The Marsh King's Daughter(17)

Rambo scents out the window as I pull out of the driveway. It’s 5:23. Forty-three degrees and dropping, which after the Indian summer weather we had yesterday only proves what everybody says: if you don’t like the weather in Michigan, just wait a few minutes. Winds are steady out of the southwest at fifteen miles an hour. There’s a thirty percent chance of rain later this morning, increasing to fifty percent this afternoon, which is the part of the forecast that worries me. Not even the best tracker can read sign after it’s washed away.

I turn on the radio long enough to confirm that the hunt for my father is still going strong, then turn it off. The maples along the highway I pass are halfway to yellow. Here and there a swamp maple blazes bloodred. Overhead the clouds are dark as bruises. Traffic is light because it’s a Tuesday. Also because the roadblock on M-77 at Seney has slowed traffic coming north to Grand Marais to a trickle.

I figure after my father laid down his decoy trail yesterday, he cut a wide circle and doubled back to the river and walked through the night in order to put as much distance between himself and the refuge as possible. He followed the Driggs River north because that’s easier than striking out cross-country, and following it south would have led him deeper into the refuge. Also because wading through the river culvert under M-28 would be a convenient way to cross the highway without being seen. I picture him making his way carefully through the dark, weaving between trees and wading creeks as he avoids the old logging roads that would make travel easier but would leave him vulnerable to the helicopter’s searchlight.

Then as soon as it started to get light, he holed up for the day in someone’s empty cabin. I’ve broken into a cabin more than once myself when I got caught out after the weather turned. As long as you leave a note explaining why you broke in and a few dollars for the food you ate and any damage you caused, nobody cares. My challenge now is to find that cabin. Even if the rain holds off, as soon as it gets dark, my father will be on the move. I can’t follow his trail if I can’t see it, so if I don’t find him before nightfall, by morning he’ll have such a long lead, I never will.

Ultimately, I believe my father is heading for Canada. In theory he could roam the Upper Peninsula wilderness for the rest of his life, constantly on the move, never lighting a fire, moving strictly at night, never making a phone call or spending any money, hunting and fishing and eating and drinking whatever he finds in whatever cabins he breaks into like the North Pond Hermit did in Maine for almost thirty years. But it will be a whole lot easier if he just leaves the country. Obviously he can’t cross at a manned border crossing, but there’s a long stretch of border between Canada and northern Minnesota that’s only lightly monitored. Most of the roads and railroad crossings have buried sensors to let authorities know when someone’s trying to sneak through, but all my father has to do is pick a remote, deeply forested section and walk across. After that, he can keep going as far north as he likes, maybe settle near an isolated native community, take another wife if he’s so inclined, and finish out his days in peace and obscurity. My father can pass as First Nations when he wants to.

Five miles south of our place I turn west onto a sandy two-track that will eventually come out at the Fox River campground. The entire peninsula is crisscrossed with old logging trails like this one. Some are as broad as a two-lane highway. Most are narrow and overgrown. If you know your way around the back roads as well as I do, you can drive from one end of the peninsula to the other without hitting pavement. If my father is heading toward the Fox River, as I suspect, there are three roads he’ll have to cross. Taking into account the time he escaped and how far he could travel before he had to go to ground, this middle road is my best guess. There are a couple of cabins down this road I want to check. No doubt the searchers would be investigating these cabins as well if my father hadn’t led them into the wildlife refuge. I imagine they’ll get around to it eventually. Or maybe not. My mother stayed missing for close to fifteen years.

The irony of my mother’s kidnapping is that it happened in a place where kidnappings never happened. The towns in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula barely qualify for the descriptor. Seney, McMillan, Shingleton, and Dollarville are little more than highway intersections marked by a welcome sign, a church, a gas station, and a bar or two. Seney also has a restaurant with a motel and a laundromat. Seney marks the beginning of the “Seney Stretch” if you’re traveling west on M-28 or the end of it if you’re traveling east. Twenty-five miles of straight-as-an-arrow, flat-as-a-pancake, mind-numbingly boring highway between Seney and Shingleton that crosses the remains of the Great Manistique Swamp. Travelers stop at the towns on either end to top off their gas tanks, or to grab some chips and a Coke to break up the ride, or to use the bathroom one last time before they head out because this is all they’re going to see of civilization for the next half hour. Some say the Seney Stretch is really fifty miles long, but it only feels that way.

Until my mother’s abduction, the children of Luce County weren’t kept under lock and key. Possibly not even after, because old habits die hard, and because no one ever really thinks that bad things are going to happen to them. Especially after they’ve already happened to somebody else. The Newberry News reported every crime, no matter how small. And they were all small: a CD wallet taken from the front seat of an unlocked car, a mailbox vandalized, a bicycle stolen. No one could have dreamed the theft of a child.