Tamarack County: A Novel Part 20

"And what would that be?"

"Are you lonely sometimes, Cork?"

"Sometimes. Isn't everybody?" It was a coy response, because he knew what she meant, knew exactly. And so he said, "You think I'm looking for company on a cold, lonely night? You think that's really why I came?"

"I hope that's part of it."

She was right. If he tried to tell himself that he hadn't been thinking about Stella since that lost moment the night before, he'd be a liar. The truth was that he did feel alone and empty these days, and it seemed to him forever since anyone had made him feel wanted.

Stella stood and came around the table and took his hands and drew him up from his chair. The look in her eyes, animal and knowing, made him ache in the deepest part of himself. "Come to my bedroom, Cork. You won't feel lonely there, I promise."

He glanced toward the living room sofa. "What about Marlee?"

"Those painkillers put her out for hours."

The television was still on, showing a commercial that involved a woman working in her garden. The camera suddenly focused on her hands, and Cork had a fleeting image of Rainy Bisonette. Not all of Rainy, only her hands, callused and filled with the flowers and plants she used in making her medicines and teas.

"Don't worry about Rainy," Stella said, as if she'd read his thought.

He turned his face back to her. She put her palm, impossibly soft, against his cheek, and from the delicate skin of her wrist came the same scent he'd smelled the night before in that moment he'd been certain would never come again, the scent of some exotic flower he could almost name.

"This isn't about anything except tonight, I promise," she whispered.

She kissed him, and afterward, for a long time that night, in the delicious dark of her bedroom, he was lost.

CHAPTER 26.

Stephen lay in bed, listening to the sounds the old house made as it settled around him into night. Nothing in the world was static. No matter how firm or rock-solid a thing seemed, it was always in motion, always changing, because that was the nature of creation. Nothing came from nothing. Everything came from something that had been before. At the heart of an acorn were the atoms of the tree from which it had dropped, and those same atoms had been in the soil of the earth before the oak had drawn them into itself, and before that they'd been in the water that had fallen from the sky, and long, long before that, they'd been a part of the beginning of the universe. The acorn, the oak tree, the sky, the earth, the stars, the universe, all woven into the same vast fabric of creation, all connected, all part of the Great Mystery.

He knew this. So why did he feel so separate that night, so alien, so alone? He thought he understood the reason. He was still angry with Skye Edwards for intruding on Anne's life, for tempting his sister from her destined path, one Anne hadn't simply chosen but had been born to. Hadn't she? Been born to it in the way his father had been born ogichidaa, destined to stand between his people and evil, and Jenny nakomis, full of a nurturing spirit, and he himself mide, meant to be a healer? Wasn't the way they fit into the design of creation already decided before they were born, long before they were even conceived?

He'd been staring up at the ceiling, at the pattern of shadows cast there by the streetlamp outside shining through his window, a spiderweb formed by the bare branches of the elm in the front yard. Now he closed his eyes. Maybe, he thought, no path was meant to be a simple one. Maybe that was part of the journey. Maybe you were meant to stumble, even to stray. Maybe there was something to be learned in being lost. If so, he hoped he was learning, because he sure felt lost.

Sleep came to him finally, as it always did, and as sometimes happened, a vision came with it. Not a pleasant one.

Stephen flew. He often flew in his dreams, usually with a measure of control. Those were wonderful dreams. This was different. He'd been picked up like fluff from a cottonwood and carried into the night sky, borne on the wind. Usually he gave himself over to flight in a dream, but this time he fought it, because he had a sense that where he was going was a fearful place. He struggled, battled against the current pushing him. Useless. And then he found himself caught in the branches of a tree, and he knew the tree. It was the elm in the front yard. And now the wind was trying to pull him away, but he held tightly to a limb. The wind grew stronger, and his fingers began to lose their grip. And that's when he saw the figure under the elm, dark in the night, watching the house on Gooseberry Lane. He was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, a fear that made him go weak, and just before he let go of the limb, he saw the figure turn its face upward, and the eyes in that face were like coals of a fire, and Stephen felt their glare burn two painful holes in the skin of his chest. He lost his grip on the tree limb, lost his hold on the dream, and he came out of it with a cry and dripping with sweat.

"Stephen?" It was Jenny, calling from his doorway. "Are you okay?"

He didn't answer immediately but spent a moment grounding himself in the reality of his bedroom.

