Northwest Angle

  It was a good life. But there was a complication. Aaron wanted to marry; she did not. The reason for her reluctance was the whole question of children. She wanted them; Aaron didn’t. In a way, he was like Sean. He had his work and he had Jenny and he was happy with that. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. To be an artist required so much focus, so much energy. But she believed that this kind of creation was only a part of a life. And in its way, Aaron’s refusal to have children was a refusal to participate fully in the panoply of existence, and wasn’t that really the responsibility of an artist? To experience life in all its aspects?

  When she was honest with herself, she knew that her arguments were intellectual justification for a desire that ran deeper than the mind, that grew from her own knowledge of what it was to have life inside her, real life, not imagined in typed lines or on scribbled pages. She wanted life in her that way again. She wanted to produce life. She wanted, and God help her it sounded so mundane, to be a mother.

  Her father had climbed the rock rise and been gone a long time when the baby began to fuss. She sniffed his diaper and understood. She laid him on the blanket in the moonlight and took care of cleaning and changing him. His face was round and luminous, as if the man in the moon himself lay on the ground before her. His eyes, dark and beetle-shell shiny, watched her face intently.

  “Oh, little one,” she cooed and lifted him into her arms.

  He reached up. His fingers, tiny as caterpillars, crawled her face.

  A soft scraping came from above her on the rise, and she spotted the shape of her father, gray against the white rock and black veins, making his way down. When he stepped away from the formation, she asked, “What about our friend in the cigarette boat?”

  “He’s landed on an island a few hundred yards south,” her father replied. “As nearly as I can tell, he’s just waiting.”

  “For dawn?”

  “That would be my guess. Probably being cautious. If he didn’t kill the girl, he may be figuring that, if whoever did is still on the island, they’re armed, and dark isn’t a good time to come calling. If he’s the one who killed her, he may be coming back because he saw that things had been taken from the cabin, and he needs to check it out further. Same issue with the dark.”

  Jenny rocked back and forth, and the baby sighed in her arms.

  “If I were him and I’d killed the girl,” she said, “know what I’d do?”

  “What?”

  “Burn the cabin. You told me he took the body, so he’s probably already dumped it somewhere it will never be found. Now he should get rid of any evidence he left behind that might link him to the crime.”

  Cork looked at her. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  “I’m just thinking,” she said.

  “It’s good thinking. Come dawn, I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, why don’t we try to get a little sleep? Me, I’m bushed.” He eyed the baby. “Will he sleep now?”

  “I’ll put him down and see. I could use some sleep, too.”

  She covered the baby with the blanket from the wicker basket, lay down next to him, and rolled to her side so that she could watch him. She thought of the horror of what had occurred inside the old cabin. She was afraid, but not for herself.

  I swear to God, little guy, she promised silently, I won’t let anything bad happen to you.

  He smiled in his sleep, as if he’d heard.

  Ever, she promised.

  FIFTEEN

  Rose was dreaming. Dreaming about the attic bedroom Cork had created for her in the house on Gooseberry Lane in Aurora, where she’d lived for many years before Mal had come into her life. But dreaming it in ways different from how it had been. In the dream, it was a place of secret passages that led nowhere. Of steps that threatened to collapse under her weight. Of ornate fireplaces and red velvet curtains with brocade. A place of sanctuary, certainly, but also of menace. Welcoming and at the same time disturbing. Her sister, Jo, was still alive somewhere below her. Impossibly, wonderfully alive. And the house was full of activity. She needed to get downstairs to help with things. That was her purpose, to help, and she was desperate, but because of the labyrinth of passages, she couldn’t find the way.

  Stephen’s cry from the deck above woke her: “Lights!”

  She came awake fully, sitting on a canvas chair, slumped against the railing on the bow of the houseboat. It was still dark, the moon still high in the sky. She saw pinpoints of light along the southern horizon. She got up, wincing at the deep soreness in her shoulders, the result of her long swim to catch the houseboat, she thought. And probably from the worry as well.

