Northwest Angle by William Kent Krueger Page A

situation, which he’d already spent enough time considering that he had a working plan. He was thinking about Jenny and how startled he’d been when he saw her with the baby sucking at her breast. He’d stood paralyzed for a moment, but it wasn’t because of the odd circumstance. What shocked him was that for a brief instant it wasn’t Jenny he’d seen. In the dark, with her white-blond hair and her slender body and her protective pose, it had been Jo, Jenny’s mother, holding the baby in her arms. And now Cork couldn’t shake the confusion of emotions that vision had brought with it. Paramount among them was a relapse into grief, which he thought he’d put behind him.
    Grieving wasn’t only useless, it was dangerous, especially now, when he needed to focus. From grief he slid easily into anger, all directed at himself. What had he been thinking, bringing everyone he loved here, isolating them at the end of the earth, putting them in such great danger? This was his fault, all of it. And all because he wanted his family to be happy. Christ, how stupid, how selfish was that?
    He tried to shake off his black mood with some useful thinking. He considered Anne and Stephen and Rose and Mal, imagining what their situation might be. He thought about the anchorage of the houseboat when he and Jenny had left. He visualized its orientation with regard to the approach of the storm. He decided that someone on the boat would have seen the monster front sweeping across the lake, and they would have steered into the bay of the little island and tied upsomewhere in the lee of the ridge. And if they were even only a little bit lucky, they would have emerged from the fury in good shape.
    That’s what he wanted to believe, decided to believe.
    And if that were true, then they would probably try to get Jenny on her cell phone, and when that didn’t work, they’d radio Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle to find out if he and Jenny had arrived safely to pick up Aaron. When they had their answer, they would begin motoring toward Young’s Bay, keeping an eye out along the way, maybe in conjunction with a search mounted from the Angle itself.
    And if all this were true, then a signal fire would be the best way for him and Jenny to be found. But a signal fire could alert the wrong people. The man in the cigarette boat, if he was responsible for the young woman’s death, or if not him, then whoever it was who’d inflicted the cruelties.
    A gun,
Cork thought.
If only I had a gun.
    Which was a thought of enormous and uncomfortable weight, because Jenny was right: Cork had taken a vow never again to raise a firearm against another human being. In too many ways, his history was written in blood. The blood not only of enemies but more especially of those he loved. He’d lost his wife to a bullet. He’d lost his father that way as well, and also Sam Winter Moon, the man who’d taken the place of his father in so many ways. He’d lost friends and allies. He’d seen the carnage of mindless, brutal killing in the streets of South Side Chicago and in school hallways and in what should have been the heaven of the great north wilderness he called home, violent death that, even when it was perpetrated in the name of things sacred, ended the same pointless way.
    And so, he’d given up his firearms and promised himself that his part in the killing, which would doubtless continue in the world just fine without him, was over.
    How very strange, he thought now, his mood still bleak, that circumstance kept bringing him back to the place where hishand ached for the grip of a gun. The destinies of some men and women, he’d decided long ago, were bound to the sulfur stink of cordite and the iron odor of blood. He’d tried his best not to be one of them. Yet here he was again.
    At the cove, he turned inland and, with the help of moonlight, made his way through the web of branch and timber to the damaged cabin. The door stood open. Inside,