Northwest Angle (6 page)

The child had an enormous cleft in its upper lip. It was as if some cruel hand had taken a pair of shears and snipped away a triangle of flesh. Through that cleft, a broad stretch of pink gum showed.

Jenny drew the basket from the basin, and the baby began to cry in earnest. Its little arms poked from beneath the blanket and flailed. Its face grew hot red. Jenny backed out from under the fallen spruce, lifted the child, and cradled it in her arms.

“Oh, little one,” she said softly. “Where are your parents?”
She scanned the devastated island and answered her own question. “Caught outside in the storm.” She looked down into the tiny red face with the gaping cleft in its upper lip. “Don’t worry. We’ll find them.”

The child quieted for a moment, pressed against her, and turned its face into her body. She realized it was trying to suckle her breast through the flimsy cotton of her T-shirt.

“You must be starved,” she whispered.

She laid the baby back down in the wicker, and the child began to scream again, though muted, as if it had already cried itself hoarse. Quickly, she returned to the cabin, set the basket on the bunk, and searched the maple tabletop on the far side of the room. Next to the stacked cooking pots, she found two clean glass baby bottles and several nipples.

Behind her, the baby’s cries were growing ever more feverish.

“Hold tight, little one,” she called. “I’ll be right there.”

She lifted the Ball jar, unscrewed the lid, and pulled a kitchen match from the supply inside. She pumped propane into the Coleman stove, something she’d done a zillion times with her father on camping trips, then opened the line to one of the burners and lit a flame. She took a quart-size cooking pot, filled it from the distilled water in one of the plastic jugs, and set the water over the burner to heat. From the opened carton under the table, she grabbed a canister of baby formula, popped the lid, and unsealed the contents. She measured formula into the bottle, filled it with distilled water, screwed on a cap and nipple, and shook it to mix. She set the bottle in the pan of water heating over the burner. Finally, she returned to the baby and took it in her arms. Immediately, its little face turned to her breast, and it tried again to feed.

“I wish I had something for you there,” she said.

Now she smelled it. The baby needed changing. She remembered seeing a squat wicker hamper beside the bunk. When she lifted the lid, she found clean diapers inside, folded neatly, along
with baby clothing. She took one of the diapers, spread it out on the damp mattress of the bunk, and set the squalling child on it.

“Ah,” she said, when she’d unpinned the soiled diaper. “A boy. No wonder you scream so loud.”

She could tell he hadn’t been changed in a good long while, but fortunately no rash had developed. She grabbed another clean diaper, hurried to the jug of water, and soaked the cloth. At her back, the baby’s screams grew more furious.

After she’d cleaned and rediapered him, all the time working around his flailing limbs, she carried him to the stove, where the bottle was heating.

She bent her face near his and said, as if he could understand, “Not long till dinnertime.”

At last she removed the bottle and shook a few drops onto her wrist to test the temperature. It would do. She plugged the nipple into the baby’s mouth, and instantly, he fell silent and tried to feed. He sucked loudly and then began to cry again in frustration. Jenny realized that the divide in his upper lip prevented him from forming a good vacuum. She gently pressed her finger over the cleft to seal it. The child sucked again, this time successfully.

“How long since you ate, little guy?” Jenny said, watching how furiously he worked at the nipple. She looked around her at the deserted cabin. If not for the damage from the storm, it would have been a clean, cozy place. “Where’s your mother?”

While the child fed in her arms, Jenny stepped outside. She walked the perimeter of the cabin. She came across a wooden tub with a washboard inside. Strung between a couple of aspen saplings that had survived the storm was a fifteen-foot length of nylon cord. A clothesline. She ducked under the line and headed to a rocky rise that backed the cabin. But for the baby, she would have climbed immediately to have a look at her surroundings.
Later,
she decided.

By the time the baby had finished the bottle, his eyes were drifting closed. Jenny took a minute to burp him, then returned
him to the wicker basket, where he fell instantly asleep. Hungry and exhausted from crying, she figured. How long had it been since someone had fed him, cared for him? Where was his mother?

