Northwest Angle: A Novel Read online

  “The wind knocked me right out of the boat. Felt like a semi plowed into my back. Next thing I know I’m in the water, and the waves are all over me, and I’m thinking I’m a goner. And you, too, kiddo. I finally washed up on one of the islands and hunkered down until it was all over, then I came looking for you.”

  “Just luck you found us?”

  He shrugged. “I could’ve sworn I smelled something cooking.”

  “Spam,” she said and laughed. “I’ll fix you some.”

  “Later.” He stood up from where he’d been sitting on the blanket. “First I want to have a look at that cabin.”

  “I’d rather you stayed, Dad. I feel safer with you here.”

  “Safer?” He looked around him. “Kiddo, you’ve been doing just fine without me. I won’t be gone long, promise. Just keep that boy quiet if you can. He’s got a set of lungs on him, and until we understand what’s going on, I’d just as soon nobody knows we’re here.”

  “All right,” she said, but he could hear her reluctance.

  He followed her directions and found the cabin without difficulty. The destroyed tree cover made the small structure easy to see once he knew where to look. He could tell that before the storm the cabin would have been invisible from the lake. Probably a good place to hide, if that’s what you were hoping for.

  In the blue light of dusk, he entered. The place was just as Jenny had described it. He spent a few moments taking stock of the layout, then went to the tumbled logs from the damaged rear wall and slipped through the gap his daughter had created earlier. The girl lay just as Jenny said she’d left her, on her back with her dead eyes to the twilight sky visible through the rend in the cabin roof.

  Though he was absolutely certain he’d find no pulse, he pressed her neck, the carotid artery there. Her skin was cold. He examined the bruises and the burns Jenny had described. The girl had suffered before she died. There were a couple of short lengths of nylon cord on the floor nearby, and Cork checked her wrists and ankles. He found bruising and figured she’d been bound, maybe to the chair that lay tipped over near her body. In the end, she’d been killed with a single bullet to her brain. Entry wound in her forehead, no exit wound. Small caliber. A .22 probably, chosen for the execution because the bullet wouldn’t penetrate the back of the head and would ricochet several times inside the girl’s skull, making Swiss cheese of her brain in the process. It was sometimes the way people who killed for a living operated.

  He rolled her onto her stomach, which was how she’d been positioned when Jenny found her. He retreated from the body and tried to return the fallen logs to the way they’d probably been before Jenny had disturbed them. He looked the cabin over and knew there was no way to disguise the fact that someone had been there and had taken things.

  But it was what it was.

  He left the cabin and scoured the area outside for anything additional that might be important. He found a washtub and a clothesline, and finally an old wooden outhouse destroyed in the storm. At last, he headed through the twilight back toward the shelter, where Jenny and the child were hiding.

  * * *

  She was changing the baby when her father returned.

  “So?” she said.

  “Someone wanted something from her.” He sat down against the fallen pine log that ran along one side of the shelter. “I don’t know if they got it before they killed her. Whatever it was, they didn’t think it was in the cabin.”

  Jenny was wiping the baby’s bottom. He endured her ministrations without complaint. “Why do you say that?”

  “They didn’t toss the place. Except for the damage from the storm, everything was pretty orderly.”

  “Were they looking for the baby, maybe?”

  “Possible, I suppose.”

  “It’s also possible that they weren’t looking for anything. Maybe they just did it to her out of pure psychotic cruelty,” she said bitterly.

  “That’s possible, too,” he said. “Except that the killing itself looked professional, like a hit.”

  “Who would want to execute a teenage girl? And why?”

  “I’ve got no answers, Jenny. But the whole reason she was there was to keep her hidden.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There was a perfectly good woodstove in the cabin, but it hadn’t been used in forever. Why? My guess is so that there wouldn’t be any smoke rising up to give away the cabin’s location. Only one bunk in the room, and that just large enough for one body, so she lived there alone. But it’s clear that someone’s been keeping her supplied. They could’ve been helping her stay hidden. Or,” he added, “they could have been keeping her prisoner.”

