Boundary Waters (17 page)

“Do you have anything to back up these accusations?”

“I didn’t even have these accusations until a day ago. The different last names—Harris and Jackson—threw me off. I never saw the connection before. But look at it. Same men who investigated the murder are here now. And not officially. Tell me that doesn’t smell rotten to you.”

Jo turned away from them in her chair and quietly studied the gray morning beyond her window. Cars drove past on the street. She could hear the swish of their tires on the wet cement.

“What do you want from me exactly?” she asked.

“Whoever the law is in these parts, talk to them,” the white-haired man said. “Get somebody out there to cover your husband’s ass while he finds Shiloh.”

“Why don’t you tell them yourself?”

“Booker T. Harris looks good. People believe him. Me,” and he gestured toward his wobbling body, “I’m just a crooked old jellyfish. But people who know you here, they’d listen to you. Angelo tells me you have a reputation for integrity. That’s a rare thing anywhere.”

She looked at Angelo Benedetti, who gave her the slightest of nods.

“Mrs. O’Connor,” Vincent Benedetti continued, “if a lot of people find out Shiloh’s out here—especially those rags—it’ll be open season on my girl. There’ll be a stampede and your little town will be right in the middle of it. You need to act quickly. I’m leaving you a card. Angelo.” He snapped his fingers, and Angelo Benedetti pulled a business card from his coat, wrote a number on the back, and handed it to her. “Call me and let me know what’s going on.”

She looked at the card. A purple parrot on the front with Angelo Benedetti’s name embossed below in gold. On the back, a telephone number.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“Just call,” Benedetti said. “Do we have a deal?”

“I’ll check it out. If I think you’re telling me the truth, I’ll be in touch. If not, I’ll have the authorities looking for you. Deal?”

Vincent Benedetti offered her a hand that quaked like an aspen leaf. “Deal.”

24

C
ORK HEARD THE TENT FLAP QUIETLY LIFTED
, and he was instantly awake.

“It’s light,” Sloane said through the mesh of the tent door. “Time to move.”

From behind Sloane came the crackle of a fire. The smell of wood smoke and fresh coffee drifted through the opened flap.

“Louis built a fire at first light,” Sloane explained. “I figured there wasn’t any reason not to at this point. The coffee’s ready. And water for oatmeal. Let’s move it, gentlemen. We’ve got a long way to go.”

The drizzle had ended, but thick clouds lay against the treetops and ragged gray wisps drifted among the trunks and along the riverbank like lost souls. Except for the crackle of the burning wood and an occasional word that passed between Stormy and Louis Two Knives as they stood by the fire, the forest was quite still.

Raye crawled out of the tent after Cork. He arched his back and stretched his arms. “You know, Louis,” he said with a little grin, “I dreamed all night long I was being chased by a
majimanidoo.”

Louis had been sipping hot chocolate. He lowered the cup from his mouth and a serious darkness entered his young eyes. “What do you know about a
majimanidoo?
”

Raye poured himself coffee in a hard plastic mug. “Not much. Except that according to your mother, it looks exactly like Agent Sloane there.” He lifted the mug to his nose and took in the good hot smell of the coffee.

“What’s a
majimanidoo?
” Sloane asked. He was already at work taking down his tent. When the boy didn’t answer, he stopped and looked to Stormy Two Knives. “Well?”

Stormy shrugged. “My son is the expert on his Ojibwe heritage. Me, I just have it in my blood.”

“What’s a
majimanidoo,
Louis?” Sloane asked.

“A dark, evil spirit,” Louis reluctantly answered.

“You mean because of my color?”

Louis shook his head. “Spirit. Evil spirit.”

“A devil, Sloane,” Raye offered. “An Ojibwe devil.”

“If there is a devil in these woods,” Sloane said, casting a cold eye on Stormy Two Knives, “he’s for goddamn sure met his match in me. Cut the talk now. Get food in your bellies and let’s get going.”

Cork was mixing instant oatmeal in a bowl. “What’ll happen when you don’t check in with your people in Aurora?”

“For a while, nothing,” Sloane said.

“Then?”

“Then they send someone to the last coordinates I gave and they start looking.”

“That was the other side of Bare Ass Lake. We’ll be a long way from there,” Raye said.

Louis asked, “Do they know how to read trail signs?”

