Heaven's Keep (19 page)

“And did you notice that he never looks toward the camera?” Burns said. “He goes to the bathroom several times during the course of the whole tape and always keeps his head down so that the brim of the hat covers his features. The camera never has a clear shot of his face.”

“All of which leads you to the conclusion that the man at the bar isn’t Sandy Bodine?”

“He’s Sandy’s height and the same general build, but that’s not Sandy.”

Cork shook his head. “You’re grasping at straws.”

“This complete tape is nearly two hours long,” the Bodine woman said. “I’ve watched it a dozen times. Let me ask you a question, Cork. If you watched a two-hour tape of your wife, even if you never saw her face, would you know just from the way she moves, from her body language itself, that it was her?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” She eyed him with disappointment. “Then you didn’t know your wife. I knew my husband, and that’s not him on the tape.”

“The bartender and everyone in that bar IDed him from photographs,” Cork pointed out.

“What they saw was an Indian drinking. And when they were shown a picture of my husband, they saw the same Indian. Indians all look the same to
chimooks,
” she said, using the Ojibwe slang term for white people. “Maybe especially to Wyoming
chimooks.
” She glanced away, through a window, and her dark eyes reflected the bright May sunlight outside. “Look, I stand to lose everything Sandy and I have worked for. But I don’t care about that. The truth is I lost almost everything when I lost Sandy. What I have left that means anything to
me is my son. I don’t want him growing up with people telling him his father was a drunk and a murderer. I want him to know the truth.”

“And what is that?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Burns said. “We’d like your help in finding the truth.”

“Why me?”

“You’re not involved in the lawsuit. You’re a private investigator. And you have a personal stake in the truth.”

“You could hire any number of licensed PIs to do this.”

“We did. A man named Steve Stilwell.”

“Well?”

“He’s vanished. We haven’t heard anything from him in almost a week.”

“Do you know what he’d been doing?”

“He went to Wyoming for a couple of days, interviewed some people out there, the bartender and some others who gave statements. Then he came back to Rice Lake. That’s in Wisconsin. It’s where Sandy and Becca live. Sandy operated his charter out of the regional airport there. He spent some time at Sandy’s office and was scheduled to meet with us the next day. He never showed. We haven’t heard from him since.”

“Does he work for a firm?”

“No,” Burns replied. “Like you, on his own. I’ve used him before. He’s good. But now he’s absent and that worries me.”

Cork got up and walked a little, thinking. From outside, muffled by the closed windows, came the music of a fiddler on a hot riff and then the crowd exploded in applause. “Why would someone impersonate your husband?” he asked Becca Bodine.

“I’ve thought about it until my head hurts and I don’t know. I just know someone did.”

Cork looked at the television screen, where the jerky black-and-white security tape still played. If it was Jo on that tape, even if he couldn’t see her face, he’d know it was her. He’d know it absolutely.

“Let me think about it,” he said. “Can I keep the tape?”

“Of course.”

“Are you staying in town?”

“My office is in Duluth,” Burns said. “And my home is there. Becca is staying with me for the weekend.” On the back of a business card, she wrote a telephone number. “This is my private cell phone. Call me there anytime.”

The two women stood, and Cork walked them to the door.

The Bodine woman extended her hand. “I’m sorry I got so emotional.”

“Not very Ojibwe of you,” Cork said and smiled.

She shrugged. “Modern Shinnob.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow with my answer,” Cork said.

“We appreciate your consideration,” Burns said. “But we’d appreciate your help more.”

After they were gone, Cork stood a few minutes looking at the tape on the screen, at the man his two visitors had insisted was not who he seemed. He didn’t know what to think, but he felt slightly disoriented, as if the world around him had suddenly tilted.

“Cheese!” Judy Madsen called through the door of the serving area. “Cork, we’re running low on cheese. And we could sure use your help up here.”

“Be right there,” Cork said and tried to turn his thinking to the matters of the moment.

