“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Parrant knows about me and Molly. I’ve got to get out there before he does.” Cork broke into a run.
“Why?” Jo slipped on a patch of ice, caught herself, and rushed to catch up. “What would he want with her?”
“Not her. What she has.”
Cork jumped into the Bronco. Jo got into the passenger side.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Cork growled.
“I want to make sure it’s not Sandy you’re after. I don’t want you doing anything stupid.”
“Hold on,” Cork said, too worried about Molly to argue.
He shot the Bronco in reverse, nearly sliding into the Dumpster in back of the Broiler. Then he skidded onto the street and headed toward Molly’s.
On the way, he told Jo everything he knew. About the judge and Lytton and Joe John’s murder. About GameTech and the brigade. He told her his suspicions about Sandy Parrant. Jo sat with her arms crossed, looking out the window as if she weren’t hearing a thing.
“It’s lies,” she said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
He pulled out the prints of Lytton and Joe John LeBeau and gave them to her. Jo looked at them one by one.
“Christ,” she said. Then, “He didn’t know anything about it.”
Cork turned into the lane to Molly’s place.
“This would never stand up in court,” she insisted. “It doesn’t prove anything about Sandy.”
“Come on, Jo, how could he not have known?”
He stopped in Molly’s yard and saw her skis propped by the back door. It was growing dark, yet there was no light on in the big cabin. Cork ran to the back door and into the kitchen.
“Molly!” he called toward the stairs.
He lifted the lid on the woodbox, yanked out the top logs, and saw that the bag of negatives was no longer there. He ran to the stairs and bounded up them calling, “Molly!” as he went.
She wasn’t upstairs. When Cork hurried down, he found Jo standing in the kitchen looking irritated. “Well?” she said.
“Something’s wrong. She should be here. Somewhere.”
Cork pushed past Jo and rushed outside to the shed where Molly kept her old Saab. The Saab was still there.
“See?” Jo said. “No one. Not your precious Molly. Not Sandy. Just no one.”
“The bag’s gone,” Cork said darkly.
“What bag?”
“It had negatives of photographs like the ones I showed you and Sandy showed you. Pictures the judge used for blackmail.”
“If there is such a bag, maybe Molly took it,” Jo said. “Maybe she had reason.”
“It wasn’t Molly.”
He looked toward the sauna by the frozen lake. Jo grabbed his arm.
“Cork, you can’t spread these vicious lies about Sandy. Not now, just as he’s about to head to Washington. If you do, if you say one word that casts a shadow over his going, I swear to God I’ll help him slap a slander suit on you so fast your head’ll swim.”
Cork pulled loose and started for the sauna. Jo was at his heels.
“Is this about us?” she said, nearly shouting. “Do you want to hurt Sandy because of me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Cork replied. “And what makes you think Parrant’s so goddamned innocent?”
“Because I’d know,” Jo told him earnestly. “He couldn’t lie to me.”
“Jesus, Jo, after everything we’ve been through you believe that? People lie all the time and they do a pretty damn good job of it.”
“Not Sandy.”
“Fuck Sandy,” Cork said, and broke into a run.
He pushed open the door to the changing room of the sauna. It was nearly dark inside, but Cork could see clothing piled neatly on a bench. He lifted the sweater, checking its color, wondering with a note of desperation, was this what Molly had worn this morning? He shoved through the door into the sauna that was still warm. He waited a minute for his eyes to adjust to the deeper dark inside the windowless room, and he confirmed that Molly wasn’t there. He stood a moment trying to figure. Where could she be? Had she run? Been taken?
“I’m tired of this, Cork,” Jo said from the changing room. “I want to go home. You can come back and wait for your girlfriend without me.”
Cork looked at the other door, the closed door that opened onto the lake.
“Face the facts, Cork. You’re just trying to hurt Sandy because he hurt you. All these accusations-”
“Are true,” Cork said.
He reached for the door.
“Then prove them, goddamn it. Show me the proof.”
