“Everyone else has gone somewhere. It felt pretty lonely in the house. I thought I’d hang out here for a while.” Annie smiled at Waaboo. “I have it on good authority that you’d like to talk with me.”

Waaboo had toweled off, and now he nodded. “Alone,” he said.

“Come on, Prophet,” Jenny said. “I’ll head back and start putting together some lunch for us all.”

Prophet stood and lifted his rifle. “I won’t be far,” he promised Waaboo, then he followed Jenny.

“Come and sit,” Annie said, patting the log beside her. When the boy was seated, she said, “So, what is it you want to talk to me about?”

He said, almost apologetically, “You’re dying.”

She was surprised. “Did Henry tell you that?”

“No. But it’s true.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re scared.” He closed his eyes for a few moments. When he opened them, he said, “And mad. Is it because you’re dying?”

“Because there’s nothing I can do about it. And because it makes me doubt.”

“Doubt what?”

“God. Or rather God’s love.”

“Mishomis says we walk the path we were always supposed to walk.”

“And I want to know why.”

“I see things other people don’t. Mishomis tells me why isn’t important.” He gave a shrug. “But I still wonder.”

“Maybe someday you’ll understand.”

“You, too.”

“Before it’s too late, I hope.”

With his bare toe, he drew a little circle in the dirt under his feet. “If I was dying, know what I’d want?”

“What?”

“To see Disney World.”

She laughed. “Really?”

“What about you?”

She thought that over and finally smiled. “It’s not what I want to see before I die. It’s what I want to see when I die.”

“What is it?”

“A face. Just a face.”

He nodded, as if accepting that vague reply. “I haven’t told Mom.”

“Thanks. I’d like to do that myself. In my own time.”

“Have you ever been to Disney World?”

“I can’t say that I have. But it sounds pretty great. What do you say we head back to Henry’s cabin?”

Waaboo reached out and gently touched her arm. “Her face,” he said. “It will be there.”

It was after lunch when Annie headed back to the double-trunk birch where she’d parked Rainy’s Bronco. She felt much lighter than she had on her arrival. Some of that was probably the powerful spirit of the place itself, of being in the uplifting company of Jenny and Prophet, and certainly Henry Meloux, but it was also her conversation with Waaboo. Although it was brief, it had left her feeling less weighted. If a seven-year-old boy could bear the burden of what the Creator had put on his little shoulders, she could handle her own situation. Anger did no good. The why was unimportant. And she had the promise now that the face she wanted to see as she closed her eyes at the end would be there. Maria would be there.

She reached the double-trunk birch and took the keys to the Bronco from her pocket. Before she could unlock the door, a man appeared, coming around from the far side of the vehicle, startling her.

“Oh!” She took a step back.

He was handsome in a dark way, Native, and carried a rifle. The sense she got from him immediately made her think of Prophet’s comment about what was good attracting that which was not.

“Let’s take a walk,” Liam Boyle said.

CHAPTER 41

The address Annie had given Daniel was for a house in Aitkin, a town with the only stoplight in the entire county. From the street, the place appeared badly neglected—peeling paint, torn screen door, sagging porch, dead lawn. But to be fair, the other houses on the block had not been cared for much better. Still, they seemed to be lived in. The house where Irene Boyle and Mathias Paavola had grown up did not.

Daniel, Monte, and Agent Shirley sat parked in Monte’s Tahoe on the other side of the street and several houses down from the Paavola property.

“Cork told me Mathias Paavola drives a Wrangler,” Daniel said. “I don’t see one.”

“If I were him, I sure as hell wouldn’t advertise my presence by parking it out front,” Agent Shirley said.

“There’s an alley,” Monte said. “Let’s see what the place looks like from behind.”

They cruised slowly up the street, around the corner, and into the alley. It was gravel, lined with tired-looking garages and battered garbage cans and a big tabby cat that eyed them menacingly from the top of an overturned wooden crate. The Paavola house had a garage in worse shape than most of the others. Monte rolled past and stopped a few houses away.

“I’ll check it out,” Daniel said and opened his door.

“Good luck seeing anything through those windows,” Agent Shirley said. “There’s years of dirt on them.”

“If I were Paavola, that’s exactly what I’d want,” Daniel said.

Monte got out from the driver’s side. “While you check the garage, I’ll scope out the house.”

There was no backyard fence, and Monte went straight to the house. Daniel found that Agent Shirley had been right. He couldn’t see a thing through either of the garage windows. He tried lifting the garage door, but it wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t tell if it was stuck from rust or was locked. He was armed, and he took his Glock from its holster and used it to break a pane of glass on one of the windows. In the slender shaft of light that angled through the open square, he saw the wheel well of a vehicle. The tire looked new. He bent and took a better look. In the dim illumination the light gave to the rest of the garage, he saw clearly that the vehicle parked there was a Jeep Wrangler.

Monte came back. “Shades over some windows. They’re old and yellowed. Sheets over others. They look new.”