He went over the side and followed the buoy line that was drawn taut by the pull of the boat above. Under the surface, the water was calm and everything was quiet. LePere descended, switching on his Ikelite as the sunlight diminished. He listened to his own breathing and to the steady spill of his bubbles. At seventy feet, an eelpout swam through the light, winding its body in the direction of the Apostles.
In ten minutes, he’d reached the stern of the Teasdale, where he followed the hull down to the broken midsection. He dipped over the edge and headed into the darkness at the bottom. His Ikelite illuminated a river of coal that spilled from the open cargo hold, but nowhere on that river did he see the camera. His light swept over the rocky bottom the coal didn’t cover; the camera was not there either. LePere searched the hold thoroughly and came up empty-handed. There were no strong currents that deep, nothing naturally occurring he could think of that could have moved the camera. The only thing that made sense was that someone had been there before him.
Shit. He’d have screamed it but for the mouthpiece feeding him air. He checked his regulator. He’d been down long enough. There was nothing more to see anyway. He turned and headed back to the buoy cable.
What greeted him when he reached the end of the stern was a sight more chilling than any cold the water could have pressed upon him. The buoy cable was rapidly snaking down from the surface. He realized that a hundred feet above him, the Anne Marie had either been stolen or set adrift.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he inflated the vest that was his weight compensator, and he shot toward the surface. At sixty feet, the yellow marker for decompression dropped past him and then the severed end of the cable. He knew that when he neared the surface, he’d have to rely on his depth gauge and on his own judgment to hold at ten feet and then force himself to be patient as his body decompressed. It would do him no good if he saved the Anne Marie only to succumb to the bends. The darkness gave way to light. At thirty feet, he saw the surface and that there was no silhouette of his boat above or any sign of the marker buoy. He punctured his vest with his knife to slow his ascent. When the needle on his depth gauge hit ten feet and when his own sensibility confirmed it, he held.
John LePere had gone through the torture of more sleepless nights than he could remember, watching the seconds tick off a clock so slowly he seemed in another time dimension. Nothing he’d experienced before was like the hell of the minutes he spent with the empty surface just out of his reach. He tried to think what he’d do if the boat were gone for good. What if she were drifting too far and too fast to catch? Or what if she had been set adrift with a hole punched in her hull to scuttle her?
Not yet, he told himself at six minutes when it had already felt like hours.
He calculated the wind direction and tried to envision where the boat would hit if it drifted toward Outer Island. The shoreline was nothing but tall trees, hard rock, and wild surf. He could think of no safe landing.
He gave himself nine minutes. Probably not enough to be completely safe, but the hell with it. He broke the surface and caught a wave that lifted him high. He spotted the Anne Marie adrift a quarter mile northwest. Not far beyond it, the breakers slammed against the rocks of Outer Island. Fitted for diving, he was unfit to swim. He shed his gear, abandoning tank, weights, vest. Although it was cumbersome, he left his dry suit on, his only protection against the numbing cold of the lake water. LePere began to swim.
He used strong, even strokes, trying to pace himself, relying on what his body could do as a result of all those mornings he’d cut through the water of Iron Lake for miles. But Iron Lake was small and calm. The angry waves of Superior crashed over him, choked his throat with icy water, lifted his body, and threw it down. For a long time, he couldn’t tell if he was gaining on the boat at all. He focused all his effort on trying to reach the Anne Marie before she hit the rocks, which kept him from worrying about what he’d do if he reached her only to discover the engine had been sabotaged or the rudder cable cut.
