and listen.
“I’ve started seeing another woman.”
The priest didn’t seem surprised in the least.
“I didn’t think about it at first, where it was going, what ultimately would be invloved. I wasn’t thinking clearly about a lot of things. But now-” Cork hesitated.
“Now?” the priest encouraged.
“Now every time I see my children, I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Hurting them badly. Hurting them forever.”
The priest held his cigarette delicately between his thumb and index finger, smoking in a way Cork had always considered continental. He studied the tip of his cigarette a moment, then said, “Children are resilient. But I agree it’s a reasonable fear.”
“I don’t know what to do, Tom. I don’t want to lose my family. I don’t want my children hurt.”
“What I hear you saying is that more than anything you want your family.”
The understanding in the priest’s voice touched Cork deeply. “Yes,” he confessed.
“And this other woman, does she know?”
“She suspects. She hasn’t pressed me.” Cork felt himself shouldering again a weight that seemed unbearable. “She’s a wonderful woman, Tom.” He stood up, walked across the cluttered office to the window. He blew smoke against the glass and stared at the empty steps of the church across the yard. “Funny. I remember every detail of the morning Sam Winter Moon and Arnold Stanley died. But the whole next year is a blur. I wasn’t much of a husband or a father. I didn’t even fight it when Jo asked me to leave. I think about that now and it’s like I was someone else. Someone in a bad dream. Or like I was sleepwalking. This woman woke me up, Tom.”
“Maybe time did that, Cork.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you love her?”
“I haven’t said that to her, no.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Cork watched cigarette smoke crawl the windowpane as if it were looking for a way out.
“Yes,” he finally admitted. “I do.”
“And you love your family.”
“Of course.”
“Does that include Jo?”
Cork turned back. The priest was watching him with a placid expression.
“Not at the moment. But maybe it could again if we tried. If we had some help.”
“From me?”
“Isn’t that what priests do?”
“Some.”
“Would you?”
“What about Jo? Is this something she wants?”
“She wants a divorce. And one thing about Jo, once she’s made up her mind about something, she won’t back down.”
“Sounds like you’re asking me for a miracle.”
“It does seem pretty hopeless,” Cork said.
“Hopeless.” The priest sipped his whiskey and smoked his cigarette and seemed to consider the word. “Let me tell you something, Cork. In all my life I’ve learned two things.” He pointed to the black patch over his eye. “One is never call a small man in a uniform ‘Shorty.’ The other is that nothing is ever hopeless.” He dropped the last of his cigarette into the plastic cup. “I’ll talk with Jo. I’ll do my best to convince her to join you in some counseling.”
“Thanks.”
“But, Cork, I need to be sure you’re going to end this other relationship. There’s nothing that I or anyone else can do if you’re not willing to sacrifice everything for your family.”
“I know. I’ll end it.”
St. Kawasaki smiled a little wearily. “The things that ask the most of us are the things most worth having.”
Cork left the window and walked to the desk. He tossed his cigarette into St. Kawasaki’s cup. “Mind if I use your phone?”
“Go ahead.”
He dialed Harlan Lytton’s number, waited while the phone at the other end rang eight times. He put the receiver back in the cradle. “Thanks.”
“No one home?”
“It’s Harlan Lytton. Sometimes he doesn’t answer out of sheer orneriness.”
“Lytton? The one with the dog they call Jack the Ripper?”
“That’s him. I have to go out to see him tonight.”
“Mind me asking why you’d want to pay a visit to a man like that?”
“If he answered his phone, I wouldn’t have to. But he didn’t answer.”
“Why go out there at all?”
“Long story. Kind of hard to explain.”
The priest grabbed his leather jacket. “I’ve heard things about this Lytton. I’m not going to let you go there alone. Not at night.”
“I used to go out there alone all the time when I was sheriff.”
St. Kawasaki put his hand on Cork’s shoulder and looked at him seriously with his good eye. “I hate to remind you of this, but you’re not the sheriff anymore.”
14
Lytton’s cabin lay five miles outside town at the end of a long, narrow cut into two hundred acres of thick brush, bog, balsam pine and tamarack. The lane leading to the cabin was marked by an old hand-painted sign on a cracked gray board nailed to a post: “Taxidermy.” A chain strung between two aspen saplings blocked the entry.
Cork eyed the deep snow drifted into the narrow lane. “Long walk in, Tom. I’ve got skis and snowshoes,” he offered.
“The only thing I can handle in the snow is my Kawasaki. I’ll walk, thanks.”
“Then I’ll walk, too.”
Cork reached into the glove compartment for a flashlight, then opened the rear door and took his Winchester from its sheath. He pulled several cartridges from his coat pocket and fed them into the rifle.
“What’s that for?” the priest asked.
“How much do you know about Jack the Ripper?”
The snow seemed to multiply the light of the moon that was nearly full and the mass of stars that frosted the sky, and even without the flashlight Cork had no trouble seeing the way along the cut through the trees and brush.
“I was out here once just after I first came to Aurora. I brought a big muskie Father Kelsey had caught and wanted mounted. Never made it off my motorcycle. That dog was on me as soon as I pulled up. I gave it full throttle coming back down this lane and the Ripper still nearly caught me. Biggest, fastest, meanest dog I ever saw.”
“Lytton lets it run loose,” Cork said. “Especially when he’s gone, and he’s gone a lot. Burglar protection, he claims. I used to warn him about the dog getting off his land, but the Ripper never does. Seems to know his territory. And we’re in it right now. I don’t want to be caught out here on foot without something to discourage that dog.”
