Purgatory Ridge (46 page)

“They got away,” LePere said with satisfaction.
“Your wife and boy and O’Connor’s family. They all got away. All this for nothing.”

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” Lindstrom mumbled. He looked at the dry suit.

“For O’Connor,” LePere explained. “I think he’s got a chance.”

“No chance.”

“We’ll see.”

LePere didn’t waste any more time on Lindstrom. Up top, O’Connor had flopped over with the tilt of the boat. He was struggling to keep his head above water. LePere grasped him under his arms and began to pull him toward the bow, as far as possible from where the lake spilled over the stern.

“Listen to me, O’Connor,” LePere shouted. “You have a chance. I’m going to put this dry suit on you. It will keep the lake off you. The Coast Guard will come, I promise. This will probably hurt. I’m sorry.”

O’Connor stared at him and LePere didn’t know if he understood at all. He undid the life vest and removed it. He took off O’Connor’s shoes. Then he began the arduous task of pulling the tight vulcanized rubber over Cork O’Connor’s body and zipping it in place. He could feel the bow rising, the boat slipping deeper as he worked. He tugged the hood over O’Connor’s head, then began to work the life vest back on. At first, O’Connor had moaned in pain, but by the time the dry suit and vest were in place, he was limp and silent.

Christ
, LePere thought,
I’ve killed him
.

At that same moment, the lights of the
Anne Marie
died.

In a flash of lightning, LePere saw O’Connor’s eyes spring open, and he felt a hard tug on O’Connor’s
body, as if an invisible power were trying to pull him under the water that had followed them up the deck. LePere was confused. The water should have lifted O’Connor’s life vest and O’Connor with it. Instead, he was being dragged down. In the unfathomable black of the stormy night, LePere felt along the man’s body, down his legs, searching for what had snagged him. His hand touched a cold hand, touched icy fingers gripped hard around O’Connor’s ankle. In the next explosion of lightning, he saw Karl Lindstrom climbing from the lake, using Cork O’Connor to save himself.

“No you don’t, you son of a bitch,” LePere cried. He pried loose the fingers, and he grasped Lindstrom in his own strong arms. He worked his way to the port side of the bow well away from O’Connor, then undid his belt and buckled himself to the brass railing of the
Anne Marie
. “When she goes,” he shouted to Lindstrom, “you and me go with her.” Lindstrom struggled weakly, but LePere held him fast.

In little more than a minute, the boat went under and began its own long journey to the bottom of the lake. LePere held his breath as he was dragged deep into the black water. Lindstrom fought briefly, then was still. LePere maintained his grip on the man’s body a while longer, just to be certain, then let go.

Alone, John Sailor LePere continued down. As the boat swiftly descended, he felt his chest tighten, as if he were now in the grip of something enormous and overpowering, something that had always been waiting to embrace him. His lungs seemed ready to explode, and he became afraid, suddenly desperate not to release his hold on life. He reached down, fumbled
with the buckle on his belt, but it was much too late. As the water pressure crushed his ribs, he opened his mouth to cry out. In that instant, Kitchigami filled him and took him into itself.

Cork was inside something thick, something that dulled his thinking, something he could not crawl out of. Even so, he knew what John LePere had done. He understood the sacrifice.

And he understood that now he was alone.

He felt the boat slip from under him. For a moment, the suck of it as it went under tried to pull him down, but the vest lifted him. His hands and his feet were cold. His face was cold. Sometimes when he tried to breathe, he swallowed water and coughed. The coughing hurt. He kept his eyes closed against the surge of the waves. That was easy. He had no strength to open them.

He sank into darkness often, and for long periods he was aware of nothing. Then he was suddenly staring up at a sky full of stars and a moon. The lake didn’t feel angry anymore. He was tired. It was night. He wanted to sleep.

He dreamed. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he went someplace where he could always have gone if he’d known the way; then he came back.

He opened his eyes and stared into the brightest light he’d ever seen, so bright it blinded him, yet he could not look away. Somewhere in the thick of his thinking, he remembered death came as a bright light, and he wondered,
Am I dead?

