Purgatory Ridge (45 page)

She saw a look in his eyes, the kind she’d often seen in the jury box when she knew she’d put well into their minds the question of reasonable doubt. Bridger reached down and lifted his right pant leg. Strapped to his calf was a sheathed knife. He unsnapped the leather guard that secured the hilt.

“You all just sit tight,” he said. He winked at Jo. “Could’ve used you in the SEALs.” Once more he braced himself in the companionway and waited. When the motor cut out, he tensed.

Lindstrom pulled the cabin door open. He had the gun in his hand. He said to Bridger, “Topside, Wes. We need to confer.”

“Confer,” Bridger said. “Right.”

Lindstrom stepped back on deck and Bridger followed warily. The door closed. The waves thumped the side of the boat, and the hull creaked and groaned. Jo slid quickly from the bunk. “Move away from there,” she said to LePere.

He scooted from the storage compartment, and Jo tried desperately to open the door, hoping there would
be something inside—a knife, anything—that might free them. Her taped hands were little help. She was still struggling when something slammed hard against the cabin door. A guttural cry of pain followed. Jo kept working at the latch as the sound of a fight in the deckhouse carried down to them. The crack of a pistol shot, followed almost immediately by another, brought the scuffle to an abrupt end.

They all stared at the cabin door.

When it opened, Karl Lindstrom stepped down. He looked drawn, and Jo saw a red stain on his right side above his belt line.

“He had a knife strapped to his leg,” Jo said.

“Yesterday’s news,” Lindstrom replied.

“We were hoping he’d kill you.”

“You were hoping we’d kill each other. Bad luck for you. Just a nick.”

“How will you explain it in the morning? You cut yourself shaving?”

“I’ll think of something,” Lindstrom said. “I always have.”

He held the gun in his right hand and the detonator in the other. Jo knew they’d reached the end. Would he shoot them first?

She didn’t wonder long. Nor did it ultimately matter.

Lindstrom stumbled suddenly down the steps. A look of astonishment stretched all the features of his face. He opened his mouth, and Jo thought he might speak, but all that came out was a brief, hard grunt. He dropped the gun and reached backward as if trying to grasp something behind him. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the cabin, then fell forward, facedown.
In three places, the back of his shirt was stained with widening patterns of blood.

Cork teetered at the top of the cabin stairway. In his hand, he gripped the knife Bridger had used in his fight with Lindstrom. The blade glistened with Lindstrom’s blood from tip to hilt. The bow of the
Anne Marie
rose and dipped, pitching Cork down the steps into the cabin. He stumbled over Lindstrom’s prone form, bounced off the berth, and fell at LePere’s feet. He’d dropped the knife. Slowly, painfully, he reached out, took it again in his grasp, and lifted it toward LePere.

John LePere quickly turned himself around and ran the duct tape that bound his wrists along the sharp edge of the knife while Cork held it. He tore his hands free, took the blade from Cork, and cut the others loose.

Jo sat on the floor and cradled her husband’s head in her lap. “Stay with me, Cork.”

“Always,” he whispered.

LePere said, “I’m going topside. I’ll take us back in.”

He hadn’t gone a step when Grace Fitzgerald cried out, “No!” and reached toward Karl Lindstrom.

Jo saw why. She watched in horror what none of them was able to stop. Karl Lindstrom had turned his head toward his left hand, in which he still held the detonator. Before anyone could prevent him, he squeezed his fingers around the device. A muffled explosion followed, and the
Anne Marie
shivered as if she’d been kicked.

“You son of a bitch,” Grace yelled.

“I always was a bad loser,” Lindstrom murmured.

LePere danced around Lindstrom and hurried up to
the deck. He came back a moment later, looking grim.

“He’s blown a hole in the stern. We’re taking on water.”

“What about the other boat?” Jo said.

LePere shook his head. “The blast blew the tow line free. The other boat’s gone. I can’t even see it.”

“Don’t you have life vests?” Grace asked.

“In the deckhouse,” LePere said. “Let’s clear this cabin. I have to get into that storage compartment. I keep an inflatable raft there. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

“Take Stevie up, Grace. I’ll help Cork.”

“You’re not strong enough,” LePere told her. “You get the raft. I’ll take your husband.” He lifted Cork in his arms and started up the steps behind the others.

