Authors: William Kent Krueger
Her last decision was to change her will. She intended to leave everything, whatever still existed of her wealth when she took to the Path of Souls, to the Iron Lake Anishinaabe.
She’d journaled extensively, talked the whole thing out on tape, and finally, unable to contain her zeal, had written to Libbie Dobson, pouring forth the whole plan.
To possess nothing but the full abundance of her heart, even now the very idea brought her to tears. Real tears of happiness.
She wiped her eyes and saw among the trees, glowing with the reflection of her fire, the eyes of a gray wolf. They’d frightened her the first time they’d appeared in this way, but she felt differently now. She’d faced her death and her fear of it and had come to the other side of an understanding. All things were connected. Trees, water, air, earth, gray wolf, Shiloh. Life and death. Happiness and sorrow. All elements of the Great Spirit, Kitchimanidoo. If the man called Charon found her and if he killed her, she would still be a part of a great whole. As was Wendell. As was her mother.
All her life she’d felt utterly alone. But she would never feel that way again.
She began to sing softly, “The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er . . .”
The wolf drew itself back into the night and was gone.
“Is that you, Jo?” Rose paused in the dark doorway of the kitchen, a ghost in her white chenille robe.
“Yes. Don’t turn on the light.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“No,” Jo answered. “My brain’s working overtime.”
“Worried about Cork?”
“About all of them.”
“How about some tea? Herbal.”
“Thanks.”
Jo stood at the kitchen window that overlooked the driveway and the lilac hedge beyond. The moon had risen, what little there was of it, only a scrap of light amid all the debris of heaven.
“It’s cold out there tonight,” she said.
“There are lots of good people looking for them.” Rose filled the teakettle with tap water and set it over a flame on a burner of the stove.
The Burnetts’ dog, a big German shepherd called Bogart, began to bark two houses down. The sound was dim through the glass of the closed window. It was often the only sound at night, a dull constant yapping that caused the neighbors to complain but made the Burnetts, an elderly couple, feel protected.
Whatever it takes,
Jo thought.
She crossed her arms and leaned against the kitchen counter. “I’ve been thinking about Dad.”
“What about him?”
“Trying to remember things.”
“Like what?”
“I remember he was always up early. I’d wake sometimes. The house would be dark except for the bathroom. He’d be in there shaving, humming to himself, tapping his razor against the sink. I’d fall back asleep. When I woke later and went into the bathroom after he was gone, I’d still smell the Old Spice aftershave he put on. I’ve always loved that smell.”
“You never told me before.” Rose stood next to Jo so their arms touched. “Cork uses Old Spice.”
“I know,” Jo said.
The teakettle began to whistle. Jo took it from the stove and poured steaming water in the cups Rose had set out. From the cinnamon smell that drifted up on the vapors, Jo could tell Rose had chosen Good Earth.
“I don’t remember him much,” Rose said. “Every once in a while, I dream about a man. He doesn’t look like the pictures of Dad, so maybe it’s not him. But he makes me feel safe.” Rose stirred her tea. The spoon rang against the side of the cup. “The men I remember are mostly shadowy guys in the middle of the night. You know, you’d hear their voices, maybe see a big dark figure pass by your door, and they’d be gone in the morning.”
“They were spooky,” Jo said.
Rose lifted the tea bag out and took a sip from her cup. “For Mom, they passed as companionship, I guess. But I think she never loved another man.”
“Rose.”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad I’m not alone in this. Thanks.”
“That’s what family is for.”
Dwight Douglas Sloane died quietly in the night. The last thing he said was, “Across the river,” spoken to no one.
Cork was feeding birch limbs to the fire. Stormy and Louis sat together against the tall rocks warmed by the flames. Louis slept, his head laid against his father’s arm.
Sloane gave a small groan and spoke his final piece. His chest rose high in one last struggle for breath, then fell and rose no more. His eyes were half open. The reflection of the fire danced in them and made them seem alive. But Cork knew, and so did Stormy.
“What did he mean?” Stormy asked.
Before Cork could answer, from the far side of the Deertail came the mournful howling of wolves. The crying woke Louis. He straightened up and looked at Sloane.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Louis,” Stormy said.
