Purgatory Ridge

  He was jumpy, he knew that. He glanced at Earl and saw that the BCA agent was eyeing him closely, probably guessing nervousness. Cork nodded toward the room, and Earl, after a moment, swung his eyes to his duty.

  There were sheriff’s deputies at every door. Cork told himself someone would have to be crazy to try something there. But whoever it was who’d tried to kill Karl Lindstrom the night before wasn’t exactly what you would call sane.

  23

  JO LEFT THE HOUSE SHORTLY BEFORE EIGHT P.M. Stevie was beside her in the front seat, playing with a Lego spaceship he’d built. She’d brought him because at the house on Gooseberry Lane there was no one to stay with him. Rose had gone to St. Agnes to help set up for a fellowship breakfast the next day. Annie had gone to the movies with her softball friends. And Jenny was on a date with Sean.

  Grace Cove was ten miles from Aurora, around the south end of Iron Lake, up the eastern shoreline, a few miles below the Iron Lake Reservation. When Karl Lindstrom built the home on the isolated cove, he’d paved smooth the winding access road that had always been nothing but gravel and dirt. The drive threaded through big red pines and black spruce and branched just once—left, to a rutted gravel road that led to the only other cabin on the cove, a place owned by John LePere, a man of mixed blood whom Jo used to see occasionally at the county courthouse pleading guilty to drunk and disorderly. He never had an attorney and he never pleaded anything but guilty. She hadn’t seen him there for a while. Had he sobered up? she wondered. She recalled that he was a quiet man, respectful in court. Strong and stocky, he reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of the early voyageurs, the hearty French Canadian fur trappers with their huge canoes. There was something else about him she thought she should remember, but she couldn’t quite get hold of it before she saw the big log house that Lindstrom built looming out of the twilight between the pines. Grace Cove lay behind it, a sweep of dark silver in the waning light.

  Grace came out to meet her. She wore dungarees, a yellow T-shirt, and sandals. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked relaxed. Also relieved, Jo thought. They embraced. Two friends. Or almost friends.

  “Grace, this is my son Stephen. Stevie, this is Ms. Fitzgerald.”

  “How do you do, Stevie?”

  “Okay,” he replied and limply took her offered hand.

  “My son Scott is upstairs in his room. He’s playing video games. Do you like video games?”

  “We have a Nintendo,” Stevie said.

  “I think you’ll both do fine. Why don’t you come on in?”

  Like Stevie, Grace Fitzgerald’s son was small for his age. The part of him most like his mother was the color of his hair. Other blood was strong in him, especially visible in his eyes, which were green as lily pads.

  “What do you want to play?” Scott asked politely, although he was clearly in the middle of a game.

  “I’ll just watch,” Stevie said. He stood a moment, then sat down on the floor beside the other boy. The mothers made their exit.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Grace asked. “I made sun tea this afternoon.”

  “I’d like that, thanks.”

  Downstairs, Grace went to the kitchen. Jo made herself at home in the living room, an expansive room dominated by a great fieldstone fireplace. The floor was dark polished oak. The walls were dark oak paneling. Dark beams ran across the ceiling and reminded Jo of the veins on a powerful animal. It was not, she thought, the home a woman would have designed for herself. She wondered if perhaps it had been created by Karl Lindstrom to pay homage to his family’s source of wealth—timber. The heavy wood feel of it was lightened somewhat by huge windows that let in air and sunlight, and by light-colored area rugs laid on the floor like sun-struck clouds against a darker sky. To Jo, who was used to the chaotic comings and goings of the O’Connor household, the big place on Grace Cove felt heavy and quiet and too far removed. But maybe for a poet and novelist it was the perfect place.

  Grace brought in the tea and a plate of lemon bars. “I’ll offer the boys something in a while,” she said. She sat on the sofa with Jo. “I have to tell you, until I met you I was afraid everyone in Aurora talked in monosyllables.”

  Jo laughed. “It’s because you’re a celebrity, a writer with a capital W. They’re a bit afraid of you.”