Jo found the rolled, yellow rubber raft and two small oars where LePere had indicated. By the time she’d grabbed the items, water ran down the companionway and lay several inches deep in the cabin.

Lindstrom rolled to his back and said in a wet, bubbly voice, “Help me.”

“Ask God, not me.” Jo didn’t even pause as she stepped over him and headed topside.

Without power or guidance, the boat had turned broadside to the wind, and it tilted dangerously as it rode up the waves and rolled into the troughs. Jo struggled through the deckhouse toward the stern doorway, the shifting angle of the boat throwing her off balance at every step. LePere shouted into the radio mike at the helm station, “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is the
Anne Marie
. We have a damaged hull and are sinking fast.” He repeated the message several times, giving the coordinates, then abandoned the
radio and helped Jo with the raft and oars. They skirted Bridger, who lay facedown in the water that sloshed in the deckhouse, two bloodstains merging across the back of his shirt.

Outside, the cockpit was awash with water calf deep. With both hands, Scott was holding tightly to the railing of the ladder that led up to the flying bridge. He wore an orange life vest that was too big for him. Beside Scott, Grace held herself to the ladder with one hand and held to Stevie with the other. Stevie, too, wore a big life vest. One more vest was draped across the ladder. Cork sat alone, propped against the side of the boat. Jo could see damage to the stern railing, and the list of the
Anne Marie
was becoming more obvious by the moment.

LePere cut the rope that held the raft in a roll, and he pulled the cord to open the air valve. The raft inflated quickly.

Jo saw immediately it was too small. “We won’t fit,” she screamed, beginning to lose control. She’d held herself together for so long that she felt utterly exhausted, ready to give in to panic.

“The two of you.” LePere pointed to Jo and Grace. “And the boys. You can fit.”

“I’m not leaving Cork.”

“He can’t help you.”

“I’m not leaving him,”
Jo shouted at LePere. She looked toward her husband. He was flopping like a rag doll as the waves pitched the
Anne Marie
about. Even so, it was obvious that the shake of his head was intentional. He was telling Jo
no
.

She knelt beside him. “I can’t go without you.”

She had to lean very near to hear his answer.

“You have to,” he said.

“How can I leave you, Cork?”

“We’ll never leave each other.” He nodded toward where Stevie stood, held steady by Grace Fitzgerald. “Get our son home safely. Do that for me. Promise.”

Although rain ran in rivers down her face, it wasn’t the rain that made her eyes blur. “Cork—”

“No time. Promise,” he insisted.

She yielded. “I promise.”

“I love you,” he whispered against her cheek.

“I love you,” she whispered back. She couldn’t say good-bye, couldn’t manage any more words at all. She kissed him, kissed him just that once, then she turned away.

LePere held the third vest out to Grace and Jo. “It’s the last one I have. Who wears it?”

“You,” Grace said to him.

“It won’t do me any good. In this lake, I’d just freeze to death.”

“Then could you put it on my husband?” Jo asked LePere. “I don’t want to lose him forever.”

She looked to Grace, who seemed to understand her purpose. Bodies without life vests did not float in Lake Superior. The lake didn’t give up its dead. Grace nodded her assent.

“Into the raft,” LePere shouted. Then, “Wait.” He went into the deckhouse and came back with a small compass that he gave to Jo. “Hold a northwest heading, into the wind.”

Jo put her arms briefly around the man. “Thank you.”

“God be with you,” he said and pushed her toward the raft.

The stern, riding low in the water, was the easiest place from which to launch. LePere held the raft as steady as he could while Jo and the others got in. The rough seas made it difficult, but finally Grace was settled in back with one of the oars and Jo in front with the other. The two boys huddled in the middle, Scott with his arms around Stevie. LePere shoved them off.

They headed into a wind that threw the lake at them. Jo dug at the water with all her strength. They rode several feet up a swell, then dropped into the trough behind it. The black water broke over them with numbing cold, and it was clear to Jo that they were not much better off in the little yellow raft than they’d been on the foundering
Anne Marie
. Holding the compass near her face, she checked direction. She allowed herself one look back. She could barely see the lights of the boat. The mouth of darkness was already open, ready to swallow Cork forever. She turned her mind and her will to keeping her final promise to her husband.

