A Collect for Aid Against Perils
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Amen.
They looked like a hokey tableau in one of those British sex farces. There she sat in nothing but a robe, which, she discovered as she followed Hugh’s eyes, had loosened up noticeably while she was bending and stretching in the kitchen and was now showing off a good deal more of her chest than she had intended. There sat Russ, superficially relaxed, tension radiating from every line, his attempt at appearing casual and friendly marred by a defensive glare that screamed guilt. And there stood Hugh, wine bottle in hand, storm clouds rumbling across his face, glancing back and forth between them as if waiting for someone to say the first line and start the scene.
Clare resisted the urge to yank her robe tightly together and insist, It’s not what you think. Instead she smiled brightly and said, “Hugh! I was wondering where you were. I hope the drive wasn’t too bad. You remember Russ Van Alstyne, don’t you?”
The two men looked at each other with loathing.
“Russ dropped by as I was ladling up some soup.” She felt a spark of unease at how easily the lie slipped out. “Would you like some?”
“No. Thank you.” Usually, Hugh was the embodiment of Prince Charming, with twinkling eyes and dimples on both cheeks he flashed to great effect. This closed-faced, tightmouthed man was somebody she had never met. “I find I’m not very hungry.” He looked at Russ again. “I’ve heard of neighborhood policing, but I’ve never seen it practiced in such an intimate way.”
“I’m off duty,” Russ growled.
“Ah. Yes. I take it from your costume you’ve been looking for animals to kill? You know what Wilde said about hunting. ‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.’”
Russ rose from his seat. “Oscar Wilde was talking about hunting foxes, not deer.” Clare blinked in surprise. Hugh did as well. Russ looked Hugh up and down, taking in his purple corduroy pants and floral button-down shirt. “You ought to quote him correctly if you’re going to dress like him.” He turned to Clare. “Thanks for the soup, Clare. I’ll see you later.”
He vanished between the swinging doors. A moment later, she heard the kitchen door shutting. She was alone with Hugh.
If you’re trapped with no way out, you’ve got two options, Hardball Wright said. Surrender or attack. Since I don’t expect anybody who’s gone through my course to surrender, that means you attack.
“I’ll thank you to treat my guests civilly,” she said, rising from her chair and picking up the soup bowls.
“Me?” Hugh’s jaw dropped. “What about him?” She swept past him toward the kitchen. “And what about you?” he continued, dogging her through the doors.
She dropped the bowls in the sink and turned on the faucet. “I think you look fine,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding his question. “Very English. American men are scared of color and pattern.”
“I’m not talking about my damn outfit. I don’t give a rat’s ass what Dick Van Dyke there thinks about my clothing. What were you doing sitting there with him practically nude?”
She considered saying, I don’t understand. He was fully dressed, but figured one purposefully obtuse response was her daily limit. “I’m perfectly decent,” she said firmly. “He happened to stop in right after I got out of the shower. I didn’t think he was staying long enough for me to excuse myself and get dressed.”
“Oh, but he stayed long enough for a bowl of soup and a cozy little chat.”
She turned to face him, bracing her hands against the counter. In her bare feet, she was only a few inches shorter than him. “What exactly are you trying to say, Hugh?”
“I don’t think you realize how much you talk about him. When you’re on the phone to me.” He raised his voice to imitate her. “ ‘I was having lunch with Chief Van Alstyne the other day and… I asked Chief Van Alstyne about… Chief Van Alstyne says…’”
“He’s my friend. I’m sure I also mention my friends Anne Vining-Ellis and Roxanne Lunt.”
“But I don’t find you sitting around sharing soup in the buff with them!” The word “soup” curled off his tongue with a salacious hiss.
She tilted her head up, searching for a ray of calm to settle her enough to talk to Hugh without tearing his head off. He was angry and troubled, and it was her job to help people who were hurting, not to exacerbate their wounds.
“I’m sorry you’re upset about walking in on us like that,” she said, taking a measure of pride in how even her voice was. “But I can assure you, Russ and I didn’t do anything while he was here that we couldn’t have done right in front of you, if you had gotten here earlier.”
“Lovely. I’m assured you didn’t have a before-dinner cock-tail.”
Her mouth gaped open. “That is just plain nasty!” Her voice, no longer even, sounded distinctly screechy, even to her. “Maybe you ought to hightail it over to the hotel. I’ll meet you there later when you’ve had a chance to rinse your mouth out.”
“There’s another thing. We’ve been dating for over a year now, and every time I visit you I have to make shift in a damn bed-and-breakfast.”
“I’ve told you I can’t have a man staying in the rectory with me. For God’s sake, Hugh, my church is right next door.”
“That doesn’t explain why you won’t stay with me in my apartment when you come to the city.”
She looked down. “Is your friend Jackie complaining?” Clare had been the guest of a divorced coworker of Hugh’s during the three times she had visited New York.
“Of course she’s not. But even if you’re paranoid enough to think it might get back to your congregation if you shack up in my apartment, there’s no way you can tell me anyone would know if we spent a discreet afternoon or evening together.”
“I’d know.” She pushed the sleeves of her robe up. “I’m not just playing goody-goody because I’m afraid I’ll get caught. I believe that sex should be reserved for a committed, monogamous relationship.”
“Then how do you explain Chief Vincent Van Gogh in your living room?”
She stepped toward him. “I swear, in Jesus’ holy name, that I have never, ever had sex with Russ Van Alstyne.”
“Ah, but Vicar.” Hugh looked at her ruefully. “Can you swear you don’t want to?”
Her silence condemned her. She knew it, but she couldn’t bring herself to play Peter and deny her feelings three times. Finally she managed, “What I want or don’t want isn’t important. It’s what I do.”
“He’s married, isn’t he?” Hugh’s voice was gentle.
“Yes.”
“And I suppose his wife is a real piece of work.”
Clare looked at the kitchen wall. “His wife is a beautiful, dynamic woman who loves him very much. A sentiment that he returns.”
“Ah.” He stared at the bottle of wine he’d been holding since he walked in. “What say we crack this open and have a couple of glasses while we talk?”
Randy Schoof was being very cautious. Thinking before acting. Lisa would be pleased. He had debated hiding his truck as best he could by the old mill but had decided parking it in plain sight in the employee lot was better. There was always a collection of vehicles there, and no one in a hurry to clock in or rushing to get home would be curious about one more. He had carried everything-his backpack, his sleeping bag, the groceries-in one big load rather than hiking back and forth from the mill to the parking lot. He stuck to the shadows next to the rotting clapboard as he worked his way through the skeletons of waist-high weeds. And he was quiet, as quiet as could be, despite the roar of water over the dam washing out the sound of his footsteps. At the small side door, sheltered by an enclosed overhang, he fished out his ATM card. The door was locked, but Mike, who had snuck into the building every once in a while for a joint before he was laid off, had told him the secret: The lock was crap. You could pop it with a card and reset it from inside.
A jiggle, a lift, and Mike was proved right. He pocketed the card, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him. He took a few steps and was reaching into his backpack for his small emergency-use flashlight when he tripped over something square and painfully solid.
“Shit!” he cried, smashing into the floor, the flashlight and the bags flying, jars and boxes thudding and clunking, his sleeping bag bouncing off into the darkness. “Shit! Shit!”
“Who’s there?”
He froze.
“Who’s there?”
It was a woman. Faint and seemingly far away, but a woman. How in the hell had a woman gotten in here?
“Look, whoever you are!”
Christ, they didn’t have some sort of security guard now, did they?
“I don’t care what you’re doing here! I’m trapped, and I need help!”
He climbed to his feet. Now what was he supposed to do? Silently he bent over, feeling for his backpack. He brushed it with the back of his hand and grabbed it. The zippers jingled, a faint noise he heard as a clash of cymbals.
“I know you’re here. I heard you fall over something.”
Maybe he could just stand still. Stay quiet over here by the door. Maybe he could open and close the door, pretending to leave.
“Help me! Please, please, help me! Please!”
Oh, God. He was never going to be able to ignore that. “Hang on,” he yelled. “I’m looking for my flashlight.” He knelt carefully and began patting down the floor, feeling for the narrow cylinder.
“Thank you! Thank you!”
He got a fat bottle and a loaf of bread and something smooth and cool that he managed to identify as a knife before he sliced his palm open. He jammed everything into his backpack. Everything except his flashlight, which was nowhere within reach. “Crap,” he said.
“What is it?” the woman called.
“I can’t find my flashlight.” He had one in the glove compartment of his truck, but he didn’t want to appear out in the open again so soon. Maybe later.
“Talk to me,” he said loudly. “I’ll find you by sound.”
“I’m over here,” she said. “Near the far wall, the one closest to the river. Over here. Watch out for the stacks of pallets and the-”
“Oof!” There was a clang as he ran straight into something large and immovable.
“-the big machinery parts.”
He groaned. “What are you doing here? What do you mean, you’re trapped?” He could imagine maybe one of these machines dislodging and pinning someone. But in that case, he’d expect her to sound like she was in pain.
There was a pause. A long pause. Finally she said, “It’s embarrassing.”
Embarrassing? Like what? The only thing that embarrassed Lisa was stuff like other people knowing she had her period, or that time he told a couple friends about her getting the hair on her upper lip zapped. “Keep talking,” he said. He meant so he could find her, but she took it as an order.
“I met up with someone here. We were going to… do a bondage thing. But instead, he tied me up and left me here.”
Randy felt a flash of heat in his belly. Christ almighty. Maybe she was wearing some weird leather getup. Or nothing at all. Not that he’d do anything. He loved his wife. But Christ, what a story to tell the guys. Then he remembered that he wasn’t going to be telling this story to anyone. Because he wasn’t here.
His eyes had adjusted, and he could make out shapes in the darkness. Still, he almost stumbled across her. She was on the floor, leaning against another stack of pallets. The rectangular windows a story above them shed enough moonlight across the blackness that he could make out her legs, stretched out and covered in something pale. He dropped to his knees.
She was rolled loosely into a blanket, so he couldn’t see what she had on. He couldn’t make out the details of her face, but he figured that was just as well, since that meant she couldn’t see him too well, either.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She sounded like a runner after a race, breathing hard but trying to bring herself under control. “I’m… my hands and ankles are bound.”
He reached for the blanket covering her, not touching it. “You mind if I…?”
“Please.”
He could tell by the way she talked that she wasn’t from here. “What’s your name?” he said, still not touching the blanket.
“M-Mel. Melanie.” She sounded as if she wasn’t sure.
“Nice to meet ya, Melanie. I’m Mike.” He had thought the fake name up while he was crossing the floor. No use hiding out if someone could identify him by name. “I’m, uh, going to take the blanket off now.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t see you very well.”
“It’s fine,” she said impatiently.
Maybe she wasn’t the modest type. He tugged the blanket away, using both hands to unwrap it.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that I’ve been tied up like this all day, and it feels as if my shoulders are going to break off at this point.”
He wasn’t interested in her explanations. He was interested in why she was trying to sell him a bullshit story about bondage gone bad. He and Lisa had married right out of high school, and he didn’t have a whole lot of experience, but he knew for sure that no woman would show up for a kinky scene with her lover dressed in a flannel shirt and sweatpants. And hiking boots? He could imagine-just-some guy getting turned on enough by the idea of struggling to undress her to leave the clothes on while he trussed her up. But hiking boots?
His hand slipped down to her wrists, and he felt the unmistakable texture of duct tape. “I need to get my knife,” he said.
“Of course. Thank you. Thank you.”
He stood up and threaded his way back to the backpack and plastic bag. Thinking hard the whole way.
His camping kit had a utility knife, but he grabbed the kitchen knife Lisa had tossed in with the groceries instead. Its serrated edge would go through the duct tape a lot faster. If he used it. He made his way back to her, this time stopping a few feet away, when he could see her outline in the dark.
“I have the knife,” he said.
“Thank God.” There was a quiet clink as she bent forward, like an iron manacle tapping against the cement floor. “Please, undo my hands first. My arms are numb.”
“Yeah. Sure.” He squatted. “Just, I want to know what you’re really doing here first.”
She stopped moving. “I told you.”
He waited, not saying anything. It was what his dad used to do whenever he thought Randy was lying. He wouldn’t argue; he wouldn’t explain why he thought Randy wasn’t telling the truth. He’d just sit there. Quiet. Until Randy broke.
“Cut it off! I told you, I was meeting someone here and he tied me up. I thought it was for fun.”
He squatted, silent. He held the knife out and tilted it until the blade caught a dull gleam of light from the faraway windows.
“Please!”
Part of him wanted to giggle. Who would have thought it, him using his dad’s silent treatment instead of blowing up? He felt strange, grown-up and aware that he was feeling grown-up, all at the same time. Like the first time he and Lisa slept in his parents’ house, after they’d gotten married.
“All right,” she snarled, and he was jerked into the present. “All right. Cut me loose and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me and I’ll cut you loose.”
She made a noise. “Okay.” She took a breath. “I saw a man kill my brother. He put me in his car and brought me here. I think he’s trying to decide if he’s going to kill me or not.”
His head whited out for a moment while he tried to fit that statement into the real world he lived in. The first thing he thought was Again, my luck is lousy. He had stumbled into a freaking Sopranos episode. If he let this woman go, he’d have some contract killer after him.
“What… what was your brother into? So that this guy killed him?”
“Into? He wasn’t into anything.” Her voice broke. “He was a recluse who lived in the mountains and never saw anyone except me and my sister if he could help it. I don’t know why he was killed. I don’t know anything about what’s going on.”
Recluse. Mountain. Lisa saying, Oh, honey, it’s terrible. Mr. van der Hoeven’s been killed!
“You’re not Melanie. You’re van der Hoeven’s sister, Millie,” he said.
She was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” she finally said.
“You’re missing!”
“If you cut me loose, believe me, I won’t be.”
He moved behind her and worked the tip of the knife under the fraying edge of one of her duct-tape manacles. He sawed back and forth. He had found the missing woman. Maybe she’d be so grateful, she’d give him an alibi. The duct tape parted around one of her wrists, and with a groan of pain she brought her arms around to her front.
“God.” She bent over, rocking back and forth. “Oh, that hurts.”
“Um.” He sat down, scootching a little way from her so he was out of range, in case her arms weren’t really as useless as they seemed. “Maybe since I’m helping you out, you could help me out.”
She made a noise that might have been an encouragement to continue.
“I’m, um, in a bit of trouble. That’s why I’m here. Maybe you could say that I was with you earlier? Like, in the middle of the day for a few hours?”
“I could,” she said, her voice thin with pain, “but don’t you think it would look odd that you left me tied up all day? Whatever trouble you’re in, I bet kidnapping would be worse.” Her voice changed. Became harder. “Besides, it’s up to me to get the man who killed Gene. I was the only witness to what that bastard did.”
“What happened?”
“I was…” She hesitated. “I was in an old observation tower. It’s a good walk away from where our camp is now. This man tried to take me, and my brother was protecting me, and he-the man-threw him over the railing.” She wavered for a moment before going on. “The bastard left him lying there, out in the open. Like garbage. I have to get to him, take care of his body before-” She broke off.
Randy thought of what could happen to a body left out in the woods for a few days. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too. And so will that rat bastard be. As soon as I get out of here, I’m heading straight to the cops.”
Randy twitched. It sounded too close to his own actions today. Maybe the man who killed her brother had been a cold-blooded murderer. But maybe he had been like Randy, someone who just took one more kick from life than he could take and was then left frantically pedaling to get out from under what he hadn’t even meant to do in the first place. It didn’t seem fair that a man could spend his whole life doing the right thing and then blow it all up in five minutes’ time.
“Who was he? This guy. I mean, why was he after you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know his name.” He couldn’t see her face at all, hunched over like she was, but he could hear the edge of satisfaction in her voice when she said, “But I got his license plate number. Right before he dumped me in the back of his Mercedes. I said it over and over to myself while I was locked in there.”
Randy stared into the darkness, seeing not the cold and grimy old mill but the Haudenosaunee driveway under brilliant sunshine. The driveway that was blocked by a black Mercedes.
“This Mercedes,” he said. “Did you see a bumper sticker on it? Something about the Sierra club?”
A swish of hair. She lifted her head. “Yeah.”
“Shaun Reid,” he said, scared and exultant. “That’s who killed your brother. The guy who owns this mill. Shaun Reid.”
Lisa was expecting the two squad cars that pulled into her drive. After Randy left, she had gone about her normal routine for a Saturday afternoon, showering, a load of laundry, cooking. She had a big pot of stew simmering on the stove, figuring that if she really didn’t know what her husband had done or where he had gone, she’d have dinner waiting for him. She stuck Titanic in the VCR and poured herself a glass of rum and Diet Coke, props to simulate a normal afternoon: hanging out, watching a chick flick, waiting for her husband to get home. She picked up the drink, thinking to calm her nerves, but decided the last thing she needed was to have any of her edges dulled by alcohol. Instead she swilled some around in her mouth and spat it into the sink, following that with half the contents of the glass. Simulation. The illusion of reality.
So she shouldn’t have felt sick to her stomach when she saw the headlights swinging into her dooryard. She did take a swallow of the rum and Coke then, for real, and breathed slowly and deeply before walking to the door. No sense pretending she hadn’t heard anyone driving up the road. She dropped her hand to the doorknob.
I don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything. I’m innocent. I know nothing.
She opened the door. Not surprisingly, it was Kevin again, and some old cop who was, with his brush-cut hair and weight-lifting body, a preview of what her sister’s husband was going to look like in thirty years. She supposed she should be grateful. At least they didn’t send Mark out for this.
“Lisa?” No smiles this time. “May we come in?”
She stepped back, opening the door. “What’s the matter?” She had thought about this, about how she’d first react. Tossing bagged veggies into the stew pot, she’d considered what she would have thought if the police had come to her door last Saturday, a time that was forever now going to be set off as before. Now was after. And she did as she rehearsed.
“Oh, my God.” A hitch of breath. “Is it Randy? Has he been in an accident?”
The old cop smiled as he walked past her, crinkling up his eyes, as if he were playing Santa Claus. “No accident.” He held out his hand. “I’m Lyle MacAuley, Mrs. Schoof.” She took his hand, staring mostly at Kevin the whole while.
“What is it, then? Is it Mark?”
Kevin shook his head.
“Kevin was here earlier, asking about what you might have seen at Haudenosaunee.”
She nodded. Realized she was standing there with the warm air pouring out of the house. Shut the door.
“There’s been another incident today. A young woman was beaten and left on one of the logging roads on Haudenosaunee. Did your husband mention it to you?”
“No,” she said. How would I react to this news? she wondered. I would be scared of it happening to me. She glanced toward the window nervously.
“Why don’t we sit down?” The old guy phrased it like a suggestion, but he was already crossing the room, taking in everything, the movie, the drink, the stack of bills by the phone, the water stain on the ceiling. “Is your husband home?” he asked, sitting on one end of the couch.
“No.” She glanced back toward the door. “Do I need to worry about being alone out here?”
Kevin crossed his arms over his chest. “Where’s Randy?”
Lyle MacAuley patted the couch next to him. “Calm down, Kevin. Let the lady have a seat.”
She couldn’t not sit after that. She wedged herself in the corner opposite MacAuley.
“You certainly don’t have to worry right now,” MacAuley said, smiling again. “And if you’d like, we’d be glad to drop you off at a friend’s or neighbor’s when we go. If your husband isn’t home yet. Do you expect him soon?”
“By dinnertime,” she said. “He didn’t say he’d be gone longer than that.”
“Where’s he off to?”
“Errands, I guess. I was in the shower when he left.”
“When was that?” Kevin said.
MacAuley shot him a look. “I’d hate to leave you alone out here if you feel uncomfortable,” he said. “Do you have someone you usually stay with?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. If things blow up and one or the other of you has to cool down.”
“You mean Randy and me? We don’t fight like that.”
“No?” His expression invited confidence. “I’ve been there myself. You’re young, married, money’s tight, one or the other of you is always working… you mean to say you never fight?”
“Of course, we have fights. I mean… not so’s one of us has to leave.”
“He’s never gotten a little rough?”
She was genuinely outraged. “No!”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Whatever. I don’t like to interfere between husband and wife.” He smiled. “Has your husband ever mentioned a woman named Becky Castle?”
Her heart jumped so hard she knew he must have seen it in her throat. She shook her head.
“I’m sorry?”
“No,” she said. “Kevin asked us if we knew her. Earlier.”
He leaned forward. “I don’t want to upset you, here, but… have you ever suspected your husband might be seeing someone else?”
“No!” She glared at Kevin. “Kevin, what’s this about?”
This time, he kept his mouth shut. “Becky Castle was the young woman who was assaulted today,” MacAuley said. “The poor thing was beaten so badly she had to undergo surgery to stop her internal bleeding. Somebody punched her and kicked her and hit her until she was so much raw hamburger.”
The words, the images, were so ugly she wanted to slap her hands over her ears and howl until they burned themselves out of her brain.
“We think your husband might be able to help us in our inquiries,” MacAuley went on. “It’s important we talk with him as soon as possible.”
She forced herself to nod. “Of course. I’ll have him call you as soon as he gets home.”
“Is there anyplace he’s more likely to be? At a bar, or a friend’s house? Time is important. You know, we always say the first twenty-four hours of an investigation are the most important. ‘The golden hours,’ we call them. We want to be able to talk to anyone who may know something as quickly as possible.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was at Mike’s earlier. Mike Yablonski.”
MacAuley glanced at Kevin, who nodded once.
MacAuley stood, startling her. “Okay, then. Thanks, Mrs. Schoof.”
She unfolded herself from the couch and joined the two police officers heading for the door. She didn’t understand. She had thought he would keep at her. Ask her more about her husband. “I’ll be sure to have Randy call you as soon as he gets home tonight,” she repeated.
MacAuley smiled at her, eyes crinkling, bushy brows rising. “We’d sure appreciate it.”
“Um… is there anything else I can do to help?”
He smiled even more broadly, looking less like Santa and more like the cat who swallowed the canary. “Why, yes,” he said. “Can we have a look around the house?”
Clare looked into the burgundy surface of her wine. If she sat very, very still, she could see her reflection. Or rather, the reflection of her eye. For now we see through a glass, darkly, she thought.
