Vermilion Drift

FORTY-FOUR

He was halfway to Emerson Lake when Max Cavanaugh called. Cork pulled over to the side of the road and answered his cell phone.

“I want to talk,” Cavanaugh said. “But only to you. Come alone. You’ve got twenty minutes.”

“Your place?” Cork said.

“No. I’m at the Ladyslipper Mine.”

“All right.”

“Twenty minutes,” Cavanaugh said. “Alone.”

“Max-” Cork began. But Cavanaugh had hung up.

He swung his Land Rover around, called Dross, and told her what was up.

“I’ll meet you there,” she said.

“He said alone, Marsha.”

“Fine, you meet with him alone, but I’ll be lurking in the general vicinity.”

“That’ll do.”

“Just before you have your talk, call me on your cell and leave the phone on, okay? I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

“Kind of like wearing a wire?”

“Make sure you get close to him.”

It was late, and the sun had set. From the eastern horizon a red smear was spreading across the sky, and the clouds that hung there became like bloodstained cotton. At the gate to the mine, the guard directed Cork to follow one of the roads into the great pit.

“Mr. Cavanaugh went down there himself maybe forty minutes ago.” The guard gave Cork a map and outlined the way. “Mine operation’s shut down for the night, so you don’t have to worry about being run over by one of them monster trucks or blown up in the blasting.”

Which was, in fact, a comforting piece of information.

Cork followed the road the guard had indicated. It was paved asphalt for a couple of hundred yards, then turned to hard-packed red dirt and curled south of the Great North office complex. It sloped into the pit and almost immediately cut sharply to the left, and Cork kept his Land Rover at a crawl as he negotiated the narrow switchbacks that angled toward the floor of the great excavation. Cork had seen the hole only from above; being inside was different. Above there was grandeur to the scale. Inside and up close, he could see the rugged scars of all the intimate battle that had taken place to open that great hole and tear the ore from the earth.

He turned the final switchback and came out onto the flat at the bottom of the mine, which was a broad plain of devastation as red and bare as Cork imagined the surface of Mars to be, and just as alien in its feel. Gargantuan machines stood idle amid great mounds of blasted rubble that lay waiting to be loaded and carried away. A quarter of a mile to the south, water had seeped in, and a small lake had formed in a depression there, a lake in which, Cork was pretty certain, nothing lived. He felt swallowed by the mine, dwarfed by the immensity of the excavation, and more than a little in awe of the enormity of the vision and enterprise necessary to create it.

He spotted Cavanaugh’s Escalade parked a hundred yards ahead. He slowed and turned on his cell phone.

“Can you hear me, Marsha?”

“There’s static, but I can still read you.”

“All right. Going undercover now.”

He slipped the phone beneath his shirt, where it lay cradled against the thin ridge along the top of his belt line.

“Can you hear me now?”

“Yes, and quit the clowning.”

Cavanaugh had parked fifty yards from an enormous Bucyrus electric shovel. With its long neck and open-jawed bucket, the machine reminded Cork of a great dinosaur ready to feed.

He parked near the Escalade. Cavanaugh got out and met him halfway between the two vehicles. Cork closed to within two feet of Cavanaugh, who looked weary, like a man who’d run a thousand miles.

“I’m here, Max.”

“You wanted to know why,” Cavanaugh said.

“Everything else I pretty much understand.”

Almost wistfully, Cavanaugh eyed the mine walls, which terraced toward the reddened evening sky. “My family made its fortune from this earth,” he said. “I know that a lot of people look at the damage that’s been done to the land here and judge us. Me, I look at this mine and I see the generations of families it’s supported. I see the enterprise it’s fed. I see the wars this nation fought and won because of it. It seems to me that sometimes you have to choose to do some harm in the hope-no, the belief-that it’s for a greater good. That’s how I’ve lived my life anyway, most of it in mines not much different from this one. That big shovel over there? I can work it. I can drive a truck that hauls three hundred tons. I’ve prospected and drilled and blasted. Mining’s been my life, and it’s been a good one.”

“What about taking care of Lauren?” Cork said. “That’s been a part of your life, too.”

Cavanaugh eyed him dourly but didn’t reply.