For a long time, they battled the lake, using the squat oars as paddles. Jo’s arms had never hurt so much. Moving into the wind was tiring, but it was good in a way. They held their course more easily. Jo couldn’t tell at all if they were making distance. She didn’t speak to Grace, but she could feel the push of the other oar behind her as steady as her own. After three quarters of an hour, the wind slackened and the rain began to let up. In a few minutes, the storm passed. The lake grew calmer. As if a curtain had been pulled away, the moon and stars emerged, turning the water in front of them silver. At the end of the silver,
Jo saw the black rise of land several hundred yards away, with lights scattered along the shoreline.

“We made it!” Grace shouted triumphantly at her back.

Not all of us
, Jo thought, staring at the dark land ahead.
And not all of me
.

J
OHN
L
E
P
ERE WAS ALMOST HOME
. He stood at the stern of the foundering
Anne Marie
and stared down into the black water of a lake he’d known his whole life, whose vast existence suffused every aspect of his being but whose true spirit had eluded all his attempts at understanding. LePere finally let go of trying to understand and accepted the only thing he knew for sure. Below the raging surface, along the rocky bottom hundreds of feet down, the water was still and silent, and he would soon lie there, where he’d always been meant to come to rest.

After the yellow raft was swallowed by the night and the storm, LePere turned back and appraised the situation. Bridger lay dead in the deckhouse. In the forward cabin below, Lindstrom was dead—or dying. These things were as they should be. But there was one element that had no place in this final drama. Cork O’Connor should never have been a part of it. The man had done nothing to deserve the end that awaited him.

LePere slogged across the cockpit that was swamped
with icy water. He sat next to O’Connor and helped brace him against the pitch of the boat. He offered the only bit of comfort he could. “They got away.”

O’Connor lifted his head. “They’ll make it?”

“They’ll make it.” LePere didn’t just say this. He believed it, believed it because he’d seen firsthand what the two women and their boys were capable of. “They’re strong, O’Connor. In all the important ways.”

O’Connor had lowered his head again. John LePere didn’t know if he’d heard, if it made any difference.

“Here.” LePere took the life vest in both hands. “I’m going to put this on you.”

O’Connor looked up and shook his head. LePere moved closer to hear his words. “You wear it. Wasted on me.”

“I promised your wife,” LePere told him. “It’s a promise I’m going to keep.”

O’Connor cried out in pain as LePere maneuvered him into the vest, but he didn’t fight it. LePere didn’t know if the man understood the true reason for his wife’s request. Did it matter?

“There. That’ll keep your head above water. Now if I could just keep you dry, you’d be fine until the Coast Guard comes.”

He kept his words light, but when O’Connor raised his tired eyes, John LePere could see that he understood perfectly the truth of his predicament.

“I’m sorry,” LePere said, because he felt responsible.

O’Connor shook his head slightly. Was it a pardon? John LePere wondered.

The two men sat together as the waves washed over the gunwales, filling the cockpit. LePere could feel the
Anne Marie
growing heavy and sluggish as she took on
water. There was nothing now but to wait for the end. Lightning made the lake stand out in moments of stark black and white. LePere closed his eyes and remembered things that were alive with color. The blue of the summer sky over Superior and the deep aching blue of the lake below. The charcoal cliffs of Purgatory Ridge and the green tufts of grass that grew out of even the most solid rock. His father’s eyes, golden as the sun when he looked down from the height of the ridge, pointing where the fish would run. His mother’s cheeks, flushed with happiness as she stood beside her husband. And Billy. Billy most of all. Tanned from the summer sun, strong from swimming in a lake cold as ice, a tawny baseball mitt on his right hand, his eyes an earthy green-brown and shining.

Far out of place among all that memory, a thought came to John LePere—the dry suit he kept stowed in the compartment in the cabin of the
Anne Marie
.

His eyes snapped open. “Jesus,” he said. “Of course.”

He leaped up and fought his way through the deckhouse. The
Anne Marie
was listing severely, her stern ready to disappear beneath the swells. As he reached the companionway down to the forward cabin, the lights flickered, but they didn’t die. Lindstrom no longer lay on the floor. He’d managed to crawl partway up the steps to the deckhouse. He looked dead and LePere simply stepped over him. In the forward cabin, LePere threw open the storage compartment door. The diving suit lay folded on a shelf, wet from the deep water in the cabin. As LePere made his way back to the companionway, he saw that Lindstrom wasn’t, in fact, dead. The man was watching him.