Northwest Angle

TWENTY-NINE

How far to Stump Island?” Cork asked.

“Another five miles,” Kretsch said. “It’s the last of the islands before you hit the big water, so it’s pretty far out there.”

The wind was against them, and Bascombe, at the helm, gripped the wheel and seemed tense as they bounced through the chop of the waves. They’d passed to the west of Massacre Island, which lay on the other side of the boundary line with Canada, and then Little Oak Island, and finally Garden Island, where the lake had opened up in front of them. On the horizon far to the south, Cork could see nothing. The big water, he knew. There was something about that vast expanse of looming emptiness that was a little frightening. He much preferred the sense of intricacy created by the tangle of islands behind them. Or better yet, the intimacy of the small, clear lakes of home, Tamarack County.

“What do you know about the folks who run the camp?” he asked Kretsch.

The deputy squinted against the wind, and lines cracked the suntanned skin of his face. “Not much. Not quite as accessible as the Baptists used to be. Keep pretty much to themselves, but no trouble. They have money, apparently. They bought the island outright with cash.”

“What denomination are they?”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“No particular denomination,” Bascombe said to them over his shoulder. “They call themselves the Church of the Seven Trumpets.”

“Never heard of them,” Cork said.

“Pretty fundamentalist, I understand. Holy Rollers or something,” Bascombe said. “But like Tom was saying, no trouble. Me, I think religion is for the faint of heart.”

“What do you mean?” Kretsch asked, a little edge of irritation to his voice.

“I know you’re a good Catholic boy, Tom. But it seems to me religion mostly offers false comfort to folks afraid of dying.”

Stephen had seemed intent on studying the islands as they passed, but now he turned to Bascombe. “You’re not afraid of dying?”

“Sure I am. But when I’m standing at that door, I don’t want some pasty-faced young minister telling me things are going to be better on the other side. Hell, how would he know? You man up to things in life, and I figure death’s no different. That’s all I’m saying.”

Stephen looked off toward a small gathering of bare rocks surrounded by angry water and seemed to think about Bascombe’s comments. Finally he said, “Mr. Bascombe, I respect your opinion, but for me, my religion’s about a way of living, not dying.”

Kretsch’s clear blue eyes sparkled with approval, and the deputy gave Stephen a broad grin. “I’ve never heard it said better.”

Bascombe glanced back and said affably, “Call me Seth, son.”

Stephen looked again at the great water across which they bounded. Cork was proud of his son. Stephen, in his short life, had suffered great blows. He’d been kidnapped when he was very young. He’d seen his father shot—nearly fatally—right in front of him. He’d lost his mother. Yet his faith was strong. And Cork knew it wasn’t the result alone of his Catholic upbringing, nor was it strictly Christian. Of all his children, Stephen was the one in whom the blood of the Anishinaabeg ran most powerfully, and his spirituality came as much from the teaching of men like Henry Meloux, the old Ojibwe Mide, as it did from the text of the New Testament.

“There it is,” Bascombe hollered over the wind and the slap of waves. “Stump Island.”

He pointed south, where a long gray-green worm seemed to sit on the sun-stained water. As they drew nearer, it grew into a flat, heavily wooded island. Cork could see nothing beyond it but the blue horizon. It felt to him as if he was looking at the last outpost in a great liquid desert.

“Anybody else on the island besides the camp folks?” he asked Kretsch.

“Nope. They’ve got the whole place to themselves. Don’t need outside help. For their electricity and heat, they’ve got solar panels and that big wind generator.” He pointed toward a white wind turbine that stood high above everything else on the island. “Propane for backup. They filter their own water, grow a lot of their own food. Pretty much self-sustaining.”

