“Your cousin takes the dead man’s place.”
She looked over. Ray Colon nodded yes, and she turned back to the road. She had hardly been conscious of driving. “The crew member tells your cousin he’s part of it,” she said. “He says James—Quinto—has to take the dead man’s place. If he doesn’t agree—”
“No.” Ray shook his head. “Quinto tell him. He want to go, see? He don’t want to stay in Mexico. He come in a truck with those statues, see? It all fit together in his mind. He tell the guy, you hit him with a stone, a carving. I come here in a truck with those statues. All this is suppose to happen. You take me with you, I do what you say.’”
“The bookends are the connection,” Brenda said. “He thought it was all fated.” When Ray didn’t answer, she looked over. “Destiny?”
“Okay, yeah,” Colon said. “‘Es mi destino.’ Is my destiny. Quinto always saying that. The guy tell him not to talk. He tell him, if anyone ask, your name is Diego. James in Spanish. The officers are all white, he say. Unless someone make trouble or steal money from a cabin, they don’t see the crew. They never notice you different.”
“Diego,” she said, and Ray nodded. “But you keep calling him Quinto.”
“That his own name back home,” Ray said. “Quinto mean fifth in Spanish.”
“Why not James Colon?”
Ray laughed. “He thinking in English now, not Spanish. He say colon mean something make people laugh here.”
“And he kept watching English-language TV,” she said. “The news. Watching a successful reporter named Geraldo Rivera. Why not James Rivera?”
Ray laughed again. “You are a smart lady,” he said. “You should come work for All Hands on Deck.”
Ash River, Minnesota
When Charlie Schmidt reached the landing at Northern Lights Houseboats and Cabins, it was fully dark.
The parking lot had been plowed, and one high-up security lamp glared down on shadowed mounds of snow. Schmidt parked next to a lone Chevy Blazer facing the river, then sat a moment. The frozen river was grooved by tracks from snowmobiles. All the houseboats were in storage farther up the river. Here, thirty miles east of International Falls, the snow didn’t melt until spring.
He reached in back for his parka and felt yesterday’s painting in his shoulder. The long drive, too. Twelve hours. He got out, pulled on the parka and crossed the lot. At the main lodge he rounded the corner and was glad to see lights on in the convenience store. Behind the counter, a girl sat watching a wall-mounted TV. As he stamped his feet and entered, she turned. Her face was framed by coal-black hair. Her eyes and lips were also black, her makeup chalk-white. Schmidt closed the door.
“There’s nothing for rent,” she said.
“I know. I’m friends with the owners.”
“They’re in Key West? There’s more people using their places in winter, that’s why the store’s open?”
“Right.” He pointed at the set. “What’s on?”
“Families of people in jail? Ones they think are terrorists?”
Schmidt nodded and looked to the shelves. The girl’s makeup made him feel old. So did the way she ended everything with a question mark. He had picked up supplies in Milwaukee, but stepped to the cooler. He got out a pint of half-and-half and brought it to the counter.
“This, and a package of Advil.”
On the TV, a talk-show host was interviewing a middle-aged Arab couple. Dressed in traditional clothing, the man sat stiffly, hands on his knees as the woman spoke. In the moment, Schmidt felt something for them.
◆◆◆◆◆
He turned off the county road and began the short, bumpy ride to his property. After dinner with Tina, for no reason he could think of, Schmidt had decided to go back to where everything had happened last spring, the Boundary Waters.
The Ford Explorer humped and rocked. All at once the windshield went blank—his SUV had dislodged snow from a pine bough. Schmidt stopped and tried the wipers. The sluggish blades shoved snow that was replaced, and shoved, until the third sweep gave way to clear glass and the glare of headlights.
He moved forward, tunneling his way back in space and time. Everything long avoided was still here, waiting for him. Starting out that morning, he had known only that he needed to do it. Now he felt confident. You could put it off ten years, he thought. It wouldn’t make any difference. All of it would still be waiting for you.
He kept going. Now the truck’s headlights revealed the two big granite boulders marking the halfway point to his house. He rounded them and saw the pole barn on his right, the house dead ahead. Behind the barn was where the body of John Nielson’s father had been buried under leaves. John had found the body right after finding Schmidt. The pole barn door had slid open. Charlie? Schmidt had been sitting very still, bound with duct tape on a straight chair. Hold on, don’t move. The legs of the chair had been balanced on a pair of jet skis, the noose around his neck tied to a crossbeam. John Nielson had slowly lifted the noose off Schmidt’s head with a broom handle.
Even nine months later, he flooded with relief. Schmidt now felt a powerful wish to reclaim what was here. To find what was missing.
He lurched in the truck, guiding it through the last snow-laden pine boughs. He slowed to a stop outside the barn. Snow reached almost to the padlock on the sliding doors. He would have to shovel a path. That’s why you put a shovel in the house nine months ago, he thought. It pleased him to have thought ahead, even after all that had happened. It seemed like a sign to him. Even then, he had meant to come here like this.
Schmidt turned off the ignition and got out. Quiet blanketed everything, broken only by the ticking of the hot engine. He breathed in deeply, felt his nose hair
