“Solemn is a funny name,” Stevie said. He stared at the bright light in the ceiling, his dark eyes reflecting the glare. He seemed mesmerized. Or more likely, just tired.
“I suppose,” Cork said.
Stevie’s eyes continued to glaze over. In a few minutes, his eyelids began to droop under the weight of his weariness. He finally let them close.
It was almost an hour before Jo came out again. She walked slowly toward the bench where Cork sat cradling Stevie’s head in his lap. Her normally sharp blue eyes seemed dulled, a little bewildered.
“Are you okay?” Cork asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“What happened?”
She spoke as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “I agreed to take his case.”
A wind came up and blew all night long. Jo lay in bed next to Cork, listening to the trees groan and shiver, to the wind as it rushed through the leaves with a sound like floodwaters. The curtains did a frantic dance. Finally she got up and closed the bedroom windows. When she came back to bed, she said, “By morning all the lilac blossoms will be gone.”
Cork took her hand as she slid back under the covers. “How’re you doing?”
“Worried. I don’t think I’m the right person to help Solemn. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do.”
“You haven’t had time to think about it much. I’m sure when you do, you’ll know the way.”
“The evidence is pretty damning.”
“Then why’d you take his case?”
Jo sucked in a long breath and shook her head. “I looked into those eyes and I couldn’t say no.”
“Something’s happened to him, there’s no doubt about it.”
Jo rolled to her side and studied Cork’s face. “Do you believe his story?”
“He believes his story. What I believe is that he didn’t kill Charlotte Kane, no matter what the evidence looks like. What about you?”
“I wish I knew what to think. About his story, his innocence.”
“You looked into his eyes, and you couldn’t say no. What does that tell you?”
“That I’m getting soft in my old age.” She laid her arm across his chest. “Oh, Cork, I don’t know how I can do this by myself. With the work I’m doing for my other clients, I already feel overwhelmed.”
“What do you need?”
She thought a moment. “Well, I suppose an investigator would help. Someone who can do interviews, and track down leads, and help me think about evidence and all the things I don’t know about a homicide case. I need you, Cork.”
“I’ll find a way to swing it.” Cork lifted her hand to his lips and softly kissed her palm. “You’ve got yourself a gumshoe, ma’am.”
In the relative quiet that had come with the closing of the windows, Cork heard a slight sniffle at the bedroom door. He rose up on his elbows and saw the small, dark shape of Stevie in the doorway.
“What is it, buddy?”
“I keep hearing things.”
Stevie heard things even when there was nothing to hear. Cork and Jo never chided him for the fears caused by night noises, real or imagined. They’d decided the best way to help their son was to let him know he was never alone.
“I’ll go,” Jo said. “I can’t sleep anyway.”
She went to the door, put her arm around her son, and the two of them walked back down the hallway.
The wind pushed through the trees outside like something huge and panicked. Alone, Cork lay staring at the ceiling, thinking about Solemn Winter Moon, about the evidence, about what Jo would be up against. He finally sat up and turned on the light on the nightstand. He pulled a pencil and a notepad from the drawer and set about making a list of all the factors stacked against Solemn.
Breakup with Charlotte Kane.
Seen arguing with Charlotte at the New Year’s Eve party.
No alibi.
Murder weapon is his; his prints all over it.
Fingerprints on a beer bottle at the scene of Charlotte’s death.
He looked at his list and knew that in Aurora these were not the only things that could influence the thinking of a jury. He added two more notations.
Troubled past
Solemn is an Indian.
He drew a line under these items to separate the page and began to list the factors that might help Solemn’s case.
No confession. Denies guilt.
This was important, because despite what movies and television said about the value of forensic evidence in securing a conviction, the truth was that in the vast majority of homicide cases the killer’s confession was the most damning exhibit the prosecution could present in a murder trial.
No eyewitnesses.
At the moment, there was no one who could actually place Solemn at the scene when the crime occurred. That meant that all the evidence against him so far was circumstantial, and a good defense attorney could mount an effective attack on that basis alone. Still, with circumstantial evidence, what a jury would finally decide was anyone’s guess.
Cork tried to think if there was anything else working in Solemn’s favor. Only one possibility occurred to him, and he wrote it down.
Talked with Jesus.
Cork looked at that one a long time, weighing the effect it might have on anyone’s thinking about the case. Solemn seemed to believe truly in what he’d experienced, and that belief had changed him dramatically. But it might be that not everyone would see that change, or believe it to be sincere. Maybe Cork’s own thinking was influenced by his love of Sam Winter Moon and by what he thought he owed Sam’s great-nephew. In a town like Aurora, once the opinion about a thing was set, changing that opinion was like trying to reverse the rotation of the earth. Solemn was a wild kid, a troublemaker, a hoodlum. It wouldn’t be a hard stretch at all to believe he’d killed Charlotte Kane. He was also the desecrator of St. Agnes, and the fact that he claimed to speak to Jesus might well be the final blasphemy.
Cork drew a line through his third notation under the list of things helpful to Solemn’s case, and assigned it number eight under the things against. Then he looked at what he’d put together. Jo was right to be concerned. On paper, Solemn was already a goner.
16
The next morning, as soon as he’d seen the children off to school, Cork went to St. Agnes to talk to Mal Thorne. He tried the rectory first. When he knocked, Rose opened the door.
She’d been absent from the O’Connor house for over a month, and Cork had seen her only two or three times in that period, not very recently. The children and Jo stopped by the rectory regularly, and they saw her every Sunday morning, but a stop at St. Agnes was never on Cork’s agenda. Now he stood at the doorway to the priests’ residence and looked at Rose as if he were seeing a stranger. For a moment, he simply stared at her, speechless.
She smiled. “Hello, Cork.”
“Rose?”
She laughed, reached out, and hugged him.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
“A few pounds.”
“New dress?”
“Yes. My old clothes tend to hang on me these days.”
“Your hair’s different.”
“I’ve decided to let it grow a bit.”
That wasn’t all that was different. There was a light in her eyes, a rosy aura about her, even a subtle, enticing fragrance that was the faintest hint of perfume, something that, to Cork’s knowledge, Rose never wore.
“Come in, won’t you?” she said.
From inside the rectory came the blare of the television. The Price Is Right. Father Kelsey, Cork figured, because the old priest was nearly deaf and Rose never watched television during the day. Cork held back. “I’m looking for Mal. Is he in?”
“He’s working in his office in the church this morning.”
“Think he’d mind if I dropped by?”
“You? In St. Agnes? He’d welcome that like a miracle.”
“I’ll just go on over then.” Cork took one last look at his sister-in-law. “You know, you look wonderful, Rose.”
“Why, thank you, Cork.”
Walking to the church, Cork mulled over the change in Rose. He considered that maybe just getting out of the O’Connor house had made the difference, but that was unconvincing. There was something else going on.