  “No bars that I saw,” Jenny said.

  “The confusion of this lake itself is probably enough to keep someone trapped here, especially if there’s a baby to consider and no boat available to get you safely away.” Her father shook his head, clearly troubled, then went on. “There’s another thing. It looked like her breasts were full of milk. Out here, breast-feeding would make the most sense. So why all the baby formula?”

  “Maybe he was allergic to her milk,” Jenny offered. “It happens sometimes.”

  “I thought about that,” he said. “But there’s another possibility. It could be that whoever kept her here needed a way to feed the child after she was dead.”

  “They planned on killing her but leaving him alive? Why?”

  “Why any of this? Your guess is as good as mine.” He sounded angry. He rubbed his eyes a moment, seemed to gather himself, then spoke more evenly. “I’d say she’s been dead a day, more or less.”

  “Which means this little guy didn’t eat for a long time. No wonder he’s been so ravenous.”

  She’d finished the changing and took the baby in her arms, where he nestled easily against her breast.

  Her father watched her and nodded. “You have a way with kids. Your mother did, too. She could take a crying baby, anybody’s baby, in her arms, and within a minute, that kid was all gurgles and smiles.” He thought a moment and added with a laugh, “She could take opposing counsel apart pretty ruthlessly in about the same amount of time.”

  Jenny glanced from the baby to her father. The darkness in the shelter was growing deeper with the approach of night, and he was darkening with it. “How long?” she asked. “Until someone comes?”

  “I don’t know. I just hope, when they show up, they’re the good guys.”

  “What if they aren’t?”

  He turned his face in the direction of the damaged cabin, invisible on the other side of the outcropping. “You’ll need to be able to keep the baby quiet.”

  “Babies are unpredictable, Dad.”

  “The kinds of men who do the kinds of things done back there in that cabin aren’t. They hear that baby, they’ll come for us all.”

  “Maybe they won’t be back.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  He stood, though not fully because of the low pine bough canopy.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To the top of the outcropping here. If someone comes, I want to know it.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s so quiet you can hear the dark sliding down the sky. If anybody comes, you’ll know it, Dad.”

  “Just want to be sure. Need anything before I go up top? Bottle cleaned or a diaper rinsed out? I did a lot of that when you were a baby.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she said.

  He picked up the hunting knife that Jenny had brought from the cabin and had almost plunged into his chest. “Keep this very close to you,” he said.

  Although he wasn’t a tall man, he had to bend low as he left, and even then the needles of the boughs overhead scraped his shoulders. She watched him begin to climb the gray outcropping that had sheltered her in one way before and was now sheltering her in another. Her father wore khaki shorts and a dun-colored T-shirt with BOUNDARY WATERS printed in black across the chest. His hair was a dark red-brown and in need of
cutting. He was an athletic man, a runner, a hunter from childhood, a fisherman. He was also, at least in her own experience, gentle. But she knew he’d killed men. And because he never talked about that and because she could not see it in his face or feel it in his touch or hear it in his voice, she didn’t quite know where to fit that truth into the puzzle that was her father. All she really knew at the moment was that she was grateful he was there.

  TEN

  Though ragged, a few cedars atop the outcropping had miraculously survived the fury of the storm. Cork stood among them and scanned the archipelago around him. The whole area had suffered tremendous damage. The only decent stand of trees was on a tiny island two hundred yards across the channel to the north. A long spine of upthrust rock seemed to have protected the pine copse. He figured that, if they were forced to desert the island, he might be able to construct some kind of raft, and they could float themselves and the baby over to the cover of those trees. At the moment, he had no idea what might be necessary.

  Just before hard dark descended, he found out.