Twenty minutes of a harder crawl than he’d ever done brought him to within reach of the bowline that was still dragging the buoy. He grabbed hold and hauled himself in, hand over hand, until he could reach the diving ladder. Breathing in gasps, he climbed aboard. He could hear the roar of the breakers less than two hundred yards distant now. Quickly, he went to the helm station inside the deckhouse. The key was gone. He ran down the companionway to the forward cabin and grabbed the extra key he kept on a nail under one of the bunks. Back at the helm station, he jammed the key into the ignition. The engine coughed and didn’t catch. LePere glanced toward Outer Island. He was still more than a hundred yards out, but he saw in the trough between the waves, less than fifty feet to starboard and directly in the path the wind and waves were pushing the Anne Marie, the glint of light off the sleek, jagged rocks of a shoal.
He hit the ignition again. “Come on, baby,” he whispered.
The engine caught this time. He swung the wheel hard to starboard and eased the throttle forward, narrowly missing an arm of dark rock just beneath the surface. He came about fully, nosed the Anne Marie into the wind, and put a safe distance between himself and the island. He idled the engine and checked the boat. Nothing had been damaged. The extra diving gear stowed below hadn’t been touched. He hauled in the buoy and checked the cable. The line had been cut.
He hadn’t seen the white launch, but maybe everything was different now. Maybe they would always use a different boat so he’d never know when they were watching, waiting to have another go at him.
They’d taken his camera. They’d tried to destroy his boat. They were clearly afraid.
Good, he thought, and he found himself smiling. That meant they had something to hide.
He headed the boat home with the wind at his back. It would be a while before he returned. Bridger’s luck had been bad lately and he was low on money. On a janitor’s salary, LePere would have to save carefully for months to put together the cost of a new camera and housing, but he would do it. He would do whatever he had to. They hadn’t stopped him; they’d only delayed the inevitable. Next time he came, he’d be ready to take them down for good.
He reached Purgatory Cove in the early afternoon, eased the Anne Marie up to the dock, and cut the engine. He secured the lines and headed toward shore. When he saw that the door to the fish house was wide open, he made for it quickly, then stood staring at the chaos inside. It looked as if someone had used a sledgehammer and had a field day. The compressor lay in pieces. His diving gear and the equipment and supplies for the Anne Marie had all been damaged or destroyed. Turning toward the small house, he saw that the door there stood open, as well. He hit the porch at a run. Inside, he found the rooms torn apart. The cupboards had been cleared. Drinking glasses and blue crockery plates lay shattered on the floor. In his mother’s room, the bottles had been swept off the top of the bureau and smashed.
They were after nothing. They’d already got the camera and the tape it held. LePere knew this was an attack on him. They’d come to destroy the memories the cabin held for him. His mother’s careful needlepoint had been torn from the walls. The framed wedding photograph of his parents was thrown to the floor where a callous heel had ground the broken glass, shredding the picture that had been the most solid evidence LePere possessed that once, long ago, life had been good and full of promise. In the room he’d shared with Billy, the agate collection had been scattered. Billy’s first baseman’s mitt was gone altogether.
For years, John LePere had lived with loss. He’d endured nightmares that, with each visitation, brought fresh grief. He’d learned to walk among other men as if he were a whole man, too, although he felt hollow inside. As he knelt amid the wreckage of all that had once remained to him of happiness, he let out a howl like an animal in terrible pain. What filled that hollow inside him now was a raging sensibility that felt more beast than human.
He picked the telephone up from the floor. There was still a dial tone. He punched in a number. The phone at the other end rang five times, then the voice message machine kicked in.
“Yeah, this is Bridger. Leave me a message. And make it short, God damn it.”
The line beeped.
“This is LePere. That crazy-ass idea of yours-you still want to do it, I’m in.”
16
FRIDAYS WERE ALWAYS BUSY at Sam’s Place. Because of tourists getting an early start on the weekend, business came heavily from the lake. By midafternoon, Cork had run out of hamburger buns. He left the girls in charge and took off for the IGA SuperValu in Aurora. As he started up the gravel road, he spotted Wally Schanno’s Land Cruiser turn off Center Street and head toward Sam’s Place. Near the Burlington Northern tracks, Schanno waved Cork to a stop and both men got out.
