“Dad,” she said hopelessly, speaking toward the devastation of the lake. “Annie. Stephen.”
And then she began to cry, deep, racking sobs that went on and on.
In the end, she had no choice but to pull herself together. She wiped away her tears, forced her legs to lift her upward, beat her brain into thinking clearly. She had no idea how widespread the devastation of the storm might be, but judging from the islands around her, all of which looked like they’d been at the epicenter of a nuclear blast, the area was large. The lake water was full of uprooted trees and shattered trunks and sheared off limbs and strips of bark. A boat trying to get through that mess would have to move at a snail’s pace. It would be a long time before anybody got to her, if anybody ever did.
“Dad!” she tried again, calling his name a dozen times as she turned in a complete circle. She got nothing in return.
“You’re alone, kiddo,” she said to herself. “You’ve got only you.”
She walked to the place where the dinghy lay under a fallen pine. She worked her way through the mesh of branch and needle and groped beneath the crumpled seat in the bow of the wreckage. Her fingers found wet nylon. She gripped the material and pulled it with her as she eased herself free.
The knapsack was stained with pine resin and pungent with the scent of evergreen. She dug inside and pulled out packages of cheese and crackers and some trail mix and two bottled waters, completely smashed and emptied of their contents. She found her camera intact, then her cell phone, which was also undamaged.
“Hey, girl, finally a little bit of luck,” she said, as if it was someone else speaking to her.
She powered up the phone, and the display came on and told her the device was searching. After a minute, it gave up. No signal.
“Shit,” she said and was tempted to add the phone to all the other crap in the water. Instead, she slid it back into the knapsack. And then some journalistic instinct kicked in and she brought out her digital camera, turned it on, and shot a full panorama of the destruction around her.
“Great for the documentary when they find your desiccated body,” she said.
She reviewed the photos she’d just taken and accidentally went one farther back, to an earlier shot. And there was Aaron.
From the beginning, she’d had a bad feeling about this trip. Her father had proposed it, a rare gathering of family at summer’s end. He’d just finished working a case involving a decades-old serial killing that had ended in the suicide of a wealthy man. She could tell it had affected him deeply, for reasons he wouldn’t go into, but he’d been almost desperate to have the whole family together again. Anne had come home from her mission in El Salvador, Stephen from a summer of cowboying on Hugh Parmer’s ranch in Texas, Mal and Aunt Rose up from Evanston. And from Iowa City, she and Aaron. Except that Aaron couldn’t come right away. He was committed to teaching a poetry workshop at a conference in the Black Hills and couldn’t get free until three days into the trip. The plan had been to pick him up at Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle that afternoon.
She’d been worried about him. They’d been a couple for almost a year and, in June, had moved in together. She didn’t know what to call him exactly. Friend? He was way more than that. Boyfriend? Oh, God, how teenager was that? Lover? Way too explicit. Partner? For the moment, yes, but they hadn’t talked much about what was beyond the moment. Significant other? He was significant, sure, but what a clumsy epithet. So she’d simply refrained from calling him anything except Aaron. This was going to be the first time the family would meet him, and she was concerned. Things between her and Aaron hadn’t been exactly smooth lately.
She looked across the littered water and wondered if he’d made it safely to the Northwest Angle before the storm swept through. She wondered if he was all right. And if he was, was he worried about her?
Or, she thought in a sudden acid moment of honesty, was he relieved?
At last she dropped the camera back into the knapsack, shouldered the bag, and turned to explore the island onto which fate had cast her.
The nearly total destruction made it impossible to go inland, so Jenny began to walk the shoreline. The water was shallow, the bottom mostly rock, and she moved easily, though carefully, over the irregular stones. The sun was out, as bright as ever, and the sky was a soft blue, as if no storm had ever crossed its placid face. To one degree or another, all the islands, those she could see anyway, showed the devastation of the storm. All except for one across the channel, a small island that was composed mostly of a single tall rock outcropping with a cliff facing the direction from which the storm had come. All the trees that stood in the lee of that rock rise were undamaged. As Jenny watched, a small brown animal, something weasel-like, swam to the shore, climbed out of the water, shook itself, and scampered into the undergrowth and trees.
She walked nearly half a mile, calling out her father’s name every few minutes like a kind of distress signal, before she rounded the far end of the island. She’d seen nothing helpful, destruction everywhere.
“Will anyone ever come by here?” she wondered aloud.
She pretty well knew the answer. The man who’d rented them the houseboat in Kenora had told them that it was possible to motor among the islands for days and never see another soul. When Jenny had asked if he knew the Lake of the Woods well, he’d answered cryptically, “Nobody really knows this lake.”
If the others were all right, would they come searching for her? Of course they would, but it wouldn’t matter. They would have no idea where to look. Her father had been circumspect about their excursion on the way to Young’s Bay Landing to pick up Aaron. He’d told her he wanted it to be something special between the two of them. The children in the pictographs, she understood now. His not very subtle way of asking about her own intentions in that regard. Well, it had probably seemed like a good idea to him at the time.
She looked up and saw a couple of bald eagles circling, searching in vain, she speculated, for a nest that no longer existed.
The island was narrow—generally only a couple of hundred yards wide—and humped with two hillocks of smooth, white rock, one near either end. The shoreline was pocked with little coves and inlets, now clogged with fallen timbers.
She looked up at the blazing sun and said, “At least it’s hot. I won’t freeze. And I have plenty of clean water, if I’m willing to risk a little giardia.”
She was speaking of the parasite that, she knew, sometimes inhabited the water of the North Country and that, if ingested, could play hell with her digestive tract. But it was infinitely preferable to dying of thirst.
Food was a different matter. She hoped she was rescued before that became an issue. She was glad she’d had both a hearty breakfast and lunch.
As she moved up the other side of the island, Jenny caught sight of something in the interior. She shaded her eyes against the brilliant sunlight and squinted. It was a small cabin amid the debris. Hope, a kind of spiritual adrenaline, ran through her. She turned quickly inland.
The going was far more difficult than she’d imagined. She worked her way laboriously over dozens of fallen trunks—pine, spruce, and poplar. Climbing and crouching and slithering, she took ten exhausting minutes to go only a hundred yards. She stood at last before a small structure built of logs and with a roof that was made of cedar shakes covered with birch bark. Each side ran maybe fifteen feet in length. Windows had been cut in each wall and were covered with soiled oilcloth. An enormous red pine had toppled in the storm and cleaved the roof, causing much of the back wall to tumble. It had come to rest on the top cross log of the front wall.
She’d seen such structures before, old trapper cabins or abandoned hunting camps in the woods of Tamarack County, north of Aurora. She walked to the door, lifted the latch, and entered.
It was a single room. The huge, fallen pine had invaded much of the area inside, creating a kind of labyrinth of sharply needled branches. The logs of the toppled back wall also cramped the room, and what open space was left felt tiny. Against the wall to her right, clear of the wreckage of the back wall and untouched by the pine boughs, was a bunk with bedding. Except for fallout from the damaged roof and the wetness from the rain that had come through, the bedding looked relatively clean. Toward the back, crushed under a couple of tumbled logs, was a rough-hewn table, with two broken chairs. In the center of the room stood a cast-iron potbellied stove. A long section of stovepipe had come down when the pine hit the roof, and it lay on the floor amid a shadowy splash of soot.
She ducked under the trunk of the protruding pine, and the far side of the cabin was revealed to her.
“Well, well,” she said, pleased. “At least I won’t starve.”
Against the wall of the cabin, cardboard boxes stood stacked waist high. On the side of each box was printed
