The Purification Ceremony (31 page)

    “By killing us all?” Lenore asked.

    “Yes.”

    The room fell quiet, each of us absorbing and turning over Ryan’s story. I now knew more than the bare facts, but it still wasn’t enough. I’d seen the man face-to-face. I’d felt his pain in the hallucination. But there was more to this than revenge. And until I figured that out, I would not understand him. Without understanding, I couldn’t hunt him correctly.

    Cantrell cleared his throat. His eyes were glassy and his hands were trembling slightly. “I think I know how to get him.”

    Sheila lifted her head from her husband’s shoulder.

    “How?”

    Cantrell stared at the floor. “He says he wants to kill us all, but I don’t believe it.”

    “That’s what he told me.”

    Cantrell shook his head. “It’s me he wants to kill. It’s my presence he wants to wipe out from the woods. If we’re gonna kill him, we’ll have to use me as bait.”

    “No!” Sheila cried, stunned. “No, I won’t let you, Mike!”

    He grabbed her by the wrists and shook her. “I started all this, Sheila. Now I’ve got to be the one to end it.”

    

    

    “ANY SIGN YET?” came Nelson’s whispered voice.

    “Nothing,” I radioed back.

    “Be his shadow, eh?” the guide said. “His life depends on it.”

    Beads of snow and frozen rain pelted the thicket around me in pale curtains that drew and opened at the whim of the southwest wind. Brief gusts snaked along the forest floor and crawled up my pant legs, making me shiver. I was wearing a set of Griff’s snow camouflage. I was as close to invisible as you can become in this world and yet I felt naked, exposed, though not as starkly as Cantrell.

    Sixty yards in front of me, the outfitter stuttered over downed trees and limped through brambles of black branches with an arthritic gait that hadn’t been there yesterday. Part of it was show; he was making enough noise and awkward movement to attract attention. Part of it was the weight of playing decoy in a hunt for a madman.

    Cantrell stopped in mid-stride at the base of a west-facing slope. He crouched to peer through the underbrush that bearded the rise. I knew what he was doing; somewhere just ahead, Arnie was perched in a tree stand where he could see one hundred and fifty yards in one direction and two hundred in another. Arnie was carrying a .300 Winchester magnum with a high-powered scope, ready for a long distance shot should Ryan bust out and run.

    I knew Arnie was there, but seeing Cantrell stop made me jumpy. I slid the safety off the .35 Whelan pump I’d taken from the Metcalfe collection and brought the rifle to my shoulder. The Whelan was a brush-cutting gun with a heavy bullet that created a lot of killing energy in close. In close was where I, the shadow hunter, was likely to have an encounter with Ryan. I got up tight against a tree for stability and looked down the iron sights at Cantrell, reassured by the familiar heft of the gun; my father had used a Whelan for his hunts in the cedar swamps near our cabin near Baxter Park.

    It was not my perfect little .257 Roberts, but I had shot a rifle like this many times as a girl and that was comforting.

    To my relief, Cantrell continued his jerky, weakened animal stride up the slope. I eased the safety on and trailed, craning my neck to all sides, alert for any motion, any noise, any whiff of attack.

    I straddled a log, cracking a branch. With a cackling that almost stopped my heart, a flock of willow ptarmigan burst from beneath the snow between my legs and flushed crazily through the trees toward the outfitter. He spun in his tracks, a long-barreled pistol thrust before him, the terror of anticipation plastered across his face. One of the birds tore by him at eight feet. Instinctively he swung the muzzle of the pistol at the bird before letting his right arm and the gun drop wearily to his thigh.

    The echo of the cackling birds died. Cantrell and I ogled each other across the seventy yards that separated us.

    There were no words between us, but I could feel the overwhelming pressure that had gathered around him in the past few hours; he and I were playing a game with infinitely high stakes, a game where there would only be losers. Who would lose? A question chanted by Cantrell and me and everyone else in the woods that dreary morning.

