Boundary Waters

“Let’s take a look at your handiwork, Two Knives,” Sloane said, and shoved Stormy ahead of him.

  “Louis, you stay here with Willie,” Cork said. He followed Sloane and Stormy to the other side of the thicket.

  Grimes lay fallen forward into the thorny raspberry vines.

  “Look here,” Sloane said hoarsely. He brought the flashlight close to Grimes’s neck.

  The wound was deep, nearly severing the head from the body. It looked as if it had been cleanly done with a single blow, one powerful bite of an ax swung by an expert hand. The spray of arterial blood still dripped from the raspberry vines.

  “Stormy didn’t do this,” Cork said.

  “The hell he didn’t,” Sloane shot back. “Whoever did it knew Grimes was waiting, and knew exactly where. And look here.” He moved the light so that the smashed radio lay in the middle of the circle the beam made on the ground at Grimes’s feet. “Rifle’s gone, too. Probably hidden somewhere he can get at it when he decides to do the rest of us. I’d bet he fired those shots himself to distract us, give him time to hide it.”

  “There was somebody behind us on the lake,” Cork said. “Grimes had an infrared scope. Maybe they had infrared, too, and spotted him first.”

  “There was nobody back there, O’Connor.”

  “Look, Sloane,” Cork argued. “If Stormy killed the man, why doesn’t he have any blood on him? A wound like that would have sprayed blood on the killer.”

  Sloane looked at Stormy a moment, pondering viciously. Then a cold light came back into his eyes. “Where’s your jacket, Two Knives?”

  “Jacket? I guess I left it where I was cutting wood.”

  “Right,” Sloane said, disbelieving.

  “Why would I want him dead?” Stormy asked.

  “You had fifteen thousand reasons, remember?” He towered over Stormy Two Knives and looked himself ready to murder. “Raye!” he shouted. “Get the spade from my gear at the campsite. Bring it back here.”

  “What’re you going to do?” Cork asked.

  “We can’t take the body with us and we’re not turning back,” Sloane said. “So we’re going to do the only thing we can. Bury him here.”

  “Don’t go, Willie.” Cork kept his voice calm, although he wanted to grab Sloane and shake sense into him. “Listen to me, Sloane, it’s crazy to separate us. There’s somebody out there with a rifle and a nightscope.”

  “There’s nobody out there, O’Connor. It’s Two Knives and you know it. You’re protecting him.” Sloane looked at Cork, his brown eyes wild with accusation. “I told you, never trust an ex-con. Maybe I should’ve made that never trust an Indian.” He swung his gun menacingly toward Raye. “Now go get that fucking shovel.”

  “I’ll go for the shovel,” Cork said.

  “No, that’s okay.” Arkansas Willie stepped away from Louis. “I’ll go, Cork. I think you need to stay here.” He nodded toward the boy, who looked scared.

  “Take this, then.” Cork handed him his .38. “Know how to use it?”

  “Point and pull the trigger, right? I think I can just about handle that.” He gave Cork a grin, saluted him with the barrel of the gun, then turned his flashlight down the path and headed back toward camp.

  “Sloane,” Cork tried again, “you’re making a big mistake.”

  The agent was staring at the dead man whose raspberry blood colored the vines. “My only mistake,” he replied, “was letting Two Knives out of my sight.”

  They buried Grimes near the landing. Stormy Two Knives dug the grave, all of it, with Sloane standing over him. It was shallow. Two feet below the surface, the spade began to spark against gray gneiss, ubiquitous fragments of the great Canadian Shield that underlay all the living things of the Boundary Waters. They covered the body with dirt and stacked a foot of stones over that to keep the animals from digging.

  “Was he a religious man?” Arkansas Willie asked when they’d finished.

  “I don’t know,” Sloane said.

  “I thought maybe we should say something. A prayer or something.”

  “Prayers are to comfort the living.” Sloane shined the flashlight down on the mound of stones and the light reflected back, giving his skin an ash gray pallor that made him appear as grim and unrelenting as a visitation of Death. “When this is over, we’ll give him a decent burial among his own people. They can pray all they want then. Right now, we’re going back to camp and get some sleep. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

  Raye, Louis, and Stormy moved ahead down the trail. Cork hung back and spoke quietly to Sloane. “You’re wrong about Two Knives. And that means there’s someone out there who knows how to kill.”

