Figone left the room, closing the door behind him.
“Now, then, Mr. Richardson, here’s the deal,” Kane said. “I need to go back in there, and I need a map that shows the locations of the old shafts. I’m sure you’ve had the whole area surveyed. I’m not interested in the least in where the gold might be or anything else having to do with your operation. And it turns out I have something to trade.”
“What’s that?” Richardson asked.
Kane took a videotape out of his coat pocket and set it on the mine manager’s desk.
“I took that tape out of Big John’s collection,” Kane said. “Seems he was taping his girls and their clients. This one’s got your name on it, and I watched it just to make sure. I hope you don’t mind me saying that you’re a naughty guy. Or that you don’t want your wife to see what you were up to with a teenage girl.”
Richardson reached over and tried to grab the tape, but Kane pulled it back out of his reach.
“This is blackmail,” Richardson said.
“Absolutely,” Kane said cheerfully.
The mine manager thought for a bit.
“I could have Figone take that tape from you,” he said at last.
“No, you couldn’t,” Kane said. “The only way you get this tape is if I get the map.”
The mine manager thought some more. Then he got up, walked to a filing cabinet, unlocked it, extracted a map, and spread it out on his desk.
“This shows all the mine sites we know about,” he said. “They’ve all been GPS-located. Have you got a unit?”
Kane shook his head.
“I’ll loan you one,” the mine manager said. “Wouldn’t want you getting lost out there.”
He folded up the map and handed it to Kane. Kane handed him the tape.
“If you’re thinking about trying anything tricky,” the detective said, “you should ask yourself how sure you are that’s the only copy.”
“There’s no need for threats,” Richardson said. “I’m certain my best course is to cooperate.”
Kane followed Figone’s SUV around the face of the mine pit and onto a narrow road that ran up the hill. A crew was working even though it was Sunday. The two vehicles pulled off into a small, cleared turnaround, and Figone helped Kane take the snow machine off its trailer.
“You sure you want to be doing this?” Figone asked. “It’s colder than a witch’s tit, and you won’t have much light.”
“It’s just a little recreational snow-machining, Tony,” Kane said, giving the machine a little gas and thumbing the starter. It fired right up. Kane stowed the lunch and a thermos of coffee under the backseat. He helped the old man onto the seat, slipped a balaclava over his face, wrapped a scarf around his mouth and nose, dropped goggles over his eyes, mounted, and started off, careful to not flood the engine. The old man wrapped his arms around Kane’s waist and they were off.
They rode for about twenty minutes, heading due south and mostly uphill before the old man pounded on Kane’s shoulder and waved him to the left. Kane made a long, sloping turn. He followed the old man’s thumps and waves for another twenty minutes or so. The sky was as bright as it was going to get when the old man signaled him to stop. He pulled up in the lee of a small stand of spruce and shut off the engine. The silence seemed loud after its constant whine. The old man walked a few steps away and fumbled at his zippers. Steam rose from where he wet the snow.
“God damn,” he said as he returned to the snow machine. “An old man’s bladder is no fun.”
Kane handed him a plastic cup full of coffee. He stood, looking around, sipping. Kane looked, too. To him, the landscape looked much the same as it had since they’d left the mine behind them.
“I trapped this country for forty years,” the old man said. “Had me some luck, too. Caught a big lynx in a set right here in these trees. Froze stiff by the time I got here. And a wolf let me shoot him right down in that gully. These are his hairs on this parka hood.”
The old man was silent then, as if recovering from what was, for him, such a long speech.
“I like the silence best,” he said at last. “In the summer there’s birds and animals all over, living their lives, making noise. But in the winter, sometimes the dogs would be asleep and it was so quiet. It was like if you listened hard enough, you could hear the mountains breathing.”
The old man slurped coffee.
“I was hoping to get back here before I died. Guess I should thank you for it,” he said. “Now, if my son would just come back, I could die happy.”
Kane let the silence settle.
“It’s been a long time, uncle,” he said. “Do you really think he’s coming back?”
