The day held still. Iron Lake was a calm blue reflection of the beautiful blue face of the sky. Cork looked across the big field that separated the lake from the town. Young wild grass grew calf high, and violets and pussytoes stood ready to bloom. A quiet, almost weightless sadness lay in his heart, because he knew that, despite the honest assurances of Hugh Parmer and the man’s best intentions, everything he was looking at was about to change. Change was the destiny of all things, living or not. The best anyone could hope for was to have a strong hand in shaping what came next. Cork believed that was what he’d done. And believing made it easier to put recrimination behind him and make peace with what was inevitable.
His house, when he arrived, was empty. Not even Trixie was there to disturb the tranquillity. Stephen must have taken her with him, something he often did when he headed out. These days they were nearly inseparable. Cork took a cold bottle of Leinenkugel’s from the refrigerator and went to the living room. He popped the tape into the VCR, sat down with his beer, and watched a good portion of what the security camera had caught.
If he hadn’t been looking for something suspicious, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the small details the women had pointed out: the man who was supposed to be Sandy Bodine, a southpaw, occasionally using his right hand and doing so with comfortable ease; the fact that the brim of his ball cap was pulled low, so that whenever he turned in the camera’s direction much of his face was obscured; the effusive way he engaged the other patrons, buying rounds, making himself a presence, which, according to Becca Bodine, was not at all how her husband behaved. Individually, they were not big things, but taken together they were significant enough to make Cork uncomfortable. Another thing he pondered was why would a pilot do so publicly a thing that was so clearly at odds with flight regulations? As Cork watched, he wondered about other details. What brand of cigarette was the man at the bar smoking and was it the same brand Bodine smoked? How tall was the man and how tall was Bodine? The man in the video wore cowboy boots. Did Bodine?
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 in
vestigator, 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?
TWENTY-ONE
When Cork pulled off I-35 in Duluth and drove through the Canal Park district the next day, the sun was directly above him, glaring down from between sheets of starch-white cloud. He headed past Grandma’s Saloon, across the Lift Bridge, and onto Park Point. Half a mile farther, he pulled into the driveway of the home that belonged to Liz Burns. It was a nice piece of property, a two-story of modern design with an unobstructed view of the vast, frigid blue that was Lake Superior. He parked his old Bronco behind a red Taurus with Wisconsin plates and stepped out into a stiff, cold wind that swept off the lake. He reached back inside for his jacket.
Burns greeted him at the door. She was wearing a maroon sweater, tight white slacks, and a tentative smile. “Thank you for coming, Cork.”
Inside, the house was expensively furnished, mostly in shades of white set off with blue curtains that were the color of Lake Superior on a good day. Becca Bodine sat in a white, overstuffed chair. She held a glass full of a dark liquid cubed with ice. She eyed Cork warily as he entered the room, which Cork thought was good. In the business on which they were about to embark, caution would be an absolute necessity.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Burns asked from behind him.
“No, thanks.”
Burns sat on the sofa. Cork took a wing chair to her left. Becca Bodine set her glass on a coaster on the coffee table. The tabletop was glass. On a shelf visible beneath was a large book with a lovely cover photo of the Aerial Lift Bridge and Park Point. The book was titled Duluth: Gem of the Freshwater Sea. Cork laid the videotape from the Casper bar on the tabletop next to Becca Bodine’s drink.
“I stand by what I said yesterday,” he began. “Everything suspicious you saw on this tape could be the result of wanting to see something suspicious. I can’t imagine it would be convincing to anyone else.”
“So why are you here?” the Bodine woman said.
“Because I made some phone calls to colleagues in my line who know your investigator, Steve Stilwell. They told me he’s not the kind of guy to go on a bender and leave a client high and dry. According to them, he’s not the kind of guy to go on a bender, period.”
“I tried to tell you that yesterday,” Burns said.
“How good an investigator would I be if I just took your word? But there’s another reason I’m here. I saw something on the videotape that you didn’t, something that can’t be explained away.”
“And what’s that?” Burns asked.
“The man at the bar doesn’t drink.”
“What are you talking about? We’ve seen the tape. He drinks like a fish.”
“He does a good job of making it seem that way. But if you look closely, you can see that he pours the drink inside his shirt. You have a VCR handy?”
“In the den.”
“Let’s go have a look.”
He followed Burns and Becca Bodine into another beautifully done room. A flat-screen television took up much of one wall. Beneath it, housed in a mahogany cabinet, was a VCR-DVD player. Burns turned on the screen, popped the tape into the player, and joined the others standing a dozen feet from the enormous screen. She pressed buttons on the remote, and the by now familiar jerky black-and-white image appeared, much enlarged. They stood in the quiet of the den, watching the silent movements of the man purported to be Sandy Bodine.
“May I have the remote?” Cork asked.
“Sure.” Burns handed it over.
Cork fast-forwarded. “It takes a while before he gets careless and the camera catches what he’s up to. Here.” The bartender had just brought him another round and turned away. As the man at the bar bent to drink, Cork used the remote to slow the action. “Watch carefully,” he said.
The man brought the glass gradually to his lips, then tilted it a split second before it connected. The glass emptied, but clearly not into his mouth.
“Oh, God,” Burns said, and a huge smile broke across her face. “Oh, sweet God.”
“Where is it going?” Becca Bodine asked.
“Could be something as simple as a hot water bottle that he’s taped to his chest,” Cork replied. “Though it’s probably a little more sophisticated than that. He leaves to go to the men’s room several times during the video. It could be that he uses the opportunity to empty what he’s collected.”
“Why?” asked Bodine.
“Because he wants to appear drunk without being drunk.”
“But the taxi driver had to pull over so this guy could puke,” Burns said.
Cork shrugged. “Finger down his throat.”
“He wants to appear drunk without being drunk,” Becca said. She frowned, thinking. “So he’d be in good shape to fly the plane the next
day?”
“While having given the impression that he was in no shape to be piloting,” Cork finished for her.
“Which brings us back to Becca’s question,” Burns said. “Why?”
“Mind if we go back into the other room?” Cork said. “This could take a while to sort out.”
Burns ejected the tape and they returned to the living room. Outside, the wind had picked up, and through the long dining room windows, Cork saw the waves of Lake Superior breaking blue-white and furious along the yellow beach.
“I could use a beer,” Burns said. “Anyone else?”
“I’ll have one,” Cork said.
“I keep a nice variety on hand.”
“Leinie’s?”
“Coming up. More Pepsi, Becca?”
“No, thanks.”
Burns vanished into the kitchen, and Cork heard a refrigerator door open and close. He turned his attention to Becca Bodine, who was staring toward the long windows and the whitecaps of the lake beyond.
“You never doubted him?” Cork said.
Her face was Ojibwe—skin the color of wet sand, high cheeks, a broad nose, eyes like dark almonds. Those eyes drifted toward him, and she looked troubled for a moment, then confessed, “All the time. But I knew that was my weakness. I knew that if it was the other way around, Sandy would have believed in me no matter what the evidence.”
Burns returned with two opened bottles, and they sat down again. For a moment, they drank quietly and Cork could hear the wind pressing against the house. One of the starch-white clouds blew across the sun, and the light through the windows turned gray and all the white in the house looked sullied.
“Why?” Burns said.
Cork cradled his beer in both hands. The bottle was like ice. “I’ve been thinking about that all night. The possibilities are just about endless, so we need to narrow things down. Did Stilwell give you any report on the progress of his investigation?”
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