Northwest Angle (11 page)

He said, “All right.”

They both kept swimming.

The boat didn’t come, not then anyway. Cork heard it veer southwest, somewhere beyond the little island toward which he and Jenny were swimming. In another minute, the engines died. He wondered if maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the man in the cigarette boat, although all his sensibilities told him otherwise. And it was safest, he knew absolutely, to proceed as if it was that man and he was someone to be avoided.

As they approached the island they hoped would provided sanctuary, Cork’s feet touched rock. He found footing, and he and Jenny eased the raft to shore.

“I’ll hold,” Cork whispered. “You take the baby.”

Jenny grasped the wicker basket and lifted it. Cork watched for the small eyes to blink open, but they didn’t. He grabbed the stove and the bundled blanket and led the way into the trees.

Moonlight fell between the boughs and lay on the ground in bright, shattered pieces. In this helpful glow, Cork picked his way carefully through the underbrush. He went until he reached the place where the trees met the protective rise of rock. He found a fold in the formation, a kind of alcove where the underbrush gave way to coarse grass and was walled by rock on either side. The baby had awakened and begun to make fussing noises, turning his mouth toward Jenny’s breast. Cork quickly set up the stove, unbundled the blanket, and pulled out a bottle Jenny had prepared earlier. He grabbed the pan and said, “I’ll be right back.”

At the lake, he dipped water and heard clearly the hungry baby beginning to cry. Cork wondered just how far such a sound would carry, and he was angry with the child. An irrational anger, he knew. The baby was just being a baby, but he was putting them all in danger. He hurried back and set the pan on the stove and the bottle in the pan. Jenny had laid out the blanket on the wild grass and was doing her best to soothe the infant, to no avail. Cork slipped his knife from his belt and held it up near the baby’s face. The polished blade caught the moonlight, and Cork played the silvery reflection across the baby’s face. The child
stopped fussing, captured by the sudden glittering. He reached for the blade, curious and intent. Cork moved it away, then near, then away again in a kind of game. In this manner, he kept the baby quiet until the bottle was warm enough to feed him.

Jenny settled herself on the ground with her back against rock and the baby in her arms, sucking greedily. “Thanks,” she whispered.

Cork turned away, still angry and ashamed at his anger, and he said, “I’m going to the top of this rise, see what I can see.”

“The boat didn’t come this way. What does that mean?”

“Maybe I can find out.”

Under the moon, the rocky rise lay mostly white, though it was cut by long fractures that were dark, like poisoned veins. The outcropping was bare, no cedars or any other growth offering cover. Cork recalled how clearly the man in the cigarette boat had stood out in silhouette on the rise back of the cabin, and he was careful to keep himself low as he approached the top, which was only slightly higher than the crowns of the trees it protected. He found an isolated boulder and sat in its shadow while he studied the other islands to the southwest. There were so many that they seemed to merge into one inseparable mass. He focused and tried so hard to see detail that his eyes began to hurt and his vision blurred a little.

He closed his eyes. Images came to him, unbidden, of the body in the cabin.

During his life as a cop, he’d seen cruelty in so many forms. What he’d found in the cabin topped them all. She wasn’t much more than a child. There was something about her face, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, that was disturbing. Not the bruises that had resulted from beatings—though these were horrific enough—but something in the structure itself that nagged at him. Her body was small and lean, the weight she had to have put on during her pregnancy nowhere evident. Was it possible she wasn’t the baby’s mother? No, he decided. There were stretch marks. And her breasts were full, as with milk. The
hard life alone on the island could have rid her quickly of extra fat. Which made him wonder how long she’d been there. Since winter? But how would she have kept warm? She couldn’t have built a fire in the stove if hiding out was the point of her being there; eventually the smoke would have given her away. So probably, she’d come after the thaw. Had she delivered the baby there, in that primitive place? Or had she come afterward?

Cork rolled around in his head the question Jenny had considered: Was there evidence of rape or some other form of sexual violation? He tried to recall the locations of the bruises and if he’d seen a pattern. There’d been discoloring across her left cheek and around the left eye. She’d been hit repeatedly from the right. Bruising also across the left side of her torso. Bruising as well where she’d been bound about the wrists and ankles. But no bruising of the insides of her upper thighs, which he would have expected had she been sexually molested.

