Manitou Canyon (13 page)

C
HAPTE
R
24

T
hey sat at the kitchen table in the house on Gooseberry Lane. Rose was peeling potatoes for the evening meal. Jenny was snapping the ends off pea pods. Waaboo was in the living room, using an old towel to play tug-of-war with Trixie. The growls of the dog and the howls of Waaboo mixed in a kind of familiar music that was oddly comforting. Rose had spent much of her life in this house with the sound of children like music in the background. She and Mal had not been able to have children, and in her own quiet home she sometimes missed all the chaos that came with little ones.

That afternoon they'd received a call from Kathy Engesser at the Sheriff's Office to say that Marsha Dross and one of her deputies had flown out to join the others at Raspberry Lake. There'd been some trouble, but the exact nature wasn't clear. She'd promised to update them when she knew more. She hadn't called back yet.

Rose watched Jenny tear at the little green pods. “Are you particularly mad at those peas?”

“I still don't get it.”

“What?”

“Why Dad felt he had to go. Now Daniel's out there, too. Suddenly my wedding's taken a backseat for everyone.”

“John Harris is an old friend.”

Jenny tore a pod completely apart and swore under her breath. “They haven't seen each other in years.”

“It's about more than that. I think Cork feels he needs to atone.”

“For what?”

“Your mother. Your brother. All those poor, preyed-on kids he couldn't save after that young girl washed up on Windigo Island last year. I think maybe he feels that he's let a lot of people down.”

Jenny studied the pile of pea pod ends lying discarded in a small bowl. “He never talks about that.”

“Maybe he never will. That's not his way.” Rose put down her potato peeler. “You know, every time I look at you, I see your mother. You look so much like her.”

“Did he talk to her?”

“Not nearly as much as she would have liked. I remember her telling me once that getting him to share his feelings was like trying to pick berries off a big, thorny bush. I'm guessing that when she died, there were a lot of things he regretted never saying to her.”

Jenny reached across the table and squeezed her aunt's hand. “You keep us grounded, you know. I'm glad you're here.”

The kitchen door burst open. Stephen, Rainy, and Daniel swept in, bringing the cold from outside.

“Is that coffee I smell?” Daniel said.

They all tugged off their coats and hung them.

“Sit down,” Rose said. “I'll pour coffee for anyone who wants some.”

Waaboo came running and hit Daniel going full-bore. The man stumbled back but held. He lifted the little boy, who said, “You smell like a pine tree.”

“And you smell like a dog,” Daniel said.

“Cuz of Trixie,” Waaboo told him.

At the sound of her name, the old dog came trotting in.

They all sat at the table. Rose gave Waaboo a little plastic tumbler of milk and a cookie, and he ate quietly as the others told of their day on Raspberry Lake, including the great spill of blood they'd found on the island.

“Search and Rescue will be out tomorrow in full force,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “I don't think they'll find anything we didn't.”

“Just like her grandfather,” Stephen said. “They've disappeared into thin air.”

“Maybe a monster ate them,” Waaboo said. “There are monsters in the woods.”

Jenny said, “Why would a monster eat John Harris and his granddaughter and Baa-baa?”

“I guess because he's a hungry monster. Can I have another cookie?”

“It will spoil your dinner,” she said. “I think Trixie wants you to play with her some more.”

Waaboo slid from his chair, picked up the old towel, which Trixie had dropped on the floor, and ran into the living room, the dog following on his heels.

“It's a good question,” Rainy said. “Why would a monster eat them all?”

“And what's that monster's name?” Daniel said.

The telephone rang. Jenny answered, listened a moment, and said, “Thanks, Father Green. I appreciate your prayers. And I'll let you know as soon as we've heard anything.” She came back to the table. “Word's already spreading.”

“Should we call Annie and tell her what's going on?” Stephen said.

Annie, the middle O'Connor child, was in California, where she'd taken a job with a nonprofit organization in San Jose, leading groups of inner-city kids on camping trips into the Sierras. At the moment, she was in the mountains on one of those excursions.

“I think we should wait,” Jenny said. “We don't know what's going on. No reason to get Annie upset and pull her away from her kids until we have a better handle on this. Okay?”