The boy listened to the wolves, their sound like a sad song in the dark beyond the river. “He was wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Stormy asked.
“Remember, he said the wolves weren’t his brothers. But listen to them. Uncle Wendell told me that the wolves only cry for their own.”
“
Ma’iingan,
” Stormy said. “I’d be proud to call him my brother.”
W
HEN THE GHOST OF SUNRISE
first began to haunt the sky, Cork ate a light meal. He and Stormy talked quietly at the fire while Louis slept. Stormy agreed it would be best to stay where they were until Cork sent someone back for them. If no one came by the following morning, Stormy and Louis would walk out, following the same route Cork proposed to take along the Noodamigwe Trail to the old logging road. Cork left Stormy both weapons.
“I don’t need extra weight on this run,” he said. “I don’t think you and Louis will need all that firepower either. Raye probably doesn’t suspect that we’re on to him. I’ll bet he has a story already concocted about being washed downriver and getting lost in the woods. But I’d feel better if you kept the guns.”
Cork stretched his muscles in preparation for the run. He discarded his jacket, so that he was dressed in a thermal top, sweater, jeans, socks, and his boots. “I know you’ll keep him safe,” he said, looking down at Louis as the boy slept.
“Cork, I’ve been hard in my thinking about you for a long time. It was easier for me to blame you, you know. I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“Get to the woman before that
majimanidoo
does.”
“I’m on it.”
“When you get to Wendell’s, if you need a firearm, he keeps a rifle in the tall cabinet in his shed. And you’ll find cartridges in a Quaker Oat container on the shelf.”
“Quaker?”
“My uncle’s sense of humor. Good luck.” He offered his hand.
Cork took the strong hand. “To you, too.” He turned away and began to run.
The morning air was crisp, and Cork, as he breathed, left a trail of vapor that vanished within moments of his passing. The light was still gray, but the sky was a clean blue, and within an hour, the tips of the tallest pines burned like candles set to fire by the light of the rising sun. Cork followed the Deertail south to its junction with Raspberry Creek, and there he turned east. The creek ran between low, rugged hills covered with jack pines. The bed was nearly dry, but, here and there, Cork splashed through small pockets of water trapped behind a fallen log or rock dam. He ran through ragged patches of sunlight clean of bugs in the autumn cold, and he startled big ravens that flew up in a drumming of wings, cawing their complaints as he passed under them. He ran more slowly than he wanted, but the creek bed was an obstacle course littered with rocks and limbs and sudden mud that threatened to snap an ankle if he placed a foot unmindfully. Normally when he ran, his thoughts moved in a different world. Now he kept his concentration riveted to the dozen feet of ground directly in front of him.
He almost missed the Noodamigwe Trail. He broke into a sudden wide bar of sunlight, and by the time he looked up, he was already beyond the four-foot swath of cleared forest. He backtracked and picked up the Noodamigwe heading south.
The Noodamigwe Trail was one of the oldest through the Boundary Waters. Voyagers loaded with beaver and mink pelts had traveled the route two hundred years before, and the Anishinaabe long before that. The trail was little used anymore—most visitors to the Boundary Waters came by canoe—and was covered with porcupine grass. Where the edges of the trail touched the forest, clusters of yellow buttercups and bluebells grew. The grass was wet with melted frost and glistened ahead of Cork like a carpet covered with jewels.
He was sweating heavily, and he shed his sweater as he ran, tying it around his waist by the arms. His legs were fatiguing already, the result of too little sleep, the extra weight of his boots, and clothing ill-suited to a run. He couldn’t think about the fatigue or he would begin to feed himself to it. So he thought instead about Arkansas Willie Raye.
The man had fooled him, but not without Cork’s complicity. Raye had woven truth and lie into an appearance that was seamless. Not a particularly difficult trick. Even the worst people weren’t pure evil. They were selfish, greedy, thoughtless, prejudiced, afraid. But these weren’t traits of the Devil, only human weaknesses, and most often Cork had found them paired with some balancing virtue.
