“I heard about Charlotte Kane,” Cork said.
He’d reached the boulder and could now see what Gooding and the sheriff saw. The body lay on a bed of snow crystals like a fish in a meat market display. She was fully clothed, still wearing her down parka. The skin of her face and hands seemed well preserved, and Cork figured the body had been frozen all winter.
From Soderberg’s reaction, Cork had assumed the worst, but he’d been wrong. Even in death, Charlotte Kane was lovely to look at. Her hair was long and black, sleek from the snow around her melting under the April sun. Cork remembered how, whenever she’d stopped at Sam’s Place for a burger or a shake, she’d always been extremely polite. She’d been a quiet, lovely young woman. Now her face was pale, relaxed, her arms crossed over her chest, as if she were only in a long, deep sleep. Seeing her this way, Cork felt an overwhelming sadness for her and her family.
And something more, something he hadn’t felt in months. The tug of a dark shape from behind a curtain of solid white, an unseen hand that reached out to him.
“Pender,” Soderberg hollered. “Pender, get these men out of here.”
Cork looked back at the footbridge, then at the snowmobile being hauled up the bank, and finally at the place where the body lay. “Looks like her Arctic Cat flew right off the bridge,” he said. “Must’ve come hell-bent down that hill.”
Gooding nodded. “And she couldn’t negotiate the bridge. She’d been drinking, we know that.”
The bridge was well marked and wide enough for an easy crossing. Cork recalled what Jenny had told him about Charlotte the night she’d disappeared, about the girl’s dark poetry and fascination with suicide.
Soderberg stepped in front of Cork, eclipsing the body. “I want you out of here, O’Connor. This isn’t your concern.” He looked around. “Where the hell is Pender?”
“What’s that?” Cork pointed toward a scrap of brightly colored paper just visible in the snow a few feet away.
“I was just going to check it.” Gooding wore surgical gloves and he reached over and pulled out a red, white, and green wrapper. “Pearson’s Nut Goodie,” he said. He brushed away a bit of snow and brought up some torn cellophane. “Beef jerky.” He widened the cleared area and uncovered the remnant of a Doritos bag, pieces of frozen orange rind, and a Corona beer bottle with a couple of inches of pale liquid still in the bottom.
Gooding looked up at Cork. “What do you make of that?”
Soderberg, who still appeared shaken, said, “Maybe she was trapped by the storm and ate to keep her strength up, hoping to get found.”
Cork studied the body, its peaceful repose. There was a detail that bothered him. “Take a good look at her, Arne. Notice anything?”
Soderberg swung his attention back to Cork and to the priest, who stood observing at a slight distance. “Out of here, O’Connor. And look, Father, I’m sorry, but you need to leave, too. Pender,” he cried. “Pender, where the hell are you?”
“Here, Sheriff.” Duane Pender emerged from the shadow under the footbridge, zipping his fly as he came. He stepped carefully among the rocks and pockets of snow along the creek bank. “Nature called,” he said with a look of chagrin.
“Escort these men back to the parking lot,” Soderberg ordered. “O’Connor, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give my deputy any trouble.”
Cork said, “Where are her gloves, Arne?”
“What?”
“Her gloves.”
Soderberg looked down at her hands, which were white and bare.
“If she’d driven that snowmobile out here without gloves on, her hands would have been frozen long before she got to Moccasin Creek,” Cork said.
Soderberg nodded to Gooding. “Check her coat.”
Gooding went through the pockets of her parka and came up empty-handed. He sifted the snow around her body and shook his head.
“Why would she have the presence of mind to bring food with her but not gloves? And one more thing,” Cork said. “That bottle of Corona. Hard to believe it would have survived the crash in one piece.”
“But not out of the question,” Soderberg countered.
“Maybe not. How’d she open it?”
“How do you usually get a beer open? You twist off the damn top.”
“That’s a Corona, Arne. They don’t make a twist top. Unless you find an opener around here, you gotta wonder.”
Soderberg said, “I thought I told you to get these men out of here, Pender.”
Deputy Pender was new to the sheriff’s department. He hadn’t served under Cork. To him, Corcoran O’Connor was just a guy who ran a burger joint on Iron Lake. Because Pender was a Baptist, the priest had no special authority as far as he was concerned. He jerked his head in the direction of the trail up to the parking lot. “You heard the sheriff.”
“Are you going to bag that stuff?” Cork asked, indicating the things Gooding had uncovered near the body.
“O’Connor.” Soderberg put out a hand, as if to move Cork bodily from the scene. Cork glared at the hand, and Soderberg drew up short of actually touching him.
“I’ll bag it,” Gooding said.
Cork turned and started up the bank. The priest held back.
Mal Thorne asked, “Sheriff, when are you going to tell her parents?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’d like to be there when you do.”
Soderberg shook his head. “I don’t think-”
“Arne,” Cork said, “have you ever had to tell a mother or father that their child is dead?”
In reply, the sheriff simply glared. It may have been meant to demonstrate Soderberg’s perturbation, but more probably it was meant to disguise the fact that he’d never had to shoulder that particular burden.
Cork said, “When you do, I think you’ll be glad to have someone like Mal there with you.”
“When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.” To his credit, Soderberg spoke civilly to the priest. “I’ll think about it, and I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll be at the rectory.”
Soderberg turned an angry eye on Pender. “When you get to the parking lot, relieve Borkmann and send him down here. I want a word with him.”
They walked up the trail, slowly because of the slippery terrain and because there was something heavy on them now. Cork thought about Soderberg, about the anguish on his face as he’d stared down at the body of Charlotte Kane. It occurred to him that the sheriff had probably never dealt with death in this way before. He wondered how Soderberg liked the responsibility of the job now.
The priest let out a deep sigh that had nothing to do with the effort of the climb. “Is Rose home?”
“I think so,” Cork said. “Why?”
The priest kept his eyes on the mud. “Glory’s going to need her.”
6
Cork spent the afternoon working on Sam’s Place, getting ready for the tourist season. Sam’s Place was an old Quonset hut that had long ago been converted to a burger stand on the shore of Iron Lake, just beyond the northern limits of Aurora. Beginning in early May until late October, Cork, with the help of his daughters, catered to the hungry fishermen and tourists and locals. For an ex-lawman, it was a quiet existence, but one Cork had come to appreciate.
He was thinking about Charlotte Kane as he worked, about how peaceful she’d looked in death. He’d heard that freezing wasn’t a bad way to go, that people who froze to death experienced a false warmth at the end, a final euphoria. Maybe that’s how it had been for Charlotte. He hoped so. However, that didn’t explain why she had no gloves with her, or who’d opened the curiously unbroken Corona bottle. Cork had considered from several angles the food wrappers found in the snow near the body. He would love to have a look at the autopsy, to know if any of that junk food was in her stomach when she died. Because more and more, the circumstances caused him to consider the possibility that she had not been alone at the end.