“Not too,” he replied hoarsely.
“You didn’t see who hit you?” Molly asked.
Cork shook his head. “It happened too fast.”
“I don’t understand. If they were after the bag, why didn’t they just take it?”
“That’s something I don’t understand either,” Cork said.
Molly stepped down from the high seat in the sauna, took a dipper from a bucket, and threw water over the hot stones. The water hissed and steam shot up into the air, and Cork felt the sweat pour from him. It felt good to sweat so freely. Cleansing. Molly sat back down beside him.
“Unless,” she said.
“Unless what?”
“Unless they managed to take what they wanted while you were unconscious.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Cork said.
“How long were you out?”
“I don’t know. Not long, I think.” He wiped his face with his hands, then ran his fingers through his hair, which was as wet as if he were in the shower. “There’s something else, though. When I was out, I dreamed I heard a couple of gunshots. And when I found the rifle in the blackberry bramble, I could tell it had just been fired.”
“At you?”
Cork made a show of feeling himself. “No new holes.”
“Shooting at who, then?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’ll all be clearer once I’ve had a look in that bag.”
“Do you think the oil stain in the snow means it’s Tom Griffin?”
“I’ll definitely have a talk with St. Kawasaki.”
“But you don’t really want it to be him, do you?”
Cork glanced at her. Her face ran with sweat. Her red hair clung to her flushed cheeks.
“You want it to be Sandy Parrant,” she said.
“Yes,” Cork admitted. “I want it to be Parrant.”
“I’m worried,” she told him, and touched his shoulder. “I wonder what knowing the kinds of secrets that are in that bag might do to a person. Not just you. Anyone. I wonder if Wally Schanno didn’t have the right idea.”
“Schanno destroyed evidence,” Cork said.
“And maybe he saved a lot of good people needless pain.”
“Was that his motive?” Cork asked her pointedly. “Look, I don’t know how to get to the truth without going through that bag. If you have a better idea, I’m willing to listen.”
Molly stared into the grating of the stove, where the fire blazed with a searing red-orange flame.
“You see?” Cork said.
“Where’s the bag?” Molly asked.
“Hidden.”
“Here?”
“In the woodbox. It was just a precaution. Probably not even necessary. Even so, I don’t want to stay here with it. After I’ve had a chance to look through it, I’ll take that bag somewhere else.”
“No,” Molly said. “If you’re off somewhere in the night, I’ll worry. As long as we’re together, I’m not afraid for you.”
He listened to the crackle of the fire as it heated the stove, the rocks, the air all around him. He glanced at Molly. It was weak of him, he knew, but he didn’t want to leave.
“All right,” he agreed. “As long as we’re together.”
She leaned to him and kissed him. “Time to cool off. I cleared the hole in the ice. The water will feel wonderful. Here.” She handed him socks she’d laid out earlier so that his wet feet wouldn’t stick to the ice.
They ran together out of the sauna. The deck was slippery with ice, and Cork had to catch himself on the railing to keep from falling. Molly ran ahead, surefooted and graceful, and dropped into the hole with a frigid splash. She came up quickly and Cork helped her out.
“Your turn.” She laughed, steaming in the moonlight.
34
The blood from Jack the Ripper’s carcass was no longer frozen on the bag. It had thawed, making an unpleasant mess of the canvas. Molly eyed the bag grimly as Cork lifted it from the woodbox and carried it to the kitchen.
“Here,” she said. She took some newspapers from a stack by the kitchen door and laid them out on the floor.
Cork set the messy canvas on the papers, opened it, and took out the plastic bag inside.
“Can I get rid of that?” Molly asked nodding at the canvas.
“I’ll toss it,” Cork said.
He carried the canvas bag wrapped in newspaper outside to the garbage bin, a lidded wooden crate that held two metal garbage cans. There was a latch on the crate lid to discourage raccoons. Cork dropped the bloody canvas into one of the cans and returned to the kitchen.
“Want some help?” Molly asked without enthusiasm.
“Do you really want to?”
“No. Do you mind?”
Cork was almost certain the truth was there among the contents in the plastic bag. Or at least the guideposts that would lead him to the truth. But Molly was probably right. There was sure to be more in the bag than he needed to know, than anyone needed to know.
“I’d best do it alone,” he answered.
“I’ll make you some coffee.” And she did. Then she walked to him and kissed the top of his head where his hair was thinning. “I’ll be upstairs in bed if you need me. Should I wait up?”
He shook his head. “This will take a while.”
She stood at his back, her arms around his neck. “I’ve never told you, Cork, but I love you.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She went through the kitchen door, and Cork heard her creak up the old stairs.
When Cork was a boy and still believed in God and the Church and heaven, the ringing of the morning Angelus had always had a strange effect on him. It was a sound that filled him with hope, no matter what his mood. Molly’s words-“I love you”-had the same effect, dropping hope into a hopeless place. Cork wanted to hold to the feeling, to believe in the possibility of some other greater power that would make all things right.
But he looked down at the black jumble of negatives bound up in plastic, and he knew it was never so simple.
Onto Molly’s kitchen table, he dumped the contents of the bag, a mess of dozens of strips of black-and-white negatives mixed with several audiocassette tapes. He checked the tapes first. Each was identified only by number, nothing else. He took a strip of negatives at random, lifted it toward the ceiling light, and saw immediately that unraveling any secrets they held would be far more difficult than he’d expected. Looking at a print was simple. A print was a reflection, more or less, of what the eye naturally saw. Trying to decipher the inverted lighting of a negative in which shadow is light and light is shadow was going to be no easy task. The small size of the negative was another stumbling block.
Cork squinted at the images on the strip in his hand. The first photograph, like the one of Jo and Parrant, had been shot at night. Lytton seemed fond of night shots, of using the night vision lens, an apparatus that could magnify small sources of light hundreds of times to illuminate night images. But then, night was the best time for activities people preferred kept secret. The photograph appeared to have been shot from a distance. Several people sat around a table in a room that looked to be on the upper floor of a building. A telescopic lens brought the next photos much closer. The room itself had a picture on the wall, much too small for Cork to make out details, and a bookcase. But that was really all he could tell. He turned the strip over, hoping that a reversed view might help. It didn’t. Who they were, where they were, and why Harlan Lytton saw fit to capture them on film remained a mystery.
It was clear to him that he would need to enlarge the image. He looked in the drawers of Molly’s kitchen for a magnifying glass, but found nothing. He trudged upstairs, where Molly lay reading in bed. She took off her glasses and gave him a smile.
“Done so soon? Or is it just that you couldn’t resist the temptation of my bed?”
“No and yes,” Cork said, crossing to her. “No, not done by a long sight, and yes, the temptation of your bed is mighty.” He sat beside her, leaned where she lay propped on her pillow, and kissed her. “I need something that will magnify the negatives. Do you have a magnifying glass or a loupe hidden away somewhere?”