In the Lake of the Woods (18 page)

Good thoughts, Kathy told herself. Good thoughts for good girls. She gripped the cord with both hands, braced herself and pulled back hard.

There was a short coughing sound. The Evinrude sputtered, then caught.

Kathy gave it some throttle.
Good thoughts for good girls.
It was one of those proverbs her Girl Scout leader used to clip out of Methodist magazines and recite to the troops as a way of bludgeoning them toward rectitude. The old lady—Mrs. Brandt—she had banality to burn. A jingle for every occasion: birthdays, menstruation, first love.

Kathy couldn't help smiling as she turned the boat back into open lake.

Never pout, never doubt, that's our famous Girl Scout.

Right now, though, it was hard to push away the apprehension. The shadows were rapidly lengthening, and in the air there was the crisp, metallic scent of winter. A shift in the ozone, maybe. Mrs. Brandt would've been ready with all the technical details.
When you're lost, look for the moss. It's on the north, so sally forth.

It took almost twenty minutes to cross the open water. This time there were no channels south. Directly ahead, the shoreline loomed up as a blunt, gently curving mass of rock and pines, a long green wall arcing out in front of her as far as she could see. Kathy cut back on the power, idling offshore, trying to settle on a proper course of action. Nothing sensible revealed itself. She gazed at the dense forest, then up at the sky. The facts seemed obvious. Lost and totally alone. And the physical universe had no opinion. Trees did not talk. No face behind the clouds. No natural laws, only nature. Which was the truth, she told herself, so she might as well get on with it.

She brought the boat around and followed the shoreline in what she took to be a generally westward direction, looking for a channel south. The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries. Suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.

Very briefly, closing her eyes, Kathy felt the need to cry. Her throat tightened up. "Don't be an idiot," she said. "Just find a goddamned
way.
" And then for a long while she followed the curving shoreline, moving at low throttle, watching the sun sink toward the trees straight ahead. The wind was colder now. She passed between a pair of tiny islands, veered north to skirt a spit of rocks and sand, then aimed the boat
west into a wide stretch of choppy water. After more than a hour nothing much had changed. The purest wilderness, everything tangled up with everything else. At best, she decided, the day contained another half hour of useful light, twenty minutes to be safe. She hesitated, then turned in toward a small dome-shaped island off to her left. No choice, she thought. Get some sleep. Start fresh.

Thirty yards offshore she cut the power. Already dusk was coming down hard.

The little island seemed to float before her in the purply twilight, partly masked by a stand of reeds and cattails. She unlashed the oars, set them in their locks, and began pulling in toward what appeared to be a narrow strip of beach beyond the reeds. It was harder work than she would've guessed. The waves kept turning her, and after only a few strokes she felt a dull ache settle into her neck and shoulders. The effort exhausted her. Twice she got caught in the reeds and had to back off and pick out a new angle of approach. On the third try she stopped and pulled up the oars. "Fuck it," she said, "you're not a child."

She stripped off her sneakers and jeans, moved to the stern, hopped out into thigh-deep water. The quick cold made her skin tighten. Partly wading, partly swimming, she got behind the boat and wrestled it through the cattails and up onto the narrow beach. She used the bow line to secure the boat to a big birch and then lay back on the sand to let herself breathe. It felt good to have ground beneath her.

The darkness now was almost complete. Six o'clock, she guessed.

For a few minutes she lay listening to things, the waves and nighttime insects, then she got up and took off her underpants and wrung them out. In the boat she found an oilcloth to dry
herself. She put on her jeans, slicked her hair back, used the last slivers of dusk to do an inventory. There wasn't much. No matches or lighter. Nothing to eat. She had, the life vest, which she now slipped on for warmth, and she had her wallet and a pack of Life Savers and a tackle box and some Kleenex and the gasoline and the two oars and the boat. In her pockets she found a comb and a few coins.

She dragged the boat higher up onto the beach, wedged a couple of rocks under the stern.