  “I see them,” Anne cried. She stood near Rose, her flashlight in hand, still scanning the water for debris. “There,” she said and pointed toward a couple of points of light far ahead.

  Rose went to the open window near the helm station and spoke to Mal, who was still at the wheel.

  “Young’s Bay?” she asked.

  “Not if the GPS is correct. We still have several miles to go.”

  “How’s your ankle?”

  “Big as a cantaloupe and purple as a plum.”

  “Does it hurt much?”

  He smiled, looking tired. “Only when I laugh, sweetheart.”

  Stephen came down the ladder from the upper deck, where he’d gone once the houseboat had cleared Tranquil Channel and entered more open water. He’d stationed himself there to watch for lights, or a signal fire from his father and sister, or anything that might be helpful or hopeful. Anne had stayed below with Rose to continue to watch for debris. Both kids had managed to keep their eyes open, while Rose, though she’d tried valiantly not to, had fallen asleep. They were remarkable, these children who were hers and not really hers.

  “The Northwest Angle, Mal?” Anne asked.

  “Nope, not yet.”

  They both looked tired, Stephen and Anne, but in the light that fell on the deck from the cabin, Rose could see hope bright in their faces.

  “The lights are moving,” Stephen said. “Probably running lights. And they’re headed this way. Maybe it’s Dad and Jenny coming back to us?”

  He looked to his aunt for an answer, looked to her for hope, which was something he and the other O’Connor children had done from the time they were born.

  Most of her life, Rose had taken care of others. First her mother, an alcoholic army nurse, who at fifty, had suffered a severe stroke and needed constant attention. It hadn’t been a difficult decision for Rose, giving up her own life to make her mother’s life easier. She’d never thought of herself as an attractive woman. Boys—and, later, men—had always had eyes for Jo, who was brilliant and beautiful and wild. Rose was devout, and so her life had become the Church and taking care of her mother.

  After her mother died, Rose still had the Church to hold to, and she seriously considered entering an order. Then Jo, who’d married a Chicago cop named O’Connor, had given birth to her first child, a baby girl. Though it was a joyful event, it was difficult in a way. Jo was a lawyer with a career on the rise. A baby, no matter how welcome, presented great hardship. It was Rose who’d suggested that perhaps she could help. The situation wasn’t one that any of them had foreseen as long-term, but once she joined the O’Connor household, Rose had become an integral part of it. She’d seen the other two children born and helped raise them and thought of them, in a way, as her own.

  The Church had continued to be her rock. Somewhere in the back of her mind still lurked the idea that someday, when the children were grown and gone, she would give herself over fully to the service of God. But when she lay alone at night in her cozy attic bedroom, a little voice of truth would sometimes speak to her. It would whisper to her that becoming a bride of Christ was a blessed calling, yes, but for her it was an escape. It was a way not to have to face a terrible reality, which was that Rose wanted desperately to be loved. Not by the Holy Spirit, although that was fine in its way. The truth was that she longed to hear a man w
hisper he loved her, and she longed to whisper the same words in return. She suffered terrible, lustful desire, and sometimes wondered bitterly why she was being tested in this way.

  When she was nearing forty and beginning to lose hope of ever finding love, Father Mal Thorne had been assigned to St. Agnes in Aurora, a remote parish buried deep in the North Woods. He’d been sent, ostensibly, to help the aging priest there. In truth, he was sent into exile, because he was a priest on the edge of falling completely away from the grace of the Church, a priest full of question, full of doubt, and too often, full of alcohol. Looking back on it, Rose saw God’s hand at work. Two people desperately in need of a connection more human than ethereal had been given each other and, in this unlikely union, had found their way back to the divine.

  God, Rose believed fervently, worked in mysterious ways.