“Trail signs?”

“Notches on trees, rocks set in a line, that kind of thing,” Louis explained.

Sloane actually smiled. “That’s a little primitive for them, son.” He shrugged. “But what the hell, it’s worth a try. I’m putting you in charge of trail signs, Louis.”

Within an hour, they’d shoved the canoes into the sweep of the Little Moose River. The water was swift, clear caramel beneath them and silver gray ahead. Between them and Wilderness, the first and largest of the lakes north along the Little Moose, lay more than a dozen miles and two unnavigable rapids. Cork had the point, paddling his canoe. Stormy and Louis came next. Raye and Sloane brought up the rear.

Cork had been thinking a lot about who killed Grimes. Whoever they were, they had some knowledge of the woods they were traveling. Except for the glimpse of the ember Louis had seen on the lake, they’d kept their presence hidden. Although they would have had to stay pretty far back to remain unseen, they’d followed exactly, at every turn and every trail juncture. Cork decided it was likely they knew where Louis was leading them—at least to a point. But they must not have known the whole of it, Shiloh’s exact location. As he’d told Raye the night before, Cork believed that whoever they were, they wouldn’t do anything further until Shiloh was found.

Cork was certain that after that, whoever it was shadowing them,
majimanidoo
or otherwise, they would strike.

25

S
HILOH SAT UPRIGHT WITH A JOLT
and listened. She stared straight ahead and blinked away the blur of sleeping. A thread of white smoke curled upward from a circle of ash near her feet and she realized she’d let the fire burn out. Panicked, she looked around desperately for the yellow eyes of the timber wolf who’d watched her from the darkness of the trees. A wet mist cloaked the woods and lake, and she could see nothing beyond a dozen yards. She reached for the knife she’d clutched much of the night, the Swiss army knife Wendell had given her as a gift. Although the blade wasn’t long, it was sharp, and it was all she had in the way of a weapon. She probed the mist and strained to hear again the sound that had awakened her.

The night before, soon after she first saw him, the wolf had slipped away, vanishing as silently as he’d appeared. She’d risked a moment to feed the fire, and when she’d looked back, the eyes had been gone. She held tight to the knife, blade extended and gleaming in the firelight, and tried to see everything all at once—left, right, behind her. Although she seemed alone, she felt watched. All night, she felt watched. After a long time had passed, she knew she had to prepare for the cold, wet hours ahead. As Wendell had advised, she put on the thermals to wick moisture from her body. Over that a layer of wool—sweater and pants. Then her jacket, and finally a slicker as the light rain began to fall. When she finished, she clutched the knife in her gloved hand and settled herself against the big rock at her back. Before she knew it, she’d given in to sleep.

Her sleep was restless, haunted not by fearsome images of the wolf but by an old visitation. She was in Wendell’s cabin. Safe. Outside, a light rain fell. She could hear it against the windows. She’d laid a fire in the stove, which had warmed her. The sound from the burning logs, the hiss and pop of sap, was like a song. A knock at the door disturbed her. Who would come so far to visit? Who would know how to find her in that hidden place? In the prescient way of dreams, she knew that it wasn’t Wendell and that she should not open the door. But the dream had a terrible momentum of its own. She watched herself cross the cabin floor and reach out to the latch. When she swung the door open, the Dark Angel swept in on black wings. Shiloh fell back. As always, the Dark Angel had no face, only a deep emptiness, black as a starless night, where a face should have been. From within that emptiness came a powerful force like the suck of a tornado trying to pull her into the void. She fought, uselessly, and felt herself being drawn into a place she knew was death.

She woke before she was swallowed, drawn out of her sleep instantly by a sound.

It came again, from the wall of gray mist that blocked the lake, the noise that had yanked her from her sleeping. A hoarse cough, somewhere out on the water. She tried to stand, but her whole body objected, every muscle cramped and knotted. Slowly, painfully, she stretched herself out. Carefully, she stood.

It was like a prison cell, the small area she could actually see. Drab gray and menacing. Beyond the rock, the lake was flat and solid as iron plating. The mist shifted slowly of its own accord in the windless morning.

A crow’s sudden cawing broke from somewhere out in the gray and startled her. She listened.

Only that,
she thought, relieved.

