“Glory has a daughter?” It was the first Cork had heard.
“Had. I think her name was Maria. They told me she died.” She wiped her hands on her apron and nodded toward the lake.
“Like I said, Dr. Kane’s probably down at the boathouse.”
“Thanks.” Cork put the photograph back on the shelf and walked to the front door.
“I don’t imagine he’ll be thrilled to have company,” Olga said.
“I’ll take my chances.”
After Olga closed the door, Cork stood on the porch a moment thinking about Glory and the daughter she’d lost. Was there a curse on the Kanes, he wondered.
The front of the house was well kept, but the long, sloping back lawn was a different story. The grass was badly in need of cutting, the blades grown tall, ready to seed. Making his way to the boathouse, Cork felt as if he were wading into a deep, green sea.
The view of Iron Lake from the end of the point was one of the best on the whole shoreline. The day was calm and the water hard blue. The only sound was the noise of the crows in the cedars. Fletcher Kane stood on the dock, casting a line into the lake. He was using a fly-fishing rod, casting as if the lake had trout. Iron Lake had trophy walleye and northern, fat black bass that lurked in the weeds, and sunnies and bluegills in the shallows, but it had no trout. Tall and awkward-looking most times, Fletcher Kane seemed a study in grace as he cast the line. His long body moved in some rhythm that beat in his head. Out and back, out and back, his long, mantislike arm cocked and released, and each time the fly at the end of the line touched the water at almost the same spot with no sound, no splash to mark the moment of delicate connection, only a widening circle of ripples that gently warped the blue steel look of the water.
Kane wore khakis and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. A brimmed canvas hat protected his head from the sun. Flies were hooked all around the crown like small, bright jewels. That Fletcher Kane was a fly-fisherman was something Cork hadn’t known. Kane was a murky pool of unknowns, and the only reason Cork had sought him out was to stir things up and see what surfaced.
“Fletcher?”
Kane jerked and the fly at the end of the line popped back, falling far short of its mark.
“I’m sorry,” Cork said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“O’Connor. What do you want?”
“Just to ask a few questions if I could.”
“About what?”
“Charlotte.”
“Your wife sent you?”
“I’m consulting on Solemn Winter Moon’s defense.”
“I don’t have a thing to say to you.”
Kane glanced at the fishing line that lay on the surface of the water like a crack across a blue china plate. He began to reel it in.
“You won’t return Jo’s calls. She’s just wondering if you know how we can get in touch with Glory. We’d like to talk with her.”
“I haven’t heard from her.”
“You have no idea where she is?”
“At this point, you know as much as I do.”
He’d finished cranking in the line. Water dripped from the reel and wet black spots appeared on the boards at Kane’s feet.
“You mind telling me the name of Charlotte’s doctor?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“Fiona Case.”
“Did Charlotte ever talk about her teachers?”
“Why all these questions about Charlotte?”
“I’m just trying to understand your daughter better, Fletcher. It might help to understand her death. What about her teachers?”
Kane’s jaw worked in a way that sent bony waves along his cheeks. Anger just below the surface. Cork wasn’t sure he would respond.
“Only one that I recall. Her English teacher.”
“Man or woman?”
“A man. I forget his name.”
“What did she say about him?”
“That she liked him.”
“Liked him a lot?”
“She thought he was a good teacher.”
“And she mentioned no one else?”
Kane seemed to have hit the end of his patience. His eyes bugged out, and he spit his words. “What does this have to do with anything? Winter Moon murdered her and that’s all there is to it.”
“You know that for a fact? How?”
“You mean besides all the goddamn evidence? He threatened her before.”
“When?”
“Just before Christmas. He came to the house. They argued. He grabbed her, made threats. I ran him off.”
Cork knew this was Kane’s perception of the incident and that Solemn told a slightly different story.
“Two weeks later, she’s dead.” Kane threw his rod against the side of the boathouse. “I shouldn’t have run him off. I should have killed him.”
