“Just like her grandfather,” Stephen said. “They’ve disappeared into thin air.”
“Maybe a monster ate them,” Waaboo said. “There are monsters in the woods.”
Jenny said, “Why would a monster eat John Harris and his granddaughter and Baa-baa?”
“I guess because he’s a hungry monster. Can I have another cookie?”
“It will spoil your dinner,” she said. “I think Trixie wants you to play with her some more.”
Waaboo slid from his chair, picked up the old towel, which Trixie had dropped on the floor, and ran into the living room, the dog following on his heels.
“It’s a good question,” Rainy said. “Why would a monster eat them all?”
“And what’s that monster’s name?” Daniel said.
The telephone rang. Jenny answered, listened a moment, and said, “Thanks, Father Green. I appreciate your prayers. And I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve heard anything.” She came back to the table. “Word’s already spreading.”
“Should we call Annie and tell her what’s going on?” Stephen said.
Annie, the middle O’Connor child, was in California, where she’d taken a job with a nonprofit organization in San Jose, leading groups of inner-city kids on camping trips into the Sierras. At the moment, she was in the mountains on one of those excursions.
“I think we should wait,” Jenny said. “We don’t know what’s going on. No reason to get Annie upset and pull her away from her kids until we have a better handle on this. Okay?”
“All right,” Stephen said, but it was clear his agreement wasn’t wholehearted. “So what do we do? It doesn’t feel right just sitting.”
“I’d like to know more about this John W. Harris and his family,” Jenny said. “There’s a reason Harris is missing and Lindsay’s been taken.”
“And Cork,” Rainy said.
“I think Dad just happened to be along,” Stephen said. “Collateral—” He stopped himself.
They were quiet, because they all knew the blood on Raspberry Island could have come from Cork.
Daniel broke the silence. “Let’s get started,” he said and rose from his chair.
“Where are you going?” Rainy asked.
“To talk to Marsha Dross. I want to know what she found out when Harris first went missing.”
“I’m going with you,” Rainy said.
Jenny slid her chair back. “I’d like to go, too.”
Daniel shook his head. “I’d rather you worked your magic on the Internet. Find out what you can about the Harris family.”
“We should talk with Trevor, too,” Stephen said and followed Daniel and Rainy to the door.
Rose said, “I’ll have dinner waiting for you when you’re finished.”
They all took off, Jenny to her computer, the others out the door. Rose was left alone in the kitchen. The circumstances were certainly awful, but what she’d just experienced she understood as one of the great blessings in her life. Family. They were all different and didn’t always agree and sometimes fought and knew how to hurt one another deeply, if they wanted to. But when one of them had a back against the wall, they all rallied and became a formidable whole. God, did she love them.
CHAPTER 25
They’d stripped themselves of their wet clothing, Cork and the kid. The tall man had given them each a wool blanket he’d pulled from one of the packs that had been in the first canoe so that everything was dry. Then he and the woman had gathered firewood. With a big hunting knife, he’d stripped away the outer layer of the wood, which had become wet in the recent rain, and the woman had built a fire, a good one that burned hot and sent up very little smoke. They’d strung a line between trees near enough to the fire that the wet clothing they hung there would dry more quickly.
In the late afternoon, the tall man put fishing gear into the first canoe and paddled onto the lake. Although Cork figured they’d planned on being flown quickly out of the Boundary Waters after the abduction, the tall man had clearly come prepared for the unanticipated. In the midst of all the inexplicable and confusing occurrences of the last two days, it was a small thing, but it mattered. It told Cork more about the man.
As daylight weakened, the kid sat by the fire with the blanket draped around him. He stared into the flames, his expression one that seemed to speak of sullen regret. He was still a kid, but he probably wanted very much to be thought a man. Like the tall man, Uncle Aaron. They were family. To bring a kid on an expedition like this, one that from the outset would involve kidnapping, was hard to fathom. Whatever was at the heart of their mission, it was important to them. Money? Cork dismissed that one out of hand. There’d been no ransom demanded for John Harris. Revenge maybe? Cork had seen the passion for vengeance drive even good men to horrific deeds. If revenge, then in response to what? Or it might be that the Harrises were leverage in some kind of struggle. But what struggle, and who were the forces involved?
The tall man had left the sour woman with the rifle. She sat with her back against a tree, scanning the sky as if watching for the reappearance of the floatplane. Lindsay Harris, who’d been sitting on the far side of the fire from the kid, stood suddenly and moved toward him.
“Get back where you were,” the woman ordered.
“I’m not going to plot anything,” Lindsay replied. “You can hear every word I say.” She sat next to the kid. “You okay?”
“Cold,” he said.
“Mind if I look at that knee?”
“What for?”
“I’ve had my share of first-aid training.”
The kid drew the blanket aside enough for her to see the wound. She touched the area around it. The kid made a pained sound.
“What do you think?” he said.
“The body’s an amazing thing,” she said. “Good at fighting what doesn’t belong inside it. But there’s something even more important. When I was thirteen years old, I visited my grandfather in Costa Rica. He was designing a road through some mountains there. I got bit by a jumping viper.”
“What’s that?”
