“Lindsay!” Cork called from the top of the ridge. “Lindsay Harris!”
To which he received no reply. There was the sudden caw of a crow startled from the branches of a tree below and the flap of wings as the bird took flight. Cork watched it grow small in the distance, black as an ash against the gray of the sky.
He thought maybe the young woman had gone into the cover of the pines to relieve herself or back to the pit toilet of the island campsite. But there was something else that was a possibility, a thought that came to him because of all the loss he’d suffered due to violence, a thought fed by the mysterious appearance of the lights on the ridge the night before and the mysterious disappearance of whoever had been there. And fed as well by the inexplicable vanishing of John Harris. Someone had taken Lindsay Harris.
He could have climbed down the wall the way he’d come up, but he decided on a different tactic. He moved to the far side of the ridge, the long palisade that fell precipitously to the water. He loped east along the ridgeline until he found a fold in the rock that might hide him as he descended. As carefully and quietly as he could, he made his way down. At the bottom, he found himself in a small copse of aspen, bare in this season, the shed leaves on the ground wet and blessedly silent as he made his passage through the trees. He entered the pines, where the forest floor was a soft, deep bed of brown needles. He crept soundlessly toward the place where Lindsay’s Waldo-looking hat had been dropped, a thoughtless oversight maybe. Or maybe a bit of bait to lure him down.
He spotted movement beyond a line of raspberry bushes. Although the thicket was empty of foliage and berries, the combined bramble was too dense to see through clearly. He bent low and crept nearer. He still could barely make out what was on the other side, but he could hear the whisper of voices.
“What’s he doing up there? What’s taking so long?” A woman’s voice, but not Lindsay’s.
“Patience.” A deeper voice, older, offering a piece of advice that might have come from Henry Meloux.
“When I see him, should I shoot him?” A young voice, male. Afraid or, at the very least, terribly uncertain.
“No.” The man again, firmly in charge. “You wait for my say-so.”
Cork had brought no weapon, had no way of defending himself or Lindsay. This was not at all what he’d expected. But he wasted no time considering the whys of the situation. He needed a plan. These people had come in canoes—there was no other way—and had probably hidden them somewhere on the island. They’d have to return at some point, and if he could find those canoes, he’d be waiting. He slipped quietly away.
They weren’t difficult to locate. As he’d told Lindsay earlier, there were only three good landing places on the island, and they’d already investigated two of them. The third was not far from the fold in the rock wall where he’d made his descent. Just inside the cover of the pines near the shoreline, he found the canoes, two of them, tipped behind a fallen log, hidden from the sight of anyone moving past on the lake.
Which would have been Lindsay and me, he thought. They’d been waiting. But why? What was it about this place or the missing man that was so important people were ready to kill because of it? Were they there to protect something? Take something? Lindsay? Her grandfather had disappeared. Did they mean to make her disappear as well? Cork hadn’t seen her with the others or heard her. Had she been able to hide?
He didn’t so much hear as sense the danger. He spun, and the man came at him with the knife. Cork reacted instinctively, his mind and body trained across a lifetime of law enforcement. He parried the assailant’s thrust with his left forearm and punched his right fist into the man’s throat. The man staggered back, still gripping the knife. Cork was on him, and they fell to the ground, grappling. The man’s breath came in desperate rasps, rattling through his damaged throat, but he fought with surprising strength and delivered a jolting blow to Cork’s jaw. Adrenaline had pumped into every muscle of Cork’s body. He barely felt the impact. He battled with the thoughtless instinct of survival. They rolled across the soft mat of pine needles, each in the grip of the other, their bodies twisting. Cork broke away and was on his feet quickly. His assailant rose more slowly, and as he came up, Cork delivered a kick to the side of his head that sent him tumbling. Cork tensed, prepared for the next attack, but it never came. The man lay facedown on the ground, unmoving. Cork was on top of him in an instant. The man made a little sound, like the last bit of air from an emptying balloon, and was still. Carefully, Cork stood up and stepped away. As he watched, a pool of blood spread from beneath the downed man. Cork bent and rolled him to his side. The knife handle protruded from his chest above his heart. As Cork watched, the stranger bled the last of his life out onto the pine needles that were his deathbed.
Cork stood slowly. He felt the ache of his jaw now where the man’s fist had connected. His head rang. He staggered a little. He had time for only a few breaths before what felt like the kick of a mule hit the back of his head, and he sank into a blackness empty of everything but one last moment of dread.