Cork opened the door. Framed in the threshold lay the snow-covered lake, a pale, peaceful blue in the twilight. A sky, pure as springwater, ran above it to the far shoreline. Ten yards from the door was the hole in the ice that Molly and Cork had dipped in when they’d finished their sauna the night before. And between that hole and the door where Cork dumbly stood, Molly lay naked on the ice.
His legs would not move. They barely held him up. His throat went dry and he couldn’t swallow, could hardly even breathe. Yet his senses took in everything about her. Her eyes were open and the look on her face was calm. Her white skin had gone blue, nearly the same soft color the twilight gave the snow. Her long red hair stuck to her shoulders and to the ice, the matted strands stiff as broom straw. Her right arm was outstretched, her hand fisted as if it held to something fiercely.
He felt as if he’d stood there forever, though in truth it was but a moment. Jo whispered behind him, “Oh, God, Cork.”
He moved then, moved although he knew with a cold, empty certainty that it was useless. He knelt at her side, felt at her throat for a pulse in her carotid artery. Her skin was encased in a thin sheathing of ice and seemed almost brittle to his fingertips. He finally took his hand away and looked at Jo.
“Call the sheriff’s office,” he said quietly.
Jo backed away and turned without a word toward the cabin.
“And bring a blanket,” he asked her.
He tried to lift Molly’s head, to cradle her in his lap, but her hair, frozen solid, held her prisoner to the ice.
“The phone’s not working.”
Jo handed him the blanket.
He covered Molly, except her face. Then he dug into his pocket and brought out the keys to the Bronco.
“Find a phone,” he said.
She took the keys but didn’t move.
“Cork.” She touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
She stepped back, turned, and left. Cork heard the Bronco start up, the gears grind as Jo struggled to find reverse, then she was gone and he was alone with Molly.
The sun had fallen behind the trees, and an orange glow, as if from a distant fire, spread out from the west across the whole sky. The evening star glimmered brilliantly above the dark eastern horizon. Not a sound, not even the faintest breath of wind disturbed the silence.
Molly’s gray-green eyes looked to the sky and Cork looked there, too, into a distance no man could measure.
“Please, God,” he whispered, praying for the first time in years, “take care of her.”
He bent his head and he wept, and although he didn’t see, where the tears fell onto Molly’s soft blue cheek, for just a moment, the ice there melted.
43
Wally Schanno looked about as bad as Jo had ever seen a man look. Hobbling on his crutches, a grimace of pain at every step, he made his way up from the lake to Molly Nurmi’s cabin. The whole way he kept a few yards behind the men who bore the covered stretcher to the ambulance. Although he was a tall man and not particularly old, he seemed small and ancient, bent under the weight of the work of that evening.
In contrast, Cork was like some hard piece of wood, carved into the shape of a man. Nothing showed on his face. He sat at the table in Molly Nurmi’s kitchen and he had not moved since he’d placed himself there shortly after the sheriff’s arrival. Jo had fixed coffee, fumbling in the kitchen cabinets and drawers for filters and a coffee tin and measuring spoon. Cork hadn’t said a word. He’d barely spoken at all in response to the questioning of Captain Ed Larson, into whose hands Schanno had placed the investigation, while he leaned on his crutches and listened. Sigurd Nelson came, waddling down to the ice in his heavy coat, voicing his displeasure at having to be called yet again to do the work of his elected-and underpaid-office. Under the spotlights Schanno’s people had set up, Sigurd pointed out the blue lips, as in carbon monoxide poisoning, the effect of prolonged decreased oxygen flow in hypothermia. The limbs were rigid as well, and the skin hard as ice from deep frostbite, all definite indications of death by hypothermia. She probably fell on her way from the sauna, he speculated, hit her head on the ice, and froze to death. Jo waited, expecting Cork to scream out his protest, to alter that hasty judgment, but he didn’t say a thing as Molly Nurmi’s body was worked loose from the ice, warm water carefully used to melt the link between her frozen skin and the frozen lake water. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle. Nothing to indicate anything other than what it appeared to be-a terrible, terrible accident.