A Fountain Filled With Blood

“I considered that. Problem is, his actions are consistent with McKinley’s story. Neither Emil Dvorak nor Todd MacPherson was robbed. And that video store had a lot of walking-around money in it.”

MacAuley plucked at his uniform shirt in a hopeless attempt to air it out. “Maybe he was a freak. Maybe he really did believe he was destined to wipe out homosexuals or something. Maybe he’s got a bunch of pamphlets tucked away in his apartment, with his manifesto and a call to arms on ’em. We haven’t cataloged near everything yet.”

Dr. Scheeler interrupted. “Gentlemen, you’re getting well out of my area of expertise. I’m going to bid you good night. Chief Van Alstyne, I’ll have my report to you as soon as possible.”

“Thanks, Doc. And thanks for being available to go to the scene on such short notice. We’re usually not this busy.”

The medical examiner’s teeth shone whitely in the darkness. “That’s okay. My patients never complain.” His car door thunked behind him and he backed out of his parking spot. Russ could hear Faith Hill on the radio, wailing away about breathing as the doctor drove away.

He turned back toward MacAuley. “I want to keep Noble tracking down anyone who knew Chris Dessaint. I want to know the people he ran with, what he liked to do, and whether or not he might have played McKinley and Colvin. First thing in the morning, we’re going back to his trailer and taking apart everything we didn’t touch the first time. Maybe we’ll find something that’ll let us close this case.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful.”

Russ sighed. He took off his glasses and tried to find a clean, dry spot on his shirt to polish them. “We still have that APB out on Jason Colvin?”

“Yeah.”

“We need to update it. Let everyone know the suspect we’re looking for may already be dead.”

Chapter Twenty-One

It was fifteen minutes after they left Robert Corlew’s boat slip in the marina that Clare finally understood, really understood, why someone would voluntarily live through winter after brutal winter in the north country. They had motored out past the docks, the mainsail billowing, until they passed some unmarked point and Corlew turned the boat away from the wind, swung out the boom, and told her and Terry Wright to run up the jib. The forty-two-foot boat surged forward like a thoroughbred let out at the Saratoga racetrack. Clare stood clutching the mast with one hand, half-sheltered from the brilliant sunlight by the red-and-white curve of the jib sail, as the boat surged and rose repeatedly beneath the soft soles of her old Keds. Ahead of her, the long lake stretched out forever. Its water, a forbidding slab of black in the winter, was dancing blue now, a thousand sparks of spray and sunlight flashing all around her. And at the shoreline, the mountains rose up out of the water, smoky blue and alpine green. It was like living in a fairy tale. She half-expected to see a white-towered castle rearing out of the forest.

“I think Story Land amusement park is over there somewhere.” Terry Wright waved in the direction of the opposite shore, where a little town emerged from the forest in a clutter of bright-roofed houses that ran down to the water’s edge. The rotund banker eased himself down until he was sitting on the deck, his feet braced against the low lip running beneath the rail line. Clare followed suit.

“I was just thinking it looked as if there ought to be a castle here somewhere.”

“There are. Fort Ticonderoga, at the head of the lake, at the point where it meets with Lake Champlain. And behind us, Fort William Henry. Fought over by the French and the Indians, the British, and the colonists. This place was called ‘the key to the continent’ in the eighteenth century. There’s been a lot of blood spilled into these waters at one time or another.” He smiled, his round cheeks sunburned underneath his enormous mustache. “That’s not, by the way, a hint that there will be today.”

Clare laughed. “Fair enough.” She leaned back on her elbows, closing her eyes and letting the sun sink into her bones. “Hard to imagine wars here at the moment. It seems like heaven to me.”

“There was a war over heaven, too, wasn’t there? And now look. The place is overrun with tourists, just like Lake George. Of course, heaven isn’t closed between October and May. I hope not anyway.” He laughed. Terry’s infectious laugh gave him a reputation as a comic because it made listeners join in even if what he said wasn’t particularly funny.

“What are you two nattering on about up there?” Mrs. Marshall’s voice cut through the rush of the water and the wind. “Come down here and join us. Robert’s breaking out the drinks.”

Clare followed Terry along the edge of the deck and dropped beside him onto a well-padded bench in the boat’s cockpit. Mrs. Marshall and Sterling Sumner were occupying the opposite bench, Sterling holding the wheel steady with one hand. His ever-present scarf, in deference to the eighty-degree weather, was of jaunty striped silk rather than wool, and one long end fluttered in the breeze.

As she bounced into place, Robert Corlew leaned out of the hatch, his wide shoulders nearly filling the space. The developer had unusually thick hair that sprang with suspicious abruptness from his forehead. Clare had thought today might be the day when she would finally be able to verify that it was a rug, but Corlew had a captain’s cap jammed firmly onto his head, hiding everything underneath. He handed two tall glasses up to Mrs. Marshall. “Lacey, gin and tonics for you and Sterling.” He turned his attention to the other bench. “Reverend Clare, Terry, what’s your poison?”

