He stood, though not fully because of the low pine bough canopy.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To the top of the outcropping here. If someone comes, I want to know it.”
“Are you kidding? It’s so quiet you can hear the dark sliding down the sky. If anybody comes, you’ll know it, Dad.”
“Just want to be sure. Need anything before I go up top? Bottle cleaned or a diaper rinsed out? I did a lot of that when you were a baby.”
“We’ll be fine,” she said.
He picked up the hunting knife that Jenny had brought from the cabin and had almost plunged into his chest. “Keep this very close to you,” he said.
Although he wasn’t a tall man, he had to bend low as he left, and even then the needles of the boughs overhead scraped his shoulders. She watched him begin to climb the gray outcropping that had sheltered her in one way before and was now sheltering her in another. Her father wore khaki shorts and a dun-colored T-shirt with BOUNDARY WATERS printed in black across the chest. His hair was a dark red-brown and in need of cutting. He was an athletic man, a runner, a hunter from childhood, a fisherman. He was also, at least in her own experience, gentle. But she knew he’d killed men. And because he never talked about that and because she could not see it in his face or feel it in his touch or hear it in his voice, she didn’t quite know where to fit that truth into the puzzle that was her father. All she really knew at the moment was that she was grateful he was there.
TEN
Though ragged, a few cedars atop the outcropping had miraculously survived the fury of the storm. Cork stood among them and scanned the archipelago around him. The whole area had suffered tremendous damage. The only decent stand of trees was on a tiny island two hundred yards across the channel to the north. A long spine of upthrust rock seemed to have protected the pine copse. He figured that, if they were forced to desert the island, he might be able to construct some kind of raft, and they could float themselves and the baby over to the cover of those trees. At the moment, he had no idea what might be necessary.
Just before hard dark descended, he found out.
The sky was deep amethyst when the man came. In the quiet that was a natural part of evening and yet, in all the destruction of that day, still felt unnaturally profound, Cork heard the growl of a powerful engine. The maze of islands hid everything. A long few minutes passed before he spotted the craft. It was a sleek cigarette boat. Though capable of extraordinary speed, it moved at a snail’s pace, the result, Cork understood, of having to make its way through all the floating debris. The boat came slowly around an island to the south and up the channel in front of where Cork lay on his belly, glued to the top of the outcropping. He saw two big engines, a dark blue hull. The man at the wheel wore a ball cap that shielded his face. In the weak light of the waning evening, that was all Cork could see. The craft followed the shoreline, then the motors cut out, and the sleek vessel eased into a little cove near the cabin. Cork could barely make out the boat’s pilot as he jumped to shore and quickly disappeared among the tangle of debris. Cork spotted him once more just outside the cabin, then the man was gone.
He slid down the outcropping and went back to Jenny in the shelter. She held the baby in her arms. Even in the dark, he could see the fear in her eyes, and he knew she’d heard the boat.
“Are we rescued?” she asked.
Cork said, “I don’t know. Keep him quiet if you can.”
He quickly returned to his post atop the outcropping.
A few minutes later, the man emerged from the cabin. Again, he was lost from sight for a while, then Cork spotted him, searching the cabin’s perimeter. Next, he clambered up a rise that stood back of the cabin and had been balded by the storm. At the top, he became a silhouette, lean and black against the threadbare blue of the eastern evening sky. He turned in a circle, scanning the island. Finally, he raised a dark, silhouetted arm. Almost immediately the crack of three gunshots shattered the stillness that lay over the island. Cork figured those shots shattered as well his hope that this new arrival might mean rescue.
The man descended and reentered the cabin. He was inside a good while. The light in the sky faded, died, and Cork could no longer see anything. A glow blistered on the eastern horizon. The moon. It would be up within the hour. Cork stayed on top of the outcropping, watching. Eventually, the beam of a flashlight began to sweep the area near the cabin and then move steadily toward the cove, where it was lost from Cork’s sight. A couple of minutes later, the big engines kicked in. Cork thought the speedboat would head away. Not so. A powerful searchlight snapped on. The engines growled like a couple of hungry predators, and the boat crept along the channel, the searchlight sweeping the shoreline of the island. As the vessel neared the tiny cove where Jenny said the dinghy lay crushed, it slowed. Cork hoped that his daughter had done a good job in hiding the wreckage.
He held his breath and watched the crawl of the searchlight.
Jenny had heard the shots but had no idea what they meant. She’d hoped her father would come down from his observation post and say they were rescued, but he didn’t. A while later, she heard the boat returning and waited, and still her father didn’t come. The baby had gone back to sleep in his basket. If it was true, as her father had said, that the woman in the cabin had been dead a day, then the baby had probably cried himself out several times over the course of all those hours during which he had been so cruelly abandoned. Tired, hungry, thirsty, wrapped in a soiled diaper, his mother dead within a stone’s throw. In her head, Jenny knew that the baby had no concept of what had taken place in that cabin, but her heart broke for him nonetheless. She wondered if the child had been awake during any of it, had made the noises babies make, had drawn attention to himself. If so, whoever had killed his mother hadn’t cared. Had left the child to the elements, left him to die of dehydration or starvation, as cruel in its way as the death of the young mother. Jenny listened to the sound of the boat drawing nearer on the other side of the outcropping and wondered what kind of monster had visited that cabin.
She heard the engines slow and thought that the boat must be passing the cove where she’d taken shelter. It was one of the few landing places along the channel. She waited to hear the sound of her father hailing whoever was at the wheel, but he remained silent. Not a good sign.
The baby began suddenly to stir and fuss, as if disturbed by a bad dream. She lifted him, and he turned his head immediately toward her breast. She tried to offer her pinkie as a pacifier, but he shook her little finger off and pressed his face adamantly to her breast.
The boat continued around the tip of the island. A beam of light suddenly appeared, sweeping along the shoreline. It illuminated the clawlike roots of the fallen pine where she’d built her blind and her shelter. The baby furiously nuzzled the thin cotton of her T-shirt, and she could tell that he was about to cry out in frustration. With desperate speed, she lifted her T-shirt, fumbled her breast free from the halter of her swimsuit, and pressed him to her. He took her nipple into his little mouth and was quiet.
Her hand shot to the hunting knife that lay beside the propane stove, and she grasped the handle, ready to defend with her life the life of the baby in her arms.
At that same moment, the light died. The engines kicked in powerfully, and the boat growled away into the distance.
A crackle of branch came at her back, and she spun, thrusting the knife threateningly before her.
“Whoa,” her father said. “Just me.”
She saw the astonishment on his face when he spied the baby sucking at her breast. She said, “He was about to cry, and I don’t have a pacifier.” She turned her back to him discreetly. “Would you fix me a bottle? There are some matches and a couple of candles mixed in with the canned stuff I brought from the cabin. You can use one of the candles for light to see by.”
Her father groped among the items she’d piled into the blanket, and a minute later, a candle flame illuminated the shelter.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“No idea.” She could hear the exhaustion in his croaky voice. Hell, she was beat, too.
“He knew about the cabin, though,” her father said. “If he didn’t know about the body before, he knows now.”
