Luther Tillman already knew that Iron Furnace was a small town in Kentucky, on Iron Furnace Lake. Six hundred residents. The biggest employer was a hundred-room five-star super-expensive resort. That and more he had learned online. But he didn’t know why Cora Gundersun embedded those three words, apparently unconsciously, among the obsessive repetitions in her strange journal entries.
After fingering a circle of red, a crescent of blue, Hazel Syvertsen chose a dewdrop of yellow and fitted it into the leading. “Cora was invited to a conference at Iron Furnace Lake Resort. Four days, five nights, all expenses paid. She was so excited about it.”
“Conference about what?”
“The education of special-needs children. Supposed to be part conference and part reward for the attendees, who’d all been at one time or another named Teacher of the Year by their city or state.”
“When was this?”
“Last August. Before school began.”
“Who put on this conference?”
“A charitable foundation. I think it was something called the Seeding Foundation. No. Seedling. The Seedling Foundation.”
“She went to this alone?”
Molding the lead came to the dewdrop curve, Hazel said, “She could have brought a guest, one girlfriend or another. Which would have bollixed things if one of the men at the conference turned out to be her Mr. Right. After all, they had a profession in common with her, an affection for children that most of the world considers lost causes. Maybe you can’t quite imagine this, but Cora was a huge romantic. She believed there’s someone special out there for everyone, she just needed fate to make the connection. Going to Kentucky alone was a way of giving fate a little kick in the ass.”
Having read several of Cora’s short stories and a portion of a novel, Luther knew she’d been a romantic who wrote about hope and the potential goodness of the human heart without sentimentality, in fact with an undercurrent of affecting melancholy. He didn’t intend, however, to tell Hazel about those notebooks, which someone had meant to incinerate along with everything else in Cora’s house.
“Did she meet a man at this conference?”
“She met one or two she liked, but no one who, as she put it, made her want to do cartwheels.”
“But you said something happened to her at that place.”
Hazel stopped working with the window and seemed to be studying the flow of form and color in the finished part of the composition, though it was the glass of memory through which she was peering. “I can’t explain easily, Luther, but Cora was different after Iron Furnace Lake. Quieter. Less likely to laugh at silly things. I mean, the absurd things in life we all experience. She was enthusiastic about the conference when she first returned from it…but it was a gauzy kind of talk, few specific details, which wasn’t a bit like Cora. She had a keen eye for details. When she told you about something interesting that happened, it was always a colorful story. But after a day or so, she didn’t say another word about Kentucky. The few times I brought it up, she waved away the subject, as if it had been a lovely place, yes, but otherwise a disappointment.”
“Maybe she did meet a man there,” Luther said, “someone she thought was special, and one way or another he hurt her.”
“Yes, I wondered. But I don’t think that was it.”
She left the worktable and went to a window and gazed out at her mantled backyard and a grove of spruce, their glaucous needles flocked with snow and ornamented with small cylindrical cones.
After decades of police work, Luther knew when a witness wanted to say something more but felt constrained by loyalty to a friend or by shame, or by any of the emotions and doubts that tie knots in the tongue. Techniques of interrogation failed more often than not to pry open the shell for this last pearl, and it was better to let the troubled person negotiate with her sense of what was ethical.
Without turning to face him, Hazel said, “After she came back from Kentucky, there were a few times I visited Cora and found her sitting almost in a trance, lost in thought. Her expression…well, I can only call it haunted. I had to speak to her two or three times before she became aware of me. I felt there might be something she was afraid of but that she didn’t want to talk about.”
A spider spinning a web inside her skull, Luther thought, and laying eggs in the folds of her brain.
After another silence, Hazel said, “I should have pressed her about it. Should have been more concerned. More of a friend.”
“You don’t have one iota of responsibility for what happened at the Veblen Hotel.”
Hazel turned to face him. “I know I don’t, Luther. I know. And yet, damned if I don’t feel that I do.”