Free Manitou Canyon by William Kent Krueger Page B

and then along a faint trail that cut inland through a thick stand of pines. They came to a place where the rock shot up from the dirt in a long wall sixty feet high.
    â€œThey were up there last night?” Lindsay craned her neck toward the low, dirty-looking sky.
    â€œOn top. If what we saw is what I think we saw.”
    â€œWhat now?”
    â€œI’m going to climb.”
    â€œMe, too,” she said without hesitation.
    â€œThe rock’s wet, bound to be slippery.”
    â€œYou think you can make it?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œThen so can I,” she said gamely and started up the wall. She’d gone only a few feet when her boot slid from under her and she fell to the ground.
    â€œYou hurt?”
    â€œOnly my dignity.” She studied the wall again. “I think I’ll wait here.”
    Cork took his time, choosing his handholds and footholds carefully. In five minutes, he’d mounted the ridge. He walked slowly along the top, which was mostly rock. Some aspens had managed to put down roots, but they were a hardy few. He stood on the ridge, with a good 360-degree view of the lake, and saw no sign of humanity except the campsite on the mainland where he and Lindsay had spent the night.
    Then he glanced down. On a flat stone just to the left of where he’d planted his feet, he saw what looked like black ash. He removed his gloves and bent and touched his right index finger to the stone. He lifted the finger to his nose and smelled tobacco char. Someone had smoked there. Whoever it was must have smoked after the rain had stopped or the little fall of ashes would have been washed away. Cork walked along the ridgetop studying the ground more carefully. He found a place between the rocks that in summer had been filled with wild grass. That now dead grass lay pressed down in a long outline that had probably been made by a sleeping bag.
    It was an odd place to camp. To haul gear to the top of the ridge wasn’t an easy thing. There was no shelter from the inclement weather, and no particularly comfortable places to sleep. The only advantage to being there might be the view. In the dull gray of November, that view was hardly worth the climb.
    There were only two ways into and out of Raspberry Lake: the portage to the south, which was how Cork and Lindsay hadcome the day before, and the portage to the north, a long, difficult trek nearly two miles to the next lake, which was called Baldy. If whoever had been here had canoed the lake to either portage that morning, Cork would have seen them. Which meant that they had left when it was still dark. Or they were still on the island.
    Cork went back to the place where he’d climbed up the rock wall. He looked down to where he’d left Lindsay Harris. She was nowhere to be seen. The only evidence of her was the stocking cap she’d been wearing, which was lying on the ground at the bottom of the wall, looking very much like a piece of Waldo that had been severed and left for carrion.

C HAPTER 10

    C ork hadn’t checked in on the sat phone the next morning, but Marsha Dross again advised patience. The cloud cover, the location, the unreliability of sat phones in general. There could be so many reasons for the silence from the Boundary Waters.
    It was barely light out when Rose, Jenny, and Waaboo left the house on Gooseberry Lane and headed north out of Aurora. They passed the turnoff to Sam’s Place, and Rose glanced across the railroad tracks at the Quonset hut sitting all alone on the shore of Iron Lake. Although Cork continued to use it in winter as the office for his private investigations, it looked abandoned at the moment, a shell with no life inside. Which was how, these days, she sometimes thought of Cork. Something was missing in him, something vital, something life-giving, and she didn’t know what it was exactly and so had no idea how to help him find it.
    â€œI always hate it when we close up Sam’s