  The sky was deep amethyst when the man came. In the quiet that was a natural part of evening and yet, in all the destruction of that day, still felt unnaturally profound, Cork heard the growl of a powerful engine. The maze of islands hid everything. A long few minutes passed before he spotted the craft. It was a sleek cigarette boat. Though capable of extraordinary speed, it moved at a snail’s pace, the result, Cork understood, of having to make its way through all the floating debris. The boat came slowly around an island to the south and up the channel in front of where Cork lay on his belly, glued to the top of the outcropping. He saw two big engines, a dark blue hull. The man at the wheel wore a ball cap that shielded his face. In the weak light of the waning evening, that was all Cork could see. The craft followed the shoreline, then the motors cut out, and the sleek vessel eased into a little cove near the cabin. Cork could barely make out the boat’s pilot as he jumped to shore and quickly disappeared among the tangle of debris. Cork spotted him once more just outside the cabin, then the man was gone.

  He slid down the outcropping and went back to Jenny in the shelter. She held the baby in her arms. Even in the dark, he could see the fear in her eyes, and he knew she’d heard the boat.

  “Are we rescued?” she asked.

  Cork said, “I don’t know. Keep him quiet if you can.”

  He quickly returned to his post atop the outcropping.

  A few minutes later, the man emerged from the cabin. Again, he was lost from sight for a while, then Cork spotted him, searching the cabin’s perimeter. Next, he clambered up a rise that stood back of the cabin and had been balded by the storm. At the top, he became a silhouette, lean and black against the threadbare blue of the eastern evening sky. He turned in a circle, scanning the island. Finally, he raised a dark, silhouetted arm. Almost immediately the crack of three gunshots shattered the stillness that lay over the island. Cork figured those shots shattered as well his hope that this new arrival might mean rescue.

  The man descended and reentered the cabin. He was inside a good while. The light in the sky faded, died, and Cork could no longer see anything. A glow blistered on the eastern horizon. The moon. It would be up within the hour. Cork stayed on top of the outcropping, watching. Eventually, the beam of a flashlight began to sweep the area near the cabin and then move steadily toward the cove, where it was lost from Cork’s sight. A couple of minutes later, the big engines kicked in. Cork thought the speedboat would head away. Not so. A powerful searchlight snapped on. The engines growled like a couple of hungry predators, and the boat crept along the channel, the searchlight sweeping the shoreline of the island. As the vessel neared the tiny cove where Jenny said the dinghy lay crushed, it slowed. Cork hoped that his daughter had done a good job in hiding the wreckage.

  He held his breath and watched the crawl of the searchlight.

  Jenny had heard the shots but had no idea what they meant. She’d hoped her father would come down from his observation post and say they were rescued, but he didn’t. A while later, she heard the boat returning and waited, and still her father didn’t come. The baby had gone back to sleep in his basket. If it was true, as her father had said, that the woman in the cabin had been dead a day, then the baby had probably cried himself out several times over the course of all those hours during which he had been so cruelly abandoned. Tired, hungry, thirsty, wrapped in a soiled diaper, his mother dead within a stone’s throw. In her head, Jenny knew that the baby had no concept of what had taken place in that cabin, but her heart broke for him nonetheless. She wondered if the child had been awake during any of it, had made the noises babies make, had drawn attention to himself. If so, whoever had killed his mother hadn’t cared. Had left the child to the elements, left him to die of dehydration or starvation, as cruel in its way as the death of the young mother. Jenny listened to the sound of the boat drawing nearer on the other side of the outcropping and wondered what kind of monster had visited that cabin.

  She heard the engines slow and thought that the boat must be passing the cove where she’d taken shelter. It was one of the few landing places along the channel. She waited to hear the sound of her father hailing whoever was at the wheel, but he remained silent. Not a good sign.

  The baby began suddenly to stir and fuss, as if disturbed by a bad dream. She lifted him, and he turned his head immediately toward her breast. She tried to offer her pinkie as a pacifier, but he shook her little finger off and pressed his face adamantly to her breast.

