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said something amiable in reply, but the words didn’t register. Cork simply told him, “I need to have Stephen come home. I need to have him come home now.”

FOUR
Day One, Missing 12 Hours
    H e sat at the kitchen table, a cup of cool coffee at his elbow. He held the phone in his right hand and, with his left, punched in the number of Jo’s sister.
    “Rose, it’s Cork. Sorry to call so late.”
    Because of either the lateness of the hour or the somber tone of his voice, she didn’t waste time. “What’s wrong, Cork?”
    “I’ve got bad news. Jo was on a charter flight to Seattle. This morning while it was flying over Wyoming, it disappeared from radar and radio contact was lost.”
    There was a long moment of silence as Rose absorbed this information. “What does that mean exactly? Did the plane crash?”
    “Not necessarily. The authorities are checking all the airports in the area to see if it might have landed somewhere. They’re in the middle of a big snowstorm, and it sounds like everything’s kind of confused.”
    “So it could have landed in some out-of-the-way place and because of the weather they can’t get word out. Is that it?”
    That was the positive read. He said, “Yes.”
    He waited, staring out the window at the night beyond that was as black as the cold coffee in his cup.
    “Just a moment, Cork,” Rose said. “Mal’s here.” She covered the phone, and he couldn’t hear anything except the emptiness of the line. He thought of the silence in the middle of the message Jo had left him, and again he felt the knife of regret.
    Mal was Cork’s brother-in-law. He’d once been a Catholic priest serving the parishioners of St. Agnes in Aurora. Then he’d fallen in love with Rose. Now they were married—five years—and living in Evanston, Illinois.
    Rose came on the line again. “Do the kids know?”
    “I called Jenny and Anne. They both wanted to come home right away, but I convinced them to stay put until I know more.”
    “How’s Stephen doing?”
    “Taking it hard. He’s up in his room right now.”
    “And you?”
    “Not good either. I would have waited to call until I knew more, but with this kind of situation it won’t be long before the media picks up on it. I wanted to make sure you both heard it from me.”
    “We’re coming up there, Cork.” Rose, always a strong woman, had already put away her despair and girded herself for action.
    “Rose, there’s no reason—”
    “You’ll have your hands full. We’ll leave first thing in the morning. End of story.”
    For many years before she married Mal, Rose had lived with the O’Connors. She was part of the family. Cork could have resisted more, but the truth was that he liked the idea of her being there. He also understood that worry was multiplied by distance and silence, and coming to Aurora would put her closer to the situation, to any news that came.
    “Thanks, Rose.”
    “If you hear anything, you’ll let us know.”
    “Of course.”
    “We’ll see you tomorrow, Cork. In the meantime, we all have a lot of praying to do.”
    Cork had the television on, tuned to The Weather Channel. The storm in the upper Rockies was one of the stories they were tracking. On radar, the area of snow was a huge white blob gobbling up most of western Wyoming, as well as large parts of Montana, Idaho, and northwestern Colorado. He went to the bookcase in the corner of the living room, pulled out an atlas, opened to the map of Wyoming, andlocated Owl Creek County and the Washakie Wilderness. He’d been through Wyoming a couple of times, but always far to the south, on I-80. He’d never been to Yellowstone, never been anywhere near the Washakie Wilderness. He tried to imagine it, and what he visualized were the mountains in the cowboy movies of his youth—distant, blue, beautiful, formidable.
    The phone rang. Caller ID told him it was the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. It was Dross. “I’m back in the office,” she told