Iron Lake

30

THE GEESE WEREN’T THERE. Cork looked across the dark, empty water and listened in vain. The grain lay in the snow by the bucket, untouched. He figured they were gone for good.

In the cabin, there was a message on his answering machine. Molly. “Call me,” she said.

He kicked the heat up and reminded himself that tomorrow he’d get the window fixed. His ribs felt like hell, but his stitched hand seemed okay. He opened a can of Hormel chili, heated it up, grated a little cheese over it, ate the chili with saltines. After he’d cleared the dishes, he made a pot of coffee and sat down at the old table Sam Winter Moon had made from birch. He set Jo’s folder in front of him. For a long time he simply sipped his coffee and stared at the blood-crusted, unopened folder. He wanted to believe that what the photographs captured didn’t matter now. Old infidelity. But it did. The pictures chronicled more than Jo’s unfaithfulness. They were a testament to the ridiculous nature of the trust people placed in one another. Marriage was only one example. There were others. Elections. The ministry. Medicine. The bottom line was that people who leaned too heavily on someone else were setting themselves up for a terrible fall, and they had no one to blame in the end but themselves for the hurt they suffered. Cork had learned the hard way. And he vowed it would not happen again.

He considered the closed folder. He wasn’t sure that studying what it contained would do any good. But he didn’t have any other ideas.

The first photograph wasn’t so hard. A distance shot. It framed the bow of Parrant’s sailboat tied up to the dock. The name “Thor’s Hammer” was clear on the side. Beyond the dock was the long dark of the backyard. And beyond that the whole rear of Parrant’s house rising up and filling the photo. There was firelight in the living room, the soft glow visible through the sliding doors of the upper deck, and two slivers of light lower down where the hot tub was, illuminating what appeared to be a single large white shape. Cork put the photograph on the table to his left.

The next photo was an enlargement of the first, centered on the hot tub. Two candles burned on the rim of the tub, and in their soft light the large white shape clearly defined itself as two naked bodies pressed together. The faces weren’t yet clear. The dark-haired male arching from behind could have been almost anybody. But to someone who knew what to look for, the woman bent forward was plainly Jo. She’d worn her hair longer then and crimped.

Despite his resolve to look carefully at all the photographs, Cork turned away. He fished around in his pocket for his cigarettes, and as he lit up, he saw that his hands were shaking. His stomach was like a ball of wet clay, and he realized he was breathing fast. He got up, walked away from the table, and leaned back against the kitchen counter. The draft through the cardboard chilled the back of his neck.

What had he hoped to see? What could those photographs possibly tell him about the deaths, about whether Paul LeBeau had really gone into hiding, and Joe John, too, and what, if anything, they had to do with all of this? The photos couldn’t tell him any more than he already knew—that Jo didn’t love him and hadn’t for longer than he cared to consider. It was a sobering realization, but not one that particularly advanced his understanding of the recent events in Aurora. Jo, like Cork and so many others, had simply been captured by Lytton’s lens in a selfish, potentially damaging act.

Cork tapped the ash of his cigarette into the sink and found himself wondering about Lytton. Had the man enjoyed the show? Had he taken the film back to his isolated cabin, developed it, and got some kicks from seeing Jo fucked like a dog?

He threw his cigarette in the sink, stomped to the table, and slapped the folder closed. He wanted to burn the damn thing. Schanno had probably been right. The best place for such trash was an ash heap.

In the dead of night from a dead sleep, Cork snapped wide awake, threw off the covers, and began to pace the room. The air was chilly, but he felt strangely warm and excited. He barely noticed the cold floorboards under his bare feet. He stopped at the bedroom window and stared outside. In the snowy darkness, the world was reduced to black and white.

He knew. Son of a bitch, he knew.

It was like this sometimes. Sometimes a thing was right in front of him, so simple. Yet it wasn’t until he closed his eyes and shut down his thinking that what was simple became clear.

The key was the folder itself.

Cork went into the other room, flipped on the light, and looked at the manila folder that had Jo’s name on it. Like most office folders, it had several additional creases just to the right of the center fold. The creases were there so that the folder could be accordioned outward as the contents increased. In Jo’s case, although the folder was old, the additional creases had never been used. His own folder in the white file cabinet in Schanno’s office had been like that as well. But Cork would have sworn the folder on Sandy Parrant had been different. The creases were worn as if the folder had been enlarged to contain a great deal more than the photographs of the indiscretions around the hot tub. At one time there had been something else in the file.

What was it that had been removed? And who had removed it? Sigurd Nelson, the coroner, before he delivered the small silver key to Wally Schanno? Schanno himself? Or was it possible Sandy Parrant had somehow managed to get to the folder and remove the worst of what it contained?

His feet were getting cold, but he didn’t want to break his thinking and he went on pacing the room.

Was there a way to find out what had been in Parrant’s file? Was there a way around the blundering of Schanno?

He looked down at the old folder with Jo’s name. There hadn’t been a file for her next to his in the white filing cabinet. Yet here was what such a file might have held. If there had been a folder, Cork figured it hadn’t been this one. The bloody folder didn’t have a typed label as all the others had, only Lytton’s own handwritten labeling. Had Jo’s been pulled? If so and if it was Lytton who’d taken it, why had he transferred the photographs to another folder? It didn’t make sense.

And then again, maybe it did.

Lytton probably did all his own film developing. If he wanted to produce photographs of Jo and Parrant that would hurt and humiliate Cork, he didn’t need to pull them from the file cabinet in his rented Aurora U-Store shed. He had the negatives. All he had to do was make prints. And put them in something, any old thing. An old folder lying around. And if that was true, then where were the negatives? Cork wondered how thoroughly Lytton’s place had been gone through. Was it possible all the negatives were still hidden there somewhere?

His feet were going numb from the cold. He decided that in the morning he would go to Harlan Lytton’s place and have a look. These days things had a way of happening around him. Although events seemed chaotic, Cork was beginning to suspect they weren’t at all. Sam Winter Moon used to say that sometimes the only way a man learns the true spirit of a rock is to stub his toe on it.

Cork turned out the lights and headed back to bed.

Even if he didn’t find what he was looking for in the morning, he had a strong sense that something would find him.