The old man was silent for so long Kane wondered if he’d heard him.
“A man’s gotta have faith,” Abraham Jordan said. “If you don’t have faith, what do you have?”
The two of them sat there on the snow machine, drinking their coffee and thinking their thoughts. The old man threw the last of his onto the snow and dropped the cup into the compartment under the seat.
“It’s just around there that I seen the angel,” he said, pointing. “We better get going.”
Kane started the snow machine and took them through the gully and around a shoulder of snow-covered hill. There was a frozen, snow-covered creek down below them a ways, and they rode along the side of the hill slowly. Kane had driven snow machines before, but not recently, and he didn’t want to tempt fate. They rounded another shoulder of hill, and the old man pounded him on the back. He found a level spot and coasted to a stop.
“This is it right here,” the old man called over the rumble of the idling engine. “This is where I seen the angel. He was headed that way.” He pointed to the ridge that led down to the creek.
Kane pulled the map from an inside pocket and unfolded it. He checked his GPS unit, then examined the map.
“There’s some mine workings right down there,” he said, pointing.
“Sure there is,” the old man said. “Everybody knows that.” Then he gave Kane a big grin.
“It’s a lot shorter if you just follow the creek,” he said. “You can drive up a dirt road off the highway, unload your snow-go, and be here in ten, fifteen minutes. Don’t have to go through the mine at all.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that, uncle?” Kane said.
The old man grinned again.
“I like to ride the snow-go,” he said.
Kane put his things away and took them slowly down the ridgeline, then followed the creek. The old man pounded him on the back and he stopped.
“You got city eyes,” the old man said. “There’s the trail. There’s a drift tunnel up the hill a ways.”
Kane untied a couple of pairs of aluminum bear-claw snowshoes from the back of the machine. He and the old man put them on.
“You sure you can make this climb, uncle?” Kane asked.
The old man gave him a pitying look and started off. Kane followed. The snow cover wasn’t deep, and they probably didn’t need the snowshoes, but the old man kept moving so there wasn’t a chance to take them off. A few minutes’ slogging brought them to the entrance to the drift tunnel. It was somewhat overgrown by bushes.
“See them broken branches?” the old man said. “Somebody been in there a little while ago.”
Kane sat on a fallen tree and took off his snowshoes, then helped the old man remove his. He pulled a flashlight out of an inside pocket and led the way into the drift tunnel, stooping to avoid the low roof. The tunnel led in and down, and the two men followed it for maybe fifty yards, dropping to their hands and knees as the tunnel got smaller. From the marks on the floor, something had been dragged along it.
Finally, the tunnel opened into a sort of gallery in front of the rock face, which still bore the marks of the picks that had gouged it nearly a century before. Kane could rise to his knees and shine the flashlight around. The beam fell on something, and behind him, he could hear the old man suck in his breath. Caught in the beam of the flashlight were a pair of pale hands folded across a big book.
“Maybe that wasn’t an angel I seen,” the old man said as the flashlight’s beam climbed up the body to focus on Faith Wright’s dead-white face.
“Maybe it was, uncle,” Kane said. “Maybe it was the angel of death.”
27
And he said, who made thee a prince and a judge over us?
intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?
And Moses feared, and said, Surely this thing is known.
EXODUS 2:14
THE SUNDAY-EVENING SERVICE WAS NEARING ITS END when Kane slid into the back of the community hall. Nobody worked in Rejoice on a Sunday, and there were three religious services, the evening’s being the longest and most fervent. Moses Wright stood at the front of the congregation, wrapping up what must have been a powerful preaching. The sweat was rolling off his brow, and most of his congregation were on their knees, arms stretched toward the heavens.
“Jesus calls on us to be vigilant,” Moses was saying. “Go out and witness to your faith by the way you live, and be ready to protect it from the evils of the world.”
Calls of “Amen” issued from the worshippers. Young Matthew Pinchon stepped forward and turned to face the audience.
