Northwest Angle Read Free Page B

Woods of Minnesota. Rose had fallen in love with him; terrible events had followed, events not his doing or hers, nor was their love the cause, but in the end, Mal had chosen to leave the priesthood. He hadn’t turned his back on the Church. He’d simply opened his heart to Rose. Something she thanked God for every day.
    Mal kissed her shoulder. “They’ll be coming back soon.”
    “They’re such good kids,” she said.
    “The best.”
    “They’re grown now.”
    “Not quite, but growing.”
    “I remember when they were small. Yesterday, it seems.”
    “Nature of the beast. We all grow up.” He spoke softly into her ear. “Do you miss them being small and needing you? Are you thinking we should try again ourselves?”
    She smiled. “We just did.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    She knew. The thermometers. The graphs. And the specialists.
    “I’m forty-four years old,” she said. “I think at this point it’s a miracle I’m willing to leave in God’s hands. They’ll be coming back soon. We should get up.”
    She moved to rise, but Mal held her down for a moment, gently.
    “I love you, Rose,” he said. “I’ll give you anything in the world that I can.”
    He looked so deeply, so seriously into her eyes that her heart melted all over again. “You’ve already given me the best thing, sweetheart.” And she kissed him a very long time to let him know how much she appreciated the gift that was his heart.
    She dressed and stepped out onto the platform of the bow, looking north across the little bay to the tip of the island where Anne and Stephen had swum to search for blueberries. She didn’t see them.
Still hunting,
she thought. Her husband came to her side, and they stood together, and then she turned and looked to the southwest.
    She gave a little cry and said breathlessly, “Oh, Mal.”
    He looked there, too, and uttered in disbelieving horror, “Sweet Jesus.”
    The formation stretched from horizon to horizon, a mountain of dark cloud. The leading edge was rounded, like a bow drawn taut. Or, Cork thought later in his recollections, like a great plateau in the sky, shaped by forces so enormous he couldn’t even begin to imagine the scope of their power. The monster rose from the earth itself, straight up tens of thousands of feet in a sheer, curving wall the color of sooted stone. Behind it, there was no sky, only that great unstoppable body of storm. Lightning rippled along the top of the formation and struck deep inside in angry flashes that made the cloud, in moments of brilliance, seem almost translucent. The great plateau of the storm swept toward them with unbelievable speed. Before it, the lake was a swell of turbulent water. Cork understood that in only a few minutes all hell would hit them, hit them there in the open in their flimsy dinghy.
    He swung the tiller, and the boat dug a deep, curling trough in the green water. Jenny gripped the bow and bent low as if to make herself more aerodynamic, although it could have been that she was simply cowering in the shadow of what was about to strike. Cork shot back toward the narrow channel where, only a minute before, they’d emerged from the gathering of islands. The outer islands were small and provided little protection. He hoped there was enough time to get well inside the archipelago. Full throttle, he cut along channels where the possibility of submerged rocks had, earlier, made him proceed so carefully. Desperately, he scanned the shorelines ahead, searching for some inlet that might offer the hope of shelter.
    The beast struck before he could make them safe.
    *   *   *
     
    They were in one of the wider channels. Jenny was looking frantically forward. Ahead and to the left, she saw a small landing between two outthrusts of stone. Before she could turn to tell her father, the wind hit her as if someone had swung a telephone pole. She flew forward and smacked her head against the prow. She was stunned but still fully aware of the