“You’re pretty sure she was killed in the boathouse?”
“Like Marsha says, I wouldn’t state that officially, but that’s my current speculation.”
“So killed in her boathouse, taken to the Vermilion One Mine, and sealed up with the other bodies in the drift,” Dross summed up.
“Anybody at the Northern Lights Center hear or see anything?” Cork asked.
“The current residents didn’t arrive until the next day, and all the staff had gone home by then,” Larson said. “The only person who might have heard was a guy named Huff. He’s a long-term resident. But he wasn’t at the center in the time frame we believe the killing took place. He was out drinking and has someone who backs up his story. So basically nobody’s been able to give us anything.”
“I’ll give you something,” Cork said. “Huff was quite comfortable in Lauren Cavanaugh’s private area. You might want to lean on him a little, see what gives.”
“And you know this how?”
“I was there a couple of days ago, talking with Ophelia Stillday. Just an observation I made.”
“All right.” Larson jotted a note in his little book.
Simon Rutledge eyed Cork, and there was an enigmatic expression on his face. He said, “I have a little something to add about the earlier killings. The priest assigned to St. Agnes in those days was accused of masturbating in the confessional. Shortly after that, some women’s panties were found hidden there, stained with semen. The investigating officer apparently didn’t feel the situation was such that the priest should be looked at as a viable suspect in the Vanishings, but the Church yanked the guy.”
“Jesus, where’d you get that information?” Larson asked.
“You said the files had been destroyed, but I knew that one of your retired deputies, Cy Borkman, had been with the department back then, so I talked to him. Then I tracked down the priest. It was basically the same thing Cork did.”
Dross leveled a cold eye on Cork. “You knew about this?”
“Yes.”
“And you were going to tell us when?”
“As soon as I had a few more things worked out.”
“Like what?”
Cork said, “Simon, did the priest tell you about Monique Cavanaugh’s sexual proclivities?”
“Reluctantly.”
“What do you think?”
“If it’s true, she wasn’t exactly Snow White.”
Dross leaned forward, and, even across the room, Cork thought he could feel the heat of her rising anger. “What are you two gentlemen talking about?”
“According to the priest, Monique Cavanaugh propositioned him several times,” Cork replied. “She finally threatened him. And that was followed by an anonymous call to the sheriff’s department that resulted in the aforementioned soiled intimate items coming to light in the confessional.”
“She set the priest up?”
“That’s certainly what he believes.”
“That doesn’t mesh at all with the image everyone has of her,” Larson said.
“You need to press her son a little more on the subject of his mother, Ed. You may discover that he doesn’t consider her Snow White either.”
“Is there anything else you know but haven’t told us?” Dross asked.
“I saw Isaiah Broom today,” Cork replied. “I told him I was pretty sure the unidentified body was his mother.”
“Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?” the sheriff cried. “We haven’t positively ID’d the final remains. If this gets out and you’re wrong…” She took a moment to rein in her anger, and the whole time the smolder of her gaze was directed at Cork. At last she said, “What’s done is done. That’s all for now, gentlemen.”
The normal tourist traffic had swelled with the influx of folks curious about the grisly discovery in the Vermilion Drift, and Sam’s Place was doing a land-office business. Judy Madsen, Jodi Bollendorf, and Kate Buker had the situation under control when Cork checked in. He promised to be there early that night to close and left things in their capable hands.
He returned home, gathered the boxes that contained his mother’s journals, and took them out to the patio in the backyard. Trixie jumped up and ran to greet him. He released her from the tether that held her, and she bounded to the far corner of the yard and snatched a dirty tennis ball in her teeth. Cork threw it a few times, then told her gently he had work to do. He grabbed a cold Leinie’s from the refrigerator, settled into a patio chair, and took out the journal that contained the entries immediately following the missing pages that would have chronicled the time of the Vanishings.
September 17, 1964
Fall is here and everywhere I look I see blood. It’s in the color of the sumac and the maple leaves and the sky at sunset and at dawn. Henry Meloux is helping Hattie and Ellie and Mom and me. Liam walks like a man made of stone, cold and hard. Cork, ever the quiet, watchful child, sees and wonders but does not ask. Thank God.
Does not ask, Cork thought. Well, he was asking now.
He scanned other entries, looking for anything that might be a clue to the missing days.
September 21, 1964
The first day of fall officially. Usually a glorious time, but this year we all mourn. Winter is already in our souls. Liam grows more distant. What has been asked of him is great, and he struggles. He is not one of The People. If he were, he might understand and better accept how things must be. There is friction between us. This I can live with. For now. What hurts is seeing how Liam has distanced himself from Cork as well. He’s short with his son. And the Irish in Cork flares up and he lashes back. They battle these days. Except that Cork has no idea of the true enemy here.
September 29, 1964
Cork has been suspended from school. He got into a fight with another boy. Over what neither of them would say. Liam is furious. Nothing new. He’s angry all the time now. I’ve asked him to talk to Henry Meloux. He refuses. Cork sits in his room, staring a hole through the wall. My heart is breaking.
October 16, 1964
Liam my beloved Liam is dead.
Dear God why?
TWENTY-SIX
In October 1964, the Summer Olympics were held in Tokyo. In that same month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize. The St. Louis Cardinals became World Champions, beating the heavily favored New York Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. China detonated its first nuclear weapon. The Star of India was stolen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Nikita Krushchev was removed as leader of the Soviet Union.
And in October 1964, Cork O’Connor lost his father.
In his memory, his life until then had been happy. But one cool fall day, when the oak leaves were a stunning russet against a startling blue sky, when the cry of migrating Canada geese chorused over Iron Lake, when the evening air was full of the scent of woodsmoke curling from the chimneys of Aurora, everything changed. Changed over the course of a few hours. Changed, in fact, in a single instant. Changed forever with the final beat of his father’s heart.
It had begun with a shoot-out. Cork’s father and a deputy had responded to an alarm at the First Citizen’s Bank, where three inmates who’d escaped from Stillwater Prison were attempting a robbery as they fled toward Canada. During the exchange of gunfire that erupted, a deaf old lady, a cantankerous woman notorious for yelling at children trespassing on her precious lawn, wandered into the line of fire outside the bank. Cork’s father left the cover of the Buick that shielded him to pull the old woman to safety. In those few moments of exposure, a bullet from a stolen deer rifle pierced his heart.