  “I’m not wrong,” Sloane said.

  “You’re sure of that? One hundred percent?”

  “One hundred percent.” Sloane walked away.

  “I’ve got two suggestions,” Cork said.

  Sloane stopped.

  “I still say no fire. And I think you and I ought to take turns on watch through the night.”

  Sloane thought a moment. Without turning back he said, “All right.”

  They ate a cold meal—peanut butter on crackers, beef sticks, dried fruit, granola bars—in a cold silence. They washed it down with water. When they were done, Cork said, “I’m going after Stormy’s jacket.”

  Sloane looked as if he were about to object, but he ultimately nodded.

  “Where were you cutting, Stormy?”

  “There’s a little trail follows the river to a creek about fifty yards that way. Stand of aspen there. Some good dry wood. Left my jacket slung over a log.”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “Pissing in the wind,” Sloane grunted.

  Raye had returned Cork’s .38. Cork took it, and a flashlight, and headed down the trail Stormy had indicated. He found the creek and the stand of aspen. He found several downed trees and a small pile of branches Stormy must have cut. But he found no jacket.

  He shined the light on the creek. It was a clear flow, a few inches deep, three feet wide. Fallen aspen leaves, dragged along by the current, crawled the bottom like banana slugs. Cork spotted the print of a boot lightly embedded on the bank. Looking closely, he realized the footprint was on a faint path that followed the little creek. He began carefully to move through the underbrush, the beam of the flashlight illuminating the path, leading him, he knew, toward Bare Ass Lake.

  In a few minutes, he stood on the shore. The lake water slapped against rocks at his feet. The wind moved the trees around him, and their branches touched and scraped, making a sound that seemed like a language Cork couldn’t understand. He edged along the shoreline and, after about thirty yards, reached the landing where Grimes had been killed.

  Cork retraced his steps along the shore toward the faint path. Before he reached the juncture with the little creek, he saw something riding the surface of the water, nudged between a couple of boulders. He reached down and lifted Stormy’s jean jacket. The lake water had done nothing to clean the material. The front was streaked with dark splashes, nearly black as they mixed with the dark blue denim.

  “Find anything?” Sloane asked when Cork stepped back into camp.

  “Nothing,” Cork said. He moved past Sloane without looking at him.

  “Should’ve saved yourself a lot of trouble and just listened to me, O’Connor.”

  “You found the stand of aspen?” Stormy asked, puzzled.

  “I found it,” Cork said. “Your jacket wasn’t there.”

  “I could have sworn,” Stormy said. “Are you sure, Cork?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Sloane stood up, groaning with the effort. “We ought to turn in, get some sleep.”

  “My jacket should have been there,” Stormy insisted.

  “I give you my word, Stormy,” Cork told him wearily. “Your jacket wasn’t in the aspen stand.”

  “Go on, Two Knives. Into your tent. I’m leaving those cuffs on,” Sloane said. “And leave the flap open,” he instructed L
ouis as the boy crawled into the tent with his father. “I don’t want that man out of sight. You still want to stand watches, O’Connor?”

  “Yes,” Cork said.

  “Probably a good idea, just to keep an eye on him.”

  At that moment, the bark and howl of wolves carried across the Little Moose River from the woods on the far side. Sloane swung the beam of his flashlight in that direction, illuminating only an empty forest. “Great. On top of everything else, now I’ve got to worry about wolves.”

  “You don’t have to worry about them,” Louis said defiantly from inside the tent. “They’re a good sign. We are Ma’iingan. The Wolf Clan. Those are our brothers.”

  “Son,” Sloane replied coldly, “they ain’t no brothers of mine.”

  21

  BY NINE O’CLOCK, Jo was nodding. She sat in the rocker in Stevie’s room, The Indian in the Cupboard open on her lap, her head down, her eyes closed.

  For a moment, she dreamed.

