The Marsh King's Daughter, page 2
I peel out of the parking lot and drive south on M-77 as fast as I dare. There aren’t a lot of police cars in the area, but for the officers who patrol this route, aside from ticketing speeders, there isn’t much to do. I can appreciate the irony of my situation. I’m speeding because I’m late. Getting stopped for speeding will make me later still.
Mari works herself into a full-on tantrum as I drive. She kicks her feet, sand flies all over the truck, the sippy cup bounces off the windshield, and snot runs out her nose. Miss Marigold Pelletier is most definitely not a happy camper. At the moment, neither am I.
I tune the radio to the public broadcasting station out of Northern Michigan University in Marquette, hoping for music to distract her—or drown her out. I’m not a fan of classical, but this is the only station that comes in clearly.
Instead, I pick up a news alert: “—escaped prisoner . . . child abductor . . . Marquette . . .”
“Be quiet,” I yell, and turn the volume up.
“Seney National Wildlife Refuge . . . armed and dangerous . . . do not approach.” At first, that’s all I manage to catch.
I need to hear this. The refuge is less than thirty miles from our house. “Mari, stop!”
Mari blinks into silence. The report repeats:
“Once again, state police report that a prisoner serving life without parole for child abduction, rape, and murder has escaped from the maximum security prison in Marquette, Michigan. The prisoner is believed to have killed two guards during a prison transfer and escaped into the Seney National Wildlife Refuge south of M-28. Listeners should consider the prisoner armed and dangerous. Do NOT, repeat, DO NOT approach. If you see anything suspicious, call law enforcement immediately. The prisoner, Jacob Holbrook, was convicted of kidnapping a young girl and keeping her captive for more than fourteen years in a notorious case that received nationwide attention . . .”
My heart stops. I can’t see. Can’t breathe. Can’t hear anything over the blood rushing in my ears. I slow the truck and pull carefully onto the shoulder. My hand shakes as I reach to turn the radio off.
Jacob Holbrook has escaped from prison. The Marsh King. My father.
And I’m the one who put him in prison in the first place.
2
I pull back onto the pavement in a spray of gravel. I doubt anyone is patrolling this section of highway in view of everything that’s happening thirty miles to the south, and even if someone is, getting stopped for speeding is now the least of my concerns. I have to get home, have to have eyes on both of my daughters, have to know that they’re with me and they’re safe. According to the news alert, my father is heading away from my house and into the wildlife refuge. Only I know he’s not. The Jacob Holbrook I know would never be that obvious. I’ll bet any amount of money that after a couple of miles, the searchers are going to lose his trail, if they haven’t already. My father can pass through the marsh like a spirit walker. He wouldn’t lay down a trail for searchers to follow unless he wanted them to follow it. If my father wants the people who are looking for him to think he’s in the wildlife refuge, then they’re not going to find him in the marsh.
I clench the wheel. I picture my father lurking in the trees as Iris gets off the bus and starts up our driveway, and I press down harder on the pedal. I see him jumping out and grabbing her the moment the driver pulls away, the way he used to leap out of the bushes when I came out of the outhouse, to frighten me. My fear for Iris’s safety isn’t logical. According to the news alert, my father escaped between four and four fifteen, and it’s now four forty-five; there’s no way he could travel thirty miles on foot in half an hour. But that doesn’t make my fear any less real.
My father and I haven’t spoken in fifteen years. Odds are he doesn’t know I changed my last name when I turned eighteen because I’d had all I could stand of being known only for the circumstances in which I grew up. Or that when his parents passed away eight years ago, they willed this property to me. Or that I used the bulk of the inheritance to have the house where he grew up razed and brought in the double-wide. Or that I’m living here now with my husband and two young daughters. My father’s granddaughters.
But he might. After today, anything is possible. Because today my father escaped from prison.