“It couldn’t have been easy covering for her all these years.”

“That’s what you do when you’re family.”

“What kind of family was she, Max? Hard to love, I imagine.”

“You’re wrong. She was easy to love. Too easy. She walked into a room and she brought the sun with her. She was full of life, ideas, energy. Next to her, most people were like pieces of wood.”

“Then why did you kill her?”

“I’m not entirely certain I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There are things you need to know first. Before he died, my father told me about my mother. Horrible things.”

Cavanaugh fell silent and looked down at the hard rock beneath his feet.

“Was she involved in the Vanishings, Max?”

He gave his head a vague shake. “My father couldn’t say for sure, but he suspected. She was capable of it, he believed. At least after they moved here.”

“What made this place different?”

“She met a man, a truly evil man.”

“Indigo Broom.”

Cavanaugh lifted his gaze to Cork, apparently surprised that he knew the name. “Yes, Broom. My mother had had relationships before, a lot of them unconventional, but this was different. This was beyond bizarre. Where there’d been only, I don’t know, narcissism in her, there was cruelty, brutality. The change in her frightened my father. He was preparing to go to the police with his suspicions when she disappeared and the Vanishings stopped. For him, it was like being freed from hell. My grandfather was long dead, every family tie here ended, and so we left Aurora and all the awful memories behind.”

“But then you came back.”

“The worst decision I ever made.”

“Tell me about Lauren, Max.”

Cavanaugh looked away, and his gaze ran across the whole devastated landscape around him. “On his deathbed, my father made me promise to be responsible for her because she was, in many ways, like my mother.”

“What ways?”

“She was beautiful and smart, just like my mother, and just like my mother she had no heart. She loved no one.”

“Not even you?”

“She needed me, needed me desperately. But love? I don’t believe she understood the word. Not in the way you and I might understand it.”

“What about you? Did you love her?”

“I’m not sure I can explain. We shared blood, history, a lifetime of memories. That was part of it. But more important, I understood that she had no choice in who she was. Some people come into the world missing a limb or without sight or hearing. We don’t blame them for the way they’re born. How could I blame Lauren because she came into the world without a heart? She was her mother’s child.”

“You’re not like that.”

“Luck of the draw. It might just as easily have been me. Or both of us. What a curse that would have been for my father.” He let out a breath that may have carried a whisper of a laugh. “It was Dad who pointed out to me that I was the lucky one. He told me I had to share my heart with Lauren. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. Pick up the pieces, fix what she broke, mend the wounds she delivered. Hers was a lonely existence, really. She used people and threw them away, and afterward she was alone. Always alone.”

“Except for you. She came to you for companionship and comfort, yes?”

He breathed deeply, sadly. “She always came to me crying.”

“Manufactured tears?”

“Real enough. But always for her, never for anyone else. In her world, there was no one else worth crying over.”

“Not even you.”

“Not even me.”

“A hard love, Max. Is that why you killed her?”

“I told you. I’m not certain I did.”

“What happened that night?”

“First you have to understand something. Lauren was always self-centered, and I’d come to expect that. But when she moved here and moved back into that awful place we’d lived as children, she began to change. I saw her becoming cruel. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t care about other people, she began to enjoy inflicting pain.”

“Physical?”

“I don’t know. Emotional pain, certainly. But because of what my mother was, I began to be afraid.”

Evil finding evil, Cork thought.

“That night she called me at the Four Seasons, hysterical. I tried to calm her, but it was clear that she needed me. I left.”

“Without a word to anyone.”

“I thought a few minutes with her would be enough. Over the years, I’ve learned exactly what to say to her.”

“Did you know she’d been shot?”

“She said something about it, but she often lied to be certain I’d come when she needed me. When I got there, I saw that it wasn’t a lie. She’d bled, although she wasn’t bleeding anymore. She told me what happened, told me in a fury, told me she was going to kill the Stillday girl. She was a mess. Partly hysterical with tears, partly in a hysterical rage. She was waving a gun around. She kept a small firearm somewhere, but this wasn’t it. This one I’d never seen before. I had no idea where it came from. The gun scared me.”

Cavanaugh stopped talking. The entire sky had turned vermilion, and everything beneath it was cast in the same hue. If fire could bleed, Cork thought, this would be its color.

