Blood Hollow

22

Cork left his Bronco parked in front of the Soderberg house and walked the quarter mile up North Point Road to the old Parrant estate, a huge thumbnail-shaped plot of land at the end of the peninsula, surrounded by cedars. Cork lingered on the drive, which was lined with peonies, and he took a good long look at the imposing house. An undeniable power emanated from all that dark stone, but it seemed to Cork a joyless energy, with anger at its heart. He thought about Judge Robert Parrant and his son. The father a brutal man, the son even worse. Violence, betrayal, death, these had been their lives and their legacy. Fletcher Kane and his family had fared no better. Charlotte was dead, and no sooner had she been buried than Glory took a powder, vanished without a clue. Cork understood. He’d probably have fled that doomed house, too.

His knock wasn’t answered immediately. He waited in the deep porch shade, listening to noisy crows that had established a small rookery in the cedars down toward the lake. The door was opened a minute later by Olga Swenson, the housekeeper.

“Afternoon, Olga,” Cork said. “Is Fletcher in?”

Olga Swenson wasn’t a cheerful Swede. Before Kane hired her, she’d been a waitress and part-time cook at the Pinewood Broiler. Her dour nature had probably kept the tips minimal, which may have explained why she’d gone to work for a man like Kane. She seemed just about as thrilled to see Cork at the door as she’d been to see him park his butt on a stool at the Broiler.

“Yah.”

“Could I speak with him?”

She appeared to view this as a burdensome request, but she stepped aside and let him into the foyer. “I’ll get Dr. Kane.”

She walked down the hall toward the room Cork knew was a study. She knocked, opened the door, then came back.

“He’s not there.”

“Upstairs, maybe?”

She scowled, turned, and climbed the steps as if mounting a gallows.

“Mind if I sit down while I wait?” he called.

Without a word, she lifted her hand and waved him in.

He wandered into the living room. He was about to sit on the sofa when a photograph on a bookshelf caught his eye. He walked over and took a look. It was of Glory and a young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen. They were standing in the desert with a big pipe cactus behind them. Glory had been wearing a straw hat, which she held in her hand so that her face would be clear in the shot. The girl wore a baseball cap that shaded her features. Even so, it was clear that she had a large gauze bandage over the left side of her face, and that she stared unhappily at the camera. She looked vaguely familiar to Cork, but he couldn’t quite place her. He took the photo down to study it more closely.

“He must’ve gone down to the boathouse.”

Cork turned quickly. Olga Swenson had come downstairs quietly and was eyeing him as if he were a thief.

“I was just looking at the picture.”

The housekeeper’s expression softened just a little. “It used to be in Charlotte’s bedroom. That room’s closed all the time now. It seemed kind of lost there, so I brought it down. I don’t even think Dr. Kane’s ever noticed.”

“Do you know who this is with Glory?”

“Her daughter.”

“Glory has a daughter?” It was the first Cork had heard.

“Had. I think her name was Maria. They told me she died.” She wiped her hands on her apron and nodded toward the lake.

“Like I said, Dr. Kane’s probably down at the boathouse.”

“Thanks.” Cork put the photograph back on the shelf and walked to the front door.

“I don’t imagine he’ll be thrilled to have company,” Olga said.

“I’ll take my chances.”

After Olga closed the door, Cork stood on the porch a moment thinking about Glory and the daughter she’d lost. Was there a curse on the Kanes, he wondered.

The front of the house was well kept, but the long, sloping back lawn was a different story. The grass was badly in need of cutting, the blades grown tall, ready to seed. Making his way to the boathouse, Cork felt as if he were wading into a deep, green sea.

The view of Iron Lake from the end of the point was one of the best on the whole shoreline. The day was calm and the water hard blue. The only sound was the noise of the crows in the cedars. Fletcher Kane stood on the dock, casting a line into the lake. He was using a fly-fishing rod, casting as if the lake had trout. Iron Lake had trophy walleye and northern, fat black bass that lurked in the weeds, and sunnies and bluegills in the shallows, but it had no trout. Tall and awkward-looking most times, Fletcher Kane seemed a study in grace as he cast the line. His long body moved in some rhythm that beat in his head. Out and back, out and back, his long, mantislike arm cocked and released, and each time the fly at the end of the line touched the water at almost the same spot with no sound, no splash to mark the moment of delicate connection, only a widening circle of ripples that gently warped the blue steel look of the water.