—
I’M ONE MINUTE LATE. Definitely not more than two. I’m trapped behind Iris’s school bus with the still-shrieking Mari. Mari has worked herself into such a state, I doubt she remembers what set her off. I can’t pull around the bus and into our driveway because the stop sign is extended and the red lights are flashing. Never mind that mine is the only other vehicle on the highway and that’s my daughter the driver is delivering. As if I might accidentally run over my own child.
Iris climbs off the bus. I can see by the dejected way she trudges up our empty driveway that she thinks I’ve forgotten to get home in time for her again. “Look, Mari.” I point. “There’s our house. There’s Sissy. Shh. We’re almost there.”
Mari follows my finger, and when she sees her sister, just like that, she shuts up. She hiccups. Smiles. “Iris!” Not “I-I” or “I-sis” or “Sissy” or even “I-wis,” but “Iris,” plain as day. Go figure.
At last the driver decides that Iris is far enough from the highway to turn off the caution lights and the door hisses shut. The second the bus starts moving, I swing around and pull into our driveway. Iris’s shoulders straighten. She waves, beams. Mommy is home and her world is back on its axis. I wish I could say the same for mine.
I shut off the engine and go around to the passenger side to strap Mari into her sandals. As soon as her feet touch down, she takes off across the front yard.
“Mommy!” Iris runs up and wraps her arms around my legs. “I thought you were gone.” She says this not as an accusation but as a statement of fact. This is not the first time I’ve let my daughter down. I wish I could promise it will be the last.
“It’s okay.” I squeeze her shoulder and pat the top of her head. Stephen is always telling me I should hug our daughters more, but physical contact is difficult for me. The psychiatrist the court assigned to me after my mother and I were recovered said I had trust issues and made me do trust exercises, like closing my eyes and crossing my arms over my chest and falling backward with nothing to catch me but her promise. When I resisted, she said I was being belligerent. But I didn’t have trust issues. I just thought her exercises were stupid.
Iris releases me and runs after her sister into the house. The house isn’t locked. It never is. The downstaters who own the big summer homes on the bluff overlooking the bay keep their places locked and shuttered, but the rest of us never bother. If a thief had a choice between an empty, isolated mansion filled with expensive electronics and a double-wide that sits within sight of the highway, we all know which one he’d pick.
But now I lock the door to the house and head for the side yard to make sure Rambo has food and water. Rambo runs along the line we strung for him between two jack pines and wags his tail when he sees me. He doesn’t bark because I taught him not to. Rambo is a Plott hound, a brindled black and tan with floppy ears and a tail like a whip. I used to bring Rambo bear hunting with me and a couple other hunters and their dogs every fall, but I had to retire him two winters ago after a bear wandered into our backyard and he decided to take it on alone. A forty-five-pound dog and a five-hundred-pound black bear aren’t an even match, no matter what the dog thinks. Most people don’t notice at first that Rambo has only three legs, but with a twenty-five percent handicap, I’m not about to put him back in the field. After he started running deer last winter out of boredom, we had to start keeping him tied. Around here, a dog with a reputation for harassing deer can be shot on sight.
“Do we have any cookies?” Iris calls from the kitchen. She’s waiting patiently at the table with her back straight and her hands folded while her sister scavenges crumbs on the floor. Iris’s teacher must love her, but wait till she meets Mari. Not for the first time, I wonder how two such different people can come from the same set of parents. If Mari is fire, Iris is water. A follower and not a leader; a quiet, overly sensitive child who prefers reading to running and loves her imaginary friends as much as I once did mine, and takes the slightest rebuke far too much to heart. I hate that I caused her that moment of panic. Iris the Largehearted has already forgiven and forgotten, but I haven’t. I never forget.
I go into the pantry and take a bag of cookies from the top shelf. No doubt my little Viking raider will one day attempt the climb, but Iris the Obedient would never think to. I put four cookies on a plate and pour two glasses of milk and head for the bathroom. Turn on the tap and splash a handful of water on my face. Seeing my expression in the mirror, I realize I’ve got to hold it together. As soon as Stephen gets home, I’ll confess everything. Meanwhile, I can’t let my girls see that anything is wrong.