“All right,” Stephen said, but it was clear his agreement wasn't wholehearted. “So what do we do? It doesn't feel right just sitting.”

“I'd like to know more about this John W. Harris and his family,” Jenny said. “There's a reason Harris is missing and Lindsay's been taken.”

“And Cork,” Rainy said.

“I think Dad just happened to be along,” Stephen said. “Collateral—” He stopped himself.

They were quiet, because they all knew the blood on Raspberry Island could have come from Cork.

Daniel broke the silence. “Let's get started,” he said and rose from his chair.

“Where are you going?” Rainy asked.

“To talk to Marsha Dross. I want to know what she found out when Harris first went missing.”

“I'm going with you,” Rainy said.

Jenny slid her chair back. “I'd like to go, too.”

Daniel shook his head. “I'd rather you worked your magic on the Internet. Find out what you can about the Harris family.”

“We should talk with Trevor, too,” Stephen said and followed Daniel and Rainy to the door.

Rose said, “I'll have dinner waiting for you when you're finished.”

They all took off, Jenny to her computer, the others out the door. Rose was left alone in the kitchen. The circumstances were certainly awful, but what she'd just experienced she understood as one of the great blessings in her life. Family. They were all different and didn't always agree and sometimes fought and knew how to hurt one another deeply, if they wanted to. But when one of them had a back against the wall, they all rallied and became a formidable whole. God, did she love them.

C
HAPTE
R
25

T
hey'd stripped themselves of their wet clothing, Cork and the kid. The tall man had given them each a wool blanket he'd pulled from one of the packs that had been in the first canoe so that everything was dry. Then he and the woman had gathered firewood. With a big hunting knife, he'd stripped away the outer layer of the wood, which had become wet in the recent rain, and the woman had built a fire, a good one that burned hot and sent up very little smoke. They'd strung a line between trees near enough to the fire that the wet clothing they hung there would dry more quickly.

In the late afternoon, the tall man put fishing gear into the first canoe and paddled onto the lake. Although Cork figured they'd planned on being flown quickly out of the Boundary Waters after the abduction, the tall man had clearly come prepared for the unanticipated. In the midst of all the inexplicable and confusing occurrences of the last two days, it was a small thing, but it mattered. It told Cork more about the man.

As daylight weakened, the kid sat by the fire with the blanket draped around him. He stared into the flames, his expression one that seemed to speak of sullen regret. He was still a kid, but he probably wanted very much to be thought a man. Like the tall man, Uncle Aaron. They were family. To bring a kid on an expedition like this, one that from the outset would involve kidnapping, was hard to fathom. Whatever was at the heart of their mission, it was important to them. Money? Cork dismissed that one out of hand. There'd been no ransom demanded for John Harris. Revenge
maybe? Cork had seen the passion for vengeance drive even good men to horrific deeds. If revenge, then in response to what? Or it might be that the Harrises were leverage in some kind of struggle. But what struggle, and who were the forces involved?

The tall man had left the sour woman with the rifle. She sat with her back against a tree, scanning the sky as if watching for the reappearance of the floatplane. Lindsay Harris, who'd been sitting on the far side of the fire from the kid, stood suddenly and moved toward him.

“Get back where you were,” the woman ordered.

“I'm not going to plot anything,” Lindsay replied. “You can hear every word I say.” She sat next to the kid. “You okay?”

“Cold,” he said.

“Mind if I look at that knee?”

“What for?”

“I've had my share of first-aid training.”

The kid drew the blanket aside enough for her to see the wound. She touched the area around it. The kid made a pained sound.

“What do you think?” he said.

“The body's an amazing thing,” she said. “Good at fighting what doesn't belong inside it. But there's something even more important. When I was thirteen years old, I visited my grandfather in Costa Rica. He was designing a road through some mountains there. I got bit by a jumping viper.”

“What's that?”

“A poisonous snake. It jumps when it strikes you. We were in the jungle, a long way from any clinic. Everybody thought I was going to die. Except my grandfather. He told me the only thing that would kill me was not believing.”

“Believing what?”