Hugh thumped his glass against the table. They were sitting in the kitchen. The only other spot to sit face-to-face downstairs was in her living room, where she and Russ had been talking. By mutual, unspoken agreement, Clare and Hugh avoided that room when she returned downstairs dressed in a sweater and jeans.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at a loss for words,” Hugh said.
“There’s nothing to say.” In a way, she was telling the truth. For close to two years now, she had kept her mouth soldered shut, refusing to even think about the unthinkable. She had cracked and admitted it to herself; eventually, she had admitted it to Russ. It terrified her to think that the truth was so close to her surface that she was on the verge of admitting it to a nice man she saw every six or seven weeks. “There’s nothing to say,” she repeated.
“Is he going to divorce the little woman?”
That made her look up from the depths of her glass. “No.”
“Are you planning on chucking the whole priest thing and living a life of wickedness as a kept woman?”
She couldn’t help it; her lips twitched. “No.”
“Bit of a sticky wicket, eh?”
“You sound like someone in the 1939 version of The Four Feathers. ” She took a sip of the Shiraz. They had discovered, on her first trip to New York, that they shared a common devotion to prewar British films.
“The fellow who went blind and gave up the girl because it was the right thing to do, no doubt.”
She smiled into her wineglass.
He swallowed a gulp of wine. “Where do you think this thing is going? With you and me, I mean.”
She was surprised. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“Good Lord. You must be the only single woman over thirty I know who isn’t thinking about how to get herself married off.” He spread his arms and looked down at himself. “Am I not eligible? Not repulsive, don’t drool or pick my teeth in public, ready for housetraining.”
She took another sip, uncertain if he was joking or not. “Hugh, are you proposing? Or just looking for more affirmation that your shirt looks okay?”
“I’m just trying to figure out why you don’t at least eyeball me as potential husband material.”
She sighed. “Because for the past six or seven years, I’ve thought of myself as someone who is never going to get married. It’s not as if I’ve had men throwing themselves at me. Believe me. When I realized my calling, it sort of dovetailed with my spectacular lack of a love life. I figured I was meant to be a celibate.”
“Okay.” He ticked off one finger. “So, aspirations to be bride of God. Anything else?”
“Hugh.” She interlaced her fingers and propped her chin on the back of her hands. “Look at you. You’re urban, you’re trendy, your job involves travel and parties and reveling in the spoils of capitalism. I’m a priest who has settled in a little Adirondack backwater. Can you honestly see any way of me fitting into your life? Or you fitting into mine?”
He ticked off another finger. “Lifestyle differences. Anything else?”
I’m in love with somebody else. Something in her face must have given her thoughts away, because he held up a third finger. “Emotional complications.” He waggled the fingers at her. “It’s rather like choosing a substantial investment, isn’t it?”
“Spoken like a true venture capitalist.”
He took another sip of wine. “You have two candidates vying for your investment.”
“I don’t-”
“One is old enough to be your father, entombed in the same small town where he was born, and, oh, yes, is married.”
She drained her glass and poured herself another.
“The other,” he spread his arms again, showing off the floral shirt in all its splendor, “is handsome, youthful-comparatively speaking-amusing, well educated, has a healthy bank account and a career that gives him some flexibility in relocating as you climb the ladder to ecclesiastical success. Oh, and is single.” He leaned back in his chair. “And,” he stressed, “is Anglican.”
“Your virtues are exceeded only by your modesty.” She slid the bottle toward him. “You still haven’t told me if you’re proposing or not.”
“Not. Not yet,” he amended. “I’m not sure yet if you and I are suited for the long haul together.” His voice sharpened. “But I’d like a chance to find out without the local law enforcement cramping my style.” His chair scraped as he stood up. “I’d better get over to the hotel. I want to check in and freshen up before dinner. Do you want me to come back and pick you up?”
She shook her head automatically. “No, it doesn’t make sense for you to drive in and out of town twice.”
“I could wait for you to get dressed. We could lounge about the hotel together.”
“No. I still have to get to the dry cleaners and pick up my dress after you go. Then I’m going to make a quick hospital visit to a family I was with this afternoon before coming back here to get ready.”
“Right. I’ll see you later, then.”
“Wait!” She stood up. “What about-what about all this?” She waved her hand, indicating the table, the glasses, the remnants of conversation hanging in the air. “What are you going to do?”
He looked surprised. “I’m not going to do anything. We’re still friends, right?”
She nodded.
“And we can keep seeing one another occasionally?”
“Of course.”
“Then I don’t have to do anything. Except wait.” He stepped closer. “Because sooner or later, the choice you’ve made is going to blow up in your face. Bad investments always do. And when it does,” he smiled, “I’ll be here.”
She was still pondering his words when she heard his car pulling out of her drive. She hadn’t dated the whole time she had been at Virginia Episcopal Seminary. Now, in the space of one afternoon, she had two men in her house who wanted her. Who knew a clerical collar was such a turn-on? Of course, neither was exactly what you’d call a healthy, promising relationship. “Is this one of Your little jokes?” she asked. “Because if You’re trying to give me a message about what I should do with my life, I wish You’d be more clear.”
She should have called a lawyer. She should have told them no, they couldn’t look through her house, they couldn’t try to find some scrap of something tying her husband to Becky Castle. But it was too late now. If she said no, if she said stop, if she made Lyle MacAuley come down from upstairs, where she could hear him lumping around in her bedroom, looking at God knows what, they’d know. They’d know she’d folded. That she knew what her husband had done, and therefore that she probably knew where he was and when he was coming back. Her supposed innocence and the fact that Randy had gotten rid of any evidence were the only cards she held now. She had to play them.
Lisa sat on her couch, facing Kevin. They had spilt up, him and MacAuley, and Kevin was sticking to her like glue, supposedly so she wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable having some old cop pawing through her underwear drawer. She knew the real reason was to make sure she didn’t pick up the phone and warn her husband not to come home.
“Can I get you anything? A soda? Water?”
Kevin shook his head. “No, thanks.”
She stood, stretched. “I think I’ll make myself some coffee.”
Kevin stood as well. “I guess I will have a cup, if you’re going to make one.” He followed her into the kitchen.
She had just pulled the box of filters out when the phone rang. She froze. Oh, no. Not now. Please, no. Before she could recover and lunge for the phone, Kevin crossed the floor and snatched up the receiver. He held it out a few inches, so they could both hear, and beckoned her over. At that moment, she hated him. If she had thought she could get away with it, she would have clawed the receiver out of his hand and clubbed him to death with it.
He motioned again, fiercely. She walked over to his side. “Hello?”
“Lisa? Is that you? You sound like you’re on a speakerphone.” Lisa trembled with the effort of not sagging with relief. “It’s my sister,” she said.
“What?” Rachel said.
Kevin handed her the receiver and went back to the coffeepot as if it were perfectly normal for him to hijack someone’s phone.
“Sorry, Rache.” Lisa glanced toward Kevin. “Kevin Flynn is over, and he mistakenly thought you were a call he was expecting.”
There was a long pause on her sister’s end. “Is he alone?” Rachel eventually asked.
“Nope.”
“Oh, God, they didn’t send Mark over, did they? He called me just a little while ago. He has to go in to work early.”
“Mark was a real sweetheart to drive me to my job this morning. Will you be sure to thank him for me when you see him?”
There was another pause as Rachel parsed Lisa’s statement. “You need to be careful,” she said. “Mark told me they’re calling everybody in, all shifts, the part-time guys, everybody. The only time they usually do that is when things get really crazy, Christmas week, New Year’s, stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh,” Lisa said. Across from her, Kevin was scooping coffee out of a can. “Why do you think Mom and Dad are doing that?”
“Mark didn’t say, but I’m guessing they’re pulling out all the stops to find your husband. Lise, you need to think about hiring a good lawyer and having Randy turn himself in. This isn’t like ducking out of a traffic ticket. Mark and the rest of them will be searching for someone they think is dangerous. They have guns. People get killed evading arrest.”
Lisa’s throat closed up.
“Look, I’m off shift. I’m going to pick up Madeline from the neighbor’s, and then we’re coming over to keep you company.”
“With what’s going on? Mark won’t like it.” Her sister and Mark were both control freaks. They tended to wrangle a lot.
“He doesn’t get a vote. Besides, he’ll be at work. He doesn’t need to know. The important thing is, will it help, me being there? Or would you rather be alone?”
“I’d love you to come over,” Lisa said gratefully.
“Okay. I’ll see you when I get there. Till then, keep your legs crossed and your mind on higher things, as Mom would say.”
Lisa was laughing as she hung up.
Kevin looked at her. “What’s up?”
Her brief bubble of good humor faded into air. She shrugged. “Our parents.”
“I know how that can be. Coffee’s almost ready, if you want to get the cups.”
Lisa turned over possibilities as she unloaded two clean mugs from the dishwasher and took out the sugar bowl and spoons. She could do as Rachel suggested. Find a lawyer, tell Randy to turn himself in when he called. But then where would they be? If Randy was found guilty, he’d do time, no way around it. They knew a guy who got into a bar fight in Lake George with somebody who’d been messing with his girlfriend. Busted him up. Got sent to Plattsburgh for a year. How would she and Randy survive for a year without his income? They’d have the lawyer’s bills to pay, on top of the loans and the credit cards and everything else.
She opened the refrigerator and removed the jug of milk. Ultimately it boiled down to the fact that prison would kill Randy. He needed to be outdoors. He hated the jobs that shut him up inside; being locked away for a year or more would gut him. Then there was his temper. He needed to have her around for ballast. On his own, bottled up and seething, he’d explode. And some drug dealer, some guy who was a real criminal, unlike Randy, would knife him.
The coffee ceased bubbling out of the filter. She waited a second to see if any last drips fell, then pulled out the pot and poured two cups. So. No lawyer, no surrender. Or not yet. That could always be their reserve, their fallback position.
Clumping on the stairs. MacAuley poked his head through the doorway. “Thought I smelled coffee.”
Lisa forced a smile. “Can I get you a cup?”
“Sure.” He sauntered in and took up a post leaning against the refrigerator. “Nice place you have.”
She poured MacAuley a cup and handed it to him. “Thanks,” he said. He slopped in enough milk to turn it tan and took a deep, appreciative drink. Then he looked at her over the rim of the cup. “I hate to cause you distress, ma’am, but we do have reason to believe your husband may have been seeing Becky Castle.”
Lisa had split firewood before, and she knew what he was about. He was poking at the surface of the log, looking for a crack he could wedge his splitter into. It could take hours to chop apart a log with an ax. You needed an opening. It didn’t matter how small: Once you worked a splitter into it, down came the maul, and that log was gone, split in two, ready for the woodstove.
She took out her own splitter. “No, he wasn’t. And I know that to be true, because I know who she was seeing.”
MacAuley’s bushy eyebrows flicked upward. She had caught him off guard. “Who?”
“Shaun Reid.”
“The guy who owns the mill?” Kevin made a face. “Get out! He’s older than my father!”
MacAuley looked at him wearily. “It doesn’t shrivel up and drop off when you turn fifty, Kevin.” He turned to Lisa. “How do you know this?”
The first rule of lying: Keep as close to the truth as possible. “I clean for the Reids. Thursdays. And I was at Millers Kill High when she was. I know some of the same people she knows. There’s always talk. It’s a small town.”
“She lives in Albany now.”
“He never travels ‘on business’? She never comes up to ‘visit her folks’?” She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve got it wrong. But I’ve never heard any whispers about her and my husband.”
MacAuley set down his mug. “Mrs. Schoof, what would you say if you I told you that Becky Castle has named your husband as the man who assaulted her?”
“I’d ask why on earth Randy would want to hurt a woman he can barely remember from school.”
“She says he was planning on stealing her father’s logging equipment. She took pictures of him, and when she wouldn’t surrender the camera to him, he beat her up.”
“Oh, please. Randy was going to steal a skidder? And what, escape with it down the highway at twenty-five miles an hour?” Ladling scorn kept her from wincing. She knew Randy tended to act without considering the consequences, but she hoped even he wasn’t stupid enough to try to guarantee job security by ripping off heavy equipment. “Who’s more likely to have a reason to try to shut her up for good? A man who wants to get a good recommendation from her father? Or a man who’s already been through one expensive divorce and can’t face another one?”
MacAuley and Kevin glanced at each other. She clicked her teeth together. The second rule of lying: Don’t say too much.
“Miss Castle told us she ran into your husband’s motorcycle at her father’s house this afternoon. She called the tow truck and had it taken to Jimino’s garage on her dime. We’ve got a confirmation on that from the tow truck dispatcher and the mechanic.”
Lisa noticed MacAuley had dropped the “what would you say if I said” fig leaf. She looked him straight in the eye. “So she did meet up with him today. That explains why she used his name when she had to find someone to pin her injuries on.”
“Oh, come off it,” Kevin said.
Lisa put her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never known a battered woman to lie about what happened to her because she was afraid of the guy who hit her? Or in love with him?” She let her anger and her irritation show fully in her face, so they wouldn’t see past those emotions to where she was desperate and afraid.
Lyle looked at her as if he were measuring her. Finally he swung his gaze toward Kevin. “Time to go,” he said. Kevin promptly put his cup down, coffee untouched.
“When your husband comes home,” MacAuley said, “have him contact us immediately. Whether he’s responsible or not, things will go a lot easier for him if he does.”
Thunk. Thunk. The sound she heard as she ushered them out of her house was the echo of two pieces of wood falling, neatly and sweetly cloven in two.
Clare barely made it into the dry cleaners before they closed. She wasn’t the only person to wait until the last possible moment. Ahead of her, a harried-looking woman balanced a cranky toddler on her hip while accepting a stack of shirts. Behind her, the door chimed in a good-looking young man whose suit and camel coat looked decidedly out of place on a Saturday in Millers Kill.
“Clare Fergusson,” she told the attendant, after the woman had struggled away with kid and clothing. “One dress and two blouses.”
The woman took her slip and nodded past her at the young man. “You?”
He reached past Clare to hand in his pink receipts. “Je-remy Reid and Shaun Reid.”
Clare twisted around, interested. “Excuse me,” she said as the woman bustled toward the back. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but are you related to Courtney Reid?”
He raised his dark brows. “She’s my stepmother.” He looked at Clare. “And you’ll have to excuse me, but you don’t look at all like one of Courtney’s usual friends.”
“I’m the priest at St. Alban’s. Clare Fergusson.” She held out her hand.
He shook it. “I remember. One dress, two blouses. I’m Jeremy Reid.” He grinned, exposing teeth so dazzlingly white they had to have been bleached.
“Are you home for a visit?” Behind the counter, she heard hangers rattling. Millers Kill boasted the last dry cleaner in America to resist automation.
“Nope. I work here. Well, not here, exactly. At the new resort.”
“Oh! I’m going to be there tonight. At the grand-opening dinner dance. At least,” she considered, “I think I’m going. If it’s still on.”
“It’s still on. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because of the van der Hoevens.” A plastic thwap-thwap drew her around. The woman laid Clare’s clothes on the counter.
“Twenty dollars,” the attendant said, her impatient expression signaling that she was mentally already locked up and gone.
“What about them?”
Clare dug her wallet out of her jacket pocket. “Millie van der Hoeven is missing.” She dropped her voice. “And I don’t think it’s made the news yet, but Eugene van der Hoeven died today.”
“Holy shit!” His eyes went to her collar, which she had put on for her hospital visit, and he blushed slightly, burnishing his high cheekbones. She smiled to herself. Her sister Grace would have gone after this one with both hands. “Sorry. But no, we haven’t heard anything about canceling the dinner dance. When I left, preparations were in full swing.”
She handed over her twenty. “Who’s sponsoring the event?”
“GWP, the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation, and the resort. It’s not just for the land transaction, you know? It’s also a thank-you for Mr. Opperman’s investors and big donors to the ACC.” He frowned. “Even without the van der Hoevens, I don’t think Mr. Opperman would pull the plug. He wants to open the resort with a bang.”
“Mmmm.” She had met John Opperman two summers ago, when the resort was just breaking ground. He had engaged in the most cold-blooded business dealings she had ever witnessed. She had destroyed his corporate helicopter. It was safe to say neither had been left with a good feeling about the other.
The clerk hoisted a stack of suits and shirts onto the counter. “Forty-three bucks,” she said. Jeremy handed her a card.
“Do you think your father will be worried? If the land deal is off?”
He looked at her sharply.
“I heard the company buying the property was on the verge of making a bid for your family’s mill.”
“That’s not widely known.”
She smiled in what she hoped was a disarming fashion. “Priests hear all sorts of stuff that’s not widely known.”
He bent over to sign the charge slip. “Yeah, well, Dad won’t be shedding any tears if the deal doesn’t come through.”
“Oh? I heard he was looking forward to retirement and travel.”
Jeremy stood. “Courtney told you, right? I swear, Dad could shave his head and become a Buddhist monk and she wouldn’t notice if it didn’t fit in with her worldview.” He dragged his clothing off the counter. “He’s not happy about the acquisition. I think it’ll be good for the company and good for him, and I’m trying to convince him of that, but I’m not fooling myself into thinking he’s all okay with it.”
“Excuse me,” the woman behind the counter said. “We’re closed now.” She stared pointedly at Clare’s dress and blouses, still on the counter.
“Right. Sorry.” Clare scooped up her clothing. “What do you think your dad will do? If the company gets bought out?”
Jeremy shrugged. “Join the twenty-first century? There’s not much call for small manufacturers who want to pass down the business from father to son like a feudal lord. Maybe if he’s forced to hand over the reins, he’ll finally accept that I’m not going to be the fifth generation of Reids to spend his life chained to a paper mill.”
“Excuse me,” the woman said loudly. “We’re. Closed. Now.”
Jeremy stepped ahead of Clare and opened the door for her. “Thanks,” she said.
“My pleasure. I’ll see you at the dance tonight.” He flapped the plastic bags. “You’ll recognize me by my neatly pressed dinner jacket.”
She smiled. “Nice meeting you, Jeremy.” She watched him cross the street before turning and walking down the sidewalk to her car. She had parked in front of Coffee To Go and was considering getting a cup before heading over to the hospital when she became aware of a large red pickup parked behind her little Shelby.
She laid her dress and blouses in her car and crossed to the truck’s passenger side. The window rolled down. Warm air and the sound of country music spilled out of the truck cab.
“Are you following me?”
Russ hooked one hand over the steering wheel. “I’m on my way from the station to the hospital. I saw your car. There was a parking space right behind it.”
“That’s quite a coincidence.”
In the faint light from his dashboard, she thought she could see him blush. “It’s not entirely coincidental. I, um, remembered you said you were going to the dry cleaners.”
“And to the hospital?”
“Mmm.”
She couldn’t stop her mouth from curving into a smile. “Why don’t you walk with me, then?”
“Walk?”
“Sure. It’s only, what, five or six blocks away?”
“More like eight or nine,” he said, but he was already shutting down the engine and sliding out of the truck.
“C’mon. Walking’s supposed to be good for you senior citizen types.”
He gave her his death-ray glare. She laughed.
“Just you wait, darlin’,” he warned. “First time you jaywalk-you’ll feel the long arm of the law.”
Help me get this stuff off my ankles.”
“No.”
“For chrissakes, then!” Millie stood up from the box where she had been sitting. “Just give me the damn knife! I’ll do it myself!”
Randy backed out of reach. “No.”
“I thought you were going to help me!” Anger fueled her stride, and she tried to stalk toward the man fading into the darkness. The six inches of duct tape stubbornly twined around her ankles caught her up short, and she would have plunged face forward onto the dirty floor if she hadn’t flung her arms wide and dropped into a squat. Finally her yoga lessons were paying off.
“I have helped you.” She couldn’t see him at all now. “I cut your hands free, I gave you food, I helped you to the bathroom-”
Her face burned. “You’re keeping me as much a prisoner here as Shaun Reid is.” Her gratitude toward this guy for putting a name to her brother’s murderer had shriveled up somewhere between the sandwich and the potty break, when she realized he was keeping her hobbled for a reason. “You’re probably in it with him.”
“I am not!”
She had learned a few things about Randy Schoof in the hour or so since he had stumbled into her new prison. One: He had little, if any, control over his emotions. Her father would have rolled his eyes at the way Schoof revealed his passion and his envy as he spoke about his wife, his hard luck, and Shaun Reid. He gave himself away with both hands, something van der Hoevens learned not to do by the age of four.
Two: Randy Schoof wasn’t very bright. She discounted formal education-she knew several environmental activists who hadn’t graduated high school and yet were razor sharp and well read-but Randy didn’t fall into that class. He seemed little informed about and less interested in the world. She got the feeling that in the right circumstances he might be downright gullible.
Three: He was scared of something. And that made her scared as well, because he had all the impulse control of a fourteen-year-old with ADHD. If it was Shaun Reid who frightened him, she might be in bigger trouble than before.
She sat back down. She needed to keep him her friend. “Just tell me what it is that’s keeping us here. You know, I have friends and connections all over the country. I could help you disappear.”
“I don’t want to disappear. I just want to stay in my house, with Lisa.”
“Lisa could come with you. I have an awful lot of money, you know.” Actually, compared to her parents in their heyday, she was practically a pauper. But she was pretty sure that in Randy Schoof’s eyes, she was rich.
“I don’t want a handout.” He was only a shadowy form as he spoke. Moonlight from the window above them shafted onto the floor several feet away. “I wasn’t looking for no special favors. I just want a chance to make a decent living out in the woods. That’s all I want. But you know, everything’s stacked against a guy like me. If you didn’t get into the business forty years ago, like Ed Castle, forget it.”
“Look, all I’m saying is that I can help you. But you have to help me.”
“I will. But we need to stay put for a while. I’m gonna call my wife soon, and then we’ll see.”
Theoretically, there was nothing keeping her from getting to her feet and inching her way across the warehouse until she found the door to the outside. She had more than a hunch that he’d stop her by force if he had to, though. Her arms were untied, but she didn’t have any illusions on that account. He had carried her into the ancient and odiferous water closet, and although he wasn’t much taller than she was, he was built like a hunk of Adirondack granite. It was, she thought, a kind of game. If she put him into a position where he felt he had to restrain her, she would lose. In order to keep playing, she had to stay on his side.
“Why don’t you go call her, then?”
She felt, rather than saw, his consideration.