So Arkansas Willie had fooled him. But Cork had been ripe for fooling. Raye had played a worried father, concerned that he’d let his child down. And that was Cork all over, bound up in a confusing guilt about his own children. He knew Aurora saw him as a philanderer, a man who’d abandoned his duty and his family. Although the truth was far different, far more complex than anyone would guess, he still felt vulnerable. Being seen unfairly as having abandoned the ones he loved, he was more than willing to believe that no father would. Willie Raye had played to that vulnerability, enlisting Cork in his quest to locate Shiloh, using Cork as a perfect dupe. Cork didn’t know why, what Arkansas Willie had to gain, but it was obvious the man’s purpose all along had been murder.
I should have seen,
he thought, castigating himself silently as he ran. The theft of the letters at Grandview had been a fraud, a setup. And that same night, he’d given Raye Stormy’s name, all the son of a bitch needed to plant money at Wendell’s cabin that would incriminate both Stormy and Wendell. And Raye, running down the hill toward the burning cabin where Shiloh had stayed, firing his pistol, warning the man he’d hired to kill her.
Christ, how could I be so blind?
He paused where the trail crossed a running brook, cupped his hands, drank, and did a quick calculation. Five miles to the old logging road, another ten to County Road C. Less than halfway home. He checked his watch. Reaching Wendell’s before noon had been a ridiculously optimistic appraisal of the task ahead of him.
But there was nothing to be done except suck it up and keep going.
A mile short of the Sawtooth logging road, the Noodamigwe crested a hill and dropped at a steep angle through a stand of quaking aspen. The trail was a river of leaves a foot deep, wetted from the melted snow, slick as ice. As he started downhill, Cork braced himself against the pull of gravity that tried to accelerate his descent. His left foot, as he planted it, slid from under him and the world did a sickening flip. His view was a blur of flying leaves, bone white tree trunks, and chill blue sky webbed with the bare branches of the aspen. He tumbled uncontrolled, then stopped abruptly when his left shoulder rammed a stump solid as petrified wood.
He lay on the ground, wet leaves stuck to his face like leeches, a dull fire burning in his left shoulder. When he tried to sit up, the fire blazed, burned white hot all over, and he cried out. After another minute, he did a slow roll to his right and worked his way to his knees. Gently, he felt his left shoulder at the socket and touched a place that was like punching an elevator button to the top floor of the Agony Building.
Dislocated, he figured. Shit. It had happened to him once before during a high school football game. He was out for the season.
He spent the next minute reviewing his options. There were only two. He could quit. Or he could do his best to move beyond the pain and finish what he’d set out to do. No choice at all.
He stood up carefully and, just as carefully, slid his left hand into the front of his jeans and pulled his belt tight to hold it there. He knew of no sure way to keep his arm from moving, but he had to try to immobilize it as best he could. The belt would have to do. He completed his descent of the hill at a cautious walk, an excruciating preview of what was ahead.
S
HILOH LEFT THE CANOE
drawn up on the shore and walked along a path into tall marsh grass. She crossed wood planking laid over muck. A couple of minutes later, she stepped into a large square of gravel and yellow dirt where several empty vehicles sat parked. The sight of windshields and tires and the familiar glint of sunlight off chrome moved her to tears. Her body, whose strength had not failed her in all the long journey, suddenly felt weak and she sat down, weeping with relief.
She was out.
Redwing blackbirds flitted among the cattails near the parking area. Small white clouds, delicate as angels’ breath, drifted across a pale blue sky. Two days before, she’d been certain she was a dead woman. Now, like Lazarus, she was alive again. From somewhere down the road came the drone of a chainsaw. Shiloh stood up and began walking toward the sound.
After a quarter mile, she came to an old yellow pickup, leprous with rust, that had been parked to the side of the road. From the pines beyond came the song of the chainsaw, the sound rising and falling as the teeth bit through timber. Forty yards into the trees, Shiloh found a short man with a thick gray beard, dressed in biballs and a red flannel shirt, his hands covered with brown leather gloves. He was cutting a small, felled pine into sections. He concentrated on his labor and didn’t see her at first. When he did, he eyed her a while before killing the engine.
“Yah?”