William Krueger - Northwest Angle

In his bunk on the other side of the small cabin, Mal slept dead as stone. Rose finally slipped out of her own bunk and went to the window. In the east, she saw a thin vermilion line, the approach of dawn. She also saw Aaron, standing alone on the dock, hands deep in the pockets of his jeans, staring where the day would break. Quietly, she dressed in the clothes she’d worn the day before, put on her canvas boat shoes, and eased herself out the door.

The birds were calling to one another. She realized that, after the terrible storm, everything had been stilled, even the sound of the birds. Had they fled to safety somewhere and now returned? The air was cool and moist, the wind steady and fresh against her skin. She smelled the scent of wet earth and evergreen coming from the woods at her back.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked as she approached Aaron. She’d softened her voice in order not to startle him.

He turned his head, showing the strong profile of his face. She didn’t know much about him, but she could clearly see one of the reasons Jenny had been attracted to him. With all that tousled hair and those haunting green eyes and the brooding aspect of a poet, he was beautiful.

“Can’t stop worrying,” he said. “Can’t stop wondering where she is out there, if she’s okay, if she’s hurt, if she’s scared, if she’s—” He stopped himself.

“If she’s even alive,” Rose finished for him. She stepped to his side and stood near enough that she could feel the warmth of his bare arm. “I’ve been praying all night that they’re safe.”

He stared at the bloodred line in the sky. “I don’t believe in prayer. But right now I wish I did.”

“I wish you did, too. I find that, when I have no control over something, it’s a comfort to let go and put my trust in a prayer.”

Aaron said, “Did you pray for Jenny’s mom?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me for reminding you, but it didn’t do much good.”

“Not for my sister, no.”

Somewhere far out on the lake, in water that was still the color of night, a loon called. It seemed an utterly sad sound.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said. “That was unkind of me.”

“Maybe, but it was the truth of how you feel. It helps me know you better.”

“This,” he said, lifting his hands in quiet frustration, “wasn’t how you were supposed to get to know me.”

“Nor you us. It is what it is.” The vermilion line in the east was growing wider and more diffuse, and the surface of the lake had picked up a hint of color, which was the hue of old blood. “She was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Only one of you, lots of us. And the O’Connors can be clannish.”

“Show me a family that isn’t. But I’m guessing that’s not what was really worrying her.” He turned to her fully, and even in the dim illumination that was a long distance from daylight, she could discern the intensity in his eyes. “She’s talked to you, I know. Things haven’t been exactly easy between us lately. I wasn’t even sure I should come. Now I look out across this lake and I think to hell with the small squabbles. I just want her to be with me and be safe.”

“I understand.”

He studied her and nodded. “She’s told me a lot about you, about everyone. She’s pretty high on her family.”

Rose smiled. “We’re all pretty fond of her, too.”

Jenny hadn’t said much about Aaron’s family, and what little she did wasn’t encouraging. They lived somewhere in Virginia, near D.C. They had money, from banking, she thought. Aaron was their only child, which to Rose meant that they should dote on him. But Jenny said there was something not right in his relationship with his parents, something festering, something that Aaron wouldn’t talk about but that kept him at a distance. He hadn’t been home in several years, and if his parents wanted to see him, they had to come to Iowa. They almost never did. She had yet to meet them.

“You really heard a smuggler out there?” Aaron asked.

“We heard a boat running through the dark. From what Seth said, the circumstance seemed consistent with the action of a smuggler.”

He thought about that, then his gaze made a long sweep of the lake. “A big place, this. Probably not much chance of them running into that kind of trouble, don’t you think?”

What she thought was that she didn’t know the Lake of the Woods and so had no idea what might be possible. What she said was “I’m sure you’re right.”

“I guess we should try to get some sleep,” he said.

“Do you think you can?”

“Maybe I’ll try saying a little prayer before I lie down.”

He didn’t look at her or smile, and she had no idea if it was meant as a joke.

She hoped it wasn’t.

NINETEEN

The cigarette boat roared out of the glare of the rising sun, just as Cork had predicted. He shielded his eyes and squinted and watched it race over water that reflected morning sunlight with painful brilliance. It swung to the far side of the island, where he lost it behind the bald rise that backed the old, damaged cabin. The engines cut out suddenly, and Cork suspected that the boat had entered one of the many inlets along the island’s shoreline, where it would anchor.

He slid toward a small formation of rock that was like a lifted shoulder, slipped into the long trough of morning shadow that it cast, and tried to be still as the stone where he lay. He scanned the island across the channel for any sign of the man who’d come hunting. The birds had returned, and he saw white pelicans roosting along rocks that shot up from the waterline like a row of molars. An eagle rode the wind, circled the island, and finally landed in the crown of one of the few ragged spruce trees that had survived upright. It was an hour before he saw movement of a larger creature near the center of the island, scuttling over a long outcrop of flat-topped rock. Cork wouldn’t have seen him except that the rock was pale as ice and the mottled green of the man’s camouflage fatigues stood out for a few moments in sharp contrast. The figure quickly crossed the rock and vanished amid the debris on the other side. He was too distant and too soon gone for Cork to make out how heavily armed he might be. From the man’s position, Cork was fairly certain that he was, in fact, working his way down the length of the island.

Cork had been right in much of his thinking so far. Not that it pleased him. During the night, as he’d kept his lonely vigil atop the rock, he’d allowed himself to hope that he might be wrong about everything. That the man had fled the island in order to alert the authorities and let them deal with the girl’s murder, and that with the morning light they would come, and he and Jenny would be rescued. Of course, there was the fact that the man had already returned once and carried away the girl’s body, but maybe there was a reasonable explanation for that, too, one that, because he was tired and battered, Cork simply wasn’t seeing.

Now, as he watched for the lone figure to reappear, he was pretty certain the man had taken the body to dispose of it. No corpus delecti, no proof of a crime. This time the killer had returned to be certain that, if there were witnesses, they, too, would disappear.

Now Cork speculated that the man in camouflage would reconnoiter the island and probably find the smashed dinghy and the little shelter Jenny had built and understand that someone had been there after the storm but was no longer. He would realize that in this place visited by no one, someone had come, thrown there by providence and the storm. They’d found the murdered girl, and maybe the baby, and then what? Been rescued? Probably not, or at least not yet, since the island was so remote. So what, then? Gone somewhere else would be the most obvious answer, slipped off the island seeking a better hiding place. And where would that be? The hunter’s gaze would swing across the narrow channel to the only stand of trees in sight that was still upright and offered shelter.