Maybe it was just a wrong number, she told herself.

But in the next instant, she heard it. The sound came from the dining room, a jiggling of the handle on the door that opened onto the backyard patio.

Earlier, when she lay down to rest, she’d set the Louisville Slugger on the floor beside the sofa. Now, she moved from the window and once again took the bat in her hands. Although the house lay in darkness, she still held to the cover of the wall as she crept toward the dining room. She peered around the corner and saw the figure at the patio door, solid dark against the backyard, which was dimly lit by a gibbous moon low in the sky. She couldn’t see who it was, but she could see, rising like a straight stick from his right shoulder, the silhouette of the barrel of a rifle that must have hung from a strap.

Annie didn’t waste any time. She reached around the corner of the wall to the light switch and flipped it. The room exploded with brilliant illumination from the chandelier above the dining table. Which was good and not good. The good was that it made the figure stumble back immediately. The bad was that the glare off the patio door panes made it impossible for Annie to see the intruder clearly.

At almost the same moment, she heard the mudroom door in the kitchen rattle.

Two of them? she thought, glancing that way. Her grip on the bat tightened.

When she swung her eyes back to the patio door, the figure was gone. She turned her attention to the intruder at the mudroom door, moving swiftly in that direction. As soon as she entered the kitchen, she hit the light switch and drew the bat back, ready to swing. But it wasn’t a menacing stranger who came in.

“Whoa,” her father said, holding up his hands in surrender. “It’s just me.”

“Someone tried to break in,” Annie said quickly.

“Where?”

“The patio door.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Wait here.”

Her father rushed past her, but she didn’t remain behind. She followed him, the bat still gripped in her hands. Cork opened the patio door and ran out. He stood in the rectangle of light cast by the dining room chandelier, looking left and right. He glanced back at Annie.

“Close and lock the door. Lock the kitchen door, too. Don’t open up unless it’s me knocking.” He vanished into the darkness where the light didn’t reach.

Annie did as he’d said, locked both doors, then went to the living room and waited. The knock at the front door came a couple of minutes later. She turned on the porch light but didn’t look out.

“Dad?”

“It’s me.”

She unlocked and opened the door. “Did you see him?”

Her father shook his head. “Nothing. And nothing parked on the street. I heard an engine fire up next block over, so he might have parked there. Whoever he was, he’s gone now.”

Annie’s jaw went tight. “Lewis.”

“Lewis?”

“I need a cookie and milk,” Annie said.

In the kitchen, she took two chocolate chip cookies, one for each of them, from the Ernie cookie jar while Cork poured milk into a couple of small tumblers. They sat at the table, and Annie related everything that had transpired regarding the security guard named Lewis.

“But you can’t say for sure that he was at Spirit Crossing today?” Cork said.

“When the headaches are really bad, I sometimes see things that aren’t there.”

“And you can’t say for sure that he was the one at the patio door?”

“No.”

“If he’s been a cop, he probably had no trouble finding out exactly who you are and where you live and our telephone number here. I’ll get our phone records tomorrow and see who called tonight. That may nail him.” Then he furrowed his brow and said, “What’s going on, Annie? These headaches, what’re they about?”

Maybe it was the physical and emotional strain of the day. Maybe it was simply that a human being couldn’t hide a painful truth forever. Whatever the reason, all that she’d held back for so long behind a dam of fear and a desire to spare herself the pity of others and a deep sense of the hurt that the truth would bring to those she loved came pouring forth. She began to weep, and her father took her into his arms and listened as she pressed her face to his heart and told him everything.

Cork lay in bed, unable to sleep. Annie was dying. His beloved daughter was dying and there was nothing he could do about it, nothing anyone could do. Another medical opinion, he’d suggested. Mayo Clinic in Rochester. But she told him the doctor who headed the medical team in Mexico City, the best, she’d been assured, had trained at Mayo. She was finished seeing doctors. He’d made a promise to Annie to let her tell the others in her own time and in her own way. After the wedding, she’d said, so that nothing would interfere with the celebration. He’d sworn he wouldn’t even tell Rainy. Now this awful truth was an iceberg floating inside him, its sharp, icy edges cutting into his heart.