* * *
He came to gradually. The first words he heard before he opened his eyes were “Kill him now.”
They were spoken by a woman, the voice he’d heard from the other side of the raspberry thicket. This time the words weren’t whispered.
“No,” replied the other voice, the voice that had reminded him of Meloux. “We need him.”
Cork opened his eyes and at first saw only the flat, slate sky between the pines. He slowly turned his head, and the others came into his line of vision. A tall man, grayed, powerful-looking, Native. A woman, maybe forty, with murder in her eyes, also Native. A kid, sixteen or seventeen at most, holding a rifle, looking nervous. He, too, was Native. Cork didn’t see Lindsay Harris.
“He’s awake,” the kid said.
The man knelt beside Cork. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Cork said.
“This is how it stands. Do what we tell you or you’re dead. It’s that simple. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Can you get up?”
“I’ll try.”
“Keep him covered,” the man said to the kid.
Cork heard the slide of the bolt on the rifle. He rolled and drew himself up on his hands and knees. His head throbbed and he felt dizzy. He pushed himself up fully, swayed a little, then got his footing.
“Cork?”
At the sound of Lindsay Harris’s voice, he turned. She stood near the tipped canoes with her hands bound behind her back.
“You okay?” he asked.
“For now.” She eyed their captors in a frightened way.
“What do you want?” Cork asked the strangers.
“Your silence and your muscle,” the man said. “Help us get him into a canoe.”
He nodded to where the body of the man who’d attacked Cork lay in a pool of blood that had turned the brown pine needles a wet scarlet.
“He touches my brother, I’ll kill him,” the woman said.
“You’ll load him then?” the man asked her.
“With your help.” She walked to the dead man and stood over him, her face as hard as the wall Cork had scaled that morning. She looked at the tall man expectantly.
“Put one of the canoes in the water,” he instructed Cork. To the kid, he said, “Stay with him. Shoot him if he does anything except what I’ve asked.”
Cork went to the nearest canoe and, even as he bent to the work of lifting it, admired its construction. It was birch bark, handcrafted, light and sturdy and made with no iron fasteners. It rose dramatically at the bow and stern, in the way the Ojibwe had once fashioned their canoes. He lifted it easily onto his shoulders, carried it to the lake, and set it in the water.
“Steady it,” the tall man said.
Cork stepped into the lake and did as he was asked.
The woman gripped her brother’s legs and the tall man took the shoulders. They carried the body between them to the canoe and laid it in the center.
“Now the other canoe,” the tall man said, and Cork obeyed.
“Give me the rifle,” the tall man said to the kid. When he held it, he pointed the barrel at Cork and spoke to the woman and the kid both. “Go fetch the gear.”
His companions walked into the woods and disappeared, leaving Cork and Lindsay Harris with the tall, graying man.
“What now?” Cork asked.
“You’ll see soon enough, O’Connor.”
“Should I know you?”
“We’ve never met.”
Cork looked at the canoe where the dead man lay. “He attacked me.”
“His job was to watch the canoes.”
“You can let her go.” Cork nodded at the young woman. “She had nothing to do with this man’s death.”
“She had everything to do with this man’s death.”
“Who are you?” Lindsay said. “What do you want?”
“You talk too much,” the man said. “It would be best if you said nothing.”
“Are you going to kill us?” she asked.
“Only if necessary.”
“What would make that necessary?” Cork said.
“You’ll know when it happens.”
The others returned with packs, which they set in the canoes. From one of the packs the woman took a satellite phone and held it toward the tall man.
“You make the call,” she said. “I’ll hold the rifle.”
The tall man took the sat phone but handed the rifle to the kid. Then he walked away from the others and stood near the lakeshore and made the call.
“Well?” the woman said, when he returned.
“Nothing. Must be the clouds. We’ll try again at the next lake. Load up.”
The tall man directed Cork to the bow of the canoe that held the dead man.
“I don’t want him in the same canoe with Flynn.” The woman spat the words, full of venom.
“All right.” The tall man nodded toward the bow of the second canoe and told Cork to get in. He cut Lindsay’s hands free and put her in the middle of that same canoe with the gear, and he took the stern. When the kid and the woman had taken their places in the canoe that held the dead man, they shoved off.
The morning was windless, the water like glass. They glided easily across the lake, heading toward the place where John Harris’s canoe had been found empty and adrift and where the day before Cork had sat in his own canoe, trying to heed Meloux’s advice, waiting for something to come to him. And it had. In spades.