At 9:53 p.m., Hickey pulled into the turnout beside Watson Creek. Both tires on the right side sank into mud. He left them embedded and sat stiffly behind the wheel, trying to breathe evenly, silence the fears that assaulted him, blot out the hideous vision that besieged him, of Wendy in death. She lay on her side with her head turned straight upward. She looked astounded. Her chest and her hair were soaked in blood. Her arms clutched her belly.
Hickey rolled down the window to let the heat out and the frost in. Sweat kept beading on his forehead. When he wiped his brow, his hand felt like a frozen block. He sat listening for tires and motors. Bounced his forehead off the steering wheel, cussing the miserable part of his brain that sought to prepare for the worst, that kept reminding him how often he’d suspected that Wendy couldn’t live much longer. How she belonged in heaven, if heaven existed; no matter, she wasn’t suited for the world. A hundred times in the past eight years he’d wondered if his calling wasn’t only to protect her for the little while until she finished her tour on earth. One hell of a job he was doing.
Several times he reached for the door handle or the starter button and had to suppress the urge to rush the cabin alone. It seemed he couldn’t wait another moment. His fingers burned. His feet threatened to leap out of his shoes.
Six minutes after ten, the sheriff’s cruiser rattled into the turnout and stopped beside him. The four doors of the cruiser sprang open at once. The muscle-bound Indian named Roy had been driving. Two more deputies climbed out of the rear. The three deputies and Sheriff Boggs gathered around Hickey. Roy carried a 30.06 with a telescopic sight. The others held lever-action Winchesters.
One deputy was the lanky son of Louis Pederson, a village shopkeeper. The boy had freckles that looked like splotches of oil. Beside him stood a deputy named Gene, who used to deal poker at Harry’s casino. He was tall as a flagpole, with hands that together could hide a basketball, or the decks he’d used to palm cards and deal seconds.
“What’ve you got in mind, Tom?” the sheriff asked.
“We’ve gotta walk in,” Hickey said. “The only way to do it is sneak up on the cabin.”
The sheriff glanced up at the trees. “Maybe we oughta drive a little way. The wind’s blowing off the mountain. I don’t guess they could hear us till we crested the hill and started down.”
“I’m not gonna risk it. We can get up there in twenty minutes or so hiking.”
“You know the layout?”
“I fished Flower Lake a couple times,” Hickey said. “There’s only the one cabin.”
Deputy Pederson offered, “What’s-his-name lives on this road, doesn’t he? The snowplow driver.”
“Lewellen,” the sheriff said. “His place is at the end of the road, about a quarter mile beyond the lake. Tom, you’re sure this crony of Harry’s wasn’t giving you the business?”
“Sure enough.”
“Okay, then, let’s shake a leg.”
Gene rummaged in his pocket for keys, walked to the cruiser’s trunk, and got out a small duffel bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. “I’m bringing some flares. Anybody want one?”
“What for?” Roy asked.
“You’d know if you hadn’t sat out the war playing your tom-tom. How else you gonna see the target, hold the flashlight in one hand, the rifle in the other? I don’t think we’re gonna need the snowshoes.”
“Bring ’em along,” the sheriff said. “And get out a Winchester and flashlight for Tom.”
Roy carried the snowshoes. They started two abreast up an icy dirt road confounded by sinkholes and rivulets, bordered in second-growth cedar and fir, each tree so close to its neighbor that the branches intertwined. The trunks were thick but short, twenty to thirty feet, just high enough to make the narrow road look like a tunnel into some treacherous cavern.
Hickey startled at every footfall. No matter how softly the men walked, and whether on dirt or snow, each step crunched, grating his senses and afflicting his spirit as though it had broken a mirror. At the quietest rustling in the underbrush—probably a squirrel—he wheeled and clapped the rifle butt to his shoulder. He pulled ahead of the others and still heard them panting. His heartbeat galloped. It sounded like restless fingers drumming.
At the crest of the hill, he ran off the road, through knee-deep snow in a stand of aspen to the edge of the dropoff and stood gazing down at Flower Lake.
Maybe six hundred yards long, half that wide, deep and murky, it looked like a black hole fringed in lace. In dead center rose an island of stacked, glacier-polished boulders. There were several piers, all but one in ruins. The good one lay on the opposite shore toward the far end. Behind it, the forest made way for a log cabin, the banker’s place.
Out from between Hickey’s teeth came a sound he’d never heard: a falsetto whimper. Wendy was there, he knew. Dead or alive. A light, so dim it might’ve been shed by a single candle, flickered against the pane of the window that overlooked the water. He peered at it while trying to swallow his heart.
A volley of sharp reports sounded. Hickey’s gut thought it was a gun, but his mind rebutted the idea.
Deputy Pederson marched up and stopped beside him. “Yessir. Somebody’s down there, all right.” He turned to meet the sheriff. “You hear? Somebody’s chopping logs.”
