“I don’t see running lights,” Anne said. “Aren’t you supposed to use running lights at night?”
“Not if you’re smuggling,” Stephen said.
“But it’s going so fast in all this . . . this garbage,” Rose said, indicating with a sweep of her hand the debris they were slogging their own way through.
Stephen shrugged. “Desperate, maybe.”
Desperation, Rose thought. That was something they all knew about. She listened to the sound of the boat growing distant. It was good to know that they were not alone on the lake. She said a little prayer for whomever it was so desperate that they risked speeding across treacherous water, prayed for their safety.
Then she prayed once again for Cork and Jenny.
TWELVE
Jenny said, “Where are you going?”
The moon had been up for an hour, and the island was like a charcoal etching, black shapes against white light.
“Back to the cabin,” Cork replied.
“Jesus, what for, Dad?”
Cork stood bent at the edge of the little shelter, peering out at the blasted landscape. In the moonlight, it seemed to him to be an island made of bone. He spoke in a whisper in order not to disturb the baby.
“If I’m going to build a raft to get us off this island, I’ll need some things I don’t have now.”
“Like what?”
“Rope, for starters. I saw a clothesline at the cabin.” He stepped outside into the clear night and brought himself upright.
Jenny moved away from the where the baby lay on the blanket, left the shelter, and stood beside her father. “Isn’t there something else we could use? Tear strips from our clothing or something.”
“Rope’s better,” he said.
“What else?”
He was looking at the lake now, at the tall islands around him, black as char. The powerboat had gone away, far enough that the sound of the engines had faded to nothing. Cork hoped that somewhere in the hard dark he might see a light—a campfire or lantern or flashlight—something that would indicate they weren’t completely alone, though he knew in his heart that was exactly what they were.
“What do you mean ‘what else’?” he said.
“You said ‘for starters.’ ”
“Oh. Maybe a flashlight.”
“Or maybe a gun,” Jenny said, nailing his real thought. “You told me you’d never touch a gun again.”
He faced her. In daylight, her hair was so blond it was nearly white. When she was a little girl, there were times that her windblown hair had reminded him of the silky fibers of milkweed. Her mother’s hair had been the same color and texture. Jenny was like her mother in many ways, Cork thought. Lovely, smart, perceptive. But her mother was dead, and Jenny was very much alive, and Cork meant to keep her that way, whatever it took.
“I told you I’d never fire a gun again at a human being,” he said.
“When you were sheriff, you told me, and I quote, ‘Never aim a firearm at someone without being fully prepared to use it.’ End quote.”
“Journalists,” he said. Then he said, “Yes, I’d prefer to be in possession of a firearm at this moment.”
“I’d prefer that, too,” she said. She looked deeply and sadly into her father’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Not your fault,” he replied. “I’ll be back, and then we’ll throw something together to float ourselves off this island.”
She unscrewed the cap on the Ball jar, took a handful of matches, and gave them to him. “There are more candles in the cabin, in a cigar box,” she told him. She also handed him the knife. “You’ll need this to cut the clothesline.”
He kissed the top of her head, threw a glance at the child, and left. He began to make his way to the other side of the outcropping, where he intended to follow the shoreline until he reached the cove near the cabin.
The moon had risen to a point roughly forty-five degrees above the horizon, so bright that he could see much of the detail, if not the color, of those island features within a few dozen yards of his position. Whenever he glanced back toward the outcropping to gauge his progress, he found his shadow floating behind him on the water, a familiar companion in all that was so strange.
He did something dangerous as he slogged along. He thought. Not about his current situation, which he’d already spent enough time considering that he had a working plan. He was thinking about Jenny and how startled he’d been when he saw her with the baby sucking at her breast. He’d stood paralyzed for a moment, but it wasn’t because of the odd circumstance. What shocked him was that for a brief instant it wasn’t Jenny he’d seen. In the dark, with her white-blond hair and her slender body and her protective pose, it had been Jo, Jenny’s mother, holding the baby in her arms. And now Cork couldn’t shake the confusion of emotions that vision had brought with it. Paramount among them was a relapse into grief, which he thought he’d put behind him.
Grieving wasn’t only useless, it was dangerous, especially now, when he needed to focus. From grief he slid easily into anger, all directed at himself. What had he been thinking, bringing everyone he loved here, isolating them at the end of the earth, putting them in such great danger? This was his fault, all of it. And all because he wanted his family to be happy. Christ, how stupid, how selfish was that?
He tried to shake off his black mood with some useful thinking. He considered Anne and Stephen and Rose and Mal, imagining what their situation might be. He thought about the anchorage of the houseboat when he and Jenny had left. He visualized its orientation with regard to the approach of the storm. He decided that someone on the boat would have seen the monster front sweeping across the lake, and they would have steered into the bay of the little island and tied up somewhere in the lee of the ridge. And if they were even only a little bit lucky, they would have emerged from the fury in good shape.
That’s what he wanted to believe, decided to believe.
And if that were true, then they would probably try to get Jenny on her cell phone, and when that didn’t work, they’d radio Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle to find out if he and Jenny had arrived safely to pick up Aaron. When they had their answer, they would begin motoring toward Young’s Bay, keeping an eye out along the way, maybe in conjunction with a search mounted from the Angle itself.
And if all this were true, then a signal fire would be the best way for him and Jenny to be found. But a signal fire could alert the wrong people. The man in the cigarette boat, if he was responsible for the young woman’s death, or if not him, then whoever it was who’d inflicted the cruelties.
Which was a thought of enormous and uncomfortable weight, because Jenny was right: Cork had taken a vow never again to raise a firearm against another human being. In too many ways, his history was written in blood. The blood not only of enemies but more especially of those he loved. He’d lost his wife to a bullet. He’d lost his father that way as well, and also Sam Winter Moon, the man who’d taken the place of his father in so many ways. He’d lost friends and allies. He’d seen the carnage of mindless, brutal killing in the streets of South Side Chicago and in school hallways and in what should have been the heaven of the great north wilderness he called home, violent death that, even when it was perpetrated in the name of things sacred, ended the same pointless way.
And so, he’d given up his firearms and promised himself that his part in the killing, which would doubtless continue in the world just fine without him, was over.
How very strange, he thought now, his mood still bleak, that circumstance kept bringing him back to the place where his hand ached for the grip of a gun. The destinies of some men and women, he’d decided long ago, were bound to the sulfur stink of cordite and the iron odor of blood. He’d tried his best not to be one of them. Yet here he was again.
At the cove, he turned inland and, with the help of moonlight, made his way through the web of branch and timber to the damaged cabin. The door stood open. Inside, moonbeams shot through the shattered roof and gave definition to what would otherwise have been utter dark. He carefully navigated the labyrinth of the boughs thrust
