Blood Hollow

3

After he dropped Schanno off at the sheriff’s office, Cork headed for home. The people of Aurora had seen this kind of storm many times before, seen worse. They’d sealed themselves behind heavily insulated walls and double-paned windows and settled down to wait. Cork’s Bronco was the only thing that moved against the wind, and it moved slowly.

An enormous snowdrift blocked the door to Cork’s garage. He left the Bronco parked in the drive and waded to the side door of the house. As he stepped into the kitchen, he could feel how knotted his whole body had become from fighting the blizzard. He breathed out deeply, trying to relax.

“Dad!”

The soft gallop of little feet across the living room floor. A moment later, his seven-year-old son burst into the kitchen. Stevie raced toward his father and threw his small arms around Cork’s waist. The force of Stevie’s greeting nearly knocked Cork off balance.

“You’re cold,” Stevie said. He smiled up at his father.

Cork laughed. “And you’re not.” There were crumbs at the corner of his son’s mouth, and the scent of food ghosted off his breath. “You smell good enough to eat.”

“Mom fixed soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.”

“You mean she burned soup and cheese sandwiches,” Jenny said, as she came into the kitchen. At seventeen, Cork’s daughter was slender and bookish, trying fiercely to be independent. She’d recently emerged from a Goth phase during which she’d dyed her hair the color of night and her entire wardrobe was black. She’d returned to wearing clothes with color, and her hair was very near its natural shade of blonde.

Cork’s wife was right behind her. “I admit everything was a little overdone,” Jo said.

“Overdone? Mom, you cremated dinner,” Jenny said, but with a smile.

Cork eased from his son’s grasp, hung up his parka, and laid his mittens on the counter. Then he gave Jo a long hug.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“For burned food?” He laughed softly. “That’s okay. Rose fed me.”

“Where is Aunt Rose?” Stevie looked with concern toward the window beyond which raged the storm. “Didn’t she come home with you?”

“She stayed out at Valhalla to help Dr. Kane and his sister. Father Mal stayed, too. They’re fine, Stevie.”

“You didn’t find Charlotte?” Jo said.

He shook his head.

“Know what we’re going to do tonight?” Stevie danced with excitement. “Fix popcorn and watch The Lion King.” It was his favorite video.

“Sounds great, buddy.”

Jo put her hand on his cold cheek. Her hair was like winter sun, a shining white-blonde. Her eyes were pale blue. When she was angry, they could become cold and hard and pierce Cork like shards of ice, but right now they were warm and liquid with concern. “Why don’t you go up and take a good, hot shower?”

“Thanks. Think I will.” He took one step, then stopped abruptly and asked, “Where’s Annie?” For he’d suddenly noticed the absence of his middle child.

“Relax,” Jo said. “She’s at the Pilons. Mark and Sue insisted she stay the night with them rather than try to make it home in the storm. Go on now. That shower will do you good.”

Upstairs in the bathroom, he turned on the water, then stood at the sink, looking into the mirror. As the glass steamed over, his own image was obscured, and he saw again the lone figure of Fletcher Kane at the window of the big cabin, staring at the frozen lake, with nothing to hold to but the thinnest of hopes.

“You okay in there?” Jo called from beyond the door.

Cork realized he’d been standing a long time gripping the solid porcelain of the sink. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

After his shower, he came downstairs to the smell of fresh popcorn and found his family already gathered in front of the television. Stevie was in his pajamas.

Cork sat on the sofa with his son snuggled against him, spilling pieces of popcorn into his lap. He paid little attention to the video. He was seeing instead the empty white trails that had been in front of him all day, and he was thinking, was there somewhere he should have looked but hadn’t? He was surprised when the movie seemed to have ended so quickly.

“Time for bed,” Jo said to her son.

“I’ll take him up,” Cork offered.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. Come on, buddy. How about a piggyback ride?”

Stevie wrapped his arms and his legs tightly about his father and rode Cork’s back upstairs to bed. Cork tucked him in, sat down, and began to read from The Tales of King Arthur. Stevie lay staring up at the ceiling, his hands behind his head.

“Does it hurt to die?” he asked suddenly.

Cork lowered the book. At seven, Stevie had already withstood blows that some people lived their whole lives never having to face. Cork believed his son was strong deep down and he answered honestly.

