Mercy Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

him up, then he let them sew his earlobe closed.
     
     
    She was waiting for him when he came out. She looked with alarm and sympathy at the gauze and tape on his ear. “What happened?”
    “I’ll tell you on the way.”
    Two blocks from the hospital, Jo pulled her Camry to the side of the street, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and listened. He told it calmly, almost blandly, but her face registered the horror of the scene.
    “Oh God, Cork. How’s Marsha?”
    “She’s still in surgery. We won’t know for a while.”
    She gently lifted a hand toward the side of his face. “How’s your poor ear?”
    “Smaller.”
    “Does it hurt?”
    “They gave it a shot. Can’t feel much now.”
    She stared through the windshield. It was night and quiet and they sat in the warm glow of a street lamp. She put a hand to her forehead as if pressing some thought into her brain. “Why, Cork?”
    “I don’t know.”
    She leaned to him suddenly and held him tightly, and the good smell of spaghetti came to him from her hair and clothing. It was a quick dinner and a favorite of their children.
    “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “I’ll get you home and you can relax.”
    “No. I need to go to the department. I want to listen to the tape of Lucy’s call.”
    It was a little before nine on a Tuesday night. Aurora, Minnesota, was winding down. Many of the shops had already closed. A good crowd was still visible through the windows of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, and the air on Center Street was full of the tantalizing aroma of fried food. In front of the display window of Lost Lake Outfitters, against the buttery glow of a neon sign, stood old Alf Pedersen, who’d started the outfitting company fifty years earlier. Alf knew the most beautiful and fragile parts of the Boundary Waters, the great wilderness area north of Aurora, and although he’d guided hundreds of tourists in, he kept those places secret. In the next block, the door of Wolf Den Books and Gifts opened and a plank of light fell across the sidewalk as Naomi Pierce stepped out to close up. He couldn’t hear it, but Cork knew that the opening of the door had caused a small bell above the threshold to jingle. He thought about the show that had been on television at the hospital. He didn’t know whose reality that was, but his own reality lay in the details of this place, his hometown, details an outsider might not even notice. A tinkling bell, a familiar silhouette, the comfortable and alluring smell of deep-fry.
    There was another reality for him as well. It was grounded in a maple leaf of blood on Marsha’s uniform, the sound of glass shattered by a bullet capable of exploding his head like a melon, and the long, terrifying moments when he’d scrambled desperately to make sense of the absolutely senseless.
    “You okay?” Jo asked.
    “Yeah, I guess,” he answered.
    She accompanied him into the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Bos Swain, who’d relieved Patsy as dispatcher, buzzed them through the security door.
    Bos was short for Boston, which was the name by which Henrietta Swain was known. As a young woman, she’d dreamed of going to college, specifically to Boston College, for reasons which she’d never divulged. Instead, she’d married her high school sweetheart, who went off to Vietnam and came back messed up psychologically. Bos had worked to support them and the two girls who were born to them, and although she never went to college herself, she sent both girls east, one to Barnard and the other to Boston College. When the girls were gone, she divorced her first husband and remarried, a good man named Tim Johnson who had a solid job stringing wire for the phone company. Although she didn’t need to work to support herself anymore, she kept on as a dispatcher, drawing a county paycheck every two weeks, which she deposited in trust funds for her grandchildren’s education. She was a fleshy woman, unusually good-humored, but the events of that