Northwest Angle

  Light came into the cabin through the shattered roof and fell across the body in a swath of bright yellow-orange that was like a satin ribbon. Jenny stood a moment, absolutely stunned. Slowly, and with great reluctance, she knelt and checked the woman’s neck for a pulse. Nothing, and the skin was cold to her touch. She drew her hand away, then reached out again and carefully rolled the woman onto her back. Young, Jenny saw. No more than seventeen or eighteen. Her hair was long and black and done in a braid. Her skin was the same color as the child’s, faded sandstone. Her cheekbones were high and proud. She was clearly Indian. Jenny knew that in this area it meant she was probably Ojibwe or Odawa or maybe Cree. The side of her face that had been pressed against the floor was covered with clotted blood. The other side was a mottle of deep bruising. There were burns on her breasts, little singes dark and round as old pennies. And there was also a bullet hole dead center in her forehead.

  Jenny turned away. She rose and stumbled back, scrambled through the gap she’d created in the tumbled logs and stood shaking. She wished her father was there. Her father would know what to do.

  But he wasn’t. There was no one but her.

  Whoever did this may be back, said the voice inside her head.

  “They’ve already killed her,” she said aloud. “Why would they come back?”

  Do you want to take that chance?

  She knew then that there would be no bonfire. Although it might bring rescue, it might also bring back a murderer. She looked the damaged cabin over carefully, forcing herself to think clearly. She knew she had to leave that place, find shelter somewhere else. She said aloud but quietly, “I’ll take the stove, a pan, some formula, and a few canned goods.”

  They might see that some things are missing, the voice told her.

  “Can’t be helped.” She took the damp blanket from the bunk, spread it on the floor, and threw in a few canned goods, the canister of formula, some utensils, a can opener, the pan she’d used to boil water, a couple of candles, and the Ball jar of kitchen matches.

  “Clean diapers,” she reminded herself.

  She grabbed a handful of diapers and tossed them onto the blanket with the other items. She brought the four corners of the blanket together and tied them.

  Water, she thought, grabbed one of the unopened jugs of distilled water, and put it beside the blanket. She went to the propane stove, closed the lid and flipped the latch. As she drew the stove off the long, hand-hewn table, she spotted a knife. It was a clip point hunting knife with a five-inch fixed blade and black rubber handle, a good utilitarian knife that might have been used to cut meat for cooking. She grasped it and slipped it into her knapsack with her useless phone and camera. A final time, she scanned the room.

  Then she looked at the sleeping baby. He’d been well cared for, she understood. The dead woman, his mother, had loved him, it was clear.

  “I’ll find somewhere to hide us, somewhere safe, and I’ll be back for you, little man,” she promised.

  The voice said, Is there anywhere safe on this island?

  For that one, Jenny didn’t have an answer.

  SEVEN

  Mal piloted the houseboat while Rose tried in vain to raise someone on the radio. The dismal scratch of static was all she got, and finally Mal said, “Give it up, sweetheart. I think the beating from that storm did it in. We’re lucky our GPS still works.” He tapped the unit on the console.

  “What about your cell phone?” Rose asked.

  “I haven’t been able to get a signal on that thing since we left Kenora.”

  They’d motored out of the bay and come around the end of the island where Anne and Stephen had disappeared. Rose looked at the destruction, and she thought hell couldn’t look any worse. Trees lay cleaved as if with a battleax. Those few that had somehow managed to survive upright were stripped bare. The houseboat pushed through flotsam thrown off the island by the angry hand of the wind—bark and branch and brush. Fifty yards to the left of the boat and a little behind them, two shapes floated, dark and indistinct in the blue of the reflected sky. Something about them suggested to Rose that they had not come from a tree.

  “Mal,” she said, almost breathless, and she pointed him back.

  He spun the wheel, and the houseboat came about and nosed toward the floating shapes, which were different from the stiff detritus of tree parts around them, riding the gentle undulations from the wake of the houseboat like things made of flesh and bone.

