Blood Hollow

19

The first miracle occurred a few days later, on Memorial Day.

Every year on that holiday, weather permitting, the O’Connors had a backyard barbeque. They invited friends and neighbors, and over the coals of a couple of grills, they cooked up hamburgers and hot dogs that they served with Rose’s famous potato salad. Everyone who came brought a dish to share. Cork nestled beer and pop in a half-barrel full of ice, and the kids made lemonade from real lemons. The piece de resistance was a tub of vanilla ice cream handmade in an oak bucket filled with ice and rock salt, and everyone had to take a turn at the crank.

Memorial Day weekend was a big one for tourists. Cork could have made a tidy profit keeping Sam’s Place open, but for him family came first. If he was going to flip burgers, he’d just as soon do it in the company of people he loved for people he cared about.

Rose was late. She had planned to come early with Father Mal so that she could help the rest of the O’Connor clan get everything ready. When she hadn’t arrived by one, Jo called the rectory. The phone rang half a dozen times before Father Kelsey picked up. He’d been invited, as always, but Father Kelsey seldom left the rectory anymore. He preferred the comfort of his easy chair in front of the television.

The priest said that Rose and Father Mal had left some time ago after Mal got a phone call. Something odd at the cemetery. Father Kelsey didn’t know what kind of oddness, or why anyone would call out the priest, or what made Rose feel she needed to accompany him.

Cork was about to start the coals when Jo reported all this to him and asked if he’d mind popping over to the cemetery to check things out. As Cork headed toward his Bronco, Stevie ran to him begging to go along.

Lakeview Cemetery occupied the crown of a big hill at the southern end of town. The site was surrounded by a black wrought iron fence, built tall so that deer couldn’t jump it to feed on the flowers inside. Because this was Memorial Day, Cork expected to see a number of people there, paying their respects to loved ones who existed now only in memory, but he was surprised to find the cemetery looking nearly deserted.

Gus Finlayson, the cemetery groundskeeper, stood smoking a pipe under a burr oak tree just inside the gate. Cork stopped. “Where is everybody?”

“Way to the other side,” Gus said. “You ain’t heard?”

“What?”

“Best go on and see for yourself.”

Cork drove ahead, threading his way down the narrow lanes between the rows of gravestones. He soon saw the place, dozens of cars parked on a hillside at the distant end of the cemetery. As Cork approached, Stevie stuck his head out the window.

“It smells pretty,” he said.

And it did. The air was redolent with the scent of roses.

Cork parked behind Mal Thorne’s Nova. Just ahead of that was a sheriff’s department Crown Victoria. Randy Gooding stood next to the cruiser, his arms crossed. Mal and Rose were with him.

“What’s up?” Cork said.

Gooding nodded down the hillside where a crowd had gathered. “Check it out.”

Cork glanced at Mal, who looked a little mystified. Rose glowed and seemed about to speak, but she held herself back.

Cork descended the hill with Stevie at his side. A quiet murmur came from the gathering. In the gaps between people, Cork glimpsed deep red, like a pool of blood, at the center of things. He found an open space and moved in. It was not blood but rose petals, thousands of them, a foot deep over the grave and covering the grass around it in a circle several yards wide.

Then he looked at the gravestone.

Fletcher Kane had paid a pretty penny for the stone that marked his daughter’s grave, bought her a white marble obelisk six feet tall. Carved in relief above Charlotte’s name was a beautiful angel with eyes cast toward heaven.

“Look, Dad,” Stevie said. “The angel is bleeding.”

Not exactly bleeding, Cork thought. Weeping. Tears of blood, it seemed, dark red trickles that ran glistening from the angel’s eyes all the way down the white face of the stone into the petals that lay deep around the base.

A few of the crowd were on their knees, praying. Most of the others simply stared at the weeping angel with a quiet reverence. Cork turned away and walked back up the hill.

“Where did the petals come from?” he asked.

Gooding shrugged. “The question of the day.”

“It’s like they fell from the sky.” Rose lifted her hands, as if to catch any petals that might yet flutter down. “And the angel, Cork. Did you see the tears?”

“I’d take a sample of those tears, if I were you,” Cork said to Gooding.

“I already have. Over great objection from the true believers down there.”

The priest gave Cork a dazzling smile. “Don’t you feel it? Something absolutely amazing has happened here.”

“Amazing all right,” Cork said. “Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble. Did Gus Finlayson see anything?”

Gooding shook his head. “It was like this when he opened the gate this morning. Says there was nothing last night when he locked up.”

“Does Arne know?”

Gooding said, “Sheriff’s over in Hibbing, spending the day with Big Mike and the rest of his family. I didn’t see any reason to haul him back here for this. No harm done, so far as I can see. I’m guessing at some point somebody will come forward and we’ll find out it was just some kind of extravagant gesture.”

“No one will,” Rose said. There was a look in her eyes that was a little like madness. Cork wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her so happy.

Stevie climbed back up the hill, cradling something in the palm of his hand. “They look like red teardrops,” he said of the three delicate petals he held. “Can I keep them?”

“I think it would be all right,” Cork said. “Let’s get on home, buddy. Your mom will be wondering.” He turned to Rose and Mal. “You guys coming?”

“We’ll be along,” Rose said in a dreamy voice.

The girls, when they heard, had to see for themselves. They came back with Rose and Mal Thorne, excited and mystified. Then Jo had to go, too.

In a day that was normally filled with talk about baseball and fishing and gardens and remembrances of the past, most conversations centered on what had quickly been dubbed “the angel of the roses.”

