Boundary Waters (29 page)

She slid from the covers. The tile of the floor was cool beneath her feet and made her think of Hershey’s bars, cold and hard from the refrigerator. In the hallway her shadow, cast by the night-light, crept beside her along the wall. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and listened. Below, the great living room spread out so large she couldn’t see the walls. The floor was red tile covered with a thick, ruby Oriental rug. The room looked empty. But the angry voice was there, just out of sight. Her mother had stopped crooning now. The voice Shiloh didn’t recognize suddenly vaulted into a shriek. Her mother gave a little cry: “No!” She stumbled into view and fell near the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t look up, but Shiloh could see her face, could see the red on her skin that was like the tile on the floor. And then the Dark Angel appeared. Dressed all in black, the figure carried a golden sword streaked with red. The Dark Angel swooped toward Shiloh’s mother, who raised a feeble arm. The golden sword descended. Again and again it struck, until Shiloh’s mother no longer tried to fend off the blows, until the red tile glistened with a deeper, wetter red.

The house seemed filled with the sound of heavy breathing. Whether it was her or the Dark Angel, Shiloh couldn’t tell. The Dark Angel slowly turned and raised its head. There was no face, only a blackness where the face should have been. Shiloh shrank back. She could hear the Dark Angel ascending. She turned and ran to her room, ran to her closet, wedged herself into the farthest corner amid her stuffed animals and her shoes. She knew when the dim glow from the night-light blacked out a moment that the Dark Angel had entered her room. Pee soaked her pajamas and spread out on the floor beneath her. She could hear the Dark Angel breathing just outside the closet doorway. She closed her eyes.

She felt the touch of a hand on her cheek, but she dared not look.

“We’re angels, you and I,” the voice said. “Little innocents.”

Shiloh drew back from the touch. Her eyes were still shut as tightly as she could force them.

“I won’t hurt you, child.”

Slowly, Shiloh opened her eyes and looked where the pool of blackness lay instead of a face. The Dark Angel lifted a finger toward that blackness, a bar across the place where lips should have been. A sign for silence. Then the Dark Angel vanished.

The memory of the Dark Angel had vanished, as well. Except in Shiloh’s dreams. Then Patricia had guided her back.

“A dark stocking,” Patricia suggested when they spoke about the blackness where there should have been a face. “Or maybe a veil. And the golden sword? The brass poker from the fireplace that was used to kill your mother.”

It was odd. The Dark Angel was her mother’s killer, but her mother was only memory, and who killed her wasn’t as important to Shiloh as discovering that the Dark Angel was, in fact, human.

They’d spoken of other things, of Shiloh’s loneliness, her feelings of abandonment, of her disconnectedness.

“Why
Shiloh?
” Patricia had asked. “When you chose your professional name, why only that one name?”

Shiloh hadn’t replied.

“Think about it. No last name. No connection. No family. No history. Just Shiloh.”

Wendell Two Knives had said much the same thing in his letters to her. She began receiving them after the tabloids had made big splashy headlines about her arrest and conviction and sentencing for substance abuse.

He was, he reminded her in the first letter, the husband of her grandmother’s sister. He’d guided her mother and her into the Boundary Waters once long ago. Shiloh had remembered him and the trip into the Boundary Waters the summer before her mother died. She remembered the canoe. Birch bark. And the quiet of the forest. And all the things Wendell Two Knives had known and shared with them. She remembered how peaceful her mother had seemed, a rare thing. It was a good memory. One of the last.

Wendell invited her to come again. He knew of her problems. The woods, he’d written, had healed her people for generations.
Her people
. Was he accepting her as Indian even though she’d lived her whole life in the white man’s world?

It was weeks before she wrote back, well into her therapy with Patricia and ultimately at Patricia’s urging. Wendell replied. They spoke on the phone. His voice was kind, slow, soothing. He told her stories of her mother and her grandmother. Wonderful stories that filled her with longing. He invited her again, told her he knew of a place she could be alone for as long as she wanted, alone to remember who she was. Had she ever been alone? he asked.

“I’ve always been alone,” she heard herself confiding. “And afraid.”

“I can help you not be afraid,” he promised.

