Sheriff Luther Tillman had never needed—and never had the patience to endure—what others thought of as a full night’s sleep. Instead, he functioned well on four or five hours, with an occasional six. Sleep was rest to him, yes, but it also felt like a taste of death, waking to discover that, for hours, the world had gone on just fine without him, as one day it would go on forever. In a pinch, he could skip an entire night’s sleep with little ill effect. This would be one of those nights.
At 1:10 A.M. Friday, having returned from the ruins of Cora Gundersun’s house, he brewed coffee and put a tin of butter cookies on the kitchen table. He sat there to read more of the teacher’s writing. Page by page, Cora’s fiction didn’t just entertain but also educated him as to the complexity of her mind and the generosity of her heart. If he thought he had known her well, he found now that he’d hardly known her at all. It was as if he had waded out into a knee-deep pond with a placid surface, only to discover immeasurable depths teeming with life.
Yet nothing he read helped to explain what she had done. In fact, the beauty of her fiction made the ugliness of her actions more difficult to comprehend, so that shortly after 4:30 in the morning, he put aside her stories and returned to the journal in which she had struggled for so long to pry out of herself the four sentences about a spider crawling within her skull.
When he and Robbie Stassen had considered these words while standing in Cora’s kitchen, they had scanned quickly through the repetitions, which because of her precise cursive formed a pattern that lulled the eye but that changed dramatically when a new phrase began. Now he perused the pages with greater care, line by line, looking for he knew not what.
In time he was rewarded with the word iron where the word inside should have been: a spider crawling iron my skull…
He would have thought it meant nothing, a mere error, except that twenty lines farther, the word appeared in the same place, and later in another phrase entirely—speaks in an iron whisper—where it replaced the word evil.
In every investigation, a good cop looked for patterns and for the lack of patterns where patterns ought to be, and often, as now, he came upon telling clues.
After he had found twenty instances of the word iron where it didn’t belong, he encountered the word furnace where the word whisper should have been, and then in place of the words my brain.
There were nineteen instances of furnace before he discovered a third word embedded like code within the thousands of repetitions.
For days at a time became instead for days at a lake. That same substitution occurred twenty-two places in eleven pages.
Although Luther proceeded line by line through the remaining pages of the journal, he found nothing else of interest.
Iron Furnace Lake.
Cora’s struggle to express her bizarre fear that a spider was colonizing her brain appeared to be the work of a woman bewildered by her own rapidly developing paranoia, perhaps embarrassed by it, frightened not just of the imaginary spider but also of her belief in its existence, which part of her must have known was irrational.
The embedding of a place name within the pages of repetitive writing seemed like a different matter, as if while she consciously attempted to leave behind her a statement about the spider, her subconscious strove to transmit from its darker reaches the name of a place that either she had forgotten or she resisted remembering.
Having found this much, Luther didn’t know what it might mean, if it meant anything at all, or how he might go about establishing a connection between her paranoid fear and her assault on the hotel.
Anyway, there was no point in conducting such an inquiry. The unlikely perpetrator was dead. She couldn’t mount a defense based on an insanity plea. He had no need to prepare for a trial.
He couldn’t let it go, however, because of the FBI’s inadequate inspection of Cora’s house, because of the Department of Justice official who ordered the Bureau agents to cease and desist, and not least of all because someone had torched the house with a vengeance, destroying everything in it—and tried to make it appear as if vindictive locals had done the job.
Luther had gotten into police work because he believed in the rule of law. A civil society could not endure without it. When the rule of law was diminished, the strong preyed on the weak. If the rule of law collapsed, every barbarism would ensue, and the streets would run with blood in such volume that all apocalyptic biblical plagues and disaster-movie horrors would seem by comparison to be the musings of naïve children. He had long watched with concern as those who were corrupt became bolder in their thieving and lust for power, as corruption spread to institutions once immune to it.
He had two daughters. He had a wife. He could not turn away from this case merely because higher authorities had removed it from his jurisdiction, nor because finding the truth of the assault on the hotel seemed hopeless. Taking refuge in the hopeless nature of anything was just a form of cowardice.
In his study, he unlocked the handsome mahogany gun cabinet. Of the three lower shelves provided for the storage of ammunition, one remained empty. He put Cora Gundersun’s journals there and engaged the lock and pocketed the key.
At 5:50, as Luther sat at the computer, reading about the town of Iron Furnace, Kentucky, Rebecca entered in pajamas and robe. From behind, she put her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. “Up all night?”
“No way I could’ve slept.”
“Nothing you could’ve done or can do.”
“A wife has to say that.”
“Especially when it’s true. Now you need to be ready for this awful day.”
“The Feds aren’t letting me do anything but direct traffic.”
“They’ll want you center stage today.”
“Don’t see why they would.”
“Yesterday’s snow screwed up air travel. Last night it was mostly local and state media. But this morning it’ll be a world of them in town, and the Washington types will want your face out there in case down the road they need someone to blame.”
Switching off the computer, getting up from the chair, putting his arms around her, Luther said, “What happened to the Pollyanna I married, suddenly gone all cynical on me?”
“Didn’t happen suddenly,” she said.
“No, I guess it didn’t.”
“Don’t let them use you, Luther.”
He kissed her brow. “They won’t.”
“They will if you let them. If they throw a lot of dirt at you while they’re digging themselves out of a hole…well, we still have to live here.”
“The people of this county know me, dirt thrown or not thrown.”
“The people of Judea knew Jesus, too, and how did that go?”
“Woman, I’m no Jesus.”
“My point exactly.”
“Close your eyes, beautiful.” He kissed her left eyelid and then the right.
She put her head on his chest. “Anyway, I’m still a Pollyanna about you.”
They held each other as, beyond the windows, light pierced the bleak, curdled sky and formed into a new day.