It was dusk before the gathering in the O’Connors’ backyard broke up and people drifted home. Rose and Mal Thorne lingered, sitting across from each other at the picnic table, talking in quiet tones. Mal sipped from a can of Leinenkugel, Rose from a coffee mug. Jenny and Stevie were finishing a game of croquet. Annie was devouring the last hot dog. Cork stood just inside the sliding back door, watching the scene in his yard. Jo came from the kitchen, put her arm around him.

“Annie’s still eating?” she said.

“She’s a growing girl, an athlete. And she does like to eat. She told me she wants to be a professional sin eater when she grows up.”

“A what?”

“A sin eater. It’s something Mal told her about. Back in the Middle Ages, rich people hired poor folk to feast over the bodies of their dead loved ones. Basically a ritual eating of sins so the rich would go to heaven.”

“And the poor people?”

“Fat and damned, I guess.” He saw Jo’s look of concern. “Relax. She was only joking.”

“A grotesque joke. Why would Father Mal tell her such a bizarre story?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

With a small frown, Jo regarded her sister and the priest.

“What is it?” Cork asked.

Mal leaned across the picnic table and said something. Rose laughed and lightly touched his hand.

“She’s in love with him.”

“Rose? With Mal?”

Jo nodded.

“She told you?”

“She didn’t have to.”

Cork could see it now. A comfortable intimacy between the two of them. Almost like a married couple. In truth, the revelation didn’t surprise him much. He thought back and realized that he’d noted the signs but simply hadn’t put them all together. Jo, of course, had been way ahead of him on that.

“Do you think Mal knows?”

“I don’t know. Men can be so blind. Maybe a priest even more so.”

“What are you going to do?”

“It’s her life.”

“You’re not going to talk to her?”

“If she wants to talk to me, she will.”

“Nothing we can do?”

“Be there for her when she needs us.”

“I’m sorry, Jo.” He put his arms around her. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I slip out for a while?”

“Where?”

“I want another look at the angel of the roses.”

Gus Finlayson was preparing to lock the gate when Cork arrived at the cemetery.

“Hold on dere, Cork,” the old Finn shouted, waving the Bronco down.

“Five minutes, Gus, that’s all I need.”

Gus leaned in the window and shook his head. “Been a hell of a long day, that’s for sure, and it ain’t gonna get any longer if I got anything to say about it.”

“Everybody cleared out?”

“ ’Cept the sheriff. He’s still out dere.”

“At Charlotte’s grave?”

“Yah.”

“If you lock the gate, how’s he going to get out?”

“He’s got a key. The department copy.”

Cork had forgotten. Not surprising. He couldn’t remember ever having cause to use it himself when he’d been sheriff.

The cemetery was going dark at Finlayson’s back. The rows of stone markers, rigid and charcoal colored, reminded Cork of a military brigade standing watch over the dead.

“How about letting me in and I’ll come out with him?”

Finlayson puffed out his cheeks but gave in easily. “I’d argue, but I’m too pooped. Pull on in. Sheriff’s somewhere over to the other side of the cemetery.”

“Thanks, Gus.”

As he approached Charlotte’s grave the smell of the rose petals was astonishing, the fragrance both pleasing and overpowering. Mal Thorne had asked him earlier, didn’t he feel it? Didn’t he feel that something remarkable had occurred? He wasn’t entirely sure what he felt, but what he thought was that the hands that had created this event were made of flesh and blood, and sooner or later the mind behind it, and the motive, would reveal itself.

Soderberg’s BMW sat under a linden tree. The sheriff was nowhere in sight. Cork parked in the middle of the lane, blocking traffic if there’d been any. He got out and stood awhile, taking in the hillside and Iron Lake in the distance. The sky was the color of an old nickel, and everything under it lay in a dim light that was not day nor yet night. Everything around Cork was absolutely still. He had the feeling he was looking at an underexposed black-and-white photograph, one that didn’t give away what the photographer had intended to capture.

Then he saw the flare of a match reflected off the shiny marble pillar thirty yards down the hill.

Soderberg drew meditatively on his cigarette and didn’t turn at Cork’s approach. When Cork spoke his name, the sheriff jumped, a cloud of smoke shot from his mouth, and he dropped his cigarette. The ember exploded in a small burst of sparks in the grass at his feet.

“Jesus Christ, O’Connor.”

“Sorry, Arne.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Same as you, I imagine. Trying to understand the angel of the roses. Thought you were in Hibbing.”

“I was until I heard about this.” Soderberg picked up his cigarette. There was still enough glow to the ember to salvage a smoke if he’d wanted. Apparently he didn’t. He just held the cigarette in his fingers. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out,” he said.

“You have a theory?”

Soderberg looked the graves over and nodded to himself. “The Ojibwe.”

Cork almost laughed. “What are you talking about?”

“Winter Moon claims he talked with Jesus. He gets his Indian friends to do this. Big miracle.” Soderberg waved his hands in a gesture of magic. “Poof, everyone believes he’s pure and blessed and how could they ever convict him of murder? You realize what all the roses for these petals must have cost? The casino brings in that kind of money. Hell, it’s pocket change to those people.”

“Show me the receipt, Arne,” Cork said. Although he had to admit it might be a plausible theory, if you thought the Iron Lake Ojibwe gave a hoot and a holler about Solemn Winter Moon.

Soderberg lifted his foot and snuffed out the cigarette against his sole. Rather than toss the butt out among the petals, he put it in his pocket and turned uphill toward his car.

“I need to follow you out, Arne.”

“Hurry up then.” Soderberg started walking.

Cork took a last look at the scene around him. The light was almost gone, but there was enough left so that he could clearly see the eyes of the angel. For a moment, he could have sworn that the angel looked right back at him.