“Okay.”
“You saw the grave yesterday, how deep all the petals lay. I did a rough calculation this morning. It would take a couple of thousand roses to supply enough petals to do the trick.”
Cork let out a low whistle.
Gooding nodded. “I lost a lot of sleep last night considering how that many roses would get here. UPS? FedEx? What?”
“Did you run that question by Lyons?” Cork noticed his coffee cup still had the ghost of a lipstick print along the lip. He wiped it clean with his napkin, then took a sip.
“Yeah. He says they could have come from a wholesaler almost anywhere. Up from the Twin Cities, Duluth, over from Fargo. Could even have come directly from one of the big suppliers down in Miami. Good time of year to order a lot of roses. Big South American crops coming in, but no big holiday to generate demand. You’d get a good price.”
“How would they get to Aurora?”
“They come in bunches of twenty-five, in containers they call Florida boxes, usually shipped by the gross. Generally they’re kept fresh with cold packs, so they don’t need special refrigeration or anything. Lyons said usually there’s nothing on the packaging that would make them stand out from other freight, so they wouldn’t necessarily be noticed.”
“Anybody with a sizeable truck could have picked them up at an airport or a freight depot?”
“Exactly.” He reached into the white sack again and pulled out a plastic bag full of wilted petals. “I left a bunch of these with Lyons. He’s going to see if he can identify the variety, give me some idea of where they might have come from.”
“So you’re among those who think there’s a logical explanation for the roses?” Cork said.
Gooding put back everything he’d taken from the white sack. “You know anything about the miracle of Our Lady of Fatima?”
“Not much.”
“At one point during the visitations, a shower of rose petals fell from the sky. Same thing happened in the fifties when a Filipino nun went on a fast for world peace. Documented.” He reached for his coffee cup and signaled Sara for a refill. “In eighteen fifty-one, blood and pieces of meat rained down out of a cloudless sky on an army post near San Francisco. In Memphis, Tennesee, in eighteen seventy-seven, live snakes fell by the thousands. Stones showered down on Chico, California, for a full month in nineteen twenty-one. There are hundreds of such documented cases. Most theories involve things being sucked up by tornadoes or hurricanes and deposited elsewhere.”
“What about the tears?”
“I sent a sample down to the BCA lab in St. Paul for analysis. It’ll be a while before we have anything.” He looked directly into Cork’s eyes, and his own eyes seemed lustrous. “I’m going to do everything I can to prove there’s a logical explanation. But if I can’t, it won’t be the first time I’ve seen a miracle.”
“Yeah? How so?”
Gooding waited until the waitress had refilled his cup. Then he glanced behind him at the tables where the noise was the rumble of voices and the clatter of flatware on plates. Just slightly, he leaned toward Cork.
“Not a lot of people know this, and I’d just as soon you kept it to yourself. I was dead once.”
Cork drew back to get a good look at Gooding. It was clear the deputy wasn’t kidding.
“When I was six, my mother packed us up for a Christmas trip to visit friends up in Paradise, in the U.P. of Michigan. It’s snowing like crazy, and the roads are ice. We’re crossing a bridge over the Manistee River, and some guy swerves across the center line, hits our car, and we go through the railing, plunge right off the bridge. The river’s covered with ice, but the car just busts right through. I can still hear my mother, screaming, then the car’s full of water so cold it felt like a big hand had grabbed me and was squeezing the life right out of me. It was dark in the water under the ice. I couldn’t see anything. The last thing I remember is this beautiful light, this beautiful peaceful light surrounding me, and I remember not being afraid.
“The next thing I know I’m in a hospital room. I open my eyes and the nurse there is crying, making the sign of the cross, saying it’s a miracle. I’d stopped breathing for almost half an hour before they pulled me from that river and revived me. As nearly as I’ve been able to tell, there’s been no residual harmful effect. I forget things now and then, but who doesn’t?”
“You told me you grew up in a children’s home. Your parents?” Cork asked.
“Killed in the accident.”
“And you believe it was a miracle that you survived?”
Gooding thought a moment. “I know these things happen, that doctors say there’s a medical explanation, the cold water shuts down the body, reduces the need for oxygen, all that. But believe me, when it happens to you, it’s nothing short of a miracle.” Gooding glanced behind him again. “Like I say, I’d just as soon you kept this to yourself. Especially now, with all that’s happening here in Aurora.”
“Sure, Randy. I understand. No problem.”
Gooding stood to leave.
Cork said, “You and Annie friends again?”
Gooding smiled. “We had a long talk one night after youth group. I apologized, told her pretty much what I told you about Nina van Zoot. I think she appreciated that I trusted her. She’s a special young woman, Cork.” Gooding stood up. “Thanks for the breakfast. I owe you one.”
After he’d finished his own breakfast, Cork headed to the sheriff’s office. He wanted to have a talk with Solemn. When he walked into the department, he found Marsha Dross on front desk duty talking with a blonde in tight jeans, stiletto heels, and a red Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt.
Deputy Dross said, “I can’t authorize that. You’ll have to talk to the sheriff.”
“And he’s not here,” the woman said impatiently.
“That’s right.”
“What about his lawyer? If I get permission from him, can I talk to Winter Moon?”
“That would be a beginning,” Dross said.
“Who’s his attorney?”
“Jo O’Connor.”
“Got an address for this Joe guy?”
“In the phone book.”
“Thanks. You’ve been a big help,” the woman said with sarcasm. She turned abruptly, glared Cork aside, and shoved out the door.
“Who was Ms. Charm there?” Cork asked.
“Journalist. Tabloid journalist.”
“Oxymoron, isn’t that?” Cork said. “She wanted to talk to Solemn?”
“Yes. And she’s not the first.”
“May I talk to him? On behalf of his attorney, that Joe guy?”
The deputy laughed and buzzed him through.
It was Cy Borkmann in charge of the jail that day.
“Has he been any trouble?” Cork asked.
“Winter Moon? Are you kidding? All he does is sit. Talks to you when you talk to him. Stands when you tell him to stand. Otherwise, it’s like he’s zoned out or something.” He let Cork into the interview room, then went to get the prisoner.
When Solemn came, he stood just inside the door. He looked a little spacey as he smiled at Cork. The deputy locked the door and left them alone.
“How’re you doing, Solemn?”
“Fine,” Solemn said. “I’m just fine. But I’ve been wondering about you.”
“Me?” Cork stood in the middle of the room, feeling oddly awkward in the young man’s presence. “Never been better.”
Solemn studied him awhile, that enigmatic smile never leaving his face. It was Cork who broke the silence.
“You heard about the roses?”
“Father Mal was here a little while ago. He told me.”
“What do you think?”
“If you think about something like this, you’ve missed the point. You were at the cemetery?”
“Yes.”
“Before you began to think, what did you feel?”
“That someone had gone to a lot of trouble for no reason that I could see.”
“You felt that? Really?”
It wasn’t true. What he’d felt when he first stood in the quiet of that cemetery, in the overpowering scent of roses, was something very much like awe. Then his thinking had kicked in, his twenty-first century mind, locked behind bars of skepticism.