  “If you prick me, I bleed.”

  Grace sipped her tea, then was quiet. The silence began to feel weighty and awkward to Jo, but because she’d come to listen, she waited.

  “Thanks for coming out,” Grace finally said. “I know it’s pretty far.”

  “Not so far for these parts. And it sounded important.”

  “It is. To me.” She looked at Jo, and seemed to decide it was time to take the plunge. “I’m leaving Aurora.”

  “So soon? You haven’t really given it a chance.”

  “It’s a lovely place, I’m sure. But it’s not really the place I’m leaving. It’s Karl.”

  Jo was caught by surprise. Although she hadn’t known what to expect when Grace asked to speak to her, she hadn’t considered it would be this. The sun had dropped behind the pines and spruce that curtained Grace Cove. The room seemed to have filled with a melancholy light. Grace leaned forward and set her glass on the coffee table.

  “What do you think of my husband?”

  Jo set her own tea glass on a coaster made of a varnished slice of some sapling, the few rings that marked its brief life hardened into a lovely, useless pattern. “I’ve dealt with Karl only professionally.”

  “You sidestepped my question, counselor.”

  “Sorry. I’ve found him in all our dealings to be smart, prepared, and—except for a brief period after the bombing at the mill—quite civil, despite our differences.”

  “Bright. Prepared. Civil. Not warm, personable, funny?”

  “Grace, I haven’t dealt with him in any but a professional way.”

  “Are there other people you deal with on a professional basis to whom you would ascribe the traits warm, personable, funny?”

  “Of course.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “You can’t. You haven’t even presented it. Look, why don’t you just tell me about it. All about it.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m here to listen.”

  Grace looked around. “A little dark in here, don’t you think?” She stood and turned on a lamp, crossed the polished floor to another lamp, and turned that on as well. She paused, staring out the window toward the dark wall of pines at the edge of her lawn. “It’s lonely out here. My family house is near Chicago, right on Lake Michigan in a row of great houses. Karl grew up in one just down the shoreline. The Lindstroms called it Valhalla.”

  “You’ve known him for a long time, then.”

  “All my life. Our families belonged to the same clubs. Karl and I were always paired for social functions. The expectation, at least on our parents’ part, was that we’d get married someday. Karl always thought so, too.”

  “But not you?”

  She shook her head, walked to the coffee table, took up her tea, idly sipped.

  “Karl had a tough childhood. His father had his mother committed when Karl was seven years old, and not long after that he divorced her. His father married four more times, all women of looks and little substance. He paid no attention to his son. Poor Karl practically lived at my house. My parents, at least, treated him kindly. I always knew Karl felt a way about me that I didn’t about him, but I was able to maneuver around that. Our senior year in high school, he proposed to me. I turned him down, of course. He made threats.”

  “What kind of threats?” Jo asked.

  “Oh, nothing dangerous. The ‘I’ll join the foreign legion and you’ll be sorry’ kind of thing. Well, he did. Or his version of the foreign legion. He applied to the naval academy and was accepted. He went off to Annapolis, and I went to Stanford. We saw one another occasionally when we were home for the holidays. I have to ad
mit, Karl in his uniform was quite impressive. Then the summer between my junior and senior year, my father hired a young man on the crew of his yacht.”

  “You fell in love, your father objected, you married anyway, and the young man proved in the end to be more than worthy. Superior Blue.”

  “What I didn’t put in the book was how Karl came back into my life.”

  They both turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairway. The boys came down.

  “Mom, can we have something to snack on?” Scott asked.

  “Sure. Okay with you if I give them some cookies?” Grace asked Jo.

  “Fine. But go easy, Stevie.”

  “In the kitchen, Scott. You know where.”

  The boys went together. Jo watched them, smiling.

  “Scott’s good with him. Stevie’s usually pretty shy.”

  “Scott’s just happy to have another nonadult around. Or nonmom.” She looked down at the tea glass in her hand. “Where was I?”