“Beer,” said Terry. “If I don’t keep working on it, this belly will disappear.” He laughed again.

“Same here,” Clare said. Corlew ducked out of sight and reappeared a moment later with two bottles, ice-cold and dripping. Clare handed Terry Wright his bottle and tilted hers back, drinking down a third of the beer at one go. “Boy, this sun sure makes you thirsty,” she said, lowering the bottle.

Mrs. Marshall was staring at her with exactly the same expression Grandmother Fergusson used the time she caught Clare in a burping contest with her cousins. Too late, Clare noticed the pair of glasses Corlew was holding in his other hand. Silently, he handed one to Terry, who proceeded to pour his beer. Corlew proffered the other glass to her.

“Unless you’d rather…” Swill it down like that, Clare thought, finishing the sentence for him. She smiled weakly and accepted the glass, then dutifully poured and handed her bottle back to Corlew.

I’m thirty-five years old, she reminded herself. I’m these people’s spiritual adviser. I’m not going to be intimidated by the fact that they’re all old enough to be my parents. She glanced at Mrs. Marshall. Or grandparents.

Robert climbed back out of the hatch with his own beer, in a glass, and slipped behind the large wheel to sit on the transom locker at the very stern of the boat. “Cheers, everyone,” he said, and raised his glass.

“Cheers,” they all replied.

Clare twisted in her seat to look back at the shoreline slipping past them. A boardwalk jutted into the water, crammed with arcades, T-shirt shops, and rickety stands selling Italian sausages and fried dough. A redheaded man, bearded and bespectacled, was trying to keep a pair of skinny kids from falling off the edge of the pier. The children, holding clouds of cotton candy bigger than their heads, waved energetically at the boat. Clare waved to them and turned back toward her companions, inexplicably buoyed up again. It was too beautiful a day to feel bad, and the thought gave her another epiphany. The long, hard winter had given her an appreciation for the summer that she had never had before. The sun, the clear blue sky, the green and growing things were blessings that she enumerated day by day, because they would be gone in a twinkling, in a heartbeat. Winter was the default here, with summer a brief and glorious escape. She felt that this ought to provide her with some solid spiritual insight, but all she could think was that she now understood why no one was attending the Sunday services.

“You’re looking particularly thoughtful, Ms. Fergusson.” Mrs. Marshall, silver-haired and elegant, could never bring herself to address Clare either by her first name or as Reverend Fergusson. Clare couldn’t blame her for the latter—she herself had grown up hearing that the word reverend was an adjective, not a title. Her grandmother Fergusson would no more have addressed a priest as Reverend than she would have attended services without a hat. Of course, Grandmother Fergusson’s priests had all been male. Father was not a title that Clare would choose. She supposed she would have to either get her doctorate in divinity or rise to a post in the Episcopal hierarchy in order to get a proper gender-free title. Bishop Fergusson…

“Isn’t this the point where you say, ‘I’m sure you’re all wondering why I brought you here’?” Sterling Sumner said. The word Clare usually applied to Sterling, in the deepest recesses of her mind, was disagreeable. In vestry meetings, the architect was impatient and prone to dismiss the opinions of others as uninformed. Today, his face was pinched into an expression that suggested irritable bowel syndrome.

Robert Corlew broke in before she could answer him. “I think we all know what we’re here to talk about. Let me try to frame the issue. We’ve had some very unfortunate episodes of violence this summer around Millers Kill.”

Clare opened her mouth to point out that a bloody murder was a bit more than an unfortunate episode, but then she thought better of it and shut it again.

“It appears that there may be a connection between the attacks and the victims’ lifestyles. In other words, all the men involved were homosexuals. Reverend Clare made a statement to the press, expressing her opinions. I’m sure you all saw it. Now, if I understand what she’s told me, she wants St. Alban’s to get involved in some way.” He sat back down on the transom chest so abruptly, Clare was startled. She had expected him to start in on what he wanted to see happen.

Everyone looked at Clare.

She could feel things slipping out of control, her own waspish reaction ready to burst forth, her impatience with having to deal with these people.

Not these people. My people, came the thought. Her thought? She wasn’t sure. But she knew what she had to do. She put her glass into one of the cup holders molded into the side of the bench.

“I’d like us to start with a prayer,” she said. Corlew looked surprised, then nodded. She watched each of them as they gathered into themselves. Mrs. Marshall folded her hands neatly beneath her chin. Sterling ducked his head and covered his face with one splayed-fingered hand. Corlew, still standing at the wheel, tilted his head back, a practical position that left his eyes half-lidded but still able to see. Terry Wright laced his fingers together easily and rested them in his lap, head bowed. For a moment, she wished she could bring them together, hold hands, and pray, but they were all Episcopalians, after all, and holding hands was not the way things were done. It would only make them uncomfortable.