The island was easily a half a mile long, flat and heavily wooded, and the shoreline looked to be all rock. Bascombe guided the launch around the west end, where a gathering of cabins and other buildings came suddenly into view, spread out along the finger of a broad peninsula. The cabins were clapboard painted cedar red. Two structures stood out: the tall wind generator, bone white, and the dark metal spider webbing of another tower currently under construction. The tower looked as if it might, when finished, be used for radio broadcasting. Bascombe guided them toward a long dock, where a couple of big powerboats were moored. Near the dock stood a large boathouse. As they approached, two men came from the boathouse to meet them. The first was tall, blue-eyed, black-haired, gothic looking in the angular cut of his jaw and the long slope of his nose. He wore a denim shirt with sleeves rolled back and clean, faded jeans. The other man was younger, slender, willowy, handsome in a brooding way. He had the same black hair and blue eyes as the other man, and even without having been introduced, Cork figured they were family. They both cradled rifles.

“What’s with the hardware, Gabe?” Bascombe called as they motored up.

The taller, older man let the rifle hang in one hand, barrel toward the ground, unthreatening. “Just making sure that I knew you and that you’re friendly, Seth. We had someone trespassing last night, someone with a firearm. Took a couple of shots at us.”

“Anybody hurt?” Kretsch asked.

“No, thank God.”

“You see who it was?”

“Didn’t, Tom. But it was someone in a cigarette boat, I can tell you that much. Took off fast once we came after him.”

Bascombe said, “Noah Smalldog?”

The man named Gabriel nodded. “That’s what I figured. There’s a soul bound for hell as surely as I’m standing here.”

They tied up, and when they’d all disembarked and stood together on the dock, Cork asked, “Why would Noah Smalldog come here in the middle of the night?”

Cork placed the tall man in his early forties. His hair, wild in the wind that blew across the big water, gave him a restless, almost manic look. He had eyes so blue-white they seemed made of crystal, and those eyes were looking at Cork pretty sharply.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

“My name’s Cork O’Connor. And I think this Smalldog may have taken a potshot at me, too.”

“Well, I guess that puts us in the same boat.” The man shook Cork’s hand. “I’m Gabriel Hornett.”

“This is my son, Stephen,” Cork said.

“Stephen, eh? Fine Christian name, that. A brave Christian martyr.”

“Yes, sir,” Stephen said with a brief, courteous smile. “Is that Hornet, like the insect?”

“Two t’s at the end, son. Makes my sting twice as dangerous.”

Hornett laughed, and Cork could tell it was a line he used often and was fond of. “This is my brother, Joshua.” He indicated the willowy man with brooding good looks who stood at his side. The younger Hornett gave a silent nod in acknowledgment. Cork placed Joshua in his mid-twenties, a good fifteen years younger than his brother.

“What does Smalldog have against you?” Hornett asked.

“Long story,” Cork replied.

“And part of the reason we’re here,” Kretsch said. “Can we go somewhere out of this wind and talk?”

“Sure thing. Let’s go to the community hall. This way.”

Hornett turned and led them away from the shore. His brother brought up the rear, following a few steps behind the others. Hornett took them into the heart of the church camp, a clean and pleasant place. The cabins and buildings, all sturdy-looking structures, had been recently painted and were in good repair. In addition to the metal tower under construction, there was another major project under way: a long wooden skeleton, a two-story framework of studs that appeared as if it might become a dormitory, or maybe even a barracks. The grounds were immaculate, and the paths through the trees were of crushed limestone, beautifully white against the green of the grass and the trees. There were a number of people about, all busy with the various constructions as well as the normal work of a camp—repairing steps on a cabin or raking leaves or collecting garbage. No one seemed to take any particular notice of Cork and the others.

“Quite a place you have here,” Cork said.

“The Lord has guided us well,” Hornett replied. “We call it the Citadel.”

“And your church is the Church of the Seven Trumpets, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“Interesting name. Where does it come from?”

“Read your Revelation, Cork. The Apocalypse is coming, make no mistake. We’re preparing ourselves and our souls here.” He gave Cork and Stephen a sidelong glance and added, “We open our arms to anyone wanting to accept Jesus before it’s too late.”

“You’re talking End Times?” Cork said.

“You say that with a smirk, sir, which I’m sorry to see.”

