Boundary Waters (27 page)

“And we’d have lost that anyway,” Sloane added.

Stormy put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Louis, you’ve done a good job.”

The boy smiled at his father’s praise, and he looked down, embarrassed by the attention of the other men.

“How about some coffee before we start the next one?” Sloane suggested.

He made the brew and they all took some, including Louis, and they sat around the fire. Cork was tired to the bone and could see it in the faces of the others as well. They’d had a long, hard paddle. Two men had met brutal deaths. And it had come down to this: The life of the woman they’d come for might well depend on a couple of thin strips of birch bark. But Cork felt a quiet pride at that moment, in the company of these men and the boy. For despite the terrible odds against them, they had not backed down.

“If you’re right, Cork,” Sloane said, finally breaking the good quiet that had come with the coffee, “and Shiloh got free, where would she go from here?”

With his index finger, Cork snagged a bit of ash that was floating on the surface of his coffee. “I’ve been thinking about that. Louis could probably back me up, but I’d guess if she knows anything at all, she’s headed for the Deertail River. It would begin to complete the circle back to the place we put into Boundary Waters yesterday. The river heads southeast, ultimately to Lake Superior.”

“Wouldn’t she have passed us on our way here?” Willie Raye asked. “I mean, wouldn’t we have seen her?”

Cork shook his head. “In this weather, with all these islands, we could miss the
Queen Mary
going by.”

“So,” Sloane went on, “she makes this river, the Deertail, then she’s home free?”

Cork swung his gaze to Louis.

“Animkiikaa,” Louis murmured.

“I don’t know what you said,” Sloane told the boy, “but it don’t sound good.”

“It means ‘thunder,’” Louis said.

“On a white man’s map, you’ll see it called Hell’s Playground,” Cork said.

Arkansas Willie asked, “What is it?”

“As bad a stretch of rapids as you’ll find anywhere in the Boundary Waters,” Cork replied. “Class four. Deafening when you’re near it.”

“Wouldn’t she know about Hell’s Playground?” Sloane asked.

“If she’s got a map,” Cork said. “And if she knows how to read it.”

Willie Raye rubbed his hand across his mouth in a nervous way. “If she doesn’t know and she gets herself into them . . .” He couldn’t finish his question.

Sloane set his cup down. “Maybe we’d better get started on the other canoe.”

They all moved toward the work, all except Arkansas Willie Raye, who doubled over suddenly and hobbled desperately toward the trees.

36

S
HILOH KEPT THE FIRE SMALL
. A compromise between fighting the cold and risking that the stranger, should he find a way to follow her, might see the blaze. She hauled the canoe well away from the shore of the island and covered it with evergreen boughs. She built the fire in the lee of the canoe and bent close to warm herself.

She had no food. Everything she had, she’d brought in her pockets. Matches, knife, map. But she didn’t care that she couldn’t eat. She was alive. God almighty, she was alive.

She’d climbed the slippery rock wall ahead of the man who called himself Charon, hoping he’d fall. He didn’t. He was agile as a mountain goat, even with the heavy pack on his back, and he was never farther from her than arm’s reach. She made it to the top first, a few seconds ahead of him. He mounted the wall and stood poised there, the floor of the forest below him on one side, the long narrow lake Wendell called Nikidin on the other. She turned to face him. And what she saw behind him made her eyes go huge.

He glanced at her face, saw the surprise there, and spun around to confront—

A gray wolf.

The animal was tensed as if to leap at him, focused on the stranger with a fierce intensity in its yellow eyes, its teeth bared. A threatening growl rumbled in its throat.

Charon went for his gun. As his hand disappeared into his vest, Shiloh lunged at him, pushed into him with all her strength. She would love to have shoved him so that he fell to the forest floor, but her vantage point gave her only the option of the lake. As he plunged into the water a dozen feet below, Shiloh turned and fled up the trail along the ridge.