  The boat continued around the tip of the island. A beam of light suddenly appeared, sweeping along the shoreline. It illuminated the clawlike roots of the fallen pine where she’d built her blind and her shelter. The baby furiously nuzzled the thin cotton of her T-shirt, and she could tell that he was about to cry out in frustration. With desperate speed, she lifted her T-shirt, fumbled her breast free from the halter of her swimsuit, and pressed him to her. He took her nipple into his little mouth and was quiet.

  Her hand shot to the hunting knife that lay beside the propane stove, and she grasped the handle, ready to defend with her life the life of the baby in her arms.

  At that same moment, the light died. The engines kicked in powerfully, and the boat growled away into the distance.

  A crackle of branch came at her back, and she spun, thrusting the knife threateningly before her.

  “Whoa,” her father said. “Just me.”

  She saw the astonishment on his face when he spied the baby sucking at her breast. She said, “He was about to cry, and I don’t have a pacifier.” She turned her back to him discreetly. “Would you fix me a bottle? There are some matches and a couple of candles mixed in with the canned stuff I brought from the cabin. You can use one of the candles for light to see by.”

  Her father groped among the items she’d piled into the blanket, and a minute later, a candle flame illuminated the shelter.

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  “No idea.” She could hear the exhaustion in his croaky voice. Hell, she was beat, too.

  “He knew about the cabin, though,” her father said. “If he didn’t know about the body before, he knows now.”

  “I heard shots.”

  “I’m not sure what that meant. Maybe a signal to someone else out there on the lake. Maybe some kind of threat or warning, I don’t know. But once it was clear that he had a gun, I didn’t want to take any chances.”

  “Will he come back?”

  He didn’t reply immediately, and Jenny wondered if it was because it hurt him to talk, or if he was simply reluctant to answer. “If I were him, and I wanted to be sure of the situation here, I’d come back at first light, when I could see everything better.”

  “What do we do?”

  He spoke as if the answer was obvious. “We make sure we’re not here.”

  ELEVEN

  Mal navigated by moonlight. They were moving along a corridor he said was called Tranquil Channel. Fortunately, the runn
ing lights still worked. The storm had littered the lake with all kinds of debris, and Rose was posted forward with Stephen and Anne to watch for anything that might damage the bow at waterline. They all had flashlights, and the beams crisscrossed the tea-colored water ahead.

  Stars lay on the sky like sugar tossed on an onyx plate. The moon, frost-colored and nearly full, was at their backs. The islands rose black all around them, their outlines visible from the way they blotted out the stars.

  They’d been intent on their responsibilities, on keeping all eyes toward the lake in front of them, and for a long time they had not spoken. Rose was tired, tired physically and mentally, tired of considering all the tragic possibilities they might have to face. She’d lapsed into a long, silent prayer.

  “I keep trying to figure that storm,” Stephen finally said, without looking away from the broad yellow oval where his flashlight beam met water. “I never saw anything like it before. Like a tornado except it was everywhere.”

  “Straight-line winds,” Anne said. “We had a storm like that once at St. Ansgar. A bunch of trees on campus blew down. A lot of damage in town, too.”

  “I wonder how far the damage goes here,” Stephen said. “All the way to the Northwest Angle, do you think? And back to Kenora?”

  “That’s something we probably won’t know until we dock,” Anne said.

  The progress of the houseboat, though measured, created a small breeze that felt cool against Rose’s face. Her eyes hurt from the intensity with which she scoured the lake and the darkness ahead. Mal had said that, as soon as they hit open water, he’d try to give the houseboat more throttle. Until then, it was best to proceed with utmost caution.

  “Do you think they’re okay, Aunt Rose?” Anne asked.

  Anne stood to her left. Rose tried to remember what that side of the boat was called. Starboard? Port?

  “I really think that, yes,” Rose replied, trying to keep the exhaustion out of her voice.

  Stephen stood to her right. He turned his face toward her sharply. In the moonlight at his back, half his features were brilliant, the other half in shadow. “Why?” he challenged.