William Krueger - Blood Hollow

He could see Charlotte in the woman at the door. The same raven hair, the same facial structure-small nose, high cheekbones, strong chin. Attractive. The eyes were different, blue and softer, with tiny crow’s feet. She wore a yellow summer dress and sandals.

“Mr. O’Connor?”

“How do you do, Ms. Kane?”

Her hand was small but firm, her nails well manicured and polished with an opal sheen.

“Won’t you come in?”

Lilies filled a vase on a table in the foyer, and Cork walked into their marvelous fragrance.

“Would you care for some coffee, or perhaps some tea?” she offered.

“Thank you, no.”

In the living room, she indicated a stuffed chair and Cork sat down. She took a place on the sofa, crossed her legs at the ankles, and folded her hands on her lap.

“When you called from the clinic, you said you had some information about Fletcher that you thought I ought to have. Is he all right?”

“In a way, that’s what I’m trying to find out. I’m from Aurora, Minnesota, your ex-husband’s hometown.”

“You’re mistaken, Mr. O’Connor. Fletcher is from Kansas.”

“I knew him until he was thirteen years old and his mother moved him away. They left as a result of rather unpleasant circumstances. It doesn’t surprise me that your husband might have chosen never to speak of that time in his life.”

“I’m sure we’re talking about two different Fletcher Kanes.”

Cork had brought with him a photo he’d cut from the Aurora Sentinel that had run with an article about the family shortly after Kane came to town. The article had been vague, but the photograph was clear. He handed it to her. “Is that your husband?”

She looked at the photo and said warily, “Yes.”

“He returned to Aurora two years ago. He brought a daughter with him. Her name was Charlotte.”

“Charlotte?” Her eyes hardened and the crow’s feet deepened. “Is this some kind of sick joke? You said you were with the sheriff’s department?”

“I was sheriff of Tamarack County, that’s where Aurora is, for eight years.”

“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.”