“I couldn’t get her to calm down,” Cavanaugh finally went on. “And I was angry, too. Angry at the disruption of my evening, angry at Lauren because, hell, she probably had gotten what she deserved, angry at a whole lifetime of bending to her selfish whims and putting up with her crazy, selfish behavior. It seemed to me in that moment that two crazy people were in the room, and I said that to her. God help me, I said, ‘We’re both better off dead.’”

Recalling it, Cavanaugh seemed stunned, and he fell silent.

“What did she do, Max?”

“Stopped her raving,” he said in a distant voice. “Walked to me. Walked to me with that gun in her hand. Pushed herself against my chest with the gun between us. Reached down and brought my hand up and put my finger over her finger on the trigger and whispered, ‘Do you want that, Max? Do you?’”

Cork waited, then pressed. “What happened?”

“The gun went off.” Cavanaugh turned his mystified eyes to Cork. “She looked up at me, and I couldn’t tell if it was surprise or relief I saw. And then she dropped at my feet. Just dropped. I went down to her. I called her name and she didn’t respond. There was blood all over her. I held her, but it was like holding a rag doll. I knew she was dead. I should have called someone, but instead I…”

By the end, Cavanaugh’s voice had dropped to a desperate whisper. To be certain that Dross on the other end of the phone had heard clearly, Cork said, “You killed her, Max?”

Cavanaugh shook his head with sudden fierceness. “I don’t know if I killed her. I don’t know if I pulled the trigger or she did, honest to God.”

“Then what happened, Max?”

“I went back and made excuses to the people at the Four Seasons and went home. I thought…” He hesitated, as if uncertain how to proceed. “I thought I would be free, but it didn’t feel that way at all. Does that make sense? If you’ve walked bound all your life and suddenly the ropes are gone, is that freedom? I didn’t quite know how to go on, Cork.”

“Why did you hire me to find her?”

“When no one reported her dead, Jesus, I thought maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she somehow pulled herself off that floor and went somewhere to recover and…”

“And what, Max?”

“And maybe she needed me.” His face held a look of bewilderment. “How sick is that? I realized that in some twisted way I needed her, too. And I realized one more thing, Cork, maybe the hardest lesson of all. Dead isn’t dead. The dead are always with us.”

“The second round of threatening notes, ‘We die. U die. Just like her.’ That was you, wasn’t it, Max?”

“After you found Lauren’s body, I got worried, afraid you might look my way. It was simply misdirection.” The tone of his voice indicated that to him it was a thing that hardly mattered now.

“Come back with me, Max. We can go to the sheriff, and you can explain.”

Cavanaugh gave his head a slight shake. “I never married, Cork. Never had children. Do you want to know why?”

“Because you had your hands full taking care of your sister?”

“Because I might have had a child like Lauren. Or worse, like my mother. It’s in my blood somewhere. But I’m the last of the Cavanaughs. When I’m gone, the blood curse is gone, too.”

“Come with me, Max.”

“You go on. I want to stay, keep company awhile with these rock walls. I feel comfortable here. You can tell the sheriff everything I told you. You will anyway, I suppose, and it’s all right with me.” He waited, and when Cork didn’t move, he said, more forcefully, “Go on, Cork. I want to be alone.”

“Max-”

“I can call a security person and have you escorted out.”

“No need. I’ll go.” But he didn’t, not right away. He said, “I’m sorry, Max.”

“For what?”

“Those ropes you talked about, I guess.”

Cavanaugh offered him a sad smile. “And I’d guess you have ropes of your own. Doesn’t everybody?”

Cork walked back to his Land Rover and got in. He looked back and watched Cavanaugh return to his Escalade.

He slid the phone from under his shirt. “You get all that, Marsha?”

“Loud and clear, Cork. I’m at the front gate now. I’ll pick him up when he comes out.”

Cork swung his vehicle around and started toward the incline that would take him along the switchbacks to the top. He figured he’d join Dross and together they would wait for Max Cavanaugh.

He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when he heard the explosion behind him, and the walls of the pit were lit as if by lightning, and he saw in the rearview mirror the Escalade consumed in an enormous blossom of red-orange flame.