William Krueger - Blood Hollow

If anyone else had put him in this position, Cork would have throttled them. But Rose asked little, and when she did, it was a request to be heeded.

“All right.” He let out a huge breath that conveyed, he hoped, his frustration. “You want a ride back to the rectory?”

“I’d rather walk. I’ve still got a lot of thinking to do.”

A breeze arose, glided off the water cool and fresh, lifted her hair. Cork saw how beautiful she was then, and how any man might love her.

She said, “I used to believe life was pretty simple. There was my family, my friends, and my church, and there wasn’t much that prayer couldn’t help.”

“And now?”

“Some days,” she said, “I wonder.”

She turned away from the lake.

“I wish you’d take a ride,” Cork said. “Until we know who stalked Annie, it might not be safe to be out alone so late.”

She weighed his concern, and after a moment, she said all right.

“Wait in the Bronco. I’ll get Annie.”

Inside, Annie had finished the cleaning and was ready to go.

“What did Aunt Rose want?” she asked.

Cork gathered everything for the night deposit, shook his head, and said, “I’m not sure she knows.”

Early the next morning, before he left town, Cork drove to Sam Winter Moon’s old cabin. Blue woodsmoke rose up from the stovepipe, and the smell of frying bacon was in the air. Dot’s blue Blazer sat under a birch tree. The cabin door opened as Cork walked toward it, and Solemn’s mother stepped outside. She wore jeans and a blue and white Timberwolves T-shirt and held a spatula in her hand.

“Morning, Dot.”

“Cork.”

“Looking for Solemn.”

“He’s along the creek.” With the spatula, she pointed toward the east.

“Where are the bodyguards?”

“Bodyguards?”

“Junior and Phil Medina.”

“Solemn sent them away.” She swung her free hand at a fly that was darting about her head. “Jo told me you’re going to L.A. today.”

“Yeah.”

“I told Solemn. He didn’t seem to care much. He heard about the miracles. That they were bullshit.”

“How’s he doing?”

She shook her head.

“Think he’d mind if I talked to him?”

“You can try. Hungry? I got pancakes and bacon coming up soon.”

“No, thanks. I’ll just have a word with Solemn then be off.”

He found Winter Moon sitting on a stump a hundred yards down Widow’s Creek. It wasn’t far from the place where, months earlier, Cork had found the dead whitetail. All remains of the deer were probably gone now, eaten by scavengers and insects. Nature cleaning up, Cork knew.

Solemn sat slumped, his arms on his knees, his head down, watching the creek water run past a few yards away. He didn’t seem to hear Cork coming.

“Solemn?”

The young man didn’t turn, didn’t move at all. “They don’t believe,” he said.

“A lot of people never did. Does that make a difference?”

“It’s gone. That feeling I got in the woods. I’ve lost it. Why did it come to me if it was just going to go away?” He shook his head. “You were right all along. It was just a dream. Hallucination, whatever. All those people looking to me, they really were just a bunch of suckers.”

Cork sat down on the ground next to the stump and looked at the water moving past, saw how the sky was reflected on the surface without obscuring the rocks beneath that formed the creek bed.

“Solemn, last winter I saw something that to this day I don’t understand. It was right after Charlotte disappeared. I was part of the search team looking for her, but I got lost in a whiteout on Fisheye Lake. Couldn’t tell up from down. I haven’t been so scared in a long time. Then someone, some thing, guided me to safety. I never saw it clearly. It stayed just at the edge of my vision, but I felt it was Charlotte, and I don’t know how that could have been.”

“You believe what you saw?”

“I want to believe. I want very much to believe, but I fall way short. It saved my life, that’s all I know, just like what you saw saved yours.” Cork shrugged and stared beyond the creek where the forest lay deep as any secret he knew. “I remember something Sam used to tell me. He said there’s more in these woods than a man can ever see with his eyes, more than he can ever hope to understand.”

For a long time, Solemn didn’t respond. Then he said, “Sam’s dead.”

“What I’m saying is that most people would give anything for a moment of the kind of certainty you had out there in those woods. What you experienced is a rare gift and one that gives the rest of us hope.”

Solemn slowly lifted his head. There were tears in his eyes.

“I felt like I was overflowing. Now I wish it had never happened, Cork, because now that it’s gone, I feel more empty than ever. And more alone.”

Cork wanted to reach out and hold Solemn, but touching that way wasn’t Ojibwe.

He stood up. He had a plane to catch.

“Go to Henry,” he said.

He stopped in Aurora to gas up. As he headed south out of town, he drove past the sheriff’s department and the park where the crowd had once gathered, hoping for a glimpse of a man who’d talked with God. The park was empty now. Whenever hope packed its bag and left for good, all that remained was a terrible emptiness, immeasurably sad.

That was something Solemn understood well.

Cork drove to the Twin Cities, and at two o’clock caught a plane to L.A. By the time he’d shuttled to the Hertz lot to pick up his rental and driven to his hotel, a quaint place called the Claremont Inn just across the city line from Pomona, it was nearly six o’clock. His stomach was still on Minnesota time and he was starved. After he checked in, he headed out in search of food and the Worthington Clinic.

He found the clinic first. It was a multiwing building of snow white stucco set in a sea of grass behind iron gates and a wall hung with bougainvillea. In the background rose the San Gabriels, copper green in the late afternoon haze. It looked like the kind of place only an Oscar or a million bucks would get you into.

He had a decent steak in a restaurant just off Route 66, then he drove awhile. He hadn’t been in Southern California for years and what had bothered him then bothered him now. The orange groves had become subdivisions and parking lots, and even with all the freeways no one seemed to be able to get anywhere fast enough.

He returned to the hotel a little before ten, and saw from the blinking light on the room telephone that he had a message. It was from Jo. “Call me, sweetheart,” she said. “I have some good news.”

Although it was nearly midnight in Minnesota, Cork called immediately. Jo answered, sounding a little sleepy.

“I talked with Rose today,” she told him. “After you left. She knows where Glory is.”

“How?”

“Glory heard about the angel of the roses and called Rose last week. She made Rose promise not to tell anyone. And you know how Rose is when she makes a promise.”

He did. And now he understood the discussion he’d had with his sister-in-law the night before.

“She talked with Glory today, and Glory asked her to have you call as soon as possible.”

Jo gave him Glory’s number.

Cork looked at the area code. “Where is this?”

“Iowa. Rose said that when you call you should ask for Cordelia Diller.”

“Who?”

“That’s the name Glory is using. She’ll explain. One more thing, Cork. Dorothy Winter Moon’s been getting a lot of threatening calls. People are pretty angry about the miracle business. A lot of them seem to blame Solemn, think he must’ve been in on it. He’s gone to Henry Meloux’s, by the way.”

“Good. If anyone can help, it’s Henry. How’s Annie?”