As she stood watching, she realized that some of the stars were moving. A boat. Not the powerboat, which had run without lights and had moved with reckless speed. Maybe a houseboat? Oh, God, if she could just signal it. She thought frantically but came up with nothing. If only they’d prepared wood for a fire, something she could set a match to.
And then what, Jenny? Use a blanket to send smoke signals? And what if the man in the powerboat came instead?
She heard the rational voice in her head speaking words her father might have spoken, and she watched the lights vanish behind the blind of other islands.
She returned to the shelter, fighting the urge toward discouragement, a fight made easier whenever she saw the baby. He was awake, but not crying. He lay caught in a netting of moonlight that fell through the cracks in the evergreen boughs above. He looked at her silently as she knelt beside him, his dark little eyes intense. She reached out and took his small hand. He gripped her thumb with a strength that surprised her.
She’d almost had a baby once. And when she didn’t, she’d worked very hard at not imagining what that might have been like. She’d struggled to close the wound in her heart.
“Don’t you worry, little guy,” she said gently. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”
She took him in her arms and carried him out of the shelter and stood looking down at the little white moon of his face, and she couldn’t help but smile. She heard a cricket chirping somewhere near, the first sound of life from the island since the storm.
“See?” she said to the child. “Everything will be just fine, don’t you worry.”
She heard underbrush and branch breaking not far away. She turned, knowing it was too late to hide, and she waited. Her father appeared and seemed surprised to see her in the open with the baby.
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
“Just fine,” she replied. “We both are.”
“Wonderful,” her father said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
THIRTEEN
Cork searched the shoreline until he found two snapped trees suitable to his purpose. They were poplar, the broken sections eight inches in diameter. One was roughly ten feet long, the other six. He’d have preferred them to be more or less the same length but knew he had to make do. He hauled the trunks to the rocky cove in the lee of the outcropping and worked by the light of the moon. Using the hunting knife, he cut away as many of the branches as he could and put the trunks side by side. The fit was far from perfect, but it would have to do. He cut the fifteen feet of clothesline cord he’d taken from the cabin into two equal sections and lashed the broken trees together. The result was a long raft just barely wide enough for the baby and some of the items from the shelter. He dragged his construct into the water and was satisfied with its buoyancy. When he was finished, he returned to the shelter.
Jenny had prepared things there. The stove was closed and latched. The blanket was tied in a bundle with the most necessary things inside—diapers, formula, bottle, some canned goods.
“Ready?” Cork asked.
“Do we really need to do this?”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want to take any chances. Do you?” He pointedly eyed the baby she held.
“No,” she agreed.
“Bring the little guy. I’ll get the other things.”
The moon was directly above them, and they walked in puddles of their own shadows. Crickets chirped all around now, a hopeful sound, Cork thought, as he led the way to the cove.
When Jenny saw the raft he’d built, she said, “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Dad, that won’t hold us.”
“Not us, but it will hold him and the other things. You and I are going to swim.” He pointed across the channel to the little island with the stand of trees still intact. “I figure it’s maybe a couple of hundred yards, that’s all.”
He made it sound like no big deal, though he knew there was great potential for danger. If the baby got fussy or restless and kicked around a lot and ended up in the lake. If another storm whipped up out of the blue and caught them in open water. If the cigarette boat returned while they were making their passage.
Jenny said, “And if he falls in? Or if that guy comes back in the boat while we’re crossing?”
He laughed, despite himself and their precarious situation, because Jenny, in her own thinking, was right there with him, neck and neck.
“All right,” he said. “I admit it’s got its risks, but I don’t have a better offering at the moment. Are you game, or do we stay here and wait it out and hope cigarette boat man doesn’t come back looking for us? You have an equal vote in this.”
She rocked back and forth as she held the baby. He’d fallen asleep again, cradled in her arms. Cork was a little disturbed at how natural it seemed to see them both this way.
“Okay,” she finally said. “But we swim on either side of him. Everything else can go to the bottom of the lake, but we make sure he’s safe.”
“Of course,” Cork said. “Give me the basket.”
He’d left a few branches in the center of the raft as a kind of cradle. He placed the wicker basket there. Ahead of it, he put the stove and Jenny’s knapsack and, behind it, the blanket bundle and the jug of distilled water. He stripped to his swimsuit and laid his dry clothes on top of the blanket. He held the baby while Jenny did the same, then handed the little guy back. She took him, waded into the lake, and carefully laid him down in the basket. He didn’t wake.
“You ready?” Cork asked.
“Let’s go,” she answered.
They shoved off, carefully guiding the raft between them. The lake was cool but calm. Each held to the makeshift float with one hand and with the other pulled through the water. As they swam, they pushed away the debris that clogged the channel. Their movements created a profound disturbance. Undulations crawled away in all directions, and the surface of the water became mercurial in the moonlight, silver along the crests and black in the troughs.
Cork had grown up on Iron Lake, the crown jewel of Tamarack County, and he’d been a swimmer all his life. He’d taught his children to swim almost before they could walk. So he didn’t worry about Jenny. A couple of hundred yards was nothing. Unless the baby gave them trouble. But the child was quiet, riding comfortably as young Moses might have in his basket of woven reeds. Cork wondered just a little at the child’s apparent complacency, which all things considered, seemed unusual, maybe even a little unnatural. His own children, as he recalled, had all been light sleepers, and he and Jo had spent long hours at night walking them. On the other hand, his children, when they were babies, had never been left alone for a full day without food or liquid, had never cried hour after hour until sleep came only with complete exhaustion. Which was how he imagined it had been for this baby boy. The child was still recovering, still bone weary, Cork decided. When he regained his strength, maybe he wouldn’t be so placid.
They were a little over halfway across when Cork heard the distant sound of powerful outboards.
Jenny heard it, too. “Dad,” she said quietly, but with a trace of panic.
“Just keep moving.”
“Maybe it’s not him,” she said.
“It’s him.”
They kept stroking, kept the same measured pace, which helped maintain the stability of the thrown-together raft and avoided jostling the sleeping baby too dramatically. Cork was concerned that very soon it wouldn’t be the motion of the raft that would waken the infant but the sound of the big outboards as the cigarette boat made its way through the debris of the channel. He tried to formulate a plan, some way of heading off the disaster that was approaching. When the boat swept past, the roar of the engines might be loud enough to drown out any noise the child would make. But once the engines cut out, it would be a different story. The baby’s crying would carry forever in the calm of that night. Cork thought that if he were the man in the cigarette boat, he’d come back slowl
y, perplexed by the child’s presence in the middle of the channel. He’d use his searchlight to sweep the water. And what would happen then?
Cork decided, and he knew he was getting a little desperate here, that when the light snapped on, he and Jenny would loose their hold and go under and swim away. They would resurface at a distance, perhaps using some of the debris as a shield, and maybe, just maybe, when the boat eased up to the raft, Cork could somehow surprise the man at the wheel.
All this thinking took place in the course of less than a minute. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Jenny whispered from the other side of the raft, “If he comes, you swim away. I’ll try to keep him focused on me and the baby, and maybe if he’s distracted you’ll have a chance of surprising him.”
Which, except for the obvious danger in which it put his daughter, wasn’t a bad idea. Better, probably, than his own. Because if Jenny stayed with the raft, she would make sure that the baby, in his flailing, didn’t tumble into the lake.
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.
FOURTEEN
At 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.