The Purification Ceremony (23 page)

    “Bugger’s a beast,” Nelson cried when we reached the flat and we both stopped, bent double, gasping for breath. “He knew we’d run that slope!”

    “He doesn’t move like a seventy-year-old man,” I said.

    “Who said Metcalfe was seventy?” Nelson asked, surprised. “James was in his late fifties and hard as a rock.”

    “You think it’s him?” I asked.

    “I don’t know, eh? A strange man, that James, but I never thought he’d go in for something like this. Then again, he got damned weird after Annie, Grover’s mom, died. They were lovers, going way back. The old man loved her more than his real wife, that’s for certain. Nancy Metcalfe was a shrew. Kids weren’t much better, especially the boy, Ronny.”

    “Grover told me Ronny was mean to him.”

    “That was Grover being kind. Ronny was a sadistic little shit. You know, the kind of kid who’d blow up a frog with a firecracker. There’s a story that when they were kids, he smashed Grover’s pet loon over the head with a rock while Grover was watching.”

    “Ronny a hunter?”

    Nelson thought about that for a second. “Yeah, but not as good as his father. Not by a long shot.”

    “But it’s possible. That it’s Ronny, I mean.”

    “At this point anything’s possible, eh?”

    I took it in, trying to figure out what would make James Metcalfe, a man grieving for his lost love, turn madman. Or, if it was Ronny, what would make the son of a famous hunter turn murderer. I could come up with no answers that satisfied me.

    “Where are we?” I asked, changing the subject.

    “About a quarter of a mile from where Griff had his stand the first day,” Nelson said.

    Something clicked deep inside me and I stared at him in disbelief. “We’ve got to move! He’s going to lose us in the water!”

    And then we were racing over fallen logs, through poplar whips, over hummocks swept clean of snow by the wind, slipping on the long-forgotten frozen red earth that did not offer solace, only a covenant of the unknown. The brush grew thick in the drainage bottom. We crashed into it. Thorns snagged at our clothing. We were close targets in the brake, but dread did not accompany me; I was the sudden welcome sister of a harpy, praying for conflict.

    I beat Nelson to the stream bank, sliding up to it on my knees, my safety off, my index finger poised at the trigger. Earl’s attacker had gone to the rushing water cleanly and not exited the other side. I looked for silt in the streambed.

    I peered at the snow on the overhanging brush for clues to the direction he’d taken. There was nothing but the patina of new snow on old snow and, under it, dead branches and, under them, the aerated fury of water.

    I sat cross-legged, leaned my head against my gun and cried; it was my vote that had brought us out here today, my vote that had put an arrow in a man’s back. And when it counted, my skills had failed me. Water travel was part of his pattern, his willful use of Power, but I had not anticipated his using the stream again.

    Nelson came in behind me, huffing and choking with exertion. He glanced at me and then at the last track. He watched the stream for a very long time while I composed myself.

    “Must have gone on his hands and knees out of here, eh?” he said at last. “Got to want to leave a place something fierce to crawl in ice water.”

    I got out some tissues from my pocket and blew my nose. I pressed snow to my eyes to reduce the puffiness. “I don’t think physical pain enters into his reasoning,” I said. “He’s beyond it.”

    That idea bounced around me during the hike south in the unfulfilled hope we’d find his exit trail this side of the Sticks. It sat on my shoulder on the long trudge out to the logging road in the twilight and in the pitch-darkness and driving snow while waiting for Cantrell. It would not leave me, even when we’d reached the lodge and I’d slumped in a chair to drink the steaming-hot cup of coffee Sheila gave me while Theresa bustled around her man. If Earl’s attacker was beyond pain, death did not matter; he’d already experienced it in some manner and been reborn as this monster hunting us.

    Amie had moved a bed down into the great hall, where Earl could be cared for. He’d shot the businessman full of Demerol, then opened the wound enough to lay in a shunt he’d fashioned from the trimmed ringer of a rubber glove to drain off the fluids that pooled around the broadhead. He had Lenore spoon-feeding Earl mass dosages of antibiotics he’d crushed and dissolved in boiled water. Still, the pediatrician looked worried.