The trail led eventually to the cabin, but she didn’t stay with the trail. After fifty yards, well out of sight of the place where the stranger splashed, struggling to climb from the lake, she hid herself. Her gut said to put distance between them, but she’d lived with fear long enough now not to be shoved around by it foolishly. She pressed herself flat on the wet ground behind a low growth of blackberry vines. Two feet to her right, the ground ended in a twenty-foot drop to the lake. She knew it wasn’t a likely spot for hiding—open and with no escape. In her mind, however, she saw him running past her, bolting toward the thicker woods atop the ridge where the cover was better.

In the still, wet air, sounds carried easily. She heard him grunting as he heaved himself from the water up the rock wall. Heard him swear softly. Heard the squish of his wet leather boots and the swish of his wet jeans as he bounded up the trail toward her.

She stopped breathing and squeezed shut her eyes, as if plunging herself into a dark silent place might blind him to her. She held her breath until she began to feel dizzy and to hear only the sound of her own blood throbbing in her ears.

Then she exploded. Sucked in air like a big machine sputtering to life. And when she could hear again, she heard the sound of the man who called himself Charon running far up the trail near the top of the ridge.

She should wait, she knew. Give him time to move farther on. To be lost for good among the trees above her. But the panic she’d kept at bay finally was on her. She sprang up and leaped the blackberry vines and ran as fast as she could for the rock wall that dammed the stream. She slipped twice scrambling down but felt no alarm at the near plunges. What did she have to lose? She reached the bottom and didn’t look back as she raced for the cover of the woods. When she reached the big lake, she shoved her canoe into the water and paused only long enough to pull the knife from her pocket, whip out the blade, cut free the yellow duckie, and put two long slashes in its side. She hopped into the stern of her canoe, grabbed the paddle, and dug hard at the water.

She imagined him on the shore, aiming his gun. She felt the place between her shoulder blades where the bullet would rip through. But she didn’t risk a glance back until she was more than two hundred yards out. Then all she saw was the empty shoreline, the flat yellow at the water’s edge where the deflated kayak floated like a pat of melted butter, and, among the pines where the stream ran, a gray shape that moved low to the ground and vanished the moment her eyes found it.

She’d paddled ceaselessly, with a strength that came from a place inside her she’d never known existed. Two hours, three, she didn’t know. Somewhere along the way, the rain turned completely to snow and the gray light to a deep charcoal that was early night. She bumped into an island and realized she could go no further. With what suddenly seemed the last of her strength, she dragged the canoe from the water. With her knife, she cut evergreen boughs and hid the craft. The rain had wetted everything, but she found a fallen birch, broke off some branches, stripped the wet outer bark, and shaved some dry kindling.

She was beyond tired. She entered a place where her thoughts and actions seemed to bubble up of their own accord from some well of primordial knowledge. She realized she was humming to herself and thought probably her music had always come from the same kind of place. The best of it anyway.

Feeding the flames sparingly, keeping the fire small, she thought about the stranger, the man who called himself Charon. Why had he come for her? What purpose would her dying serve? Who wanted her dead? And what did it have to do with the work she’d hidden at the cabin? Whoever was behind it, they’d learned about the work from the letters she’d written poor Libbie. What was it she’d put in those letters that would drive someone to murder? Was it the past? She’d been so vague in what she told Libbie about the secrets of her therapy, both with Dr. Sutpen and on her own in the deep woods. The future? She’d been more explicit about that, full of an excitement she could barely contain. No drugs, no running from the past, no longer being nothing but a piece of dandelion fluff borne on the strongest wind. She was going to shape her future, change her life. Oh, she had such visions. And The People—Wendell’s people, her people now—would be a part of everything.

But there could be no future until she freed herself completely from the menace she’d only just escaped, the man called Charon. It was as if the Dark Angel had stepped from her dreaming and had become flesh and blood. Well, if this was the Dark Angel, if this was the horror of the past rising, then she would be ready. This time she would fight back.

She realized she was beginning to nod, the exhaustion finally overtaking her. But there was one chore left before she slept.

She unfolded the blade of her knife. Grasping a handful of her long black hair, she severed it near her scalp. She took another handful and cut. Again and again and again. The knife moving over her whole head. Long swathes of her beautiful hair lying about her as if she were in the midst of slaughter. Hacking away. Cutting shorter and shorter. Until she could grasp her hair no more. Until there was so little left, no one could.