  Oh, God, Rose prayed silently, please, God, no.

  She ran to the bow platform, wanting to be certain and at the same time terrified by what she might discover. At the rail, she gave a little cry.

  “What is it?” her husband called.

  “Oh, Mal,” she said, her voice choked. “It’s a doe and a fawn. They’re dead, poor things.”

  “Let’s find the living, Rose,” Mal said and swung the boat back toward the island.

  They eased along the shoreline, moving through the eerie calm, looking west into the sun, shielding their eyes, straining to see movement of any kind. Rose remembered the field glasses she’d brought for birding and hurried to her cabin. Everything in the houseboat had been thrown into disarray, and her small cabin looked as if it had been ransacked by vandals. She finally found the glasses under the bunk amid the clutter of clothing and paperbacks, and she raced back to the control station. She scanned the island as they circled, she and Mal hardly speaking.

  They came around at last to the bay where they’d begun.

  Rose had always prided herself on being a woman of profound and indomitable hope, but at the moment, she could barely hold back tears.

  “I didn’t see a thing,” she whispered.

  “We’ll go around again, Rose. We’ll go around until we find them.”

  She looked into his eyes, green eyes, like spring grass. “We will find them, won’t we, Mal?”

  “God will have to answer to you if we don’t,” he said. “And I know he doesn’t want that.” He smiled gently and touched her arm, then looked past her and said, “Well I’ll be damned. Look, sweetheart.”

  She turned where he pointed. Inside the bay, at the very rocks on the shore where Mal had tried to safely anchor, Anne and Stephen stood, waving their arms.

  “O ye of little faith,” Rose said to herself. And she kissed the top of her husband’s head.

  Mal guided the boat to within a dozen feet of the shore. Anne and Stephen waded out to meet them and climbed aboard using the ladder of the swim platform. Rose hugged them both and said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” Stephen said. He had several long scratches across his bare chest, as if a cat had raked him with its claws. “As soon as a couple of trees went down, we kind of wedged underneath them and they protected us.”

  “We were more worried about you and Mal, out there in the houseboat,” Anne said. Her red hair was blown wild and filled with dust and twigs, but there seemed no real damage.

  “What about Dad and Jenny?” Stephen said.

  Mal had left the control station and, favoring his injured ankle, had limped aft to where the others stood. He said, “The radio’s out, so we don’t have any way to get word to or from anyone. I think we should head to the Northwest Angle and see if your dad and Jenny made it there safely.”

  “If?” Anne said.

  “Confirm they made it safely,” Mal corrected himself. “Anybody have a better idea?”

  No one spoke, and Mal hobbled back to the control station with the others following.

  “How long do you think it will take us to get there?” Anne asked.

  Mal kicked the engines into action and began to back away from the island. “I don’t know,” he said. “With all this crap in the water, we’ll have to move slowly. Several hours, at least. Well after dark.”

  They motored out of the bay and into the broad open water, and Mal headed the houseboat southwest.

  Rose stood at the railing of the bow with Stephen and Anne, and they a
ll looked toward the vast horizon spotted with islands destroyed in the storm, rising out of the lake like carbuncles festering in the afternoon sun. There was not a human thing in sight, and Rose recalled the words of the man who’d rented them the houseboat.

  “Lake of the Woods is a place you can get well and truly lost if you’re not careful. You can go for days among all those islands and never see another soul.”

  They would be careful, Rose knew. With the GPS, they would not get lost among the thousands of islands. And she prayed that there were at least two other souls they would yet see.

  EIGHT

  It took Jenny three trips to bring all the materials—blanket, knapsack, and water jug—and carry the baby to the place she hoped would be sanctuary. She’d chosen a spot at the other end of the island, as far from the cabin as she could get. The baby, no longer starved but still exhausted, continued to sleep.

  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
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  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 chest, 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.