“Nice kid,” Cork said.
“They don’t make ’em any nicer.”
“I’ll let her know. But you still owe her a personal apology.”
“She’ll have it.”
Gooding walked down the steps into the deepening gloom as night overtook Aurora.
Cork went back to the living room, where Jo and Jenny were waiting. “I’m going up to talk to Annie. Okay?”
“I think it would be all right now,” Jo said.
Upstairs, he tapped at her door. At first there was no answer. Then Annie called out in a small voice, “Yes?”
“It’s Dad. May I come in?”
“Just a minute.”
He waited. In her room, there was a tiny click and a little welcome mat of light slipped under her door. A moment later, she opened up.
He hadn’t exaggerated to Gooding. Black mascara ran down each of Annie’s cheek in a wide, crooked line. The whites of her beautiful brown eyes were red from crying. Her hair was a mess. She left the doorway, went to her bed, and sat down, all slumped over. Cork sat beside her and put Gooding’s sketch facedown on the floor.
“I just talked with Randy Gooding.”
“Here?” She seemed alarmed.
“He came by to apologize.”
She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”
Cork put his arm around her. “He won’t.”
“Oh, Daddy.” She fell against him and buried her face in his chest. “I messed up.”
“No, you didn’t.”
She pulled away and reached toward her ears. “I’m going to take these awful things out. I’m never going to wear them again.”
“Now wait a minute.” Cork gently gripped her wrists, restraining her. “Your mother has pierced ears. Do you think that’s so awful?”
“No.” She lowered her hands and Cork let go.
“Before you ran into Randy, were you happy with what you’d done?”
“Yes.”
“Then stick with it.”
Annie thought it over. “You think I should?”
“Absolutely.” He reached out and blurred one of the black mascara lines with his finger. “You might want to talk to Jenny. Get some pointers on makeup.”
She shook her head adamantly. “I’m not wearing makeup anymore.”
“Not a bad choice,” Cork said. “You’re beautiful without it.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart.”
Annie kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks.”
“Randy left this for you.”
He gave her the drawing, and her face broke into a wonderful smile.
“One more thing,” Cork said. “I have it on good authority that Damon Fielding wants to ask you out.”
“Damon?”
“That’s what I hear.”
Her eyes danced. “Radical.”
Cork left her sitting on her bed, with Gooding’s offering in her hands and the prospect of Damon Fielding in her thinking.
After Gooding’s reaction to Annie, Cork thought a lot about Charlotte Kane, considered if maybe something had gone terribly wrong with a quiet young woman’s attempt to be desirable, and, as Gooding had feared, she’d become involved in something way over her head and dangerous, perhaps with the married man Solemn believed she was seeing. He wanted to talk more with Solemn about that possibility, but the young man had vanished completely. From discussions with Dorothy Winter Moon, Cork knew that she’d given her son nothing. She claimed not to have seen Solemn at all since his disappearance. If she was telling the truth, Solemn was flat broke. His truck was still in the impound lot, so he had no transportation. He had no clothes but those he’d been wearing when Cork had last seen him. So what had become of Solemn Winter Moon?
Periodically, Cork visited the old cabin on Widow’s Creek, looking for an indication that Solemn might have returned to the place where he’d spent good times with Sam. Early one sunny Sunday morning in the middle of May, he drove to the rez, through Alouette, and up north toward Widow’s Creek. The wild grass was high on the narrow track that led between the pines to Sam’s old cabin. Cork parked and went inside. The place smelled musty and abandoned. He saw that a spider had spun a web in one of the kerosene lanterns and had already trapped and bound in silk a bounty of tiny prey. As he stood in the middle of the empty cabin, he heard a scurrying under the bunk. He understood. The cabin was gradually being taken over. In the end, the woods would reclaim the land and the materials Sam had borrowed to build his little home.
He walked to the creek. The snowmelt was over, and the water was clear now, fed by a spring that bubbled from a rocky hillside about a mile northeast. Sam had erected his cabin beside a little waterfall below which the creek widened into a pool a dozen feet across. The water Sam drew from the pool he used for everything-drinking, cooking, bathing. All winter long, even when the deep cold put a hard shell of ice over the creek, Sam kept a hole cleared in the pool. The bucket with which he carried water was still there, sitting upright on a flat rock on the bank. Cork glanced inside. A black snake lay coiled at the bottom. It lifted its head toward Cork. The fork of its tongue tasted the air. It was a harmless racer, not dangerous at all. Still, its presence in the bucket startled Cork and left him feeling uneasy.
He looked around once more and was about to return to his Bronco when something caught his eye and his ear. A couple of hundred yards south along the creek, a dozen crows circled, dropped, and rose. They cawed furiously in the way of those scavengers when they were squabbling over carrion. Their cries grated against the stillness of the woods and added to Cork’s sense of disquiet. He began to make his way through the bog myrtle that grew thick along the banks of Widow’s Creek. It didn’t take him long to realize he was following a faint trail that had recently been broken through the thorny shrub growth.
Everything about the scene felt a degree off, as if the whole compass of that place had been shifted. His uneasiness deepened into a true sense of menace, and he found himself wishing he’d brought his rifle.
The crackle of the brush as he pushed through alerted the crows. At his approach, they scattered. They’d been feeding on something at the center of a patch of ostrich ferns grown a yard high. Cork could see an outline of crushed greenery, but the growth was too thick and too high for him to be able to make out immediately what was there. The size, however, was about right for a human body. He caught a glimpse of soft tan like a leather coat, and almost immediately was assaulted by the smell of rotting flesh. He steeled himself and went forward.
It was death, all right, but not exactly as he’d anticipated. The carcass of a yearling whitetail lay on a bed of bloodied ferns. Its throat had been shredded, its stomach cavity ripped open, emptied. Cork suspected it had been brought down by wolves who’d feasted and left the rest for scavengers. He stood awhile looking down at the raw flesh that was so thick with flies it appeared to be covered by rippling black skin. What was it he’d expected? What was it he’d feared? That it would be Solemn he’d find there? And why was that? Because death would have explained easily how Solemn had been able to drop so completely off the face of the earth. And because a shadow had come over all of Cork’s thinking now, a darkness that shaded all his expectations with foreboding.
The crows cried at him bitterly from the branches in the pines where they’d fled. Cork left the place and walked back to his Bronco, unable to shake the sense that in these woods there was a great deal that wasn’t right.
14
