by Steven James
Someone had handcuffed his left wrist to the cot’s frame.
How did you get here?
He remembered being attacked, yes, but he didn’t know how much time had passed since then. However, he had the sense that he’d been wavering in and out of consciousness for quite a while.
Maybe he’d been drugged.
Since his torso was bandaged, it meant that whoever had brought him here was trying to keep him alive, at least for the time being.
Interesting.
A ransom?
Possibly.
Where are you? What’s going on? Get your bearings.
The room smelled of pine, with a touch of wood smoke from a fireplace or wood burning stove, and in the faint light he could tell that the walls were made of logs.
After working in law enforcement in this county for nearly twenty years, he knew a lot of the houses in the area. As far as he could tell, he’d never been in this residence before.
It might have been any one of the dozens of cabins that surrounded the lakes in the region.
Inspecting the cot, he saw that the legs had been nailed to the floor to keep him from moving it.
He listened.
Someone was in a nearby room. It sounded like he or she was going through a cupboard of pots and pans.
On Saturday night, in the instant before he’d been stabbed, he’d recognized the man who was attacking him, and now he wondered if it was the same guy in the other room.
Brandon Hollister: a killer he’d caught two years ago. He was in his twenties and had been one of the bad influences on Lancaster Bell’s son, Ty.
But he was bright and had made it into medical school.
One night when he was back home for the weekend, he’d stabbed a neighbor in a bar fight after they’d both had too much to drink.
The victim had died, and Hollister’s claim that it was self-defense didn’t fly with the jury. He’d been sentenced to life plus fifty years for aggravated battery, first degree murder, and a slew of other charges related to fleeing and resisting arrest after the incident.
How he’d escaped from the Derthick State Penitentiary was a mystery to the sheriff—and so was the fact that no news had come through dispatch about it on Saturday afternoon or evening.
Why wouldn’t the warden have released word to the law enforcement community?
Unless he didn’t know the guy was missing.
But how would that have happened?
And if Hollister is acting out of revenge for you catching him, why would he have bandaged you up rather than just letting you die?
Sheriff Byers was tempted to call out to whoever was in the cabin with him, but realized that if it was Hollister, it might be better not to let him know he was conscious. Instead, he should probably spend some time assessing the situation and trying to find a way out of here.
His gun and radio were gone, as well as the keys to the handcuffs.
Okay.
Priorities: lie still to keep the stab wound from tearing open, and try to figure out a way to pick those cuffs.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
Kyle and Daniel grabbed a quick lunch on the way, and arrived in Bayfield at quarter to twelve. They parked in front of the Apostle Islands Sailing Adventures & Boat Rentals office on the Lake Superior shore.
Just beyond the building, the lake stretched out dark and foreboding toward the islands. Daniel could see one of them a few miles offshore and even though he wasn’t positive which one it was, from studying the maps online yesterday, he guessed it was probably the one they were looking for—Madeline Island.
Though most of the lake was still open water, there were some stray ice floes and it looked like a narrow strip of ice did encircle the island and also spread out from the shoreline near Larry’s business. Some of it was missing near his dock, where he’d apparently cleared it away so he could get his boats onto the lake.
A skiff with an outboard motor waited for them.
“Okay,” Daniel said as they approached the front door, “we can’t tell him he’s lending a boat to someone who just escaped from an insane asylum.”
“Or someone who was found covered with blood at a crime scene where his dad went missing,” Kyle added.
“That too.”
Larry had joined the Peace Corps after graduating college with an agricultural degree. He’d volunteered in Africa for a couple of years before returning to the States and moving up here to work for the guy who owned this boat rental business. A year later, the man was killed in a snowmobile accident. He didn’t have any family and had left the business to Larry, who’d been running it ever since.
Daniel had never met him, only heard about him, and now when Kyle’s uncle opened the door, he had the sense that he would have fit in better on the beaches of Jamaica than a small town here in northern Wisconsin. Wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, and with dreadlocks and scholarly glasses, he looked like a mixture of a hippie beach bum and tax accountant.
After a warm greeting, he invited them in.
Kyle simply introduced Daniel as his friend—not as someone who had hallucinations, heard dead people talk, or went sleepwalking carrying hunting knives around the house.
Better safe than sorry.
“Right on,” Larry said amiably. “Well, there’s no wind today so you should be okay. It’s about two miles to Madeline Island. I checked the motor—she’s working fine but there are oars in the boat in case you run into trouble. You know how cold it is out there, so don’t do anything stupid. And life jackets: I want you both wearing them.”
Kyle nodded. “Okay.”
“Tell me again why you need to go to—no, wait, don’t tell me. I probably don’t want to know—or do I?”
“It has to do with one of my relatives,” Daniel replied. “He used to be a keeper out there at the Lost Cove Lighthouse.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“That place hasn’t been in service in years.”
