The Purification Ceremony (29 page)

    I never warned my father again about my feelings. I didn’t need to. He could see them in the clouds that passed over my face when he’d come to say good-bye to Katherine before departing for rounds at the hospital and the clinic.

    I’d leave Katherine slowly, envisioning all that might happen and praying it would not.

    I must have been calling out in my sleep, because suddenly I jerked awake and Griff was pressing an ice pack to the nasty swelling on my cheek, saying, “Your daddy’s not here, Little Crow. It’s just me, and you’re going to be all right.”

    I stared at him for a long time before asking, “What time is it?”

    “Quarter to six in the evening,” he said. “Arnie says you were suffering from hypothermia and exhaustion. It’s a miracle you got back here at all considering you had just those deer skins for clothes. He’s already sewed your cheek and your forearm up. And he cleaned out those nasty dog bites, though he’s worried about rabies. We found the bloodied picture of a woman in your pouch. Is she part of this? Phil said you talked to the killer! What happened?”

    Woozily, I sat up on the couch they’d laid me down on in the great room of the lodge. I was dressed in somebody’s thick flannel robe. The room spun before settling. Arnie was checking on Earl across the room. Lenore hovered nearby. “Tell me what happened to Butch first.”

    Griff’s expression tightened. “A nightmare. Cantrell and Nelson and I tried to backtrack you yesterday morning, but we lost your footprints in the storm around nine.

    Every two hours we drove the cat along the logging roads hoping to find you coming in. But by this time yesterday, I thought we’d lost you for sure.”

    “What about Butch, Griff?”

    “We were pretty low last night at dinner, but I’d made up my mind to go back out at first light and look until I found you,” he went on in a strained voice. “Arnie had Earl’s vital signs stabilized, and no loss of spinal fluid, thank God. But he still had us on shifts around the clock. Butch had midnight to three. Here’s the awful thing: Theresa left a window cracked in the kitchen to air out the fish smell from dinner.”

    “He came in an open window?

    Griff nodded, chagrined. “Yeah, she’s taking it hard, figures she’s to blame. Way I see it, he would have gotten in somehow. Anyway, Theresa said when she finished her shift at midnight, Butch was lying on the couch by the fireplace, reading a book. We figure the killer came in around a quarter to two. Earl says the painkillers were wearing off by then and he couldn’t sleep. He saw the guy coming through the kitchen door with a weird black knife out and that wolf cape on, heading straight for him.

    “Earl yelled for Butch,” Griff continued, “and Butch woke up and went for his gun. But Earl says he never saw anyone move that fast in his life. Before Butch could swing the shotgun around, the killer had the fireplace poker in his hand and was clubbing Butch’s wrist. The gun went off before Butch dropped it, and that woke up Phil and Arnie in the next cabin and Cantrell and Sheila in their cabin.

    “Then Earl says the killer hit Butch on the side of the neck with the poker and he dropped. By now Phil and Arnie were banging on the front door. And the killer knew he was getting closed in on and he started to run. Only Butch wouldn’t give up. He got the ash shovel and chased the sonofabitch. Cantrell was working at the kitchen door, trying to get it open.

    “Well, the killer went up the stairs and Butch followed, right on his heels. Only Butch tripped and the killer — ” Griff shook his head, not believing it. “He spun and cut Butch’s throat before he could even get his feet under him. Cut his throat and slashed off part of his ear and the right side of his scalp in one motion. Took it with him.”

    My mind reeled with the image of the shrine in the cave.

    “What about the stained-glass window?”

    “I’m coming to that,” Griff said. “Just as he cut Butch, Phil threw one of the porch chairs through the front window and jumped through right when Cantrell got the kitchen door open. They both shot at the guy as he went up the last flight to the landing.”

    Arnie had left Earl’s bedside to come up behind Griff. There was a bleak cast to his skin. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the doctor said quietly. “Phil and Mike shooting at him from two different angles and neither of them hits him He had that hunk of Butch’s long brown hair in one hand and the knife in the other and he went straight at the stained-glass window and dove through it. He landed on the porch roof in the snow, rolled off and kept on running.

    Butch was dead by the time I got to him.”

    He hung his head.

    Griff said to me, “But what happened to you?”