“That my spirit was stronger than that poison. He said, ‘Spirit is at the heart of everything, and there's nothing more powerful. Trust your spirit.' His exact words.”

“What happened?”

“Well, here I am.” She smiled. “Like I said, your body's an
amazing thing. But at the heart of everything is your spirit. Trust that.”

“Stupid story,” the sour woman said.

But the kid said, “I'm going to be all right.” Then he said, “Thanks.”

The tall man returned with a couple of smallmouth bass. While he cleaned them, the woman scrounged two forked sticks and two long, straight sticks from among the pines on the little peninsula. When the tall man was finished, he skewered the fish with the long sticks, mouth to tail. The woman pushed the two forked sticks firmly into the ground at the fire's edge and the tall man set the fish to roasting over the open flames.

The clothing had mostly dried by the time the fish was cooked, and Cork and the kid dressed for supper. Everything smelled heavily of woodsmoke. The bass were truly tasty. In the Boundary Waters, after a full day of canoeing and portaging, anything remotely edible seemed like a feast.

“You spend a lot of time in the woods,” Cork said to the tall man.

“It nourishes me,” the tall man said. He eyed Cork across the fire. “I'm sure you know what I mean.”

“I've been coming to the Boundary Waters since before I can remember,” Cork told him. “My father and mother brought me with them when I was just a baby.”

“I was born in the woods,” the tall man said.

“Where was that?”

The tall man smiled, as if he saw the trap, and didn't respond.

The kid said, “I don't feel right anywhere but in the woods. People, well, they just kind of make me nervous. Out here, it's just me and the spirits of the woods. I don't have to say nothing if I don't want to.”

“You're talking plenty now,” the woman said. Then she eyed the tall man. “Both of you.”

The kid looked at her, then into the fire, and fell silent.

“Did you build the canoes?” Cork asked the tall man.

The tall man seemed to consider the advisability of answering, glanced at the sour woman, and finally said, “Yes.”

“In the old way,” Cork said and let his admiration show.

“My father taught me. And his father taught him.”

Cork nodded toward the kid. “Have you taught your nephew?”

“Uncle Aaron—” the kid started, but the woman cut him off.

“Hush up, both of you,” she snapped. “Can't you see he's just trying to get information out of us? How stupid can you be?”

“That's enough,” the tall man said.

The woman looked at Cork. “I don't like you.”

Cork said, “Now there's a news flash.”

Lindsay Harris laughed, then caught herself and returned to her silence.

“I want to ask you something,” the tall man said, looking at Cork, his eyes like glowing charcoal in the firelight. “Why didn't you try to signal that plane?”

“I know the pilot. He's a friend.”

“So?”

“If he'd landed and had come to shore, what would you have done?”

“Killed him,” the woman said, sounding eager at the prospect.

“Exactly,” Cork said. “I didn't want to take that chance.”

Night had fallen. The moon was rising, and where its glow didn't swallow the stars, the sky glittered. There was not a ripple on the lake, and across it ran a frosty-looking river of moonlight. In the summer, the woods would have been full of the sounds of nocturnal creatures—crickets, tree frogs, bull frogs, katydids, and of course the ubiquitous buzz of the mosquito. But in that shoulder season right on the cusp of winter, the woods were dead quiet. But not at all dead, Cork knew. Out there in the dark were deer and moose and mink and rabbits and a whole world of animals that didn't sleep through the cold season. Across aeons, they'd evolved into creatures that could withstand the worst of what the North Country might deliver. The spirits, as the kid had called them, of that land were powerful and enduring, and
Cork understood the awe and the kinship the kid felt toward them.

“Cold again tonight,” the tall man said. “Ice on the lakes by morning, more than today. It'll slow us down.”

The woman said, “We don't have much time. If we just had the damn sat phone.” She gave the kid another of her cold glares.

“It will be what it will be,” the tall man said. “If we have to leave the canoes and walk, we'll walk.”

“Christmas before we make it to White Woman Lake,” the sour woman said, then seemed to realize her mistake and looked at Cork to see if he'd caught it.

He had. And he filed that piece of information away with all the other bits he was collecting that might help him put the puzzle together before it was too late.