  So when she peered toward the lights across the moonlit water of Lake of the Woods, she believed that, no matter how blind she and the others might be to the ultimate purpose of events, there was a great and compassionate heart at work. And her answer to Stephen’s question—did the lights mean his father and sister were safe and returning—was deceptively simple but deeply felt: “God willing.”

  It was, indeed, a boat, a big power launch. It came straight for them, moving slowly across the water, and when it was near enough, a searchlight played over the houseboat, and a man hailed them.

  “Hullo! You folks okay?”

  “Yes,” Anne called back.

  “Why don’t you cut your engine, and I’ll pull alongside?”

  At the helm, Mal eased back on the throttle, and the engine idled. The big launch drew up alongside. The shape of the man at the wheel, large as a bear, was visible in the moonlight. The ambient light from the GPS screen on the dash of the helm gave his broad, bearded face a ghostly look. As the bow neared the houseboat, he cut his own engines, leaped forward, and grabbed the bow line.

  “Catch this, son, and tie me up,” he called to Stephen and tossed the line. Then he stood next to the gunwale, meaty hands fisted on his hips, grinning up at Rose and the O’Connors.

  “First folks I’ve run into out here,” he said. “I was beginning to be afraid nobody’d made it. Glad to see you’re all right. Were you caught in the blow?”

  “The blow?” Stephen said.

  “The storm,” the man replied. “It’s played hell across the lake from Baudette to Kenora.” The man eyed the shattered window at the helm station. “Looks like you got some damage.”

  Mal limped out and came to the railing. “We lost the radio and got shook up a bit, but we’re okay. But we’re missing two of our party. They headed to the Northwest Angle this afternoon, but since we lost the radio we haven’t been able to check to see if they made it.”

  “Let’s find out,” the man in the launch said. “What are their names?”

  “Cork and Jenny O’Connor.”

  The big man returned to the wheel, lifted a radio mike, and raised someone at Young’s Bay Landing. The answer from whomever he spoke to was that nobody by those names had come in that afternoon, either before or after the storm. But someone was there waiting for the O’Connors and worried as hell.

  “Aaron?” Rose asked.

  “Is the guy named Aaron?” the man relayed over the mike.

  “That’s a roger, Seth,” came the reply.

  “Tell him I’ve got some of his party here with me. We’ll be coming in.”

  “Will do.”

  The man in the launch said, “My name’s Seth Bascombe. Tell you what, folks. There’s an old Indian fishing camp just ahead. What say you tie up to the dock there and come on with me to Young’s Bay Landing. You can see about this Aaron, and we can figure what to do about your missing parties.”

  “Can we go back out looking tonight?”

  Stephen asked. Bascombe stroked his beard as if considering, then shook his head. “Son, the truth is it would be best to wait until morning for that. Mine’s one of the last boats still out searching, and I count myself lucky to still be afloat in all this damn debris. It may be that your missing parties made it to one of the inhabited islands, and we’ll be hearing from them before too long anyway. And to be honest, I’m pooped. Need some shut-eye. We’ll head back out at first light. Ought to be a flotilla along with us then. You all onboard with that?”

  Their reluctance was obvious to Rose, but Bascombe’s wisdom was hard to argue with, and so they all agreed.

  They crossed the international border in the dark. Once they’d left the area the storm had devastated, Bascombe made good time across what seemed, under the face of the moon, to be a lake of liquid silver.

  “Young’s Bay Landing,” he called out, pointing toward a cluster of lights looming ahead.

  He throttled back, and they entered a narrow passage and motored to a brightly lit dock where several people stood waiting. Bascombe eased the boat against the dock and asked Stephen to toss the bow line. One of the men caught it and looped it around a piling, and someone else tied the stern line to a cleat. Lots of hands helped Rose and the others from the launch.

  “Everyone all right here?” The question came from a woman who scrutinized them with what appeared to Rose to be a trained eye.

  “No,” Rose said. “My husband’s hurt. A broken ankle, maybe.”

  “Let’s get him inside so I can take a look.”