“I won’t try to leave,” she promised. “If you want, you can even tie up my hands.” She forced a chuckle. “Although I’d appreciate it if you did it in front instead of in back. My shoulders are still aching.”
“Well…”
She crammed her fear and desperation into a tiny, tight box and pushed it to the back of her mind. She spoke to her latest captor in the jolly “we’re all in it together” tones that she used to cajole agreement out of sulky activists trapped in overlong meetings. “C’mon. I’m in a jam. You’re in a jam. I know you need to talk to your wife before you do anything else. The sooner you do that, the sooner we can get out of here.”
“Okay.”
His capitulation surprised her. “Okay,” she echoed. Stay on his side. Show him how well you cooperate. “Um… do you want to tie up my hands?”
“Naw. I figure you ain’t going nowhere. Even if you made it to the door, I’d be back by the time you could get outside. And outside, there isn’t no place to hide.” There was a scraping sound. Millie stiffened, but it was only him rising from whatever crate he had been perched on. “I’ll be back.”
She was alone in the darkness again.
Millers Kill was closing down for the night. Russ walked with Clare along Main Street, hearing the door chimes jingling as shopkeepers locked up, looking into store windows where display lights simmered like fires banked to last out the night. This being one of the last dry towns in New York, there were no bars or pubs springing to life, no restaurants gearing up for an influx of customers. Except for gamers hanging out at All Techtronik or dads dashing into MacPherson’s Video for the latest movies-action for him, chick flick for her, Disney for the kids-the streets emptied out. If you lived in Millers Kill, you went elsewhere on a Saturday night. To the Dew Drop Inn across the Cossayuharie line, or to the second-run cinema in Fort Henry, four screens, no waiting. If you wanted Dolby Sensurround and well-sprung seats, it was another half hour to the Aviation Mall in Glens Falls. If you wanted to drink in a place where the bartender didn’t look at you funny for ordering a martini, well, Saratoga was forty minutes and a whole cultural time zone away.
“Are you having second thoughts?”
Clare’s voice broke him out of his reverie. “About what?”
She jammed her hands into her bomber jacket pockets and stared straight ahead. “Walking with me. In public.”
He laughed. “Are you kidding?” He looked at her more closely. Under a sodium streetlight, she was burnished orange, striped by black shadows from a leafless maple arcing over them. Like a kid wearing tiger face paint for Halloween. “No,” he said more seriously. “I don’t worry about stuff like that.” He hesitated. “Do you? Did-has anyone said anything to you?” By anyone, he meant Hugh Parteger. He was trying, he really was, not to be unreasonably jealous, especially because he recognized that if he were a better friend to Clare, he’d be throwing her toward the rich, single guy who was obviously nuts for her, instead of snarling like a dog in the manger.
She glanced behind her. “I had a visit from the diocesan deacon this afternoon. Before you, uh, arrived.”
“I hope you didn’t entertain him in your bathrobe, too.”
She glared at him, then blew at a strand of hair that had worked its way free of her usual knot. “It turns out the bishop sent Father Aberforth to-”
“Wait a sec. Who’s Father Aberforth?”
“The diocesan deacon.”
“Shouldn’t he be Deacon Aberforth?”
She glanced up at him sideways, the ghost of a smile in her eyes. “Somebody hasn’t been reading The History and Customs of the Episcopal Church in America. Career deacons are, in fact, properly designated ‘Father.’ Unless, of course, they’re women, in which case I’m sure Aberforth refers to them as ‘Ms.’ ” She snorted. “Anyway, he was there to call me out on a serious matter. One that he attributed to my inexperience and to not understanding how people will talk in a small town. A matter he wanted to keep quiet so as not to give any other priests bad ideas.”
His stomach sank.
“Us?” “Ha! Exactly what I thought. I was sure someone had come tattling to the bishop about seeing the two of us together.”
“We’re not doing anything wrong,” he said automatically.
“Oh, Russ.” She looked up at him ruefully. “Tell me you’d have no qualms describing our relationship to your wife. And make me believe it.”
He kept his mouth shut.
“Anyway, it turned out he and the bishop are hot under the collar about Emil Dvorak’s and Paul Foubert’s union ceremony. I was supposed to apologize and repent, and I wouldn’t-”
“What a surprise,” he said under his breath.
“-so Father Aberforth is going to talk to the bishop and let me know what shape my discipline will take.”
“Discipline? This isn’t just them getting cranky?”
She shook her head, sending another strand of hair floating loose.
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I could be removed. Have to try to find a position in another diocese with a disrecommendation from my bishop.”
“Another diocese. In New York?” Leave? Leave? How could you leave?
“Maybe. I’d probably have better luck in one of the more liberal dioceses, like Maine or New Hampshire.”
Okay. New Hampshire wasn’t that far away. Of course, coming up with an excuse to visit there would be a challenge. And traveling to see Clare would be tantamount to acknowledging, to himself at least, that they were having an affair. Whether or not they were sleeping together. He tasted the idea: him and Clare, together, somewhere no one knew his name or marital status. How long would his self-control and fidelity to his vows, both of which he took great pride in, last under those circumstances?
About forty minutes, was his guess.
She looked up at him, her face grim, and he wondered if she was thinking the same thing. “It’s not getting censured that upsets me. It’s the fact that the whole time I thought Father Aberforth was talking about us, I was frantically thinking of ways to discredit what he might have heard.”
“That’s natural. Your bishop can’t get on you for your thoughts, Clare. Only for your actions.”
“Don’t you see? I wasn’t thinking about what was true, or what was right, or about being honest in my relationship with my church. I was thinking about covering my ass. Period.”
They had come to the intersection of Main and Radcliff. A wind off the mountains skirled across the open streets, rustling dried leaves and drawing a shiver from Clare. At least, he hoped it was the wind making her cold. They turned left toward the hospital. He considered, and rejected, several variations on Buck up! It’s not so bad! Finally he settled on “What can I do to help?”
Her lips curved. “You make me think of that Star Trek episode. Where Captain Kirk tells his love interest ‘Can I help’ is the most beautiful phrase in the universe.”
“Yeah, and then she gets run over by a truck. Let’s not go there.”
She looked away from him. “I’m wondering if I ought to talk with someone. About”-she waved a hand, indicating him, her, the town, everything- “the situation.” She glanced up at him again, and in the streetlight he could see her anxiety. “I wouldn’t have to name you.”
He was embarrassed. That had been his first thought, that he would be exposed. “To Father Aberforth?”
“Probably not. He hasn’t struck me as the sympathetic sort so far.”
He gagged the part of him that was yelling, Tell? Are you crazy? This was about her, not about him. “Is that what you want?” he asked carefully. “Sympathy?”
Her shoulder sagged. “I don’t know what I want. Absolution, I guess. For someone to tell me that I can sustain this tightrope act with you without hopelessly compromising my standards. For someone to confirm that what I feel for you isn’t wrong, that it’s a gift from God.”
“Some gift.” They rounded the corner and saw the Washington County Hospital sign glowing white and blue in the darkness. “ ‘Here, here’s your soul mate, the person who completes you. Whoops, did I mention you can’t actually be together? Have a nice day.’ ”
He glanced down at her. She was looking ahead, a complicated smile on her face. “That’s the nature of His gifts. He wants to see what you do with them.”
“Thanks, but I’ll stick to stuff from stores that take a return with receipt.” They had reached the walkway to the admissions lobby. Smokers clustered along the wall, the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark. From the parking lot, visitors drifted up in twos and threes toward the doors. A nurse and a man in a wheelchair waited for a car making its way along the circular drive.
He turned to Clare. “If you need to talk with someone, do it.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
“I mean it. This”-he waved his hand in exactly the same way she had earlier, wondering why he couldn’t come up with a better way to indicate an emotional tidal wave threatening to swamp his life- “shouldn’t make you less of who you are. I don’t want that, and if you have to go to confession or talk to the bishop or whatever, you should do it.”
“And name names?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “If you have to. Although, I gotta tell you the truth, I’d rather you fudged the identity thing if you can. But if you have to, go ahead.” He settled his glasses firmly over his ears. “Just don’t make yourself smaller for me.”
She nodded.
“Let’s get inside. Talk to people who have worse problems than we do.”
The first thing Rachel said when Lisa opened the door was “You do know your house is being watched, don’t you?” “What? Where?” Lisa stepped past her sister onto the doorstep. The automatic floodlight had come on when Rachel drove into the dooryard, and the beaten dirt and withered grass were brilliantly, if temporarily, lit. “I don’t see anybody.”
“Across the road from the start of your drive. I could see the squad car. I don’t know who’s staking you out, but it’s not Mark.”
Lisa stepped back inside and pulled the door shut behind her. “How do you know?”
Madeline was sound asleep on her sister’s shoulder, her eyelids almost translucent to her fine blue veins, her pink mouth open. A tiny snore bubbled from her nose. “Here, take her for a moment,” Rachel said, easing the five-year-old off her shoulder. Lisa took her niece, grunting slightly. Maddy’s frail baby-girl look was deceiving.
Rachel stripped off her coat. “Whoever was in the squad car waved to me. Mark would’ve flashed his lights.” She wiggled Madeline’s jacket off the little girl. “She fell asleep in the car,” she explained. “Mark dropped her off with the Tuckers when he was called in. Three little girls and a hyperactive dog-she probably didn’t stop running the whole time she was there.”
“You want to put her down in my bed?”
“Thanks.”
Lisa mounted the stairs, one hand on the banister to keep her from keeling over backward beneath the unexpected weight. Rachel slipped past her in the hall, and by the time Lisa reached her bedroom, her sister had the covers drawn back on the double bed. Lisa laid her niece down. The little girl curled like a bear cub in its den and buried her face in the pillow. Rachel tucked the bedclothes around Madeline, and the two sisters stood looking at her in the light shafting in from the hallway.
“She looks like a total angel,” Lisa said quietly.
“It’s an adaptive trait,” her sister said in the same low voice. “The child who looks sweet and adorable while sleeping is the child whose parents forget what a pain in the butt she can be when awake.”
Lisa smiled lopsidedly. Rachel could afford to be cynical about kids. She already had one. Lisa had hoped, this year, maybe… but if Randy went to prison, there weren’t going to be any kids, not this year. Maybe not ever.
Rachel, perhaps reading her mind, wrapped an arm around Lisa’s waist and hugged her. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go downstairs and have a drink.”
In the kitchen, Lisa ladled out two bowls of stew to go with their rum and Cokes. Rachel dug into hers, but Lisa had no appetite. She sat and watched her sister eat and listened to her dole out sensible advice between bites.
“You have got to call an attorney. Forget the whole court-appointed thing. Believe me, when it comes to criminal trials, you get what you pay for, and you have to be willing to pay for the best.”
“How are we going to afford that?”
“Mortgage your house? Sell it? You’ll find a way. Mom and Dad may help out.”
Lisa stared into her stew. “Great. Then we can spend the rest of our lives getting out from under a mountain of debt.”
“I’m only saying. If it was Mark, that’s what I’d do.”
“What if they don’t find Randy?”
Rachel wiped her mouth and pointed the napkin at her sister. “Lisa, you can’t get on a Greyhound bus nowadays without showing some ID. Even tiny little police departments like ours have computerized records and access to national databases. How long do you think Randy could last out there under those circumstances?”
“But you’re always hearing about crimes where no one was caught.”
“No one was caught because no one was ever identified as the perpetrator. That’s not what’s happening here. The woman ID’d Randy.”
“Then it’s her word against his! And he has an alibi!”
Rachel put her spoon down. “And that’s exactly why he needs a sharp laywer. Somebody who can take whatever holes exist and tear ’em open enough so that the jury has a reasonable doubt about whether Randy did it.”
Lisa wanted to shove her bowl and spoon out of the way, to set her forehead against the table and weep. She wanted a way out of this nightmare, and her sister, with her steady, implacable voice, was telling her there was none.
The phone rang.
“You want me to get that?” Rachel said.
“No.” Lisa rose from her chair and crossed the kitchen. “Hello,” she said into the receiver, already thinking about how quickly she could get off the phone and how on earth she was supposed to find a good criminal lawyer.
“Hey, honey. It’s me. Can you talk?”
“Randy!” Across the kitchen, Rachel sat up straighter. “Babe, where are you? No, wait, don’t tell me yet. Are you safe?”
“I’m fine. Look, I need to talk with you.”
“So talk.”
“In person.”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It’s really important. I think I have a way to get out of this mess. Remember how I told you I left some stuff in Mr. Reid’s office? To, you know, make him look suspicious instead of me?”
“I do, babe. That was so smart of you.”
“What if I told you I might have a way to get him to confess that he beat up Becky Castle?”
Lisa stared at the phone. Now what was he thinking? She couldn’t begin to imagine, which probably meant it wasn’t that good an idea. “I’d say that sounds… not very likely,” she said.
“I don’t want to get into all the details right now,” he said. “Please, honey. You gotta trust me. I need you to help me pull this off.”
Oh, boy, she was going to regret this. “Okay.”
“Great! Come to the Reid-Gruyn mill. Park in the back of the employee parking lot. You’ll see my truck. I’ll meet you there.”
The Reid-Gruyn mill? She had figured he would be halfway to Plattsburgh, holed up in a motel by now. “Where are you calling from?”
“The employee break room.”
“That’s crazy! Somebody will spot you!”
“That’s why I want to get off the phone.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said. “I love you. Bye.” She hung up without waiting to hear his reply.
“What’s going on?” Rachel’s voice, behind her, startled her. While she was wrapped up in the call, Rachel had risen from the table and was now standing in the doorway.
“He wants me to meet him.”
“Where is he?”
Lisa looked at her sister. Rachel’s face colored. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! What do you think I’m going to do?”
“Oh, Rache.” Lisa opened her arms and gathered her reluctant sister into an embrace. “If you don’t know anything, you won’t have to choose between protecting me or lying to Mark.”
Rachel took Lisa by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Please, please promise me you’ll consider what I said. About getting a lawyer.”
“I will. I am.”
Lisa broke away and strode through the living room. She had opened the closet door and had her hand on her jacket when Rachel said, “Not that way. You’ll be followed.”
“Huh?”
Rachel pushed Lisa’s jacket back into the closet. She grabbed her bright red parka from where she had tossed it over the back of a chair. “Wear this.”
Lisa put it on.
“My keys are in the car,” Rachel said. “Wave to the cop watching the end of your drive. If any car flashes its lights at you, flash back.”
“What about Maddy’s booster seat? Will he notice that it’s empty?”
“I’ve got a tote bag full of books and Maddy’s backpack in there. Stack them in the seat and drape one of her blankies over everything.” She hugged her sister. “For God’s sake, be careful.”
The expression on Rachel’s face made Lisa pause. “Are you sure?” she said. “I don’t want to screw up your marriage or get you into trouble.”
Rachel smiled an echo of a smile. “We’re sisters. Of course I’m sure. Now go. The faster you get to wherever it is, the faster you can get back.”
There was something about starting up Rachel’s car, wearing Rachel’s parka, that made Lisa feel less like a desperate wife out to help her fugitive husband and more like a teenager breaking curfew. Her hands shook with nervous excitement as she shifted into gear, and she held her breath as she rolled down the length of her drive.
She reached the hardtop road and put on her blinkers in the opposite direction from where she intended to go-just in case. Sure enough, parked in the darkness, sat a squad car, just as Rachel had said. Lisa hunched into the parka, and as she turned onto the road and passed the cop car, she raised her whole arm and waved, putting as much sleeve between her face and the window as possible.
She drove in a state of suspended animation for the next several minutes, her eyes on the rearview mirror instead of the road, expecting at any moment to see swirling red lights and headlights flashing her to the side of the road. But nothing happened. No one was following her. She had gotten away with it. She grinned, and the feeling of power and relief that flooded her body was almost enough to make the earlier fear and anxiety worthwhile. She switched her attention to the road in front of her. She had to find a crossroad to take her to one of the roads that would set her on the route to the Reid-Gruyn mill.
The first thing Clare heard was raised voices. Halfway down the hall from Becky Castle’s room, she stopped in her tracks as Ed Castle bellowed, “Goddammit, whyn’t you stop harassing her and find the son of a bitch who put her here!”
Russ frowned and quickened his pace. In other rooms, behind half-closed doors, hushed visitors clutched bouquets and green plants and peered toward the hall. Suzanne Castle’s voice fed the interest: “Will you be quiet, Ed! You’re upsetting her!”
Clare broke into a jog, catching up with Russ in time to round the corner and see him plunge through the door to Becky’s room.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Ed Castle snarled. She couldn’t see his expression, but he didn’t sound like a man ready to forgive and forget.
Clare hovered in the doorway. Russ filled the minuscule hallway between the toilet and the rest of the room, and she didn’t want to squeeze past him and stick her foot through the moment.
“Whyn’t you lower your voice, Ed.” Russ sounded like a twenty-year sergeant reining in a frightened PFC, simultaneously nerve-settling and authoritative. “I don’t think you want everyone in the hospital knowing your business.” He nodded in the direction of the far bed. “Becky, I’m glad to see you feeling better. Lyle.”
Clare edged along the wall behind Russ until she spotted Lyle MacAuley, propped up against the window.
“You’re not welcome here.” That was Ed. She still couldn’t see him, but she didn’t need to. The anger threading through his words spoke for itself.
“Ed, I’m sorry about what happened this afternoon. I truly regret it, and I wish I’d never been put in a position where I had to choose between a friendship and doing my job. But I wouldn’t be any kind of a cop, and I wouldn’t be keeping the people of this town safe, if I had done otherwise.”
“Safe? Safe?” Clare heard a footfall. “Look at my little girl! You call this keeping us safe? If there weren’t ladies present, I’d tell you where you can stick your apology.”
“Ed,” his wife soothed.
Russ stepped into the room, enabling Clare to see the Castles for the first time. Ed was standing pugnaciously beside the head of Becky’s bed; Suzanne was rising from a chair, her hands stretched toward him. When Russ took one more step toward his deputy chief, she finally saw Becky Castle.
And gasped.
Lyle’s gaze flicked toward her. His bushy brows raised, in surprise or salute, she couldn’t tell. Suzanne caught sight of her, too; the older woman wrenched her mouth into something halfway between a grimace and a smile. Ed kept his eyes on Russ.
“I’m not just here to apologize,” Russ said. “Lyle and I need to talk with Becky.”
“Talk with her? What’s wrong with you people? She’s told you who beat her up. I gave you his address! What else do we have to do, make the arrest?”
“We’ve been out to Randy Schoof’s place,” Lyle said. “He’s not home, but we have an officer staking out his drive. I’ve interviewed a friend he was with earlier. The friend alibis him, but he did give a list of places Schoof might be.”
“Fine. Get out there and find the little bastard.”
“We intend to, Ed. But we need to cover all the bases.” Lyle twisted so that he was facing Becky directly. He smiled at her as if she were still a pretty girl. “Becky, do you know a man named Shaun Reid?”
“Sure.” Her injured mouth slurred the word. “He owns Reid-Gruyn Pulp an’ Paper.”
“What’s your relationship with Shaun Reid?”
Despite her stitches, Becky frowned. “Wha’ d’ you mean?”
“Is it professional? Personal?”
“I don’ have a relationship with him. I know who he is, that’s all.”
Lyle glanced up at Ed and Suzanne, a protective wall of parenting. “Maybe we should talk about this without your mom and dad here.”
“The hell you say.” Ed bristled. “Anything you got to ask Becky, you can ask in front of us.”
Lyle’s cool gaze flickered toward Russ. Russ nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Becky,” Lyle said, “are you involved with Shaun Reid?”
“Wha’? No!”
“For chrissakes, Reid is married. And he’s practically my age! What does this have to do with Becky’s assault?”
Lyle ignored Ed. “Becky, we’ve heard there’s a rumor around town that you’ve been seeing Shaun Reid. We’d like to know if there’s any truth to it, and if there’s anything more you’d like to tell us about when you were attacked.”
“Randy Schoof attacked me.” Becky spoke slowly, enunciating the words carefully. “When I wouldn’ give him the camera. I don’ know Shaun Reid personally.”
“You heard her. Now get out and arrest this Schoof before I-”
Russ raised one hand. “Ed, you really, really don’t want to be making threats in front of two peace officers.”
Suzanne stepped forward for the first time, laying her hand lightly on her daughter’s shoulder. “Please. Find the man who did this.” She looked at Russ, then Lyle. “Please.”
Lyle glanced at Russ again and saw something there Clare wasn’t privy to. The deputy chief nodded. “We will, Suzanne. You all take care. I’ll let you know as soon as we have more information.” He slipped past Russ and vanished into the hall.
“Ed,” Russ said. The older man scowled at him. “I’m sorry.”
Ed waved him off. “Words are cheap. Show me by bringing in that punk Randy Schoof.”
She could hear Russ take a breath, as if he were going to say more. Instead, he nodded, as Lyle had done, and trudged out of the room. Clare stepped into the space he had vacated. “Hi.” She put on a cheery smile. “I thought I’d stop by and see how everybody was doing.”
What do you think?” Lyle was leaning against the wall opposite the elevator bank.
“I think she’s either telling the truth, and it was Schoof, or she’s afraid to say anything in front of her parents, and Reid is somehow involved.” Russ removed his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his thermal shirt.
“You want me to clear the room? Question her again?”
“No. We’ve pissed off the family more than enough for now. Schoof is our main target. Shaun’s probably a dead end. Consider the source of the information. If we uncover anything to change that, then we’ll come in with the full court press.”
“We’ve got an APB out on Schoof, and Noble’s cruising the town, checking out places he’s been associated with. Relatives’ houses, places of employment, the works.” Lyle’s radio squawked for attention. He unhooked it from his belt and keyed the mike. “MacAuley here.”
“Lyle, it’s Noble.”
Lyle looked at Russ. “Go ahead.”
“I’ve found the Castle girl’s missing car.”
“Good work. Where is it?”
“In the office parking lot at the Reid-Gruyn mill.”
Russ rehooked his glasses over his ears and reached for the mike. “Noble? It’s Russ. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Hold down the fort.”
“Will do, Chief.”
Lyle turned off the radio and stowed it. “So. Maybe there is something to the Reid angle after all.”
“We’ll see. I want you to follow up with Schoof’s buddies. Lean on the guy he said he was hunting with. See if you can shake anything else loose.”