“Did they argue often?”
“All the time.”
“You were in the habit of listening in on their conversations?”
Kane took a quick step forward. In height, he towered over Cork. Rage burned in his eyes, the desire to strike. But he didn’t. He balled his hands into fists at his side and said, “Just get the hell out of here. Everything I loved is gone. What more do you want from me?”
It was a question that, at the moment, Cork couldn’t answer.
As he left the boathouse, a wind rose, blowing in from across the lake. Big clouds that had been sleeping in the distance all afternoon suddenly woke up and raced across the sky, their dark blue shadows ghosting off the water onto the land. In the myths of his grandmother’s people, manidoog rode those shadows, spirits of the woods, sometimes playful, sometimes malevolent.
Halfway to the house, Cork paused as a great block of shade engulfed the lawn, turning the deep grass around him the color of a bad bruise. The crows in the line of cedars thirty yards away began to raise a ruckus, and Cork looked to see what the big deal was.
Snakes. Thousands of them. Slithering scales over slithering scales, wave after wave, an angry black sea, smothering the grass under the trees. Crying wildly, the crows took to the safety of the sky. Cork felt his own flesh crawling as he stared at the writhing mass sweeping against and around the cedar trunks. One snake he could tolerate. A whole fucking sea was terrifying.
A shaft of light struck the ground, and Cork looked up where the sun pushed through a split in the cloud. When he glanced back at the cedars, the snakes were gone. The crows were gone. And by then the cloud shadow was gone, too.
Carefully, Cork walked to the place where the snakes had been. He thought the grass might carry some mark of their passage, but the long, upright blades showed no sign of disturbance. He stepped to the cedars. Beyond them was the south shore of the point, all rock and water, facing toward Aurora. There was nowhere for the snakes to have gone except into the lake.
Far down the shoreline, the crows wheeled away like ashes in a wind.
23
DOROTHY WINTER MOON was in Jo’s office in the Aurora Professional Building. Cork knew this the moment he pulled into the parking lot. The enormous orange International dump truck she drove for the county was there, dwarfing all the other vehicles in the lot.
When he knocked, Jo told him to come in. Dot sat in one of the client chairs. She wore bib overalls with a dusty yellow T-shirt underneath, and the tan on her arms was even darker from the grime of her labor. Her old steel-toed Wolverines looked battle scarred and her face looked worried.
“I was telling Dot about the pubic hairs,” Jo said.
In the autopsy of Charlotte Kane’s body, the medical examiner had combed the pubic area and found hairs that didn’t appear to match the dead girl’s. The evidence had been sent to the lab of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul for DNA testing and to match against a DNA sample from Solemn. The report had come back that morning. The pubic hairs were not Charlotte’s, nor had they come from Solemn.
“That’s good, right?” Dot said.
“It’s a good-news, bad-news thing,” Jo replied.
Cork leaned against a windowsill and crossed his arms.
“The good news is that it indicates the last person to have sex with Charlotte wasn’t Solemn,” Jo said.
“The bad news?”
“Motive. The prosecution could argue that it proves Charlotte was seeing somebody else and that Solemn killed her in a jealous rage.”
“Seeing who?”
Jo looked to Cork.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he said.
“Can’t you tell from the DNA of those pubic hairs?”
“We need a sample to match them against, Dot. And for that we need a suspect and enough evidence to request that a sample be taken.”
“You don’t have a suspect?”
“Not yet.” Cork gave her a sympathetic smile. “How’re you holding up?”
Tough as she was, Dot seemed to soften in her chair. She stared down at her rough hands. “People are out at my place all the time now, reporters, assholes, all the time taking pictures, asking questions. Somebody broke the deer on my lawn. I’ve been keeping Custer locked in the house. All those people around, they’re driving the poor dog crazy.” She looked at Cork, then past him out the window. “It’s hard when I visit Solemn. He’s my son, but he isn’t. It’s like a stranger stepped into his skin. We don’t seem to know what to say.”