He’d kept his promises, every one. The cabin had been wonderful. The woods had been healing. In her aloneness, after a time, she heard her own voice speaking to her truly.

She asked Wendell for a tape recorder. And she let the voice speak. The truth of her life that she’d turned away from through drugs and sex and a hundred forms of forgetfulness. It all poured out of her. And then her plans began to form. Such wonderful plans for the future that included, now, The People. Her people.

As the current of the Deertail carried her away from the hidden cabin and back to the world, she was excited by the thought of returning. She felt strong in her resolve to carry out the plans she’d created, had dictated carefully onto the tapes, had written to Libbie about. For the first time in her life, she felt truly herself and in control of her destiny.

There was only one thing that kept the moment from being perfect. She looked back, knowing the man called Charon was somewhere behind her.

She pulled out the map. The arrows followed the Deertail River for quite a way. She was headed toward something called the Deertail Flowage, where she would portage briefly to a round patch of blue called Embarrass Lake. She hoped she would know what the flowage was when she got there.

She put the map away and let the current carry her. Occasionally she paddled, but the river seemed to know its way and to welcome her as a companion. The sun was warm. She was tired, drowsy, and she closed her eyes. Until she heard the roar, she didn’t even realize she’d fallen asleep.

She woke with a start. The canoe was moving fast. Less than twenty yards ahead, in an angry crashing of white water, the river funneled into a long corridor of dark rock. She tried to back paddle, but it was useless. The river dragged her in.

The canoe leaped from under her, then tipped hard to the right. She threw herself in the opposite direction and dug at the water with her paddle. The bow glanced off the sharp edge of a rock half submerged and surrounded by roiling white. She was launched toward a place where the river climbed high and furious as if desperate itself to escape the corridor, and even above the din of the crashing water she heard a scraping that made her certain the canoe was being ripped apart. The world tilted. The bow lifted as if the craft were raising its head in the throes of a noble death. Water poured in at the stern, and she thought for sure she would swamp. Weighted now, the canoe spun sideways and slammed broadside into a huge rock that split the river. She grabbed the gunwales as the canoe began to tip. Then suddenly, miraculously, she swung out, canoe and all, bow downriver, and she was free of the corridor.

She was not out of danger. Great chunks of fractured rock littered the water before her, and around them the river foamed like a rabid dog. She grasped her paddle with both hands and drove the canoe to the right of a long, ragged spine of rock. She hit a whirlpool, fought to stay on the outer edge, and rode the spin for a dozen feet before she broke away. For another thirty yards, the water grumbled under the keel, but its real fury was past.

The river opened up again in a smooth, broad flow. Overhead, a brown hawk rode the thermals along the canyon walls, easy as a dream against the sapphire blue sky. In the bottom of the canoe, water sloshed gently over her boots.

Once again, she’d beaten a thing that thought it had her. She lifted her paddle above her head and let out a warrior’s yell. The echoes of it came back to her from the canyon walls like the voices of her ancestors crying her on.

40

A
NGELO
B
ENEDETTI CARRIED HIS FATHER
into cabin 7 at the Quetico. When the trembling, white-haired man had been ensconced in a leather easy chair, Booker T. Harris stepped toward him. Harris’s hands were clasped behind his back as if they’d been cuffed, and his face glistened with the sweat of a worried man.

“One of my men is dead out there. I want to know why.”

Nathan Jackson, who’d stood at the long glass windows that overlooked the lake, fuming silently, threw his hands up in exasperation. “For God sake, Booker, you know why. The son of a bitch is afraid Shiloh’s going to help nail his fucking ass for Marais’s murder.”

“Are we back to that?” Benedetti said. “I thought we were done with it.”

Jackson started across the room. “I’m not done until I’ve put you in the gas chamber.”

“Back off, Nathan.”

Harris reached out to grasp his brother’s shoulder, but Jackson pulled loose.

“The hell I’m going to back off.”

Benedetti furiously motioned to his son. “Get me out of here, Angelo. This place stinks of bullshit.”

“You’re going nowhere.” Jackson lurched toward the quivering man in the leather chair, but Angelo Benedetti thrust himself between them, chest to chest with Jackson. Harris grabbed his brother and yanked him back.

