Blood Hollow

29

Late that afternoon at Sam’s Place, Jenny said, “Dad?”

Cork was scraping the griddle. “Yeah?”

“Dad?”

He heard this time how queer her voice was and he turned. Business had been slow. Jenny sat on the stool at the serving window with her headphones on, listening to a CD by a group called Garbage. Cork followed her fearful gaze.

In the parking lot stood Fletcher Kane, staring darkly at Jenny.

“I’ll be right back, honey,” Cork said.

He took off his apron and went outside.

Kane was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He reminded Cork of an undertaker. In the heat, sweat trickled down his temples. His eyes stayed locked on Jenny behind the window.

“What is it, Fletcher?” Cork asked, not kindly.

“What if she were dead?”

“What?”

“Your daughter. What if she were dead?”

“What do you want?”

“You have no idea, do you, how that would feel?”

“Is that a threat?”

Kane finally looked at Cork. “They let him out.”

“Solemn? Yes.”

“He’s not at his mother’s.”

A boat came up to the dock. The engine whined like a huge insect, sputtered, then died. The silence after seemed heavy.

“Why would you care?” Cork said.

“I want to know where he is.”

“You think I’m going to tell you?”

Kane reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a checkbook and a Montblanc fountain pen. He unscrewed the cap of the pen and opened the checkbook.

“How much?”

“Are you serious?”

Kane held the checkbook in the palm of his left hand. With his right, he wrote out a check and handed it to Cork.

Twenty thousand dollars.

“Go home, Fletcher.” Cork tore up the check.

Kane watched the torn pieces flutter to the gravel, then looked toward Jenny. “No idea,” he said, and walked back to his car.

Cork went into Sam’s Place and called the sheriff’s office, asked for Gooding. After he explained the episode with Kane, he said, “Randy, he’s right at the edge of something.”

Gooding breathed deeply on the other end. “I’ll have a talk with him. I’m not sure what else we can do. He hasn’t broken any law that you know of, has he?”

“Not yet.”

“You know how it is, Cork.”

“Yeah, I know.”

It was dark when Cork finally locked the door of Sam’s Place and headed to his Bronco with the day’s take in hand.

He went to First National of Aurora and completed the night deposit. As he prepared to head out of the bank lot onto Center Street, Fletcher Kane’s silver El Dorado cruised passed. Cork waited a moment, then eased onto the street a couple of cars behind him.

It was a warm summer night. The traffic was primarily young people, teenagers mostly, cruising toward the Broiler, which stayed open until midnight, or to the new Perkins, which was open twenty-four hours. They’d sit in booths, drink coffee or Cokes, smoke cigarettes, and talk of things that mattered to them now. Jenny and her boyfriend would be out there somewhere, in the midnight blue ’76 Camaro that Sean had bought as a junker and had brought back to life. For Jenny, the things that mattered would be books; for Sean, in that season, it would be baseball.

Cork had been young once, in Aurora. He remembered the explosive feel of summer nights, when, at fourteen or fifteen or sixteen your heart was big and your head was forgotten, when you believed you had it in you to do everything, when you felt like you’d never die but if you did that was all right, too, because it couldn’t get any better than this, or any worse. Every corner on Center Street was a place he’d lingered, spotlighted by a streetlamp, hanging out with a half dozen other boys his age. Except he’d never hung out with Fletcher Kane. Kane was a loner, even then, a small kid with glasses, tending a little toward plump. He was bright, everybody knew that, but not in the least athletic. Cork couldn’t remember if he had had a best friend, or even a good one. Once the scandal of his father’s death broke, and word got out about the investigation Cork’s father had been conducting, Fletcher Kane stopped going to school and Cork almost never saw him on the street.

Cork did remember one incident. A Saturday night a couple of weeks after his father had died, Fletcher showed up at the old Rialto Theatre. Cork was there, too, to see Sean Connery as James Bond in From Russia with Love. After the show, as Cork headed home, he saw Fletcher surrounded by a number of high school boys, who’d cornered him in the alley behind Pflugelmann’s Rexall Drugstore. Cork ran hard to the sheriff’s office, where he found Cy Borkmann on duty. The deputy was young, but heavy even then. He followed Cork back to the alley and broke up the gathering where the high school boys were in the process of “pantsing” Kane, forcibly removing his trousers to make him walk the streets in his underwear. Fletcher Kane never said a word of thanks, not to the deputy nor to Cork. He eyed them both while he put on his pants, as if waiting for them to take their own turn at humiliating him, then with as much dignity as he could muster, he walked on home. Two weeks later, Kane’s mother left Aurora for good and took her son with her.

Fletcher Kane had been set that way in Cork’s mind for thirty-five years. Then the tall man with long hands and deep pockets had showed up in Aurora. The boy, however, was still visible in the face, especially in the hard, dark eyes that even after more than three decades still seemed to be watching the town, as if ready to be hurt and to hurt in return.

Kane turned onto Cascade, circled back, and again entered the stream of vehicles on Center Street. What was he looking for? What was out there in the night that drew him from the solitary dark of his home?

Cork followed for nearly an hour, up and down Center, past the Broiler and Perkins, as Kane insinuated his El Dorado into the flow of cars packed with teenagers. He had no business tailing the man this way, but he was curious and also concerned. Everything he believed told him Kane needed watching.

Finally, the El Dorado made a left on Olive and headed west, away from the center of town. Kane took another left on Madison and two blocks later, turned the corner, and pulled to the curb in front of St. Agnes. Cork drove past and rounded the next corner. He parked and leaped from the Bronco.

A waxing half moon had risen, bright enough to cast vague, disturbing shadows. Cork kept to those shadows as he made his way back toward the church. In the moonlight, the silver El Dorado seemed to glow. The driver’s door, when it opened, flashed like a signal mirror. Cork ducked behind a minivan parked on the street.

Kane moved like a man condemned, dragging himself up the steps to the doors of St. Agnes. His shadow went before him and touched the wood long before he did. He reached out and tugged at the knob. His right hand rose in a fist and beat against the door. He stepped back, and for a long moment stared at what was locked against him. Finally he turned and sat down on the top step. He bent forward, and his shadow bent with him while he and his darker self began to weep.

Cork knew that he was trespassing on something terribly private. He crept away, wondering if Kane wept for himself, for his own hopeless situation. Was he, perhaps, still grieving for his daughter? Or had he come to the church seeking something that the locked door prevented him from finding?