“A poisonous snake. It jumps when it strikes you. We were in the jungle, a long way from any clinic. Everybody thought I was going to die. Except my grandfather. He told me the only thing that would kill me was not believing.”
“Believing what?”
“That my spirit was stronger than that poison. He said, ‘Spirit is at the heart of everything, and there’s nothing more powerful. Trust your spirit.’ His exact words.”
“What happened?”
“Well, here I am.” She smiled. “Like I said, your body’s an amazing thing. But at the heart of everything is your spirit. Trust that.”
“Stupid story,” the sour woman said.
But the kid said, “I’m going to be all right.” Then he said, “Thanks.”
The tall man returned with a couple of smallmouth bass. While he cleaned them, the woman scrounged two forked sticks and two long, straight sticks from among the pines on the little peninsula. When the tall man was finished, he skewered the fish with the long sticks, mouth to tail. The woman pushed the two forked sticks firmly into the ground at the fire’s edge and the tall man set the fish to roasting over the open flames.
The clothing had mostly dried by the time the fish was cooked, and Cork and the kid dressed for supper. Everything smelled heavily of woodsmoke. The bass were truly tasty. In the Boundary Waters, after a full day of canoeing and portaging, anything remotely edible seemed like a feast.
“You spend a lot of time in the woods,” Cork said to the tall man.
“It nourishes me,” the tall man said. He eyed Cork across the fire. “I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“I’ve been coming to the Boundary Waters since before I can remember,” Cork told him. “My father and mother brought me with them when I was just a baby
.”
“I was born in the woods,” the tall man said.
“Where was that?”
The tall man smiled, as if he saw the trap, and didn’t respond.
The kid said, “I don’t feel right anywhere but in the woods. People, well, they just kind of make me nervous. Out here, it’s just me and the spirits of the woods. I don’t have to say nothing if I don’t want to.”
“You’re talking plenty now,” the woman said. Then she eyed the tall man. “Both of you.”
The kid looked at her, then into the fire, and fell silent.
“Did you build the canoes?” Cork asked the tall man.
The tall man seemed to consider the advisability of answering, glanced at the sour woman, and finally said, “Yes.”
“In the old way,” Cork said and let his admiration show.
“My father taught me. And his father taught him.”
Cork nodded toward the kid. “Have you taught your nephew?”
“Uncle Aaron—” the kid started, but the woman cut him off.
“Hush up, both of you,” she snapped. “Can’t you see he’s just trying to get information out of us? How stupid can you be?”
“That’s enough,” the tall man said.
The woman looked at Cork. “I don’t like you.”
Cork said, “Now there’s a news flash.”
Lindsay Harris laughed, then caught herself and returned to her silence.
“I want to ask you something,” the tall man said, looking at Cork, his eyes like glowing charcoal in the firelight. “Why didn’t you try to signal that plane?”
“I know the pilot. He’s a friend.”
“So?”
“If he’d landed and had come to shore, what would you have done?”
“Killed him,” the woman said, sounding eager at the prospect.
“Exactly,” Cork said. “I didn’t want to take that chance.”
Night had fallen. The moon was rising, and where its glow didn’t swallow the stars, the sky glittered. There was not a ripple on the lake, and across it ran a frosty-looking river of moonlight. In the summer, the woods would have been full of the sounds of nocturnal creatures—crickets, tree frogs, bull frogs, katydids, and of course the ubiquitous buzz of the mosquito. But in that shoulder season right on the cusp of winter, the woods were dead quiet. But not at all dead, Cork knew. Out there in the dark were deer and moose and mink and rabbits and a whole world of animals that didn’t sleep through the cold season. Across aeons, they’d evolved into creatures that could withstand the worst of what the North Country might deliver. The spirits, as the kid had called them, of that land were powerful and enduring, and Cork understood the awe and the kinship the kid felt toward them.
“Cold again tonight,” the tall man said. “Ice on the lakes by morning, more than today. It’ll slow us down.”
The woman said, “We don’t have much time. If we just had the damn sat phone.” She gave the kid another of her cold glares.
“It will be what it will be,” the tall man said. “If we have to leave the canoes and walk, we’ll walk.”
“Christmas before we make it to White Woman Lake,” the sour woman said, then seemed to realize her mistake and looked at Cork to see if he’d caught it.
He had. And he filed that piece of information away with all the other bits he was collecting that might help him put the puzzle together before it was too late.
CHAPTER 26
Deputy Pender was at the contact desk. He buzzed them through and took them back to the sheriff’s office. Marsha Dross was sitting at her desk, bent over a topographical map of the Boundary Waters. She looked up when they walked in, and Rainy saw clearly in her drawn face the deep concern she felt.
“Only one chair,” she said, nodding to the empty seat on the other side of her desk. “You’ll have to fight over it.”
Daniel and Stephen insisted Rainy take the chair, and they stood flanking her.
“Three disappearances. And not a clue where they vanished.” Dross sat back. “Azevedo’s still looking. He’s camping out at Raspberry Lake tonight. Tomorrow I’ve got Search and Rescue on it and dogs coming in, but somehow I don’t think they’ll turn up anything.”