“It does sometimes.”

“Annie says it’s like sleep. And then you wake up with the angels.”

“It might be like that. I don’t really know.”

“Angels are white, like snow.”

Stevie said it as if he knew it was the truth, and Cork, who knew the absolute truth of nothing, didn’t argue.

He read until Stevie’s eyes closed and his breathing was deep and regular, then he closed the book and listened to the wind push against the house as if seeking a way to enter. He pressed the covers tightly around his son, gave him a gentle kiss, and turned out the light.

Jo was already in bed. She had an open folder on her lap, a legal file. She wore a long, yellow sleep shirt that Jenny had given her for Christmas. Across the front in black letters was printed LAWYERS DO IT IN COURT. In Cork’s eyes, she was a beautiful woman, his wife, and he looked at her with appreciation, as if he’d almost lost her but now here she was, a gift.

Jo looked up from her reading. “Is Stevie asleep?”

Cork nodded.

“Rose called. She’s fine.”

“At least the lines are still up,” Cork said. “That’s something.”

“You look exhausted. Why don’t you call it a night?”

“Not sure I can sleep.”

“Do you want to talk?”

“I don’t know what there is to say.” He stood at the end of their bed. “Schanno’s calling in a cadaver dog. Not that it will do any good. Way too cold. He just wants to be certain in his own mind, and the Kanes’, that he’s tried everything. If Charlotte Kane’s out there, she’ll be frozen under that snow until the spring melt.” Cork hesitated, then said what was on his mind. “I wanted to ask Mal Thorne something today. I wanted to ask him why his God lets things like this happen.”

“His God?”

“His idea of God. Doesn’t he preach a loving God every Sunday?” Cork didn’t know for sure, because church was a place where he’d refused to set foot for the last three years.

Jo gave him a look that seemed full of compassion, not censure. “Do you really want to argue theology right now?”

She was right. It wasn’t God he was angry with.

“I’m going to walk a little,” he said.

“I’ll be here.”

He headed downstairs and found Jenny standing at the living room window. He glanced where she looked and he was startled by her dark reflection in the glass. For the briefest instant, he saw again the shape of the wraith that had appeared to him on the ice of Fisheye Lake, a form that was both real and not real, that he’d sensed was Charlotte and yet was not Charlotte. Had they connected, two souls lost in a frigid hell?

“ ‘Rage against the dying of the light,’ ” Jenny said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s from a poem by Dylan Thomas.”

Jenny was an honors English student and an avid reader. She dreamed of being a great writer someday. She had a knack for remembering passages and seemed to have an appropriate literary reference for any occasion. Cork studied her reflected face, pale and serious in the window.

“Will you find her?” she asked.

He didn’t like the way she’d phrased her question, as if the responsibility for saving Charlotte Kane were his personally. He wanted to tell her that he’d done his best. That they all had. That it was no one’s fault.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Across the street, John O’Loughlin came out of his house and trudged to where his Caravan sat buried against the curb. He cleared the door on the driver’s side, stepped in, and started the engine. Then he got out and scraped his windows. Finally, he tried to ease the vehicle forward. The tires just spun. O’Loughlin got out again, pulled a shovel from the back of the van, and dug at the snow in front of the wheels. Cork couldn’t imagine what would take a man out into a storm like that. He considered bundling up and going over to give a hand, but he knew that even if O’Loughlin made it out of the drift in front of his house, he’d just get stuck somewhere else. In a couple of minutes, Cork’s neighbor gave up and went back inside.

“Do you know her well?” he asked.

Jenny shook her head. “I used to talk to her a little at church, but she hasn’t come for a long time.”

“How about school?”

“She’s a senior. We hang out in different crowds. She’s rich. Pretty. You know.”

“She’s always seemed very nice. Quiet. Smart, I hear. Very smart.” Though how smart was it to ride a snowmobile alone into the wilderness in the dead of night?

“Smart, yeah, but she’s been kind of out of control for a while,” Jenny said. “Partying a lot, running with Solemn Winter Moon.”

“Solemn,” Cork said. He knew the kid well. Ojibwe, good-looking, troubled. An enticing guide for a young woman who wanted a quick walk on the wild side.

