第4章 Larkspur

The approach to Larkspur had to be flown from the south, over the gap between it and its nearest neighbor, where a channel of calm water sheltered behind the rock and the spruce grew close to the shore. Nessa made the turn low and slow, reading the water. The storm had not yet reached its peak, and the channel lay glassy between the swells, a rare pocket of quiet. She set the Merganser down there, well inside the lee, and taxied to a rough crib of logs that passed for a dock and killed the engine, and the sudden silence was enormous. The island was exactly as she remembered it: two hundred meters of dark rock rising to a spine of wind-bent spruce, the cabin tucked into the shadow of that spine, invisible from the open water. There was a small boathouse, a fuel drum lashed under a tarp, and a woodpile that had been covered by a previous tenant. "This is it," she said. Isaak climbed out onto the float and stood looking at the island, at the cabin, at the wall of grey water beyond the channel. The wind found him and pushed his wet coat against his ribs. "How long has anyone been here?" "Nobody lives here. The service keeps it for fuel and weather emergencies. I have not been out since the summer before last." She stepped onto the dock and tied off. "It has a stove, a hand pump for the cistern, two bunks, and a radio that I would not trust in a fight. It also has a cellar, which is why Tarn chose it." The cabin was small and cold and smelled of old smoke and cedar. She got the stove lit while he walked the room once, slow and thorough, checking the single window, the door, the cellar hatch, the way a man checks a place he intends to sleep in. When he was satisfied he came and stood by the stove and held his hands over it, and she saw the raw red of his knuckles and the fine torn skin, and understood that he had walked most of the night through a rain storm with his hands open to the cold. "There is a first aid kit in the locker," she said. "Your hands." "It is not worth it." "It is worth it because in two days you may need them to row." She pulled the kit down and put it on the table and did not offer to do it for him, because she had already read enough of him to know that would not be welcome. He sat and cleaned the knuckles himself, methodical, and she turned away and began the work of hiding them both. The routine of hiding was the same as the routine of rescue, she realized as she went about it, and the thought did not comfort her. Both were about controlling what could be seen. She took the fuel drum and moved it into the boathouse so it would not catch the light. She broke down the last of the daylight with a canvas over the window, leaving a slit she could open to watch the channel. She found the old hand-crank radio in its case and set it on the shelf and did not turn it on, because there was nothing yet to say to Tarn and every transmission was a way to be found. She made a list in her head of the surfaces of the island, the sight lines, the places a boat could anchor and watch, and she did not like the number. Isaak had fallen asleep sitting up by the time she turned around, his head tipped back against the wall, the first-aid kit open on the table beside him. She looked at him for a moment in the grey light, a stranger she had been ordered to keep alive, and then she took the spare blanket off the upper bunk and put it over him and went outside to walk the shore. The wind had a smell to it that she did not like, a mineral smell, the smell of the lake turning over. She walked the south shore to the point and stood there with her collar up and watched the channel. Nothing moved but water. On the far island, a single spruce leaned out over the drop, and she remembered it from the summer before last, remembered Vesta pointing it out and saying that a pilot should always know one landmark that never moved. She had been twenty-four then and had not understood why Vesta, who never stayed anywhere, would care about a tree. Now she stood in the cold and understood that Vesta had been teaching her something else entirely: how to find a place you might have to come back to. Her radio, the little handheld in her jacket, crackled once. "Nessa." Vesta's voice, thin over the distance. "Are you there." "Here." "Good. He is with you?" "He is asleep by the stove." A long pause, and when Vesta spoke again there was something underneath the steadiness, something she was working to hold down. "Listen to me. There was a boat at the harbor this morning, a workboat, unfamiliar. Two men asked Hob about the floatplane. They said they were looking for a man who had been lost on the coast road. Hob told them nothing, and called me, and I have moved the Shrike to the south pier where she cannot be seen from the channel." Another pause. "Nessa. Whatever I told you about that island, about it being off the map, the second half of that is true and the first half is not. Somebody sold a list of our old safe places twenty years ago, and I never knew who, and I have spent every year since hoping the list was a lie." "Vesta—" "Keep him hidden," Vesta said. "And keep the plane ready. Do not wait for my permission to run. If you have to go, go." The radio clicked and sighed and went quiet. Nessa stood at the point for a long while after that, watching the channel, and the wind came across the water and laid its cold hand on the back of her neck. Behind her, over the roof of the cabin, a thin grey thread of smoke rose from the stovepipe and bent away north, and she thought of the man asleep inside and of the drive she had not asked him about and of the list of old safe places that had been sold to strangers, and she understood that the island she had chosen to hide him on was already a known place, and that something was coming. The light was going out of the west and the channel had gone the color of slate, and the wind came down off the ridge with the smell of the open lake in it. She had not been out to the island since the summer before last, the summer she had spent learning the eastern approach so she would never again have to come in over the rocks, and standing at the point now she remembered why she had stopped coming. The island was quiet in a way the mainland never was. On the shore, the lake was always talking, always working the pier and the hulls of the moored boats, and here, behind the rock and the spruce, the talking stopped, and what was left was the memory of a man who had once stood at this same point with a fishing rod and a bad joke and had laughed at her for counting the swells. She had counted the swells that night too, and had counted them wrong, and had said go. She went back inside and banked the stove and sat down across from him with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door, and she did not sleep. ---