Rainy knew that Marsha Dross’s concern wasn’t just professional. Cork had hired her when he was sheriff, the first woman law enforcement officer in Tamarack County. She’d once taken a bullet meant for him. And he, in turn, had saved her life. What bound them, bound all those in the room, was powerful. They’d shared their lives with one another. They shared a common history and, in a way, a common heart.
“Whoever they were in those canoes, they were after Lindsay Harris, not Cork. The only common thread at the moment seems to be the family tie,” Daniel said. “I don’t want to seem cold-blooded, but Harris is a very wealthy man. What did the kids have to gain if their grandfather died?”
“A reasonable question. And one I looked into myself when Harris went missing.” Dross sat back. “They inherit. They inherit everything.”
“Were they close, grandfather and grandchildren?”
“I only know what I observed, and their concern for their granddad seemed real enough.”
“Trevor Harris is an actor,” Rainy said.
“And his sister is missing now, too,” Stephen said. “If she never shows up, he’s the only heir left.”
“He didn’t go into the Boundary Waters with Cork and his sister,” Daniel pointed out. “You have to ask yourself why.”
“And,” Rainy added, “how was it that whoever took Cork and Lindsay knew they were coming?”
They all fell silent, mulling over these things. Then Daniel asked, “Where exactly was Trevor when his grandfather disappeared?”
“Fishing,” Dross said. “Alone. Same with his grandfather. As I understand, it was a kind of contest between the two of them. Apparently Trevor bet a thousand dollars that he could land a bigger fish than John Harris. According to Lindsay and Dwight—”
“Would that be Dwight Kohler?” Stephen said.
Dross nodded. “He was their guide in the Boundary Waters. According to Lindsay and Dwight, they went entirely different directions on Raspberry Lake. Trevor paddled to the east end of the horseshoe and his grandfather headed west. An hour later, Trevor came back with a whopper of a walleye. Dwight snapped a photo of him with his prize.” She got up and went to one of the file cabinets along the wall, pulled open a drawer, and drew out a photograph. She brought it back to the desk. It was a shot of Trevor Harris holding up his prize catch, a huge grin plastered across his face.
“Big fish, all right,” Stephen said.
“So it would appear that Harris couldn’t have had a hand in his grandfather’s disappearance,” Daniel said.
“That’s right.” Dross took back the photograph. “And the granddaughter was with Dwight the whole time, so we didn’t really look at her either.”
She started toward the file cabinet with photograph in hand, but Daniel said, “Mind if I hang on to that?”
The sheriff handed it over. “I don’t know what good it’ll do you.”
Daniel tapped the photo. “I’d like to know what bait our actor used to catch this big fish. Maybe Dwight can tell me.”
“So where do you go from here?” Rainy asked the sheriff.
“The blood samples we took on Raspberry Island are being analyzed. We’ll have the blood type by morning. DNA’ll take a while.”
“But at least you’ll be able to tell if the blood type matches Cork’s,” Rainy said.
“Or Lindsay’s. We’ve already secured that info. In the meantime, we’ll do a thorough search of Raspberry Lake, see if the dogs turn up anything tomorrow. You’re welcome to go along if you’d like.”
They looked at one another, and Daniel finally answered for them. “I think we’ve got thi
ngs here to see to. But you’ll keep us posted?”
“Promise,” the sheriff said.
* * *
At the Four Seasons, Nadia, the desk clerk from Romania who’d been there the day before, when Rainy and Daniel were looking for Trevor Harris, told them he’d gone out not long before.
“Dinner?” Stephen asked.
“I suppose eating is one of the things you can do at the casino,” she said.
As they drove out of town toward the Chippewa Grand, Daniel said, “What kind of man gambles when his sister is lost in the woods?”
“My first guess would be someone addicted,” Rainy replied.
“Another might be someone who didn’t particularly care about his sister but put on a good act,” Daniel said.
Rainy shook her head. “I think that’s a harsh judgment. When I was with him today, I didn’t get a sense of callousness. And he seemed truly alarmed today when he saw the blood.”
“You’re always looking for the best in people, Aunt Rainy,” Daniel said.
“No. I’m always looking for what balances them, good and bad. Maybe Trevor Harris has a gambling addiction, but that doesn’t mean he’s the kind of young man who’d want his sister dead in order to get rich.”
“But what about his grandfather?” Stephen said. “Is Trevor capable of doing the old man in? Any feeling there, Aunt Rainy?”
“I don’t know how he could have been involved. He was fishing in a whole other part of the lake when his grandfather went missing. Let’s talk to him before we make any assumptions. I think it’s best to keep ourselves open to all possibilities.”
The casino was hopping. The slots were busy, singing their siren songs to a milling crowd. Trevor Harris was at a high-stakes blackjack table. He had an enviable stack of chips in front of him. Whether he’d bought them all or had won them, Rainy couldn’t have said. But in the minute or so that they stood watching before they approached him, he won and then won again, and his stacks grew. A young woman playing next to him, a redhead in a studded, black leather vest, reached out and ran her hand down his arm. When he looked at her, she gave him a big maroon-lipped smile and said, “Just trying to pick up some of your luck, honey.”
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