Purgatory Ridge (31 page)

The thunder grew nearer, big cracks that sounded as if they were splitting the earth. Blind, she pictured the forest shattered where the lightning hit, the ground scarred black. It wasn’t a pleasant image and she tried to shake it. A strong wind rose in advance of the storm. She could feel the air pushed through the gaps in the old cabin, and she could hear the creak and groan of the trees as they bent. If there were rain, she knew it wouldn’t be gentle.

The storm overtook the cabin. Lightning flashed so brightly that even through the disgusting cloth across her eyes she could see the night illuminated. Immediately after each bolt, thunder made the ground tremble as if, compared with what the heavens wielded, the earth under Jo was nothing. The lightning seemed to strike all around the cabin, frighteningly close. Although she’d thought that after what she’d already been through, nothing could scare her further, she was terrified.

Between the claps of thunder, she heard a growing roar, like a huge wave sweeping toward her. A few minutes later, hail hit the cabin. The din as the stones pounded the old roof and walls was deafening. The end of the world would be no less terrible, Jo thought. As frightened as she was, her greatest concern was for Stevie, for whom even a normal thunderstorm was a
nightmare. She longed to be holding him, comforting him.

God
, she prayed, more desperately than she ever had,
please help us
.

And the hail left. As suddenly as it had come.

In the quiet that followed, she heard Stevie whimpering softly.

“Are you sleeping,”
she hummed to him. She was relieved to hear his quivering little echo.

More time passed. Hours, it seemed. She was afraid for Scott. She thought she could hear him, his shivering almost audible. Was he coming back, the man who’d given them food and a bit of hope? His concern had seemed genuine, and his promise to return with the insulin had seemed sincere. Still, a man capable of kidnapping was probably capable of almost anything despicable. Maybe it was part of the plan, a sort of good cop–bad cop scenario. One terrorizes, the other gives hope, and in that way they keep the hostages caught in indecision, incapable of escape. The man who’d brought them to the cabin was vile, there was no doubt in Jo’s mind. He was fully capable of the cruelty he promised. But the other was an unknown. And even if he meant well, what control did he have over anything?

She could barely keep her eyes open. For a moment, she closed them.

She was dreaming instantly. Of walking through a strange house. Looking for Cork, but unable to find him. She opened a door and something black leaped at her and she woke.

The dream turned her thinking to the house on Gooseberry Lane. It was the only place she’d ever lived
that she let herself love. She could see Cork and Rose and the girls gathered at the kitchen table. She could see the worried look on all their faces. Imagining their helplessness made her want to weep, and she yanked herself away from that weakness. Instead, she imagined her family in council, considering action. Cork wouldn’t sit by and let this happen. Jo didn’t know what he would do exactly, but she knew that somehow he was working his way toward her. She wrapped all her hope around the solid belief that somehow he would come.

She was dreaming again. This time it was a horrible dream full of fire. She woke with a start and found that the air she breathed was full of smoke, so thick she could feel the texture of it in her nostrils when she breathed. She listened. No tree frogs or crickets. None of the usual night sounds. The only noise from outside the cabin was a dry crackle that sounded like a thousand feet marching across a bed of brittle branches. The march was accentuated now and then by the boom of a big bass drum.

Fire
.

She began working her wrists desperately over the ragged edge of the post, trying to cut the duct tape that bound her. The smoke grew thicker, and the sound that only minutes before had seemed distant rose to a constant roar punctuated by the boom of trees exploding. The fire was moving rapidly toward them. She felt the current of the air shift as it was drawn in to feed an immense body of flame.

Please, God, no. Not this way
.

Behind her back, her wrists covered a territory of only inches as she strained, twisting against the ropes.
Then she felt the slight resistance as the tape snagged on a big splinter. She tried to calm herself, to focus on the delicate trick of notching the tape, for she knew that if she pulled too hard, the splinter would simply break off. She began to cough, and she could hear Grace and the boys coughing, too. The cough made it hard to be delicate with the tape. Sweat soaked the bandanna across her face. The air was growing hotter and moving faster as it was sucked in to feed a monster that was almost at the doorstep.

Please, God
. Over and over again as she struggled, she prayed that simple, desperate prayer.
Please, God
.