T
he bluegrass sessions ended around four, and soon after, the crowd dispersed. At four thirty, Judy Madsen told Cork to go home, told him bluntly but gently that he’d been distracted all afternoon and had been about as useful as a wet kitchen match. Cork didn’t argue. He took the videotape the two women had brought him and left the Quonset hut. Outside he stood in the sunshine watching the band platform being dismantled. The folks at the balloon table were packing things up. Some of those who’d come for the festivities lingered along the shoreline, eating burgers or drinking soft drinks from Sam’s Place. At the small dock, a boat cast off and backed away while another waited its turn to tie up.

The day held still. Iron Lake was a calm blue reflection of the beautiful blue face of the sky. Cork looked across the big field that separated the lake from the town. Young wild grass grew calf high, and violets and pussytoes stood ready to bloom. A quiet, almost weightless sadness lay in his heart, because he knew that, despite the honest assurances of Hugh Parmer and the man’s best intentions, everything he was looking at was about to change. Change was the destiny of all things, living or not. The best anyone could hope for was to have a strong hand in shaping what came next. Cork believed that was what he’d done. And believing made it easier to put recrimination behind him and make peace with what was inevitable.

His house, when he arrived, was empty. Not even Trixie was there to disturb the tranquillity. Stephen must have taken her with him, something he often did when he headed out. These days they were nearly inseparable. Cork took a cold bottle of Leinenkugel’s from the
refrigerator and went to the living room. He popped the tape into the VCR, sat down with his beer, and watched a good portion of what the security camera had caught.

If he hadn’t been looking for something suspicious, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the small details the women had pointed out: the man who was supposed to be Sandy Bodine, a southpaw, occasionally using his right hand and doing so with comfortable ease; the fact that the brim of his ball cap was pulled low, so that whenever he turned in the camera’s direction much of his face was obscured; the effusive way he engaged the other patrons, buying rounds, making himself a presence, which, according to Becca Bodine, was not at all how her husband behaved. Individually, they were not big things, but taken together they were significant enough to make Cork uncomfortable. Another thing he pondered was why would a pilot do so publicly a thing that was so clearly at odds with flight regulations? As Cork watched, he wondered about other details. What brand of cigarette was the man at the bar smoking and was it the same brand Bodine smoked? How tall was the man and how tall was Bodine? The man in the video wore cowboy boots. Did Bodine?

The phone rang, and Cork jumped, startled out of his intensity. It was Stephen, calling from his cell phone. He was zipping back across the lake with Gordy Hudacek but without the promised catch. Cork told him to stop at Gratz’s Meat Market on the way home, pick up three rib eyes and a loaf of garlic bread, and tell Gratz he’d drop by on Monday to make payment.

Cork hung up just as Parmer arrived. When Cork opened the front door, Parmer studied his face and said, “You look like a man who knows a mule kick’s coming. What’s the story?”

Cork pulled two beers from the refrigerator and played the tape for Parmer, pointing out the details that, if you were of a mind to question things, might make you wonder.

Parmer shook his head. “I understand what you’re saying here, but I gotta tell you, Cork, I don’t see anything you can take to the bank. In my experience, if you go looking for conspiracies, you’re always going to see a figure lurking in the shadows, whether someone’s there or not. It’s human nature.”

Cork nodded. “Yeah. Probably.”

“What would be the point of it anyway? Why would someone go through all that trouble?”

“Let’s talk outside,” Cork said. “Stephen’s on his way with some steaks. I need to get the coals going in the grill.”

They went onto the patio in the backyard where Cork kept his Weber. He poured out charcoal and used a chimney to get the fire going. Then he stood in the early evening, beer in hand, staring across his empty lawn. There was a maple in the yard that his daughters and Stephen had spent a lot of hours in their childhood climbing like monkeys. Cork had built a small platform in the lower branches, where the kids often clustered in the gathering dark to tell ghost stories. The platform was still there, though his children had long ago outgrown the simple pleasures of ghost stories and climbing trees.

“Why would some guy spend the night in the bar pretending to be Bodine?” Parmer asked. “To discredit him?”

