Cork had no answer for that.
“Here I am praying for Jo and for all of us. I should be praying for them, too, I suppose. Sometimes it just seems there can never be enough prayers.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. “You were talking in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing I could understand. It sounded angry.”
That was probably right. He was afraid, and long ago he’d come to understand that translating fear into anger helped him deal with situations that threatened to paralyze him.
“Rose, I don’t know if going out there will do any good.”
“You have to go, though. You have to act, Cork. It’s what you do best.”
“What about you?”
“I pray. It’s what I do best.”
In what quiet comfort they could draw from each other’s company, they sat until Stephen came downstairs with his suitcase. He looked at his watch.
“Mr. Parmer will be here in an hour, Dad. Have you even packed?”
“Last night.”
“Should we, like, wait out front?”
“It’s a little early for that.”
“Maybe some breakfast first,” Rose suggested, rising.
“That would be awesome, Aunt Rose.”
Stephen dropped his bag by the front door, then stood at the window staring eagerly into a morning that still looked very much like night, as if he was trying hard to hurry the dawn. Cork showered, dressed, and brought his own suitcase downstairs. Mal was up now, too, drinking coffee in the kitchen and helping Rose. Stephen sat at the table, doing a lot of damage to a stack of pancakes. The girls came down a few minutes later. And shortly after that, Hugh Parmer arrived.
Cork introduced Parmer, and they all made a fuss of thanks, which Parmer accepted in a genuinely humble fashion. Stephen was eager to be off, so they were quickly and cleanly on their way to the Duluth airport in the dark of a very early November morning. Cork had cautioned Parmer to watch for deer, who were crepuscular creatures, apt to be lurking along the road as dawn approached. They made it to the airport without incident. Just as the sun began to rise over the vast inland sea of Lake Superior, Parmer’s Learjet lifted off the ground, made a long curl to the west, and headed toward Wyoming.
After Stephen grew tired of looking out the window at the earth thirty thousand feet below, he turned to his host and asked, “Do you own this jet?”
“Yep.” Parmer sat with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Lock, stock, and twin Honeywell engines.”
“It must’ve cost like a million dollars.”
“Several, Stephen. But in my work I need the freedom that having my own set of wings gives me.”
“You build things, right? I mean like condominiums and stuff.”
“Communities, Stephen. I develop communities.”
“Dad says you’re planning on trashing the shore along Iron Lake.”
“Sorry, Hugh,” Cork said.
Parmer laughed. “One man’s vision may be another’s nightmare, son. Your dad and I have a lot of talking to do. I think we’ve finished dealing through intermediaries. I believe we’ll be working face-to-face on this from now on, man to man, which is the best way to do business, I think. But we’re going to worry about that later. Right now you and your dad have more pressing concerns.”
Stephen studied the interior of the Lear with continued admiration. “Maybe we could use your jet to look for Mom.”
“I think you’ll want something that maneuvers in and out of those mountains a little better. I’ll bet we can arrange for that.”
“We?” Cork said.
“Manner of speaking. But when I offered to help in any way I could, I wasn’t just blowing smoke, Cork. If you want to arrange for your own aircraft in the search out there, you do that. Have ’em bill it to me.”
“That’s a lot more than I intended when I asked for your help, Hugh.”
“And little enough for me to give.”
Stephen said, “Were you always rich?”
“Nope. Grew up in West Texas working on the same spread where my father was a ranch hand. That’s how I started out.”
“How’d you get rich?”
“The truth is that I married the rancher’s daughter. Didn’t do it because she was rich. I loved that woman with all my heart.”
“Still married?” Cork asked.
“ ’Fraid not. Lost Julia almost twenty years ago to a drunk driver.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’d think that after twenty years I’d get used to the idea.” He looked out the window of the plane. “I hope you find your wife, Cork. I truly do.”
The flight was smooth and uneventful, and shortly before ten o’clock the Lear touched down on a runway of the regional airport in Cody, Wyoming.
Cork had called ahead and arranged for a rental car, a Jeep Wrangler. After he confirmed that it was waiting, he and Stephen said good-bye to Hugh Parmer. They shook hands, and Parmer said, “I’m heading home, but if I hear that there was some way I could’ve helped and you didn’t ask me, I’ll be well and truly pissed.”
“I’ll be sure to let you know,” Cork said. “Hugh, I appreciate everything you’ve done.”
“We’ll be talking,” Parmer said. He ruffed Stephen’s hair. “Your old man’s lucky to have you along for backup. Keep him out of trouble, okay?”
“I will,” Stephen said earnestly.
“And, son,” Parmer added. “I sincerely hope you find your mother.”
They drove southeast toward the Bighorn River, into a basin from which they could see the Absarokas to the west. The mountains were completely covered with snow, and at one point Stephen said solemnly, “They look like the teeth of a wolf.” They drove between irrigated fields, where great rolls of hay lay wrapped in black plastic and wore a mantle of snow. They drove through rocky hills dotted with prickly pear cactus. They saw ranch houses in the distance, isolated, lonely-looking places, and spotted cattle grazing near gullies lined with cottonwoods. The farther south they drove the more rugged the land became, marked by the rise of long escarpments whose sharp cliffs were red as open wounds. Cork was surprised how little snow there was in the Bighorn Basin, in some places not much more than a dusting.
After an hour and a half, they came to Hot Springs, which proved to be a large town perched on the high ground at a bend in the Bighorn. On the far side of the river, steamy vapor drifted up from yellow pools. Hot Springs had an old western feel to it, a community carved out of rock and bedded in sand. It was, in a way, colorful. Blue sky, blue river, blue-white mountains, red rock, yellow springs. The day was warm, the temperature in the high forties. In the hills above town lay pockets of snow, but in Hot Springs itself most of what had fallen had already melted away. They drove directly to the courthouse, an old building of tan brick, and they parked in the lot of the annex, a newer two-story addition that housed the Owl Creek County Sheriff’s Department and the county jail. Also parked in the lot were news vans from stations in Casper and Cheyenne with satellite dishes on top. Cork and Stephen went inside and found themselves in a small waiting area, empty at the moment, with two inner doors. One door was marked JAIL, the other AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There was a public contact window so dark Cork couldn’t see what was on the other side. He walked to the window and spoke into the small grate embedded in the glass.
“My name is Cork O’Connor. This is my son, Stephen. We’re here to see Deputy Dewey Quinn.”
“Need to see some ID,” came the voice from the other side.
Cork took out his driver’s license and dropped it in the trough beneath the glass, where a couple of fingers drew it in from the other side. A minute passed, then the license came back. “Have a seat,” the tired, disembodied voice said.