“Before we go, let us join our hands,” he said, “and pray for Faith Wright, wherever she might be, to come back to the righteous life. And for her family and all of us who know her here in Rejoice, as they seek to understand the ways of God.”
He motioned for Thomas Wright to join him at the front of the room. People stood up and took up the hands of their neighbors and bowed their heads.
“I think you might want to wait on that prayer,” Kane called. “I have a few things to say.”
Heads snapped up. The looks on their faces weren’t welcoming. Kane walked through the crowd until he was near the front, facing Pinchon and the two Wrights. All the eyes on him didn’t seem to bother him a bit.
“I found Faith today,” he said, speaking loudly so everyone in the hall could hear him. “She is dead.”
Thomas Wright staggered as if Kane had hit him. He bent over, uttered a low, keening sound, and began to cry. Moses Wright gave Kane a look of pure hatred. Kane didn’t like telling Faith’s father that way, but he had work to do here, and there was no way to do it that would be easy on Thomas Wright.
“She was lying in an old mining tunnel back up in the hills a few miles from here,” he said, his voice rising over the hubbub from the crowd. “Her arms were crossed over this.” He raised the brown leather-covered Bible over his head and shook it.
“How did she die?” Matthew Pinchon asked.
“It looked like what we call blunt-force trauma,” Kane said. “Somebody hit her or she hit something, and it killed her. But maybe you’d better let me tell this, and then I’ll answer questions.”
He raised the Bible and shook it again.
“Whoever killed her and hid her body is a religious man,” he said, bringing the crowd’s attention back to focus on him, “or else wanted us to think he is.”
He looked around the room.
“Because of what Faith was doing, there are many suspects,” he said. “But the reason Faith died wasn’t that she was whoring, at least not directly.”
The word brought a gasp from the crowd.
“What’s the matter?” Kane asked. “There are whores in the Bible, aren’t there? Aren’t there, Elder Moses Wright?”
The old man was trying to bore holes in Kane’s chest with his eyes. He looked up and gave the detective a twisted grin.
“ ‘And behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart,’ ” he said, his voice rising and falling in its preacher’s cadence.
“So there would be many suspects,” Kane said, “except that Faith left behind an account that tells us who her killer is. Left it behind in this.”
He shook the Bible again and pieces of paper flew out and landed at the feet of the three men. Pinchon and Moses Wright bent to pick them up.
“Leave those alone,” Kane snapped. The men froze. Kane stepped forward and retrieved the papers. As he picked them up, the people nearest him could see that they were covered in graceful, feminine handwriting. Kane sorted the papers carefully and returned them to the Bible.
The room was hot from all the sweating bodies. Kane had left his coat in the back but was otherwise still dressed for snow-machining. He’d have liked to have taken the time to get out of the snow-machine pants and boots, but he couldn’t pause now. Momentum would be important. He took a handkerchief out of a pants pocket and mopped his face.
“Her story is one this whole community should hear,” he said, “for it involves one of its leaders. Here is what it says.
“After her mother got sick, Faith needed comforting. She sought the comfort of a man she trusted, but instead of comforting her, he forced himself on her. This went on for some time. Faith didn’t know what to do. She was, I imagine, depressed because of her mother and shocked by this man’s behavior, and perhaps afraid that no one would believe her.
“But Faith was a strong person, and she fought her way clear of this man. How she got him to stop, it doesn’t say. Perhaps she threatened to expose him, I don’t know. But she forced him to stop taking advantage of her, and life went on.”
Kane stopped and looked around the room. It was completely silent and all eyes were on him. He went on.
“Life doesn’t just go on, though, when you are a sexually abused child. Especially when you see your abuser every day. Faith came to be of the opinion that she had been ruined. Whether she blamed herself—many victims do, at least initially—I don’t know. I do know that she couldn’t seek professional help, and came to think she had been ruined, physically and spiritually. Some of you mentioned that, after her mother’s death, she seemed to just be going through the motions of her religion, and that’s why.
“That would have been bad enough. But when she was about sixteen, her abuser told her that he wanted to marry her. There were complications to that, but he said he could work them out.