After they finish their milk and cookies I send them to their room so I can follow the news without their listening in. Mari is too young to understand the import of terms like “prison escape” or “manhunt” or “armed and dangerous,” but Iris might.
CNN is showing a long shot of a helicopter skimming the trees. We’re so close to the search area, I could practically go outside and stand on our front porch and see the same helicopter. A warning from the state police scrolling across the bottom of the screen urges everyone to stay inside. Pictures of the murdered guards, pictures of the empty prison van, interviews with the grieving families. A recent photograph of my father. Prison life has not been kind. Photos of my mother as a girl and as a hollow-cheeked woman. Pictures of our cabin. Pictures of twelve-year-old me. No mention of Helena Pelletier yet, but give it time.
Iris and Mari come pattering down the hallway. I mute the set.
“We want to play outside,” Iris says.
“’Side,” Mari echoes. “Out.”
I consider. There’s no logical reason to make the girls stay inside. Their play yard is surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence, and I can see the entire area from the kitchen window. Stephen had the fence installed after the bear incident. “Girls in, animals out,” he said with satisfaction when the contractors finished, dusting his hands on the seat of his pants as if he’d set the posts himself. As if keeping your children safe was that simple.
“Okay,” I say. “But just for a few minutes.”
I open the back door and turn them loose, then take a box of mac and cheese from the cupboard and pull a head of lettuce and a cucumber from the fridge. Stephen texted an hour ago to say he’s running late and he’ll grab a bite to eat on the road, so it’s boxed macaroni and cheese for the girls and a salad for me. I really don’t like to cook. People might think that’s strange considering the way I make my living, but a person has to work with what they have. Blueberries and strawberries grew on our ridge. I learned how to make jelly and jam. End of story. There aren’t a lot of jobs that list ice fishing or beaver skinning as qualifications. I’d go so far as to say I hate to cook, but I can still hear my father’s gentle scolding: “Hate is a strong word, Helena.”
I dump the box of noodles into the pot of salted water boiling on the stove and move to the window to check on the girls. The quantity of Barbies and My Little Ponies and Disney princesses littering the play yard makes me ill. How will Iris and Mari develop qualities like patience and self-control if Stephen gives them everything they want? When I was a child, I didn’t have so much as a ball. I made my own toys. Pulling apart horsetails and fitting the sections together again was every bit as educational as those toys where babies are supposed to match shapes to holes. And after a meal of young cattail spikes, we were left with a pile of what my mother always said looked like plastic knitting needles on your plate, but to me, they looked like swords. I’d stick them in the sand outside our back door like the palisades of a fort, where my pinecone warriors had many epic battles.
Before I dropped off the supermarket tabloid grid, people used to ask me what was the most incredible/amazing/unexpected thing I discovered after I joined civilization. As if their world was so much better than mine. Or that it was indeed civilized. I could easily make a case against the legitimate use of that word to describe the world I discovered at the age of twelve: war, pollution, greed, crime, starving children, racial hatred, ethnic violence—and that’s just for starters. Is it the Internet? (Incomprehensible.) Fast food? (A taste easily acquired.) Airplanes? (Please—my knowledge of technology was solid through the 1950s, and do people really think airplanes never flew over our cabin? Or that we thought they were some kind of giant silver bird when they did?) Space travel? (I’ll admit I’m still having trouble with that one. The idea that twelve men have walked on the moon is inconceivable to me, even though I’ve seen the footage.)
I always wanted to turn the question around. Can you tell the difference between a grass and a rush and a sedge? Do you know which wild plants are safe to eat and how to fix them? Can you hit a deer in that patch of brown hide low behind its shoulder so it drops where it stands and you don’t have to spend the rest of the day tracking it? Can you set a snare for a rabbit? Can you skin and clean the rabbit after you catch it? Can you roast it over an open fire so the meat is done in the middle while the outside is deliciously black and crusty? For that matter, can you build a fire without matches in the first place?
