the hard rock that was her husband and used it to make her, too.”

  “Any idea why they were like that?” Cork asked.

  “The Reverend, he spent time in prison early on, which is where he claimed he had his vision of the End Times and was tapped by God to be some kind of general in the holy army. Abigail, hell, I believe she was born purely evil. Some people are like that.”

  “I don’t believe that’s true,” Rose said quietly but firmly.

  “Well, maybe she had a rough childhood then or something, I don’t know. By the time I met her, her heart was dead to anything except the Reverend and bringing about his vision of Armageddon.”

  “You and Joshua fell in love?” Cork said, encouraging her to continue her story.

  She shook her head. “More like we fell in lust. He was pretty ripe for picking. But Abigail was dead set against it. She had another girl chose for Josh, homely as tree bark but real strong and real set in her belief in all the crap the Reverend slung around. Long and short of it, I got pregnant, and Josh and me had to get married, and Abigail, I swear, hated my guts.”

  “That must have been uncomfortable,” Rose offered.

  “I thought I could handle her,” Sarah said. “I didn’t understand how heartless that woman could be.”

  “Tell them what happened that summer,” Cork said.

  Sarah drank from her mug and wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “The Reverend moved a bunch of the church folks up to a wilderness area real near the border with Canada, where he had a kind of compound. It was real basic. No running water. No indoor toilets. No electricity. I don’t think it was ever meant to be a permanent place, just somewhere safe and isolated where he could make plans for another place he called the Citadel, which was supposed to be some sort of fortress for Christian soldiers to gather and ride out Armageddon. He had pretty elaborate ideas.”

  “How was he going to pay for it?” Cork asked. This part was of particular interest to him.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, most of his followers weren’t much better off than me and my dad.”

  “Okay, go on,” Cork said.

  “Once we were there, we stayed. It became like a prison, real hard to leave. I didn’t ever once see a nurse or doctor. Abigail tended me, if tending you could call it. When the baby came, I delivered on a bunk in a log cabin by the light of a kerosene lamp. Me and Josh, we’d already picked out names for the baby. Eve if it was a girl, Adam for a boy. Well, it was a boy. But the minute I saw his face, I knew he was different. I understood about Down syndrome. I’d seen those folks on television and in magazines. When I looked at little Adam, I knew. So did Josh. He didn’t want nothing to do with his son. He blamed me. Told me I hadn’t taken care of myself right. The Reverend, he said it was some kind of judgment from God. My father, he just stayed out of it.”

  She seemed on the verge of tears. Rose put her arm around the woman’s shoulders, and Sarah looked up at her gratefully.

  “I didn’t care my baby was different,” she said to Rose. “I loved him every bit as much as if he’d come out perfect. In a way, I was glad he wasn’t perfect. I thought here is a person who will need me and love me his whole life, which was something I never had before.”

  “I understand,” Rose said.

  “Then one morning, a few weeks after Adam was born, when I woke up and went to get him out of the little dresser drawer I was using as a crib, he was gone. I screamed bloody murder, but everyone claimed they had no idea what had become of my baby. I tore around that church compound, pulling out my hair and crying like I don’t know what. Joshua, he couldn’t look me in the eye. But Abigail, she stared me down and said, and God help me these were her exact words, ‘Satan must have come to claim his own.’ If I’d’ve had a gun at that moment, I’d’ve shot that evil woman dead.”

  Her green eyes were, at that moment, like jade knives.

  “What happened after that?” Cork said.

  She collapsed a little in her chair. “I went kind of crazy. There’s quite a spell where I don’t remember much. When I finally came around, I gathered that I’d been ranting about being the Virgin Mary and losing my son. I pretended to still be crazy, because I figured if I told them exactly what I thought of them, they’d kill me like they killed my baby boy. I thought about running away, but we were so far out in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have no idea which way to go.”

  “How long ago was this?” Cork asked.

  She thought a moment, calculating. “Five, six years. I been biding my time since, waiting for my chance. When you folks showed up, I decided it was now or never.”

  Cork asked, “Why didn’t you say something
when Tom Kretsch and I were there the first time?”

  “They’d’ve killed you for sure. They done it before and got away with it. They think they’re God’s special people and don’t believe in any law except what they say comes straight from the Bible to them.”

  “Where’s Jerusalem Hornett now?”

  “Died just before we came out here. One of his sons stayed back in Washington State to head up the church there while Abigail and Gabriel and Josh came out here with some of the faithful to start building the Citadel.”

  “Those folks bought Stump Island with hard cash,” Cork said. “And all the construction they’re doing can’t be cheap. Do you have any idea where their money comes from?”

  “Things go on at night. Boats come and go. It’s got something to do with that, I expect, but I don’t know exactly what.”

  Cork looked down at Smalldog, still unconscious, and said, “Maybe when he comes to he can enlighten us.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  In the late morning, Rainy Bisonette took heated water from the stove reservoir and poured it into a big washtub, and she and Jenny washed little Waaboo. Earlier, Henry Meloux had left the cabin and gone with Stephen and Aaron to gather mushrooms and tubers and herbs. Aaron wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, but he’d gamely agreed. Walleye, who would normally have trailed along behind the old Mide, seemed interested in the baby, and he stayed, lying in the meadow grass nearby, and watched with interest as the women went about their work.

  “Part of it,” Rainy said, continuing the discussion they’d begun earlier that day, “is that he’s clearly sick, and he can’t figure out what’s at the heart of his illness. I’ve never seen him so tense, so anxious.”

  “Is it possible he’s afraid of dying?”

  “Uncle Henry’s the last person I would suspect of being afraid to make the passage and walk the Path of Souls.” She handed Jenny a bar of soap. “But maybe.”

  Waaboo squealed with delight at the feel of the warm water and Jenny’s gentle, slippery palms. His little arms flailed, and water splashed, and the air above the tub was filled with droplets that sparkled in the sun.