It wasn't a beach, really. Just a ledge of sand jutting out from the main body of the island. It was shaped something like an arrowhead, forty or fifty feet wide at the base, narrowing toward the tip. Behind her, where the ledge hooked up with the rest of the island, she could make out a long dark smudge of heavy forest.

Kathy spanked her hands together. "Well, let's
go,
" she said, which gave her confidence. Quickly, she moved to the tree line and collected an armful of pine boughs and carried them over to a level spot beside the boat; in five minutes she had a mattress. She covered it with the oilcloth and sat down. Good enough, she decided. And nothing more could be done until morning. She took out a Life Saver, leaned back against the boat, and looked up at a bright yellow moon rising over the pines to the north. She wouldn't starve. Plenty of fish in the lake. Mushrooms and berries, all kinds of things.

Right now, she thought, John would be getting a search organized. Helicopters and floodlights. A whole army of Girl Scouts out beating the bush.

Things would work out.

She was strong. Good health, good brains.

Yes, and in the morning she'd get out the tackle box and do some trolling, pull in a nice big breakfast. Find a way to
make a fire. Then look for a channel south. Keep going until somebody found her, or until she ran dead-on into the Minnesota mainland.

Easy, she thought. Like one-two-three.

Kathy pulled her arms inside the life vest. For a while she listened to the waves, the swishings in the trees, then later she found herself thinking about John. A New Year's Eve back in college when they'd gone dancing at The Bottle Top over on Hennepin Avenue. The way he'd looked at her, no tricks at all. Just young and in love. Sentimental, maybe, but it was one of those times when all the mysteries of the world seemed to condense into something solid. People all around them, drums and guitars, but even so, they were all alone in their own little bubble, not really dancing, just moving, smiling from inside themselves. At one point he'd taken her face in his hands. He'd put his thumbs against her eyelids. "Boy, do I
love
you," he'd said, and then he'd made a small turning motion with his hand, as if to drop something, and whispered, "Girl of my dreams."

She'd never figured out what he'd dropped that night. Himself, maybe. Or a part of himself.

But it didn't matter. Because in the morning he was stationed outside her dorm again, the same old games, and after all these years nothing had really changed. The secrecy and spying, it never stopped, not for long, and at times she'd felt an overwhelming need to remove herself from him, to make herself vanish.

Which was what happened finally.

The thing with Harmon—it wasn't love.

Not infatuation, either, and not romance, just the need to break away. Someone kind and decent.

Kathy tucked her chin into the life vest, closed her eyes.

Love wasn't enough. Which was the truth. The saddest thing of all.

She curled up against the boat.

In the morning she'd start fresh. Find something to eat and fill up the gas tank and see what the day brought. Fresh, she thought.

By early morning of the second day, September 21, the organized search force included close to a hundred volunteers, three State Police aircraft, two patrol boats from the Ontario Provincial Police, and a U.S. Border Patrol plane equipped with air-to-ground optical mappers and a General Electric infrared heat scope. More than thirty private boats were out; others were on the way from Warroad and Baudette. The search zone encompassed more than six hundred square miles of lake and woods.

Nothing at all was found.

No boat, no body.

John Wade spent most of the morning on the telephone. Claude and Ruth Rasmussen took turns playing secretary, filtering out the news rats, but still Wade found himself mumbling things to people whose faces he couldn't summon up. He felt tired and helpless. Just before noon Kathy's sister called from International Falls to say she'd be coming in by float plane at one o'clock.

Her tone was brusque, almost rude. "I'll need to get picked up," she said. "I mean, if it's no problem."

"One o'clock," Wade said.

"Any word?"

"Nothing. They keep saying to be patient."

There was a buzz on the line before Pat said, "Christ," and broke the connection.