A dark shape eclipsed the light. Cork saw that it was Jo’s face. She was so beautiful with the light behind
her like a halo. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her, but he could not speak. So he smiled. The smallest of smiles. All he could muster before he felt himself begin to yield to darkness, to the sweet pull of oblivion, thinking his wife’s face was a good last vision, a good final gift to take with him into forever.

J
O
O’C
ONNOR STOOD
in ash that covered the ground like snow. Around her as far as she could see, the bare, blackened trunks of pine trees rose up and scraped against an empty sky.

The rain had helped firefighters control and eventually extinguish the multitude of blazes that, for weeks, had been burning large areas of the North Woods. The old-growth white pines known as Our Grandfathers, sacred to the Ojibwe Anishinaabeg of the Iron Lake Reservation, had not been spared. With every breath, Jo took in the smell of char, of senseless destruction. She felt, as she had so often lately, a deep sense of loss and grieving.

“What a tragedy,” she said, then sighed.

Henry Meloux, who was among those who’d accompanied her to view the devastation, looked where she looked. His old face was soft and wrinkled. His brown eyes seemed amazingly calm. “Who can say what Kitchimanidoo is all about? We see little and understand less.”

Grace Fitzgerald had walked ahead of them with Scott and Stevie. Stevie looked back often to make certain his mother was still there. At a fallen pine, he stopped and bent down. Scott stooped beside him, and they peered intently at something on the ground.

“Mommy.” Stevie waved for Jo to come. “Look,” he said. “A flower.”

It was true. A small flower had thrust its yellow blossom up through the scorched earth and the ash.

“It’s like magic,” Stevie said.

“Not magic,” Meloux told him. “The way of Grandmother Earth. Come with me, Makadewagosh. I’ll show you other ways Grandmother Earth reveals her heart.”

Stevie grinned proudly at the name the old man now called him by. Meloux had kept a promise he’d made several weeks before when the boy and his father visited Crow Point. He’d bestowed upon Stevie another name, an Anishinaabe name. He called him Makadewagosh, which meant “silver fox,” for that was the name Meloux had dreamed. To Jo, who remembered her small son bathed in silver moonlight and slipping through the dark at Purgatory Cove to save them all, the name rang so true. Meloux led the two boys away a distance, pointing out things and talking softly as they walked.

“How is Stevie doing?” Grace asked.

“He wakes almost every night with nightmares. He wets the bed. He has trouble being separated from me. The psychologist says that in cases of post-traumatic stress, it often takes a long time to recover. But he’s very optimistic about Stevie. How about Scott?”

Grace watched her son. Her face was gentle, touched with concern. “He seems to be doing all right. He talks about it pretty openly. I wonder if the loss of his father
so early has made him stronger somehow. I guess only time will tell.”

Jo heard the boys laugh at something Meloux said. She was more grateful to the old man than she could say. What she hadn’t told Grace, hadn’t even told the psychologist, was that Henry Meloux was also helping Stevie, using the ancient wisdom of the Grand Medicine Society to restore harmony to the spirit that was her son. It was Meloux who’d suggested visiting the devastation of Our Grandfathers. In the look on Stevie’s face as he listened to the old man’s words, Jo could see the flower amid the ash.

“Rose is signaling,” Grace said.

Jo looked back. Her sister stood at the top of a slight rise, waving her hand. “He’s giving them trouble,” Jo said. “I knew he wouldn’t stay in the car.”

Jo left Grace. When Stevie saw her going, he abandoned Meloux and ran to his mother. They joined Rose at the top of the rise and looked down at the logging road that Lindstrom’s company had built in anticipation of cutting the white pines. A dark blue Explorer was parked there, along with an old red Bronco. Jenny and Annie stood at the bottom of the rise. Between them, using their strength for support, was their father. His right arm was held in a sling, and under his shirt was a lumping of thick gauze and bandages.

At daybreak after that long, awful night at Purgatory Cove, Jo had been aboard the Coast Guard cutter when they pulled Cork from the lake and laid him on the deck. His face was white as hoarfrost. Behind his heavy lids, his eyes looked lifeless. She was certain he was dead. She leaned to him, for a moment blocking the morning sun.
Then he smiled at her, so faintly she thought at first she’d only imagined it.

