“Still awake?” she asked. “I thought everybody would be asleep.”
“Sandy bring you home?”
“Yes.”
She got the pearls off and tried to move by him toward her bedroom, but Cork blocked her way.
“You stayed a long time,” he said.
“We were working on business.”
“You’ve been working on business a lot with Sandy.”
“I’m his attorney, Cork.”
“Is that all you are?”
Jo stepped back. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought it was me,” Cork said. He shook his head stupidly. “All along I thought it was my fault. Christ, how blind can a man be?”
Jo watched him closely but said nothing.
“Do you love him?”
Jo didn’t answer.
“Are you planning on marrying him as soon as I’m out of the picture?” His voice rose as if Jo’s silence was only because she couldn’t hear him. “Are you?”
In Anne’s room, the bed creaked. “Not here,” Jo said.
Cork turned and walked angrily to the guest room. Jo followed and closed the door.
“Well?” Cork said.
Jo stayed by the door, her hands behind her back, gripping the knob.
“You lied to me,” Cork accused.
“No. I just didn’t tell you.”
“Bullshit.”
“I didn’t want you to know. Sandy’s in a vulnerable position. He’s a very public figure. And I’m still technically a married woman.”
“But that’s not your fault, is it? Lord knows, you’ve done everything you can to hurry this along.”
“Cork-”
“How long?”
“What do you mean?”
“How long has it been going on?”
She sighed, closed her eyes. “A while.”
“A long while,” Cork corrected her.
“Cork, I didn’t like not telling you. But how could I? It would’ve been all over Aurora, and Sandy’s standing could have been terribly damaged.”
“ ‘Sandy’s standing’? ” Cork looked at her, his eyes wide with a kind of horror. “Who are you, Jo? I don’t even know you anymore.”
“I didn’t do it to hurt you. It just happened, Cork.”
Everything in him felt drawn taut, ready to snap. He could feel his right temple twitching as if there were something under his skin trying to break out.
“When?” he asked. “When did it just happen? After I was out of your bed? Out of the house? When?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“After you were out of the house.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“Why would I lie?”
Cork went to the dresser and pulled out the folder stained with Lytton’s blood. He held it out to Jo.
She drew back in revulsion. “What’s that?”
“Take it. Open it.” He thrust it at her.
She put the pearls on his bed, gingerly took the folder in her hands, and carefully opened it. She studied the photographs. Cork watched her face go pale as her pearls.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Where did these come from?”
“Does it matter? Look at the lower corner of each of them. There’s a time-date stamp. Those pictures were taken the summer after Sam Winter Moon died. I wasn’t out then, Jo. Or I guess I was and just didn’t know it, huh?”
She looked ill, drained of all her color. “What difference does it make now, Cork?”
He turned away and went to the window. He watched the elm tree in the yard writhe in the wind like a creature in pain.
“What did I do to deserve this, Jo?”
“The world doesn’t revolve around you, Cork,” she said. Her voice was flat and cold and hard, like frozen ground. “Everything doesn’t happen because of you. Some things just happen.”
She moved behind him toward the bed. He heard the soft rustle of her dress. He didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see her at all.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said. “Don’t get your hopes up. Didn’t I say that? But you wouldn’t listen. You didn’t want to hear. It’s over between us, Cork.”
“And Sandy Parrant is the reason.”
There was a long stillness, then Jo said, “I suppose.”
“Get out.”
“Cork-”
“Just get out.”
He heard the door open, heard her leave, heard the sound down the hallway of her own door closing. He turned and saw that she’d put the folder on the bed and taken her pearls.
For a long time he stood at the window listening to the howl of the wind outside. If it was true, as Henry Meloux said, that he’d heard the Windigo call his name, he understood why now. Because it felt exactly as if his heart had just been torn out of him and devoured.
23
Jo lay awake in the black of four A.M. remembering a moment before it all fell apart. She and Cork out at Russell Blackwater’s trailer in the hours before the shootings at Burke’s Landing. She recalled them holding one another and feeling a terrible numbness where caring should have been. She’d blamed it on the circumstances, the weight of what each of them carried that night, the responsibilities. But it wasn’t that. They were holding something dying, maybe already dead, but they were too scared to admit it.
She wondered why the tragedy at Burke’s Landing hadn’t brought them together. Adversity was supposed to do that, wasn’t it? Instead, everything got worse. Cork wasn’t just distant. Something in him seemed to have died along with the other deaths that drizzly morning. Nothing mattered. Not his job, his family, her. He called out in the night sometimes, sat bolt upright and grabbed at the air. What was it he was reaching for? The past? Was he trying to pull the dead men back? Trying to pull them all back?
She never knew. He wouldn’t talk about it.
Near dawn she heard Cork moving about. She put on her robe, went downstairs to the living room, and sat tensely on the sofa to wait for him. When he came down, she stood up, and clutched the robe around her throat as if she were freezing.
“Cork?” she said.
The living room was dark. He seemed startled by her presence.
“What?” he grumbled.
“Could we talk?”
“I’m on my way out.”
“We need to talk.”
“What’s there to talk about? You made everything clear.”
“I don’t want us to finish things all bitter and angry.”
“What am I supposed to do? Shake your hand and thank you kindly for leaving me for another man?”
“Could we just talk for a while?”
“You said yesterday you didn’t want to talk about our marriage anymore. So what’s changed?”
“You’re hurt. I didn’t want that.”
“What difference does it make to you?”
“I know you might not believe this, but I care about you.”
Cork was a solid darkness within the dark of the living room. Jo could see that he held the gym bag he’d used to bring his clothing from Sam’s Place. And he held his rolled-up bearskin.
“Could we talk in my office? Please?”
Cork didn’t answer, but he didn’t leave. Jo took that as a good sign and led the way. In her office, she closed the door behind them, then switched on the lamp on her desk. They both blinked a moment at the light.
“You look tired,” she said
“I didn’t sleep.”
“Me either.”
“You know what I did, Jo? I lay awake putting it all together, all the signs, signals. I could see it now, in neon. But, you know, what I couldn’t put together was where it began.”
“I don’t think you need to know the details. I don’t think that would do anybody any good.”
“You wanted to talk. This is what I want to talk about.”
Jo leaned against the oak desk thankful for the support of the solid wood. “It was after the shooting at Burke’s Landing. When Sandy and I were down in St. Paul together working to negotiate a settlement before any more blood was spilled. Things were intense. It just happened.”
“Just happened.” Cork shook his head.
“We were drifting already, Cork, don’t deny it. There were days we’d come home and not say more than a dozen words to one another, and then it was to talk about money or the kids’ school things or the most recent rumor making the rounds in Aurora. I don’t know, maybe we thought we knew each other so well we didn’t have to talk. If that was it, we were wrong. Because every night it felt as if I was going to bed with a stranger.”