Northwest Angle

EIGHT

It took Jenny three trips to bring all the materials—blanket, knapsack, and water jug—and carry the baby to the place she hoped would be sanctuary. She’d chosen a spot at the other end of the island, as far from the cabin as she could get. The baby, no longer starved but still exhausted, continued to sleep.

She spent an hour building a blind from all the waste of branches sheered off by the horrific wind. She constructed it around an uprooted pine on the far side of the rock outcropping that had protected her during the storm. The pine lay a fair distance from the wreckage of the boat, which she also tried to hide, and completely out of the line of sight from the cabin. She didn’t know if the girl’s killer or killers would be back, and she didn’t know if they would look the island over, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Against a firearm, she was almost powerless. When she finished, she created a little shelter in the lee of the fallen pine, whose roots were like a great claw spread toward the south. She wove a kind of roof of evergreen boughs overhead to provide shade from the sun. Finally, she spread boughs across the ground to give some softness there and overlaid them with the blanket she’d taken from the dead woman’s bunk. Inside this makeshift shelter, there was just room enough for her and the baby and the things she’d brought.

She understood that most of this she was able to do because of her father. Even before she could walk, he’d taken her camping in the great woods north of Aurora, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Growing up, she’d learned how to survive. In her office in Iowa City, these skills had seemed distant and useless. Now she was grateful.

But Iowa City had given her other skills that were important at the moment. During all her years of college, because her scholarships didn’t completely cover her costs, she’d worked in the nursery of a day-care center at the university.

Her father had once told her that life was always preparing you for what lay around some corner in the future; smart people paid attention. She hoped that she was smart enough, because God only knew what lay around the curve just ahead.

By the time Jenny had done all she could, the sun was low in the sky. She sat, very tired, and watched the sleeping child. Neglect was sometimes the inevitable result of teen pregnancy, she knew, but this child had obviously been loved and well cared for. She wondered how anyone could do the things someone had done to the child’s mother. It could have been cruelty, pure and simple. The sad reality was that some men fed on that. Or, she considered, it could have been that they wanted something from her she wouldn’t or couldn’t give them.

“Like what?” she asked aloud.

Even to begin to speculate on that one she would probably have to go back to the cabin and have a really good look around. And she had no intention of doing so.

The evergreen boughs cast a shadow over the baby, but not completely. There were places where the needles didn’t quite mesh, and waning sunlight came through and fell on his face in soft tangerine splashes.

“She was so young, your mother,” Jenny whispered to him, and she heard in her voice the imbroglio of sadness and anger. The young, she knew, were often the victims of the worst cruelties.

Because the girl had been naked, Jenny wondered if she’d been raped. And that possibility sent more ice into her blood. She didn’t want to be anywhere near whoever had been there, whoever might return.

The baby began to stir. Jenny took the cooking pot to the shoreline only a few yards distant and filled it with lake water. She lit a burner and set the pan on the stove. She made up a bottle of formula and set it in the heating water. By that time, the baby was fully awake and fussing.

She picked him up, sat herself on the blanket, and cradled him. He was, despite his cleft lip, a lovely child, with fat cheeks and a broad little nose. He looked up into her face, and his dark eyes seemed to be searching for understanding. He’s wondering who I am, this stranger who smells nothing like his mother, Jenny thought. He lay quiet in her arms. She felt his breath break upward against her neck, and his heart beat against her own heart. He reached up a tiny hand and touched her chin.

Jenny wondered how long the girl had been dead. How long had the child gone without food, without touch?

She cooed to him. “There, there, little one. Don’t be afraid. I’m here for you. I’m here for you. No one will hurt you, I promise.”

After the baby fed, he slept again. Jenny was hungry, starved in fact, and she opened a can of Spam and a can of pineapple slices. She diced them together in the same pan she’d used to heat the baby bottle, and she fried the concoction over the burner of the Coleman. The result was outrageously delicious.

In the middle of cleaning up afterward, she stopped suddenly and listened. The wind had returned, but gently so, and the lake water shushed against the shoreline so that she wasn’t certain she’d really heard anything. She checked the baby, then left the little shelter and climbed to the top of the rock outcropping, where a few of the cedars, though ragged, still miraculously stood. The sun was just setting, and the islands to the west wore peach-colored halos; their faces were going dark. In the shadows, the water was silver-black. The lake surface rolled in the breeze, and all that floated there—trees and parts of trees and God alone knew what else—lifted and fell as if on the chest of a breathing thing. In the dimming light, it all seemed to be part of one living organism, one great, wounded creature. She listened again and heard only the water and the soft sigh of the wind among what remained of the cedar branches.

She looked toward the far end of the island, where she could see the damaged cabin amid the rubble. Behind it rose the small, bare hillock where she’d stood that afternoon and had called in vain for the baby’s mother, a young woman who could not answer and was past caring. She was tired, and that moment seemed long ago now.

She was about to leave the outcropping and return to the shelter when she took a last look at the lake, and she froze. There was movement in the water, movement out of sync with the easy rise and fall of the swells. Something, she couldn’t tell exactly what, was approaching. It came purposefully, propelled by a mechanism that, at the moment, she couldn’t discern. It was long and dark in the water, with a wide splay of what might have been antlers at the head. A buck? she wondered. But the body seemed much too long, so perhaps a moose. The creature pressed on, and as it neared the island, she realized with a sickening jolt what exactly she was looking at: a section of shattered tree, and the antlers were branches, and what propelled it was a man.

She dropped to the ground and lay on the hard cap of the outcropping, watching the figure swim the log toward shore. In her mind flashed the horrible image of the naked girl who’d died so brutally less than a quarter of a mile from where she lay. She was dreadfully afraid for the baby. And she felt her own maddening helplessness in the face of all the terrible possibility ahead.

The man let go of the log and slogged ashore. In one hand, he held a long, thin object that Jenny was certain had to be a rifle. He was a good hundred yards from where she lay, and because of the distance and the dim light, she couldn’t make out any detail except for the firearm he carried. She waited, barely breathing.

He stood a long moment, as if catching his breath, then began to walk the shoreline in the direction of the cabin.

From below and behind Jenny came the sudden bawling of the baby.

The man stopped and turned.