“Saturday, the fifteenth of October. Wendell still hasn’t come.”
She sat in the empty cabin a moment, aware of the silence of the afternoon, terribly aware of her aloneness in the great wilderness.
“He said he would be here and he’s the only man who’s ever kept his promises to me,” she said into the recorder. “Something’s wrong, I know it. Something’s happened to him.”
The red light blinked off. But she left the recorder on, not knowing if it captured at all her final confession: “Jesus Christ, I’m scared.”
3
Cork was breathing hard and feeling great. He’d been running for an hour and he was nearing home. Each stride landed on a mat of fallen leaves and each breath filled him with the dusty smell of a long, dry autumn. He kept to a gravel road that paralleled the Burlington Northern tracks. The tracks ran through the town of Aurora, Minnesota, and in doing so, shadowed Iron Lake. In the late afternoon of that mid-October day, the lake was dead calm, a perfect mirror of a perfect sky, blue and piercing. The trees along the shoreline were ablaze, bursts of orange and russet that exploded again on the still surface of the water. In boats here and there, solitary fishermen cast their lines, shattering the mirror in brief silver splashes.
Cork cleared a small stand of gold-leafed birch and aspen that surrounded the ruins of an old foundry, and Sam’s Place came into view.