  “Karl coming back into your life.”

  Grace nodded. “In some ways, the navy was the best thing that could have happened to him. Growing up, he had a father he could never please, whose love he could never fully win. I always felt sorry for him. He was such a lonely boy. The navy did something, toughened him, gave him, I believe, some concrete measure of himself, an acknowledgment of his achievements, things his father never did. There was something very attractive about him then. He had a powerful feel to him. He could walk into a room and take charge. It was as if he’d grown into the man he was meant to become. Very handsome, indeed.”

  “You were married then. To the poor but worthy man.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Jo. I didn’t drool over Karl. I was happy for him. He visited Edward and me whenever he was in town. The two of them got to be good friends. They both shared a love of the water, sailed a lot together.

  “Karl left the navy to take over the Lindstrom business after his father died. Everything had gone to hell under his father’s haphazard practices. He was working himself to death. That’s when Edward convinced him to take a break, a two-week voyage around the Great Lakes, to relax. Unfortunately, at the last minute, there was a problem at one of the mills and Karl had to back out. Edward went anyway, alone, and disappeared in the middle of Lake Superior.” She stopped for a moment, and Jo could see that time hadn’t yet healed the wound. “Even though Karl was overwhelmed with his own problems, he dropped everything and was there for me. I was a mess. He was my spokesman to the press, my guide, my shrink, my business executive. He did what needed doing, what I couldn’t bring myself to do. For almost three years.”

  “And then you married.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d fallen in love with him?”

  “No. Not like with Edward. I’d come to rely on Karl. And I thought Scott needed a father. It seemed the natural progression of things.”

  “And now?”

  “Karl has tried. It’s not his fault. It’s just that…” She paused, reached again for her tea, but missed and nearly knocked the glass over.

  “Just what?” Jo asked after things were settled.

  “At the very heart of him, he’s still a Lindstrom. He snaps at Scott. He makes decisions without discussing things with me and then he brooks no argument. Moving up here, for example. It’s lovely country, Jo. I won’t deny that. But I don’t belong here. And Scott desperately needs other children around. I know Karl thought it would be good to get away from where so many memories haunted us both, but—”

  “You let him build a home like this without really wanting it?” Jo said, interrupting.

  “I have homes in New York City and Malibu, too. I can easily afford a home like this.” She put a hand on Jo’s knee. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that money wasn’t the issue.”

  “I understand.”

  “Edward and I, we shared everything. Our thoughts. Our fears. Our hopes. I knew his soul. I knew absolutely that he loved me. This honker, for example.” She squeezed the end of her nose as if it were a bicycle horn. “He loved my nose. Karl asked me a few weeks ago why I’d never considered having something done to it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Karl shares so little of himself. A Lindstrom trait. When he does, it’s not attractive. I’ve begun to feel as if I’m living with a stranger, although I’ve known him all my life. With all the problems over the logging issue, he’s hardly ever here. When he is, he’s still not really here.” She turned away from Jo, moved to the window again, clasped her hands behind her. “So I’m leaving him. I’m going to ask for a divorce.”

  Jo put her glass down. “Are you telling me this because I’m a friend, or because I’m an attorney?”

  “You do family law.”

  “Up here, I do everything. But you have attorneys, I imagine. Good, expensive attorneys.”

  “I don’t want you to handle the divorce, Jo. That’s not it. Just tell me what I’m facing.”

  “Legally?”

  “That. And anything else you think I ought to know. This is scary. I haven’t said anything to anyone, but I need to talk to someone.”

  “Does Karl know?”

  “I haven’t told him. But I can’t imagine he doesn’t know at some level.”

  “Have you thought about counseling?”

  “I’ve suggested it several times. Karl’s a Lindstrom, an ex–naval officer. He doesn’t believe in help. That kind, anyway.”

  Something fell in the kitchen, a crash of glass on the floor.

  “Scott? You guys okay in there?” Grace called.