 

Wade showered, put on clean clothes, and made the twenty-minute drive into town. Another bright day, almost hot, and the trees along the road flamed up in brilliant reds and golds. Now and then he'd catch a glimpse of the lake off to his right, which brought Kathy's face to mind, but he told himself to cut it out. Thinking wouldn't help. Not him, not anyone. As ' the road flattened out into open country, Wade tried to prepare himself for what was coming with Pat. There was a tension between them that never seemed to unwind. Cold civility at best. Right from the start, way back in the college years, Pat had always appraised him with a frosty, calculating stare, searching for the flaws, beaming in on him with hot cobalt eyes. Partly it was a distrust of men in general. Two divorces, a long string of live-in boyfriends. Four years ago she'd taken up with a weight trainer at a fancy health club over in St. Paul. The trainer was long gone, but Pat now owned the club and three more out in the suburbs. It was the only relationship that had ever worked out for her: a thriving business and the sort of body you didn't insult. A hard case, he thought. And the trick now would be to keep a buffer between them, polite but plenty of distance.

He pulled into the gravel lot behind Pearson's Texaco station. He parked and went inside. Art Lux was sitting at a pair of marine-band radios.

The sheriff got up, poured coffee into a styrofoam cup, passed it over to Wade. "Not a whole shitload to report," he said. "Still at it, lots of lake to check out." Behind him, the
two radios made sharp crackling noises. "Got yourself some rest, sir?"

"A little. What's the plan?"

"Nothing fancy. Keep at it." Lux pointed up at a large survey map tacked to a wall. "That whole area there, we got it covered solid. Checked out the resorts. All closed up for the season, no signs of nothing. Right now the wild card's gasoline. How much she's got, how she uses it. Those little Evinrudes, the fuckers go forever on a lousy tablespoon."

Wade nodded. He watched Lux pour himself a half cup of coffee and sit down in front of the radios. The man was wearing his dairy farmer outfit, gray on gray, a green Cargill cap perched up top.

"So you're hanging tough, sir?"

"Well enough. Kathy's sister comes in at one."

Lux offered an approving smile. "Glad to hear that. A person needs company."

"True, but it doesn't help—"

"If you don't mind my saying so, a thing like this, it tends to put everything else in perspective. What's important, what's not. Politics and all that." Lux glanced at the radios, then at the concrete floor. "Not that it matters, I guess, but I voted for you. Great big X next to your name."

Wade rolled his shoulders. "That's two of us."

"You deserved better."

They looked at each other with a kind of curiosity. Not friendly, not hostile either. Lux locked his hands behind his head, tilted back in his chair. "I should be totally straight. Vinny Pearson, he thinks you're—what's the right way to say this? He thinks you're not quite explaining everything."

"Vinny's wrong."

"Is he?"

"Yes," Wade said. "I love my wife."

"Well, absolutely. I can tell. Thing is, though, Vinny says you should be out looking. That's what he keeps blabbing about—'The man ain't even
looking.'
Exact words."

"No kidding?"

"Yes, sir."

"In that case," Wade said, "tell him to fuck himself. Exact words."

The sheriff grinned. "Right
there,
that's how come I voted for you. Spit and vinegar. All the same, a piece of advice, you might want to think about getting some fresh lake air."

"Fine then. I'll do that."

Wade looked at his wristwatch and turned toward the door.

"One other thing," Lux said. "You get a chance, bring the sister by. A couple simple questions."

It was a little before one o'clock when Wade stepped outside. He walked up past the post office and turned into the boatyard behind Arndahl's Mini-Mart. The place was littered with barbed wire and rotting lumber and a dozen old boats in various stages of decay. Near the water a hand-lettered yellow sign said town landing. The place seemed inanimate, no cars or people.

Wade made his way out onto one of the wooden docks and looked across the inlet to where the horizon was almost black with forest. His headache was back. Too much booze, obviously. It was time, he decided, for some reforms. The positive approach. Dispense with the liquor, get himself together.

Tomorrow, he thought. No doubt about it.

 

At one-fifteen the float plane splashed down, settled onto its pontoons, and turned in toward the docks. Pat was first off. No mistaking her—a taller, more muscular version of Kathy.
She wore a red tank top, black jeans, high white sneakers. Even from a distance her arms had the gloss of new copper piping.