Purgatory Ridge

34

FOR JOHN LEPERE, the drive to Purgatory Ridge was like a slow trip to hell. He had a lot of time to think, and what he thought was that no matter how he looked at it, he was screwed. They were all screwed. The O’Connor woman had seen his face, and it was obvious she’d recognized him. As he negotiated the dark, winding highway that led to the north shore of Lake Superior, his own thinking was taking a lot of twists and turns, trying to find a way that could keep things from ending badly. Was there a way to deal with the O’Connor woman, to strike a bargain that would avert disaster? No matter how he looked at the situation, no matter how he imagined Bridger and himself playing things out, it seemed clear that someone had just rolled snake eyes.

Christ, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to have been. Bridger had planned it so carefully. A quick, clean snatch of the Fitzgerald woman and the boy. Hostages for no more than a couple of days. Hooded the whole time so they would be blind to their captors. No one would get hurt. And even if they did (Bridger had put it to him), did LePere really care? Had the Fitzgeralds cared when Billy and twenty-seven other good men lost their lives in a storm churned up by the Devil himself? Had they even noticed?

Bridger had laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “The scheme is very clever, very clean and very safe. I promise, Chief.”

Except Bridger hadn’t counted on the O’Connor woman and the boy. He hadn’t known about the diabetes. He couldn’t have predicted the fire. All his life, LePere had been offered nothing but disappointment and despair. Why should this situation be any different?

When he finally turned south onto Highway 61, he saw that although the sky above Lake Superior was clear, the brightness of the moon and stars was drastically cut by the high smoke from all the fires. The whole world was burning, it seemed to him, and it was only a matter of time before everything around him was turned to ash.

Beyond the lighted tunnel that ran under Purgatory Ridge, LePere turned onto the narrow lane that led through the poplars down to the cove. He pulled up to the old fish house and parked. He dropped the tailgate, lifted the door of the camper shell, and shined the beam of his flashlight inside. The women and the boys were huddled together, pressed up against the cab, eyeing him as if he were a monster about to gobble them up.

“You’ll be safe here.” They inched forward. He cut the tape that bound their ankles, and he helped them down from the bed of the pickup. “This way.” He opened the door of the fish house, turned on the light, and ushered them inside.

The fish house was ten feet wide by fifteen feet long. Waist-high tables were built against the long sides. The floor was solid maple planking with a drain dead center. There was a washbasin and cupboard at one end and half a dozen built-in shelves at the other. Three days before, after he’d found the fish house broken into and his equipment destroyed, he’d installed bars over every window and put a new heavy-duty lock and hasp on the door. He’d cleaned out the useless materials from inside, so that except for a couple of empty wooden crates and a few items on the shelves, the fish house was bare. There was plenty of room for his “guests.”

“Sit on the floor,” he said.

The Fitzgerald woman tried to speak through the tape over her mouth. LePere pulled the tape off.

“Scott needs food.”

“You gave him the insulin,” LePere said.

“He needs food now.”

LePere had to admit the boy didn’t look so good. “Anything special?”

“Fruit. Or peanut butter and jelly on bread. Sweetened cereal. Almost anything.”

“All right.” He took the tape off the O’Connor woman’s mouth. “What about you and your boy?”

“Water,” she replied. She looked down at her son, whose mouth LePere had refrained from taping. “Stevie, do you want anything?”

The boy stood hard against his mother, barely as tall as her waist. He shook his head.

“Maybe some peanut butter and jelly. And some milk,” his mother suggested to LePere.

“Sit down,” he told them. When they had, he said, “I’ll be back.” He turned out the light, locked the door behind him, and headed across the yard.

He’d also cleaned his little house on Purgatory Cove after it had been trashed. The only obvious signs of the destruction were the bare places on the walls where his mother’s needlepoint had hung. LePere went to the phone and dialed Bridger’s number in Aurora. He got the answering machine.

“Fire burned down the cabin. I’ve got our friends. We’re visiting Anne Marie.” He hung up, wondering where the hell Bridger could be at that time of the morning.