Glioblastoma. Brain cancer. This alien thing in her body, slowly killing her. A year, maybe, Annie had told him.

She’d been gone forever, it seemed, living her life in a place he could barely imagine, a crumbling barrio on the edge of a Central American city he’d seen only in the photographs she sometimes attached to her emails. He’d looked forward to her return for Stephen’s wedding with such great joy, the chance after too long to reconnect with this child who’d strayed so far from home.

No, not strayed. She’d chosen very definitely the course of her life. She’d always known her own mind, been a strong woman, a fighter in every way. When he’d come home that night, she’d held a baseball bat in her hands, ready to clobber an intruder. Then she’d put her face to his chest and wept as she told him the truth of this thing she could not fight.

He slipped from bed. Rainy lay sleeping soundly. She’d come home in the early morning hours with Stephen and Belle and Maria, all of them dead tired from the work they’d done helping at Spirit Crossing. There’d been injuries and arrests, at both the encampment and the crossing itself. Things were spinning out of control. She and Belle and Stephen feared there would be more trouble the next day, and they would be heading off early to do what they could to help. He looked down at his wife, this good human being, with whom he shared so much. But he could not share with her this awful truth in his heart. This awful sadness. Because he’d promised Annie, and he was a man true to his word.

He left the bedroom and went downstairs, opened the front door and slipped outside. He sat on the porch swing. The night had cooled a bit and a soft breeze brushed against his face. A lopsided gibbous moon hung in the black sky, showering faint silver across the lawn. Where the moon didn’t eat their light, the stars were a glittering sea of diamonds. It should have been a lovely night. Except that two young women were dead, another woman was missing, someone was menacing the O’Connors. And Annie was dying.

In that moment, it was too much. Cork bent his head and began to weep. Deep sobs broke from him, the only sound in the night. Everything was beyond his control. He wanted to rail at God, at the Great Mystery, at whoever or whatever was responsible for all the horror in the world. He lifted his tear-streaked face to the heavens and asked that eternal and unanswerable question: “Why?”

Except for the sound of one man’s grieving, the night was silent.

CHAPTER 27

Cork was up early the next morning, making breakfast. It had been three days since Waaboo had discovered the body that was almost certainly that of Fawn Blacksmith buried in Erno Paavola’s blueberry patch, and Cork was still struggling to understand what exactly had happened to her and to Olivia Hamilton and what, if anything, might tie the two murders together.

The night before, as he and Dross had returned from Cloquet, Cork had called Daniel’s cell phone and filled him in on what they’d found. Daniel had told Cork that Waaboo had agreed to return to the blueberry patch to see if he could once again touch the spirit of Fawn Blacksmith. Cork said he wanted to be there and to let him know when they left Crow Point.

As he was making oatmeal, he heard the thunk of something hitting the front door. He peeked through the living room window and saw that the street was empty, no media vans. On the porch, he found the morning paper. The front-page story in the Duluth News Tribune was the discovery of Olivia Hamilton’s body in the room beneath Erno Paavola’s cabin. The byline was Greta Hanover. She did give Waaboo credit for his sense of smell, which led to the discovery of the body beneath the cabin, but she made no mention of talking to a ghost.

Cork went back to making breakfast for everyone. They all had agendas. Stephen, Belle, and Rainy planned to head back to Spirit Crossing. Annie, when Cork told her about Waaboo returning to the blueberry patch, asked if she could be there, too. And wherever Annie went, Maria was sure to follow.

They ate together at the dining room table, discussing the intruder the night before. Breakfast was oatmeal with blueberries, sweetened with maple syrup.

“It had to be Lewis,” Stephen said. “Looking for some kind of revenge.”

Cork thought this over. “He was involved in security with a lot of cops. Suspended or not, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to get our address and phone number, I suppose. I’ll call Marsha and ask her to follow up on it.”

Belle added a few more blueberries to her oatmeal. “He’d have to be pretty stupid to try something like that.”

“He didn’t strike me as the sharpest tool in the shed,” Stephen said.

“Is it possible that whoever is responsible for Olivia Hamilton and Fawn Blacksmith knows about us?” Rainy said. “About Waaboo, I mean? And they’re afraid of what he might find out if he connects with the Blacksmith girl’s spirit?”