"Yeah," he finally said. "Bad dream is all."

Jenny came and sat beside him. "A vision?" She was well acquainted with Stephen's gift, and she asked this seriously.

"Maybe," he said.

"Not a good one sounds like."

He slid himself up and put his back against the wall at the head of his bed. "A scary one."

"Want to talk about it?"

"I want to think about it first."

Jenny wore a yellow sleep shirt. In the last year, she'd let her hair grow long, and it lay almost white over her shoulders, even in the dark of Stephen's bedroom. As often happened when he was with Jenny these days, he was reminded of their mother.

She said, "When you were a kid, you used to have horrible nightmares. You believed in monsters. I remember Dad used to come in here, and you'd both go hunting for them. Under the bed, in the closet."

"Never found any," he said. "Not then."

"I hope you don't ever."

"You sound like Mom."

"I'll take that as a compliment. You're sure you're okay?"

"I'll be fine."

"All right. See you in the morning."

She walked out, and he was alone again.

Waking up didn't take away the fear, the urgency, or what Stephen felt was the reality of the dream. He threw back the covers, got out of bed, and went to his window. He looked at the front yard, at the big elm with its ma.s.s of bare limbs and its great st.u.r.dy trunk. But what he looked at particularly was the shadow the tree cast across the snow as a result of the streetlamp at the curb. It was in that shadow that he'd seen the figure with the ember eyes. He thought about the vision Meloux had related over the telephone the day before. Had they both seen the same majimanidoo, the same devil? He saw nothing now, and he saw no tracks in the snow that someone-human or otherwise-would have left had they been there. He also thought about what Jenny had said. That she hoped he didn't meet any monsters, ever.

Yet he had a sense that this was somehow the point of the dream, the vision. It had been eerily similar to the one Meloux described, and Stephen had a powerful feeling that a confrontation was looming. With whom or with what, he couldn't get a handle on. At the moment, he was like the cottonwood fluff in the wind. He needed to bring the vision to him in a different way, bring it in a way in which he could partic.i.p.ate actively. Despite his fear, he needed to face the devil. And he believed he knew exactly how to do that.

CHAPTER 27.

The ring tone of his cell phone woke him. The room was dark, he was sleepy, and he fumbled for several moments before he finally had the device in his hands.

"O'Con-," he began but stopped because his voice was hoa.r.s.e, both from just waking and from the dry air blown by the furnace of the Daychilds' place. He cleared his throat. "O'Connor," he said.

"Cork, it's Marsha Dross. Is it convenient for you to come to my office?"

"When?"

"Now, if possible."

He looked toward a window, saw no light at all in the sky outside.

"It's important," Dross said.

He wondered what time it was, but he'd put his watch in the pocket of his shirt, which he'd folded and laid on the floor at the foot of the sofa. He grabbed his shirt and began to dig.

Dross said, "I think I might have a handle on Evelyn Carter. I think her disappearance might be connected with the death of Wakemup's dog."

That brought him fully awake. He found his watch and saw that it was six-fifteen. "I'll be there in half an hour."

In the night, Stella had wakened Marlee and guided her, barely conscious, to the girl's bedroom. Then she'd given Cork a blanket and pillow, kissed him a long, final time, and he'd bedded down on the sofa, so that if Marlee woke and came looking, it would appear that he'd been there all night. He didn't like this kind of deception, but he wasn't exactly comfortable with the idea of Marlee knowing-even guessing at-what had occurred between her mother and him. At some point, he'd have to a.n.a.lyze all of this, figure where he stood, emotionally and morally. He didn't think of himself as the kind of guy who went looking for a one-night stand. Especially if it involved the mother of the girlfriend of his son. Which was a thought that, just in itself, was hopelessly complicated.

Stella must have heard his cell phone. When he stood up, he found her in the hallway, watching him, her hands in the pockets of her robe.

"I have to go," he said.

"Not even breakfast first?"

"It's business."

"I've heard that one before." Then she smiled, letting him know it was in jest. "Go."

"The call was from Marsha Dross. She thinks she's onto something that might help explain what happened to Dexter."

"What is it?"

"I'll know after I've talked with her."

"You'll let me know, too?"

"Absolutely."

Cork had worn his pants to bed, and his T-shirt. He finished dressing, gathered his loose things, and stuffed them into his gym bag. While he did this, Stella got his parka. They stood together at the front door. This near to her, he could smell that she'd just gargled and could see that she'd run a quick brush through her hair and had put on lipstick. Just for him? Cork felt awkward, unsure what the protocol of parting dictated.