“It’s the situation,” Jo said. “It’s put a lot of stress on both of you.”
Dot handed Jo several papers. “Anything else you want me to sign?”
“No, that’s it.”
Dot tugged a pocket watch on a chain from her overalls. “Got to get back to work. Spreading gravel out at the fairgrounds parking lot today.”
“I’ll let you know when there’s anything new,” Jo said.
“Thanks.”
Dot gathered her hair back and jammed a red ball cap over it. Cork could hear the clomp of her heavy boots long after she’d closed the door behind her.
“Coffee?” Jo asked, rising from her chair.
“No thanks.”
She poured a mugful from a stainless steel server. “Well?”
Cork sat in the chair Dot had vacated. “I talked with Tiffany Soderberg. She says Fletcher Kane was creepy when it came to Charlotte. Watched her all the time.”
“Fletcher Kane is creepy, period. Proves nothing.” Jo sat down and sipped her coffee. “Okay, for the sake of argument, suppose there was something between daughter and father, that doesn’t mean he killed her. You’ve read the statement he gave about the night she disappeared. He was home. His sister corroborated his story.”
“And Glory’s conveniently gone now. He claims he doesn’t even know where. I’d love to have his phone records for the past couple of months. I’d bet there’s a good chance we’d find a number for Glory. Have you heard anything about the phone records for Valhalla yet?”
Cork had recommended that Jo subpoena the telephone record of the calls made to and from Valhalla on the day of the fatal New Year’s Eve party. He thought it might be enlightening to know whom Charlotte had talked to on the last day of her life.
“Nothing yet.” She looked at him and he could tell she was mulling something over.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m just wondering about due diligence.”
“What about it?”
“You seem to be looking at Kane and no one else. Isn’t that exactly what you accused Arne Soderberg of doing with Solemn?”
Cork pulled a small notepad from the pocket of his shirt. He put it on the desk where Jo could see. Written on it were four notations: Teachers. Doctor. Family Friends. Priest.
Cork said, “According to the academic record I got at the high school, Charlotte had four male teachers while she attended. She talked about one of them in particular. Her English teacher, Alistair Harding. He taught a poetry class she took fall semester last year. Her only official extracurricular activity was the school literary magazine. Harding was the advisor. He probably had a good window on her psyche. I’ll do some follow-up on him today.
“Her family doctor is Fiona Case. I think we can pretty much eliminate her as a suspect, but I’d still like to interview her.”
“Unless I can bring a successful motion to compel her to talk, you won’t get a thing out of her, Cork. Patient/client privilege. And the courts these days are extremely reluctant to allow medical records to be released or testimony to be given in instances where the victim’s sexual past might be an issue.”
“All right, then. We’ll put Dr. Case on the back burner for now. How about family friends? I’ve been thinking a lot about that one. Glory told me that Fletcher didn’t have friends. He had acquaintances, associates, colleagues, but no friends. And Glory, as nearly as I can tell, had only one close friend and that was Rose. We definitely need to talk to her.”
“I already did. She doesn’t know anything that would be useful. Glory was always very careful not to talk about the family.”
“That probably means there was a lot to hide. What about St. Agnes? Were the Kanes involved in the church community other than to attend mass?”
Jo shook her head. “Not in any significant way.”
“So they barricaded themselves in that big house and kept company mostly with one another.”
Jo looked at the final notation on the notepad. Priest. “You’re not serious about Mal.”
“Mendax, Jo. She was angry with him for some reason.”
“But Solemn believes Charlotte was involved with a married man.”
Cork took his notepad back and stood up to leave. “In the eyes of a lot of his parishioners, he is married. Married to the church.”
It was a busy day at Sam’s Place. At a break in the action, Cork turned to Jenny and asked, “Mr. Harding was your teacher for poetry last fall, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me about him.”
