Free Northwest Angle by William Kent Krueger Page A

minute later, a candle flame illuminated the shelter.
    “Who was it?” she asked.
    “No idea.” She could hear the exhaustion in his croaky voice. Hell, she was beat, too.
    “He knew about the cabin, though,” her father said. “If he didn’t know about the body before, he knows now.”
    “I heard shots.”
    “I’m not sure what that meant. Maybe a signal to someone else out there on the lake. Maybe some kind of threat or warning, I don’t know. But once it was clear that he had a gun, I didn’t want to take any chances.”
    “Will he come back?”
    He didn’t reply immediately, and Jenny wondered if it was because it hurt him to talk, or if he was simply reluctant to answer. “If I were him, and I wanted to be sure of the situation here, I’d come back at first light, when I could see everything better.”
    “What do we do?”
    He spoke as if the answer was obvious. “We make sure we’re not here.”

ELEVEN
     
    M al navigated by moonlight. They were moving along a corridor he said was called Tranquil Channel. Fortunately, the running lights still worked. The storm had littered the lake with all kinds of debris, and Rose was posted forward with Stephen and Anne to watch for anything that might damage the bow at waterline. They all had flashlights, and the beams crisscrossed the tea-colored water ahead.
    Stars lay on the sky like sugar tossed on an onyx plate. The moon, frost-colored and nearly full, was at their backs. The islands rose black all around them, their outlines visible from the way they blotted out the stars.
    They’d been intent on their responsibilities, on keeping all eyes toward the lake in front of them, and for a long time they had not spoken. Rose was tired, tired physically and mentally, tired of considering all the tragic possibilities they might have to face. She’d lapsed into a long, silent prayer.
    “I keep trying to figure that storm,” Stephen finally said, without looking away from the broad yellow oval where his flashlight beam met water. “I never saw anything like it before. Like a tornado except it was everywhere.”
    “Straight-line winds,” Anne said. “We had a storm like that once at St. Ansgar. A bunch of trees on campus blew down. A lot of damage in town, too.”
    “I wonder how far the damage goes here,” Stephen said. “All the way to the Northwest Angle, do you think? And back to Kenora?”
    “That’s something we probably won’t know until we dock,” Anne said.
    The progress of the houseboat, though measured, created a small breeze that felt cool against Rose’s face. Her eyes hurt from the intensity with which she scoured the lake and the darkness ahead. Mal had said that, as soon as they hit open water, he’d try to give the houseboat more throttle. Until then, it was best to proceed with utmost caution.
    “Do you think they’re okay, Aunt Rose?” Anne asked.
    Anne stood to her left. Rose tried to remember what that side of the boat was called. Starboard? Port?
    “I really think that, yes,” Rose replied, trying to keep the exhaustion out of her voice.
    Stephen stood to her right. He turned his face toward her sharply. In the moonlight at his back, half his features were brilliant, the other half in shadow. “Why?” he challenged.
    “It’s simply what I choose to believe.”
    “What if they were caught in open water?” he threw at her. “They’d never make it.”
    “Then they weren’t caught in open water,” she said calmly. “They made it somewhere safe before the storm hit. Until I’m proven wrong, I’ll believe the best.”
    “You actually think that way?” His tone suggested that she was more than a little foolish.
    He had good reason to be skeptical of her philosophy. Almost two years earlier, when his mother had disappeared on a charter flight over the Rockies during a horrific snowstorm, they’d all held to an impossible hope that she would be found alive. It had been Stephen’s father who’d pursued the truth and