Then a watery plop, followed by, “Shit, Roy, I can’t see my damn hand in front of my damn face. The fish can’t see nothing neither. No wonder we’re having the luck God give a three-legged racehorse.”

A minute later, Shiloh heard the sizzle of fishing line played out fast from a reel and the splash of a big fish breaking water.

“Got him!” the voice exclaimed triumphantly.

“Well, hell, don’t tip the damn canoe, Sandy. You’ll lose him for sure.”

“I ain’t tippin’ nuthin’. Shift the other way, goddamn it.”

“Play him, Sandy boy,” the second voice urged. “You really hooked that son of a bitch.”

“We’re tippin’, Roy!” Sandy shouted.

“I got it under control. My butt’s practically in the water over here. Just land the damn fish!”

The two voices barked back and forth a while until the splashing stopped.

“What d’you figure, Roy? Eight, ten pounds?”

“If it’s an ounce.”

“Didn’t I tell you they come big up here?”

“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me fishing from a canoe was going to be such a royal pain in the ass.”

Shiloh called into the mist. “Hello?”

She was greeted with silence.

“I need some help,” she tried again.

Out of the gray, a wary voice queried, “Who are you?”

“Help me, please.”

“Hell, Sandy, can’t you hear it’s a woman? Put that damn fish down and grab a paddle.”

Shiloh heard the water break with rapid strokes. A moment later, they emerged from the mist. Two bulky men, bearded, wearing down vests and billed caps. They came at the shore fast, then backpaddled hard before they hit the rocks. The man in front looked up at Shiloh with concern.

“You okay, miss?”

“I am now,” Shiloh replied.

The two men exchanged bewildered glances as she broke into great sobs of relief.

26

W
ALLY
S
CHANNO REMINDED
J
O OF
A
BE
L
INCOLN
. Not because he looked like the Great Emancipator, although in his height and gauntness there was a certain similarity. It was more that Schanno seemed like one of those rails Lincoln had spent so much time splitting in his early years. Thin, dry, tough. Suited to the purpose of being part of a structure that delineated something. In the case of Lincoln’s rails, they were property fences. In Schanno’s case, he was the law in Tamarack County.

When he opened the front door of his home to Jo, he was dressed in a white shirt, dark tie, gray pants held up by gray suspenders. He gripped a coffee cup in his hand and he smelled of Old Spice aftershave.

“I’m sorry to bother you so early, Wally.”

“That’s all right, Jo. Just finishing my morning mud.” He held up his cup. “Come on in.” He stepped aside and put a finger to his lips. “Arletta’s sleeping.”

“How is she?” Jo asked in the foyer.

Schanno took her coat and hung it in the closet. “About the same. I count it as a blessing that she doesn’t seem to be getting much worse. Doc Gunnar says Alzheimer’s is like that sometimes. Plateaus, you know.”

Arletta Schanno was one of the finest, prettiest women Jo had ever seen. She’d been a schoolteacher before the disease hit her. Annie and Jenny had both passed through her classroom, and both still said third grade was the best year they ever spent at Aurora Elementary.

“May’s here now, you know,” Schanno said, speaking of Arletta’s sister. “She’s a big help.”

May stepped in from the kitchen. She was a dark-haired woman in her early fifties. She came from Hibbing and Jo didn’t know her well. She seemed a stern woman, not given to smiling, the way Arletta had always been. But she was obviously capable and willing to help. Goodness came in all kinds of packages.

“Would you like some tea or coffee?” May asked. It was a polite question, but not especially warm.

“Thanks, no, May. I just want to talk to Wally briefly.”

“All right.” She disappeared into the kitchen immediately, as if the room had sucked her back in.

They settled in the living room. Schanno took the big easy chair. Jo sat on the edge of the sofa.

“The men who went into the Boundary Waters with Cork. I think they may not be who they claim to be. You spoke with them. Did you ask them for identification?”

“Sure, I did. But—” A dour look came over his long, raggedy face.

“What is it, Wally?”

“I’m not saying anything for sure, but I have a strange feeling in my gut about this whole thing. Why are you asking?”

Jo told him about her visit from Benedetti and his entourage. Schanno listened quietly through the whole thing. Jo couldn’t recall hearing the man ever swear before, but when she finished, Schanno said, “Jesus.” He rubbed his clean-shaven jaw. “Like trying to decide which side of the razor blade to grab hold of.”