“Okay. Anything new on the van der Hoevens?”
“Eric and the state lab guys were on site when I left.” Russ glanced at his watch. “If Judge Ryswick has come through with a warrant, Eric should be searching the house right now. Mark’s running the black Mercedes angle with the DMV. Washington County first, then surrounding counties.”
“That’s going to be the proverbial needle in the haystack.”
“I know. I’d pay good money for a single other lead as to where Millie van der Hoeven has gone, but the Mercedes, right now, is our best bet. You wouldn’t believe how many Mercedes have been registered in the tri-county area in the past two years.”
“And you didn’t believe ’em when they said the economy was recovering.”
Russ snorted. “Wanna guess the most popular color for Mercedes sedans?”
Lyle rolled his eyes. “Black?”
“There you go. That’s why you get to be the deputy.”
Lyle shoved away from the wall and punched the elevator button. “Coming?”
Russ jerked his head toward the other end of the hall. “I want a word with Clare before I go.”
“We should have her pry the truth out of the Castle girl.”
“No lie.” The elevator dinged, and the doors whooshed open. Russ slapped his hand against the edge of the door. “You know, she told me something earlier. Thinking about Shaun Reid.”
“What?”
“Have you heard anything about this GWP buying the mill out from under him?”
Lyle shook his head. The door dinged impatiently.
“According to the new Mrs. Reid, it’s on the table-if the Haudenosaunee land sale goes through. The question is, does Reid want to sell the place? Or would he be willing to try to throw a spanner in the works?” He let go of the door and was rewarded by the sight of Lyle’s thoughtful expression as the doors slid closed.
Russ had always liked the Reid-Gruyn mill. When he had been a high school student, he had occasionally met up with Shaun at his father’s office, which even back in the late sixties had the ossified feel of a memorial to an industrial age long passed. He swung by regularly on patrol, but he hadn’t been past the twin stone pillars in decades. Driving through the remains of the gates-the actual iron grills had been taken down before Russ was born-he was pleased to see nothing had changed.
The old mill, moldering into the river, was a half-hidden shadow, tucked behind the new mill and far removed from the parking lot’s faded white lights. The new mill, which hadn’t been new since Calvin Coolidge was president, loomed beside the black, glittering rush of water. Even from the edge of the gate, Russ could see the phosphorescent white of the dam spill and, fronting the mill, long and low, the offices. Russ wondered how many of them were still occupied in an age of downsizing and outsourcing.
Noble was parked in the row of reserved spaces in front of the offices. His squad car was angled so its headlights bounced off an apple green Prius. Russ pulled in alongside him and got out.
Noble got out of his car. “Hey, Chief.”
“You got a flashlight?”
Noble handed over his Maglite. Russ shone it through the windows. The light picked out an overnight bag, a pair of sneakers, and the usual junk that collects in busy people’s cars: CD cases, crumpled fast food wrappers, an empty soda bottle.
“No dress.” Russ looked up at Noble. “She was supposed to be going to the big shindig at the new resort. Where’s her dress?”
“In the bag?” Noble was a bachelor, which led him to misinterpret women once in a while. Like now.
Russ shook his head. “Women don’t roll long dresses up in little bags. It’s like a guy’s suit. It has to be on a hanger.”
He fished his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and dialed 411 while handing the flashlight back to Noble.
“Millers Kill. New York,” he said. “Shaun Reid. Please connect me.”
His phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Then a female voice: “Hello, Reid residence.”
“Hi. Could I speak to Shaun, please?”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Russ Van Alstyne. From the Millers Kill police.”
There was a beat. “Has something happened to Jeremy?”
Jeremy? Was that Shaun’s kid’s name? “No, ma’am. Nothing like that.”
“Are you fund-raising?”
Russ felt his temper turn over, like a lazy engine on a cold morning. “Ma’am, it’s illegal for police to solicit funds. I need to speak to Shaun Reid on official business.”
“Well.” He could almost hear her unspoken rejoinder. There’s no need to get huffy about it. “I’ll get him for you.”
He stared at the finish of the gas-electric hybrid while waiting for Shaun to get to the phone. It was fresh and pretty and young. Like its owner. He was 95 percent sure that she had told them the truth, and Randy Schoof was their man. But Lyle had this story about Shaun’s involvement, and now here was the Castle girl’s car sitting smack-dab in front of his office. Two points of contact. Could be coincidental, but Russ didn’t like coincidences.
“Russ? Hey, long time no see. When was it, the Rotary Club meeting last year?” Shaun sounded upbeat, as if hearing from his old high school buddy were the highlight of his Saturday evening.
“Has it been that long? Time flies.”
“It sure does. How are you doing? How’s that beautiful wife of yours?”
“Linda’s great. Look, I have a little situation here at your mill, and I wonder if you could come over and take a look at it with me.”
The pause over the line was so long, Russ held the cell phone away from his ear to make sure he still had a signal. “Shaun?” he said.
“Sorry. A situation at the mill? What is it?”
“I’d rather explain it when you get here.”
“I’m, uh, due to be at the Algonquin Waters resort by seven-thirty tonight. Courtney and I are going to a dinner dance there. Business with some overseas guys. I really can’t miss it.”
“Don’t worry. I shouldn’t keep you too long. Linda and I are going, too, and she’ll have my head if I stand her up.”
“Ah. Yeah? Okay, then. I’ll be over as soon as I can.”
“I’ll be waiting right here in the parking lot.” He said good-bye and switched the phone off, wondering if maybe, just maybe, there was something to Lyle’s rumor after all. Shaun certainly sounded nervous about something.
His palms were so damp the steering wheel slicked through his grip as he cornered the car. Shaun started to wipe his hands on his thighs and stopped himself at the last moment before making sweaty streaks on his tuxedo pants. Then he barked an unpleasant laugh. In a matter of minutes, he might be the best-dressed occupant of the Washington County jail.
He noticed the speedometer and eased up on the gas. He had taken Courtney’s Volvo wagon, since his Mercedes still had a small fan blowing across the driver’s seat. He knew his wife would want to appear at the dance in the sedan, and he had no way to explain the wet leather. It had, at the most, another thirty minutes to dry. That was if he made it to the dance, of course.
What had Russ found? What did he know? The list of possibilities was short and terrifying, so he refused to think about it. He breathed: in with the calm, out with the fear. He needed to be cool, collected, at the top of his game. Maybe this was just a fishing expedition. If it was, he had a chance to sail away unscathed-if he didn’t look like Richard Nixon proclaiming he wasn’t a crook. Russ had been a lifelong army guy. Narrow-minded. Unimaginative. Shaun had successfully gone toe to toe with CEOs and shareholders and bankers. He could handle Russ. Yes. In. Out.
His first surprise was seeing a squad car parked right up front, by the offices. Its headlights were trained on some little green car. Not that he was going to complain. The farther away Russ stayed from the old mill, the happier Shaun would be. He coasted to a stop a few spaces away from the mystery car and, retrieving tissues from Courtney’s center compartment, hastily wiped his palms dry.
Russ and a uniformed cop were flanking the car. Shaun walked forward, arm outstretched, on the offensive. “Russ, my man. What’s going on? What’s this car?”
Russ shook his hand. Then his eyes widened. “What the hell happened to your face?”
Shaun was ready for this one. He touched his cheek with two fingers and laughed ruefully. “This is what happens when you try Rollerblades at our age. I flew straight off the sidewalk and ran into a tree.”
“I hope the tree looks worse.”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t.”
Russ gestured toward the green car with a solid-looking flashlight. “You recognize this car?”
“Never seen it before. It’s one of those hybrids, isn’t it?”
“Yep.” Russ shone the flashlight into the interior. Shaun could see a cheap tapestry overnight bag.
“Is it stolen?”
“Nope. It’s been missing, though.”
Shaun felt an electric prod against the small of his back. Christ. What if it was Millie van der Hoeven’s car? What was it doing here?
“It belongs to a young woman named Becky Castle. You know her?”
What the hell? “No.”
Russ made a grunting sound. “There should be a fancy dress hanging in here. I don’t see anything, do you?”
“No.” What was going on? What was Russ suspicious of? Shaun felt himself stretching out, seeking balance, looking for the right path through a potential minefield. Information was power, and he had precious little of it right now.
“This is where someone would park if they came to your office, right? It doesn’t look like the layout’s changed since your dad’s time.”
“There was no need to change it.”
“Were you in the office today?”
“Yes.” That sounded too bald. “It’s not unusual for me to come in on a Saturday for a while. I can get a lot of work done without any calls and faxes coming in.”
“I bet. About what time were you here?”
Shaun calculated rapidly. “Noon until two-thirty.”
Russ tipped the flashlight so the beam pointed at Shaun’s starched white shirt. The edge of the light splashed across his face. “Could we take a quick look inside your office?”
“Sure.” He needed to know what Russ was looking for. He had nothing to do with this car, and there wasn’t anything in his office that might point toward the van der Hoevens. But why did Russ have him come out to see Becky Castle’s car? Wait a second. Castle. He knew a Castle. “Is this Becky Castle related to Ed Castle? Castle Logging?”
“His daughter.” Russ pointed his flashlight toward the station wagon. “Is that your car?”
Shaun’s face tightened. He forced a light tone into his answer. “Sure is.”
“Were you using it earlier today?”
“Yeah,” he lied. He dug into his pants pocket, fumbling for the office keys. “Here we are,” he said when he found them. “Let’s go on in.”
Inside the door, he flicked on the lights. The reception area sprang to life. Thank God, there was nothing amiss. He crossed the floor and unlocked the door to the inner offices. He flung it wide open. “Here they are. Nothing much has changed. Mine is where my dad’s used to be.”
Russ strolled into Shaun’s office, his gaze taking in everything. “Looks like you did some redecorating.”
“Courtney,” Shaun said.
“Nice couch. Long enough to really stretch out on.”
“Yeah, she has an eye for-” He spotted the pale pink fabric wedged in the cushions the same time Russ did.
Russ leaned forward and pulled it free. It was a pair of pink thong panties. Russ held them up on one finger. “Yours?”
“Where the hell did that come from?”
Russ bent over and pulled the leather cushions away from the couch frame. There was a scattering of coins, some crumbs, and, balled into one side, another piece of fabric. Russ lifted it, and it unfolded into filmy pale pink pantyhose. He looked at Shaun.
“I swear. I have no idea how those things got here. I never saw them before in my life.”
“Where’s that door lead to?” Russ nodded toward the far wall.
“It’s my bathroom.”
“Anybody else use it? Your secretary, maybe?” Russ opened the door and switched on the light.
“Not… usually.”
Russ’s large frame blocked Shaun’s view into the bathroom. “You sure you don’t want to rethink your statement about not knowing Becky Castle?”
“I’ve never met the woman!” Shaun struggled to keep his breathing even. In with the calm. Out with the fear. It didn’t matter what Russ thought about this Castle woman. In that, Shaun was completely, utterly blameless. The important thing was to make sure they didn’t link him to Eugene van der Hoeven. And that they stayed away from the old mill.
“Come on in and take a look.”
Shaun squeezed into the bathroom next to Russ. There, on the vanity, was a woman’s makeup bag, unzipped. Next to it was a pair of dangling chandelier-style earrings, the kind that would go with a-Shaun caught a flash of hot pink out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see a full-length strapless satin dress on the shower rod. It was dangling crookedly from its straps, as if someone had hastily looped them over the hanger and then hurried away.
“It looks to me,” Russ said, “as if a woman came in here to give someone a private showing of her fancy ball gown and all its accessories. And then she let someone take them all off.” He looked down at Shaun. “Or I suppose it could be that you’re a transvestite.”
“I am not a cross-dresser!” Shaun managed to get out.
Russ nodded. “Pink would be a lousy color for you, anyway.” He moved toward the door, forcing Shaun to back out ahead of him. “We’re still missing Becky’s coat.”
“This is ridiculous. You have no proof these are Becky Castle’s.”
Russ ignored Shaun’s protest in favor of walking back to the reception area. “This where you hang your coats?” He rolled the closet door open.
Thank God, there weren’t any strange articles of clothing hanging there. “That’s my secretary’s raincoat,” he said, “and the other two are mine.”
Russ ran his boot across the floor of the closet before patting down the coats. He dipped his hand into Shaun’s jacket’s pocket and came up with a shiny clutch of keys.
“Yours?”
Shaun shook his head. He was speechless.
“Let’s see if the slipper fits, huh?” Russ crossed to the door and stepped outside. Shaun hurried after him. Next to the green Prius, Russ bent over and, careful not to touch the car itself, inserted one of the keys. He turned it. There was a popping sound as all the locks sprang free.
Russ straightened and spoke to the uniformed cop. “Noble, will you get on the horn and get a crime scene investigation unit over here? And since Lyle headed up Becky Castle’s questioning, let’s get him on the scene, too.”
The cop nodded and disappeared into his squad car.
Russ turned to Shaun, a mournful expression hanging from his face. “So, old friend. Anything you want to tell me?”
So how come you’re going to let him go?” Lyle cocked an eyebrow at Shaun Reid, sitting slumped on his receptionist’s desk while a state police evidence technician powdered his leather sofa for prints. Reid was staring at his fingers, smudged black with ink. He had volunteered his prints after Russ told him they needed to be able to rule out the things he had touched in the office. Russ hadn’t pointed out that the prints might also rule in Shaun if he had been in Becky Castle’s car.
“We’ve got her stuff in here,” Lyle continued. “Her car parked out front. And he looks like he’s gone three rounds with a baseball bat. Skating injury, my ass.”
“Where’s he going to go?” Russ crossed his arms. They were standing in the doorway to the office, out of earshot, able to keep an eye on the work going on inside and outside, where the second technician was going over the Prius. “He and his wife are attending a dinner dance. If he were scheduled to fly out of the country, I’d be worried. The Algonquin Waters, I think we can cover.”
Lyle’s expression was half in light, half in darkness. He reminded Russ of an Iroquois false face mask, lips curving, eyes piercing. “Are you sure you’re not bending over backward to give an old friend the benefit of the doubt?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been hunting with Ed Castle for the last four years. The man handed your head to you on a platter an hour ago. I’m not saying you two were best buds, but that’s gotta hurt. I’m just wondering if you’re not hedging your bets to keep it from happening again.”
“If Shaun Reid had anything to do with Becky Castle’s assault, I’ll be first in line to haul him in. As far as letting him loose now, I have two good reasons. One.” He held up a finger. “The simplest story is the one most likely to be true. Schoof beat up Becky Castle. In support of that theory, we have the victim’s own testimony-”
“Which may be unreliable.”
“Randy Schoof’s disappearance,” Russ continued, “and the fact that your informant on the Reid-Castle affair is none other than Mrs. Randy Schoof.”
“Okay, okay. I agree, Schoof is the number one suspect. I still think there’s something weird about Reid.”
“Which brings me to point number two. I can keep an eye on him at the party tonight. Who he talks to, if he leaves, whatever.”
“Speaking of which, aren’t you supposed to be home right now? Getting all prettied up?”
Russ looked at his watch. “Crap. Yeah. Look-”
“I know. Cell phone, beeper, check-ins. We’ll stay in touch.”
Russ smiled. “Thanks, Lyle. The only reason I can do this for Linda is because I know you’re on the job.”
“You’re making me blush. Get outta here.”
Russ strode into the office. “Shaun!” Reid looked up quickly. “Thanks for all your help. Better hit the road. You and I are already going to be late to this thing.”
Shaun blinked. “I’m free to go?”
“Course you are.” Russ bared his teeth in a grin. “We can’t be disappointing the ladies, can we?”
Lisa Schoof drove slowly past the gates to the Reid-Gruyn mill for the third time since seven o’clock. When she had first approached the mill, she had been ready to drive through the entrance and on to the employee parking lot but had been frozen with terror at the sight of a cop car idling outside the offices. She had slammed on the brakes, coming to a dead stop in the middle of Route 57, expecting at that moment to see her husband escorted out of the building in cuffs. It was only the honk of a driver approaching from her rear that got her moving again. She took the first cross street she could and circled back toward the mill.
The second time she slid slowly, slowly past, a panel van had joined the squad car. She couldn’t make out the writing on its side, but the state seal and the lights on top made it clear it was another sort of police vehicle. Every light in the office appeared to be on, and she could make out a uniformed cop standing between the squad car and a small green car.
Now, on her third pass, the cop car, the van, and the lights were still there, but a pickup and a station wagon that had been parked next to the squad car had disappeared.
Could they have taken Randy away while she was driving in circles? Should she loop around a few more times in the hope they would all clear out? The dark pressed in all around her sister’s car. She wanted to hide in it, to scurry away from the mill office, lit up like the guard tower in a prison.
She clamped her hands around the steering wheel and turned through the gates. She wanted to think of herself as brave, but she admitted to herself it was hopelessness that propelled her across the parking lot, the knowledge that if her husband had been arrested, she couldn’t effect his release, and if he was still free, somewhere in the mill, she had to pass by the police. She had no choice. He was waiting for her.
She drove slowly, steadily, curving past the carnival of light that was the administration building, but not going so far out of her way that it would look suspicious. She had a cover story in her head: If she were stopped and questioned, she was delivering a meal to her husband, who worked on the floor. She knew that a lot of guys working second shift brought a big bag lunch to take the place of dinner with the family.
She was not stopped. No one emerged from the offices to wave or shout or blow a whistle. Instead, she slipped around the corner into the employee parking lot, a rectangle of asphalt running from the edge of the offices to the bank of the river. A dozen or more vehicles, almost all trucks and SUVs, clustered beneath a few fluorescent lights on aluminum poles. Three picnic tables sat near the featureless mill wall, scoured flat by cold and darkness. Cigarette butts littered the lot like spent casings.
Lisa got out of her sister’s station wagon. Randy had said he would meet her, but she didn’t know if he would recognize or trust the Durkees’ car. She walked toward the black and rushing river, passing one truck, then another. The third one was Randy’s.
“Babe?” she whispered. Nothing. She kicked the door gently. “Randy?”
His face appeared in the window. She almost screamed, clamping her hand over her mouth to still her surprise. He motioned for her to come around to the passenger side.
When she got into the cab he clutched at her, and she dug her hands into the back of his coat, and they held each other as if it had been four years instead of four hours. Lisa couldn’t stop patting him. “Are you okay?” she asked, over and over. “I was so scared when I saw the cops at the office.”
“I know. They were there when I tried to leave the mill. I nearly pissed my pants. I was going to go back to the old mill to wait for you, but I decided the truck was safer.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She sat back, separating them by a few inches. “Tell me what’s so important that we’re both here in the parking lot where we could be spotted any minute.”
Randy grinned. “I know who killed Eugene van der Hoeven.”
This was so far outside anything Lisa expected, she thought she must have misheard him. “Come again?”
“I know who killed Eugene van der Hoeven. It was Shaun Reid.”
“Mr. Reid? The guy who owns the mill?”
Randy nodded. She glanced out the windshield, wondering when the Candid Camera guy would show up and Randy would announce the whole day, everything, had been an elaborate gag. “Well,” she said.
He made an impatient noise. “You know the missing woman? Millie van der Hoeven? She’s in the old mill.” He pointed to where the building moldered, hidden behind the faceless brick wall of the new mill. “She witnessed the whole thing. Shaun Reid killed her brother, stuck her in the trunk of his car, and stashed her there to hide her.”
“You’re serious.”
“Of course I’m serious.”
She leaned forward and rested her head on his shoulder. “Okay. So how is this going to help you?”
“We tell Mr. Reid that we have her. If he confesses to beating up Becky Castle, we’ll keep her hidden away. If he doesn’t confess, we bring her out and he’s going down for murder.”
Lisa blinked at him.
“Don’t you see? He’d for sure rather be charged with assault than murder.”
It was such an ambitious and, in its own weird Randy way, brilliant idea that she almost hated to point out the flaw. “What about Millie van der Hoeven?”
“What about her?”
“What do we do with her during the months it takes for Mr. Reid to come to trial? Or is she volunteering to go into hiding to save you?”
He looked abashed. “That’s the fuzzy part of the plan.”
“Fuzzy? Babe, that’s a freaking jungle growing up around you. It’ll never work.”
“It could,” he insisted. “Think about it. Even if we didn’t make it stick, you know, with Mr. Reid, we could buy some time. We could take her home with us-”
“Take her home with us?” Lisa screeched.
“Long enough for it to set up in the cops’ minds that Mr. Reid did it. Then, even if we let her go and she narcs on Reid and he says he didn’t have nothing to do with Becky Castle, it’ll be his word against mine. Or who knows? Maybe we could convince her to say she saw him beat up Becky and kill her brother.”
“Like a buy-one-get-one-free.”
He didn’t hear the sarcasm in her voice.
“Yeah! There’s nothing says we have to, you know, treat her bad while we keep her. Maybe we can make her our friend.”
Lisa held up her hand for him to stop talking. There was something in what he just said-some kernel of an idea that might just possibly work. She closed her eyes so she could think better. Okay, what if Shaun Reid confessed? The cops would focus all their investigation on proving Shaun was the guy who beat up Becky Castle. Stuff that incriminated Randy would be pushed aside. Overlooked. Maybe, if they were lucky, forgotten. It wouldn’t be perfect, not with the victim herself yawping on about Randy, but it would be a big old help to that smart lawyer Rachel thought they should hire.
It would be terrible for Mr. Reid, of course. Maybe even-and here she shivered, from deep inside the core of her, because she hadn’t known that she was capable of thoughts like these-maybe he would even commit suicide.
Maybe it could just look like he had committed suicide.
Maybe Millie van der Hoeven, who had so mysteriously vanished without a trace or clue left behind, might never show up again.
Lisa looked into Randy’s hopeful, innocent eyes. “I think it’s a great idea, babe. I think we can really do something with it.”
Millers Kill, like most towns within reach of Lake George, Saratoga, and the mountains, had numerous campsites, cabins, and motels devoted to summer vacationers. Visitors arriving after leaf-peeping season was over had a far narrower range of accommodations. If the travelers didn’t want to stay in one of six bedrooms divided among three bed-and-breakfasts, they had the choice of the Sleepy Hollow Motor Lodge, the Stuyvesant Inn, or the brand-new and very luxurious Algonquin Waters Spa and Resort.