Stella seemed just as much at sea. She gave him his parka, then looked down at her hands, empty now, and said quietly, "About last night."

"What about it?"

"I don't . . . I'm not usually . . . It's just been a long time."

"That's okay. It was a lovely night."

"Was it?" She lifted her eyes, dark and happy, to his. "For me, too."

"Thank you, Stella." He leaned to her and gently kissed her lips.

"You don't have to call me," she told him. "Really. Unless it's about Dexter."

"I'll call," he promised.

Outside, the air hit him like a fist. The wind was up, and the chill in it was monstrous. He quickly drew his gloves and stocking cap from the pockets of his parka and pulled them on. He was glad to get into Jenny's Forester and out of the wind. He started the engine and let it warm up a couple of minutes so that the defroster would melt the moisture from his breathing, which had begun to form a crystalline coating on the inside of the windshield the moment he got in.

While he sat waiting, he thought about his night with Stella and how he felt about it. Was he relieved to be leaving in this way, quickly and without any emotional mess? Not really. Was he confused? Absolutely. But he was also, he realized with a smile he wasn't even aware of until he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, grateful. Although there was a good deal of danger in what he'd shared with Stella, he'd enjoyed himself immensely. This did cause him some guilt, because he honestly wasn't sure what last night meant in terms of his relationship with Rainy Bisonette. When Rainy left, Cork had tried to think of it not as an ending but as a hiatus. He'd believed that at some point he and Rainy would be together again and what was required of him was mostly patience.

Until last night, he'd thought of himself as a patient man. Now he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of a lot of things.

When the gla.s.s had cleared, Cork turned the Forester in a tight circle and headed away. He glanced in the rearview mirror and was just a little disappointed not to see Stella's face at a window, watching him go.

He drove straight to the Tamarack County Sheriff's Department. When he swept inside, Deputy Pender was on the public contact desk. Without Cork even having to ask, Pender buzzed him through the security door.

"She's expecting you," the deputy said, nodding in the direction of Dross's office.

By the time Cork walked in, the whole sky was illuminated by the pale light of early dawn, and beyond the windows, the town of Aurora was emerging fully from the dark. Dross was at her desk, phone in hand, in the middle of a conversation. She waved him toward an empty chair. Cork shed his coat, draped it over the back of the chair, and sat.

"Honestly, Ed, there's no reason for you to cut your visit short. We've got this thing in hand." Dross listened, then nodded. "I promise I will. My best to Alice." She hung up. "Ed Larson. He heard about Evelyn Carter, and he thinks he should cut his visit to San Diego short."

Cork glanced at his watch. "Awfully early out there. Is he worried you can't do this without him?"

"He's worried he'll miss out on an interesting case."

"So fill me in on this interesting case," Cork said.

Dross turned in her chair so that she sat in profile, silhouetted against the dawn. She seemed to be speaking more toward the brightening sky than to Cork. "Every time I question the Judge, I get the same feeling. He doesn't really have a clue about what's happened to his wife. In fact, it's getting to the point where he doesn't have a clue about much of anything anymore. I really believe he's losing it. From everything I've been told, he's been on that downslide for a while. His wife's death seems to have snapped whatever was holding him to reality. So, I've been doing a lot of thinking about Evelyn Carter. I keep asking myself is there maybe some connection between her disappearance and the death of Wakemup's dog."

"Why would there be any connection?"

She turned back to him. "Because of Cecil LaPointe."

Cork said, "I've been wondering if LaPointe might have something to do with the dog and with what happened to Marlee Daychild, but Evelyn Carter? I mean, if LaPointe wanted revenge, why not just go after her husband?"

"Okay, consider this. To a man in prison, what's the most important thing in life?"

"Not getting a shiv stuck in him, I suppose. Or anything else stuck in him, for that matter."

"Ask me, and I'd say it's his freedom. The one thing you absolutely give up in prison is your freedom."

"Okay, go on," Cork said.

"What was the most important thing in the Judge's life?"

"I give up," Cork said.

"His wife. Without her around, he's helpless. The way things are looking for him right now, in very short order, he'll be in a nursing home, probably a locked memory unit, with no real say left in his life. About as near to prison as you can get without being behind bars. Or at least that's how I'd look at it."