    “You better get the others,” I said.

    An hour later, I’d gotten into real clothes. Arnie had cleaned and redressed the bite wound on my arm. He’d given me a mouthful of antibiotics and some painkillers. My back and leg muscles were stiff and my left arm and cheek throbbed, but I was clear-headed.

    They were gathered around me in the great room, silent. The chaotic despair I’d stumbled into was gone, replaced by a new and jaundiced view of the world, a view shaded by a nervous vigilance; and I knew they knew that nothing I would say would change that. It would likely make it worse, for they would be thinking — why did she live and the others die? And I would not have an explanation.

    I told them how I’d come to guess at the position of the camp on the island at the confluence of the Sticks and the Dream, how I’d gone upstream to the Sticks in the waders, how I’d crossed to the island, entered the cave and found this photograph and another like it on a macabre altar. Before I could continue, Lenore interrupted. “Who is she?”

    “Who cares?” Phil snorted. “Who’s the motherfucker in the wolf’s hat?”

    “He wouldn’t tell me who he was,” I replied. “He just kept asking me, ‘Know my name? Know my name?’ When I asked him if he was James or Ronny Metcalfe, he just laughed.”

    Theresa’s head turned into Nelson’s shoulder and she whimpered. “He’s crazy. He’s going to kill us all. And we don’t even know why.”

    Beside her on the couch, Sheila was rocking gently back and forth, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, her eyes shifting from me to the photograph and back. Cantrell leaned against the fieldstone mantelpiece, his body stiff, his expression narrow and hard. Kurant was watching both of them, but especially Sheila. The fire in the hearth flared for a second and illuminated the writer’s red hair, which had the sudden and terrifying effect of triggering in me the memory of the cave and the killer’s rants. And the horror of the cause of these murders was laid out before me in broad stroke and sickening detail.

    “Diana?” Griff said, gently shaking my shoulder. “What’s the matter? Arnie was asking you what happened in the cave after you found the photograph.”

    Stunned, I stammered, “I-I know who t-the killer is and w-why he’s here.”

    Phil’s head shot forward like a snapping turtle’s after a frog. “You know who…? I thought you said… fuck it… who?”

    I gestured at Cantrell, “Ask Mike.”

    The outfitter came off the mantelpiece braced for a fight.

    “How in the hell would I know?”

    “I think you do,” I said. “Their faces must haunt you every night.”

    “Don’t know what you’re talking about, lady,” he said. His gaze was a shell built of many layers around a cruel secret.

    I met that cold glare and matched it for almost a minute until Sheila cracked and tore the handkerchief from her mouth. “Stop it, Mike, just stop it! It’s over. I won’t go on living a lie anymore!”

    She was on her feet, no longer the little, mousy woman. She was red-faced and strung out and nasty.

    “You’ll sit down, Sheila,” Cantrell growled. “And you’ll shut up if you know what’s good for you.”

    “I won’t shut up, eh? Can’t shut up anymore. And I won’t cover for you neither!” she screamed. She turned to me. “That’s Lizzy Ryan in that picture — I’d know her face anywhere. It’s been eating at me the past six hours. It’s him, then, isn’t it? Devlin Ryan out there?”

    “I didn’t know it when I was in the cave. But I think so now.”

    “Then God have mercy on our souls,” Sheila wailed, and she collapsed into her chair and wept. Her husband did not move to comfort her. No one moved to comfort her.

    “Devlin? Lizzy? Someone gonna explain what’s going on?” Earl demanded blearily from his cot.

    I said to Cantrell. “Are you going to be a man and tell them, or will I?”

    For a moment the outfitter hesitated; then Phil stepped up in front of him, his massive paws balled into a fist. “My man Butch is on ice out there. I been shot through the arm. You don’t start talking soon, I’ll know why not.”

    Cantrell shot a look of pure hatred at me, then said stiffly, “My name’s not Cantrell. That’s Sheila’s maiden name. My real name’s Teague, Mike Teague. The woman in the picture is Lizzy Ryan.”

    Griff gasped. “Teague? You mean like the guide Teague? The one who was with the hunter in Michigan who shot…”

    “Yeah, the one who shot Lizzy Ryan in her backyard while she was hanging clothes,” Cantrell said, finishing his thought. “Not guilty as charged.”