“This was back in the thirties.”
“Huh.” Daniel couldn’t tell what Larry might have been thinking.
“No one really goes up there anymore,” Larry noted.
“We just found out about him. We didn’t want to have to wait until spring to see where he worked.”
That was true enough.
“So, curiosity?”
Daniel and Kyle shared a look. “Right,” Daniel replied.
Larry nodded toward Kyle. “And your mother? She’s fine with this?”
He opened his mouth as if he were going to answer, then closed it again.
“Aha.” Larry evaluated that. “Well, clearly there’s more going on here, but I think I’ll opt for plausible deniability—as long as you guys promise to be careful out there.”
“We will,” Daniel assured him.
On the dock, Larry handed them each a life jacket, then indicated the rowboat. “It’s designed more for stability than for speed. Most people, they come up here and want to tool around the islands for a day or two. All I care about is them being safe.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
Larry dug a compass and a map of the islands out of his coat pocket. “If you’re just going to Madeline you shouldn’t need these, but there’s a chance of snow and the visibility might be limited. You should be fine, but if it does start snowing it’s pretty much a straight shot east. The lighthouse is on the northern tip of the island, on the other side of an inlet.”
“Great.” Daniel accepted the map and compass. “Thanks.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“So do I.”
He and Kyle climbed into the boat.
Even though Daniel was familiar with how to run an outboard motor, he let Larry talk him through the steps.
Then they took off.
Just as the snow began to fall.
Nicole Marten was worried about her boyfriend.
It was a weird deal.
She cared so much about him, but she was also scared about the things that happened with him—the hallucinations; the sleepwalking; the bizarre, terrifying blurs.
She’d never been afraid of him, it wasn’t like that. She trusted that there was a bigger reason behind everything that was happening, although she didn’t know what that might be.
But right now, even more than being concerned about Daniel, she was worried about his dad.
Before leaving the Goessel’s house, Daniel had assured her that they would find his father in time, but she realized there was no way he could guarantee that, no way anyone could.
Still, for some reason, hearing him say it had helped, at least a little.
Now, as she had a pretend tea party with Michelle, she prayed that Daniel would be safe going out on the lake, and she prayed for his dad—that he would be okay until someone could find him and help him.
In the back of her mind she was also thinking of her boyfriend’s blurs and the research facility and the wolf poaching.
It seemed like, somehow, everything was tied together.
If Daniel was going to focus on finding his dad, and the wolf poaching was at all related to everything else, maybe she could help by trying to solve that.
She wasn’t sure what she could do right now, but later, when she put Michelle down for a nap, maybe she could go online, search through the information they had on the wolf poaching locations, and see if she could uncover anything that they might have missed earlier.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
The black, ominous-looking surface of the lake hungrily absorbed the snowflakes as soon as they landed.
As Daniel worked the motor, Kyle kept an eye out for ice floes.
Because of the noise of the outboard, neither of them spoke much, but Kyle pointed when he saw ice and Daniel navigated past it.
Being on the water reminded Daniel of fishing and canoeing trips he’d taken with his dad, and he found himself worrying once again about him.
Where is he? What really happened to him?
Questions about his dad’s disappearance plagued him.
Who called 911 when he was attacked? Why can’t you remember being there? If this escaped prisoner did stab him, where did he take him? Why?
The falling snow eventually made it impossible to see the island, but with the help of the compass, they soon found the ice-encased shoreline and followed it north toward the cove where Larry had told them the lighthouse was located.
Daniel throttled the outboard down so he and Kyle could talk.
“Hey, I have a question for you,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been curious about for a long time.”
“What’s that?”
“Why don’t you go out for sports? I mean, I’ve seen you run. You could probably qualify for state in cross country—track too—if you wanted to.”
“That came out of nowhere.”
“I was just thinking about last night and how I might have needed some real speed. That brought it to mind.”
“Last night?”
“I took Mr. Zacharias’s keys when we were in the car. I thought I might need to outrun him and I realized you wouldn’t have had any trouble doing it. Anyway, I was just wondering about track and cross country. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool.”
“I guess it’s no big deal—telling you, I mean.” But Kyle stared at the lake quietly for a long time before going on. “It has to do with something that happened back when I was a kid. At the time, I was playing baseball.”
“I didn’t know you ever played baseball.”
“Well, I didn’t for very long. Pretty much I sucked, and everyone knew it—including my dad. One game I was up to bat and we were behind. Bottom of the ninth inning. Two outs. Two guys on base, and we were two runs behind. It sounds like a cliché but it was true. My dad was in the stands when he got a page from the hospital. He must have figured I wouldn’t get on base because he left to answer it. But I didn’t know he’d gone anywhere.”
