She had been paddling deeper and deeper into the western reaches of the forest, away from the dramatic, scenic peaks and the resort hotels built below them and, finally, away from even the smallest roads. Now she was at the edge of a five-mile lake, and it looked enormous, with thick forests beyond and jagged mountains as a backdrop. The quiet was overwhelming. In the night the quiet had seemed like a cloak to her, protecting her, but now in the clear, bright late afternoon it seemed like an emptiness waiting for something to fill it. She could hear birds in the forest and a buzzing blackfly that kept making spirals in the air behind her ear. Beyond those constant, unchanging noises there was no sound. When she moved, the crunch of a twig made her spine stiffen.
When she had come up here as a child with her parents, they had stayed on Cranberry Lake in a cabin and fished and gone east to hike up Mount Marcy because that was what tourists were supposed to do. But they had never left the marked trails. In those days the rangers used to tell people the Adirondacks were the oldest mountains on earth. Since then, the scientists had learned that they were young and still growing.
Today the part about growing made them seem alive, capable of at least that much intention and therefore almost sentient, but with a brutal kind of sentience: the blind, brainless reflex of monstrous stomach-turning sea creatures that lived in the dark and rose toward sounds so they could eat. She knew that what she was feeling was a form of agoraphobia. If she didn’t shake it off, she was going to end up cowering somewhere, trembling and unable to take care of herself.
She waited for the blackfly to settle, then slapped at it but missed, and this only seemed to wake others. She pushed her canoe into the water and headed for the middle of the lake. She told herself she was doing it to stay out where the blackflies weren’t swarming, but it was actually to stay in the open, away from the banks.
She camped for the night at the tip of Little Tupper. She forced herself to do what she knew she had to do. She picked out a package of dried food, read on the label that it was designed for a hearty meal, and ate all of it. She walked knee-deep into the icy water to bathe and wash her clothes, then hung them on a low limb to dry. At the end of it, she was exhausted. She made her tarp into a lean-to and fell into a deep sleep beneath it.
She was in dark emptiness for an hour, and then her mind began to work again. In her dream it was still night, but she became aware that there was a splash and then another and then a dripping sound. The splashes were footsteps. She sat up to reach for her rifle, but it wasn’t there. She turned and looked at the lake. A man was coming up out of it, walking toward her, the water dripping off his clothes as he sloshed to shore. He walked up onto the bank and stood across the campfire from her. For a moment she was angry at herself for having built a fire, but then she remembered that she hadn’t. It had just come. Then she recognized the man: He was Harry Kemple. He leaned down and warmed his hands at the fire, and she could see steam rising from the shoulders of his dripping suit.
"Harry!" she said. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to her, so she yelled, "Harry! It’s me!"
Harry looked up at her and then back down at the fire. "What—you think this is some kind of coincidence? Like I’m going to be surprised to see you?"
"I’m sorry," she said.
He held up his hand and nodded wearily, the way he used to. "No harm done." He bent closer to the fire. "Jesus, it’s cold out here."
"I’m sorry he killed you."
He shrugged and pointed to the place where the undertaker had stitched up his throat. The sewing was thick and crude, like the laces of a shoe. "It only took about a minute."
"It was my fault," she said. He seemed to oscillate, as though she was seeing him through water, and then she realized it was her tears.
"Yeah," he said. "But it doesn’t matter."
"What doesn’t matter?"
"None of it. People are born and they die. What any of them do in between doesn’t look like much from a distance. Viruses and rusty nails and people like Martin, they’re working all the time on the same side. Always were, always will be. If they didn’t exist, we’d die anyway." He scratched at his stitches gingerly, then looked back down at the fire and rubbed his hands together.
Jane could sense that some new rule was in place. Harry was waiting for her to ask the right question. "Did Martin kill Jerry Cappadocia, too?"
He turned his head to look to the right and the left, then at her. "Am I talking to myself, or what? I’m trying to tell you nobody gives a shit."
Maybe he needed to tell her something that nobody else could. A dead person wouldn’t come if a living one could give the same answer. "Do you know who hired Martin to do it?"
Harry seemed angry. "Of course I do. You still don’t get it, do you? What’s it going to get you if I tell you the name of one more criminal you never met and will never see?"
"I’ll get to know. That’s what the mind is for. It has to know."
Harry rolled his eyes and sighed. "Jerry was a scumbag. I told you that years ago. Another scumbag just like him paid some money so he could take his place with some girl."
Jane gasped. "Lenore Sanders. The one who hired Martin was Robert Cotton. Of course. The reason nobody figured it out was that it never occurred to them that it wasn’t about money and power. Cotton got the girl and nobody noticed."
"It doesn’t matter," said Harry. "Nothing happened. Hanegoategeh, the left-handed twin, took Jerry off the count and Hawenneyu, the right-handed, replaced him. The Creator creates, the Destroyer destroys, and it goes on like that. It was a harvest. Bobby Cotton is ripening too."
Jane said, "What you’re telling me is that it’s just good and evil in this constant fight and that there’s no outcome."
"Right. It’s a wash. You’re out here to get revenge, punish Martin. I’m telling you not to bother. I stopped caring when he got me. I’m just a dream." He looked up from the fire. "It’s you I feel sorry for."
Jane began to feel afraid. "Why?"
Harry pointed off into the woods toward the next lake. "He’s the real thing. Every time he kills somebody, it makes him stronger. He gets better at it—a little faster, a little less easy to surprise. He watches what we do to get away, how we try to fight back. Once he’s seen anything, he knows how to beat it; and every time he gets somebody, that’s one person who could have stopped him who can’t anymore. I’m telling you, he’s a monster. Killing me fed him."
"How can I turn a monster loose?"
Harry tugged at the laces on his throat. "Nice of you to think of that now, kid."
She stepped forward through the fire, but it didn’t burn her. She put her arms around Harry. He was cold and hard, like a side of beef in a freezer, and she could feel the water squeezing out of his suit and soaking into her clothes.
Harry sighed, then said grudgingly, "He’s going way back into the woods, as far as he can go. Make sure you see him before he sees you. Don’t feed him again."
Then her arms closed, because there was nothing between them. Harry was at the shore already, walking back into the water, up to his knees, his waist, his chest, and then she could just see the top of his head for a moment before it disappeared, leaving a little ripple.
26
She awoke feeling cold and wet, just as the day was beginning. She knew all of it now. Harry had told her the answer to the question that the police and half of the no-neck population of the Midwest had been asking for five years. She already had traced the conspiracy all the way back to its source, but the words had not come to her until she had imagined Harry saying them. A criminal with a name she had never heard until a couple of days ago had wanted Jerry Cappadocia’s girlfriend.