    This hunt had been Cantrell’s idea. A simple variation off a tactic used by deer hunters everywhere. He and Nelson had decided to limit our options and so Ryan’s. On the map in the great room of the lodge, Cantrell had used a grease pencil to highlight a mile-long by half-mile-wide corridor north of the beaver-pond flat where Ryan had wounded Earl and south of the high ridges Nelson and I had chased him across before losing him in the feeder stream of the Sticks. The terrain was marked by four interconnected razor-backed slopes, no more than three hundred vertical feet in elevation, each no more than two hundred yards apart, all feeding onto the flat-topped rise where Arnie waited. On the map, the razor-backs looked like the gnarled, bony hand of an old man. On each of the fingers, high in a tree stand like Arnie’s, a hunter waited. Theresa sat in a hemlock about a quarter of a mile east of me, on the knuckle of the first finger. Kurant’s position was on the same finger, but well out toward the nail. Kurant hated being there, hunting, but he knew he had no choice; Ryan was unlikely to make distinctions as to who would live or die. Griff covered the first joint beyond the knuckle of the second finger, Phil the second joint of the ring finger. Nelson was west of me on the knuckle of the pinkie. Cantrell had put his wife on the nail of the shortest finger, the place he felt was strategically the safest location, the stand least likely to see action.

    Once Sheila had accepted that her husband was determined to go out as bait, she demanded to be out in the woods, too.

    “No,” Cantrell said. “I can’t let you go.”

    But Sheila had stood her ground, showing the inner toughness that had enabled her to stand by her man even in the wake of Lizzy Ryan’s killing. “If you think I’m sitting in this lodge while you go out and try to get yourself killed, you’re out of your mind, eh?”

    As it was, there was very little sleep in the hours between the planning of the hunt and the execution. Long before dawn we moved Earl and Lenore to a room on the second floor of the lodge. Arnie had changed the dressing on Earl’s back, dosed him again with antibiotics and painkillers, then handed Lenore a shotgun. As she’d closed the door behind her, I thought of her sitting in the hard wooden chair next to her husband, facing the door alone for the rest of the day, wondering at any noise in the floorboards beyond. I could not have stood it. Better to be out in the elements, moving.

    We’d left the estate an hour before daylight, all of us on foot, Cantrell and I walking each stander to his tree. There we screwed in metal foot pegs to take us twenty-five feet up, then attached metal stands to the trees with chains. The shooters were in place by 8 A.M., fighting the dank cold, trying to remain motionless in the trees while Cantrell and I wandered between the finger ridges, hoping to draw Ryan into our trap.

    The strategy was sound. Ryan had demonstrated with his attack on the lodge that he was willing to take almost any chance to complete his twisted ceremony. But instead of trying to cut his track and deal with him in the chaos of the open woods, the outfitter wanted to control the parameters of the hunt by restricting our setup to this small chunk of terrain. Our goal was to lure Ryan into one of the funnels between the fingers where either I or the standers could get a shot before he got to Cantrell.

    Now, however, I had my first pangs of doubt. I’d been dogging the outfitter for nearly three hours and completed three loops in and around the razor-backs without sign of Ryan. On the radio there was an increase in the volume of whispered, desperate chatter: “Seen anything?” “No, you?”

    “Nothing.” “I don’t like this.”

    Cantrell slid the pistol into his shoulder holster. He took off his baseball cap and wiped his brow with his sleeve. He got out a water bottle from his fanny pack and drank from it. Then he nodded to me and gestured toward the ridge where Arnie waited. I signaled back that I’d be right behind him. I checked my watch 11:31 A.M.

    The first shot was a flat cracking explosion behind me, over my left shoulder. And then a second and a third, all of them from the far side of the first finger, midway down the shelf.

    “Theresa!” I despaired. One of the two standers we’d believed least likely to encounter Ryan had shot first. I sprinted back toward her position along the trail we’d gouged in the snow. As I ran I tugged the radio from my belt and shouted into it, “That’s Theresa shooting! Stay off the radio until I call you. Cantrell! Cantrell! Listen to me: if she’s missed, he’s going to loop. Move toward her southsoutheast. I’ll go straight at her.”

    “Okay,” came the outfitter’s hoarse reply. I didn’t turn to see where he’d gone. He was on his own now. I couldn’t be the shadow anymore.

    “Theresa?” I huffed into the radio. “Theresa, answer me!” “Get down here!” she whined in return. “I think I hit him, but I can’t see him anymore. Hurry!”