She left the cabin again and this time climbed the rise behind the cabin. The crown of the hillock was bare and gave her a decent view of the island. She shielded her eyes against the low sun. She could see the rocky outcropping at the other end, where she’d sought shelter from the storm. What lay between that far place and where Jenny stood was total devastation: snapped trunks, uprooted trees, an enormous web of fallen timbers. She cupped her hands and hollered, “Hello! Can anybody hear me?”

No reply. She called again and again with the same result.

She deserted the rise. In front of the cabin, she found a trail that led toward the shoreline. The trail was blocked by fallen trees, but she followed it anyway, ducking and climbing, and, in a couple of minutes, stood at a little inlet littered with detritus from the storm. Around a ragged pine stump was a groove bare of bark, worn, Jenny guessed, as the result of a boat tying up there often. No boat was tied there now. She stared out from the inlet and saw only more destroyed islands across the channel. She was afraid for her father and for her family. She felt utterly alone and was tempted to give herself over completely to despair. But there was the baby to consider now.

She returned to the cabin, sat on the mattress beside the wicker basket, and studied the child. His skin was the color of sandstone. His hair was thick and black. When his eyes had been open, Jenny had seen their hard, almond color.
Ojibwe?
she wondered. She tried to sort through the whole strange situation of finding the baby in the basket hidden under the woven mat outside. One more odd circumstance in what was becoming a long line of circumstances that were not at all right.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said quietly to the sleeping child. “Maybe I’ll build a bonfire on top of the rise out there, keep feeding it until someone sees the smoke and comes.”

But will anyone come?
said the voice of reason inside her head.

“It may take a while, but yes,” she replied aloud. She looked toward the stacks of cardboard boxes on the other side of the cabin, beyond the fallen pine. “If we have to, we can wait a long time.”

Yeah, as long as there’s propane for the stove,
reason pointed out.

“Let me see what we can find,” Jenny said.

She hadn’t seen another propane tank near the stove, so she began to clear away debris where the fall of the pine tree had toppled the back wall. She pulled away broken branches and put her back into moving one of the logs enough to create a gap for her to slide through so that she could explore the corner of the cabin where the crushed table and chairs lay. She made her way into a tiny open space behind the logs and stopped. A woman lay on the cabin floor, facedown, her cheek in a puddle of coagulated blood. She was utterly naked.

Light came into the cabin through the shattered roof and fell across the body in a swath of bright yellow-orange that was like a satin ribbon. Jenny stood a moment, absolutely stunned. Slowly, and with great reluctance, she knelt and checked the woman’s neck for a pulse. Nothing, and the skin was cold to her touch. She drew her hand away, then reached out again and carefully rolled the woman onto her back. Young, Jenny saw. No more than seventeen or eighteen. Her hair was long and black and done in a braid. Her skin was the same color as the child’s, faded sandstone. Her cheekbones were high and proud. She was clearly Indian. Jenny knew that in this area it meant she was probably Ojibwe or Odawa or maybe Cree. The side of her face that had been pressed against the floor was covered with clotted blood. The other side was a mottle of deep bruising. There were burns on her breasts, little singes dark and round as old pennies. And there was also a bullet hole dead center in her forehead.

Jenny turned away. She rose and stumbled back, scrambled
through the gap she’d created in the tumbled logs and stood shaking. She wished her father was there. Her father would know what to do.

But he wasn’t. There was no one but her.

Whoever did this may be back,
said the voice inside her head.

“They’ve already killed her,” she said aloud. “Why would they come back?”

Do you want to take that chance?

She knew then that there would be no bonfire. Although it might bring rescue, it might also bring back a murderer. She looked the damaged cabin over carefully, forcing herself to think clearly. She knew she had to leave that place, find shelter somewhere else. She said aloud but quietly, “I’ll take the stove, a pan, some formula, and a few canned goods.”

They might see that some things are missing,
the voice told her.

“Can’t be helped.” She took the damp blanket from the bunk, spread it on the floor, and threw in a few canned goods, the canister of formula, some utensils, a can opener, the pan she’d used to boil water, a couple of candles, and the Ball jar of kitchen matches.

