The Big Law

Outside, feeling more confident, taking control, he climbed back in the car and handed Caren the key to the empty locker. Then they studied the map. She pointed to a local road, just past Lutsen. The turn off for the cabin.

They left Duluth and headed up Highway North 61. What if, he thought. What if I was alone in this car? Like the land, his thoughts changed, becoming rougher, wilder. Fields and oak trees were left behind. Granite-toothed hills and pine trees overlooked the road. What if she just disappeared? Superior paced them, an endless stampede of whitecaps.

They stopped in Two Harbors at a Holiday, so Tom could buy some industrial-size black plastic garbage bags and a roll of duct tape. Caren bought a pack of Marlboros and returned to the car. Tom went to a public phone on the wall next to the fruit display. He stared at a pyramid of oranges, took out Garrison’s card and called the FBI office in St. Paul.

“Garrison’s not in,” said the agent who answered.

“Tell him it’s Tom James. I’m with Caren Angland and we’re in danger. I’ll call back in an hour. Make sure he’s there.” Tom saw it developing as a classic plot, not a news story; feed Garrison the broad details to start, save the best for last.

Back on the road, in motion. Was he reporting it? Or was he living it? He stepped on the gas.

Signs: CASTLE DANGER, GOOSEBERRY STATE PARK. BEAVER BAY and SILVER BAY, where immense chalk clouds balanced over hulking relics of the iron mining industry. The road was narrow, two lanes curling and dipping.

Getting remote, wilder.

Tofte, Lutsen, and then Caren showed him where to turn on the gravel road that twisted up a ridge. A small sign with the number 4. Away from the familiar highway, even with the windows up, and the heater on, Tom could hear the trees groan in the wind, an eerie sound that disturbed his city-trained ears. And he could feel the deep- woods chill. At Caren’s direction he slowed and then stopped. A dark narrow lane carpeted with pine needles wandered into the trees. The access was barred by a logging chain strung between two pines.

Caren got out and felt around the roots of one of the chained trees. She held up a rusted Sucrets tin. Opened it and took out a key. Tom forced the rusty Yale lock open and dropped the chain. Drove in. Put the chain back up.

Tom checked the deserted road. Just the low howl of the wind, the heaving pine crowns. Alone.

A hundred yards up the bumpy track they came to a sagging cedar plank cabin on a boggy pond. Caren’s expression fit right in; it was the most desolate place Tom had ever seen.

The cistern was another hundred yards from the cabin, in thick undergrowth and jack pine. It took Caren half an hour to find it. Stonework from another century jutted from the moss and pine needles. Rusted sheets of buckled metal bolted to gray wormwood heaped over the sides. A mattress spring.

Orange, flaking refuse; decaying tin cans.

Back at the car, Caren stood hugging herself in the cold while Tom dragged the suitcase from the cargo hatch. Acting as if he were checking the locks, he slipped his THE BIG LAW/87

hand in, pulled out a packet of bills and stuffed them into the zippered, inner security pocket of his jacket.

All right, Tom. You just crossed the line.

Feels… alive.

Then he doubled and redoubled garbage bags over the luggage as protection against water damage. When he finished, he secured the bundle with loops of duct tape.

Carrying the suitcase on his shoulder, he was soon sweating and dizzy from exertion. She tapped him on the arm and spelled him with the bag. Amazing. She wasn’t even breathing heavily.

Aerobics at the spa. Gym rat.

At the cistern, he carefully rearranged the rusty mess to make room for the bulky package. Then he eased the bundle into the cranny he’d prepared and placed layer after layer of corroded debris over it. The frozen ground was stiff as steel.

They left no footprints. He took this as a sign.

As he used pine needles to scrub the rust off his hands he wondered if he could find the place in the dark. He’d counted his steps back to the cabin. One hundred and six. When he emerged from the trees he took a visual fix on a wind-damaged birch tree to the right of the cabin. If he stood in front of the birch, the direction to follow through the trees was two o’clock.

He realized he was staring at Caren’s back as she huddled in her baggy denim jacket, smoking a cigarette. He tapped her on the shoulder and put his hand out for one of her cigarettes. He tore off the filter and lit it with her plastic Bic.

First time in ten years he’d had one. He inhaled. Breathing poison felt right. Hot little sparklers of nicotine sizzled in his fingertips. But then-no. Smoking was back-sliding, one of Tom James’s weak habits. He was moving away from Tom James. Moving fast. He stamped the cigarette out on the cold ground.

They were all alone out here. He looked at his hands, which were nicked, raw and bleeding slightly from working at the cistern. The slight labor had raised several blisters.

Weak. But getting stronger.

Back in the car, Tom wrote down the exact mileage on a business card as they turned onto the gravel road. He made another mileage notation when they reached the highway.

For a minute he studied the intersection, sketched a collapsed billboard for a landmark. Then he dropped the car in gear and drove north toward Grand Marais, and beyond it, Devil’s Rock.

18

Kit was down for her nap. The dishwasher and the clothes drier hummed their safe lullabies. Stacks of clothes were folded with precision in two plastic baskets next to the kitchen table. Morning chores were done. That wasn’t true.

With Kit, the work never ended.

When he and Nina had gone off to take on the world, she had quit the army, had been a grad student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. When they got back, she was pregnant and he thought…

He paused. Aired out the resentment. Moved on.

Banks of thermal windows lined the lakeside wall. A desk.

Low shelves full of books. Gathering dust, except the ones about child rearing…

The window casements still smelled of new maple and cedar. The whole house smelled new. Like Kit smelled new.

Like his life did.

An olive drab, rectangular metal box sat on his desk, the shape and cover latch identifying it, to a veteran’s eyes, as a fifty-caliber ammo can. But this one was outfitted with a cedar liner. Broker ordered it out of a catalog, full of cigars, from a warehouse in North Carolina. He popped the lid, removed a corona and snipped it in half with a guillotine cutter he carried in his pocket. He put half back in the box and stuck the other half in his mouth.

He patted his stomach where it strained slightly against his waist band. Off cigarettes for six months. Eight pounds over his best weight. He had been through hundreds of cigars and a lot of frozen yogurt. He had yet to light one of the cigars.

He mulled over them, rolled them in his lips, then clipped off the end when they started to get soggy and chewed them and cut them down to a nub. An interim step. Insurance against reaching for a cancer stick in times of stress.

Like now.

It would be all right. Jeff would be here. Steady Jeff.

Seventeen years ago-God, that long-they’d all been up here, cases of beer, steaks. Steelhead fillets from the nearby Brule River on the grill. Sleeping bags lined up on the plank floor of the then one-room cabin. Jeff, Keith,