“I don’t know. Henry gets around pretty good for an old man. He could be anywhere.” He said it lightly, as if, of course, there were no reason to expect Henry Meloux to be waiting for them. Except Cork had every reason to expect it. Henry was always there when he was needed. It was part of the old mide’s magic. “But it’s odd that Walleye’s gone, too. Walleye never leaves.”
Cork felt a little uneasy being in Meloux’s cabin without the old man there, without his consent. But he also felt something prickling, an old cop instinct. He stepped to Meloux’s table, an ancient construction of birch. Laid out on the table were several large, soot-blackened stones.
“What are they?” Jenny asked.
“They’re madodo-wasinun. Stones for a sweat. You know that Henry Meloux is a mide.”
Jenny looked at him, not comprehending. “A mighty what?”
Cork smiled. “Not mighty-mide. One of the midewiwin. A member of the Grand Medicine Society. It looks as though Meloux has taken someone through a purification recently.”
“What for?”
“A sweat can be for a lot of reasons. Atonement, for example. To help a spirit return to a state of harmony.”
“Henry Meloux’s spirit?”
“Maybe.” But he wasn’t thinking at all that it was Henry. He was remembering the visit Joan of Arc of the Redwoods had made to Meloux only a couple of days before. Had she come seeking the old mide’s help? His guidance, perhaps, in her effort to atone? Atone for what? The death of Charlie Warren?
“What do we do?” Jenny asked.
“We go back home.”
He could tell from the look on her face that it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but she accepted it. Maybe like him, she felt too beat to fight it anymore.
Outside, the clouds were moving east. The sky to the west had cleared and above Iron Lake stars were reappearing. Cork found the flashlight Jenny had dropped. He tried the switch, but the light didn’t come on. As they started back along the path, the moon slipped out from behind the bank of clouds and lit the way for them. It was moonlight, as moonlight had existed for millions of years, but it seemed, like everything else that used to be familiar, to have an eerie quality to it now. The ground was thick with melting hailstones, and when Cork reached the Bronco, he found its body pocked with dents. He started the engine and made a U-turn. Jenny switched on the radio. As they headed back toward Aurora, the news came on, and with it, a report that Forest Service authorities feared the lightning might have set new fires in the North Woods.
Cork shook his head. Henry Meloux had always told him that everything had purpose, that the Great Spirit oversaw all life with a profound wisdom. At that moment, Cork found it hard to believe. What in the hell could Kitchimanidoo be thinking?
32
SHE HEARD THE THUNDER coming from a long way off, and her first thought was Rain. She let herself imagine the feel of it, cool against her face, running down her festering back, quenching the fire there. She lifted her head, as if to greet the raindrops, and pain shot through the stiff muscles of her neck and shoulders.
Time and pain. They were two strands of what bound her. The hours dragged. Her body seemed to chronicle each minute with a new aching. She couldn’t sleep, refused to let herself. She needed to be aware, even if it meant feeling everything. She needed to believe something might break for them, even if there seemed nothing she herself could do. Vigilance and hope. What other allies did she have?
The thunder grew nearer, big cracks that sounded as if they were splitting the earth. Blind, she pictured the forest shattered where the lightning hit, the ground scarred black. It wasn’t a pleasant image and she tried to shake it. A strong wind rose in advance of the storm. She could feel the air pushed through the gaps in the old cabin, and she could hear the creak and groan of the trees as they bent. If there were rain, she knew it wouldn’t be gentle.
The storm overtook the cabin. Lightning flashed so brightly that even through the disgusting cloth across her eyes she could see the night illuminated. Immediately after each bolt, thunder made the ground tremble as if, compared with what the heavens wielded, the earth under Jo was nothing. The lightning seemed to strike all around the cabin, frighteningly close. Although she’d thought that after what she’d already been through, nothing could scare her further, she was terrified.
Between the claps of thunder, she heard a growing roar, like a huge wave sweeping toward her. A few minutes later, hail hit the cabin. The din as the stones pounded the old roof and walls was deafening. The end of the world would be no less terrible, Jo thought. As frightened as she was, her greatest concern was for Stevie, for whom even a normal thunderstorm was a nightmare. She longed to be holding him, comforting him.
God, she prayed, more desperately than she ever had, please help us.
And the hail left. As suddenly as it had come.
In the quiet that followed, she heard Stevie whimpering softly.
“Are you sleeping,” she hummed to him. She was relieved to hear his quivering little echo.
More time passed. Hours, it seemed. She was afraid for Scott. She thought she could hear him, his shivering almost audible. Was he coming back, the man who’d given them food and a bit of hope? His concern had seemed genuine, and his promise to return with the insulin had seemed sincere. Still, a man capable of kidnapping was probably capable of almost anything despicable. Maybe it was part of the plan, a sort of good cop-bad cop scenario. One terrorizes, the other gives hope, and in that way they keep the hostages caught in indecision, incapable of escape. The man who’d brought them to the cabin was vile, there was no doubt in Jo’s mind. He was fully capable of the cruelty he promised. But the other was an unknown. And even if he meant well, what control did he have over anything?
She could barely keep her eyes open. For a moment, she closed them.
She was dreaming instantly. Of walking through a strange house. Looking for Cork, but unable to find him. She opened a door and something black leaped at her and she woke.
The dream turned her thinking to the house on Gooseberry Lane. It was the only place she’d ever lived that she let herself love. She could see Cork and Rose and the girls gathered at the kitchen table. She could see the worried look on all their faces. Imagining their helplessness made her want to weep, and she yanked herself away from that weakness. Instead, she imagined her family in council, considering action. Cork wouldn’t sit by and let this happen. Jo didn’t know what he would do exactly, but she knew that somehow he was working his way toward her. She wrapped all her hope around the solid belief that somehow he would come.
She was dreaming again. This time it was a horrible dream full of fire. She woke with a start and found that the air she breathed was full of smoke, so thick she could feel the texture of it in her nostrils when she breathed. She listened. No tree frogs or crickets. None of the usual night sounds. The only noise from outside the cabin was a dry crackle that sounded like a thousand feet marching across a bed of brittle branches. The march was accentuated now and then by the boom of a big bass drum.
Fire.
She began working her wrists desperately over the ragged edge of the post, trying to cut the duct tape that bound her. The smoke grew thicker, and the sound that only minutes before had seemed distant rose to a constant roar punctuated by the boom of trees exploding. The fire was moving rapidly toward them. She felt the current of the air shift as it was drawn in to feed an immense body of flame.
Please, God, no. Not this way.
Behind her back, her wrists covered a territory of only inches as she strained, twisting against the ropes. Then she felt the slight resistance as the tape snagged on a big splinter. She tried to calm herself, to focus on the delicate trick of notching the tape, for she knew that if she pulled too hard, the splinter would simply break off. She began to cough, and she could hear Grace and the boys coughing, too. The cough made it hard to be delicate with the tape. Sweat soaked the bandanna across her face. The air was growing hotter and moving faster as it was sucked in to feed a monster that was almost at the doorstep.
Please, God. Over and over again as she struggled, she prayed that simple, desperate prayer. Please,