After nearly two years living in the area, Clare knew this. So she shouldn’t have been surprised when she entered the lounge at the Algonquin waters and found her date chatting with Deacon Willard Aberforth.
They were sitting at the long green-granite bar, identical glasses of peat-brown whiskey in front of them. From the high color on Aberforth’s face, his was the latest in a line of drinks.
Hugh spotted her first, jumping off his stool and clutching his heart, staggering like a man blinded by beauty. He recovered in time to take her hand and help her onto his abandoned seat, assistance she was grateful for, given the volume of material in her skirt. “Vicar! You’re absolutely stunning! You’re going to be the most beautiful woman here tonight. Doesn’t she look absolutely amazing?”
His last remark was directed to Deacon Aberforth, who examined Clare with a great deal more attention than he might have had he been strictly sober. “Elegant,” he pronounced with a disappointed air. “Although perhaps a bit too revealing?” He waved in the direction of Clare’s shoulders and chest. “I myself prefer to maintain the dignity of the church with good, classic clothing.” Aberforth still wore his black wool jacket and dog collar; he had spiffed up for the evening by replacing his black blouse with a deep purple one.
Clare resisted the urge to tug her neckline higher. “I’m trying to envision the intersection between clerical clothing and ladies’ evening wear. Maybe an off-the-shoulder cassock?”
Hugh laughed. “If you write up the business plan, I promise you, I’ll have my firm invest.” He waved the bartender over. “Do you want a Macallan?”
She nodded. After the day she’d had, she wanted several Macallans.
“You didn’t tell me, Ms. Fergusson, that your friend here is the nephew of the bishop of Warwick.” Aberforth leaned his elbow on the bar and toasted Hugh.
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s because I didn’t know.”
Hugh smiled smugly. “Told you we’d make a good match. Stick with me, Vicar, and we’ll have a pectoral cross on you before you can say, ‘the Very Reverend Mrs. Parteger-Fergusson.’ ”
She stared at him.
“Fergusson-Parteger?” he suggested, handing her her glass of whiskey.
How much had he had to drink? “That’s the silliest name I’ve ever heard,” she said. “And I don’t believe in this married-hyphenating business. Either keep the old name or take the new one.”
“Hear, hear.” Aberforth toasted both of them. From the lobby, a bell rang out, so perfect in pitch and modulation, it had to be a recording of some sort.
“I think that’s the sign to head in to dinner,” Hugh said. “Father Aberforth, it was great meeting you. P’raps I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’m sure of it. I will be attending the ten o’clock Eucharist at St. Alban’s, with the bishop.”
“Ah. Yes.” Hugh’s face had a trapped expression. Anglican and episcopal-nephew though he was, Clare had yet to see him inside a church. She took pity on him. “Do you need to stop off anywhere before we go in to dinner?”
Hugh’s face cleared. “Yes. Yes, I do. I’ll meet you outside the ballroom door.” He dashed off before Aberforth could pin him down about tomorrow.
Clare collected her whiskey and carefully slipped off the bar stool. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning, Father Aberforth.”
He surprised her by taking her bare upper arm. “Ms. Fergusson.” She frowned at his hand, but he didn’t release her. “Let me give you some advice. The only female clergy who are successful at celibacy are the ones who are too old and dried up to care or the ones who are too mannish to attract members of the opposite sex.”
Her fingers tightened around her glass. If she had had anything, anything, heavy to hand, she would have brained him.
“Any other woman, alone, attracts attention of the wrong kind. As, I hear, you may have done.”
She froze.
“Find a nice young man and settle down. Your congregation and your bishop will thank you. With the help of the right sort of spouse, you may find you have a career in the church, not just a vocation.”
Clare didn’t trust herself to say anything. She nodded stiffly to the deacon, gripped her skirts in one hand, and stalked out of the bar. Hugh was loitering near the ballroom entrance. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re white as a sheet.”
“That… disgusting old man.” She lifted her drink and saw her hand was shaking. She knocked back half the whiskey in one swallow.
“Go easy,” Hugh said. “That’s too good to take as medicine. What did that disgusting old man do?”
“He told me I had three options open to me if I wanted to be a successful parish priest. Go through menopause, become a dyke, or get married.”
Hugh was silent for a moment. “So,” he said finally. “I guess this means you’ll be wanting an introduction to Brunhilda over at the Womyn’s Moon Circle Collective, then.”
She laughed.
“C’mon,” he said. “You can’t let a relic from the nineteenth century get your goat. You’ll outlive him, anyway. Someday he and all the old gents running the show will die off, and who will be left? That’s right, a bunch of postmenopausal lesbian and married women.”
She smiled at him gratefully. “You really are very good for me, you know?”
“Of course I do. Let’s get inside and find our seats.”
The Algonquin Waters ballroom elevated Adirondack haut rustic to new heights. The rosewood floor glowed in the light from a dozen antler chandeliers. Three walls of polished pine were punctuated with twenty-foot riverstone pillars, while the fourth, which faced them as they walked through the entryway, was glass, sheets and slabs of glass, providing indigo and silver views of the mountains and the nearly full moon.
“Not bad,” Hugh said.
“This place is going to be wedding reception central,” Clare said. “Believe me. I officiated at twenty weddings this year, and at least half the brides and their mothers would have given their right arms for a place like this.”
Round tables encircled the dance floor, long white linen and low dark flowers with votives that reflected in the silver and silver that reflected in the crystal. Clare felt self-conscious suddenly, out of place amid the finery. Her grandmother Fergusson would have been thoroughly at home here, admiring the men in their dinner jackets, critiquing the women’s long dresses. But every step Clare had taken in her life had brought her farther and farther away from places like this, and she found herself nervously plucking at her skirts, wondering if that off-the-shoulder cassock might not have been a better idea after all.
Then Hugh spotted someone from Saratoga that he knew, and she was swept up in introductions and chitchat. The bell rang again, and waiters began to emerge from doors on the far side of the room, carrying trays of salads and carafes of water. Clare tugged Hugh away to search among the tables for their name cards. She had just bent over to eximine a piece of pasteboard more closely-it turned out to read CHERYL ERNGARTEN-when she heard a voice behind her. “Reverend Fergusson! Over here!”
She turned and saw her senior warden, Robert Corlew, standing and waving. She wended her way past the intervening tables and took his outstretched hand. “You look terrific!” he said. “By God, say what you like about Father Hames”-Clare smiled patiently at the mention of her saintly predecessor-“he couldn’t do justice to a dress like that!”
The other man sitting at the table had also risen, and Clare saw with interest it was Jim Cameron, the mayor of Millers Kill. “Reverend Fergusson,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
She introduced Hugh to the mayor and to Robert, and they in turn presented the ladies at the table, Eunice Corlew, a small, wrenlike woman so self-effacing she seemed to disappear into the furniture at times, and Cameron’s wife, a keen-jawed, graying blond Valkyrie named Lena Erlander.
“Sit with us!” Corlew urged. “We have two empty places. Two little old ladies came by, looked over the rest of the names at the table, and then collected their cards and went away!” He swept his hand, indicating the empty seats between him and Lena Erlander. “Guess they must have been Republicans, Jim!” He laughed at his own joke.
Clare glanced at Hugh. Corlew could be a bit of a blowhard, but she wouldn’t mind having some face time with the mayor. That was the sort of relationship that could pay off when the church went looking for, say, donated space for their young mothers’ child care program.
“You’re a Republican, Robert,” Cameron pointed out. He turned to Hugh. “Please, do join us.”
“Well, I suppose if Clare doesn’t-”
“Oh, yes, sit here! Sit with us!” The new voice was richly feminine, bright and breathy. “I haven’t had a chance to talk with Reverend Fergusson since she saved my poor husband’s leg.”
Clare jerked around. A tiny blonde wrapped in pale pink satin that made her resemble a well-endowed Greek goddess stood framed between Eunice Corlew and Jim Cameron. She smiled at Hugh, and despite the fact that she was easily a decade or more his senior, Clare could feel him straighten his spine and expand his chest in response. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Linda Van Alstyne.”
Russ watched across the table and counted the expressions flickering, subtle as brushstrokes, across Clare’s face. Horror. Chagrin. Embarrassment. And now the dawning realization that she wasn’t going to be able to get out of sitting down with them. Cataloging Clare’s emotions helped him ignore his own.
Linda was chattering away. “… so Russ was tromping around in the woods, doing some investigation or something, and he slipped into a woodchuck hole and broke his leg! If Reverend Fergusson hadn’t been there to help get him to the hospital, he would have frozen to death.” She beamed up at Clare. “Sit! Sit!”
Hugh Parteger, whom Russ hadn’t even registered until that moment, pulled out the seat next to Robert Corlew. Clare collapsed into it with none of her usual grace. Parteger, who looked considerably more at home in his tuxedo than Russ felt in his, sent a cool glance across the table before seating himself next to the mayor’s wife.
“How brave and clever of you, Reverend Fergusson,” Lena Erlander said in her Scandinavian accent. “Your name-is it Swedish?”
“Scots,” Clare said. “And please, call me Clare.”
Jim Cameron launched into the story of how he and Lena met on a trip to Scotland three years back, which opened the door for Parteger to make the table laugh with a description of learning the Scottish fling for a party, which got Rob Corlew onto dancing lessons he and his wife took on their last cruise, which pretty much got them through the salad. All that time, Russ watched Clare, avoided watching Clare, watched her without seeming to watch her, and felt like a complete shit.
He was the guy in the cartoon with the comic angel on one shoulder and the leering devil on the other. One of them was smacking him upside the head and saying, Look at this gorgeous woman sitting next to you! Do you want to screw that up? The other had eyes popping out on cartoon springs and was drooling. Those eyes, that hair, all that skin… He’d never seen Clare so undressed before. He wanted to run his hands over her pale white shoulders and down her-He forked a large and bitter piece of endive into his mouth and crunched it.
“You still working on that?” the waiter said. Russ dropped the silverware onto the plate and waved it away.
Linda started describing the frantic hours of work she put in today to get the draperies up all over the hotel. He let his gaze wander to the table next to them, and to the table next to that, automatically checking for signs of intoxication or aggression or distress. Way up at the front of the room, he saw his mom and her cousin Nane, talking and laughing with a rowdy group of women he assumed were the volunteer gardeners of the ACC. A little distance away, he spotted a table with an imbalance of seven men: four elegantly dressed Asians, three white guys in badly fitting rental tuxes, and one slim, older woman in a smoke-gray dress.
“What was the oldest van der Hoeven’s name?” he asked Clare, without thinking.
“Luella? No, Louisa.”
“I think that’s her over there.” He pointed with his chin. His wife gave him an incurious glance before returning to the mayor. She was pitching him on redecorating his office.
Clare turned around in her seat. “It could be,” she said. “I can see a family resemblance.” She turned back. “Do you think she knows?”
“Knows what?” Robert Corlew looked at Clare, then Russ, then back to Clare.
“Eugene van der Hoeven was killed today,” Russ answered.
“No sh-oot!” Corlew said. “Is that going to put a stop to the land sale?”
“Evidently not,” Clare said. “Those Malaysians are the bigwigs from GWP.” She bit her lower lip. “Oh, crud. I have two cases of wine in my car I was supposed to deliver for them.” At Corlew’s baffled look, she went on, “Eugene asked me to do it as a favor. The guy who was supposed to pick them up never showed.”
“Eugene?” Corlew said. “How did you get to be on a first-name basis with the van der Hoevens?”
Clare launched into an account of her time as a search and rescue volunteer. Russ checked out the table next to the GWP brass. And whaddya know, there was his old friend Shaun Reid, with his young and lovely second wife. The tables at the head of the room had already been served their entrees, and he could see Shaun eating methodically. Even from a distance, Russ could see his movements were those of someone stiff and sore.
One of the waiters came up to Shaun. Russ, expecting to see a wine bottle produced, was surprised when the uniformed man handed Shaun what looked like a piece of paper. Shaun unfolded it, read it, and looked around wildly. He sat, head bowed for a moment, then rose and followed the path the waiter had taken out of the ballroom.
That’s interesting.
Russ skidded his chair back. “I think I’ll excuse myself before dinner arrives,” he said. He left through the main entrance, but instead of turning right toward the restrooms, he turned left. He walked past the length of the ballroom until he came to a door bearing a discreet brass plaque: EMPLOYEES ONLY. He pushed against the door and was disappointed to see it led into a shallow room lined with shelf upon shelf of table linens. He stepped back into the lobby. The wall continued unbroken to the corner. Somewhere behind there was the kitchen, but it obviously had an entirely separate entrance, so that unsuspecting guests couldn’t stumble their way into the noisy chaos that made their dinners possible.
He reached into his jacket pocket and removed his cell phone. “Hey, Harlene,” he said when his number connected. “Any news?”
“Hey, Chief. The crime scene boys just finished up at Reid-Gruyn. They said there’s a load of prints off the couch, so it may take ’em a while to eliminate the duds.”
“Do you know if anyone’s tried to get ahold of Shaun Reid? To question him, or maybe to get him to open up a room or something?”
“Not to my knowledge. Lyle’s still on the road checking out places where the Schoof boy might be. Kevin’s still watching the house. He’s called in a few times to complain about how bored he is.”
“Tell him boredom is good. It’s when things get interesting that you have to worry.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Eric’s still up at Haudenosaunee. Mark’s trying to eliminate some of the Mercedes… oh, wait, he wants to talk to you.”
There was a pause, and then he heard Mark’s voice. “Hi, Chief.”
“Hi. You find something?”
“Not yet. But there was something interesting. I’ve been going through the names trying to see if anybody who’s ever had a connection to the van der Hoevens has a black Mercedes, right? And I run across a name that doesn’t have a connection to the family but may be linked to Haudenosaunee.”
“Who?”
“Shaun Reid. He’s a possible suspect in the Castle assault, right? And she was found on Haudenosaunee property.”
Shaun Reid. Who looked for all the world as if he had been brawling today. “Good work. I think it might be time to pay Shaun a more formal visit. Pull together everything we’ve got for a warrant request. If Ryswick comes through, maybe we can hit him early tomorrow morning. In the meanwhile, keep looking for any other connections for the Mercedes. This could easily be someone from the city, you know. Their father, Jan van der Hoeven, headquartered his business there.”
“Yeah, I know.”
From the entryway in the middle of the lobby, Russ could hear the muted clinking of forks hitting china. “Gimme back to Harlene, will you?”
Harlene came onto the line. “Yeah?”
“Tell Lyle I want him to drop by the hospital again as soon as he can. See what the reaction is when he tells Becky Castle her stuff was found in Reid’s office. Have Eric call me from Haudenosaunee as soon as he can. I want to know if he’s turned up anything.”
“Will do, chief. How’s the fancy party? Is it making up for having to work on your birthday?”
He thought about their table. Linda and Clare and Hugh and Russ. Like a bad Italian art movie. “Harlene, I can honestly say I’d rather be eating greasy takeout and waiting for an autopsy report than be here.”
Lisa Schoof tried to control her shaking. She stood in the passageway outside the Algonquin Waters kitchen, listening to pots hammering iron burners and dishes clanging against stainless steel. The door swung open, and she jerked to attention, but it was only an assistant in a grease-spattered white shirt, ducking down the hall for a quick smoke. The door, shutting, pumped a blast of steam and smell and the sound of harsh voices jabbering in a language Lisa couldn’t even recognize.
She had found her way to the kitchen door easily enough: In her sweater and padded motorcycle jacket she looked nothing like the guests she had seen in her brief flight through the lobby, and a sympathetic chambermaid, thinking she was new and late for her shift, pointed her in the right direction.
She stepped into the kitchen, thinking she could snag a waiter to deliver the message she had written out, but was stymied immediately by the chaos around her. She had waitressed before, at the Red Lobster in Glens Falls, but that kitchen could have fit into a corner of the acreage of white tile and chrome racks that surrounded her here. She was perhaps ten steps in when a short man in front of an open blast furnace of an oven started screaming at her, first in a foreign language, then in English. “Get out! Get out, you! Get out!”
Lisa stumbled back, breathless, and was on the verge of bolting when a hand fell on her shoulder and a pleasant voice asked, “What are you doing here, kiddo?”
She was face-to-face with a faultlessly white shirt and an elaborate waistcoat. The man holding her looked like a riverboat gambler in a western. “Are you a waiter?”
“Sure am. Are you new?”
She shook her head. “No.” Her throat threatened to close up, but she got her prepared story out. “I work for Mr. Shaun Reid. I have to get a note to him. It’s important. It’s about the, the mill. His mill.”
“Where’s he at? The banquet? The door’s right over there. I can show you the way.”
“Oh, no. I can’t. I’ll get in trouble. He, he doesn’t want the other businessmen to know. That… there’s a problem.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew the tightly folded note. “Could you?”
The waiter smiled at her indulgently. “Sure, kiddo. Do you know where he’s sitting?”
She had thought about that, driving in. “I think he’s with the people from the big paper company.”
“GWP? Okay, I’ll see that he gets it.” He held out his hand for the paper, but she unfolded it quickly and pulled her ballpoint from her pocket. Meet me in the hallway outside the kitchen, she scribbled at the bottom. She refolded the paper and passed it to the nice waiter.
“You better leave now, before Egoberto tries to fillet you.”
She glanced over to where the ferocious cook was ramming rounds of helpless bread into the fiery inferno. “Right,” she said.
So here she stood, chafing her hand over her arms in a futile attempt to rub away the cold seeping from her gut. It already felt as if she had been waiting for an hour. What if the waiter couldn’t find Reid? What if he laughed and tore up the paper? What if he called the cops and they were already on their way to arrest her for blackmail? What if-
The kitchen door swung open again. Shaun Reid strode into the hall, brushing at his tuxedo jacket as if it had been soiled by his time in the kitchen. He saw her. His head went up. His black eyes and bruises startled her. He looked like a boxer. “Who are you?” he asked.
His age, his clothing, the authority in his voice-she almost blurted out the truth by sheer force of habit. The thing that caught her was that he didn’t know already. She had been cleaning his house for a year now, and he didn’t recognize her. Then she noticed the sheen of sweat across his forehead, the dampness on his upper lip.
It was quite cool in the kitchen passageway.
“I’m the person who has Millie van der Hoeven safe.”
He glanced quickly over his shoulder, then back at her. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll go call my friend, and he’ll take her to the cops. She’s been dying to talk to them all day.” She feinted, as if she were going to go around him.
He threw out his arm to stop her. “Open your jacket,” he said.
She did.
“Pick up your sweater.”
“Screw you. You want to see tits, go somewhere else, you perv.”
“I want proof you’re not wearing a wire before I talk with you, you little twit.”
“Oh.” She lifted her sweater and jacket as far as the underside of her breasts and turned around slowly, so he could see there wasn’t anything snaking down her back. It was by far the weirdest thing she had done in a day full of weird things. It didn’t feel real-more like she was acting in a TV show. The unreality emboldened her. “Here’s the deal,” she said, lowering her sweater. “You confess to having beaten up Becky Castle, and we’ll make sure Millie van der Hoeven never has the chance to testify that you killed her brother.”
Reid’s eyes narrowed. He stepped toward her, and for a moment she was afraid. Then a crash from the kitchen reminded her that they were in a relatively public place. If he tried anything, she could bring the house down with her screams.
“It was you who put that dress and the makeup in my office, wasn’t it? You little bitch.” He hissed the last phrase so quietly she wasn’t sure he had said it at all.
She forced her voice to remain strong and confident. “I’m sure you’d rather be arrested for assault than for murder.”
“It was an accident,” he snapped.
“So you want us to take Millie to the cops?”
“No!” He crossed one arm over his chest and propped the other against it. He covered his mouth and chin with one hand. Finally he said, “How do I know you won’t let her testify to the police after I’ve pled guilty to the assault?”
“It’s a balance. Like a seesaw. If you deny you beat up Becky Castle, we’ll be in trouble. If we let Millie tell the cops, you’ll be in trouble.”
“Getting arrested for assault and battery is trouble, you idiot.”
“You’re a rich guy. You can afford a good lawyer. Tell him it was a lovers’ fight, he’ll probably get you off with a few years suspended and some domestic violence classes.”
He looked at her closely. “Your friend is the person who really assaulted the Castle girl, isn’t he?” He stared at her hand. She looked down and saw her wedding ring. “He’s your husband,” Reid said.
She folded her hand and pressed it against her leg. “Do we have a deal?”
“I have to finish the dinner,” he said, tilting his head toward the kitchen. “I’m conducting some important business there. And I need a chance to call my attorney, to arrange to turn myself in.”
“You have until midnight tonight.”
“Just like Cinderella,” he said. “All right.”
She stood for a moment, not knowing what to do now. He had just… given in. She hadn’t been expecting that. Finally she shook herself and walked off. He said nothing, so neither did she.
It wasn’t until she had rounded the corner and was facing the stairs up to the lobby that she let herself smile, a wide, glorious, split-seamed smile. She did it. She was going to save her husband.
Shaun waited until the young woman was out of sight before shouldering his way through the swinging kitchen door. He barged straight through the middle of the freewheeling choreography of chefs and line cooks and waiters, his face pricking even foul-tempered kitchen workers to jump out of his way.
The hushed roar of the banquet hall neither slowed him nor soothed his expression. He pistoned along the edge of the room until he spotted the sommelier, pulling bottles from the bottom of a well-loaded cart. He moved into her space, crowding her until she clinked against the cart. “Jeremy Reid,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Um,” she said.
“Where?”
She pointed toward the ballroom exit. “He’s… he’s…”
“Where?”
“The lobby bar,” she squeaked.
Shaun sped toward the exit, moving as fast as he could without drawing undue attention to himself. He pushed through the doors into the lobby.
The lobby of the Algonquin Waters resort, for all its gleaming wood and arching spaces, was essentially a triangle whose point was truncated by a wide rectangle. The ballroom and smaller meeting rooms ranged along the bottom of the rectangle. One corner of the triangle hosted massive leather furniture in front of a riverstone fireplace that could have accommodated a whole deer on a spit. The other corner was the lounge bar. At the intersection of the triangle and the rectangle, the Oriental-carpet-covered floor opened to allow visitors to descend to the lower spa level via a polished cherry stairway. The same stairway where, if his guess was correct, his little friend was going to come out and cross the lobby to the parking lot.
