work, you know that, Chief?” He stepped outside. A minute later, the van pulled away and headed up the narrow lane to the highway.
John LePere felt good. The hardest part was over-dealing with Bridger. He left the table and went into the kitchen. He put some bananas in a sack and filled a plastic jug with cold tap water. Outside, the air was warm and carried the smell of smoke. LePere crossed to the fish house and unlocked the door. The women looked up as he entered. The boys were asleep, chins resting on their chests.
“I thought you might be hungry, maybe could use a drink of water,” he said quietly. He put the sack on the floor. The jelly glasses were sitting on the table and he filled them. He offered a drink to Grace Fitzgerald. She nodded and he put the glass to her lips. “Your husband has the money,” he told her. A trickle ran down her chin and he wiped it away.
“I can’t imagine where he got it,” she said.
“If two million would have saved Billy, I’d have moved heaven and earth to get it.”
“Scott needs another injection,” the Fitzgerald woman said.
“I’ll get the stuff.” He looked at Jo O’Connor. “You want a drink before I go?”
“No, thanks.”
When LePere returned, Scott Fitzgerald was awake. “I’m going to cut your hands free so you can give him the shot,” LePere said to the boy’s mother. He severed the tape and pulled it off her wrists, then put the packaged syringe and the medicine into her hands. He stood back and watched. The boy took the shot without flinching. LePere reached out for the syringe so he could dispose of it.
As she put it in his hands, the Fitzgerald woman said, “If ten million could have saved Edward, I’d have given it.”
LePere was caught by surprise and it took him a moment to place the reference. “Your first husband, right? The lake got him. I read your book. He sounded like a stand-up guy.”
LePere put the syringe down a small slot in a metal box on the wall that had been a repository for old razor blades in the days when his father sometimes used the basin in the fish house to shave. “Do you remember him?” he asked her son.
“Not really,” the boy said.
“Maybe you’re lucky. It hurts a lot if you do.”
“You move on with your life, Mr. LePere,” the Fitzgerald woman said.
“Yes.” He tapped the metal box to make sure the syringe had dropped. “But you never forget, do you?” He turned and looked down at her. “I watched you a long time on the cove. You’re different from the person I thought I saw.”
“Different how?”
“Doesn’t matter. I was way off base.” He picked up the roll of duct tape. “I need to bind your hands again.”
“Do you have to?”
“It won’t be much longer. I’m sorry.” He bound her, then asked her son, “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“How about a banana?”
“Okay.”
He cut the boy free and waited while he ate. “What about your son?” he asked the O’Connor woman.
“Mostly, he needs to sleep.”
He tossed the banana peel outside and taped the boy’s wrists again. “I’m tired. I need some sleep, too. I’ll check back in a while. The windows are open and the breeze is up. You should stay cool.”
LePere locked the fish house and drifted down to the rocks that separated the cove from the lake. He sat down, trying to take it all in, trying to memorize every detail. In another day, he would be looking at bare walls and iron bars, and he wanted to remember home. He gazed up at the great ancient lava flow called Purgatory Ridge, the dark, striated cliffs that were the backdrop for his best memories. He closed his eyes, and the silver-blue circle of water that was the cove was there, bright in his mind, and hard beside it, the little house. The popple and aspen along the shoreline were green now, but he could remember them aflame in fall, their autumn leaves scattered across the water like shavings of gold. Last, he turned and looked at the lake that had been there for a thousand lifetimes before his and would be there a thousand lifetimes after. He’d often hated the lake, blamed it for what had been taken from him. But the truth, he knew, was that the lake was simply what it was, vast and indifferent. It asked nothing and yielded to no one, and if you journeyed on its back, you accepted the risk. In its way, it mirrored life exactly.
Facing the prospect of prison, John LePere felt free and alive for the first time in more than a dozen years.
The sound of a powerful inboard motor woke him. He lay on his bed, listening as the thrum grew louder and entered the cove. He jumped from his bed, went to the window, and watched as Wesley Bridger cut the engine and guided a sleek motor launch up to the dock. LePere put on his shoes and headed down to the water.
Bridger tossed him a line. “Tie her up.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“Borrowed her. Just for tonight. They’ll never miss her, believe me.”
“What for?”
Bridger jumped from the boat. He held his ski mask in one hand and a heavy-looking metal flashlight in the other. As soon as his feet were squarely on the dock, he slipped the mask over his head. “Let’s go up and talk to our guests.”
“Why?”
“We’ll give ‘em the good news.” He put his arm around LePere’s shoulders in the way of comrades. “Everything’s set for the exchange. Don’t you think they’ll want to know? Also, I owe them an apology, Chief. I was pretty hard on them.”
It was early evening. LePere realized he’d slept much longer than he’d expected. The air felt good, cooler. Something in the wind had changed.
At the fish house, as LePere undid the lock, Bridger asked, “Chief, I just want to check. Are you sure about all this? I mean, taking the whole responsibility on your shoulders while I’m free as a bird with a two-million-dollar nest?”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been as certain of anything, Wes.”
LePere opened the door and took a step inside. He didn’t even feel the blow to the back of his head. He simply dropped into darkness.
38
THE GIRLS LOOKED BATTERED, tired beyond weeping, and older by far than their years. And Rose, for all her courage and faith, looked ready to yield to despair.
“When you give them the money, they’ll give Mom and Stevie back, right?” Jenny pressed him.
Cork chewed on a ham-and-cheese sandwich that Rose had put together for him. He barely tasted the food, and he ate only because he knew he had to keep his own strength up. “Yes, Jen,” he said. “I believe they will.” He glanced at Deputy Marsha Dross, who leaned against the wall near the kitchen doorway. She was a slender woman of medium height, had short brown hair, and was as smart as any law enforcement officer Cork had ever known. He saw her eyes shift away because she knew the true uncertainty of the situation. He saw, too, how tired she was. Like all the law officers involved, she’d put in long hours with little sleep. She didn’t do it because it was her job, Cork knew. She did it because it was the right thing to do and because it might help. Cork was truly grateful.
“How will you give them the money?” Annie asked. She sat at the kitchen table with her father and Jenny. Rose stood at the kitchen sink, washing a few dishes. Wet silverware in the dish drainer caught the rays of the early evening sun and scattered flames of reflected light across the walls and ceiling.
“I don’t know, Annie. We’ll have to wait for the call this evening. At nine-thirty.”
“Can’t they, like, trace the phone call and catch him?” Jenny asked.