  Another sound followed, something high, but muted, a muffled cry. The women exchanged a quick glance and moved toward the kitchen. They’d taken only a step when two men pushed through the kitchen doorway. They wore ski masks over their faces, black leather gloves on their hands. Each gripped a boy. One of the men held a handgun. All the air seemed to rush from Jo’s lungs, and something hot and too heavy to hold very long pressed down inside her stomach. Even so, she felt the briefest sense of relief to see that the firearm was pointed not at the children but at her. She tried to speak but felt paralyzed. The two intruders seemed momentarily stuck, too.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the man with the handgun finally asked her.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. More or less.” She was surprised that although she could barely breathe, her words sounded calm.

  “Take whatever you want,” Grace said. “Leave the boys alone.”

  “We’ll take what we want, all right.”

  Jo looked at Stevie. Her son’s dark eyes were wide, little holes full of terror, and his mouth was open as if in a soundless cry. Jo wanted to kill the man whose huge hand dug into Stevie’s tiny arm.

  “It’s okay, Stevie,” she said.

  “Oh, but it ain’t okay,” the man with the handgun said. “Both of you turn around.” He swung the barrel in a tight circle.

  Jo hesitated and Grace also did not move. The man with Scott in one hand and the handgun in the other put the barrel to the boy’s head. “Do it now,” he said.

  A sound escaped Grace’s throat, not loud, but pitiful. It seemed to hit hard the man who held Stevie. “For Christ’s sake,” he told the other man, “get the gun away from his head.”

  “All right.” The barrel swung toward a Tiffany lamp on a walnut end table. The shot shattered more than the glass of the lamp. Whatever had held Stevie silent broke, and he began to whimper.

  “Shut up,” the man with the gun said. Then to the other man, “Shut him up.”

  “Don’t.” Jo took a step.

  The barrel of the handgun was aimed again on her heart. “Don’t even think about it.”

  The man who held Stevie said, “Look, you do exactly as we say and no one will get hurt, I promise. What’d you say his name is?”

  “Stevie.”

  “Okay, Stevie. You’re gonna be fine. Just fine. But you have to do what I tel
l you, okay?” He waited. “Okay?”

  Stevie watched his mother nod, then he nodded, too.

  “Good man.” He looked at Jo. “Turn around.”

  She did. Slowly. Followed by Grace. So that both had their backs to the boys and the men. Jo heard the sizzle of tape pulled from a roll. Glancing back, she saw that Stevie’s and Scott’s hands were being bound with silver duct tape.

  “You okay? Does that hurt?”

  Stevie’s captor asked. Stevie shook his head. Scott was secured, too, and a strip of tape went over the boys’ mouths.

  “Just tell us what you want,” Grace insisted. “Whatever it is, you can have it.”

  The man with the gun said, “Put your hands behind your back. That’s all I want. Right now.”

  The women were bound in the same way as the boys. Their mouths were taped.

  “What do we do with these two?” Jo felt a light tap on the back of her head.

  “Can’t leave ‘em. They come, too.”

  “What about the note?”

  “On the glass coffee table. He’ll find it. Everyone this way.” The man with the firearm in his hand waved them toward the kitchen.

  Milk lay in a puddle on the kitchen floor amid shattered glass. Cookies sat on the table, half eaten.

  “Outside.” The man with the gun held the back door open.

  They stood on the back deck, in that time of day when the sun had deserted the sky, yet something of it lingered, the memory of light, just enough to illuminate dimly the landscape of the cove. The moon was rising, and stars lay scattered above the trees like pinholes in a dark ceiling.

  “This way.” The gunman motioned them to follow and headed down a flagstone path toward the dock. Behind him walked Scott and Stevie, then Grace and Jo. The other man brought up the rear. When they reached the edge of the lake, the gunman called over his shoulder, “We’re all going to take a little dip.” He waded into the water, calf-deep, and began to follow the shoreline. Jo understood. They would leave no tracks in the sandy bottom of the lake. Where the lawn gave way to woods, a small runabout sat on the water, the bowline tied to a sapling on the shore.