“But no longer?”
“No longer.” Cork took out the issue of the Duluth News Tribune that he’d shown to Hadlestadt at the clinic. “I have something here I think you ought to see.”
She took the newspaper from him and spent a minute reading. She studied the news photo intently. “Whoever this is, she isn’t my daughter. She looks like my daughter, but she’s not.” Ms. Kane stood abruptly and walked to a piece of blond furniture that seemed constructed for the sole purpose of holding expensive knickknacks. She took from it a framed photograph and brought it to Cork.
“This is my Charlotte. You see?”
It was a professionally done portrait, shot against a soft blue background. At first glance, it appeared to Cork to be the same young woman whose picture was in the newspaper. But when he put the news photo and the other side by side he could see the differences. In the jawline, the ears, and in the eyes especially. The California Charlotte looked tanned and happy. The Minnesota Charlotte was pale, thinner, sullen. Still, it was possible that the differences could be the result of the poor quality of the news photo reproduction, or a differing state of mind when each shot had been taken.
“Their ages are different, too,” the woman said. “My Charlotte would be older.”
Cork said, “Would you be willing to tell me about your daughter and her disappearance? And about Fletcher?”
She stared at him. “If you’re not a sheriff anymore, what does all this have to do with you?”
“A young man has been accused of killing Charlotte Kane. Our Charlotte. I don’t believe he did it.”
“Why do you want to know about Fletcher?”
“There are a lot of unanswered questions in the case. If that’s not your daughter in the news story, you have to wonder why they look so much alike and have the same name.”
She sat down and closed her eyes. Cork waited. Through sliding doors, he could see a wide deck, flower boxes filled with red and white blossoms, and beyond that the purple hills of a metropolis that stretched unbroken all the way to the purple horizon.
“Charlotte disappeared a week after her sixteenth birthday,” she began slowly. She looked at her hands, not at Cork. “We’d given her a car as a gift. She’d just got her license. She left after dinner that evening to meet some friends at the library. She never came home.
“Two days later, they found her car. There was a lot of blood in the trunk. Charlotte’s blood. They never found her body.”
She raised her head. Her face was taut, but composed.
“It took me a long time, Mr. O’Connor, but I finally accepted that my daughter is dead. It was different for Fletcher. I loved Charlotte very much, but she and Fletcher had something special between them.” She hesitated. “I don’t know how well you know my husband.”
“Not well at all, I’m afraid.”
“You’re not alone. I was married to him for eighteen years, and I understood him no better on the last day we were together than I did on the first. Fletcher was a very private person, very closed. He allowed few people near him, and he let no one inside. No one except Charlotte. From the moment she was born, she somehow managed to open Fletcher’s heart. I admit, I often felt on the outside of things, a little envious of what the two of them shared.
“In the weeks before she died, however, they were often at odds. Charlotte’s grades were slipping. She was spending too much time with her friends. In Fletcher’s view, anyway. Really, it was normal teenage testing, rebelling. The night she disappeared, they had a fight. About her clothes, which Fletcher thought made her look like a bum. It was the style back then. Holes in everything. She left, and never came back. Fletcher couldn’t deal with her loss, couldn’t stop blaming himself, although there was no reason for blame. It tore him apart. He got stuck in his grieving. In the end, we didn’t just lose our daughter. We lost each other. Eight months after Charlotte disappeared, we separated, then divorced.”
The phone rang.
“Would you excuse me,” she said. She left the sofa and went to the kitchen. “Hello?” she answered. “Hi, sweetheart.” She was quiet for a moment. “No, I said Thursday night. The tickets are for the nine o’clock set. Jill and Ed will meet us there.”
Cork didn’t like listening in. He took the photograph of Charlotte Kane and returned it to the shelf from which her mother had taken it.
“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Connor.” She stood in the doorway to the kitchen and spoke from a distance.
“That’s all right.”
“This is all very difficult to absorb.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t know what’s going on in your town-what’s it called?”
“Aurora. Minnesota.”
She nodded. “But your Charlotte isn’t mine. Of that I’m absolutely certain.”
“You’re not curious?”
She crossed her arms protectively. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had to deal with loss. This kind, this overwhelming uncertainty. At first you live on hope. You pray your heart out. You don’t sleep, don’t eat. Days stretch into weeks, weeks into months. Finally, holding on to hope becomes like holding up the earth, and you just can’t do it anymore. You have to let go. You have to grieve and move on. I haven’t heard from Fletcher in over two years. I moved on. I’d hoped the same for him.” She squeezed her eyes shut, as if experiencing physical pain. After a few moments, she went on. “Fletcher didn’t just lose a daughter. I think he lost the best part of himself, and he was desperate to get that back somehow. He became obsessed with finding Charlotte, whom he didn’t believe was dead. He saw her everywhere. In passing cars, on street corners, in the mall. I’ve heard that everybody has a double somewhere. So I suppose it’s entirely possible that he finally found Charlotte’s double, some young woman as desperate for a new life as he was for his old.”
“Or he manufactured her.”
It took a moment, but as she understood what he was suggesting, a look of horror dawned on her face. “Jesus. That’s hard to believe.”
“But not impossible. I understand your husband was a gifted plastic surgeon.”
“You misunderstand. I think Fletcher was probably capable of something that desperate and bizarre. What’s hard to believe is that he found someone willing to let him do it.” She crossed the room and picked up the photograph of her daughter. “If that’s what happened, I feel so sorry for her. Mr. O’Connor, when you find the answer, I’d like to know.”
He left her standing in the middle of her beautiful home, looking deeply troubled.
36
After he talked with the contact officer, Cork had to wait awhile. Finally Sergeant Gilbert Ortega came up front and escorted him back to the homicide division. There was another plainclothes detective in a corner of the office, coat off, shirt-sleeves rolled back, fingers tapping on a computer keyboard. He glanced up when Cork came in with Ortega but went right back to his work. Ortega sat down at his desk and motioned for Cork to take the other chair.
“Minnesota, is it?”
“That’s right.”
Ortega scratched at the small, neat mustache that lay like a pencil line on his upper lip. “Never been there. Pretty, I hear.”
“You heard right.”
“Officer Baker said you’re interested in an investigation we conducted a few years back.”
“Yes. Vic’s name was Charlotte Kane.”
Ortega nodded. “I remember. All the evidence pointed toward homicide but we never found a body. What’s the Minnesota connection?”