He was not terribly shocked at his ability to recall all these horrific details. A lifetime of training, he understood. What really bothered him was that he couldn’t help seeing Jenny in that young woman’s place. As soon as his mind started to go there, his gut drew taut and his eyes blinked open.

And he saw it. A small flicker of light. Maybe only a match struck for a cigarette. But there it was. For a few long moments. Then gone. Although the dark made it difficult for him to judge distance accurately, Cork made a rough guess that the light had come from three or four hundred yards away.

Why had the man in the cigarette boat stopped there? Simply to wait at a safe distance until it was light enough to check the island where the woman had been murdered? Or was there something particular about the place he’d tied up?

Questions, only questions. Cork would have given his right arm to know who was out there and what they were after. His right arm to know what he would be facing when he finally took his stand.

A
t eighteen, she’d been in love. Desperately in love. The way you can be in love only once and only when you’re very young. His name was Sean Pflugleman. He was a poet and the son of a pharmacist. She was a writer of—well, everything then. They’d begun dating when he was seventeen and she sixteen. They’d talked of going to Paris together after graduation, of becoming the new Lost Generation, of embracing the bohemian, of throwing convention to the wind and living simply to discover life and all the experiences that the world offered. Sex was, of course, a part of that discovery. And although they were careful—condoms—in the summer after she finished high school, Jenny O’Connor had become pregnant.

And that had changed everything.

Sean, so eager in his lovemaking and gallant in his poetry, bridled at the idea of becoming a father. He became sullen and accusatory, and when his parents strongly suggested that he “do the right thing,” he blamed Jenny for ruining his life. It was odd, she’d thought then, how quickly that kind of love could die. She wasn’t necessarily thinking of Sean’s love for her; when she saw what he’d become, she’d wanted nothing to do with tying her life to his, or his to the child they’d conceived, and her love for him had shriveled to almost nothing. She’d been determined to have the baby, and her mother and father had pledged their full support in helping her raise their grandchild.

Near the end of her first trimester, she’d miscarried. She was counseled not to think of it as losing a child, but how could she not? Life had been inside her, connected to her, dependent on her. Her blood had flowed through the baby and the baby’s blood through her. She’d felt it every day, a connection more powerful than anything she’d ever known, including her passion for Sean. Once she’d accepted her situation and had made her decision to keep the baby, she’d embraced her new life with joyful expectation. A baby. Her baby. She would wake sometimes, alone in her bed in the house where she’d grown up on Gooseberry Lane in Aurora, Minnesota, and feel tears of happiness as she imagined what her new life would be like. Not easy, she clearly understood. A single mother. It would mean a shift in all her plans. She’d been accepted to the University of Iowa, with the idea that someday she might become part of the famous writers’ program there. But that wouldn’t be. The child would come first. Maybe she would attend Aurora Community College. Maybe she would take over management of Sam’s Place, the burger stand her father owned on Iron Lake. It didn’t matter. What she did would be done for her child, and whatever was required of her, she would do it with love.

The miscarriage had changed everything again.

She’d gone to Iowa City, graduated with honors, been accepted in the writers’ program. She’d met Aaron Houseman, a poet-farmer who lived in the area. He was older than she by several years, but he was a good man and shared with her a love of language and an understanding of the power of words. Last June, they’d moved in together, his place, an old farmhouse on acreage that straddled a little creek a few miles outside Iowa City. He hadn’t grown up farming, but land was part of his inspiration and poetic vision, and he dabbled at planting and harvesting, though his real money came from a trust fund. He’d built a shack on the stream, where he would disappear for long hours to write. She had a job at the
Press-Citizen,
the Iowa City newspaper. In the evenings, she worked on a novel.

It was a good life. But there was a complication. Aaron
wanted to marry; she did not. The reason for her reluctance was the whole question of children. She wanted them; Aaron didn’t. In a way, he was like Sean. He had his work and he had Jenny and he was happy with that. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. To be an artist required so much focus, so much energy. But she believed that this kind of creation was only a part of a life. And in its way, Aaron’s refusal to have children was a refusal to participate fully in the panoply of existence, and wasn’t that really the responsibility of an artist? To experience life in all its aspects?

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.

R
ose 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.