Cork understood. Stormy was already confronted with a system weighted to Harris’s advantage. Once out in the woods, Harris could do anything he wanted, and who was there to challenge him?
“Yes, me,” Cork said. “And him.” He nodded at Willie Raye.
“Christ,” Harris said, noting Raye carefully for the first time. “I’ll be damned if it isn’t Arkansas Willie. I thought you were dead.”
“Those reports were greatly exaggerated,” Raye said without smiling.
“What are you doing here?” Harris asked.
“Shiloh’s my daughter,” Raye said.
Harris gave him a smile without a thimbleful of humor in it. “Is that so? Seems to me I heard once upon a time that when it came to husbandly doings, you were more likely to be doing husbands.”
Arkansas Willie’s face darkened, as if he’d entered a tunnel. He came out on the other side looking mean and hard. “She’s my daughter, you son of a bitch You’re not going after her without me.”
“No way.” Harris shook his head adamantly.
“Arkansas Willie doesn’t go,” Cork said, “I don’t go. I don’t go, Stormy doesn’t go. Stormy doesn’t go, the boy won’t go. Long way for you to come, to not get where you’re going, Harris.”
Harris regarded them all. “Ah, shit.” He stepped away and turned his back to the men while he considered.
Stormy motioned Louis to his side. The boy obeyed and took shelter under his father’s arm. Raye mouthed a “thanks” to Cork. Sloane had lowered his weapon and was waiting.
“All right,” Harris finally agreed, swinging back around. “But this is how it’s going to be. We give the orders. You do exactly as we say or we’ll nail your asses. Understood?” Harris waved Agent Sloane toward the logging road. “Get on the radio. Put it together.”
14
“Shit.”
Jo O’Connor stood in a bright square of kitchen sunlight, glaring down at a cherry pie that flaunted its perfection from the pages of Rose’s opened cookbook on the counter. Flour and dough surrounded the cookbook as if there’d been a battle in a bakery. Jo’s fingers were doughy, her jeans starred with floury handprints. Her conversation earlier that morning with Rose played again and again in her mind, like a bad tune she couldn’t shake.
“You don’t really want to try this,” Rose had said, eagerly offering her sister an out.
“I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t want to,” Jo replied.
“At least let me give you a few tips.”
“Tips? I’m thirty-eight years old, Rose. I make a living deciphering legal gobbledy-gook. I can certainly follow the instructions in a cookbook.”
“But-” Rose had tried.
“No buts. This is my pie.”
Rose had started to argue, then shrugged, opened her arms toward her kitchen, and proclaimed darkly, as if inviting an army to ravage that which she best loved, “Fine, then. Be my guest.”
Jo jammed her fists on her hips and eyed the mess she’d made of the kitchen. “Sweet Jesus,” she whispered, and rued her own stubbornness with Rose.
The territories of their interests had been established early. Their mother, an army nurse, moved them a dozen times when they were growing up, and a dozen times they’d faced the obstacle of being new in a place. Rose had been a plump child, freckled, terribly picked on by other children, and possessed of a gentle and uncertain spirit that kept her from fighting back. Jo had done that kind of fighting for both of them. When she was thirteen, she broke the nose of the son of a full colonel at Fort Sam Houston who’d goosed Rose, grabbed her purse, pulled out a tampon, and taunted, “Plug the ugly dyke!” Jo had been afraid her mother, whom she and Rose both called the Captain, would be angry. The Captain wasn’t. The colonel’s son not only apologized to Rose, he asked Jo to the movies. She turned him down.
For Rose, each home was a haven, and she learned to care for each respectfully and well. From early on, she did the cooking. Jo fixed the leaky faucets. Rose did the laundry. Jo changed the oil in the car. Rose sewed. Jo mowed the lawn. In school, Rose was content to pass her courses without attracting attention. Jo battled to be at the top. They were so different-in appearance and interest-that except for the fact they loved one another fiercely, it might have been hard to believe they were sisters.
Jo was in her third year of a full scholarship to Northwestern University when the Captain suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed on the entire left side of her body. Rose, who’d just begun a major in home ec ed at Eastern Illinois, dropped out to care for her mother. For more than seven years, that was the focus of her life. A few months before Jenny was born, the Captain passed away, another stroke, massive this time. Jo was about to begin her final year of law school at the University of Chicago, and Rose offered to come and help with the baby. She’d been an integral part of the O’Connor household ever since.
Jo looked down at herself, dusted with flour, barnacled with bits of dough. She was sorry she’d insisted on tackling the pie. But there was motive in her madness. The pie, along with other desserts prepared by the women of St. Agnes, was to be served that evening at a church gathering honoring Elysia Notto, a local girl who headed a Benedictine mission in Togo and who was visiting her home parish for a brief while. Jo knew the women of the church had long ago opened their arms to Rose. Her kindness, her firm, gentle spirit, and her proficiency at skills those women admired had helped her overcome fairly quickly the hurdle of being an outsider in Aurora. It didn’t hurt. Rose was always the first to put in, that she was also heavy, unattractive, and no threat whatsoever where their husbands were concerned. Whatever the reasons. Rose had found her place, as if she’d always belonged in that isolated, far north town. But Jo never felt accepted in the same way. Although the women of Aurora were always cordial, Jo sensed a half-built wall there. Rose believed this was because the women didn’t understand Jo. Part of it, she argued, was that from the beginning Jo had chosen to represent the Anishinaabe in proceedings that were often at odds with the interests of the citizens of Aurora. Also, she worked in an arena generally populated by men and was extremely successful there. And, finally, she was very attractive. That, Rose told her bluntly, was a lot to overcome.
If there had indeed been a wall, events of the last year had begun to make it crumble. Cork’s affair with Molly Nurmi, something known to the whole town now, had brought Jo a good deal of sympathy. Although she felt guilty-if people knew the whole story, there would be little sympathy-she was touched by the warmth of the concern suddenly showered on her, and she found herself trying, often in awkward ways, to reciprocate.
The pie, in some pathetic twist of thinking, was one of those ways.
Now she looked down at the ruins of a crust that refused to do for her even something as simple as roll flat on waxed paper. She swore quietly.
“Is Rose dead?”
Jo turned around and found Cork standing in the kitchen doorway taking in the devastation.
“At church all day. I’m cooking,” Jo said gravely.
“You?”
“I’ve cooked before. Remember?”
“Believe me,” Cork said. “I remember.”
She’d been notoriously bad, had had a reputation among their Chicago friends for possessing a flair for the soggy, the lumpy, the burned. Consequently, Cork had done most of the cooking before Rose came to live with them. He was pretty good at it; she’d always been the first to admit it.
Cork took a couple of steps into the kitchen. “What are you making?”
“Cherry pie. For the St. Agnes Guild tonight.”
Cork scanned the counter, the whole mess, and Jo was afraid he was going to offer her advice. He didn’t. Just nodded and glanced at the potato peelings lying in the sink. “Cooking dinner, too?”
“Yes.” She recalled the looks of horror on the faces of the children when they’d heard the news. “Shake ’n Bake chicken, mashed potatoes, canned corn, and gravy from a jar,” she confessed. “Want to stay?”