He knew, from listening to Jeremy, that the hourly employees’ entrance in the back was locked, day and night, accessible only to those who could punch in the pass code. To get in to see him, his blackmailer must have come in through the public entrance, a bank of double doors opposite the top of the staircase.
Shaun speedwalked across the lobby to the bar. Jeremy was behind the faux-distressed bar counter, going over a list with one of the bartenders while the other one watched a football game on the television.
“Jeremy, I need to speak with you right away,” Shaun said in a low voice.
His son looked at him, clearly startled. “Dad? What’s up?”
“Please,” Shaun said, beckoning Jeremy with fingers flapping “urgent.” Jeremy excused himself and stepped away from the counter. Shaun grabbed him by the shoulders and moved them into a position where he was partially concealed by an overgrown ficus. “Can you see the lobby?”
Jeremy looked past the green fronds. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” Shaun let out a breath. “In a moment, you’re going to see a young woman come up those stairs. She’s wearing jeans and a jacket that has NORTH COUNTRY HARLEY-DAVIDSON on it. I want you to trail her, discreetly, to the parking lot.”
“What?”
“When she gets into her car, I want you to follow her. See where she goes. Then call me and let me know.”
His son searched his face. “Dad? Are you drunk?”
“Listen to me. This is an emergency. That woman is blackmailing me. She’s… she going to set up an accident at the mill and claim we’re responsible. Somebody could get hurt.”
“Are you kidding?” Jeremy looked toward the lobby, the bar, and the lounge before settling his gaze on Shaun’s face again. “Dad, if that’s so, call the police. Right now.”
Shaun squeezed his son’s shoulders tightly. “I can’t.” He cut off the start of Jeremy’s protest. “I know it doesn’t make sense to you. I know you’re working right now, and I’m asking you to abandon your job.”
“It’s not that. Things are humming along. I’m practically redundant.”
“Never.” He stared into Jeremy’s eyes, so like his own and his father’s before him. “Please. I need you to do this for me now. Please.” He saw Jeremy’s gaze flick away from him. “Is that her? Do you see her?”
Jeremy nodded.
“Will you do it? For me?”
Shaun felt his son’s shoulders relax beneath his hands. “Sure, Dad. If that’s what you need.”
“Go. Do you have your cell phone?”
Jeremy was already weaving his way between the tables, headed for the open lobby. He slapped his jacket in response. “Right here.”
“Don’t get too close to her. Don’t lose her.” Jeremy was moving out of earshot. “Thank you,” Shaun said. But he didn’t think the boy heard.
Clare was watching when Shaun Reid made his return to the ballroom. He paused in the entryway for a moment and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Her grandmother Fergusson would have approved. Never trust a man who uses tissues, she would say. He will prove flimsy and unreliable.
“Shaun Reid’s back,” she said, pitching her voice to slip under the lively conversations on either side of her.
Russ, across the table, nodded. He twisted his head slightly, as if getting the kinks out, and followed Reid’s progress back to his table. “Shame,” he said. “He’s missed most of the dinner.” Servers were circulating throughout the ballroom, collecting dirty plates and laying out dessert ware.
“You almost missed the dinner,” Linda said, mock-elbowing him in the ribs. “I swear, you’d stop your own funeral for police business.” She leaned on the table and spoke confidingly to Clare. “Listen to a woman who knows. Never marry a cop.”
Clare felt hot color flooding her cheeks. She was saved from coming up with a response by Hugh, who took her hand in his and said, “I’ll do my best to see she takes your advice.” He kissed the back of her hand. Robert Corlew made an awkward harrumphing sound, and Lena and her mayor “aaaahhhhed” as if they were sinking into a vat of marshmallow goo.
Russ looked like one of the great stone faces of Easter Island.
Clare had never been entirely convinced of the doctrine of bodily assumption, but she found herself wishing it were true and that God would see fit in His wisdom to whisk her, dress, hand, flaming cheeks, and all, into His heavenly kingdom. Now. Right now. Any time now.
She gently withdrew her hand and smiled almost convincingly at Hugh. Apparently she still had work to do on earth. To escape the massed gaze of the entire table, she twisted away, looking to where waiters were rolling out a podium next to the head table. “What’s on the schedule?” she asked no one in particular.
Jim Cameron answered. “The president of the ACC is going to give a little speech, introduce a few people, and make a plug for donations. Then the GWP folks and the van der Hoevens-” He tilted his head back, apparently just noticing the dearth of van der Hoevens at the head of the room. “Well, whoever else has to sign the deed of sale will do so. Then the dancing starts.” Beyond the head table, Clare could see where a bandstand had been set up next to the glass wall.
As she watched, the sommelier and her assistant rolled a heavy wine cart to the head table and began unloading some familiar wooden crates. “Oh, no,” she said. She couldn’t remember the damn wine for more than five minutes. She turned back to the table in time to see Linda twine her arm around Russ’s. On the other hand, perhaps she had good reason for her lack of focus.
“Excuse me.” She pushed back from the table and stood. Hugh, Russ, and Jim Cameron all rose.
Robert Corlew looked at them. “What?” he said. “What? Guys still do that?”
Lena Erlander looked sympathetically at the nonentical Mrs. Corlew.
Clare wove her way through the tables, careful to control her skirts. She crossed the dance floor and caught up with the sommelier just as she was unlocking the cart and preparing to roll it away. The crates, with their van der Hoeven Vineyards labels proudly displayed, were stacked in a staggered pyramid in front of the head table. Clare thought she had never seen a sadder sight. “Excuse me.” She touched the sommelier’s arm to get her attention. “Mr. van der Hoeven gave me two crates of his family’s wine to deliver to the banquet tonight. I’m afraid I forgot and left them in my car. Is it too late to bring them in?”
The sommelier frowned thoughtfully. “Mr. van der Hoeven’s instructions-” She caught herself, and Clare guessed that the news about Eugene van der Hoeven had already made the rounds at the Algonquin Waters. “His wishes,” she amended, “were that all the principals get a case as a gift and that the remainder be uncrated and uncorked for the dancing.” She tapped the side of her mouth with a white-gloved hand. “Yours will be awfully cold, but I suppose if we hold them back until the end of the evening… sure, go ahead. Bring them in. Do you need any help?”
“No. I’m right out front. My date and I will get them.” She turned back to her table, paused, then turned again. She crossed to where the slim woman in gray was seated, staring listlessly into nowhere. “Ms. van der Hoeven?”
The woman blinked and looked up at Clare. “Actually, it’s Tuchman. Well, no, I suppose it isn’t anymore. Maybe this time I’ll go back to being Louisa van der Hoeven. That sounds better than Louisa Tuchman, doesn’t it? Or Louisa de Parrada. I always thought that sounded like a flamenco dancer’s name. Who are you again?”
Eugene and Millie’s sister was apparently drowning her sorrows the old-fashioned way. “I’m Clare Fergusson,” she said. “I just wanted to say how very sorry I am about your brother.”
Louisa van der Hoeven de Parrada Tuchman blinked slowly. “I think Gene is one of those people about whom you can say, ‘His sufferings are over.’ ”
“Perhaps so.” Clare chose her words carefully. “I only knew him briefly, but he struck me in that time as a man who cared deeply about many things. Including your family and its history.” She waved a hand at the rough wooden crates framed by snowy linen. “I think it’s lovely that his last gesture will enable everyone to celebrate the van der Hoeven name with the van der Hoevens’ wine.”
Louisa looked down at the crates with a jaundiced eye. “No,” she said. “That’s just another example of how fake we are. Trying to impress everyone with money that was lost two generations ago.”
“I’m sorry?”
Louisa flopped one bony wrist over the edge of the table. “This is that stuff you buy in California and get stamped with whatever label you choose. The van der Hoevens don’t have a vineyard.”
Millie heard the door open. She hunched over her ankles, franticially jabbing the point of the door hinge into the stretched expanse of her duct-tape shackles. She had already punched ten, twelve, fifteen holes in the thing, but it still wouldn’t tear apart.
“Millie?” It was Randy, of course. “Still back there?”
“I told you I’d wait right here,” she called back, her voice as lighthearted and reassuring as she could make it. It wasn’t as if she could go anywhere else. Still, if she could just separate the tape before he walked back and discovered what she’d been doing while he was away… “Hey, when Shaun Reid brought me here, he said something about a box of wine near the door. Why don’t you find it, and we’ll have a drink? I don’t know about you, but I could use one.”
“Okay.” The thin beam of the flashlight appeared. It bounced around near the narrow door Randy had used to leave and enter. In the light’s backsplash, she could make out his silhouette. He had shoulders like a freaking gorilla. She thought of herself as a strong woman, but she didn’t have any illusions. He could do just about anything he wanted to her. If she didn’t get to him first. She redoubled her efforts, poking and tugging at the holes in the duct tape.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Try by the big door, the one that has the loading dock outside,” she called.
“Are you okay? You sound kind of winded.”
She took a deep breath. “Just feeling a little stressed. The wine will help.”
The flashlight beam tilted toward the front of the building. Millie poked another hole into the tape. She thrust her fingers through and pulled, her arms shaking, her thighs cramping from the strain of keeping her ankles as far apart as possible. She felt something yield. She pulled harder. There was a moment’s catch, and then a tearing sound, and her fetters fell into two pieces of tape, the ragged ends fluttering between her ankles.
She bit her lip to keep from howling. Then, for the first time all day, she stretched her legs wide, wide apart. The painful stretch was the most wonderful thing she had ever felt.
“Hey, I found it. Lemme see if I can get the lid off the box.”
Millie slowly rose from the floor. She straddled a crate, rolling her pelvis forward and back, cracking her spine and flexing her arms. From near the flashlight’s glow, she heard the distinctive sound of nails screeching out of wood.
“Phew! I hate to tell you, but this wine smells way bad. Like somebody stuffed old garage rags inside.”
“Nevermind, then.” Now she was free, she was anxious. She wanted to do what she had to do and get out. “Would you come back here, please? I’m feeling a little scared, all by myself in the dark.”
“You want me to find some water or something? I got a couple bottles in my backpack.”
“No. Please, I don’t want to sit here alone.”
“Okay.” His voice had the resigned tone of every man baffled by a woman’s changeable mind. “If that’s what you want.”
She wiped her palms against her pants. She wanted them to be hard and dry for this. “What did you and your wife decide to do?”
His voice, and the light, came closer. “Uh… she thinks you’d be better off coming home with us. In case Mr. Reid, you know, comes after you.”
She thinks we need to keep you under lock and key, Millie translated. She brought her ankles together and hunched over so that her hands, folded in her lap, weren’t visible.
The light played over her. “You okay? You look like you might be sick.”
She nodded her head. “I think I might.” She tightened her grip around the iron hinge pin. Its point, sharp and hard, pricked against her thigh. “Would you help me to the washroom?”
“Sure,” he said. He was close enough so she could smell him, gasoline and sweat and the strong, cheap detergent his clothes were washed in. He opened his arms to lift her, and she sprang forward, her thighs, her back, her arms all working together, and she drove the iron spike into his gut.
For a moment, they stood like lovers, his arms half embracing her, his face inches from hers, staring into each others eyes. Then, afraid she had only lightly wounded him, she shoved against his chest. He let out a noise like a chainsaw caught in a tree bole and fell to the floor.
The flashlight bounced off the uneven wooden boards at an angle and smashed against the metal footing of an ancient pulping machine. Instantly, the unrelenting darkness swallowed them.
“You… stabbed me.” Randy’s voice held more amazement than pain.
Millie was shaking so hard she could barely move. She backed away from the voice below her. She tried to think of something to say to him, something to justify what she had done, but in the end, her justification was that she was free to leave, whether he or his wife or Shaun Reid wanted her to or not. She backed away another step.
Randy groaned. “Holy crap.” He breathed shallowly, as if the movement of his lungs was painful. “Hurts.”
“I’ll call for help as soon as I’m away.” She skirted around him as best she could, bumping into crates and feeling her way past tarp covered machines.
“Lisa,” he moaned.
She moved toward the front of the building by touch and memory, fixing the location where she last saw Randy’s light when he had found the wine bottles. She caught a whiff of something, something that smelled like mildewed cloth and crankcase oil, and remembered Randy’s description of the case of wine. She must be getting close. “Don’t worry,” she called to the man in the darkness behind her. “We’re both going to get out of here alive.”
Russ was watching Clare make her way back to the table when his phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said to his dinner companions. “I have to take this.”
“You didn’t even check the number,” Linda said in an undertone. “Can’t they do without you for a couple of hours?”
He opened his mouth to explain that with two major investigations and a missing person, he shouldn’t even be at the party, but he bit off the words. What was the use? “I’m sorry,” he said, then retreated to the entryway and opened his phone.
“Van Alstyne here,” he said.
“Hey, Chief, it’s Eric, up to Haudenosaunee.”
“Eric. How’s it going? Find anything?” Russ watched as Clare arrived at the table. Instead of sitting down, she bent over and said something to Parteger. The view was so good he almost missed McCrea’s next sentence.
“We found a few more of those Planetary Liberation Army pamphlets.”
“Any correspondence? Anything that might be a threat to van der Hoeven?” Hugh rose from his seat and stepped back, gesturing for Clare to precede him. They began maneuvering between the tables, headed toward the entryway.
“No. It’s all pretty generic stuff. But,” Eric stressed, “we found something very interesting in the cellar. They were stacked up, nice and clean, but there were a dozen bleach jugs, the same number of empty detergent boxes, fifteen dry gas cans, and-get this-a half of a box of sawdust.
The ingredients for homemade napalm. “Holy shit,” Russ said. Clare and Hugh walked past him. “Hang on,” he said to Eric. He clamped a hand over the phone. “Are you leaving?”
Clare shook her head. “Hugh’s helping me get the wine out of my car. We’ll be right back.”
“I want to ask you about your conversation with the housekeeper this morning.”
Her eyes brightened with curiosity. “Okay.”
Russ turned back to his phone. “Eric? Good work. I’m going to call Harlene and have her alert the state police and the Feebs that we have a possible terror weapon on the loose. I’m going to give out the number at Haudenosaunee. Stay within earshot of the phone, in case anyone needs to ask you questions.”
He hung up and speed-dialed Harlene. Dammit, he didn’t want to wait until Clare and Parteger got back. Besides, Clare shouldn’t be lugging wooden crates around dressed like that. Didn’t that pansy-shirted Brit have any sense at all?
“Dispatch.”
He strode across the lobby toward the front doors. “Harlene, it’s Russ.”
“Hey, Chief. What can I do you for?”
“Listen carefully. I need you to notify the state police threat response team and the district FBI office that we may have a terrorist weapon situation.”
Harlene, thirty-plus-year veteran of the dispatch board, didn’t turn a hair. “They’re going to want to know what type.”
He pushed open one of the elaborate glass-and-pine doors. The lights around the portico were so bright they nearly drowned out the moon. “Eric’s found evidence suggesting home-brewed napalm. Direct any questions to him up at Haudenosaunee. You got the number there?”
“Yep.”
“We don’t know the amount, but it looks as if it could be several dozen gallons. This may be associated with Millie van der Hoeven’s disappearance. The stuff may be in the hands of a militant ecoterrorist group, the Planetary Liberation Army. You got that?”
“Got it.”
He walked down the curving drive toward the guest parking. “Oh, and get Kevin on the radio. Tell him to break the stakeout. I want him to have another talk with Lisa Schoof. We need to know everything about anything she might have seen and heard while at Haudenosaunee.”
“Will do.”
He spotted Clare’s little red car beneath one of the sleek light poles dotting the lot. He broke into a trot. “Keep me informed,” he told Harlene. “Anything at all, I want to know. Chief out.” He beeped off without waiting for her reply.
Clare was overseeing Parteger, who was stuffed halfway into the rear seat of her Shelby. One crate sat on the asphalt near her feet-or where her feet would be if he could see them. Her upper body was wrapped in a fur that looked like something Mamie Eisenhower might have worn.
“What is that?” Russ asked.
She plucked at the thing. “A beaver jacket. It belonged to my grandmother. I don’t have many occasions to wear it, but it’s terrifically warm.” Her voice was apologetic; whether for the existence of the fur or for not bringing it out more often, he couldn’t tell.
Parteger wiggled out of the backseat without the remaining wine. “Oh, look,” he said. “The police. What a surprise.”
Russ ignored him. “When you were talking, did either Lisa Schoof or Eugene ever say anything to you about Millie transporting anything on or off the property?”
“No,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Eric McCrea’s been doing the search of the house at Haudenosaunee. He’s found dozens of empty bleach bottles, detergent boxes, and gas cans. Plus sawdust.”
She sucked in her breath. “Oh, that’s not good.”
“What?” Parteger said. “What is it?”
“You combine them to make an accelerant,” Clare said, still looking at Russ. “All you need is a triggering mechanism and boom, instant inferno.”
Parteger looked at Russ skeptically. “And you think someone at this… Haudenosaunee has been playing junior chemist?”
“It’s not difficult,” Clare said. “It’s not much different from an old-fashioned Molotov cocktail.” She kicked the wine crate. Bottles clinked in emphasis. “You put the accelerant in a container, add some sort of basic fuse, and…”
She looked down at the crate.
She looked up at Russ.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Russ lunged for the crate, prying and yanking at the top until the slender nails holding it together groaned out of their holes and he toppled backward. A musky petroleum smell bloomed in the cold night air. Clare reached for one of the bottles. “Wait,” Russ said. Climbing to his feet, he yanked his handkerchief out of his pocket. “Don’t touch them directly. You may get some on you.” Working quickly but carefully, he removed the dozen bottles and set them on the pavement.
Clare looked into the bare box. “Where’s the fuse?” She dropped to her hands and knees beside the wooden crate. “I think the bottom on the inside of this box is higher than the bottom on the outside.” Russ patted his jacket pockets. “I need something to pry it open.” Clare rose from the pavement, turned toward her car, and reached inside. He heard the pop of a glove compartment, and then she was handing him a Swiss army knife. He slid the knife blade between the boards and pressed it up and in. The false bottom tilted up smoothly. Beneath it, twisted wires, a stripped-down cell phone, and an even layer of blasting caps had been composed into the arts-and-crafts project from Hell.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Clare said. He wasn’t sure if she was praying or not.
“What’s going on?” Hugh’s voice was tight with fear. “What the bloody hell is going on?”
“These are bombs,” Russ said. “The wine crates are bombs.” He looked into Clare’s eyes and saw his own horror there. She got it. First there would be the explosion. Then, in a moment too quick for human reckoning, a spray of shrapnel, deadly splinters embedding in unprotected flesh, and finally the sticky, liquid flame clinging to everything it touched.
“We have to clear the ballroom,” he said, amazed, as he always was, at how matter-of-fact his voice could be despite his fear.
She nodded.
“We have to get this thing out of your car,” Hugh said, turning to the backseat.
“Leave it,” Clare said.
“But Clare, if it goes off-”
“Leave it!”
Hugh reared back. Unlike Russ, he had evidently never heard Clare unleash her command voice.
“The car can be replaced. You can’t.” She turned, snatched up her skirts, and ran for the entrance to the resort.
Russ pounded alongside her, trying to hit the speed dial for Harlene with his arm jerking up and down. “Harlene,” he gasped, when he finally made the connection, “IEDs here at the resort.” Improvised explosive devices. “We need fire, we need emergency, we need every unit in the county turning out for this.”
“Copy that, Chief,” Harlene said. “Do you have casualties?”
“They haven’t blown yet, but when they do it’s gonna be bad.” Ahead of him, Clare flung open a door and leaned against it to let him run through.
“Bomb squad?”
“Hell, yeah,” he said, knowing it would be futile. The nearest explosive ordinance team was in Troop G, an hour away in Loudonville. Clare had skidded to a stop in front of the registration desk and was trying to juice an obviously skeptical clerk. “Chief out,” he said to Harlene. Pocketing his phone, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out his badge. He hung it in front of the desk clerk’s face. “This is a police emergency. You listen to what this lady says and do what she tells you to do. Got it?” He glanced at Clare without waiting for confirmation from the wide-eyed bell clerk. “I’m going to evacuate the ballroom.”
She jerked her chin down.
He ran to the entryway. At the head of the huge room, dwarfed by the moonlit mountains looming behind him, a tall, balding, academic sort was at the podium. He was talking about the preservation of the Adirondack wilderness, his amplified voice underscored by the clinking of dessert forks and coffee spoons.
“… and so we want to recognize those for whom preserving the natural world has become a calling…”
Russ paused at his own table. He put one hand on Linda’s shoulder and the other as close to the centerpiece as he could. “I want you all to get up right now,” he said in a low voice. “Get your coats and go to your cars. Go home immediately.”
“Russ!” Linda tipped her head back to look at him. “Honey, whatever on earth are you saying?”
“Bomb threat.” He decided to underplay it. The words “There’s a bomb in the room” tended to produce running and screaming. The only way they were going to clear this ballroom without someone getting hurt was to keep it lowkey. Seriously low-key. Urgently low-key.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Robert Corlew reached for his after-dinner coffee. “These things are always complete smoke. Some bored teenagers with nothing to do on a Saturday night.”
Or maybe not so low-key. “Linda,” he said, taking her by both arms. “Your life is in danger. If you love me, you’ll leave. Now.”
He looked into her big blue eyes. Please, honey, he thought. Please.
She rose from her seat and kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you at home, then.” Without a single look behind her, she walked out of the ballroom.
The table was dead silent. “Jim,” Russ said, “I’m going to make an evacuation announcement. Will you come with me? Having the mayor there may make people a little less skeptical.”
Cameron nodded. He took his wife’s hand and kissed it. “Better go, alsking.”
She nodded, pale-faced. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
He glanced up at Russ, who shook his head, then back to her. “Don’t,” he said. “I’ll find my own way home.”
Robert Corlew abruptly shoved his chair back and bolted from the table. His wife looked to where he was disappearing out the entryway. “Excuse me,” she said in her hesitant voice, and followed him.
Russ and Jim Cameron skirted the edge of the room. “What’s the story?” Cameron asked quietly.
“See those wine crates stacked up by the head table?”
“Yeah.”
“Their bottles are full of a home-brewed fire accelerant that works sort of like napalm. The timers are inside a false bottom.”
Cameron’s face drained of color, but he kept walking toward the front of the room. Toward the bombs. Russ’s respect for the man went up a good five notches. “How do you know?”
