wonder.”
Soderberg said, “I thought I told you to get these men out of here, Pender.”
Deputy Pender was new to the sheriff’s department. He hadn’t served under Cork. To him, Corcoran O’Connor was just a guy who ran a burger joint on Iron Lake. Because Pender was a Baptist, the priest had no special authority as far as he was concerned. He jerked his head in the direction of the trail up to the parking lot. “You heard the sheriff.”
“Are you going to bag that stuff?” Cork asked, indicating the things Gooding had uncovered near the body.
“O’Connor.” Soderberg put out a hand, as if to move Cork bodily from the scene. Cork glared at the hand, and Soderberg drew up short of actually touching him.
“I’ll bag it,” Gooding said.
Cork turned and started up the bank. The priest held back.
Mal Thorne asked, “Sheriff, when are you going to tell her parents?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’d like to be there when you do.”
Soderberg shook his head. “I don’t think-”
“Arne,” Cork said, “have you ever had to tell a mother or father that their child is dead?”
In reply, the sheriff simply glared. It may have been meant to demonstrate Soderberg’s perturbation, but more probably it was meant to disguise the fact that he’d never had to shoulder that particular burden.
Cork said, “When you do, I think you’ll be glad to have someone like Mal there with you.”
“When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.” To his credit, Soderberg spoke civilly to the priest. “I’ll think about it, and I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll be at the rectory.”
Soderberg turned an angry eye on Pender. “When you get to the parking lot, relieve Borkmann and send him down here. I want a word with him.”
They walked up the trail, slowly because of the slippery terrain and because there was something heavy on them now. Cork thought about Soderberg, about the anguish on his face as he’d stared down at the body of Charlotte Kane. It occurred to him that the sheriff had probably never dealt with death in this way before. He wondered how Soderberg liked the responsibility of the job now.
The priest let out a deep sigh that had nothing to do with the effort of the climb. “Is Rose home?”
“I think so,” Cork said. “Why?”
The priest kept his eyes on the mud. “Glory’s going to need her.”
6
Cork spent the afternoon working on Sam’s Place, getting ready for the tourist season. Sam’s Place was an old Quonset hut that had long ago been converted to a burger stand on the shore of Iron Lake, just beyond the northern limits of Aurora. Beginning in early May until late October, Cork, with the help of his daughters, catered to the hungry fishermen and tourists and locals. For an ex-lawman, it was a quiet existence, but one Cork had come to appreciate.
He was thinking about Charlotte Kane as he worked, about how peaceful she’d looked in death. He’d heard that freezing wasn’t a bad way to go, that people who froze to death experienced a false warmth at the end, a final euphoria. Maybe that’s how it had been for Charlotte. He hoped so. However, that didn’t explain why she had no gloves with her, or who’d opened the curiously unbroken Corona bottle. Cork had considered from several angles the food wrappers found in the snow near the body. He would love to have a look at the autopsy, to know if any of that junk food was in her stomach when she died. Because more and more, the circumstances caused him to consider the possibility that she had not been alone at the end.
He’d already pulled away the plywood that had covered the serving windows all winter, and was just preparing to clean a squirrel’s nest from the lakeside eave, when his cell phone chirped.
“Cork O’Connor,” he answered.
There was nothing but static on the phone, which didn’t surprise him at all. Technologically speaking, Aurora was at the edge of a frontier. The demand for cell phones wasn’t great enough yet to warrant the building of relay towers that would easily service the area. North of Aurora, cell phones didn’t work at all. In town, reception was often sketchy at best. Usually, Cork didn’t even bother to carry his cell phone with him.
“Hello,” he said. “You’re not coming in well.”
Within the scratchy static, he made out Rose’s voice and two phrases. “Glory Kane…” and “… needs your help.”
Glory Kane opened the door before he knocked. Cork was surprised to see that she seemed perfectly sober.
Glory was in her midthirties, a good thirteen years younger than her brother. Aside from the surname they shared, there was little about the two Kanes that was alike. Fletcher was tall, awkward looking, already gone bald. Glory was a small woman, with long black hair, and lovely features. When she did the full nine yards of makeup, she was absolutely stunning. For a while after she’d arrived in Aurora with Fletcher, she’d often taken the time to look that way. Little by little, however, she had abandoned the enormous effort it must have taken to paint over and powder smooth her pain, and now her face was different. It bore the beaten expression of a war veteran, the sometimes vacant stare of someone who’d survived a long and bitter campaign. Very often, this was simply the effect of the booze, for it was no secret that Glory Kane drank. She wasn’t obnoxious in her drunkenness. Usually, she holed up in her brother’s big house, and no one saw her for days. In the Kane household, she seemed to cover much the same territory that Rose did with the O’Connors, and to care about Charlotte as deeply as Rose did her own nieces and nephew. This might have been the reason she had allowed Rose closer than anyone else in Aurora. That and the fact that Rose didn’t have a judgmental bone in her body.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, and stood back to let him enter.
Like Cork and a lot of others who now lived in Aurora, the Kanes had returned after a long absence. Fletcher and Glory had been gone longer than most, thirty-five years. Fletcher, when he left, had been Cork’s age, thirteen. Glory had been conceived, but not yet born, visible only as an obvious rounding of her mother’s belly. So far as Cork knew, no one had heard a word from them after they’d gone. Any relatives they’d had in Tamarack County had died or departed long ago. They had no old friends and no apparent reason that compelled their return. The middle-aged Fletcher, now a widower, had simply showed up unannounced one day a couple of years earlier, bringing with him his daughter, his sister, and enough money to be one of the richest men on the Iron Range. He’d settled into life in Aurora without any word about what had happened to him in the nearly four decades of his absence. The facts known about him were few. He was a physician, a plastic surgeon, but he no longer practiced. He speculated in real estate and land development instead. He supported the Independent Republican party with heavy donations. And he guarded his privacy fiercely, something guaranteed to raise an eyebrow in any small town.
In addition to building Valhalla, his isolated retreat, he’d bought one of the grandest houses in Aurora, the old Parrant estate, which occupied the entire tip of the finger of land called North Point. The house was huge, gray stone, surrounded by cedars and an enormous expanse of lawn that ran down to the shore of Iron Lake. Cork knew the Parrant estate well. One snowy night a few years before, he’d been the one who found Judge Parrant in his study with most of his head blown away.
Glory led him into the living room. Rose was already seated on the couch. She made room for Cork beside her.
“You know about Charlotte,” he said.
Glory nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Cork said.
“Thank you.” It was obvious she’d been crying, but she seemed to have composed herself. Cork figured Rose had been a big help.
Glory generally kept to herself. Except for her regular attendance at St. Anges, she was seldom seen in public. This spawned all kinds of gossip. Rose listened to none of it, and from the beginning had made an effort to