  Two men flanked Mal and gave him their shoulders for support, and he hobbled between them toward a long, lighted building that stood a dozen yards back from the dock.

  The others followed, except for a tall, lanky young man who hung back. Rose hung back with him.

  “Hello, Aaron,” she said.

  She knew him from pictures Jenny had sent, knew him from the talks she’d had with her niece, the kinds of talks Jenny would have had with her mother if Jo were still alive. Jenny had told her Aaron was twenty-nine, but Rose saw something in his face, pinched and critical, that made him seem much older. For Jenny’s sake, she wanted to like him, and, instead of a handshake, she gave him a hug.

  “You must be Rose,” he said. “Jenny’s told me all about you.” He looked toward the building where everyone had gone. “She’s told me about all of you.”

  They stood together under the light on the deserted dock. Night insects flew about them. From inside the building came the hubbub of voices, and Rose heard the kids and Mal telling their story.

  “You must be worried sick,” she said.

  His hair was the color of wet sand and unkempt. His eyes were deep green and heavy with fatigue and concern. “They never showed up,” he said. “We could see the storm from here. It looked like some kind of monster barreling across the lake. Folks said it was headed straight up through something called the Narrows and God help anyone caught in it there.”

  “She’s with her father,” Rose said, taking his arm. “If anyone could keep them safe, it’s Cork.”

  She walked him into the building, which turned out to be a general store and café. Mal was at the center of the gathering inside, his injured ankle cradled in the lap of the woman who’d met them on the dock. With her fingertips, she felt carefully around the bruised area and finally pronounced, “I don’t think it’s a break, just a really bad sprain. Ice,” she said to no one in particular. “We need ice. And a towel.”

  “Are you a doctor?” Rose asked.

  “No, but around here you see everything,” the woman replied. “Fishhooks through the thumb, fingers nearly sliced off by some drunk trying to fillet a walleye, heart attacks, you name it.”

  “Lynn here is the closest thing we got on the Angle to Florence Nightingale,” Bascombe said.

  “Lynn Belgea,” the woman said and offered her hand to Mal. She was perhaps fifty, small, with a plain face honest as the day was long. “I’m a nurse practitioner. We probably ought to get you to Warroad and have that ankle X-rayed, just to be on the safe side.”

  “I can drive him, Lynn,” one of the men offered. “G
ot my truck outside.”

  Mal waved off the offer. “Ice and ibuprofen’ll be fine. We have some folks still out there on the lake who need finding.”

  “Those two Seth called about?” Belgea asked.

  “Yes,” Stephen replied. “My dad and my sister.”

  Bascombe said, “I explained to them we’d best wait until morning.”

  Belgea nodded. “Seth’s right. Morning’s safest and will come soon enough. We got lots of folks still unaccounted for. Don’t need to add any more to that number by sending boats out in the dark. Where you folks staying?”

  “Our accommodations are somewhere out there,” Mal said, waving toward the lake. “We docked our houseboat.”

  “Look, folks,” Bascombe said, his eyes drifting over Mal and Stephen and Anne, and finally Rose. “I have a little resort on Oak Island. Got some empty cabins. Be glad to put you up while we look for your family.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you, Mr. Bascombe,” Rose said.

  “It’s Seth. And anybody here’d do the same. On the Angle, folks help each other out. There’s a lot of territory between us and the rest of the world.”

  Belgea, who looked as tired as everyone else, smiled wanly and said, “Sometimes up here, I get the feeling there is no ‘rest of the world.’ ”

  SIXTEEN

  Bascombe said, “You folks hungry?”

  They’d landed at an unlit dock on the far side of Oak Island, a fifteen-minute boat ride from the mainland. Bascombe had shown them to their cabins, small and rustic and with only the very basic amenities inside: two bunks in each, a table with a single lamp, a sink with a mirror, and a small bathroom/shower. No bedding on the bunks, no towels hanging on the bathroom racks. Bascombe had apologized for the austerity.