“I need to follow you out, Arne.”
“Hurry up then.” Soderberg started walking.
Cork took a last look at the scene around him. The light was almost gone, but there was enough left so that he could clearly see the eyes of the angel. For a moment, he could have sworn that the angel looked right back at him.
20
A strong north wind came up in the night, bending the trees and causing the houses of Aurora to creak. Near dawn, a brief summer rain fell. The wind had died, and the sky was clear the next morning when a news van from KBJR in Duluth parked outside Lakeview Cemetery waiting for Gus Finlayson to open the gate. Behind it, a line of cars backed up along the road, mostly the curious from outside town who hadn’t heard of the angel of the roses in time to make the trip on Memorial Day. Gus was late, and the news van began honking its horn. It wasn’t long before all the horns were honking. The caretaker finally pulled up in his old Volvo and got out looking groggy, stuffing his shirttail into his pants. He fumbled with the lock and swung the gate wide.
Cork was in line with the others, but he knew long before he reached Charlotte’s grave that something wasn’t right. The incredible fragrance, beautiful and overpowering the day before, was missing.
What greeted the visitors that morning disappointed everyone. The powerful night wind had swept the cemetery clean of rose petals, and the rain had washed the tears from the angel’s eyes.
From the cemetery, Cork headed to the Pinewood Broiler to get himself some breakfast. When he stepped inside that morning, he found the talk to be all about the roses. He shot the bull a few minutes with a table full of retired iron miners, then he noticed Randy Gooding sitting at the counter by himself.
Gooding lived alone in the upper of a duplex on Ironwood Street, a block from St. Agnes. Cork often encountered him having breakfast at the Broiler, which was also near the church.
“How’s it hanging, Randy?”
Gooding looked up from his plate that held the last of a Denver omelet, and he smiled. “Morning, Cork.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Cork took the stool next to the deputy. “Eggs over easy, Sara,” he said to the waitress. “Hash browns, toast-”
“Burned, right?” Sara said.
“Charred. And coffee. Oh, and his breakfast’s on me.” He jabbed a thumb toward Gooding.
“Trying to bribe an officer of the law?” Gooding said.
Gooding wasn’t wearing his uniform. He was dressed in a dark blue polo shirt and white Dockers. Next to his plate was a small notepad with a pen lying beside it. From the furious scribble across the pad, Cork guessed that Gooding had been hard at work on something. The occasional doodles were roses, lovely roses.
“You on duty?”
“Day off.” Gooding finished the last bite of his omelet and carefully wiped his mouth with his paper napkin.
Cork tapped the notepad. “Working on the angel of the roses?”
“Yeah. Nothing criminal about what’s happened, and the sheriff made it clear that he doesn’t want any official time put in on it. But it’s got me intrigued.”
“Have you been up there this morning?”
Gooding nodded. “I used the department’s key and let myself in at first light. Gone, blown away in the night, all the petals, that wonderful fragrance. And the tears gone, too.” He shook his head sadly.
Sara set a cup in front of Cork and poured his coffee.
“Thanks,” he said. Then to Gooding, “What do you make of it?”
“Let me show you something.” Gooding shoved his plate, coffee cup, and notebook to the side. He reached down to a small, white paper bag on the floor by his stool and took out a single long-stemmed red rose. “I just came from talking with Ray Lyons.”
Lyons owned North Star Nursery and supplied a good deal of the stock that went into the gardens of Tamarack County.
Gooding broke the rose and scattered the petals over the counter. “There are enough here to cover a couple of square inches one layer deep.”
“Okay.”
“You saw the grave yesterday, how deep all the petals lay. I did a rough calculation this morning. It would take a couple of thousand roses to supply enough petals to do the trick.”
Cork let out a low whistle.
Gooding nodded. “I lost a lot of sleep last night considering how that many roses would get here. UPS? FedEx? What?”
“Did you run that question by Lyons?” Cork noticed his coffee cup still had the ghost of a lipstick print along the lip. He wiped it clean with his napkin, then took a sip.
“Yeah. He says they could have come from a wholesaler almost anywhere. Up from the Twin Cities, Duluth, over from Fargo. Could even have come directly from one of the big suppliers down in Miami. Good time of year to order a lot of roses. Big South American crops coming in, but no big holiday to generate demand. You’d get a good price.”
“How would they get to Aurora?”
“They come in bunches of twenty-five, in containers they call Florida boxes, usually shipped by the gross. Generally they’re kept fresh with cold packs, so they don’t need special refrigeration or anything. Lyons said usually there’s nothing on the packaging that would make them stand out from other freight, so they wouldn’t necessarily be noticed.”
“Anybody with a sizeable truck could have picked them up at an airport or a freight depot?”
“Exactly.” He reached into the white sack again and pulled out a plastic bag full of wilted petals. “I left a bunch of these with Lyons. He’s going to see if he can identify the variety, give me some idea of where they might have come from.”
“So you’re among those who think there’s a logical explanation for the roses?” Cork said.
Gooding put back everything he’d taken from the white sack. “You know anything about the miracle of Our Lady of Fatima?”
“Not much.”
“At one point during the visitations, a shower of rose petals fell from the sky. Same thing happened in the fifties when a Filipino nun went on a fast for world peace. Documented.” He reached for his coffee cup and signaled Sara for a refill. “In eighteen fifty-one, blood and pieces of meat rained down out of a cloudless sky on an army post near San Francisco. In Memphis, Tennesee, in eighteen seventy-seven, live snakes fell by the thousands. Stones showered down on Chico, California, for a full month in nineteen twenty-one. There are hundreds of such documented cases. Most theories involve things being sucked up by tornadoes or hurricanes and deposited elsewhere.”
“What about the tears?”
“I sent a sample down to the BCA lab in St. Paul for analysis. It’ll be a while before we have anything.” He looked directly into Cork’s eyes, and his own eyes seemed lustrous. “I’m going to do everything I can to prove there’s a logical explanation. But if I can’t, it won’t be the first time I’ve seen a miracle.”
“Yeah? How so?”
Gooding waited until the waitress had refilled his cup. Then he glanced behind him at the tables where the noise was the rumble of voices and the clatter of flatware on plates. Just slightly, he leaned toward Cork.
“Not a lot of people know this, and I’d just as soon you kept it to yourself. I was dead once.”
Cork drew back to get a good look at Gooding. It was clear the deputy wasn’t kidding.
“When I was six, my mother packed us up for a Christmas trip to visit friends up in Paradise, in the U.P. of Michigan. It’s snowing like crazy, and the roads are ice. We’re crossing a bridge over the Manistee River, and some guy swerves across the center line, hits our car, and we go through the railing, plunge right off the bridge. The river’s covered with ice, but the car just busts right through. I can still hear my mother, screaming, then the car’s