From the food he kept in the kitchen, he fixed sandwiches and put them on a tray. He put a carton of milk, a jug of water, and some old Welch’s jelly jar glasses into a paper bag, and he carried it all out to the fish house. He set the things on a tabletop and turned the light back on.

“Okay,” he said. “One at a time. You first.” He cut the tape from the wrists of the diabetic boy and handed him a sandwich. The boy began to eat.

“Where are we?” the O’Connor woman asked.

He didn’t see any point in not telling her. “The north shore. A couple of miles out of Beaver Bay.”

“What kind of place is this?” the rich woman asked.

“This is a fish house. My father’s. He was a herring choker.”

“Herring choker?”

“A fisherman,” LePere explained. “He caught herring in a net. To get them out, he had to grab them around the throat and untangle them. Herring choker.” He poured water from the jug into one of the glasses and offered it to the boy, who’d finished eating. When the water was drunk, LePere took the glass. “I’m going to tape your wrists again.”

The boy put his arms behind him and leaned forward.

“Why us?” his mother asked.

LePere didn’t answer. He finished taping, then turned to the O’Connor boy. “Now you.”

When the boy’s hands were free, LePere gave him a sandwich. The boy only looked at it. “Not hungry?”

“He likes to drink his milk along with his food,” the O’Connor woman said.

LePere shrugged and poured the boy some milk. The boy began to eat, sandwich in one hand, milk glass in the other.

“Why us?” the Fitzgerald woman asked again.

LePere was tired and didn’t feel like going into it. “If you ask me again, I’ll tape your mouth shut.”

The women ate a little and drank some water, each in her turn. LePere had the duct tape in hand, ready to bind the rich woman’s hands again when she said, “How much?”

“How much what?”

“To let us go. How much? I can pay you whatever you want.”

His face burned with anger. He stared at her, a woman who’d lived her life in luxury, who’d always been able to buy her way out of trouble. He wanted her to know, to understand as profoundly and horribly as he did, that there were some circumstances money could not alter.

“What is it you want?” she pressed him.

“The dead alive again.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. But you will.” He stepped behind her and pulled her arms back roughly.

“Please,” she said. “You’re hurting me.”

“Hurting you?” Something snapped inside him. He jumped away and yanked the gun from his belt. “Be glad I’m not killing you.”

“John.” It was the O’Connor woman, speaking to him quietly. “She didn’t mean anything. She’s just scared. We all are.”

LePere stared down at his hand and saw that it was trembling. He was surprised-and frightened-to see his fingers wrapped around the gun and to know that he’d drawn it without thinking. What else might he do without thinking? He looked at the O’Connor woman. It was her voice that had grounded him, and the fact that she’d spoken his name. He put the gun back in his belt.

“Your hands,” he said to the rich woman. Then he added, “Please.”

She put her arms behind her and said not another word as he bound her wrists. He went to the door. “I’ll check back in a while.” He turned the light off and slapped the lock in place.

He didn’t go to the house. He walked down to the small dock where the Anne Marie was tied. The hailstorm earlier had swept across the North Woods and headed east so swiftly that nothing at all could be seen of it now in the distant dark where black sky and black water met in an indistinguishable horizon. Purgatory Cove and the great lake beyond it were very still. LePere remembered summer days with Billy, challenging one another to jump from the dock into the water of the cove that, even in August, was cold enough to cramp every muscle of his body in an instant. Billy was always the first to go. Not only would he hit the water but he’d also swim out a distance, mocking his older brother, who seldom did more than jump in and climb quickly out. Billy tolerated the cold better than LePere ever could. It seemed all wrong that Billy was the one the lake had taken.

As he had so often-and so pointlessly-over the years, LePere tried to fathom the reason he’d survived the wreck of the Teasdale when, by all rights, he should have been the one dancing with the other dead at the bottom of Kitchigami. In the still of the night, a thought occurred to him, the first clear understanding he’d experienced in a very long time. He should have been dead. From the moment he climbed aboard the little pontoon raft on that angry lake, he’d felt dead. And after that, for more than a dozen years, he’d walked dead through every day.

John LePere understood that in the dangerous game he’d become part of, the hand that had rolled snake eyes that day was his own.