They rested for a minute before another volley sounded. Five whacks spaced seconds apart. Pederson gaped into the darkness. “Funny. The guy that’s chopping, he’s got a little bonfire and he ain’t nowhere near the cabin. He’s way down the heel, a little ways toward the cabin from the split where the road cuts up to Mister Lewellen’s place. Look real close, you can see the bonfire.”
“Probably run out of logs,” Boggs speculated. “Had to go out and find a dead tree. Tom, let’s get straight who’s running things. Is it you or me?”
Hickey gave up peering at the window. He turned to the sheriff and stared as though surprised to find him there, stuck his glasses back in their case, crammed it into his coat pocket. “You and Roy and Gene, see how near you can get to the woodcutter, then wait till you hear me fire a shot. That’ll be when I get to Wendy or run into trouble. The kid and I’ll slide down the hill, soon as it levels some, and cut around the topside of the lake. That oughta get us to the cabin about the same time you reach the woodcutter.”
“Sheriff, we supposed to take orders from him?” The Pederson kid asked.
“Might as well. I get the feeling Tom’s a lot better at giving orders than taking ’em.”
Hickey told Pederson to pass out the snowshoes. Each man accepted a pair, hung it by a rope loop from his shoulder, and started down the grade. About halfway, the clear swatch of a firebreak cut through the yellow pine straight down the hill from the road to the lake. Hickey and the boy turned that way, sidestepping. The path was treacherous in darkness so nearly pure, with jagged stumps and gnarled fingers of brush piercing out of the snow. Still, after a few dozen steps, Hickey found a rhythm. He might’ve reached the base of the hill in record time and on his feet if he hadn’t tried to gaze across the lake at the cabin window and missed spotting the rock that halted his front foot and sent him toppling head first. With old football instincts, he tucked and landed on his shoulder, the rifle pressed crossways against his stomach. Snowshoes flew up and clobbered the back of his head.
He skidded and plowed into the snow. When he tried to spring up, one leg folded and he toppled forward again. This time, he only rose to his knees, gazing around to regain his sense of direction. He couldn’t see the lake or cabin through the thicket of trees.
The boy caught up. He took Hickey’s arm, helped him to his feet, and returned his hat. “You okay?”
Hickey growled and pushed on. About twenty yards farther, they reached the base of the hill and what had once been a logging road that circled the lake behind the trees along the high-water line. Hickey peered between the trunks. The dim light still flickered in the cabin. He took out his glasses and stood a minute watching for movement. His heart and brain throbbed with longing for even a glimpse of Wendy. A chorus of wicked voices taunted him, proclaiming he’d find her dead.
A howl lodged in his throat. Suddenly frantic to know, and to mutilate every freak who’d harmed or grieved her, he wheeled and started trudging north around the top bend of the lake.
Along the old road, which must’ve caught daily sunlight, the snow gave way to dry patches and mud puddles. The speed he could’ve made got halved by the fallen logs he and the deputy had to dodge or climb over.
Though the forest was probably muting their noise, Hickey dreaded every slapping footstep or snapping twig. Often his feet planted themselves against his will. He couldn’t help but lean and stare between the trees at the cabin, holding perfectly still while listening for sounds that meant they’d gotten detected. Pederson took the lead.
Even when he’d reached the west side of the lake and lost any view of the cabin, Hickey stopped every few yards to listen. The last time, his body started quaking. For at least a minute, all he could do was press the Winchester across his middle, to keep the gun from dropping out of his hands, and lock his knees so they wouldn’t buckle. In forty-four years he’d never gotten a clue that fear could be this profound.
He was standing at the last bend in the road. The deputy was running back toward him. A few muted whacks sounded: the woodcutter again. Hickey managed two steps before the deputy reached him. He grabbed the boy’s arm. A handhold made standing far easier. At last he stopped quaking and gasped, “There’s no sense us going in together. One of us sticks to the road, the other takes the shoreline, sneaks around behind. There’s a back porch and steps going down.”
“Sure. I saw it. You sick or something?”
“I’ll take the road. You get to the bottom of the steps and wait. I bust through the front door, yelling like the devil. The first peep, you fly up the stairs, kick in the door, jump through the window, whatever you’ve got to.”
“Yessir.”
Hickey nodded and started up the road, planting his toes, then letting the heels fall gently to minimize the racket. He inspected every inch of the ground ahead and studied each sound. An ax bouncing off wood. A hissing noise, like a beginner attempting to whistle. The whoosh of a branch snapping back into place. Loosed clumps of snow falling off a tree and splattering. A rattle, like a pouch full of marbles. Feet padding on the crusty ground.
Hickey froze, stared up the hillside, and sensed the creature before he saw it: a small gray wolf skulking downhill. It made a leap onto the road and dashed across, rustling twigs as it wedged between two intertwined thickets. The boy yowled.