    Theresa hugged the trunk of the fir we’d selected for her earlier that morning. Her face, barely visible under a green wool cap, had an anxious sheen to it. She tottered in the tree stand upon seeing me, then got her balance and shakily pointed the barrel of her rifle south toward the ridgeline.

    “Down there, eh?” she panted. “Just on the edge of the last shelf near that blowdown larch tree I heard this godawful screaming, like a baby with colic or something. And then on the other side of the larch I see this white blob moving. You said he’d be wearing white camouflage, so I figured he was crawling along out there and I shot until I couldn’t see him moving anymore.”

    She hugged the tree tighter, flattening her enormous breasts. “You don’t think I’ve killed him?”

    “I don’t know, Theresa. We’ll have to go see.”

    Theresa shook her head, her mouth slack and open. “I can’t go down there not knowing. If he’s dead I don’t want to see what I’ve done, no matter what he’s done to us. I.. I was never much of a hunter.”

    “Okay,” I said. “But I need you to cover me.”

    She nodded uncertainly, then got her arm free of the tree trunk and faced south.

    Forty yards beyond Theresa’s stand, the clearing gave way to scrub spruces. Tufts of pale weeds poked through the surface of the windblown snow. I went from tree to tree, pausing behind each to scan the terrain below me.

    “Diana?” Cantrell called on the radio. “I can see Theresa in her tree and you about three hundred yards east of me.”

    “Anyone else?”

    “No.”

    “Then come in slow toward that shelf about fifty yards south of me. That’s where she saw him before she shot.”

    I edged closer, the butt of the Whelan an inch from my shoulder. I dissected the grid around the larch for any hint of motion, the barest speck of sound. Cantrell came into my field of vision, slow, rolling his toe into the snow before settling on his heel. He braced the pistol with both hands. As he came in line with the larch, he gestured to me to stop.

    “There’s blood ahead of me, other side of the tree,” he whispered into the radio.

    Everything changed. I searched for a crumpled figure on the forest floor. But there was only snow and ice-clad branches clawing through snow. I made it to the tree trunk and peered over, instantly sickened by the blood and the decapitated form of a giant snowshoe hare. I swallowed, got across the log and picked up the headless animal. Its back leg dangled at an obtuse angle, broken not by the impact of a rifle bullet, but by the bending force of powerful human hands.

    My mind raced, trying to decide why Ryan would break the animal’s leg before throwing it onto the shelf, only to have my weakened train of thought shattered by a fourth gunshot, this one full and blasting and close. I threw myself flat behind the log, then scrambled around to see where Theresa was aiming.

    “It’s not her!” Cantrell yelled. “That’s Kurant!” He ran forward, caught sight of me still holding the rabbit, hesitated, then took off to the east, calling over his shoulder, “Ryan’s looped the other way!”

    I sprinted after the outfitter, the Whelan in my left hand, the radio in my right. “Kurant? Kurant?”

    “He screamed and I shot!” Kurant came back. “He’s still screaming, but I can’t see him. What should I do?”

    “Don’t shoot again unless you’re sure it’s him!” I called back. “No one shoot unless you’re sure it’s him. He’s using — ”

    I tripped over a log in mid-stride. The radio flew from my hand and disappeared in the snow.

    I didn’t have time to search for it now. I had to keep up with Cantrell. He was a possessed man, sure that he was close, that the end of his nightmare was at hand. One way or another. I got up and went after him, driven by the notion that I could save Cantrell from Ryan, or at least from himself. We endure times of crisis by telling ourselves the prettiest lies we can imagine.

    The rabbit was still screaming when we came upon it in a shallow depression one hundred and ten yards east of Kurant’s stand. The rabbit writhed and squalled and spun on its side, unable to comprehend that its back leg was shattered and no good anymore. Kurant’s shot had struck two feet high, debarking a stump.

    Cantrell leaned against a big boulder, kneading at his side, his breaths coming in great gasps. “What’s he doing with this rabbit shit?” Cantrell demanded. His skin was gray. His head swiveled in one direction and then another, sure that at any moment an arrow would fly at his chest.

    The stitches in my palm and forearm ached. My head pounded from the exertion. But I forced out the only explanation I could come up with: “Decoy. He’s using them to figure out where we are and where we’re weakest. The rabbits scream and hobble around. We shoot and he knows where we are and what we’re capable of.”