Manitou Canyon Read Free

that he had a heart attack and fell into the water. We went over that lake bottom with divers. Nothing. And that takes care of another speculation, that he committed suicide. If he did, where’s the body? Here’s another speculation, that he had some kind of stroke and wandered off. If that was the case, why didn’t the dogs pick up and follow his scent? And here’s another one, off the wall, maybe, but not unheard of. A man sometimes gets to some dark point in his life when he might think that just ending it is the answer. Or rather, ending what his life is and starting over somewhere as someone different, burying himself somewhere where no one expects anything of him. Your grandfather’s a very wealthy man. If he wanted a new life for himself, I imagine he could arrange that. When I knew him forty years ago, he didn’t strike me as a guy who’d run from trouble and try to hide. Has he changed?”
    â€œGrandpa John run?” Trevor said. “Christ, no. Not from anything.”
    â€œSomeone could have done something to him,” Lindsay suggested.
    â€œMaybe,” Cork said. “Did you see anyone else on Raspberry Lake?”
    â€œNot a soul.”
    â€œAnd the sheriff’s people found no evidence of foul play,” Cork said.
    Lindsay frowned. “So what happened to him?”
    â€œI don’t know. But I do know that something out there wasn’t right. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.”
    Lindsay glanced at her brother again, a furtive look. “There’s something else.”
    She waited, as if expecting her brother to pick up the thread. Trevor Harris took a deep breath.
    â€œIt’s going to sound weird, I know,” he began. “The night the search ended, I had a dream, the strangest I’ve ever had. If it weren’t for my grandfather’s situation, I probably would have written it off as— What is it that Scrooge blames his vision of the ghosts on? A piece of undigested beef?” He laughed weakly and turned his mug nervously on the tabletop. “In this dream, I was in a desert of some kind. Like in the Southwest. It was night, big moon in the sky. I was all alone, stumbling around. I think I was lost. I know I was scared, that was the big thing. Then all of a sudden, there’s this figure in front of me. He just kind of pops up. I can’t see him clearly because the moon’s behind him and the front of him, his face and all, is in shadow. He speaks to me. He says, ‘I have a message from two fathers.’ Then, honest to God, he quotes Shakespeare: ‘Mark me. Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold. But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would freeze thy young blood.’ ”
    â€œYou’re kidding me,” Cork said.
    â€œNo. Dead serious,” young Harris said. “Are you familiar with Hamlet ?”
    â€œNot since high school.”
    â€œThat quote is a kind of mash-up of the speech the ghost of Hamlet’s father delivers to his son in Act One.”
    â€œAnd you remembered all that from the dream?”
    â€œI’m an actor. Remembering dialogue is what I do.”
    â€œTwo fathers,” Cork said. “Your father’s father speaking through the ghost of Hamlet’s father?”
    â€œI can’t think of another meaning. And my grandfather is a huge fan of Shakespeare.”
    â€œThat’s all there was to the dream?”
    â€œNo. This figure said he had something for me, too. He said, ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ ”
    â€œThe New Testament and Shakespeare. Quite a dream.”
    â€œThat’s not all,” his sister said.
    Cork looked at the brother and waited.
    Trevor said, “I asked this messenger or whatever his name.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œHe told me it was O’Connor. Stephen O’Connor.”
    Cork was about to take another sip of