Cork thought the man was way too sensitive, but in his experience, a lot of deeply religious people were. In his own mind, there was often a profound difference between those who thought of themselves as religious people and those who preferred to think of themselves as spiritual. Given a choice, he’d go with the latter every time.

The community hall was a new structure, large and simple, a great room with high ceilings and thick rafters of dark wood. Half the area inside was taken up with tables. The other half held chairs arranged in rows that faced a simple altar. The wall behind the altar was dominated by an enormous banner that held the image of a man with black hair and a black beard and crystal-blue eyes that, no matter where you stood in the great hall, seemed to follow you.

“One of the prophets?” Cork asked.

“In a way. The Reverend Jerusalem Hornett, founder of the Church of the Seven Trumpets.”

“Any relation?”

“My father,” Hornett said.

Because of the severe blue eyes in both men, Cork wasn’t surprised in the least.

“The hall serves two purposes,” Hornett explained. “We gather here for our communal meals, and this is where we worship together. We think of it like the upper room of the Last Supper, a place where we nourish both our bodies and our souls.”

“I don’t know what you’re having for dinner tonight,” Bascombe said, “but it smells like heaven.”

“Esther’s in charge of that. My wife,” he said for the benefit of Cork and Stephen. “Why don’t we all sit down so that we can talk?”

Gabriel Hornett leaned his rifle against the wall next to the front door, walked to one of the dining tables, pulled out a chair, and sat down. The others joined him, all except his younger brother, who stayed near the door, rifle still in hand, as if on guard duty. Gabriel Hornett folded his arms on the table, leaned toward Cork, and said, “Tell me about your trouble with Smalldog.”

Cork recounted the story of the ordeal on the remote island. Hornett listened without comment but clearly looked disturbed. At the end, Cork said, “Seth and Tom think the dead girl might have been Lily Smalldog and the man who shot at me her brother, Noah.”

“No,” the younger Hornett said from the door. “That couldn’t be Lily.”

Cork had paid no attention to Joshua Hornett when telling his story, but now he saw how stricken the young man looked at the news.

“Why?” Cork asked.

“Lily drowned,” he insisted.

“Or,” the elder Hornett said, “someone made it look that way, Josh. And my guess would be Noah Smalldog.” He frowned and shook his head. “That poor girl, that poor tortured soul. Dear Lord.” Then he eyed Cork and Stephen and Kretsch, each in turn, with a look of profound solemnity. “This barbarism is just further proof. End Times, gentlemen. You understand now why we see so clearly that the Apocalypse is upon us. Everywhere we look, the signs are there.”

“The signs?” Stephen said.

“Eighteen signs, Stephen,” Hornett replied with evangelistic fervor. “Five given by our Lord Jesus Christ himself to indicate his coming and the end of the age.” He lifted his right hand and began counting off on his fingers.

“One, Matthew twenty-four, eleven: ‘And many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.’ Think about it for a moment, Stephen. Jim Jones, David Koresh, Osama bin Laden, the Dalai Lama. All falsely using the name of God to lead masses away from the true path shown to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Two, Matthew twenty-four, six: ‘And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars.’ Stephen, when was the last time you turned on your television or radio or connected to your Internet and didn’t see some report of war somewhere in this world? The death toll rises daily, and everywhere nations are preparing weapons of mass destruction.

“Three, Matthew twenty-four, seven: ‘For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes.’ When we were in Zimbabwe, Stephen, we saw the good Christian farmers there being driven out and replaced by godless men growing poppies that supply twenty-five percent of the world’s drug trade. Now Africa hungers. There’s famine in Pakistan and India and China, and mark my words, very soon there will even be famine here in America as the climate begins to change because of God’s wrathful hand. As for earthquakes, there have been more recorded in the past one hundred years than in all history before that. Soon the whole earth will shake so badly that people will tremble for fear it’s falling apart.

“Four, Matthew twenty-four, nine: ‘Then they will deliver you to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name.’ Christians are scorned today, Stephen, under attack around the world. The Muslim nations would love nothing better than to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth. It has been bad, but it will get far worse.

