William Krueger: Northwest Angle

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes. You?”

“I’m fine.” She looked toward the two rope lines pulled stiff and vibrating from the pressure. “Will they hold?”

“God, I hope so.”

She turned to the windows that looked north toward the other end of the island. The little bay was a rage of tall whitecaps, and the beach where Anne and Stephen had stood was flooded from the surge.

“Lord,” she prayed aloud, “let them be all right.”

The houseboat rocked and the lines jerked as if tied to wild bulls, but for the moment they held. Mal pulled out life jackets, and they put them on and huddled together in the cabin. Rain fell in sheets so thick that everything across the bay became obscured. Hail beat on the roof in a great din. Pines along the crest of the island’s ridge bent as easily as prairie grass and began to snap. Soon their trunks littered the slope below.

After nearly an hour of battering, the wind finally won. The stern anchor line broke and the bow line followed. The houseboat began to drift rapidly into the bay.

“What now?” Rose said.

“Get to shore,” Mal told her and pushed her toward the cabin door.

“But the boat—”

“Forget the boat, Rose! Get moving!”

They went out onto the bow platform. Twenty yards of angry water separated them from the shore, and the distance was rapidly increasing. Waves swept over the decking under their feet and rain peppered them hard as pebbles.

Inexplicably Mal stripped himself of his life jacket. “Take my hand!” he cried.

She did and they hit the water together. She was surprised to find that her feet touched the rocky lake bottom, but they didn’t stay there long. The next wave lifted her and threatened to carry her out. Mal gripped her hand. Freed from the buoyancy of his own vest, he was able to hold himself against the waves, and he pulled her with him as he slogged to shore. They grabbed on to the pair of rocks where the stern anchor still sat wedged, and they watched the houseboat spin into the bay. A limb the size and thickness of an elephant’s leg flew from the island and crashed through the window next to the helm station. In the next instant, with a sinking heart, Rose saw the houseboat suddenly rise up in the grip of the storm. The windward pontoon cleared the water, and the boat began to flip.

Then a miracle happened. Or what, afterward, Rose always thought of as a miracle. As quickly as it had come, the wind died. With a great splash, the lifted pontoon fell back onto the water, and the houseboat continued a placid drift into the lake.

In the quiet that followed, Mal said, “Rose, I’m hurt.”

“Where?”

“My ankle. I turned it when we came in.”

“Let me see.”

She helped him lift his leg from the water. He wore shorts, and his feet, like hers, were bare. She saw the swelling immediately.

“Does it hurt much?”

“Like hell. But that’s not important. You need to get the boat, and we need to find the kids.”

She looked toward the open water. The houseboat was already a hundred yards distant and drifting farther as she watched.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“I’m counting on it.” He managed a brief smile.

She hated to leave him but knew he was right. She kissed him once, then began to swim.

FOUR

It had been a hard year and she’d needed this vacation. She’d been content to let her father and Mal control where they were and where they were going. Lake of the Woods? Fine. One of the largest lakes in North America? No problem. In the middle of fucking nowhere? Terrific. No, I don’t want to know anything about the charts or the lake channels or the islands more numerous than the stars. I just want to relax.

Until now, Jenny thought, staring at the lumps of wilderness she could see from the rocky beach where she stood. Now she wished she’d listened and taken note.

Great journalist I am, she thought bitterly. All that useful information, in one ear and out the other.

She had no idea where she was on that vast lake. No idea which direction she’d been going with her father or from which direction they’d come. She’d been too deep in her own goddamn worries to let go and be a real part of the gathering.

And now she was lost. And her father was out there somewhere. Lost, too?

She almost thought, Lost forever? but wouldn’t let herself go there. They weren’t lost, none of them. Not her father or Anne or Stephen or Rose or Mal. They were somewhere out there, safe.

“But that’s exactly what you thought about Mom, and she’s dead.”

She said this out loud, startled at the sound of her voice in all that numbed stillness. The effect was devastating. Her legs went weak, and she sat down on the little beach and didn’t feel at all the sharpness of the stones beneath her. She stared dumbly at the water, which was calm now and choked with debris.

Yeah, she’d hoped along with everyone else— believed along with everyone else—that after her mother disappeared she would be found and she would be safe. But it hadn’t been that way. All their hoping, all their praying, all their believing had been in vain. From almost the moment she’d vanished, her mother had been dead.

“Dad,” she said hopelessly, speaking toward the devastation of the lake. “Annie. Stephen.”

And then she began to cry, deep, racking sobs that went on and on.

In the end, she had no choice but to pull herself together. She wiped away her tears, forced her legs to lift her upward, beat her brain into thinking clearly. She had no idea how widespread the devastation of the storm might be, but judging from the islands around her, all of which looked like they’d been at the epicenter of a nuclear blast, the area was large. The lake water was full of uprooted trees and shattered trunks and sheared off limbs and strips of bark. A boat trying to get through that mess would have to move at a snail’s pace. It would be a long time before anybody got to her, if anybody ever did.

“Dad!” she tried again, calling his name a dozen times as she turned in a complete circle. She got nothing in return.

“You’re alone, kiddo,” she said to herself. “You’ve got only you.”

She walked to the place where the dinghy lay under a fallen pine. She worked her way through the mesh of branch and needle and groped beneath the crumpled seat in the bow of the wreckage. Her fingers found wet nylon. She gripped the material and pulled it with her as she eased herself free.

The knapsack was stained with pine resin and pungent with the scent of evergreen. She dug inside and pulled out packages of cheese and crackers and some trail mix and two bottled waters, completely smashed and emptied of their contents. She found her camera intact, then her cell phone, which was also undamaged.

“Hey, girl, finally a little bit of luck,” she said, as if it was someone else speaking to her.

She powered up the phone, and the display came on and told her the device was searching. After a minute, it gave up. No signal.

“Shit,” she said and was tempted to add the phone to all the other crap in the water. Instead, she slid it back into the knapsack. And then some journalistic instinct kicked in and she brought out her digital camera, turned it on, and shot a full panorama of the destruction around her.

“Great for the documentary when they find your desiccated body,” she said.

She reviewed the photos she’d just taken and accidentally went one farther back, to an earlier shot. And there was Aaron.

From the beginning, she’d had a bad feeling about this trip. Her father had proposed it, a rare gathering of family at summer’s end. He’d just finished working a case involving a decades-old serial killing that had ended in the suicide of a wealthy man. She could tell it had affected him deeply, for reasons he wouldn’t go into, but he’d been almost desperate to have the whole family together again. Anne had come home from her mission in El Salvador, Stephen from a summer of cowboying on Hugh Parmer’s ranch in Texas, Mal and Aunt Rose up from Evanston. And from Iowa City, she and Aaron. Except that Aaron couldn’t come right away. He was committed to teaching a poetry workshop at a conference in the Black Hills and couldn’t get free until three days into the trip. The plan had been to pick him up at Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle that afternoon.