He had no idea how far ahead Jo had been able to run, but he wanted to give her the best chance he could to make it safely away. He crawled from the safety of the thicket. When the beam of the flashlight was forty or fifty yards beyond him, he let out a cry. He’d meant it to be a cry of challenge, but the stabbing in his ribs turned it to a howl of pain. Still, it did the trick. Parrant turned for him and Cork ran for his life.
He skirted the cabin, not even trying to make it inside to find the rifle. It would be too great a gamble fumbling around, hoping to find the Winchester before Parrant reached him. He made instead for the vast, unbroken wilderness of the Superior National Forest a mile northeast.
He ran numbly through drifts above his knees. Awkwardly he vaulted a fallen log and came down in a snag of branches on the other side. His foot became entangled. While he worked himself free, he checked the woods behind him. Nothing. No movement. Only sound. Above him the wind raced through the tops of the pines, its passage marked by the scrape and groan of branches. From farther east came a deeper sound, a throaty grumble that Cork recognized as the tumble of fast water in a stream. Half Mile Spring. The flow gushed out of high ground and rushed down a deep ravine to the lake. As its name implied, the spring didn’t have a long run from its source to its ending, and even in the coldest winter the water never froze.
He became aware of something else, the smell of wood smoke in the wind. Meloux’s cabin! The place wasn’t far beyond the spring. Cork tried to think if Meloux owned a firearm. The old man had been a hunter once, a great one it was said, but did he own a working firearm?
Cork knew he should be moving again. Two things held him there at the log. He wanted to be certain Parrant was still following him. If Parrant was after him, it meant that Jo had a good chance of getting away. The other thing was the simple fact that he couldn’t move. The adrenaline had washed out of him, and what had seeped in to take its place was searing pain. The beating his ribs had sustained was too much. He couldn’t straighten up, could barely take a breath. Even the slightest movement drove a spike of pain right through his chest.
He’d left his gloves on Molly’s kitchen table. His hands, vulnerable to the bitter, single-digit temperature of the night, ached from the cold. He tried to blow on them for warmth, but the stabbing of his ribs gave him almost no breath for it.
The flashlight beam shot like an arrow through the trees. Cork tried to rise but grabbed at his ribs and doubled over with a moan. The flashlight swung his way. He crouched behind the log as the light played past him. He thought about the ravine at his back. Even if he could escape Parrant somehow, the deep, rugged walls of the ravine and the rush of Half Mile Spring would stop him. His best hope would be to turn to the lake, cut across the ice, and make for Meloux’s cabin. But first he would have to elude Parrant, a possibility that became less likely with each step Parrant took.
The. 38 fired unexpectedly. Cork jerked although nothing hit near him. Parrant shot another round. Cork risked a glance over the log. The light swung back and forth, scanning the woods to the left. What had he fired at? Jo? Christ, no! Cork braced himself to rise, to call out, to draw Parrant’s fire, but a hand on his shoulder restrained him.
Meloux crouched beside him. He beckoned to Cork and began to crawl on all fours toward the ravine. Cork followed his example, snow up to his chin. After a short distance, the old man rose and loped ahead, graceful despite his age. Cork did the same, although much less gracefully and a good deal slower.
He glanced back once. The beam of the flashlight had vanished.
Jo cursed the old man. Cursed him because he’d made her afraid.
In Molly Nurmi’s kitchen, she had been angry. She’d been trapped in something she didn’t see any way out of and she’d been blind with rage. Rage at Sandy for what he was, what he’d been able to hide from her so well, and rage at herself for her stupidity and blindness. The sanctuary the old man offered her had changed things. She wasn’t backed into a corner anymore. She had hope. But something unexpected had accompanied the hope. Fear. Fear so overpowering it made her tremble violently as if she were bitterly cold. She’d never been so afraid. She knew what it was now to be paralyzed by cowardice, because she didn’t think she could move.
She’d done as Meloux had suggested. She’d thought about the children. What would happen if both Cork and she were killed? She tried to remember exactly the language of their will. She wanted Rose to be the children’s guardian. She’d made that clear. Of course, it didn’t necessarily mean the court had to comply, but there was no one to contest that request. No close relatives left alive. Jo realized more clearly than she ever had how alone they all were in the world. God, they should have held together. They should have found a way.
She looked at herself, cowering in the dark little hollow, and she felt full of disgust. Cork’s cry had saved her from being discovered by Sandy. And the old man had put himself in danger, too, even though this trouble had nothing to do with him.
But here I am, she thought coldly, pulling herself together around a small fire of anger and self-loathing. Hiding like a damn rabbit.
The next shots, two of them, came from some distance away, beyond the cabin it seemed. If she were ever going to move, if she were ever going to do anything, now was the time.
She shoved aside the bough and crawled out. At her back, miles down the lake, was the safety of Aurora. She could make it. Keeping to the trees, moving carefully, she could make it. That would leave Cork and the old man to deal with Sandy alone. If Cork and the old man were still alive. If they weren’t, she was all that remained of the complications for Sandy to clear up. And he would do his best to kill her. When he wanted something, he always did his best.
She looked south toward Aurora, looked with an ache of longing toward where her children were safe with Rose. Then she turned back toward the cabin and she began to run.
She paused at the edge of the clearing, studying the dark cabin. The last shots had come from far enough away that she didn’t believe Sandy could have returned already, but she waited, watching carefully. Moonlight and the northern lights made the clearing and the cabin easy to see. The wind that had risen lifted snow off the pine trees and cabin roof, and swirls of white danced ghostlike before her. Nothing human moved, and Jo finally made a rush at the door, quietly opened it, and slipped inside. In the moonlit kitchen, she knelt and searched the floor for the rifle Cork had dropped. She found it kicked against a baseboard, and she took it in her hands.
From the window above the kitchen sink, she studied the clearing and the lane that ran between the small cabins all the way down to the lake. All around her the big cabin groaned in the wind. Sprays of loose snow gusted across the clearing. Her legs quaked and her whole body shivered with terrible anticipation. She thought about shooting Sandy Parrant. Less than fifteen minutes before, she would have done it without a second thought. Now she stood wondering. Could she pull the trigger if she had to? Could she really kill him? It might be a moot point anyway since she wasn’t sure she could hold the rifle steady enough to shoot ducks in a barrel. Even so, she understood the wisdom of old Henry Meloux. If she’d charged out of her little sanctuary full of blind rage, the only thing she would have done was get herself killed. Now at least she had a chance.
A figure emerged from the trees, loping into the clearing. She raised the rifle and sighted through the windowpane. She had no idea if she could hit a moving target, and she wasn’t sure who the target was. Her hands ached from their desperate grip on the rifle. She shook violently as if she were freezing cold. The figure turned down the lane and headed for the lake. Only then did Jo see clearly that it was Sandy, and then it was too late. He was too far away. She watched him trot past the old cabins and vanish behind the sauna. Jo felt a rush of relief that he hadn’t come her way, that she hadn’t had to shoot.