“And the last sign, Stephen, Matthew twenty-four, fourteen: ‘And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.’ You saw the tower we’re building out there? That’s a radio tower and will have a powerful signal. When we’re finished, we’ll be able to broadcast the word of God for a thousand miles. We already have an Internet site, and every year here we train men and women to travel to the darkest places imaginable to preach the holy word. Make no mistake, Stephen, the end is almost upon us. And those who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their savior will suffer torment you can’t even begin to imagine.”

When he’d finished, Hornett looked hard at Stephen, as if trying to melt the young man’s flesh with the fire in his eyes.

Stephen didn’t reply for a moment. Then he said, “Do you have a bathroom?”

“A bathroom?” Hornett seemed caught by surprise.

“Yes, sir. I have to pee.”

A flicker of irritation crossed the man’s face, and he pointed toward a door at the far end of the great hall. “Over there.”

“Thank you.”

Stephen left the table, and Hornett followed him with a cold, disappointed stare.

“Long boat ride,” Cork said. “You told me Noah Smalldog trespassed last night and did some shooting. What time?”

“Shortly after midnight,” Hornett replied. “Everyone was sleeping.”

“What woke you up to his presence? Did he shoot first?”

“I happened to be up. Some nights I can’t sleep, and so I come here to pray. I was on my way to the hall when I spotted him.”

“Where exactly?”

Hornett looked at Cork with the same irritation Stephen seemed to have engendered. “Does all this really matter?”

“Cork’s got a long background in law enforcement, Gabe,” Kretsch said. “Just where did you spot Smalldog?”

“Sneaking around Josh and Mary’s cabin.”

“Mary?”

“Joshua’s wife.”

Cork glanced toward the door where the younger Hornett stood. The man stared at the floor, frowning, lost in deep, unhappy thought. He didn’t appear to have heard his wife’s name mentioned.

“Did Josh or Mary see him?”

“No, they were sleeping.”

“Is that where he fired at you?”

“Yes.”

“And you returned fire?”

“I did.”

“With that?” Cork nodded toward the rifle Hornett had left near the door.

“No, with my handgun.”

“What kind?”

“A Colt Commander.”

“You always take the Commander with you when you go to pray?”

“I started wearing it when we first began having trouble with Smalldog trespassing.”

“After you exchanged fire, that’s when he ran?”

Hornett nodded. “To the dock, and then he shot off in his cigarette boat.”

Kretsch asked, “Any idea why he was here, Gabe?”

“I don’t pretend to understand how evil thinks.”

A door on one side of the big room opened, and a woman entered. She was stocky, with a single braid of gold hair down her back. She wore khakis and a dark green T-shirt and hiking boots. She reminded Cork of the stout Swedish immigrant women who’d helped their men carve farms out of the wild Minnesota prairie in the 1800s.

“I thought your guests might be hungry, Gabriel,” she said and brought to the table a plate filled with slices of dark bread.

“My wife, Esther,” Hornett said and introduced Cork and the others.

“Abigail is coming with tea,” Esther said.

As if on cue, the door opened again and a second woman appeared. She was older, maybe late fifties, hair gone gray. She was lean and fit like Hornett and with many of the same sharp features in her face. She wore jeans and a short-sleeved denim shirt and sneakers. There was a fluidity to her movement that made Cork think of an athlete. She carried a tray that held a white ceramic pot and several mugs. She swept across the hall toward the table.

“The tea, Gabriel.”

“Thank you, Abigail,” Hornett replied.

The woman slid the tray from her hand. “Hello, Seth, Tom.” She turned a gracious smile on Cork. “And hello to you. Welcome to Stump Island.”

“Cork O’Connor,” Bascombe said in introduction. “This is Abigail Hornett.”

Cork wouldn’t have needed to know she had the same last name as Gabriel and Joshua. It was clear all three shared the same genes.

“How do you do?” Cork stood up and offered his hand. Her palm and the pads of her fingers were callused. A woman used to hard physical labor, Cork thought. There was something in her face as well, something hard and solid, that spoke of an acceptance of travail and an abundance of grit to face it.