37

J
O WAS STARTLED AWAKE
by the ringing of the phone in her bedroom.

“Jo. Wally Schanno.”

“Yes.” She rose up in bed, struggling to shake off her sleep. “What is it, Wally?”

“I’m sorry to bother you so early.”

She glanced at the clock on the nightstand: five-thirty
A.M
. “That’s all right.”

“They found a body. One of the search parties did. Last night. Out in the Boundary Waters. A helicopter’s airlifting it to the morgue at the community hospital right now.”

“Have they identified it?”

“No. Only a brief description.”

It was like seeing the flash from a muzzle and waiting for the bullet to strike.

“Go on.”

She heard him take a deep breath. “Male. Caucasian. Red-brown hair. Brown eyes. Medium height and build. Age probably mid- to late forties. It’s vague, Jo.”

“No, it isn’t, Wally.” The bullet had struck. Dead center in her heart.

“You don’t have to come down. I—just thought—”

“I’ll be right there.”

Her blood was racing when she hung up. Her breath came rapidly and with effort. Her throat was taut and dry.
Dear God, let it be someone else.

The hall light went on. Rose stood in the doorway.

“I heard the phone ring,” she said.

“They found someone. In the Boundary Waters. A body.”

“Oh, dear.” Rose put her arms around herself as if she were suddenly cold. “Do they know who?”

“No.”

“Do they—?” It sounded as if Rose’s throat had gone tight, too, and she’d choked a moment on the words. “Do they know how?”

“I don’t know. They’re bringing the body in by helicopter.” Jo was up and looking for clothes, anything. “I’m going down to the hospital. I need to be there when it comes in.” She pulled on jeans, thick socks, a sweater, no bra. She stopped dead and looked at Rose. “The description fits Cork.”

“Oh, my God, Jo.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s him.”

“No,” Rose agreed.

Jo lurched toward the closet, grabbed a pair of boots. She sat on the floor and jammed them on. The laces wouldn’t cooperate. “Fuck.”

“Jo, it’ll be okay.” Rose knelt beside her and took her in her arms.

Jo buried her head in her sister’s chenille robe. “Oh, Rose. I think of all the things I never said, the good things. And I want to take back all the hurt.”

“I know. I know.”

Jo gathered herself, wiped her eyes. “Not a word to the kids.”

“Of course.”

She pushed herself up. “When I know something, I’ll call.”

“All right.”

Jo was out the door, down the stairs. She pulled her coat from the closet and headed through the dark kitchen to the back door. As she opened it, she felt Rose come up quickly to her side and put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll be praying.”

Jo closed her eyes a moment. “Me, too.”

A light snow had fallen in the night, covering Aurora in a thin layer of white. Like the sheet over a corpse, Jo thought as she drove to the Aurora Community Hospital. Morning was crawling up the eastern horizon. The snow clouds had moved on. The sky was a pale blue-white, the color of deep, hard ice on a lake.

Because the hospital served a large, rural area, a heliport had been constructed on the eastern side of the building. In summer, especially, the heliport got a great deal of use—accidents with axes or chainsaws, drownings, cardiac arrests in city men who eagerly shed their suit-and-tie identities and, envisioning themselves as latter-day voyagers, embarked on canoe expeditions far more demanding than their flabby, cholesterol-ridden bodies could endure.

Wally Schanno was in the parking lot near the heliport, hunched up in his leather sheriff’s jacket, hands sunk deep in the pockets. Booker T. Harris and Nathan Jackson were there as well, sitting in a blue Lumina, engine running to keep them warm. Schanno walked over to Jo’s Toyota when she parked it.

“I’m real sorry about this,” he told her as she got out. “I probably should have waited until I knew something for sure.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” she said.

She scanned the sky. Lots of stars were still visible, particularly in the north, the direction from which the helicopter would come.

Schanno looked at his watch. “ETA about ten minutes.”

“How’d they find the body?”

“One of the search parties set up camp at nightfall at a landing on the north side of Embarrass Lake. Guy gets up in the middle of the night to relieve himself and stumbles over a pile of rocks. He pulls off a few and sees that there’s a newly dug hole underneath. Digs down a little and finds the body.”