The phone rang, and Cork jumped, startled out of his intensity. It was Stephen, calling from his cell phone. He was zipping back across the lake with Gordy Hudacek but without the promised catch. Cork told him to stop at Gratz’s Meat Market on the way home, pick up three rib eyes and a loaf of garlic bread, and tell Gratz he’d drop by on Monday to make payment.
Cork hung up just as Parmer arrived. When Cork opened the front door, Parmer studied his face and said, “You look like a man who knows a mule kick’s coming. What’s the story?”
Cork pulled two beers from the refrigerator and played the tape for Parmer, pointing out the details that, if you were of a mind to question things, might make you wonder.
Parmer shook his head. “I understand what you’re saying here, but I gotta tell you, Cork, I don’t see anything you can take to the bank. In my experience, if you go looking for conspiracies, you’re always going to see a figure lurking in the shadows, whether someone’s there or not. It’s human nature.”
Cork nodded. “Yeah. Probably.”
“What would be the point of it anyway? Why would someone go through all that trouble?”
“Let’s talk outside,” Cork said. “Stephen’s on his way with some steaks. I need to get the coals going in the grill.”
They went onto the patio in the backyard where Cork kept his Weber. He poured out charcoal and used a chimney to get the fire going. Then he stood in the early evening, beer in hand, staring across his empty lawn. There was a maple in the yard that his daughters and Stephen had spent a lot of hours in their childhood climbing like monkeys. Cork had built a small platform in the lower branches, where the kids often clustered in the gathering dark to tell ghost stories. The platform was still there, though his children had long ago outgrown the simple pleasures of ghost stories and climbing trees.
“Why would some guy spend the night in the bar pretending to be Bodine?” Parmer asked. “To discredit him?”
“It’s possible,” Cork said. “But why go to such extremes to discredit the man if nothing was going to come of it? Bodine flies out the next day, gets his customers to Seattle, everybody’s happy. And if he’s confronted about drinking, he’d probably be able to mount a good defense, witnesses who put him somewhere else at the time he’s alleged to have been at the bar, so what’s the point? But if Bodine isn’t around any longer to challenge the impersonator, the charade gets carried off successfully. Unless you have a wife like Becca.”
Parmer sat down at the picnic table on the patio. He put his beer on the tabletop and slowly turned the bottle as he considered things. “Okay, so what you’re saying is that Bodine was already out of the picture when that guy walked into the bar?”
“I’m not saying it. Just following a line of speculation.”
“For the sake of argument then, Bodine’s already out of the picture. When?”
“Probably from the get-go. Changing pilots in Casper might raise some suspicion. If nobody on that flight actually knew what Bodine looked like, then it was probably never Bodine at the controls.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, Hugh. Maybe they simply wanted to get rid of Bodine and to do it without a lot of suspicion involved. A man disappears off the street, that’s one thing. A man disappears on a plane that’s never found, that’s another thing altogether.”
“This all sounds pretty crazy, Cork, you know that, right?”
Cork checked the coals and rearranged them with a pair of tongs he kept for just that purpose. “If what the attorney told me is true, the investigator looking into all this has disappeared. You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s up with that?” He heard Trixie barking in the front yard and said quickly to Parmer, “Not a word to Stephen, okay?”
“You got it,” Parmer promised.
Stephen traipsed onto the patio, Trixie dancing at his heels. “You were right, Dad. They weren’t biting in Grace Cove.”
“But you made it there in record time, right?” Cork said. “How’s that new boat?”
“Like a rocket.”
“Stephen, that lake isn’t there just for getting across quickly.”
“I know, Dad. But a boat that does is a thing of beauty.”
“Ah, to be fourteen again,” Parmer said.
Cork threw the steaks that Stephen had brought onto the grill. He directed his son to grab the salad bag from the refrigerator and toss the contents in a bowl. He wrapped the garlic bread in foil and set it on the back of the grill to heat. In fifteen minutes, they were sitting at the picnic table, sliding their knives into meat done medium rare.
