William Krueger - Northwest Angle

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 whisper 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.