Jenny put a basket of raw, frozen fries into hot oil. “He’s a good teacher.”
“What’s he like?”
She shrugged. “He’s very sensitive, I think.”
“Sensitive how?”
“Intuitive. Kind.”
“Married?”
“Mr. Harding?” She almost laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Dad, he’s gay.”
“What makes you think so?”
She lifted the basket, shook the fries to rearrange them, set the basket back in the oil. “Aside from being not married, he’s very neat, dresses nicely. And—well, it’s just something you get a feeling about.”
“A feeling,” Cork said. “But no solid evidence?”
“I never asked him, if that’s what you mean. Why all these questions?” She looked at him, and understanding came into her blue eyes. “Oh. Charlotte Kane’s married lover.”
It was sometimes difficult in the O’Connor household not to be overheard.
“You can forget about him, Dad.”
“Because you think he’s gay.”
“He goes home to England every year over the holidays. He was in, like, London or someplace when Charlotte was killed.”
A blue minivan pulled into the parking lot, and a half dozen teenagers piled out. Jenny turned toward the serving window. Cork scraped the grill and went back to this thinking.
Priest.
What did he know about Mal Thorne? What did anyone know? That he’d been in charge of a homeless shelter in Chicago and bore the scars of a knife attack by a couple of would-be thieves. Before that, a blank until his boxing days at Notre Dame. And before that, he’d been a kid from a tough section of Detroit. There were several important unknowns, among them the long period between college and Chicago, the reason a priest as capable as Mal ended up in a backwater place like Aurora, and why Charlotte was so angry with him.
When he had a few minutes, Cork went to the b
ack of the Quonset hut and pulled out an old address book. It was a duplicate of the one he kept at home. He looked up a number, dialed long-distance to Chicago.
“You’ve reached Grabowski Confidential Investigations. I’m out of the office at the moment. Leave me your name and number and a brief message and I’ll get back to you, pronto.”
After the tone, Cork said, “Boomer, it’s Cork O’Connor. Been a long time, buddy. I need your help. Give me a call when you can.” Cork left two numbers, Sam’s Place and home.
He’d just hung up and was about to return to the serving area up front when the phone rang. He figured Boomer had been screening his calls.
It was Jo. She’d just received a fax of the phone records for Valhalla. Cork told her he couldn’t get away, but that he’d call Annie and have her pick them up on her way to work.
Things were busy the rest of the day, and it was late by the time Cork finally sat down at the old birch wood table in the back of the Quonset hut and looked over the phone records Annie had brought him. A lot of young people had known about the party. Several calls had been made from pay phones, so no way of telling who was on the line. The only items on the whole list that stood out for Cork were two calls placed from the home of Wilfred Lipinski, mayor of Aurora, one at 9:57 P.M. and another a 10:41 P.M. If Lipinski had teenagers who knew about the party at Valhalla, the calls would not have been odd, but all the Lipinski children were long ago grown and gone, and so Cork wondered. For a minute or two, he considered the possibility that the mayor might have been Charlotte’s mysterious married lover. But the idea of Wilfred Lipinski, who at sixty-two looked about as kissable as a cod, making love to the young woman was too much for Cork to imagine, and he dismissed it.
When he finally locked up and headed home, it was after ten o’clock. The longest day of the year was only a couple of weeks away, and a bit of light still lingered in the sky, a thin blue memory of day spread along the western horizon. A shaving of silver, all there was of a moon, hung above Iron Lake. The night was warm and liquid, and the color of everything melted toward black.
He took a detour and cruised past the sheriff’s office and jail. Across the street, the park where the believers and the curious gathered was almost empty. A few people still kept vigil. Cork recognized the couple who’d come from Warroad on the chance that Solemn’s touch would heal their wheelchair-bound son. Such desperation, Cork thought. Although he couldn’t bring himself to pray for them, he hoped that their own prayers were somehow answered.