William Krueger - Northwest Angle

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 all 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.