FIFTEEN
Rose was dreaming. Dreaming about the attic bedroom Cork had created for her in the house on Gooseberry Lane in Aurora, where she’d lived for many years before Mal had come into her life. But dreaming it in ways different from how it had been. In the dream, it was a place of secret passages that led nowhere. Of steps that threatened to collapse under her weight. Of ornate fireplaces and red velvet curtains with brocade. A place of sanctuary, certainly, but also of menace. Welcoming and at the same time disturbing. Her sister, Jo, was still alive somewhere below her. Impossibly, wonderfully alive. And the house was full of activity. She needed to get downstairs to help with things. That was her purpose, to help, and she was desperate, but because of the labyrinth of passages, she couldn’t find the way.
Stephen’s cry from the deck above woke her: “Lights!”
She came awake fully, sitting on a canvas chair, slumped against the railing on the bow of the houseboat. It was still dark, the moon still high in the sky. She saw pinpoints of light along the southern horizon. She got up, wincing at the deep soreness in her shoulders, the result of her long swim to catch the houseboat, she thought. And probably from the worry as well.
“I see them,” Anne cried. She stood near Rose, her flashlight in hand, still scanning the water for debris. “There,” she said and pointed toward a couple of points of light far ahead.
Rose went to the open window near the helm station and spoke to Mal, who was still at the wheel.
“Young’s Bay?” she asked.
“Not if the GPS is correct. We still have several miles to go.”
“How’s your ankle?”
“Big as a cantaloupe and purple as a plum.”
“Does it hurt much?”
He smiled, looking tired. “Only when I laugh, sweetheart.”
Stephen came down the ladder from the upper deck, where he’d gone once the houseboat had cleared Tranquil Channel and entered more open water. He’d stationed himself there to watch for lights, or a signal fire from his father and sister, or anything that might be helpful or hopeful. Anne had stayed below with Rose to continue to watch for debris. Both kids had managed to keep their eyes open, while Rose, though she’d tried valiantly not to, had fallen asleep. They were remarkable, these children who were hers and not really hers.
“The Northwest Angle, Mal?” Anne asked.
“Nope, not yet.”
They both looked tired, Stephen and Anne, but in the light that fell on the deck from the cabin, Rose could see hope bright in their faces.
“The lights are moving,” Stephen said. “Probably running lights. And they’re headed this way. Maybe it’s Dad and Jenny coming back to us?”
He looked to his aunt for an answer, looked to her for hope, which was something he and the other O’Connor children had done from the time they were born.
Most of her life, Rose had taken care of others. First her mother, an alcoholic army nurse, who at fifty, had suffered a severe stroke and needed constant attention. It hadn’t been a difficult decision for Rose, giving up her own life to make her mother’s life easier. She’d never thought of herself as an attractive woman. Boys—and, later, men—had always had eyes for Jo, who was brilliant and beautiful and wild. Rose was devout, and so her life had become the Church and taking care of her mother.
After her mother died, Rose still had the Church to hold to, and she seriously considered entering an order. Then Jo, who’d married a Chicago cop named O’Connor, had given birth to her first child, a baby girl. Though it was a joyful event, it was difficult in a way. Jo was a lawyer with a career on the rise. A baby, no matter how welcome, presented great hardship. It was Rose who’d suggested that perhaps she could help. The situation wasn’t one that any of them had foreseen as long-term, but once she joined the O’Connor household, Rose had become an integral part of it. She’d seen the other two children born and helped raise them and thought of them, in a way, as her own.
The Church had continued to be her rock. Somewhere in the back of her mind still lurked the idea that someday, when the children were grown and gone, she would give herself over fully to the service of God. But when she lay alone at night in her cozy attic bedroom, a little voice of truth would sometimes speak to her. It would whisper to her that becoming a bride of Christ was a blessed calling, yes, but for her it was an escape. It was a way not to have to face a terrible reality, which was that Rose wanted desperately to be loved. Not by the Holy Spirit, although that was fine in its way. The truth was that she longed to hear a man whisper he loved her, and she longed to whisper the same words in return. She suffered terrible, lustful desire, and sometimes wondered bitterly why she was being tested in this way.
When she was nearing forty and beginning to lose hope of ever finding love, Father Mal Thorne had been assigned to St. Agnes in Aurora, a remote parish buried deep in the North Woods. He’d been sent, ostensibly, to help the aging priest there. In truth, he was sent into exile, because he was a priest on the edge of falling completely away from the grace of the Church, a priest full of question, full of doubt, and too often, full of alcohol. Looking back on it, Rose saw God’s hand at work. Two people desperately in need of a connection more human than ethereal had been given each other and, in this unlikely union, had found their way back to the divine.
God, Rose believed fervently, worked in mysterious ways.
So when she peered toward the lights across the moonlit water of Lake of the Woods, she believed that, no matter how blind she and the others might be to the ultimate purpose of events, there was a great and compassionate heart at work. And her answer to Stephen’s question—did the lights mean his father and sister were safe and returning—was deceptively simple but deeply felt: “God willing.”
It was, indeed, a boat, a big power launch. It came straight for them, moving slowly across the water, and when it was near enough, a searchlight played over the houseboat, and a man hailed them.
“Hullo! You folks okay?”
“Yes,” Anne called back.
“Why don’t you cut your engine, and I’ll pull alongside?”
At the helm, Mal eased back on the throttle, and the engine idled. The big launch drew up alongside. The shape of the man at the wheel, large as a bear, was visible in the moonlight. The ambient light from the GPS screen on the dash of the helm gave his broad, bearded face a ghostly look. As the bow neared the houseboat, he cut his own engines, leaped forward, and grabbed the bow line.
“Catch this, son, and tie me up,” he called to Stephen and tossed the line. Then he stood next to the gunwale, meaty hands fisted on his hips, grinning up at Rose and the O’Connors.
“First folks I’ve run into out here,” he said. “I was beginning to be afraid nobody’d made it. Glad to see you’re all right. Were you caught in the blow?”
“The blow?” Stephen said.
“The storm,” the man replied. “It’s played hell across the lake from Baudette to Kenora.” The man eyed the shattered window at the helm station. “Looks like you got some damage.”
Mal limped out and came to the railing. “We lost the radio and got shook up a bit, but we’re okay. But we’re missing two of our party. They headed to the Northwest Angle this afternoon, but since we lost the radio we haven’t been able to check to see if they made it.”
“Let’s find out,” the man in the launch said. “What are their names?”
“Cork and Jenny O’Connor.”
The big man returned to the wheel, lifted a radio mike, and raised someone at Young’s Bay Landing. The answer from whomever he spoke to was that nobody by those names had come in that afternoon, either before or after the storm. But someone was there waiting for the O’Connors and worried as hell.
“Aaron?” Rose asked.