But it seemed God had not listened, because the splinter broke away from the post, and Jo screamed through the tape that sealed her mouth, cursing an end that was too cruel to believe.

Then she felt a hand on her ropes.

“Don’t move.”

Jo recognized the voice of the man who’d gone for the insulin.

A knife blade slipped between her breasts and quickly severed the rope. Jo leaned forward and his hands were at her wrists, cutting them free. He moved to her ankles as she pulled the bandanna from her face. The cabin was filled with smoke made luminous by a pulsating glow that came through the doorway. The man moved to Grace and Scott. As he freed them, they pulled the hoods off their heads. Last, he bent over Stevie, who ripped the strip of cloth from his eyes as soon as his hands were free.

“Come on,” the man shouted over the roar and boom of the fire. He headed out the door.

Grace was right behind him, holding onto Scott’s
hand. Jo followed with Stevie in tow. Outside, smoke thick as fog rolled off a tide of flame that had engulfed the trees on the far side of the clearing, a little over a hundred yards away. Sparks had ignited fires in the tall, dry grass that surrounded the cabin. The man who led them ran a crazy zigzag between islands of flame. Stevie’s small legs couldn’t keep up and he fell. Jo turned back and scooped him up in her arms. When she turned around, the fire had closed in front of her, blocking her way. She sprinted left, toward the only gap she saw. She cleared the wall of fire just as the flames licked at her heels. She saw a truck with a camper shell parked among the trees at the clearing’s edge. The tailgate was down. Grace and Scott were sliding inside. The man was gesturing furiously for Jo to hurry. When they reached the truck, he lifted Stevie and tossed him in back. Jo leaped in beside her son and the man slammed shut the tailgate and dropped the door of the camper shell, locking them inside.

The fire moved with incredible speed. Already it had eaten the cabin and the whole of the clearing and was now racing through the crowns of the pine trees along the logging road. Jo knelt and peered through the rear window of the cab and through the windshield beyond. The man jumped in behind the wheel. Over his right shoulder, Jo could see that the tiny corridor of road ahead of them was solid fire on both sides. The man glanced back and in the glow of the flames, Jo looked into his face and he into hers. He turned away, jammed the truck into gear, and gave it gas. The tires spun on dry dirt, then caught. The truck hit second gear and the flaming corridor at the same time. Jo dropped and clutched Stevie to her. Fire splashed
against the sides and rolled off the tailgate. The air inside the camper shell grew so hot it threatened to sear her lungs.

Then they were out. Beyond the flames. Through the back of the camper shell, Jo could see fire touching the sky, but as she turned and peered ahead through the rear window of the cab, all she could see beyond the windshield was lush woods, dark and cool. The truck bounced wildly over the old road as the man kept pushing for speed, putting distance between his truck and the fire. Jo’s head slammed against the roof. She hunkered down beside Stevie.

They didn’t stop for miles, until they came to a place where the logging road opened onto well-graded dirt and gravel. They were still in deep woods, but by then the fire was only a distant glow against the night sky behind them. The man behind the wheel pulled over and killed the engine. Immediately, Jo slid to the tailgate and tried to open it. The inside latch was broken. She heard the man in the cab cry, “Shit!” and felt the pickup shake as he pounded angrily on the dashboard. He threw the cab door open, and kicked the side of the truck. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” he screamed. Jo slid back to Stevie and took him in her arms.

The tailgate dropped, and the rear window of the camper shell lifted. A flashlight beam shot in at them.

“Here. Your damn medicine,” the man said. He threw a plastic bag into the light.

In the beam of the flashlight, Grace dumped the contents from the bag—several syringes in individual packets and a small box. She took a bottle from the box, opened a syringe, and jabbed the needle into the bottle’s thin membrane covering. Scott offered her his leg
and she drew back the cuff of his shorts to expose the top of his thigh.

“Could you hold the light a little steadier, please?” she asked.

“Just poke him, for Christ’s sake.”

She slipped the needle into Scott’s skin and slowly depressed the plunger. When she was finished, she put everything back into the bag, then looked directly into the light. Her eyes were blue and shiny. “Thank you,” she said.

“Give me the stuff.”