“There’s something else,” Jenny began, then hesitated.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s just that…” She bit her lip and weighed the wisdom of proceeding.

Cork waited.

“I had a class with her last term. Creative writing, one of my English electives. Mostly we wrote poetry. We read some of it aloud in class, but a lot of it we didn’t. We kept these poetry journals that we only shared with the teacher and a poetry partner. Charlotte was my poetry partner. I saw what she didn’t share with the class. What she read out loud was fine and all, but what she wrote in her journal was really different. Way better than anything else any of us wrote. But very dark.”

“Dark how?”

“You know that artist Hieronymus Bosch?”

“The guy who paints those weird nightmare things, right?”

“Yeah. That was Charlotte’s poetry. Really beautiful, you know, but scary.” She looked at her father, her blue eyes troubled. “She went out in the middle of the night, right? Alone?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“Dad, a lot of her poetry was about death and suicide.”

“I don’t think that’s such an unusual fascination for a teenager, Jen.”

“There was one I remember all about resurrection and death.”

“She’s Catholic. Death and resurrection, that’s pretty much what it’s all about.”

“No, she looked at it the other way around. Resurrection, then death. It was this poem about Lazarus, about how Jesus, when he raised Lazarus from the dead, didn’t do the guy any favors. Lazarus had gone through death once, and now he was just going to have to go through it again. In the poem, he’s really pissed off. It ended something like,

‘Death take my hand and lead me to that dark bed

From which I neither rise,

Nor remember,

Nor dream,

Nor dread.’ ”

The wind let loose a fist that slammed against the house, and the whole structure quivered.

“Dad, you don’t think she might be, like, trying to kill herself?”

He put his arm around her. “I’d hate to think so.”

They watched the storm a while together, then Jenny said, “I’m going to bed.”

Cork kissed the crown of her hair. “ ’Night, sweetheart.”

He called John O’Loughlin to find out if there were some emergency, and if so, some way he could help. O’Loughlin said it wasn’t an emergency, really. He was completely out of coffee, and the idea of facing a morning of shoveling without a cup of java was frightening. Cork said he always had a pot ready by six, and told his neighbor to come on over.

He started toward the front door to secure it for the night. But he imagined Charlotte Kane struggling to get in out of the cold only to find every door locked against her. He couldn’t bring himself to throw the bolt.

Jo was waiting for him in the bedroom, her book closed on the nightstand. Cork put on his flannel pajamas and slipped under the covers beside her. She put a hand softly on his chest. “Are you all right?”

Cork stared up at the ceiling, as Stevie had done earlier. “I saw something out there today.” He told her about his experience in the whiteout.

“If it was so vague, why do you think it was Charlotte?”

“Crazy, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I felt it was Charlotte, that’s all. At the same time, it wasn’t. She was different somehow.”

“One of the manidoog taking her shape?” She was speaking of the spirits the Ojibwe, whose blood ran through Cork’s veins, believed resided in the forests, and she was not speaking lightly.

“I just can’t help feeling she was trying…” He thought about it. “It’s hard to explain, but I think she reached out somehow, you know?”

“You believe she’s dead?”

“Yes.”

Jo studied his profile. Cork could feel her eyes on him.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” she said.

“Yeah.” Cork took a deep breath. “Children do stupid things, Jo. Dangerous things. Even the best of them. Sometimes I wonder if we really know our children.”

“We know them, Cork.”

“It could be Jenny out there. Or Annie. God knows we’ve had our share of close calls. I think about Fletcher and Glory, what they’ve got to face, and the truth is, I’m so damned relieved it’s not us. Isn’t that awful?”

“I’d say it’s only human.” She kissed his forehead lightly. “You’re a good man. You’ve done your best. We all have. So much is out of our hands, out of anyone’s hands.” She reached to the lamp on the nightstand and turned out the light. Then she put her arms around her husband. “Sleep,” she told him. “Just sleep now. You’ve earned it.”

He believed he’d no more earned his sleep than Fletcher and his sister had earned their worry. But his own children were safe in bed. And his wife’s warm arms cradled him. And although these were things that every day he took for granted, that night they felt like the rarest of treasures.

“Sleep,” Jo whispered. “Sleep.”

And Cork decided he could.