    “You fucking loser” Phil said. He turned and flung his arm out in disgust.

    There was a moment of stunned silence, then Nelson demanded, “How could you?”

    “How could I what?” Cantrell snarled. “How could I have let Dilton shoot her? I see it in my head ten, twenty, sometimes a hundred times a day, and I’m telling you it was a deer’s tail flickering in the sunlight. Not a mitten. It was a mistake! An accident! Jury said so.”

    Cantrell slammed his fist into his palm. “But I was still branded. Dilton, he goes back to his job in Chicago, says he won’t hunt again, no problem. But for me it’s a big problem. The state took my guide’s license. I couldn’t make payments on our lodge. We lost it. We moved up to Ontario and lived with Sheila’s sister. I pushed a broom at night for five long years, waiting for my Canadian citizenship to clear. Then this deal come up through one of Sheila’s cousins and we bid on it, because guiding deer is what I know how to do, what I love to do, because it was my last hope of getting myself free of that one mistake. That one stinking mistake in the woods.”

    His voice trailed off and he slumped into a chair and held his face in his hands. He began to shake. Sheila went over to him and held him around the shoulders. He whimpered to her, “You don’t know how much I wished I’d thought it was a mitten and not a deer’s tail. You just don’t know, Sheila.”

    “Yes, I do, Mike. ‘Course I do.”

    I gazed into the fire, could not watch them, because I knew how they felt; I understood what it was to be empty and alone and tormented by a terrible secret.

    I shook myself from my trance, only to notice that Kurant had been taking notes. His face was flushed and his eyes darted around the room. He saw me watching him, scratched his head and said, “Still doesn’t explain how this guy Ryan got here.”

    “You think you’re so clever,” I said sharply. “You’re as much at fault for this as the Cantrells.”

    “What’s that supposed to mean?”

    “You know just what I mean,” I snapped. I explained how Ryan had captured me and made me smoke from his pipe. I told them everything that he’d said in the cave. “In one of his crazed moments he said he’d been visited by a messenger, a messenger with hair like fire.”

    “Yeah,” Kurant said warily. “So?”

    “So at first I thought it was just ravings. But just now, when I saw the fire light up your hair, I thought: What if he was telling the truth? What if someone did track him to the high desert of northern Mexico, someone who knew that the Teagues were back in business, someone who might goad him to come north, an ironic antagonist for a dramatic story he was working on about the culture of trophy hunting.”

    Every eye in the room was focused on the reporter.

    “What about it, man?” Phil threatened.

    Kurant tried to remain stoic, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

    “You lousy piece of dung!” Arnie said.

    “Four people are dead!” Griff cried.

    “My husband’s paralyzed!” Lenore seethed.

    “And Don’s wife’s a widow with a little baby and she don’t even know it yet,” Theresa added. The loathing in her voice was liquid.

    “I’m not the one who’s at fault here!” Kurant yelled, leaping to his feet. He pointed at Cantrell. “He’s the one who helped kill a defenseless woman. Not me. He’s the one who got off scot-free. He’s the one who made a mockery of that woman’s death. Did you know she was pregnant — Lizzy Ryan?”

    “No!” Sheila cried. “No, that’s not true.”

    “It is true,” Kurant said. “Only six weeks. And the evidence was suppressed at the trial. But I got hold of the autopsy report. I know how brutal this was.”

    “It was an accident,” Cantrell moaned. “It was all an accident.”

    “Yeah, sure it was, Mike,” Kurant went on, the passion in his voice rising with each word. “All you hunters are alike, gun-happy nuts who don’t give a damn about the rest of us who have to witness your blood sport.”

    “That’s not true,” I said.

    “It is true!” Kurant yelled. “The whole thing’s barbaric.” “I looked at Kurant in a new light. “You think you’re righting some wrong here, don’t you?”

    Kurant adopted an imperious attitude. “I intend to tell the story as it should have been told in the first place.

    Dilton and Teague walked away from a senseless killing and left behind a shattered man.”

    “Who’s now killing people!” I screamed.

    “I’m not responsible for that,” Kurant said flatly. “I just went and talked to Ryan, that’s all. I was doing my job, getting his side of the story.”