    “We’ve got to keep a close eye on the shunt for evidence of spinal fluid,” I heard him tell Cantrell. “If we find it, it means his spinal column would be open to infection, which threatens his brain.”

    “Jesus.” The outfitter ran his stubby fingers through his beard. He looked haggard and beaten and in need of a deep sleep.

    “We’re not there yet,” Arnie said. “I just wanted you to understand what we’re up against here. I’ve got him on antibiotics, but I don’t know if I have enough for six days.”

    “What about cutting the broadhead out?” Cantrell asked.

    Arnie grimaced. “If the tip of the broadhead is just touching the spine, then we’re better off leaving it as it is and trying to make him comfortable. I try to cut it out, I run the risk of opening a spinal column that was intact.”

    “And what if the broadhead’s in the spine and there is fluid coming out?”

    Arnie rubbed at his forehead. “A close call. Maybe you try to cut it out, irrigate it and provide drainage. Maybe you don’t. It’s a no-win situation. Either way, he’s going to get much worse before we get him out of here.”

    So what do you want from me, Doc?”

    “A watch schedule,” Arnie said. “Someone must be with him around the clock. I’ll be here, too. But I’ll need sleep in case he crashes and I have to operate.”

    “Done. No one’s leaving the compound anymore anyway.”

    I’d been listening to it all with my eyes shut. I opened them to find Kurant listening to the conversation and taking notes. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d considered sleeping with him. Then again, I thought, no man is an island. No woman for that matter, either, though I can believe that a woman must at some level be an atoll, a ring of islands connected by reefs. Our outer shores take terrible beatings, but we offer shelter in the lagoons we create at our center.

    I allowed myself a wry smile at the thought. And then, whirling out of my subconscious, it hit me. And I sat up straight and looked over at the enlarged topographical map of the Metcalfe Estate. I walked over to the map and stared at the little sliver of brown in the thick swath of blue. I shivered in understanding, knowing for certain now where the killer was camped.

    

    

    I WENT OUT from the cabin three hours before dawn, skirting the pines on the lakefront. Six new inches of snow had fallen. The air had warmed. The snow was wet. I kept to the shadows thrown by the gas-lights mounted on the corners of the porch of the main lodge and headed for the storage shed next to the icehouse, where the bodies of Patterson and Grover lay.

    The corroded bolt to the shed wailed when I drew it. I waited five minutes after the noise cut the night. No movement in the house. No sounds but the whispers of snow. I got inside and flipped on my flashlight. Rubber chest waders hung on a nail above the snowmobiles. I took them and lashed them across the top of my knapsack. I would need them where I was going.

    The knapsack rode awkwardly now with the top-heavy weight of the waders, but I shrugged off the discomfort and went out into the stormy night. I shut the door and drove the bolt home with a second cry. A baton of light flared in my eyes. I held up my hand to block the blaze. “Who’s there?”

    The light dropped toward my waist. Lenore stood on the bottom step of the back porch, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She was still in her hunting clothes from the day before. Her features had retreated, leaving her bone-exposed like an animal after a severe winter.

    “I can’t sleep. I saw you come by the window. Where are you going?”

    “To find the killer’s camp.”

    Lenore took several steps toward me. Her expression was grim, her color unnaturally pale. “Earl’s stoned on those drugs Arnie gave him. He moans and sweats.”

    She paused and the faintest smile crossed her trembling lips. “He calls my name. Not the others’. Mine. Lenore. But he can’t hear me and I can’t help him.”

    I didn’t know what to say. I was beyond her now, already going deep into the forest of my mind. “Please don’t tell them where I’ve gone.”

    “I don’t know where you’re going,” she replied honestly. “But if you do find it and they are sleeping, remember my husband and… cut their throats.”

    There are women who believe they have suffered so much they have inured themselves to suffering. Lenore seemed one of those women. I wanted to tell her that if you live long enough, however, you find that the tapestry of this existence is composed of knots of wracking seizures and recoveries. Lenore did not realize the jumbled perceptions that accompany ruthless pain had only just begun to weave themselves around her. That she would have to discover for herself.