Kyle’s dad had been an emergency room doc and Daniel wondered how serious of a situation it had been. Maybe he needed to leave; maybe he just chose to because he knew his son would strike out.
Daniel maneuvered the boat around a slab of ice about the size of a car.
“So, anyway,” Kyle went on, “like I said, I thought he was still there. So the first two pitches were strikes and, well, I didn’t want to strike out without at least trying to hit one of the pitches with my dad watching. So I swung at the third one and actually hit it. I mean, I swung as hard as I could and it was just plain luck that I connected with the ball. But I did. It was the farthest I’d ever hit a baseball before in my life. It went over the fence—just barely, and I mean, you know, this was just a kid-sized park, but . . .”
“But it was a legit home run.”
“Yeah. It was.”
“And your dad didn’t see it.”
“Right. So the two other guys scored—obviously—and I was on my way toward home with the game-winning run and I glanced up to where my dad had been sitting and no one was there. I couldn’t see him anywhere and I realized he’d missed seeing me hit the ball. I was so disappointed that I ended up staring at the ground when I crossed home plate.”
Silently, he pointed out a six-foot ice wedge and Daniel took them past it.
“He apologized later when he found out he’d missed my homer,” Kyle concluded. “I never told him about how I felt when I crossed the plate. I didn’t want him to feel bad about what had happened, but I also didn’t want him to be disappointed in me since I knew it was just a fluke and it wasn’t gonna happen again. I didn’t want to let him down so I just gave up on organized sports—all of ’em. After he died two years ago in that car crash I just, well, I just never got back into them.”
“I think he’d be proud of you if you ran.”
“Hard to say. But that’s why I don’t. There you go. Now you know.”
The conversation ended somewhat awkwardly and abruptly.
As they rode in silence beside the ice surrounding the island, snow began to accumulate next to them on the seats of the boat.
Then they came around the corner of the inlet and got their first glimpse of the lighthouse.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
It was perched on a rocky point on the other side of the cove.
The lighthouse must have been painted white long ago, but over the years the paint had peeled and chipped away after being in the exposed sunlight and the unyielding wind coming in from across the lake.
From their research, Daniel knew that the tower rose one hundred and twelve feet above the rocks. The keeper’s house was attached to its base and it looked like it was as long-abandoned as the lighthouse itself.
According to the journal entries, Betty had been standing in the field near the house when she bumped into the lantern and her nightgown caught on fire.
A chill sank down Daniel’s spine.
Was she real?
Did she really die here?
He didn’t know, but he was seriously starting to consider the possibility that Jarvis Delacroix had only imagined her, that she’d grown out of the insufferable loneliness that came from being stuck on this island by himself.
The field surrounding the house was covered with what appeared to be several feet of snow. It would make sense that the island would get battered with lake-effect snow and Daniel could only imagine how much would accumulate out there by winter’s end.
A metal mesh fence skirted the property to keep trespassers out, but the lighthouse was accessible from shore—at least it would’ve been if it
weren’t for the thirty-foot-wide ring of ice that entrapped the island.
From where they were it wasn’t possible to tell how thick it was.
Daniel stopped the boat’s motor so he and Kyle could talk more easily and his friend pulled out the oars to row them up to the edge of the ice.
“Okay,” Kyle said, “it looks like we’re stuck out here, but at least we can get a look at the lighthouse. Does it make you remember anything?”
“Not really, except what we read in Jarvis Delacroix’s journal about Betty dying out here. I think I need to go inside.”
“How are you supposed to do that?”
“It’s only about thirty feet to the rocks.”
“Thirty feet is thirty feet, bro.”
“We’re going to have to cross the ice.”
“When you say ‘we,’ do you mean ‘we’ as in ‘you,’ or ‘we’ as in ‘both you and your not-exactly-thrilled-to-die-by-drowning-today friend’?”
“I’ve got an idea, but it would mean ‘we’ as in ‘me.’”
“Seriously, I’m not thinking that ice is thick enough to walk on.”
“I’m not going to walk on it.”
“How do you plan to get across?”
“I need to spread out my weight.”
“Yeah, well, it’d be ideal if we had some cross-country skis or something. Then you might make it, but . . .”
“Well, we have something close.”
“What’s that?”
“Hand me those oars.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
“The oars?” Kyle said. “Are you kidding me?”
“If I kneel on the blades and hold on to the shafts, I should be able to slide them forward one at a time.”
“And just, what—crawl across the ice with the blades distributing your weight?”
“Yup.”
“That’s crazy.”
“We agreed not to use that word.”
“Here it applies.”
Daniel leaned over the rowboat’s gunwale and felt the edge of the ice, but found that it was just an inch or so thick here, which he guessed was way too thin to support his weight, even if he were using the oars.
