‘Not that I know of. Not until Ashlynn.’
‘What about girls who were in love with him? Even if he didn’t feel the same way.’
‘A few, I’m sure.’
‘Tanya Swenson?’
Magnus raised an eyebrow. ‘Tanya? I have no idea. She spent a lot of time with him, but Johan never mentioned her having feelings for him. Why?’
‘Ashlynn called Tanya the day before her death. I just wondered if there could have been another love triangle at work. An unrequited one.’
‘If there was, I never heard about it.’
‘Johan told me that he met Ashlynn because of you,’ Chris said. ‘She was visiting you here at the church.’
‘Yes, she reached out to me as a religious adviser. She was looking for ways to build bridges between the towns. We became very close. Ashlynn was one of the loveliest, most spiritual girls I have ever met. It’s devastating how it all turned out. I miss her.’
‘How did she hope to reconcile the towns?’ Chris asked.
‘She was seventeen. Seventeen-year-old girls believe they can do anything. She wanted to heal the wound caused by the deaths of our children here in St. Croix. I told her she was taking too much onto her shoulders, but she didn’t listen. She had such a sense of purpose and mission. One time, she even insisted I come with her to pray at the Continental Divide. She said it was very symbolic.’
‘The Continental Divide?’
‘Yes, the glacial ridges meet near Browns Valley north of Ortonville. On one side of the divide, the rivers flow north to Hudson Bay. On the other, water travels south to the Gulf of Mexico. For Ashlynn, that was the problem between Barron and St. Croix. We were neighbors living next door to each other but flowing in opposite directions.’
‘She sounds like a remarkable girl.’
‘She was. Johan was very serious about her. I truly thought they would get married.’
‘And yet Ashlynn broke up with him.’
‘I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I know why,’ Magnus said.
‘I suppose Ashlynn felt she couldn’t talk to either of us about her pregnancy. As spiritual as she was, she was a young girl. She was unprepared. Still, I just can’t imagine that she would have had an abortion. Not Ashlynn. It must be a mistake.’
Chris shook his head. ‘It’s not a mistake, and it’s not what you think. The baby was anencephalic.’
‘I’m sorry, what does that mean?’
‘It’s a severe birth defect, invariably fatal. If the baby survives to term, it dies within days or hours. Essentially, the fetus develops without a brain.’
Magnus shook his head, mute with horror.
‘You should tell Johan,’ Chris said.
‘If the police don’t already know, they’ll find out soon. It’ll be better coming from you.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘You’re sure Ashlynn didn’t tell him about the baby?’ he asked quietly.
‘Johan? Never. He couldn’t have remained silent about this.’ Magnus stared at the ceiling, his face wretched, as if he were questioning the mercy of God. ‘How that girl must have suffered. I can’t imagine it. She must have believed she was being punished.’
‘Punished? For what?’
‘For the cancer cluster. I’m sure she believed God was taking her baby, the way He took Kimberly and the others.’
‘Their deaths had nothing to do with her,’ Chris said.
‘Maybe so, but tell that to Ashlynn. That was one of the reasons she first came to me for spiritual counsel. She was convinced that the cancer cluster in St. Croix was real. She was convinced that her father’s company was causing it.’
24
Florian Steele stood on the sprawling porch of his cliff-side home. He swirled Stags’ Leap chardonnay in a bell-shaped glass. Leaning on the balcony, he watched the rocky promontory of the bluff descend below him into a nest of trees. From where he stood, he could see the town of Barron and the stark white headquarters of Mondamin. For ten years, the company had been his dream. His life. He had built it from nothing, and for the first time, a decade of labor felt utterly empty.
He heard Julia behind him. Her heels were unmistakable. His wife stood next to him at the balcony, and he stole a glance at her. She was perfectly put together, as she always was. The cross on her neck. The pinned-up blond hair. The rose dress hanging as if it were cut to her figure, which it was. Her back stiff and proud. He had been married to her for nearly twenty years, and there were days when he didn’t understand her at all.
‘There’s something wrong with us that we can’t cry,’ he said.
Julia didn’t look at him. ‘I know exactly what I’ve lost. I don’t need tears to grieve for her.’
‘I do.’
His wife brushed a stray hair from her eyes. She was impatient with him. ‘Maybe you can’t cry because you feel guilty. Did you think about that?’
‘Olivia Hawk is guilty. Not me.’
‘Maybe Olivia is simply the instrument that God chose to punish us.’
Florian scowled. ‘I don’t need a Bible lecture from you, Julia. Ashlynn’s death is not my fault.’
He slugged down the rest of his wine. He didn’t want to have this argument with her. He was tired of feeling angry when he should have been crying his eyes out. What made it worse was that Julia was right. He felt guilty. He had let Ashlynn drift out of his life without fighting to get her back. His precious little girl had begun to treat him like an enemy.
He left the porch. Inside the patio doors was the family room, rustic and huge, with a vaulted ceiling and a fieldstone fireplace. It was his room. His space. Everything else had been designed and selected by Julia, even the decor of his Mondamin office. He’d insisted on one place for himself. Dead animal heads – deer and moose, even a bear he’d shot near Grand Marais – adorned the wall. If you were a Minnesota CEO in farm country, you had to hunt. It was part of the job description. Florian had never hunted as a child, but like his other endeavors, he had researched it, practiced it, and became expert at it. Ashlynn had joined him once when she was ten. She was a natural with a perfect eye. After her first kill, though, she’d cried for hours and never hunted with him again.
Ashlynn. His little girl. Gone. There were still no tears to squeeze from his eyes. He was a void.
Florian sat on the stone hearth. Julia wandered inside and adjusted the angle of the paintings on the wall like a slave to her obsessive-compulsive ways. He resented her presence, and he hated himself for it. They’d turned on each other since Ashlynn’s death. She blamed him, and he blamed her. He felt as if his wife had been a co- conspirator in turning his daughter against him. It was ironic. In the early years, he’d been the one to put Ashlynn to bed and sing lullabies to her. He wondered if his daughter even remembered those days. As she got older, though, things changed. He ran out of time as the business demanded more and more of his attention. Ashlynn became Julia’s child, molded in his wife’s image, graceful and beautiful.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ he asked his wife.
Julia stopped with her hand on the frame of a watercolor of the Spirit River. ‘About what?’
‘You knew Ashlynn was seeing Johan Magnus.’
‘She asked me not to tell you about it, and I didn’t. That’s not a lie.’
‘I wanted to know if she was seeing anyone.’
‘You wanted to know if she was seeing
‘George Valma told me that Maxine saw Ashlynn and Kirk together near the school. I was concerned.’
‘You mean you were concerned what Kirk might tell her.’
‘Damn it, Julia!’ Florian shouted, his face flushing. He rose unsteadily, feeling the effects of two-thirds of a
