Northwest Angle Read Online Free PDF

believing had been in vain. From almost the moment she’d vanished, her mother had been dead.
    “Dad,” she said hopelessly, speaking toward the devastation of the lake. “Annie. Stephen.”
    And then she began to cry, deep, racking sobs that went on and on.
    In the end, she had no choice but to pull herself together. She wiped away her tears, forced her legs to lift her upward, beat her brain into thinking clearly. She had no idea how widespread the devastation of the storm might be, but judging from the islands around her, all of which looked like they’d been at the epicenter of a nuclear blast, the area was large. The lake water was full of uprooted trees and shattered trunks and sheared off limbs and strips of bark. A boat trying to get through that mess would have to move at a snail’s pace. It would be a long time before anybody got to her, if anybody ever did.
    “Dad!” she tried again, calling his name a dozen times as she turned in a complete circle. She got nothing in return.
    “You’re alone, kiddo,” she said to herself. “You’ve got only you.”
    She walked to the place where the dinghy lay under a fallen pine. She worked her way through the mesh of branch and needle and groped beneath the crumpled seat in the bow of thewreckage. Her fingers found wet nylon. She gripped the material and pulled it with her as she eased herself free.
    The knapsack was stained with pine resin and pungent with the scent of evergreen. She dug inside and pulled out packages of cheese and crackers and some trail mix and two bottled waters, completely smashed and emptied of their contents. She found her camera intact, then her cell phone, which was also undamaged.
    “Hey, girl, finally a little bit of luck,” she said, as if it was someone else speaking to her.
    She powered up the phone, and the display came on and told her the device was searching. After a minute, it gave up. No signal.
    “Shit,” she said and was tempted to add the phone to all the other crap in the water. Instead, she slid it back into the knapsack. And then some journalistic instinct kicked in and she brought out her digital camera, turned it on, and shot a full panorama of the destruction around her.
    “Great for the documentary when they find your desiccated body,” she said.
    She reviewed the photos she’d just taken and accidentally went one farther back, to an earlier shot. And there was Aaron.
    From the beginning, she’d had a bad feeling about this trip. Her father had proposed it, a rare gathering of family at summer’s end. He’d just finished working a case involving a decades-old serial killing that had ended in the suicide of a wealthy man. She could tell it had affected him deeply, for reasons he wouldn’t go into, but he’d been almost desperate to have the whole family together again. Anne had come home from her mission in El Salvador, Stephen from a summer of cowboying on Hugh Parmer’s ranch in Texas, Mal and Aunt Rose up from Evanston. And from Iowa City, she and Aaron. Except that Aaron couldn’t come rightaway. He was committed to teaching a poetry workshop at a conference in the Black Hills and couldn’t get free until three days into the trip. The plan had been to pick him up at Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle that afternoon.
    She’d been worried about him. They’d been a couple for almost a year and, in June, had moved in together. She didn’t know what to call him exactly. Friend? He was way more than that. Boyfriend? Oh, God, how teenager was that? Lover? Way too explicit. Partner? For the moment, yes, but they hadn’t talked much about what was beyond the moment. Significant other? He was significant, sure, but what a clumsy epithet. So she’d simply refrained from calling him anything except Aaron. This was going to be the first time the family would meet him, and she was concerned. Things between her and Aaron hadn’t been exactly smooth lately.
    She looked across the littered water and