“You would be Gabriel and Josh’s mother?”

“I am. I hope you gentlemen are okay with tea. It’s herbal, my own creation, a little sweet. I think you’ll find it energizing. Most folks do.” She glanced around the great hall. “I thought there was a young man with you.”

“My son,” Cork said. “He’s using your restroom.”

“Ah,” she said with a smile, as if she understood perfectly.

The door opened yet again, and a third woman appeared and shuffled toward the table. She was bent, as if from age, though Cork thought she couldn’t have been more than a few years past twenty. She had mouse brown hair cut very short and wore a plain yellow dress and white sandals. If there’d been any life in her face, she might have been pretty.

“Mary,” Abigail said with a little surprise and a lot of irritation.

The shuffling woman looked up and seemed astonished to see them all there.

“They killed my son,” she said.

The hall fell silent. Cork heard the high whine of a saw cutting metal outside. It came from the direction of the radio tower and reminded him of the sound of cicadas.

“Joshua,” Abigail snapped. “Come and take care of your wife.”

Before the younger Hornett could move, his wife said again, “They killed my son.”

“Yes, we know, Mary,” Gabriel Hornett said gently. “They crucified him. But remember, he died for our sins. Josh?”

The younger Hornett leaned his rifle against the wall and walked stiffly to Mary. Without a word, he turned her roughly and, with a firm grip on her arm, urged her back into the kitchen.

Abigail said to the men, “Will you excuse us? Esther, we still have work to do. Come along.”

The two women vanished into the kitchen, where Mary and her husband had gone.

A moment later, Joshua Hornett returned, drifted back to his place near the front door, and took up his rifle again.

Stephen came from using the restroom and sat down and looked at the bread and tea on the table, which had appeared in his absence.

“You should try some of Esther’s date nut bread,” Gabriel Hornett said. “She’s rather well known for it.” He picked up a slice for himself, took a bite, then spoke to Cork and Kretsch. “Josh’s wife has suffered for years from the delusion that she’s the Virgin Mary. We tolerate her delusion and pray daily for her to be cured. In the meantime, we all help Josh care for her.”

Cork said, “You took in Lily Smalldog and took care of her, too, is that right?”

“We tried. She was really a sweet girl. But we couldn’t watch her every minute of every day, and her brother and that other Indian, they . . .” He paused and shook his head as if he couldn’t find exactly the right words for what the two men had done.

“Took advantage of her?”

Hornett looked at Stephen and seemed to decide that Cork’s delicate characterization was appropriate. “Exactly.”

“Did you ever actually see them?”

“We caught sight of them on occasion, but we never actually caught them.”

“They sneaked onto the island?”

“It’s a big island, Cork. We can’t watch every inch.”

“Why did they have to sneak onto the island? Didn’t you allow Lily visitors?”

“This isn’t a prison. She wasn’t a prisoner. At first, we welcomed Smalldog and Chickaway. But when we found out what they were doing to that poor, sweet thing, we banned them absolutely from coming here.”

“How did you find out what they were doing?”

“Lily told us.”

“She just came right out with it?”

“Not in so many words. She didn’t really understand what they were doing, what sexual relations were about. They brought her little gifts and filled her head with stories, and she told us the stories. It wasn’t hard to understand what the visits from those two men were really about.”

“How old was Lily?”

“She’d just turned eighteen when she disappeared.”

“So she was a minor, or at least a vulnerable adult, when these men were abusing her. Did you call Tom?”

“We complained, of course.”

“Tom, did you investigate?”

“I talked to Lily, but she wouldn’t say anything to me,” Kretsch said.

“And nobody had her examined to confirm that she’d been abused?”

“We knew,” Hornett said. “We didn’t need to have her examined.”

“What I’m saying here, Gabriel,” Cork said evenly, “is that if you could substantiate a claim of sexual abuse of a minor or a vulnerable adult, a warrant could have been sworn out for the two men. The law could have stopped them.”

