Blood Hollow (Cork O'Connor)

by William Kent Krueger

  The cemetery was going dark at Finlayson’s back. The rows of stone markers, rigid and charcoal colored, reminded Cork of a military brigade standing watch over the dead.

  “How about letting me in and I’ll come out with him?”

  Finlayson puffed out his cheeks but gave in easily. “I’d argue, but I’m too pooped. Pull on in. Sheriff’s somewhere over to the other side of the cemetery.”

  “Thanks, Gus.”

  As he approached Charlotte’s grave the smell of the rose petals was astonishing, the fragrance both pleasing and overpowering. Mal Thorne had asked him earlier, didn’t he feel it? Didn’t he feel that something remarkable had occurred? He wasn’t entirely sure what he felt, but what he thought was that the hands that had created this event were made of flesh and blood, and sooner or later the mind behind it, and the motive, would reveal itself.

  Soderberg’s BMW sat under a linden tree. The sheriff was nowhere in sight. Cork parked in the middle of the lane, blocking traffic if there’d been any. He got out and stood awhile, taking in the hillside and Iron Lake in the distance. The sky was the color of an old nickel, and everything under it lay in a dim light that was not day nor yet night. Everything around Cork was absolutely still. He had the feeling he was looking at an underexposed black-and-white photograph, one that didn’t give away what the photographer had intended to capture.

  Then he saw the flare of a match reflected off the shiny marble pillar thirty yards down the hill.

  Soderberg drew meditatively on his cigarette and didn’t turn at Cork’s approach. When Cork spoke his name, the sheriff jumped, a cloud of smoke shot from his mouth, and he dropped his cigarette. The ember exploded in a small burst of sparks in the grass at his feet.

  “Jesus Christ, O’Connor.”

  “Sorry, Arne.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, I imagine. Trying to understand the angel of the roses. Thought you were in Hibbing.”

  “I was until I heard about this.” Soderberg picked up his cigarette. There was still enough glow to the ember to salvage a smoke if he’d wanted. Apparently he didn’t. He just held the cigarette in his fingers. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out,” he said.

  “You have a theory?”

  Soderberg looked the graves over and nodded to himself. “The Ojibwe.”

  Cork almost laughed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Winter Moon claims he talked with Jesus. He gets his Indian friends to do this. Big miracle.” Soderberg waved his hands in a gesture of magic. “Poof, everyone believes he’s pure and blessed and how could they ever convict him of murder? You realize what all the roses for these petals must have cost? The casino brings in that kind of money. Hell, it’s pocket change to those people.”

  “Show me the receipt, Arne,” Cork said. Although he had to admit it might be a plausible theory, if you thought the Iron Lake Ojibwe gave a hoot and a holler about Solemn Winter Moon.

  Soderberg lifted his foot and snuffed out the cigarette against his sole. Rather than toss the butt out among the petals, he put it in his pocket and turned uphill toward his car.

  “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

  ASTRONG 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 full of water so cold it felt like a big hand had grabbed me and was squeezing the life right out of me. It was dark in the water under the ice. I couldn’t see anything. The last thing I remember is this beautiful light, this beautiful peaceful light surrounding me, and I remember not being afraid.

  “The next thing I know I’m in a hospital room. I open my eyes and the nurse there is crying, making the sign of the cross, saying it’s a miracle. I’d stopped breathing for almost half an hour before they pulled me from that river and revived me. As nearly as I’ve been able to tell, there’s been no residual harmful effect. I forget things now and then, but who doesn’t?”

  “You told me you grew up in a children’s home. Your parents?” Cork asked.

  “Killed in the accident.”

  “And you believe it was a miracle that you survived?”

  Gooding thought a moment. “I know these things happen, that doctors say there’s a medical explanation, the cold water shuts down the body, reduces the need for oxygen, all that. But believe me, when it happens to you, it’s nothing short of a miracle.” Gooding glanced behind him again. “Like I say, I’d just as soon you kept this to yourself. Especially now, with all that’s happening here in Aurora.”

  “Sure, Randy. I understand. No problem.”

  Gooding stood to leave.

  Cork said, “You and Annie friends again?”

  Gooding smiled. “We had a long talk one night after youth group. I apologized, told her pretty much what I told you about Nina van Zoot. I think she appreciated that I trusted her. She’s a special young woman, Cork.” Gooding stood up. “Thanks for the breakfast. I owe you one.”

  After he’d finished his own breakfast, Cork headed to the sheriff’s office. He wanted to have a talk with Solemn. When he walked into the department, he found Marsha Dross on front desk duty talking with a blonde in tight jeans, stiletto heels, and a red Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt.