She slid it to him across the bed of the pickup. He rolled her the duct tape.

“Now,” he said, “tape his wrists behind him.”

“Please—” Grace began.

“Just do it,” he yelled.

She pulled off a long piece of tape and used her teeth to tear it from the roll. She took her son’s hands, guided them behind his back, and bound his wrists. “Are you all right, sweetheart? Does that hurt?”

He shook his head.

“Tape his mouth.” When she’d done as he’d asked, he said, “Now you.” He jabbed a finger into the light, pointed at Jo. “Tape her the same way.”

Jo did so, bound Grace’s wrists and ankles and put tape over her mouth. “I’m sorry, Grace,” she said.

“Now you. Turn around.”

Jo scooted toward the tailgate, turned, and put her hands behind her. He taped them.

“You come down here, too, boy,” he said to Stevie. Stevie didn’t budge.

“Come here, boy, or by God, I’ll shoot you where you sit.”

“You’d save us only to kill a child?” Jo shot back at him.

Behind the light, the man fell silent. He stepped away from the truck and looked up at the night sky a while. Jo heard him whisper, “Jesus.” When he came back and spoke, the harshness was gone. “I’m not going to hurt you, son, I promise.”

Still, Stevie did not move. The man lowered the beam. Jo studied his face and saw only weariness there. “You won’t hurt him?” she asked.

“I won’t hurt him.”

“Come here beside me, Stevie,” Jo said.

Stevie hesitated.

“Come on,” Jo urged him. “It will be all right, I promise.”

Slowly, Stevie crawled to his mother. The man bound his small wrists with a single loop of tape. He didn’t bother with Stevie’s ankles or his mouth.

“You last,” the man said, and he closed up Jo’s lips with duct tape.

“Everybody scoot together,” he said when he was done. He sounded exhausted. “And hold tight. There’s still some rough road ahead.”

They huddled against one another. The man closed the camper shell, raised and locked the tailgate. A moment later, the truck started off.

They weren’t free, but they weren’t dead either, and they’d come close to that. Jo knew there was a lot of reason to be hopeful. Unfortunately, she knew there was, perhaps, even greater reason to be concerned… For she had looked into the man’s face and had recognized him. And he knew it.

N
OBODY WANTED TO GO TO BED
. Separating, going to their own rooms, lying alone with their fears seemed impossible. The girls brought down their pillows and blankets, curled up at opposite ends of the sofa, and slept. Rose, in her robe, napped in the recliner. Cork sat in the easy chair, but sleep did not come. He couldn’t stop thinking, even though his thinking took him nowhere. He stared at the telephone, hoping Schanno would call with something. The phone refused to ring. Finally he got up and touched his sister-in-law’s shoulder very gently. She jerked awake.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “I’m going back out to Lindstrom’s.”

“What can you do there?” Rose asked.

Cork had no good answer. But Rose nodded and said, “I understand.”

Even with the moon already high in the sky, the night seemed dark. Cork followed the highway around the southern end of Iron Lake, then headed north along the eastern shore. He turned onto the drive to Grace Cove and saw a line of headlights racing toward him from Lindstrom’s place. As he pulled to the side of the road, two dark green Luminas he knew to be FBI vehicles sped past, followed by the Bonneville that belonged to the BCA. Bringing up the rear was Wally Schanno in his Land Cruiser. Schanno’s vehicle skidded to a stop beside Cork’s Bronco. Schanno rolled his
window down, and he hollered, “Get in! Things are happening!”

Cork wasted no time complying, and the sheriff’s Land Cruiser shot off, following the others, who were headed north toward the reservation.

“What’s going on?” Cork asked, buckling in.

“The agents that had the Hamilton woman and her son under surveillance reported a visitor about an hour ago. Didn’t get an ID. A few minutes later, their van peels out of the park on the rez and heads to Isaiah Broom’s place. FBI’s had Broom under surveillance, too. Hamilton, her boy, and their visitor all go inside. Five minutes later, Broom rushes out and him and the Hamilton kid load the back of Broom’s pickup truck with what appears to be crates of dynamite. Then they hook up a trailer carrying a Bobcat, and they all head off again, this time to George LeDuc’s place. That’s where they are now.”