“The law would have had to catch them first,” Hornett replied. “Not an easy thing.”

“All right,” Cork said, “let’s move on. When Lily Smalldog disappeared, did you know that she was pregnant?”

“We didn’t suspect it at all. She said nothing to us, and she wore such loose-fitting clothing all the time. Only after we heard about the boxes of formula that Chickaway had carted off across the lake did we put two and two together.”

“When she disappeared, you notified Tom immediately?”

“Of course.”

“What did you think had happened to her?”

“She didn’t leave the island on her own, we knew that much. We’ve got only two launches here, so they’re easy to monitor. We figured one of the Indians had come and taken her. Then, when we found her sweater, we thought she’d gone into the lake, same as her mother. Both women suffered from periods of darkness you can’t imagine.”

“Depression?”

“I’m no doctor, so I couldn’t really diagnose it.”

“Were they being treated?”

“We treated them with prayer, Cork. It’s our way.”

“I understand Lily and her mother had their own cabin.”

“Yes.”

“Could we see it?”

“Now?”

“As good a time as any,” Cork said.

Hornett stood up and led them to the door. “You stay here, Josh. And mind Mary,” he said with a note of chastisement.

His younger brother glared at him but said nothing and obeyed.

The cabin was several hundred yards east of the peninsula where the other buildings of the camp stood. They reached it by walking a narrow path, almost overgrown now, that ran among the birches along the shoreline. It was a small, isolated little structure built of logs, without electricity and with an outhouse off to one side. The great restless blue of the big water was visible through a wide break in the trees at its back. In the wind off the lake, the sound of the birch leaves rustling was like fast-running water. Cork thought it was a lovely spot.

“It’s pretty rustic, but Vivian and Lily seemed to be just fine with what they had,” Hornett said as they approached the place. “We were planning at some point to run electricity out here and put in indoor plumbing, but all our efforts for quite a while have been focused on our larger projects.”

The door was padlocked, but Hornett brought out a set of keys, undid the lock, and shoved the door open. He stepped inside, and the others followed.

The windows were closed and clouded with dust. Judging from the stuffiness of the room, they hadn’t been opened in a great while. There was a table, and there were two chairs and two small bunks. There was a cast-iron stove for heating. That was all. Nothing personal remained in the cabin, nothing that would have spoken to the nature of the two women, mother and daughter, who’d lived there.

“What happened to Lily’s belongings?” Cork asked.

“We’ve got them boxed and stored up at the camp, should anyone ever want to claim them. There’s nothing much, though. Clothing, a few pictures. Vivian and Lily lived a pretty simple existence. Took their food with the rest of us, washed their clothes in our laundry, bathed in our showers. They didn’t need much here.”

Cork recalled the cabin on the isolated island where Jenny had found the body of Lily Smalldog. It was a simple affair, too. Lily had been used to isolation, to making do by herself. As far as Cork could see, she hadn’t had much in her life, but what little she did have was apparently enough.

“Dad,” Stephen said.

He’d wandered away from the men and stood looking at the wall of the cabin above one of the bunks. Cork joined him and saw what he’d found.

“What is it?” Hornett asked.

“A word carved into the wood,” Cork said.

Hornett came and looked, too. “I can’t make it out. Looks like gibberish. But Lily wasn’t good with reading or spelling.”

“It’s an Ojibwe word,” Stephen said. “Gizaagin.”

“What does it mean?”

“I love you.”

Stephen stepped closer and looked down, then slid the bunk out a foot and pulled a folded paper from where it had been caught between the bunk frame and the wall. He unfolded it, studied it, then handed it to his father.

It was a drawing, simple pen and ink but really quite lovely, of a deer and fawn in a meadow. It was signed “Sonny.”

Cork handed it to Tom Kretsch. Bascombe and Hornett looked at it over his shoulder.

Hornett said, “One of those little gifts I was telling you about. It didn’t take much to get that poor girl to spread her legs.”

Not much, Cork thought. Just love.