dozens of wet boot prints. “The others?”
“They all left a few minutes ago, following Freddie Baker’s plow. You need to leave pretty soon, too, before the road drifts over.”
“Not until I’ve had some of that stew.”
“That’s why I kept it hot.”
Coming in from the cold affected Cork in the usual way. He headed to the bathroom, where he stood at the toilet for a full minute relieving himself. When he came back, Rose had a filled bowl, a napkin, and a spoon on the table.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“I’m fine with just the stew, Rose.”
He leaned to his bowl. Steam, full of the smell of beef and carrots and onions and parsley and pepper, rose up against his face. Cork thought heaven couldn’t smell any better.
“Where’s Wally? Up at the house?” he asked.
Rose moved to the sink and began to wash the last of the dishes, except for what Cork was using. “Yes,” she said.
“How are Fletcher and Glory doing?”
She turned, wiping her fleshy hands on her apron, one Cork recognized from home. She crossed to a window and looked toward the big house. “They’re scared,” she said.
There was a history of bad blood between Fletcher Kane and Cork. Glory was a chilly enigma that no one, not even Rose who was her friend, quite seemed to understand. Yet Cork had put aside his personal feelings because he was a parent himself, and the idea of a child, anyone’s child, lost in that kind of hell left a metallic taste of fear in his own mouth that even Rose’s wonderful stew couldn’t wash away.
“I hated coming in,” he said.
“Everybody did.”
The guesthouse had a small kitchen and dining area that opened onto a larger living room with a fireplace. The living room had been set up for the search. The radio sat on a big table near a window. Beside it lay the search log and other documents, including a blown-up photograph of the missing girl, a pretty teenager with black hair and a reserved smile. A topo-graphical map of the area had been taped to the wall. Cork could see the pins in the map, each search team denoted by a pin with a particular color. They’d covered what ground they could, but that was the problem. Charlotte Kane had vanished in the night on a snowmobile without telling anyone where she was going. She left a New Year’s Eve party that she’d thrown at Valhalla without her father’s consent. She was seventeen and intoxicated. Twenty-one inches of snow had fallen after her departure. Trackers-volunteers from the U.S. border patrol-had blown away the powder, what they called blue smoke, and had been able to say only that she’d headed to the graded road where she’d connected with a heavily used snowmobile trail that eventually branched in a dozen directions, and each branch in a dozen more. There was no guarantee that she’d even kept to the trails. With a full tank of gas, she could have made it halfway to North Dakota or all the way to Canada. It was an enormous area, an impossible area, to cover thoroughly.
“The air-scent dogs?” Cork asked.
Rose shook her head. “Nothing.” She headed back to the sink.
“Thanks,” Cork said.
“For what?”
“Coming out. Helping.”
“A lot of folks have helped.”
“You’re still here.”
“Somebody has to feed you. Jo would never forgive me if I let you starve or freeze to death.” As soon as she said it, she looked sorry. She put a hand to her forehead. “That wasn’t funny.”
“It’s okay, Rose.”
The door opened and a cold wind blasted Deputy Randy Gooding into the room and a lot of snow with him. He took a moment and breathed deeply the warm air inside.
“And I thought winters in Milwaukee were tough,” he finally said.
Gooding was tall and wiry, late twenties, good-looking in a square-jawed way, and possessed of a friendly disposition. Although he’d been in Aurora less than two years, he seemed to have fit nicely into the pace of life there. Like Cork, he was a man who’d fled the city for the north country, looking for a simpler way of life.
Gooding acknowledged Cork with a nod. “Sheriff wanted me to check, make sure you made it in okay.”
“Is he up at the house?”
Gooding tugged off his gloves and his dark blue stocking cap. “Him and Father Mal. Dr. Kane’s not happy that the plug’s been pulled on the search.”
Cork put his spoon down and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “If it were my daughter, I wouldn’t be happy either.”
“How’s Glory?” Rose said.
Gooding breathed into his hands. “She’s sedated herself pretty well,” he said. “Blue Sapphire gin.”
“It’s hard to blame her,” Rose said.
Gooding shook his head. “Tough on the doc, dealing with it all himself. He just stands at the window staring out as if that’ll make her materialize somehow.”
Rose turned to the stew pot and stirred with a wooden spoon. “I took some food up earlier. I’m not sure they ate anything. They’ll be hungry eventually.”
“The sheriff wants everybody ready to move,” Gooding said. “He’s afraid the snow’s going to close in right behind Baker’s plow.”
Rose glanced at Cork, and he knew before she spoke what she was going to say. “Somebody should stay. Those folks should not be left alone out here.”
“Father Mal’s planning on staying,” Gooding said.
“Father Mal can’t cook. He can’t even boil water right.”
Cork said, “I think he figures to offer a different kind of sustenance, Rose.”
She gave him a sharp look. “I understand that. But they’ll all need to eat. It’s hard to hold on to hope when you’re hungry.”
The door banged open, and once again the storm muscled its way in with the men who entered. Sheriff Wally Schanno carried on with the conversation he’d been having with Father Mal Thorne.
“With this storm blowing like it is, I can’t guarantee we’ll be back tomorrow.”
“All the more reason I should stay,” the priest said. “These people shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”
Side by side, the two men were distinct contrasts. Schanno was tall and gaunt, his face gouged by worry. He was in his midsixties, but at that moment, he looked far older. Father Mal Thorne was younger by twenty years. Although he was a much smaller man, his compact body seemed to hold double its share of energy. Broad-chested and in good condition, he always reminded Cork of a tough pugilist.
Schanno noticed Cork. “Thought I told you to skip Hat Lake and come straight in.”
“I made it back in one piece, Wally.”
The sheriff looked too tired to argue. “See anything?”
Cork thought about the gray visage behind the snow, the sense that he’d been guided back to his snowmobile, that somehow Charlotte had tried to reach out to him.
“No,” he finally said.
“Well, we’re all accounted for now. Let’s get this show on the road before we get stuck out here.”
“I’m staying,” Rose said.
Schanno began to object. “Goll darn it-”
“Thank you, Rose,” Father Mal broke in. He smiled at her, and there were boyish dimples in his cheeks. “But you don’t have to do that.”
“They’ve got enough on their minds without worrying about fixing food or cleaning up. You, too. Your hands will be full, Father.”
Mal Thorne considered it and decided in the blink of an eye. “All right.”
Schanno opened his mouth, but the priest cut him off.