“I took one apart a few minutes ago out in the parking lot.”
“When’s it set to go off?”
“I don’t know. I can recognize the basic ingredients of an improvised explosive device, but I’m no expert at figuring out the mechanics.” A waiter trundled out the kitchen doors, a silver coffeepot in each hand. Russ stopped him and showed him his badge. “There’s a bomb threat,” he said in a low voice. “We’re clearing the building. Get back in the kitchen and tell everyone. Then leave.”
The waiter peered at Russ’s badge. “And you are?”
“Millers Kill chief of police.”
The waiter’s mouth formed the word “Oh.” He turned and went back into the kitchen.
Russ and Cameron crossed the empty stretch of dance floor. The head of the ACC, who was still talking, saw them and made discreet shooing motions to clear them out of the audience’s line of sight.
“… of course, this great work cannot continue without the sort of support tha-What do you think you’re doing?”
Russ crowded the man from the podium. “Good evening, folks. I’m the chief of police here in Millers Kill, and this is our mayor, Jim Cameron.” Somewhere in the middle of the room, someone started to clap. The sound stopped immediately. “We’ve received a credible threat that bombs have been placed in this location. We are taking this threat absolutely seriously. I want you all to get up and leave the ballroom in an orderly fashion. Please exit the building and go to your cars. Emergency vehicles will be arriving shortly. Please do not impede them.”
Maybe 10 percent of the people in the ballroom rose and began making their way to the exit. The rest sat where they were, looking at each other. A torrent of voices filled the air. Someone shouted, “What about our coats?”
Russ leaned toward the mike to tell him what he could do with his damn coat. From the back of the room, a voice that could bounce off the walls cut him off. “Staff members are taking all the coats outside. As soon as you’re past the portico, you can collect your belongings.”
“Isn’t that Reverend Fergusson?” Cameron asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Russ said, smiling slightly. “You.” He turned to the head-table occupants. “Get out. Now.”
Louisa van der Hoeven stood unsteadily. “Did my brother have something to do with this?”
Russ paused. He figured either Eugene, Millie, or a combination of the two was responsible for the explosives. What the hell did Louisa van der Hoeven know that would make her jump to the same conclusion? “We consider him one of the prime suspects,” he said cautiously.
She turned to her dinner companions. “Then it’s serious. Get the hell out before the place goes up like a tinderbox.” She lurched around the end of the table and took off for the door. As more and more people rose and headed toward the entryway, the mood changed from skepticism to alarm to panic. Russ saw Shaun Reid, cell phone clamped to his ear, dragged by his wife across the dance floor. Several people began running. A woman screamed. At the other end of the ballroom, there was a booming sound as the doors to the adjacent conference area were opened. A petite woman in a severely chic black suit stood next to one and yelled, “You may exit through these doors and then out into the lobby! You may exit through these doors and then out into the lobby!” As the human tide stopped, changed direction, and began to flow toward her, she fought her way to the now-empty dance floor.
“I’m Barbara LeBlanc, the manager,” she said when she reached them. “We’re clearing the hotel right now. What else can we do?”
He motioned toward the retreating crowd, shoving and pushing to get out the doors. “Let’s start by getting as far away as possible from these crates.”
She followed him toward the dwindling mass of people, looking over her shoulder at the floor in front of the head table. “That’s them?”
“That’s them.”
“Could we move them? Some of those glass panels are doors to the terrace outside.”
He shook his head. “We don’t know when they’re going to go off. I don’t want anybody touching them.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “You have a sprinkler system in here?”
“Of course.”
“Is there some way to jimmy it so it starts without a fire? If we gave the crates a good drenching, it might help.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” She turned toward the kitchen.
“Ms. LeBlanc,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Why don’t I hear a general evacuation klaxon?”
She looked embarrassed. “The system’s not up and running yet. This is our opening night.” She cut across the almost empty room and vanished through the kitchen doors.
“This is an opening night like the Titanic was a maiden voyage,” he muttered. They reached the entryway. The last people in the ballroom, and thank God for that. “Jim,” he said, “you better get out. You’ve done everything you can here.”
“I’m trying,” the mayor said dryly. “Unfortunately, these people jamming the lobby don’t recognize that rank hath its privilege.”
Russ was distracted from replying by the sight of Clare, free of her fur, shoving against the crowd to get back inside the doors to the ballroom. Away from safety. Toward danger. “Typical,” he said under his breath. He slapped Cameron on the back and pointed to where the crush of bodies was thinnest. “Get on the phone as soon as you’re safe,” he said. “We don’t need any foot-dragging or turf games among the emergency response units. You can help cut through that.”
The mayor nodded. “Good luck.” He slipped away.
Russ snagged Clare by the arm. “Why the hell aren’t you outside?” He spoke loudly. It sounded as if the entire population of Millers Kill were jammed inside the lobby.
She laughed. “I didn’t know we had all this time,” she yelled. “Now I wish I had let Hugh get the wine out of-”
The ballroom behind them exploded.
Shaun’s cell phone burbled just as Russ Van Alstyne took the podium. He glanced at the number displayed and flipped the phone open. Usually, Courtney would have handed him his head on a platter for taking a call at the table, but she was staring, transfixed, at where Russ was going on about something and didn’t seem to notice anything else.
“Hi, Jeremy,” he said. “Where are you?”
“God, Dad, you were right! I followed her car, and she drove straight to the mill.”
“The old mill? Or the new mill?”
Jeremy sounded confused. “The new mill. I mean, she can probably see the old mill from where she’s parked, but it wouldn’t do her much good to stage an accident there. What’s that noise in the background?”
That noise was two hundred and forty chairs scraping, thumping, falling over as their occupants scrambled to get out of the ballroom. Courtney grabbed Shaun by the hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go!”
“Dad?”
Courtney plowed through the crowd, elbows flying, hauling Shaun along in her wake. “I’m here, son,” he said into the phone.
“What’s going on?”
Christ, if he told Jeremy the truth, he’d do ninety all the way up from town to be here for the crisis. And Shaun needed him at Reid-Gruyn, keeping an eye on the blackmailing bitch, making sure they didn’t move Millie van der Hoeven out of the old mill.
“It’s sort of like intermission,” he said. “Everyone’s up and stretching their legs before the dancing starts.” He and Courtney squeezed through the entryway shoulder to shoulder with at least ten others. The lobby was filling up rapidly. He clamped his hand over the phone. “Look, you head outside and get your coat. I’m going to step down the hall a ways and finish this call.”
“Shaun, the police chief said to get out!”
“Honey, it’s probably just a prank. Most of these bomb threats are. I’ll be out as soon as I can.”
She looked doubtful, but she released him. He strode quickly away from the noisy, panicked hubbub of the lobby.
“Jeremy?”
“Yeah. Are you sure everything is okay?”
“Yes. It’s quieter now. People are going back inside. Look, have you seen anyone leave the old mill?”
“No.” Jeremy’s voice was equal parts confusion and suspicion. “Why would there be?”
“I think the woman you followed has at least two accomplices and that they’re hiding out in there.”
“Dad, are these employees? ’Cause if they are-”
“No, they’re not.” He looked behind him. The mob in the lobby was flexing like a living thing now, one part desperately trying to get out, the other part determined to stay put. He could see uniformed staff forcibly preventing guests from getting onto the elevators, presumably in order to retrieve their belongings. “But I suspect they’re working with someone inside. If we’re going to find out who, we can’t call the police.” He came down hard on those last words. “I want you to-”
But he didn’t get out what he wanted Jeremy to do. There was a horrific sound, a death scream of wood and glass, a percussive wave that boxed his ears and shoved him against the wall, and then, swallowing it all, the hungry howl of a monstrous fire.
He was amazed to find he still had the phone pressed against his temple. Jeremy was screaming something. He lifted the phone higher. “What?” he rasped.
“Dad! Oh, my God, Dad! There’s just been an explosion inside the old mill!”
The explosion knocked Millie to the floor. She lay stunned and aching for a moment and then crawled to her hands and feet. She was scraped and battered but whole. Bracing her hand against the tarp-covered machine that had served to protect her from the blast, she got to her feet. The wide front door Shaun Reid had carried her through a lifetime ago was in flames. Fire splashed in all directions from it, clawing up tarpaulins, feasting on empty pallets, inching across the old wooden floor.
The light, after so many hours of darkness, was almost unbearable. Millie threw her hands up, blocking the worst of the blaze from view. A bomb. Shaun Reid had planted some kind of bomb. He had never intended to come back for her. He had left her here to burn to death. Despite the heat from the flames, she felt cold inside. As cold as the stone tower where her brother had died. Oh, God-what about Louisa? Was he after her sister, too? She had to get out. She had to.
“Help me.” The cry from the outer edges of darkness shivered down her spine. “Please. Don’t leave me.”
There, at the far edge of the growing circle of flame, she saw what she was looking for. A narrow door. She looked behind her. If she went back for him, if she tried to carry him out, the fire would swallow the door before she could make it. It’s him or me, she thought, desperation rising like vomit in her throat. It’s him or me.
“I’ll call the fire department when I get out,” she yelled. “They’ll help you.”
“Please!”
She skirted the flames, refusing to look at the raging heart of them, focusing on avoiding the questing tendrils and embers pinwheeling through the air. There it was. The door. Within reach. The heat was already hammering at its surface, and she cried out in pain as she grasped the doorknob. She thought she heard a final “Please!” but that might have been the eager, air-sucking hiss of the fire.
She staggered out into the cool darkness, blind again.
She heard shrieking, and as her eyes adjusted to the faint light thrown off by the parking lot lights, she saw the outline of a woman, running and stumbling across the scrubland dividing the old mill from the new.
“Randy!” the woman screamed. “Randy!”
A brilliant bobbing light tore Millie’s attention away from the sight. A car was jouncing down the rough drive toward them, bouncing up and down in the same pattern she had felt, locked in her captor’s trunk.
“Where is he?” The woman scrambled over the last stretch of hillocky ground. “Where’s my husband!”
“Where’s Shaun Reid?” Millie demanded.
The woman looked at her as if she had gone mad.
“Where is he?” Millie strode to where the woman was standing. “I know you went to see him!” She grabbed her by the arms and shook her hard enough to rattle her back teeth. “Tell me where he is, and I’ll tell you where your husband is!”
“At the new resort! He’s at the new resort!” The woman burst into tears.
“What the hell is going on?”
Millie spun around. A young man she might have recognized as handsome stood there, his immaculate suit looking ridiculous in the lurid glow of the fire. Behind him, his car was still running, the driver’s door open.
“My husband’s in there!” The woman, still sobbing, pointed toward the now-burning mill door.
Millie made her decision in an instant. “He’s hurt!” she said to the young man. “Please, please help him!”
He turned to look at the door and actually stepped toward it, which was more than she had thought he would do. Millie shoved him, hard, and was pounding toward his car before he had hit the ground. She slammed the door on his indignant shout, yanked the gearshift into reverse, and careened up the driveway. She spun around in the parking lot, tires screaming, and accelerated out the gate.
Clare rolled into a sitting position. Her head felt as if she were the clapper in a bell, ringing so loudly she couldn’t hear anything else.
Russ was pushing himself off the floor, rubbing the back of his neck. He turned to her, relief in his eyes. Clare? She could see his mouth move, but no noise came out.
She shook her head and pointed to her ear. He nodded and held out his hand, and together they staggered to their feet.
A table had overturned behind them, partially sheltering them from the brutal heat emanating in waves from the inferno that had been the dance floor. Only a few feet away, ragged tablecloths trembled from the violence of their destruction. Clare clutched Russ’s hand. If he had been a little bit farther from the door… She had just enough time to witness one of the magnificent antler chandeliers plunging into the maelstrom before Russ jerked her past the entryway and into the lobby.
Guests were surging, clotting, battering at the exits. She heard them faintly, shouts and crying from very far away. Mostly she heard the high-pitched ringing. Staff blocked the elevators, and the emergency stair had been chained open. As she watched, a middle-aged Asian woman emerged from the stairway, wide-eyed and shaking. Clare remembered what she had been going to do.
“The staff needs help making sure everyone gets out of their rooms.” Russ’s wince told her she needed to tone the volume down. “I’m going to go help.”
He shook his head and pointed to the reception desk, where four uniformed clerks were on phones. He turned her so she was facing him. They. Do. Job, he said.
“But what if the guests think it’s a false alarm?”
His eyebrows went up. He pointed behind him to where the ballroom was going up like a Christmas tree on a February bonfire.
She took his point. “Still. I ought to help.”
She saw rather than heard him sigh. Then he gathered her into his arms, held her tightly, and whispered into her ear. The ringing receded, and she heard him. “If you love me, you’ll leave. Now.”
Then he did something that amazed her. With dozens of people still struggling through the lobby, he kissed her, lightly, briefly, and then he put her away from him, stripped off his dinner jacket, and draped it over her shoulders.
“I can hear you now,” she said inanely.
“Go on. I’m going to make sure Mom and Cousin Nane got out okay.” She nodded. Turned. And found a frightened-looking elderly man, wearing dress shoes and pajamas and a black overcoat, watching her. She shrugged her arms into Russ’s jacket and crossed the lobby. She took the old man’s hand. “Father Aberforth,” she said. “Let me help you.”
Jeremy allowed himself sixty seconds to curse, kick the ground, and imagine what a roasting his dad was going to give him: letting one of the blackmailers get away by stealing his own freaking BMW.
After a minute had gone by, he put it aside and focused on the task at hand. The small, dark-haired woman who had screamed that her husband was inside stood by the lazily burning doorway, sobbing and hiccupping and calling, “Randy! Randy!” in an aching voice.
Jeremy crossed to her side. She looked up at him, her face wet. “Please,” she begged. “Help him.”
“I will,” he promised. “But I want you to help, too.” She nodded fiercely. “Go up to the new mill. There’s a phone inside the employees’ entrance. Call 911.” She nodded again. “Find the foreman. Tell him to have the men collect all the extinguishers we have in the building and bring them here. You got that?”
“Foreman. Extinguishers.”
“Tell him Jeremy Reid told you so.” Her wide-eyed shock at his name would have been comical under different circumstances. “That’s right, Jeremy Reid. So lay off my father.”
She bolted without another word. Jeremy looked toward the old mill. If he could get inside, he should be able to break through a window on the river side and jump. He was a strong swimmer, confident of his ability to keep even a scared and injured man afloat for the time it would take to reach the riverbank downstream from the building. If he could get past the fire. Into the water. Fire. Water.
He grinned to himself and dashed toward the river rolling past the old mill. He scrambled down the steep bank faster than he intended and wound up staggering the first few steps into the black water. It was dark down here, dark and fast-moving and steeply angled. He was afraid he would lose his footing or become disoriented if he waded in, so he forced himself to sit in the knee-deep water, sit, stretch out, and duck his head beneath the surface.
He came up gasping and yelping with pain. Christ, it felt like someone had taken a nutcracker to him. He staggered, dripping, up the bank, cupping his poor beleaguered balls. It would be a miracle if he was able to father children after this.
Facing the fiery door, he wondered if a good drenching was enough. Then he thought of the poor bastard stuck in there. It would have to be good enough. He took off his sopping suit jacket, draped it over his head, and ran inside.
Running through flame: crackling and hissing and a smell, not of smoke but of gas; heat coiling about him, his shirtsleeves crinkling, his pants legs stiffening; and then he was out, steaming but unharmed. He stumbled forward, sidestepping the antiquated machinery, wondering what was going to happen when the fire hit those monsters. Would they melt? Explode? “Hello!” he called. “Randy? Are you in here?”
Over the consuming growl of the fire, he heard a noise like a cross between a gulp and a cry. “Here! I’m over here!”
Jeremy followed the sound toward the back wall. He was expecting-He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t a guy his own age, lying on the dusty floor, surrounded by a backpack and pieces of food, bleeding from an iron stake shoved into his gut. Jeremy dropped to his knees. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What happened?”
“Millie. She had this thing…” Randy waved toward the wound. A palm’s width of black iron stuck up from the side of his abdomen. “I didn’t pull it out,” he said weakly. “I thought it might bleed more.”
Jeremy rested his hand gently on Randy’s shoulder. “That was good, man. Good thinking.” He glanced up and saw right away that his breaking-the-windows idea had a serious flaw in it. The casement-style windows facing the river were a good twelve or thirteen feet above his head. “You just take it easy, man. I’m going to get you out of here. I need to take a look around, but I’m not leaving you. You got that?”
Randy nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Jeremy rose and turned around. He considered the machines. Could he shove one under the window? To serve as a platform? He pushed against a few tarp-covered shapes and found they weren’t going anywhere without the help of a forklift. He went closer to the fire, grabbed a pallet, and dragged it to the back wall. He returned, took another, and hauled it away. He got a third from the stack, but by then the fire had spread too far, and he lost the rest of them. He prowled the grotesquely lit floor, looking for more pallets amid the detritus of a hundred and thirty years of papermaking. There were maybe four that were sturdy enough to use. He mentally measured their height against the wall. Stacked up, they might boost him high enough to leap for the casement of one of the windows. They weren’t going to allow him to bring Randy with him.
He had noticed the washroom as he circled through the building. Now he walled away the tiny hammer-beat of panic that was thudding against his ribs and went to check it out. It was small and stinking, as if rodents had died in the walls. The one window was another impossible-to-reach casement. But, he was amazed to see, the gravity-flush toilet still worked, and when he pulled the chain, water gushed into the bowl.
For a moment, he thought about wetting himself down again and making a break for the door. The fire had spread-to his eye, it seemed to be spreading faster than was natural-but one man, soaked and running at top speed, could probably still make it. One unburdened man.
He looked at the water, visible in flashes of firelight. This had probably been the executive washroom in his great-great-grandfather’s day. He felt sad, and sick, and proud, all at once.
He returned to Randy’s side. He could feel the heat now, even back here at the edge of the river-side wall, harsh and oppressive. He knelt down. Randy’s eyes were closed. “Hey, man. Are you still with me?”
“Yep.”
“Great.” Jeremy tried to infuse his words with as much confidence as possible. “Look, we’re going to wait this out until the fire trucks get here. They’re on their way already. Your wife called them.”
“Lisa?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s okay?”
“She’s fine. We’re going to be fine, too. Hang on, I’m going to pick you up. It may hurt.”
Randy’s whimper as Jeremy hauled him off the floor was almost lost in Jeremy’s grunt. “Jeez, man,” he gasped, staggering across the room. “You must be solid muscle.”
“Yeah.” Randy gritted the word out.
Jeremy squeezed sideways through the door of the water closet and laid the other man on the floor. “I’ll be right back,” he said, panting. He grabbed the first tarp he could find and dragged it off its machine and over to the water-closet door. He did the same with another tarp, hurrying, because he could see the fire, literally see it leaping and flowing, claiming more and more of his great-greatgrandfather’s mill. Finally he snatched up a pickle jar he had seen half-revealed by Randy’s backpack. He unscrewed it, dumped the pickles and juice as he bolted for the water closet, and plunged it into the bowl. He poured water over Randy, over himself, over the floor, over the tarps. He poured and flushed, poured and flushed, until he realized that he could see the interior of the tiny room clearly by the light of the fire. The blaze had reached the far wall.
He abandoned the pickle jar in the toilet, heaved the tarps inside the water closet, and shut the door. Feeling his way in the dark, he edged to Randy’s side, tugging the dampened tarps over them until they were both completely covered.
“This reminds me of pretend camping as a kid,” he said. “You know, crawling under a blanket?”
Randy made a noise halfway between agreement and pain. Jeremy stripped off his jacket and, folding it, placed it under Randy’s head. “Don’t get discouraged, man,” Jeremy said. “Help is on the way.”
“I’m sorry,” Randy whispered.
“For trying to blackmail my dad? You should be. When we get out of here, you’re going to go straight, right?”
“I’m sorry… I thought you were a rich snot.”
“I am a rich snot,” Jeremy said, smiling.
“Why are you helping me?”
Jeremy thought for a moment. “Well, you know.” He didn’t know how to put it into words. “You, me, we’re all human beings. We have to do right by each other.”
There was a long pause. Jeremy listened to the muffled sound of the fire’s roar. He didn’t hear any sirens. He told himself he wouldn’t be able to, over the other noise. Finally Randy spoke again. “If you get out of this and I don’t, will you do me a favor?”
“You’re getting out of this. Don’t worry.”
“Will you?”
Jeremy squeezed his eyelids tightly closed. He could feel the hot tears pressing against them. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Tell Becky Castle I’m sorry.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
Jeremy placed his hand over Randy’s shoulder and pressed hard. Randy’s hand fluttered up and patted Jeremy’s hand. They waited, in the damp and stifling dark, two boys under the blanket. Less afraid because neither of them was alone.
Ed Castle’s beeper went off the same moment Lyle MacAuley’s radio crackled to life. Lyle muttered an excuse-me and walked into the hospital hallway.
“What is it?” Suzanne asked quietly. Becky had finally fallen asleep again. She lay folded into her bed like the little girl she had once been. Her fragile whiteness would have blended in with the sheets if not for the purpling bruises blooming across her face.
“Fire,” Ed said, checking the code.
“Do you have to go?”
“Lemme call in and check.” He crossed to Becky’s bedside phone and dialed the dispatch number. It rang, and rang, and rang again. Finally, the line picked up, but before he could say a word, he heard a blurted, “Holdplease” and was left listening to a recorded message giving him alternate numbers to call if he was looking for the town hall, the animal control officer, or the department of motor vehicles. By the time Dispatch came back on, he had worked up a good mad.
“Harlene, what the hell is going on over there? In all the years I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve never had to wait on a fire response call.”
“Who is this?”
He raised his eyebrows. He thought Harlene could recognize every volunteer firefighter by voice. “Ed. Ed Castle.”
“Sorry.” She sounded flustered. He started to worry. He had never, ever heard Harlene flustered. “We got two major fires. The Reid-Gruyn mill and the new resort. Meet your team A.S.A.P. You’ll be supported by Corinth, Glens Falls, and Hudson Falls.”
“Wait-” he said, but she had already clicked off. He was left staring at the phone in his hand.
“Ed?” Suzanne looked questioningly at him.
