“For what?”
“Holding Darla. Letting me work with Paul.”
“It was hard, but easier on him than the legal system. He’s a fine young man.” The priest took a deep breath. “So, what now?”
“Now I get what I need to put a real son of a bitch in his place.”
“You have something on Parrant?”
“I think I probably do.”
“And you’ll be able to keep all this out of it?”
“Whatever happens, they’re safe,” he said, nodding toward the mission. He opened the door of Wanda Manydeeds’s old truck. “I feel exhausted. Is this what you feel like after hearing a confession?”
“Usually,” St. Kawasaki said, “I feel like a drink.”
41
Molly looked down on the water from a great height. The surface was perfectly blue and so still it looked like a cloudless sky. Lake Tahoe? she wondered. Tahoe was like that. Blue. Still. Cold. Freezing cold. So cold when she swam in it sometimes she hurt all over as if she were being squeezed by a great blue hand.
Like now, she thought suddenly. And she realized she was not above the water, but in it.
She shivered in the grip of that perfectly still water, in the terrible grip of the blue water cold as ice.
The sun burned her eyes. She should look away, she knew. If she looked at the sun too long, she would turn into a sunflower. She’d heard that when she was small from a lady at her father’s cabin. The lady was fat and laughed a lot and gave her Baby Ruth and Oh Henry candy bars and smelled like flowers. Gardenias.
The fat lady pointed a plump finger at her and warned her laughing, you’ll turn into a sunflower. Her father told her different, told her she’d go blind. Her father was probably right. Maybe that’s why her head hurt so much. She was going blind from staring at the sun. He’d told her the truth. About that and many things. Told her she came from bad blood. Told her her mother was a tramp. Told her she would end up one, too. Told her men would be after her like devils, and if she let them have her, she would burn. Was that it? Was that the burning in her head? Was she burning like he said she would? Then why was the rest of her so cold?
She tried to lift her hand, to shield her eyes and block the fire that burned them. But she could not feel her hand, could not tell where it was, if it moved at all.
Am I dying? she wondered. Then why am I not afraid?
Cork’s hands were full of flowers. Brilliant yellow petals around a black center. Sunflowers. He held them gently, held them out as if offering them. He stood on the still blue water with fire at his back, all alone with the sunflowers in his hands. She tried to call to him, but she had no voice. He let the flowers drop one by one onto the water. They landed without a ripple and floated toward her, formed a circle, and the circle was warm. That made her happy. To be warm again. She lay in the warm circle of sunflowers thinking how tired she was and how good it would feel to sleep. To sleep and sleep while she waited for Cork to lie down, too.
She was afraid.
… Did I tell him?…
The fire burned in the blue water around her, in the blue that was all that was left of her vision. The blue and the fire. And then the cloud, black as smoke, moved above her. In the shadow of the black cloud she could see no more.
… Did I tell him…
Yes.
The voice came from the cloud.
Yes, you told me.
… No… not you… did I tell Cork…
Tell him what?
But her eyes were too heavy, and she was too tired to talk. Molly fell back, fell into the dark, into the vast warm dark with one last question trailing her like a broken rope.
… Did I tell Cork… Did I tell him… did I tell him I love him…
42
In the fading blue of the late afternoon light, Cork drove toward Aurora. He felt satisfied in a grim way. Things had fallen into place. Most things anyway. The judge. Lytton. Joe John LeBeau’s incomprehensible abandonment of his family. All these things made sense and, in some way, had been reckoned with. There was, however, still one open loop to the maze of tragic events that had befallen Aurora, and down that last convoluted passage hid Sandy Parrant. Did he know he was being pursued? Cork wondered. If not, he soon would. The canvas bag was his undoing. With the evidence Cork was sure the bloody bag had held, he would nail Parrant’s coffin shut. Bam!
It was going on four o’clock when Cork pulled into the parking lot of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler. He thought he’d surprise Molly with a lift home, but she wasn’t there.
Johnny was hunched at the register, doing some figures with a pencil on the back of a menu. He looked slightly amused when Cork asked about Molly.
“She left two, three hours ago, big hurry. Said she had to go home to clear a space for a Christmas tree. Christmas tree.” Johnny hooted. “No woman hustles that hard for a Christmas tree. It was a guy, I’ll lay you odds.” Johnny paused a moment, set his pencil down, and looked Cork over keenly. A broad grin spread across his face. “Well, knock me over with a feather.”
Cork thanked him and headed toward the door.
“Christmas tree!” Johnny laughed at his back. “O, Tannenbaum,” he called.
As Cork started back to his Bronco, a car braked hard on the street, hard enough to skid, and when he looked up, he saw Jo’s blue Toyota back up, whip into the lot, and slide to a stop a few feet from where he stood. Jo leaped out, drilling him with an angry glare as she came. She glanced at the Pinewood, tugged off her gloves, and seemed for a moment on the verge of giving Cork a hard slap across the face.
“You know, you really had me fooled,” she said bitterly.
“What do you mean?”
“I really believed you were serious about wanting to put things back together.”
“I was.”
“My ass,” she snapped.
“Look, what’s this all about, Jo?”
“Guilt, shame, remorse, you name it, I was feeding on it. What kind of horrible woman was I to have done that kind of thing to such a nice guy like you. Good father. Faithful husband. Oh, you were good.”
Cork leaned against the hood of the Bronco. Jo’s voice was carrying, and people on the sidewalk looked at them in passing.
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I’m talking about you and that slut Molly Nurmi.” She jabbed a finger toward the Pinewood Broiler.
“What?”
“Don’t look surprised. How long’s it been going on, Cork? Hmmm? How long has she been giving you more than coffee at the Broiler?”
Cork took a step away from the Bronco and nearer Jo. The cloud of his breathing broke over her face. “Who told you about Molly?”
“What difference does it make?”
Cork grasped her shoulders. “Who told you?”
“Let go of me or I swear I’ll have you arrested for assault. Don’t think I won’t.” Cork let go and she smoothed her coat where his hands had gripped. “I’m not the only one who was caught with my pants down.”
Cork studied the satisfaction on her face a moment, then understood. “Someone showed you the photographs.”
“Good close shots, Cork. No mistake. A little sauna, a little skinny dip, a little-”
“Who showed you those pictures?”
Jo smiled enigmatically and didn’t reply.
“Was it Sandy Parrant? It was Parrant, wasn’t it?”
“I went to tell him it would be best not to see one another for a while. I was thinking maybe you and I ought to try to work through things, maybe with counseling this time. Foolish me.”
“And he showed you the pictures?”
“Yes!” she threw at him, then shook her head with mock amazement. “You really had me going. You almost had me convinced.”
Cork walked quickly past her toward the Broiler.
“Where are you going? I haven’t finished,” Jo called after him.
Cork pushed through th
e door of the Pinewood and went to the pay phone on the wall. He dug in his pocket for a quarter, but couldn’t find one.
“Johnny,” he called, “loan me a quarter for a phone call.”
Johnny, who was still at the register, popped the cash drawer, slipped out a quarter, and tossed it to Cork. “There’ll be interest.” He laughed.
Jo stepped through the door and stood watching Cork. Johnny took a look at Jo, then at Cork, and said quietly, “Uh-oh.”
Cork dialed Molly’s number. All he got was a busy signal. He slammed the receiver down and hurried out the door.
“My quarter!” Johnny called.
But Cork was outside already, with Jo right behind him.
“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 Mo
lly’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.
“Go on up to the cabin,” Schanno suggested to Cork as the woman’s body was being freed. “Wait for me there. We’ll talk.”
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