Kane wore khakis and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. A brimmed canvas hat protected his head from the sun. Flies were hooked all around the crown like small, bright jewels. That Fletcher Kane was a fly-fisherman was something Cork hadn’t known. Kane was a murky pool of unknowns, and the only reason Cork had sought him out was to stir things up and see what surfaced.

“Fletcher?”

Kane jerked and the fly at the end of the line popped back, falling far short of its mark.

“I’m sorry,” Cork said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“O’Connor. What do you want?”

“Just to ask a few questions if I could.”

“About what?”

“Charlotte.”

“Your wife sent you?”

“I’m consulting on Solemn Winter Moon’s defense.”

“I don’t have a thing to say to you.”

Kane glanced at the fishing line that lay on the surface of the water like a crack across a blue china plate. He began to reel it in.

“You won’t return Jo’s calls. She’s just wondering if you know how we can get in touch with Glory. We’d like to talk with her.”

“I haven’t heard from her.”

“You have no idea where she is?”

“At this point, you know as much as I do.”

He’d finished cranking in the line. Water dripped from the reel and wet black spots appeared on the boards at Kane’s feet.

“You mind telling me the name of Charlotte’s doctor?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

“Fiona Case.”

“Did Charlotte ever talk about her teachers?”

“Why all these questions about Charlotte?”

“I’m just trying to understand your daughter better, Fletcher. It might help to understand her death. What about her teachers?”

Kane’s jaw worked in a way that sent bony waves along his cheeks. Anger just below the surface. Cork wasn’t sure he would respond.

“Only one that I recall. Her English teacher.”

“Man or woman?”

“A man. I forget his name.”

“What did she say about him?”

“That she liked him.”

“Liked him a lot?”

“She thought he was a good teacher.”

“And she mentioned no one else?”

Kane seemed to have hit the end of his patience. His eyes bugged out, and he spit his words. “What does this have to do with anything? Winter Moon murdered her and that’s all there is to it.”

“You know that for a fact? How?”

“You mean besides all the goddamn evidence? He threatened her before.”

“When?”

“Just before Christmas. He came to the house. They argued. He grabbed her, made threats. I ran him off.”

Cork knew this was Kane’s perception of the incident and that Solemn told a slightly different story.

“Two weeks later, she’s dead.” Kane threw his rod against the side of the boathouse. “I shouldn’t have run him off. I should have killed him.”

“Did they argue often?”

“All the time.”

“You were in the habit of listening in on their conversations?”

Kane took a quick step forward. In height, he towered over Cork. Rage burned in his eyes, the desire to strike. But he didn’t. He balled his hands into fists at his side and said, “Just get the hell out of here. Everything I loved is gone. What more do you want from me?”

It was a question that, at the moment, Cork couldn’t answer.

As he left the boathouse, a wind rose, blowing in from across the lake. Big clouds that had been sleeping in the distance all afternoon suddenly woke up and raced across the sky, their dark blue shadows ghosting off the water onto the land. In the myths of his grandmother’s people, manidoog rode those shadows, spirits of the woods, sometimes playful, sometimes malevolent.

Halfway to the house, Cork paused as a great block of shade engulfed the lawn, turning the deep grass around him the color of a bad bruise. The crows in the line of cedars thirty yards away began to raise a ruckus, and Cork looked to see what the big deal was.

Snakes. Thousands of them. Slithering scales over slithering scales, wave after wave, an angry black sea, smothering the grass under the trees. Crying wildly, the crows took to the safety of the sky. Cork felt his own flesh crawling as he stared at the writhing mass sweeping against and around the cedar trunks. One snake he could tolerate. A whole fucking sea was terrifying.

A shaft of light struck the ground, and Cork looked up where the sun pushed through a split in the cloud. When he glanced back at the cedars, the snakes were gone. The crows were gone. And by then the cloud shadow was gone, too.

Carefully, Cork walked to the place where the snakes had been. He thought the grass might carry some mark of their passage, but the long, upright blades showed no sign of disturbance. He stepped to the cedars. Beyond them was the south shore of the point, all rock and water, facing toward Aurora. There was nowhere for the snakes to have gone except into the lake.

Far down the shoreline, the crows wheeled away like ashes in a wind.