“It’s possible,” Cork said. “But why go to such extremes to discredit the man if nothing was going to come of it? Bodine flies out the next day, gets his customers to Seattle, everybody’s happy. And if he’s confronted about drinking, he’d probably be able to mount a good defense, witnesses who put him somewhere else at the time he’s alleged to have been at the bar, so what’s the point? But if Bodine isn’t around any longer to challenge the impersonator, the charade gets carried off successfully. Unless you have a wife like Becca.”

Parmer sat down at the picnic table on the patio. He put his beer on the tabletop and slowly turned the bottle as he considered things. “Okay, so what you’re saying is that Bodine was already out of the picture when that guy walked into the bar?”

“I’m not saying it. Just following a line of speculation.”

“For the sake of argument then, Bodine’s already out of the picture. When?”

“Probably from the get-go. Changing pilots in Casper might raise some suspicion. If nobody on that flight actually knew what Bodine looked like, then it was probably never Bodine at the controls.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, Hugh. Maybe they simply wanted to get rid of Bodine and to do it without a lot of suspicion involved. A man disappears off the street, that’s one thing. A man disappears on a plane that’s never found, that’s another thing altogether.”

“This all sounds pretty crazy, Cork, you know that, right?”

Cork checked the coals and rearranged them with a pair of tongs he kept for just that purpose. “If what the attorney told me is true, the investigator looking into all this has disappeared. You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s up with that?” He heard Trixie barking in the front yard and said quickly to Parmer, “Not a word to Stephen, okay?”

“You got it,” Parmer promised.

Stephen traipsed onto the patio, Trixie dancing at his heels. “You were right, Dad. They weren’t biting in Grace Cove.”

“But you made it there in record time, right?” Cork said. “How’s that new boat?”

“Like a rocket.”

“Stephen, that lake isn’t there just for getting across quickly.”

“I know, Dad. But a boat that does is a thing of beauty.”

“Ah, to be fourteen again,” Parmer said.

Cork threw the steaks that Stephen had brought onto the grill. He directed his son to grab the salad bag from the refrigerator and toss the contents in a bowl. He wrapped the garlic bread in foil and set it on the back of the grill to heat. In fifteen minutes, they were sitting at the picnic table, sliding their knives into meat done medium rare.

When the light was gone from the sky, they took their dishes into the kitchen, and Parmer said good night. Cork walked him out to his rented Navigator, which was parked at the curb.

“So what are you going to do about the Bodine woman’s story?” Parmer asked.

“I don’t know. Think about it some more.”

“Let me know what you come up with. I’m in town for a couple more days.”

“We’ll see, Hugh.”

“Thanks for dinner and the company. That son of yours is a great kid.”

“Don’t I know it. ’Night, Hugh.”

He watched the Navigator pull away just as the streetlights came on. Behind him the screen door opened and banged closed, and Stephen leaped from the front porch and landed on the sidewalk. He loped to his father.

“Gordy just called. He’s trying to put together a game of Risk. I’m headed over to his house.”

Cork looked at his watch. “Home by ten.”

“Eleven.”

“Ten thirty.”

“Deal.”

Stephen raced away into the gathering dark. Cork watched until his son rounded the corner and was gone, then he went back inside and began cleaning up the dinner mess. All the while, in his head, he was picking up and examining the possibilities that Becca Bodine and Liz Burns had presented to him. The tape didn’t nail anything. And as for the missing investigator, Cork had known more than a few guys in the business who succumbed to weakness—booze, women, gambling—that took them off everyone’s radar for a while.

When he finished in the kitchen, he went to the room Jo had used as her office. Although he used it now for his own PI business, he’d left it pretty much the same: the shelves full of her reference books; the family photos she’d framed and hung; her plants, which he’d taken good care of. He never spoke of it to anyone, but whenever he was there, it was as if Jo was still with him. Her spirit haunted the room. Not in a ghostly way, but in the smell, the energy, the memories it held for Cork of walking in to find her bent over a case file, her hair fallen over her face like a veil of yellow-white silk, her blue eyes rising, the frown of her concentration vanishing, replaced with a smile that let him know she was happy to see him. And that she loved him.

He leaned against the threshold and let himself be swept into remembering, always a dangerous thing. When he finally pulled himself back, he wiped his eyes and turned away.