When the light was gone from the sky, they took their dishes into the kitchen, and Parmer said good night. Cork walked him out to his rented Navigator, which was parked at the curb.
“So what are you going to do about the Bodine woman’s story?” Parmer asked.
“I don’t know. Think about it some more.”
“Let me know what you come up with. I’m in town for a couple more days.”
“We’ll see, Hugh.”
“Thanks for dinner and the company. That son of yours is a great kid.”
“Don’t I know it. ’Night, Hugh.”
He watched the Navigator pull away just as the streetlights came on. Behind him the screen door opened and banged closed, and Stephen leaped from the front porch and landed on the sidewalk. He loped to his father.
“Gordy just called. He’s trying to put together a game of Risk. I’m headed over to his house.”
Cork looked at his watch. “Home by ten.”
“Eleven.”
“Ten thirty.”
“Deal.”
Stephen raced away into the gathering dark. Cork watched until his son rounded the corner and was gone, then he went back inside and began cleaning up the dinner mess. All the while, in his head, he was picking up and examining the possibilities that Becca Bodine and Liz Burns had presented to him. The tape didn’t nail anything. And as for the missing investigator, Cork had known more than a few guys in the business who succumbed to weakness-booze, women, gambling-that took them off everyone’s radar for a while.
When he finished in the kitchen, he went to the room Jo had used as her office. Although he used it now for his own PI business, he’d left it pretty much the same: the shelves full of her reference books; the family photos she’d framed and hung; her plants, which he’d taken good care of. He never spoke of it to anyone, but whenever he was there, it was as if Jo was still with him. Her spirit haunted the room. Not in a ghostly way, but in the smell, the energy, the memories it held for Cork of walking in to find her bent over a case file, her hair fallen over her face like a veil of yellow-white silk, her blue eyes rising, the frown of her concentration vanishing, replaced with a smile that let him know she was happy to see him. And that she loved him.
He leaned against the threshold and let himself be swept into remembering, always a dangerous thing. When he finally pulled himself back, he wiped his eyes and turned away.
In the living room, he sat down to watch again the videotape from the Casper bar. Stephen hadn’t taken Trixie with him, and the dog circled a few times, then settled on the carpet at Cork’s feet, her head on her paws. Cork rewound to the beginning and studied the tape for almost an hour. He didn’t believe he’d see anything more, but at the end of that hour he realized something about the man at the bar, something that made him stop the tape, rewind, and watch again carefully several of those moments when the man drank.
The guy in the video usually turned away from the bartender and the other patrons when he lifted his glass. He tipped his head down as he brought the drink up. What Cork realized was that the glass never touched his lips. It was a move done well and, in the moment, would have been hard to catch. Unless you scrutinized the tape, as Cork was doing now, you might easily miss the fact that the man at the bar wasn’t drinking at all. The booze was going somewhere, but not down his throat.
“Liz, it’s Cork O’Connor. I’d like to drop by tomorrow and talk to you and Ms. Bodine, if it’s convenient.”
“Of course. What time?”
“Mass here is over at ten thirty. I’ll take off right away. I should hit Duluth around noon.”
“That’ll be fine.” She hesitated, then ventured, “You sound anxious.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Cork said.
He made a call to Judy Madsen, explained that he needed her to cover Sam’s Place tomorrow. No problem, she told him.
After he hung up, he went outside. He sat on the front porch swing, staring at the pool of light from the nearest streetlamp. He was thinking that, if it wasn’t Sandy Bodine flying that plane, what else about the incident wasn’t true? Though he wasn’t cold at all, his body shook uncontrollably. Inside he was battling an ambush of fear and rage, fighting against a desperate desire not to be drawn again into a hopeless spiral of despair. For six months, he’d struggled with his grief and pain and tried to help his children deal with theirs. For six months, he’d worked to reconstruct his life around the raw, empty hole at its center. For six months, he’d fought to accept the reality that Jo was dead. Now, staring at that tiny island of light the streetlamp cast in front of his house, he thought with a shiver of hope, What if she isn’t?