Purgatory Ridge

“Alcoholic?” Cork said. “Follow me.” He led Earl to the garbage can near the shed, lifted the lid, and released a cloud of black flies. “What do you see?”

“Besides garbage?”

“Booze doesn’t flow from the tap in the kitchen sink. Where are the bottles?”

“Why pretend to be drunk?”

“Good cover, especially if people are predisposed to believing it. I’ve known John LePere a long time. Not especially well, but enough to wonder how he’d get himself mixed up in something like this.”

“Two million dollars is a lot of incentive.”

“At great risk. That’s the thing. Whoever did this is risking everything. John LePere’s got a good job at the casino. And a nice place here, for a man who likes to live alone. He has a place on the north shore, too. Kidnapping just doesn’t seem to fit.”

“Maybe because we don’t have all the pieces.” Earl dropped his cigarette and ground it out under his heel. He glanced at the cabin. “I can’t go in there. I can’t even be aware of someone going in there.”

“Maybe it’s time you left,” Cork suggested.

“I think I’ve seen everything here I want to see.”

After Earl had gone, Cork tried the back door of the cabin. As he expected, it was locked. He returned to his Bronco and took a heavy-handled screwdriver and a pair of cotton gloves from the tool kit he kept in back. He put the gloves on and used the handle of the screwdriver to break a pane in the back-door window. It was simple, then, to reach in and undo the lock on the door handle.

LePere’s place surprised him. In his experience, bachelors were generally sloppy housekeepers, especially if they were heavy drinkers. LePere kept a clean home. Cork wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for. Whatever it was, the tidy kitchen-where not even a crumb lay on the counter-seemed unpromising. He stepped into the main room. It was furnished sparely, in the way of a man who seldom had to accommodate visitors. An easy chair with a standing lamp for reading, a small dining table with two chairs, a Franklin stove, a four-shelf bookcase-full. A tasteful, braided area rug in shades of brown covered the old floorboards in front of the stove. On the walls, LePere had hung several framed photographs, all black and white. Cork checked the only bedroom, went through LePere’s small closet and chest of drawers. In the bathroom, he looked inside a little Hoover portable washer. Back in the living room, he stood a while, hoping to be struck by something that felt out of place, but nothing hit him. He crossed to the nearest photograph on the wall. It was of a man and boy standing in front of a cabin under construction. Written in white in the lower right-hand corner were the words SYLVAN COVE, 1971. The boy looked to Cork to be a very young John LePere. He assumed the man, who had his arm proudly around the boy’s shoulders, was LePere’s father.

Cork moved to the next mounted photograph. A teenage John LePere stood on a dock alongside a boy a few years younger. Behind them lay a curve of silver-gray water backed by a huge ridge of solid, dark rock. The boys were smiling broadly. In the corner, in white, had been written PURGATORY COVE, 1979.

The photograph that hung nearest the stove showed John LePere in a peacoat and wearing a watch cap. He stood in a crow’s nest, his hand shielding his eyes, as if he were intent on scanning the horizon. On the mast below him was a gigantic letter F illuminated by huge electric bulbs. In the corner of the photograph, the penned explanation read “When the radar fails. Teasdale, 1985.” A grin played across LePere’s face, and it was clear he was clowning for the camera. Cork knew LePere’s tragic history-sole survivor of the wreck that took the lives of the rest of the crew on the Teasdale. He tried to place the year, and believed it probably wasn’t long after the picture had been taken. He considered for a moment what the big lighted F on the mast below LePere might be all about, but he quickly let go of his wondering because it had nothing to do with the reason he was in the cabin.

He went over everything once more, and once more he came up empty-handed. He left the cabin by the same door he’d entered. Outside, the sun was resting on the tops of the trees along the western shore of the cove. Cork checked his watch. Eight-thirty. In another hour, the kidnappers would call, and what now seemed like the only hope for saving Jo and Stevie and Grace and Scott would present itself.

39

JOHN LEPERE CAME OUT of a dream of his father holding him tightly. His father’s clothes smelled of fish, a smell LePere loved. When he opened his eyes, he found that he was inside the old fish house and he was bound with rope. The air was hot and close and filled with a fish odor that ghosted up from every board.

“He’s coming to.” It was a woman’s voice.

His eyes focused in the dim light, and he saw that the two women and their sons were watching him. “What happened?”

“Your friend,” the Fitzgerald woman said bitterly.