But I’m a quick study. It didn’t take me long to figure out that, to most people, my skill set was seriously undervalued. And in all honesty, their world offered some pretty amazing technological marvels. Indoor plumbing ranks high on the list. Even now when I wash dishes or run a bath for the girls, I like to hold my hands under the stream, though I’m careful to do it only when Stephen isn’t around. There aren’t many men who’d be willing to put up with my staying alone overnight in the bush on foraging expeditions, or going bear hunting, or eating cattails. I don’t want to push it.
Here’s the true answer: the most amazing discovery I made after my mother and I were recovered is electricity. It’s hard to see now how we managed all those years without it. I look at people blithely charging their tablets and cell phones and toasting bread and microwaving popcorn and watching television and reading e-books late into the night and a part of me still marvels. No one who’s grown up with electricity gives a thought to how they’d get along without it except on the rare occasion when a storm knocks out the power and sends them scrambling for flashlights and candles.
Imagine never having power. No small appliances. No refrigerator. No washer or dryer. No power tools. We got up when it got light and went to bed when it got dark. Sixteen-hour days in the summer, eight-hour days in the winter. With electricity, we could have listened to music, cooled ourselves with fans, heated the coldest corners of the rooms. Pumped water from the marsh. I could easily live without television and computers. I’d even give up my cell phone. But if there’s one thing I’d miss if I had to do without it now, it’s electricity, hands down.
A shriek comes from the play yard. I crane my neck. I can’t always tell from the pitch of my daughters’ screams if their emergencies are trivial or real. A genuine emergency would involve buckets of blood pouring from one or both girls, or a black bear nosing around outside the fence. Trivial would be Iris waving her hands and screaming like she’s eaten rat poison while Mari claps her hands and laughs. “Bee! Bee!” Another word she has no trouble saying.
I know. It’s hard to believe that a woman who was raised under what were arguably the ultimate wilderness survival conditions has produced a daughter who is afraid of bugs, but there it is. I’ve given up bringing Iris with me in the field. All she does is complain about the dirt and the smells. I’m doing better so far with Mari. A parent isn’t supposed to favor one child over the other, but sometimes it’s hard not to.
I stand at the window until the bee wisely retreats to calmer airspace and the girls settle down. I imagine their grandfather watching from across the yard behind the tree line. One girl fair, the other girl dark. I know which one he’d choose.
I open the window and call the girls inside.
3
I give Mari and Iris their baths as soon as the dishes are cleared and put them to bed over their objections. We all know it’s too early. No doubt they’ll giggle and talk for hours before they fall asleep, but as long as they stay in their beds and out of the living room, I don’t care.
I make it back to the living room in time to catch the six o’clock news. Two hours since my father escaped, and no reported sightings as yet, which really doesn’t surprise me. I still don’t think he’s anywhere near the wildlife refuge. The same terrain that makes the refuge difficult to search makes it a hard place to escape into. That said, my father never does anything without a purpose. There’s a reason he escaped where he did. I just have to figure out what it is.
Before I had my grandparents’ house razed, I used to wander the rooms looking for insight into my father. I wanted to know how a person goes from child to child molester. The trial transcripts offer a few details: My grandfather Holbrook was a full-blooded Ojibwa who was given his non-Native name when he was sent away as a child to Indian boarding school. My grandmother’s people were Finns who lived in the northwestern part of the U.P. and worked in the copper mines. My grandparents met and married when they were in their late thirties, and my father was born five years later. The defense painted my father’s parents as perfectionists who were too old and rigid to adapt to the needs of their rambunctious little boy and punished him for the least infraction. I found a cedar spanking stick in the woodshed with the handle end worn smooth, so I know this part is true. In a cubby beneath a loose board in his bedroom closet I found a shoe box with a pair of handcuffs, a nest of blonde hairs I assumed were from his mother’s hairbrush with a tube of lipstick and a pearl earring tucked inside like bird’s eggs, and a pair of white cotton underpants I assumed were also hers. I can imagine what the prosecution would have done with that.
