an empty table at the front near a podium set on a raised platform. They took their seats, Cork and Agent Earl taking chairs that allowed them to face the guests. Wait staff had already begun to move among the crowd, delivering the first-course salads. Cork looked out over the gathering, men and women in fine dress, laughing and talking, bending to their food, lifting water glasses or wine. Nothing unusual.
He caught a glimpse of a waiter slipping back through the kitchen door. From behind, he looked like the young man at Sam’s Place who’d nearly been pummeled by Erskine Ellroy. He felt a rush of adrenaline, and he kept his eyes riveted on the kitchen door. A few moments later, the waiter appeared, looking nothing like Cork had expected, nothing like the kid.
He was jumpy, he knew that. He glanced at Earl and saw that the BCA agent was eyeing him closely, probably guessing nervousness. Cork nodded toward the room, and Earl, after a moment, swung his eyes to his duty.
There were sheriff’s deputies at every door. Cork told himself someone would have to be crazy to try something there. But whoever it was who’d tried to kill Karl Lindstrom the night before wasn’t exactly what you would call sane.
23
JO LEFT THE HOUSE SHORTLY BEFORE EIGHT P.M. Stevie was beside her in the front seat, playing with a Lego spaceship he’d built. She’d brought him because at the house on Gooseberry Lane there was no one to stay with him. Rose had gone to St. Agnes to help set up for a fellowship breakfast the next day. Annie had gone to the movies with her softball friends. And Jenny was on a date with Sean.
Grace Cove was ten miles from Aurora, around the south end of Iron Lake, up the eastern shoreline, a few miles below the Iron Lake Reservation. When Karl Lindstrom built the home on the isolated cove, he’d paved smooth the winding access road that had always been nothing but gravel and dirt. The drive threaded through big red pines and black spruce and branched just once-left, to a rutted gravel road that led to the only other cabin on the cove, a place owned by John LePere, a man of mixed blood whom Jo used to see occasionally at the county courthouse pleading guilty to drunk and disorderly. He never had an attorney and he never pleaded anything but guilty. She hadn’t seen him there for a while. Had he sobered up? she wondered. She recalled that he was a quiet man, respectful in court. Strong and stocky, he reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of the early voyageurs, the hearty French Canadian fur trappers with their huge canoes. There was something else about him she thought she should remember, but she couldn’t quite get hold of it before she saw the big log house that Lindstrom built looming out of the twilight between the pines. Grace Cove lay behind it, a sweep of dark silver in the waning light.
Grace came out to meet her. She wore dungarees, a yellow T-shirt, and sandals. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked relaxed. Also relieved, Jo thought. They embraced. Two friends. Or almost friends.
“Grace, this is my son Stephen. Stevie, this is Ms. Fitzgerald.”
“How do you do, Stevie?”
“Okay,” he replied and limply took her offered hand.
“My son Scott is upstairs in his room. He’s playing video games. Do you like video games?”
“We have a Nintendo,” Stevie said.
“I think you’ll both do fine. Why don’t you come on in?”
Like Stevie, Grace Fitzgerald’s son was small for his age. The part of him most like his mother was the color of his hair. Other blood was strong in him, especially visible in his eyes, which were green as lily pads.
“What do you want to play?” Scott asked politely, although he was clearly in the middle of a game.
“I’ll just watch,” Stevie said. He stood a moment, then sat down on the floor beside the other boy. The mothers made their exit.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Grace asked. “I made sun tea this afternoon.”
“I’d like that, thanks.”
Downstairs, Grace went to the kitchen. Jo made herself at home in the living room, an expansive room dominated by a great fieldstone fireplace. The floor was dark polished oak. The walls were dark oak paneling. Dark beams ran across the ceiling and reminded Jo of the veins on a powerful animal. It was not, she thought, the home a woman would have designed for herself. She wondered if perhaps it had been created by Karl Lindstrom to pay homage to his family’s source of wealth-timber. The heavy wood feel of it was lightened somewhat by huge windows that let in air and sunlight, and by light-colored area rugs laid on the floor like sun-struck clouds against a darker sky. To Jo, who was used to the chaotic comings and goings of the O’Connor household, the big place on Grace Cove felt heavy and quiet and too far removed. But maybe for a poet and novelist it was the perfect place.
Grace brought in the tea and a plate of lemon bars. “I’ll offer the boys something in a while,” she said. She sat on the sofa with Jo. “I have to tell you, until I met you I was afraid everyone in Aurora talked in monosyllables.”
Jo laughed. “It’s because you’re a celebrity, a writer with a capital W. They’re a bit afraid of you.”
“If you prick me, I bleed.”
Grace sipped her tea, then was quiet. The silence began to feel weighty and awkward to Jo, but because she’d come to listen, she waited.
“Thanks for coming out,” Grace finally said. “I know it’s pretty far.”
“Not so far for these parts. And it sounded important.”
“It is. To me.” She looked at Jo, and seemed to decide it was time to take the plunge. “I’m leaving Aurora.”
“So soon? You haven’t really given it a chance.”
“It’s a lovely place, I’m sure. But it’s not really the place I’m leaving. It’s Karl.”
Jo was caught by surprise. Although she hadn’t known what to expect when Grace asked to speak to her, she hadn’t considered it would be this. The sun had dropped behind the pines and spruce that curtained Grace Cove. The room seemed to have filled with a melancholy light. Grace leaned forward and set her glass on the coffee table.
“What do you think of my husband?”
Jo set her own tea glass on a coaster made of a varnished slice of some sapling, the few rings that marked its brief life hardened into a lovely, useless pattern. “I’ve dealt with Karl only professionally.”
“You sidestepped my question, counselor.”
“Sorry. I’ve found him in all our dealings to be smart, prepared, and-except for a brief period after the bombing at the mill-quite civil, despite our differences.”
“Bright. Prepared. Civil. Not warm, personable, funny?”
“Grace, I haven’t dealt with him in any but a professional way.”
“Are there other people you deal with on a professional basis to whom you would ascribe the traits warm, personable, funny?”
“Of course.”
“I rest my case.”
“You can’t. You haven’t even presented it. Look, why don’t you just tell me about it. All about it.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m here to listen.”
Grace looked around. “A little dark in here, don’t you think?” She stood and turned on a lamp, crossed the polished floor to another lamp, and turned that on as well. She paused, staring out the window toward the dark wall of pines at the edge of her lawn. “It’s lonely out here. My family house is near Chicago, right on Lake Michigan in a row of great houses. Karl grew up in one just down the shoreline. The Lindstroms called it Valhalla.”
“You’ve known him for a long time, then.”
“All my life. Our families belonged to the same clubs. Karl and I were always paired for social functions. The expectation, at least on our parents’ part, was that we’d get married someday. Karl always thought so, too.”
“But not you?”