“Clean diapers,” she reminded herself.

She grabbed a handful of diapers and tossed them onto the blanket with the other items. She brought the four corners of the blanket together and tied them.

Water,
she thought, grabbed one of the unopened jugs of distilled water, and put it beside the blanket. She went to the propane stove, closed the lid and flipped the latch. As she drew the stove off the long, hand-hewn table, she spotted a knife. It was a clip point hunting knife with a five-inch fixed blade and black rubber handle, a good utilitarian knife that might have been used to cut meat for cooking. She grasped it and slipped it into her knapsack with her useless phone and camera. A final time, she scanned the room.

Then she looked at the sleeping baby. He’d been well cared for, she understood. The dead woman, his mother, had loved him, it was clear.

“I’ll find somewhere to hide us, somewhere safe, and I’ll be back for you, little man,” she promised.

The voice said,
Is there anywhere safe on this island?

For that one, Jenny didn’t have an answer.

M
al piloted the houseboat while Rose tried in vain to raise someone on the radio. The dismal scratch of static was all she got, and finally Mal said, “Give it up, sweetheart. I think the beating from that storm did it in. We’re lucky our GPS still works.” He tapped the unit on the console.

“What about your cell phone?” Rose asked.

“I haven’t been able to get a signal on that thing since we left Kenora.”

They’d motored out of the bay and come around the end of the island where Anne and Stephen had disappeared. Rose looked at the destruction, and she thought hell couldn’t look any worse. Trees lay cleaved as if with a battleax. Those few that had somehow managed to survive upright were stripped bare. The houseboat pushed through flotsam thrown off the island by the angry hand of the wind—bark and branch and brush. Fifty yards to the left of the boat and a little behind them, two shapes floated, dark and indistinct in the blue of the reflected sky. Something about them suggested to Rose that they had not come from a tree.

“Mal,” she said, almost breathless, and she pointed him back.

He spun the wheel, and the houseboat came about and nosed toward the floating shapes, which were different from the stiff detritus of tree parts around them, riding the gentle undulations
from the wake of the houseboat like things made of flesh and bone.

Oh, God,
Rose prayed silently,
please, God, no.

She ran to the bow platform, wanting to be certain and at the same time terrified by what she might discover. At the rail, she gave a little cry.

“What is it?” her husband called.

“Oh, Mal,” she said, her voice choked. “It’s a doe and a fawn. They’re dead, poor things.”

“Let’s find the living, Rose,” Mal said and swung the boat back toward the island.

They eased along the shoreline, moving through the eerie calm, looking west into the sun, shielding their eyes, straining to see movement of any kind. Rose remembered the field glasses she’d brought for birding and hurried to her cabin. Everything in the houseboat had been thrown into disarray, and her small cabin looked as if it had been ransacked by vandals. She finally found the glasses under the bunk amid the clutter of clothing and paperbacks, and she raced back to the control station. She scanned the island as they circled, she and Mal hardly speaking.

They came around at last to the bay where they’d begun.

Rose had always prided herself on being a woman of profound and indomitable hope, but at the moment, she could barely hold back tears.

“I didn’t see a thing,” she whispered.

“We’ll go around again, Rose. We’ll go around until we find them.”

She looked into his eyes, green eyes, like spring grass. “We will find them, won’t we, Mal?”

“God will have to answer to you if we don’t,” he said. “And I know he doesn’t want that.” He smiled gently and touched her arm, then looked past her and said, “Well I’ll be damned. Look, sweetheart.”

She turned where he pointed. Inside the bay, at the very rocks
on the shore where Mal had tried to safely anchor, Anne and Stephen stood, waving their arms.

“O ye of little faith,” Rose said to herself. And she kissed the top of her husband’s head.

Mal guided the boat to within a dozen feet of the shore. Anne and Stephen waded out to meet them and climbed aboard using the ladder of the swim platform. Rose hugged them both and said, “Are you all right?”