    I walked away from her, head down into the storm. I passed the dim frozen forms of the hanging deer on the pole. Their carcasses shifted in the wind. The racks of the biggest ones clacked against each other — it is the sound you hear deep in the woods when the rut comes on and the bucks, driven by forces beyond their control, enter the annual rites of madness. I shivered at the clacking and hurried to get beyond the noise.

    I took a straight route out the logging road to the east-west road. I figured I had at least a three-hour head start before my absence would be discovered. They would not find my tracks because I would take my cue from the killer; I would go to water and move forward into the end of something, leaving no trail behind me.

    The darkness embraced me. There is a resonance to moving with only a thin shaft of light to guide you in such darkness. The night presses and pulses around you. It threatens and soothes, turns the snow under you to pumping mottled cream, like the wings of hawks at dusk. I kept my sanity under the pressure of the darkness the way I’d been keeping it since I’d arrived. For years I’d stood outside myself, able to live with what I’d become by watching Little Crow as if she were separate, a creature in a cage to be studied and, at times, pitied. But in these past few days, and certainly within the past twelve hours, I’d moved within Little Crow, not in retreat, but in exploration, searching for the sign of who I’d been before my mother died.

    In the months after I’d comforted her in her bedroom. Katherine had a stable period. By early spring of the following year, however, it was apparent that she was sliding by inches into a state of alternating realities, of clarity and then of murkiness. We’d find her running her fingers over framed family photographs in the den. She called Bert the postman “Charley.” She asked why Mitchell, dead nearly six years, hadn’t come down to dinner.

    And she got lost on opening day of trout season. I’d gone south along the riverbank that morning, while she said she was going to one of her favorite pools. We’d agreed to meet at ten and move to another section of the river. Ten came and passed. I walked upstream toward her pool. In one of the last patches of snow beside the bank, I discovered her prize six-weight bamboo fly rod and her wicker creel. The water above the pool was high and frothy. I ran along the bank, looking for her tracks. I found none.

    Katherine!” I screamed. “Mom!”

    There was no sound but the rushing water. I was sixteen years old. I panicked and jumped into the river and crossed to the other side. I ran frantic like a bird dog in cover. A half hour later, I found her on her knees in a shallow, turning over rocks to see what sort of nymphs she could find. When she heard me, she looked up and smiled.

    “Honey, I didn’t know you were coming to fish today.”

    It’s opening morning, Katherine,” I said, kneeling beside her. “I’m always with you opening morning.”

    “Opening morning?” she said. “Imagine that! It feels like I was fishing here just yesterday.”

    I reached out and touched her hair. Her scent and the river’s mixed and swirled around me. “Let’s go home now,” I said.

    My father was the one who had to tell her. He took her down to her gazebo in early June. I watched from the window. She fought at first. Her arms flailed and she took on that imperious pose I’d seen her use with visiting lobbyists standing in the muck of her casting pond. But my father had delivered bad news to a thousand families. He held firm. I could see a brownout of the energy that always seemed to render her skin electric. Her knees buckled and she fell into his arms. I went to the bathroom and threw up.

    Two weeks later, just as the summer began, Katherine resigned her seat in the State Senate. She made light of the event, but it was apparent in her carriage that jettisoning her position had blurred the edges of her being.

    She fished most every day that season. Each morning I awoke to the whip and ring of her fly line extending out over the pond. It was as if she believed that the constant attention to the mechanics that had been her personal Tai Chi since childhood could give her a grappling hook on the shale slope she now lived on.

    And surprisingly, for almost a year, it did. When Katherine took to waters, she assumed the lucidity of a spring-fed stream. Sporadically, when she was doing well, she spoke of writing books or teaching a course at the university in Orono. But by the fall of my seventeenth year, the number of days when her mind turned muddy rivaled the clear ones.

    The day before my father and I left for deer camp that November was one of her bad days. A friend had offered to stay with her. I went to kiss her good-bye and she grasped my hand as if she’d never hold it that way again.