Stevie ran ahead of Jo. He wrapped his arms around his father’s waist. Cork laughed and planted a kiss in his son’s hair.

Jo started down the slope toward her husband. As she neared him, he looked up. The sun lit his face with a warm yellow light. A smile bloomed on his lips. And Jo found herself looking at yet another flower. The loveliest she had ever seen.

A
TRIA
B
OOKS

P
ROUDLY
P
RESENTS

H
EAVEN’S
K
EEP

W
ILLIAM
K
ENT
K
RUEGER

Coming soon in hardcover from Atria Books

Turn the page for a preview of
Heaven’s Keep
….

I
N THE WEEKS AFTER THE TRAGEDY, AS HE ACCUMULATES
pieces of information, he continues to replay that morning in his mind. More times than he can count, more ways than he can remember, he juggles the elements. He imagines details. Changes details. Struggles desperately to alter the outcome. It never works. The end is always the same, so abysmally far beyond his control. Usually it goes something like this:

She waits alone outside the hotel in the early gray of a cloudy dawn. Her suitcase is beside her. In her hand is a disposable cup half-filled with bad coffee. A tumble-weed rolls across the parking lot, pushed by a cold November wind coming off the High Plains
.

This is one of the details that changes. Sometimes he imagines an empty plastic bag or a loose page of newspaper drifting across the asphalt. They’re all clichés, but that’s how he sees it.

She stares down the hill toward Casper, Wyoming, a dismal little city spread across the base of a dark mountain like debris swept up by the wind and dumped there. As she watches, a tongue of dirty-looking cloud descends from the overcast to lick the stone face of the mountain
.

She thinks
, I should have called him.
She thinks
, I should have told him I’m sorry.

She sips from her hotel coffee, wishing, as she sometimes does when she’s stressed or troubled, that she still smoked
.

George LeDuc pushes out through the hotel door. He’s wearing a jean jacket with sheepskin lining that he bought in a store in downtown Casper the day before. “Makes me look like a cowboy,” he’d said with an ironic grin. LeDuc is full-blood Ojibwe. He’s seventy, with long white hair. He rolls his suitcase to where she stands and parks it beside hers
.

“You look like you didn’t sleep too good,” he says. “Did you call him?”

She stares at the bleak city, the black mountain, the gray sky. “No.”

“Call him, Jo. It’ll save you both a whole lot of heartache.”

“He’s gone by now.”

“Leave him a message. You’ll feel better.”

“He could have called me,” she points out.

“Could have. Didn’t. Mexican standoff. Is it making
you happy?” He rests those warm brown Anishinaabe eyes on her. “Call Cork,” he says
.

Behind them the others stumble out the hotel doorway, four men looking sleepy, appraising the low gray sky with concern. One of them is being led by another, as if blind
.

“Still no glasses?” LeDuc asks
.

“Can’t find the bastards anywhere,” Edgar Little Bear replies. “Ellyn says she’ll send me a pair in Seattle.” The gray-haired man lifts his head and sniffs the air. “Smells like snow.”

“Weather Channel claims a storm’s moving in,” Oliver Washington, who’s guiding Little Bear, offers
.

LeDuc nods. “I heard that, too. I talked to the pilot. He says no problem.”

“Hope you trust this guy,” Little Bear says
.

“He told me yesterday he could fly through the crack in the Statue of Liberty’s ass.”

Little Bear’s eyes swim, unfocused, as he looks toward LeDuc. “Lady Liberty’s wearing a dress, George.”

“You ever hear of hyperbole, Edgar?” LeDuc turns back to Jo and says in a low voice, “Call him.”

“The airport van will be here any minute.”

“We’ll wait.”

She puts enough distance between herself and the others for privacy, draws her cell phone from her purse, and turns it on. When it’s powered up, she punches in the number of her home telephone. No one answers. Voice mail kicks in, and she leaves this: “Cork, it’s me.” There’s a long pause as she considers what to say next. Finally: “I’ll call you later.”

In his imagining, this is a detail that never
changes. It’s one of the few elements of the whole tragic incident that’s set in stone. Her recorded voice, the empty silence of her long hesitation.

“Any luck?” LeDuc asks when she rejoins the others
.