  Deputy Dross said, “I can’t authorize that. You’ll have to talk to the sheriff.”

  “And he’s not here,” the woman said impatiently.

  “That’s right.”

  “What about his lawyer? If I get permission from him, can I talk to Winter Moon?”

  “That would be a beginning,” Dross said.

  “Who’s his attorney?”

  “Jo O’Connor.”

  “Got an address for this Joe guy?”

  “In the phone book.”

  “Thanks. You’ve been a big help,” the woman said with sarcasm. She turned abruptly, glared Cork aside, and shoved out the door.

  “Who was Ms. Charm there?” Cork asked.

  “Journalist. Tabloid journalist.”

  “Oxymoron, isn’t that?” Cork said. “She wanted to talk to Solemn?”

  “Yes. And she’s not the first.”

  “May I talk to him? On behalf of his attorney, that Joe guy?”

  The deputy laughed and buzzed him through.

  It was Cy Borkmann in charge of the jail that day.

  “Has he been any trouble?” Cork asked.

  “Winter Moon? Are you kidding? All he does is sit. Talks to you when you talk to him. Stands when you tell him to stand. Otherwise, it’s like he’s zoned out or something.” He let Cork into the interview room, then went to get the prisoner.

  When Solemn came, he stood just inside the door. He looked a little spacey as he smiled at Cork. The deputy locked the door and left them alone.

  “How’re you doing, Solemn?”

  “Fine,” Solemn said. “I’m just fine. But I’ve been wondering about you.”

  “Me?” Cork stood in the middle of the room, feeling oddly awkward in the young man’s presence. “Never been better.”

  Solemn studied him awhile, that enigmatic smile never leaving his face. It was Cork who broke the silence.

  “You heard about the roses?”

  “Father Mal was here a little while ago. He told me.”

  “What do you think?”

  “If you think about something like this, you’ve missed the point. You were at the cemetery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Before you began to think, what did you feel?”

  “That someone had gone to a lot of trouble for no reason that I could see.”

  “You felt that? Really?”

  It wasn’t true. What he’d felt when he first stood in the quiet of that cemetery, in the overpowering scent of roses, was something very much like awe. Then his thinking had kicked in, his twenty-first century mind, locked behind bars of skepticism.

  “Did you and the good father come to any conclusions?” Cork said.

  “He has his doubts. Mostly, though, he asked about my prayers. The priestly thing, I guess. He asked me if I talked to God.”

  “Do you?”

  “All the time now. But it’s not like praying, like I grew up thinking of prayer. I just clear my mind and I find that God is there.”

  “Kitchimanidoo?”

  “The Great Spirit, if that’s the name you want to use, sure. Words don’t mean a lot. They get in the way.” Solemn c
losed his eyes and was quiet for so long that Cork thought he’d gone to sleep standing up. “I grew up thinking Henry was some kind of witch. Everything I knew about religion was what I was told in church, and I didn’t listen much. I wasn’t ready for any of this, Cork. Now, when I clear my mind, the one question that’s always there is, why me? And the answer that keeps coming back is, why not?”

  He smiled gently. “Maybe that’s what this is really all about. Jesus didn’t come to me because I was prepared for Him. He came to me because He can come to anybody. I’d like people to know that. That’s what I told Father Mal.”

  Solemn looked peaceful and convinced, and Cork found himself thinking about the kids he used to see at O’Hare in Chicago, the Hare Krishnas, beating their drums and chanting, so sure that they’d connected with the divine. How many of them now wore business suits, and took medication for high blood pressure, and didn’t want to talk about their Krishna days? Fervor was something the young possessed, and then it trickled away. He thought about Joan of Arc. If somehow she had managed to escape the burning and live to see wrinkles and the other slow wounds of time on her skin, would she have ceased to hear God speak, laid down her sword, become some man’s vessel carrying some man’s child? He wondered how long it would take Solemn’s certitude, his moment of grace, to pass and leave him as empty and lost as everyone else. Some part of Cork hoped that wouldn’t happen, but mostly he was sure it would.

  “Look, Solemn, the reason I came today. I’m still trying to figure who it was Charlotte was seeing before her death. I’d like to talk to her friends, get an idea if they had any inklings. Do you know who her friends were?”

  “Real friends, I don’t think she had.”

  “Who did she hang with?”

  “Three people usually. Bonny Donzella, Wendy McCormick, and Tiffany Soderberg. She was tightest with Tiffany.”

  “You’re still certain you don’t know who the married man might have been?”

  “No clue.”

  “Did she ever talk about her father?”

  “Not much.”

  “When she did, how did she sound?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was she particularly emotional in any way?”