“The Reid-Gruyn mill’s on fire. And the new resort.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Sounds like they’re turning at least two counties out to respond.”
“The new resort?” Suzanne sucked in a breath, turning toward their daughter. “Oh, lord, Ed. What if Becky…?”
He caught her in a quick one armed hug. “Don’t think about it. We’ve got her here. Whatever else happens, she’s safe now.”
Lyle MacAuley came back in from the hall. “You hear the news?”
Ed nodded. “Any idea what happened?”
Lyle’s face was an outcropping of Adirondack granite. “Chief thinks some sort of ecoterrorism. Who knows, nowadays.”
Ed turned toward his wife. “Suze-”
“Just go,” she said. “We’ll be here waiting when you get back.”
He kept calling and calling Jeremy’s number, but the boy didn’t answer. Shaun was starting to get worried. He had gotten the hell out after the explosion and now was milling around the portico. He wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe he should get into the car with Courtney and head over to Reid-Gruyn. What the hell had Jeremy been on about? An explosion? It had sounded as if it were at the mill, but there was no way that could happen. Could it?
A firefighter shouldered him out of the way. “Excuse me, sir.” They had started arriving a few minutes ago, hook and ladders and water trucks and emergency response vehicles. Lights whirling, hoses unrolling, men and women stomping around in bulky turnout suits. The fire fighter turned at the door and held up a megaphone. “Folks,” he said, his voice electronically amplified. “Please move away from this area. Please move back into the parking lot. Please stay away from the fire equipment so we can do our jobs.”
Like the nearby parking lot was safe. Shaun could see the burned and smoking ruins of one car already. He retreated downslope, instead, crossing the border of large riverstones demarcating the garden area, treading carelessly on the decorative heathers planted below the curving drive. He tried calling the foreman’s desk on the mill floor, but no one answered. He tried Jeremy’s number again. The cool edges of fear stroked his spine and coiled in his belly.
Then he saw Jeremy’s car pull into the lower parking lot. He plunged through the newly landscaped garden, churning up plants and clots of earth. The BMW drove closer and closer to the portico, stopping only when it was blocked by a line of cones. Shaun galloped toward Jeremy, thanking God, promising to mend his ways, whatever they might be. His ankle almost turned on one of the riverstones, and he had to hop over them to catch his balance. The door swung open. “Jeremy!” he called out.
Millie van der Hoeven stepped out.
She seemed as shocked to see him as he was to see her. Then she laughed, a painful, racking laugh. “You thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?”
He was speechless.
“You thought you had me tied up tight in that godforsaken warehouse. One fire, and you get rid of the only witness who could link you to my brother’s murder.”
One fire?
“I was going to… I don’t know, punch you in the gut or something. Bite you again. Let you know what a miserable, despicable failure you are. But you know what? I don’t need to count coup on you.” She turned away from him. Toward the car.
“What-” His voice cracked. “What are you going to do?”
She stopped. Looked at him disbelievingly. “What do you think I’m going to do, you murdering bastard?” She spun on her heel.
He scooped up a fist-sized rock. It was dark down here, below the light and tumult at the resort’s entrance. But even in the dark, he could still throw. He was always good at throwing the ball.
The stone hit her hard, right behind her left ear. She went down with a thud. He strode over to her. Heaved her off the ground and threw her over his shoulder. He didn’t hesitate, as he had done this afternoon. Clearly there was only one course. And what could be more fortunate than a deadly fire close at hand? Shaun moved past the fire trucks and emergency vehicles, toward the far side of the hotel. All he had to do was get inside, somewhere away from the main entrance, and dump her into the flames.
It took him no more than five minutes. Skirting the light and the action, he discovered a side door that had been propped open with a chrome-and-rubber stop. He swung Millie from his shoulders into his arms. It was heavier and a lot less comfortable, but it would present the illusion of a man carrying a woman to safety.
He walked down the hall. He could hear the fire-a smashing, sucking, howling noise. The air was hot and heavy with smoke. He passed a door, opened onto a meeting room, and recognized where he was. The hallway leading to the ballroom. Could he slip into the conference room beside the ballroom and give her a little shove through the door?
“Hey, you!” The voice was weirdly muffled.
Shaun looked up. A firefighter, his face obscured by mask and eye shield, blocked the end of the hall. He had an ax in his hand and an oxygen tank strapped to his back. “You need to get out of here. This area’s not safe.”
Shaun nodded. He turned and walked in the opposite direction. He’d wait outside the doorway until the firefighter moved on, then bring her back. Maybe go upstairs, put her above the ballroom. Bash her a few more times and call it smoke inhalation. Even if the fire didn’t get her, who would know?
“Hey!” the muffled voice again. “That girl.”
Shaun looked down. Millie’s head had lolled back, and her long blond hair was swaying above the Oriental runner.
He kept walking.
“Stop!”
He walked faster. Behind him, he heard the thud of running feet. He broke into a run, but even his athlete’s body couldn’t function at peak with a hundred and forty pounds of young woman in his arms.
The firefighter’s tackle knocked him to the carpet. The girl bounced and rolled, coming to rest on her back, her head tilted to one side.
A hand grabbed his jacket and flipped him over. The firefighter set his ax, blade side down, against Shaun’s sternum. With his other hand, he shoved the face shield up and tugged his oxygen mask down.
Shaun frowned. It was… it was… He blinked. It was Ed Castle, the guy who supplied his pulp.
“What,” Ed Castle said, “are you doing with my daughter’s college roommate?”
Russ had finished getting a radio briefing from Lyle MacAuley on the three-alarm fire that was consuming the old mill on the Reid-Gruyn property. He turned to the newly arrived Mark Durkee and Noble Entwhistle. “What’s the flammable version of ‘It never rains, but it pours?’ ” Mark shrugged his shoulders. “Okay,” Russ said. “We’re going to need some crowd and traffic control here. I want you to-”
Someone grabbed his shoulder. He looked around at John Huggins. “Hey,” Huggins said. “I got a radio squawk from one of my guys. He’s calling for paramedics and the cops.” He pointed toward the edge of the hotel. “Go around there. The second door. It’ll be open.”
Huggins strode away before Russ could acknowledge the information. “You heard the man,” he said, pointing to Mark. “Let’s go.”
From the corner of his eye, Russ saw two paramedics from the Corinth squad shouldering their rolled pallet and medical kits. He let Mark lead, trusting his younger, keener night vision to find them footing.
They found the door. The firefighter who called them in was close by.
“Lookit who I found,” Ed said.
Mark knelt by Millie. “She’s got a bloody laceration at the back of her skull,” he said. “But she’s alive.”
Russ looked at Shaun a long moment. Then he looked at the man holding the ax. “Ed,” he said. He paused. He didn’t know what to say. “Thank you,” he finally got out.
Ed nodded. “It was her hair caught my eye. Like Becky’s.”
Russ pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “Mark,” he said wearily. “Will you cuff Mr. Reid and inform him of his rights?”
Clare and Deacon Aberforth sat in Hugh Parteger’s car together, keeping warm.
“Do you think they’ll stop it?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m sure they will.” She looked through the window at the carnival of lights and hoses and moving reflective stripes. She sighed.
“I wonder if I’ll be able to get back to my room?”
“You can bunk in the rectory tonight, Father.”
He smiled at her for the first time. “You know, before all this, I would have said that was totally unacceptable.”
“And now?”
“And now, I think I’ll just say, ‘Thank you.’ ”
Clare leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.
“Ms. Fergusson.”
She opened them again.
“I suspect you and I disagree on quite a number of things, including homosexuality, the proper degree of episcopal control of a parish, and, for all I know, the doctrines of immutable grace and virgin birth.”
“I may be a liberal, Father, but that doesn’t mean I’ve fallen under the sway of Bishop Spong.”
“No. No, I suppose not. And we are called to remember what unites us in Christ, not what divides us in the world.”
“Amen,” she said. The car’s heater kicked in again, and her skirt rustled in the blower’s blast.
“What I’m trying to say is, I recognize I must seem like a hopelessly outdated fossil to you.”
She prudently kept her mouth shut.
“But I have lived a good number of years. I’ve seen quite a lot of the world. It may surprise you to know that I served in the marines as a young man.”
“You’re kidding.”
“In Korea.”
“I’m impressed.”
“And I’m a widower.”
She paused. It was difficult to imagine Willard Aberforth in a marital relationship. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m not saying this to garner your sympathy but to let you know that I’ve attained a good deal of knowledge about human nature. And about men and women.” He looked at her. His black eyes were a good deal less intimidating than they had been earlier. It was hard, she guessed, to keep your back up around someone wearing striped pajamas.
“I saw you, earlier.”
She was silent.
“When I was at the bar, after you left, the man you… were with… came through the lobby. With a woman who acted very much like a wife. Was I mistaken?”
“No. You must have a good eye for body language.”
He sighed. “Unlike you, I cannot offer confession and absolution.”
“No,” she said.
“But I can offer a quiet, listening heart. And whatever insight my years have left me with.”
Clare closed her eyes. She felt… taut, as if her skin were stretched around this secret she was stuffed with. She tried to live her life with integrity. But integrity required her to be integrated. To be one whole person, whether alone in her house or in front of an entire ballroom full of people.
She opened her eyes. Beyond the crazy emergency lights she could see the mountains. And the moon.
“When I met Russ Van Alstyne, I thought of him simply as a friend,” she started. “Our relationship seemed like”-she thought for a moment-“a meeting of true minds.”
He found her sitting in Parteger’s car, her skirts practically up to her nose, deep in conversation with an old guy in pajamas and an overcoat. He knocked on the window. She rolled it down.
“Guess what?” he said.
“After tonight? I wouldn’t dare try.”
“We’ve found Millie van der Hoeven.”
She smiled brilliantly. “Oh, Russ, that’s wonderful. Finally, some good news.”
“She’s been resting up in one of the ambulances, but before she goes, she’d like to meet you.”
“Me? Whatever for?”
“I told her about you being on the search party and talking with her brother and all. Will you come?”
She looked at the old fellow. “Will you excuse me?”
“Of course,” he said.
She maneuvered her skirts out of the car. She was still wearing Russ’s tuxedo jacket. “I see you found a replacement,” she said, fingering the heavy parka he was wearing.
“I borrowed it.” He turned his back, to show her the words FIRE CHIEF in reflective letters.
“Why am I not surprised you found one that says ‘chief’?”
He smiled to himself.
“Did you find your Mom okay?”
“Yeah, She and Nane and the rest of the ACC gardeners were already outside when the crates blew. They’ve all gone to the Kreemy Kakes diner to talk the evening over.”
“How are the firefighters doing?” she asked.
“Not bad. The ballroom, the kitchen, and the conference room next to the ballroom are a complete loss, and there’s serious structural damage to the floor above them, but they’ve managed to contain it.”
“Thank God.”
“Was Millie behind the bombing? Or the PLA?”
“No.” He didn’t elaborate on what the van der Hoeven sisters had already told him.
He pointed to where the Corinth ambulance was parked. Several people milled around the open back doors. “Are those the corporate honchos from GWP?” Clare asked.
“Yep. Millie and her sister insisted on signing the documents transferring Haudenosaunee before they left for the hospital.”
“Wow. That’s dedicated.”
Ahead of them, the delegation from GWP finished bowing and shaking hands. Russ and Clare hung back a moment until they had cleared out. Then he urged her forward. “Millie, this is Reverend Clare Fergusson. Clare, I think you’ve already met Millie’s sister, Louisa.”
Clare shook hands with Millie, who reclined on the ambulance bed with a bandage on her head. Louisa sat next to her sister, holding her hand. One of them looked like a San Franciscan socialite, and the other looked like she’d come out of a brawl in a lumber camp, but their resemblance to each other-and to their late brother-was notable.
“Millie, I’m delighted to meet you. And find you safe and relatively sound.”
Millie touched her bandage tentatively. “Thank you. Chief Van Alstyne told us about all you did to help me. And my friend Becky.”
Clare shook her head. “I was just one of the search team.” She hesitated. “I’ve already told Louisa, but I’m so very sorry about the loss of your brother.”
Tears filled the young woman’s eyes. She nodded.
“I understand your car is one of tonight’s casualties,” Louisa said. “Please allow us to make restitution.”
Russ thought of the twisted, smoking wreck that was her Shelby Cobra. “Oh,” Clare said gamely, “I have insurance.”
“Nevertheless.” Louisa looked at her sister. “And we’d like to explain to you,” she looked at Russ, “why we believe Gene was solely responsible for tonight’s carnage.”
There was a long pause. Clare looked at Russ. He shrugged. Millie had disclaimed the IEDs earlier, and he was pretty sure further investigation of the physical evidence was going to prove her statement, but he didn’t know what this was about.
“I feel responsible,” Millie said. “I was the one who brought the land sale up. I knew Gene was attached to Haudenosaunee, but I didn’t realize…”
Louisa looked at Clare and Russ. “I believe it’s common knowledge that Gene’s lived a reclusive life at Haudenosaunee since the fire that destroyed the old camp and took his mother’s life.”
Russ nodded.
“What is not commonly known-in fact, no one outside the family knew-was that… Gene…”
“Gene started that fire.” Millie’s face was as expressionless as her inflection.
“His mother had gotten primary custody of him, and he didn’t want to go. He loved to… tinker with things. Make things.”
“Things that blew up?” Clare asked bluntly.
Louisa nodded. “I don’t think he actually meant to hurt her…”
“Yes, he did,” Millie said. “He hated her, and he didn’t want to leave Daddy and Haudenosaunee. So he waited until she was alone in the old camp, and he set off his firebomb.”
“Good heavens,” Clare said, which was a lot milder than what Russ was going to say. “That’s a pretty big secret to carry around for all those years.” She searched both the sisters’ faces. “Are you sure, though, that means Eugene was responsible for tonight’s violence?”
“He locked me in the tower,” Millie said. “He slipped something in my drink last night during dinner. I don’t know what. I couldn’t remember anything when I woke up this morning.”
“Probably roofie. Rohypnol,” Russ explained. “Makes you extremely susceptible to suggestion and wipes out your memory. He could have told you to walk to the tower and climb the stairs and you wouldn’t recall doing it.”
“He did it to keep me away from the ceremony,” Millie said. “So I wouldn’t get hurt.”
“He didn’t tell me to keep away,” Louisa said. Her mouth drew taut, as if its strings had been yanked shut.
“Lou, I’m sure he had some plan up his sleeve. He didn’t want to hurt you.”
“No,” Russ said, “just the leadership of the ACC and the GWP corporate brass.” All three women looked at him.
“Oh, my God,” Clare said. “This afternoon, when I agreed to deliver the cases of wine for him, Eugene told me to leave the ballroom and come outside at nine o’clock. And bring my friends. He told me he was going to set off fireworks.”
Everyone looked out the open ambulance door, to where the night was alive with whirling lights and color.
“And so he did,” Clare said, so quietly Russ doubted the van der Hoevens heard her.
His phone rang. He excused himself and jumped out of the ambulance. “Van Alstyne here.”
“Russ? It’s Lyle. I’m calling to update you on the Reid-Gruyn fire.”
Russ listened while Lyle told him the news. He thought about Becky Castle, and Ed, and about Shaun and his new young wife, and about Lisa-the-housekeeper. He thought about Mark and Rachel Durkee. It’s true, he thought. We are all related. If not by blood, then by bonds we don’t even realize. Until they’re gone.
He walked back to the ambulance in time to hear Clare saying, “Let’s be thankful for at least this. No matter what the damage, it’s been confined to things. Things can be replaced. At least no people have been hurt.”
“I’m afraid that’s not true.” The ambulance dipped under his weight as he climbed in. “I just got off the phone with my deputy chief. He’s been monitoring the fire over at the Reid-Gruyn mill. It seems Randy Schoof and Jeremy Reid were caught in the old mill. They’ve both been confirmed dead.”
Millie van der Hoeven burst into tears.
Lisa Schoof sat in the back seat of her brother-in-law’s cruiser. It was dark, very dark, except where it was lit by the light of the still-burning fire. Every once in a while someone would come up to her and ask if she was okay, if she wanted to go to the hospital, if she could answer a few questions. She didn’t reply; even if they opened the door, their voices remained behind thick glass, and eventually Mark spotted whoever was bothering her and shooed him away.
She tilted her head against the back of the seat. She was tired. So very tired.
Once, when she and Rachel were kids, they had spent the day sledding down a hill behind their grandfather’s pasture. They had been cold, then colder, and finally their toes and fingers ached and pinched with the bite of it. But they had dared each other to stay out till dark, and Lisa had found that after a while, the pain went away, and she felt nothing at all.
That was how she felt now. Numb. And tired.
She had thought, when the firetrucks arrived, that would be the end of it. So many of them, and so many men, tossing hoses into the river, sending great sprays of water arching over the old mill. She stood on the scrubgrounds surrounded by Reid-Gruyn workers, the plant emptied out, and someone had said, “Thank God it didn’t start in the new mill,” and she had turned and said, “My husband’s in there,” and they all fell silent and drew away from her.
But still, she believed the firefighters would save him. Him and the man who had gone in to get him out. She believed, right up until the moment when, with a series of cracks and pops that echoed through the night like artillary fire, the joists and braces that had held up the old mill for one hundred and thirty years gave way. The roof collapsed inward with the flaming roar of a dying forest, blasting out great gouts of fire that scattered the firefighters and made the onlookers stumble back in shock and awe.
Randy was gone.
She couldn’t remember what she had been thinking of when she ran, screaming, toward the fire. Someone had tackled her, several someones, and held her down while she thrashed and screamed and clawed, until the paramedics appeared and gave her a shot, one of them kneeling on her chest and another one immobilizing her arm.
Now she was numb.
Mark had asked her some questions-about Randy, and Becky Castle, and Shaun Reid. She had answered them because it was the quickest way to get him to stop bothering her. After that, he left her alone. And kept the others away.
Outside, she could hear someone crying, and Mark’s voice, and then the squad car door opened and Rachel was there, saying, “Lisa. Oh, Lisa,” in a tear-clogged voice.
Lisa let her weeping sister wrap her arms around her shoulders and hold her. She wanted to tell her it was okay. She wanted to ask her if she remembered that day sledding, and the sun going down, and the numbness. But she was too tired to talk. So she let Rachel choke and sob over her, and she closed her eyes against the darkness and the light.
Compline
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless thy dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
Clare rolled to a stop and turned off the lights. “Here we are.”
“Let’s go,” Russ said without moving. “You must be exhausted.”
“I’m not, surprisingly. I think I’ve gotten my second wind.” She had shuttled Hugh to the Stuyvesant Inn and Deacon Aberforth to the rectory before returning to the Algonquin Waters resort-or what was left of it-to pick up Russ. He had been adamant about getting a ride with one of his officers, but when she pointed out that they could drop her at the rectory first, and that he’d be doing her a favor by returning Hugh’s car to him on Sunday, he agreed.
“How’s Mark?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess. I took him off duty as soon as I found out about Randy Schoof. I think they were all planning on going over to his in-laws’ house. I’m sure it’ll help the girls, being with their parents.”
“Mmm. I have to remember to call tomorrow and ask if I can do anything.”
“You mean today. It’s Sunday.”
“Is it?”
“Has been for two hours.”
She wrapped his dinner jacket, which she hadn’t taken off yet, more tightly around her. She liked the smell of it. “Now you’re fifty years and one day old.”
“I’ve decided I’m not going to have another birthday until I turn sixty. Maybe by then the town will have recovered from this one.”
“I wonder what you’ll be like when you’re sixty?”
“A geezer, just like everybody else.”
She grinned into the darkness. “Nah. I bet you’ll be all dashing and sexy, like John Glenn.”
“John Glenn? The astronaut? You think he’s sexy?”
“Yep.”
“You have some serious father issues you’re working out, don’t you?”
She laughed.
“Clare?”
Something in his voice made her laughter die away. “Yeah?”
“I decided something tonight.”
She took a breath. “What?”
“I’ve decided to tell Linda. About us. About my feelings for you.”
Say something, Clare. Say something. “Oh.”
“I can’t be dishonest with her anymore. She’s been beside me every step of the way for the last twenty-five years, and now I’ve walked so far afield we can’t even find one another with a map. I need to do something about it. I’ve decided to start by being truthful.”
“What do you think her reaction is going to be?”
He laughed briefly. “Damned if I know. Somewhere between shooting me and giving me her blessing, I think.”
“What if she asks you to cut off all contact with me? That wouldn’t be unreasonable, you know. A lot of marriage counselors would probably recommend it.” She forced herself to consider, dispassionately, what might be best for Russ. “Maybe it would be better.”
He looked at her in the darkness. “It wouldn’t be better. It would kill me. The thing about all this is, Linda loves me. I don’t think she’d ask me to do something that will”-he searched for the right word-“eviscerate me.”
She reached for his hand. He interlaced his fingers with hers. I’m going to have to be the one, she thought. When the time comes, I’m going to have to be the one to break it off. She squeezed his hand, and he tightened his fingers in return. Lord God, give me strength.
“C’mon,” he said. “Time to get you into bed.”
She laughed. He paused, not getting it for a second, and then groaned. She opened the door, leaving the keys in for him. He held out his hand, and she went around the side of the car and caught it, interlacing her fingers in his again.
“Look at that moon,” he said.
She looked to where it was riding, halfway to the horizon.
“We had dinner,” he said, “but we never danced.”
“Nobody danced. The bandstand blew up and the instruments melted.”
He tugged her off the driveway and onto the front lawn. The frost on the grass was pure silver in the moonlight. She could feel it, chilling her feet.
“Dance with me,” he said.
“You’re moonstruck,” she said.
He placed one hand at the small of her back and took the other in a proper dancing position. “No, I’m not. I’m alive, and you’re alive, and we don’t know where we’ll be twenty-four hours from now. So let’s dance while we can.”
He began singing a melancholy, wordless tune. “Dum-da-dum, da-dee-da-dumdum, dum-da-dum, da-dee-da-dumdum.” His free hand nudged her back, and the next thing she knew, they were waltzing, her skirts swishing through the frost, his feet crunching the frozen grass. She recognized the melody suddenly. “Ashokan Farewell,” from the Civil War documentary.
She chimed in, her alto humming above his baritone, the sleeves of his dinner jacket falling over her hands, and they danced, beneath the November moon, to sad, sweet music they made themselves.