  A glimpse of a long church aisle, candlelit, with someone’s shadow elongated on a dark red wall. Then she realized the aisle was a corridor through a forest, and the red walls were trees drenched with blood.

  She woke with a start and heard the front door open downstairs. Jenny greeted her Aunt Rose happily. Annie joined them and said something Jo couldn’t quite hear. They all laughed.

  Jo closed the book and left it on the rocker. She pulled the covers over Stevie, who was sleeping soundly, turned out the lamp on the nightstand, and turned on the night-light near the door. The wind had risen in the evening. Clouds had crowded out the blue of the sky and left the day with a brooding feel. Now the elm in the backyard shifted and groaned and shed its leaves in a golden weeping.

  Downstairs, Rose had the television turned to AMC. A Burt Lancaster film. He was young, and when he smiled, those magnificent teeth looked ready to tear raw flesh.

  “Where are the girls?” Jo asked.

  “In the kitchen.” Rose had a bag of microwaved popcorn in her lap. “Sean just brought her home.”

  “I heard. What’s the movie?”

  “The Killers.”

  The girls stood by the cookie jar on the kitchen counter. The cookie jar was a ceramic replica of Ernie from Sesame Street. Cork had bought it years earlier when Ernie was Jenny’s favorite guy in the whole world, next to Cork. The lid was off. The girls each had a chocolate chip cookie in hand. They were laughing over something, but they stopped when Jo came in.

  “Did you have a good day with Sean?” Jo asked. She slipped between them and reached into the cookie jar herself.

  “Yes,” Jenny answered with a dreamy smile.

  Jo bit into her cookie. “What did you do?”

  “Talked, mostly. Mom, he’s so . . . sensitive. It’s like, you know, I don’t even have to say anything, but he knows exactly what I’m thinking.”

  “I’ll bet I know exactly what he’s thinking.” Annie wiggled her eyebrows wickedly.

  “It’s not like that,” Jenny said, and gave her sister a gentle push.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s it like, then?”

  Jenny looked to her mother for help.

  “I know what you mean,” Jo assured her.

  And she did. Being in love, especially for the first time, felt like being part of something wholly new to the universe. It had been like that with Cork. A long time ago.

  “I’m happy for you.” She hugged Jenny tightly and so suddenly that the hand that held Jenny’s cookie got caught between them. Jo pulled away with crumbs down the front of her sweater and laughed.

  The doorbell rang. Jo glanced at the clock on the stove—nine-fifteen, rather late for a visitor. She heard Rose at the front door, and she went to see who’d come calling.

  Sarah Two Knives stepped in from the porch. The wind came in with her like a rude guest, mussing her hair and pushing at her clothes. Rose quickly shut the door.

  Jo knew Sarah Two Knives, although not well. In her representation of the Iron Lake Anishinaabe, she’d spoken with Sarah on occasion at meetings called by the tribal council to discuss issues affecting the rez. What she knew of Sarah, she liked. Sarah was a strong woman who’d raised her son for several years alone while her husband was in prison at Stillwater.

  Sarah looked distressed, then she looked behind her toward the closed front door. “I think someone’s watching your house.”

  Jo followed her eyes. “You’re sure?”

  “I saw someone in the shadows by your lilac bushes when I parked the truck.”

  Jenny and Annie had joined them in the living room. Annie went to the window and peered through the slit in the curtains.

  “See anything?” Jenny whispered.

  “Everything’s moving around in the wind. It looks like everything’s alive.” Annie left the window. “I’m going outside to see.”

  “We’ll all go,” Jo said and moved toward the door. “Rose, why don’t you stay here. In case Stevie wakes up.”

  “I’ll stay by the phone,” Rose suggested. “Ready to call Wally Schanno’s office.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Jo said.

  The wind hit their faces when they stepped outside. They moved together—Jo, Sarah, Jenny, and Annie—toward the lilac hedge.

  “There.” Sarah Two Knives pointed at a dark place where the hedge cornered toward the driveway.

  At the urging of the wind, the tree in the yard next door, a tall poplar, leaned over the hedge. Its long shadow moved in and out, merging and unmerging restlessly with the shadow of the hedge. Jo thought it might be mistaken for a tall man lurking there.