“Nathan, for Christ’s sake, use your head. Let me handle this.”

Jackson wrestled free and glared at Harris. “Oh, yeah. No problem, brother. Go right ahead. Handle it like you’ve handled everything else here. Got one man killed already and God only knows what’s happened to the others out there. Doing a stellar job, Booker. Downtown Saturday night.”

A small earthquake seemed to pass through Booker Harris, and whatever had held him in check collapsed.

“Fine,” he hollered. “Fine. You want to kill the man, you go right ahead. You’ve been throwing other people’s asses in jail for years—time maybe you had a visit there yourself. For thirty years, you’ve been dead set on undoing the good things I’ve done for you. So go ahead, throw it all away. And while you’re at it, you can double-kiss my ass, little brother.”

“Fuck you,” Jackson said.

“Yeah, and fuck you right back.” Harris slammed his hand down on the coffee table. The coffee cups jumped like startled little men. “I told you to stay away. God damn it, I told you I’d handle this. I’m going to let you in on something, Mr. Next Governor of the Golden State. I don’t know what all this is about out here, but I sure as hell know it ain’t got nuthin’ to do with Marais Grand.”

Nathan Jackson froze. He looked hard at his brother’s face until Harris guiltily turned away. “How do you know that, Booker?”

Jo, who’d stood back silently taking in all the sound and the fury, said quietly, “Because he’s always known who killed her.”

The men in the room—Schanno, the Benedettis, Jackson, Metcalf, and finally Harris—turned their full and amazed attention to Jo. She was a little amazed herself. But suddenly, it had all made sense.

Vincent Benedetti grabbed his son’s sleeve. “What am I missing here? Angelo, do you know what’s going on?”

“Hang on a second, Pop. I think we’re about to find out. Go on, Ms. O’Connor.”

“You all thought this was about men, about the two of you. But it was really about women, wasn’t it, Agent Harris?”

“What are you talking about?” Benedetti complained. “Speak plain.”

“Pop, will you just give her a chance?”

Jo moved closer to the leather chair from which Benedetti eyed her irritably. “You said your affair with Marais Grand began shortly after she came to perform at your casino. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And your wife threatened to leave you when she found out?”

“That’s right.”

“In fact, you said she threatened to kill you if you ever cheated on her with Marais Grand again.”

Benedetti shrugged. “She had a temper.”

“You ended that affair. But you had another fling with Marais Grand, shortly before she left for Nashville, and Marais claimed that Shiloh was the result.”

“So?”

“Did your wife know about the second affair?”

“Hell, Theresa knew about everything. I don’t know how. It was lucky for everybody Marais went to Nashville.”

Jo went on, “When Marais came back with little Shiloh and the tabloids were stirring up rumors of the old flame’s being rekindled, how did your wife react?”

Benedetti said, as if it were only natural, “She went berserk. I told her it was all lies.”

“But she didn’t believe you.”

“Who could blame her?”

“The night Marais Grand was killed, you were in Los Angeles. There were witnesses.” Jo looked up at the younger Benedetti. “What about you? Where were you that night?”

“Me? On a houseboat on Lake Mead with Joey and his folks. He’d just graduated from high school.”

“What about your mother?”

He thought a moment. “She stayed home, I guess. She was pretty upset back in those days. Didn’t go much of anywhere except to St. Lucia to light candles and pray.”

“Then she was alone?”

“I guess.”

“What are you getting at?” Vincent Benedetti sounded as if his patience was nearly exhausted.

“Angelo told me yesterday about a meeting between your wife and Agent Harris that took place in St. Lucia shortly after Marais Grand was killed.”

“In St. Lucia?” He glared at Harris. “She never told me.”

“There was a reason for that,” Jo said. “And there was a reason Agent Harris never looked officially in her direction during the homicide investigation. Think about it a moment. Wouldn’t an irate wife be a reasonable suspect in the killing of a woman reputed to be her husband’s lover?”

Everyone looked at Harris. He faced them like a man before a firing squad.

Jo said to him, “You must have had something pretty solid on her before you met her that day.”