  “If someone was there,” she said, “they’re gone now.”

  “Maybe it was one of the neighbors,” Jenny said.

  Annie tried to sweep the hair out of her face. “Yeah, Mr. Gunderson, probably. He sometimes forgets where he is and stands awhile talking to his dead brothers.”

  “Maybe.” Sarah Two Knives nodded. But it was obvious she wasn’t convinced.

  “Anything?” Rose asked anxiously when they’d returned to the house.

  “Nothing now. Probably just Mr. Gunderson a little confused.” Jo turned to Sarah Two Knives. “You didn’t come out this late to patrol my house, Sarah. What can I do for you?”

  “Can we talk?”

  “Sure. In my office. Would you like something? Coffee or tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Jo led the way to her home office and switched on a lamp. The window was open, and papers on her desk, held down by a rock paperweight Stevie had painted for last Mother’s Day, ruffled in the wind that rushed through. Jo closed the window.

  “Have a seat, Sarah. What is it you wanted to discuss?”

  Sarah sat at the desk across from Jo. She held herself very erect, a trait Jo admired in the Anishinaabe. “Some men—FBI men—came today and forced Louis and Stormy to take them into the Boundary Waters to look for a woman who’s lost there.”

  “Forced them? How could they do that?”

  Sarah told her about the gun the men claimed to have found in the toolbox of Stormy’s truck and the money in the trailer home of Wendell Two Knives.

  “The bastards,” Jo said. Then she thought about what Cork had said that morning. Hadn’t he, too, been going into the Boundary Waters to look for a woman lost there?

  “Was Cork with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t stop these men?”

  “He couldn’t, I guess.”

  Jo stood up and began to pace. “This is wrong. This is an absolute travesty.”

  “I only want to make sure my son and my husband are safe.”

  “Who else went with them?”

  “Two FBI.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed to hard, dark slits. “Majimanidoog, those two. Also, there was a man who wasn’t a policeman.”

  “The woman they’re looking for. Do you know who she is?”

  “She’s called Shiloh.”

  “Shiloh?” Jo blinked at the name. The
n the pieces began to fall together.

  “The man who wasn’t FBI. Was his name Willie Raye?”

  Sarah Two Knives shrugged. “He’s the woman’s father. That’s all I know.”

  “Do you know where they’re going?”

  “A place called Nikidin.”

  Jo gestured, a small flip of her hands, to indicate she didn’t understand.

  “It means ‘vulva,’” Sarah explained. “A place Stormy’s uncle knows.”

  “Wendell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why they forced Louis and Stormy to go? Do Louis and Stormy know the way?”

  “Louis does.”

  “Do you?”

  “If I did, I would be out there instead of my son.”

  Jo stood at the window and realized the wind had passed. The big elm in the backyard was peaceful. Whatever was behind the wind would be on them soon.

  “I wonder if Sheriff Schanno knows about this.”

  “He was there when the men left this afternoon.”

  Jo reached for the phone. “Let’s find out what he has to say.”

  The night desk officer, Marsha Dross, told Jo the sheriff was gone. Jo tried Wally Schanno’s home phone. No answer. She left a message on the machine, then tried the sheriff’s office again and questioned Deputy Dross, who maintained she knew nothing about Cork’s or anyone else’s going into the Boundary Waters. The deputy was convincing.

  Jo came around her desk and sat on the edge, leaning earnestly toward Sarah Two Knives. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do tonight. First thing in the morning, I’ll kick down a few doors. I swear I’ll do my best to make sure those men bring Louis and Stormy back safely.”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said.

  “Are you alone tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to stay here, Sarah? We can put you up in the guest room.”

  “No. I’ll be fine at home.”

  Jo walked her to the truck parked at the curb. “I’ll do everything I can,” she promised again.

  “Migwech,” Sarah Two Knives said before she pulled the truck away. Thanks.

  Inside, Rose was still sitting in front of the television, but she was watching Jo instead of Burt Lancaster.

  “What is it?” she asked.