“Lord God,” she said, “if there’s one thing we know about You, it’s that You love boats. You chose fishermen to be Your companions, and You walked to them across the water to quell their fear and doubts. Be with our company in this boat, Lord, and help us to remember that, quarreling and disputatious as we might be, we are all Your apostles. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Everyone repeated the amen, and there was a moment when they all looked up and around them at the taut sails and the sun and the fast-slapping water racing past their hull.

“My thought is this,” Clare said. “I believe we have an obligation to speak out against hate crimes. I believe that we can’t, in conscience, stand aside and witness attacks like these happening and not come forward and say, ‘This is wrong.’ ”

“But there’s no doubt that it’s wrong,” Terry Wright said in his mild, reasonable voice. “It was obvious from the papers that the attacks were horrific and that the police are going after the culprits with everything they’ve got. What more could we do?”

“It’s not as if the news of Ingraham’s murder was followed by editorials ripping up gays for their lifestyle choice,” Corlew said. “I can personally attest to the fact that not one person I’ve met over the course of the past week has said anything along the lines of ‘Good, they’ve got it coming to ’em.’ ”

“My position is very simple. I don’t want to see St. Alban’s name dragged through the mud again,” Sterling Sumner said. “After last winter’s debacle, I say we need to keep our heads down and our noses clean. Where is all this going to lead? People associating our name with crime and homosexuality. That’ll be bringing new recruits in by the busload. You do remember that we wanted you to increase membership, don’t you?”

“There are three new families attending St. Alban’s since I became rector,” she said.

He sniffed. “That’s a start….”

“I haven’t been here a year yet!”

“Calm down, Reverend Clare. No one is questioning your ability to get the job done. Get up on top of the bench, will you?” Corlew turned the wheel slightly and released the jib several inches. The boat responded by keeling starboard, away from the wind, and Clare and Terry stepped up on the padded seat and sat on the outer edge of the cockpit, leaning against the yaw of the boat.

“Sterling’s raised a valid point,” Mrs. Marshall said, taking a small sip from her gin and tonic. “How do you answer it, Ms. Fergusson?”

“I don’t think anyone would mistake our concern for victims of crime as an association with crime, any more than our mentoring program for teen mothers is a stamp of approval for girls getting pregnant.”

“Another idea of which I did not approve,” Sterling said.

Clare ignored that. “And as for people shunning us because of our known association with homosexuals”—here she wiggled her eyebrows, because she sounded ridiculously like Joseph McCarthy—“I say we don’t want new members who would think like that. We want people who will admire us for taking a stand and who will say, ‘Yes, that’s Christianity; that’s how I want to live it and that’s the church I want to belong to.’ ”

“So what is it you envision us doing, dear?”

Clare bit back a smile. She thought Mrs. Marshall’s endearment was a slip of the tongue, but it was a sweet one. She had to confess that it didn’t throw her so much when the eighty-year-old lady treated her as a girl instead of a leader. It was the men she had to whip into shape.

“Nothing aggressive or in-your-face. But noticeable. Something that makes us and our support of our neighbors visible.”

“How about a one-eighth-page block ad in the Post-Star?” Sumner said.

She looked directly at him. “Sterling, what would you do if you wanted to tell your community that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, were accepted and valued?”

“Huh.” Sumner jerked one end of his scarf. “The truth is, not all people are accepted and valued. Whether it’s because of their so-called sexual orientation or just because they’re unlettered idiots.” Mrs. Marshall murmured a reproving sound. “I can’t help it, Lacey,” Sumner said. “It goes against my grain. These men running around, doing whatever they want to, with no sense of discretion—”

“I rather think that’s the point,” Mrs. Marshall said. She laid a hand over Sumner’s arm. “That people can live their lives without having to fear that a slip of the tongue or being seen in the wrong place at the wrong time will make them pariahs.”

She knows. That was Clare’s first thought, and she realized there was something very old here between these two friends, old and buried, but not forgotten. She felt suddenly ashamed that she had been trying to maneuver Sumner into a corner.

Corlew looked at Terry Wright, discomfort and determination chasing each other on his face. “We’re not trying to make anyone a pariah. We’re simply looking out for our own.” Clare opened her mouth and he shot a hand up, waving the words away. “No, no, sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“I think, gentlemen and ladies, that Clare is right.” As always, Terry’s voice was easy, jovial—the dealmaker making a deal. “I think we could have easily sidestepped the whole issue, but now that our, ah, energetic young priest has brought it up, we’re not going to get away without some show of support. If for no other reason than if we don’t, we’ll feel like a bunch of bigots.”

Sumner made a noise.

“So we might as well come to an agreement on how we’re going to stand up and be counted. Clare?”

“I was thinking of a march from St. Alban’s to the town hall and—”

“No. No marches.” Corlew slugged back some of his beer. “The downtown merchant’s association would kill us.”

“He’s right,” Terry said.

“Maybe we could have a fund-raiser?” Mrs. Marshall suggested. “A dinner dance. It’s short notice, but we could probably get together a committee and be able to present it by mid-September.”

Clare shook her head. “I think that’s too removed in time from what’s happening now. Besides, a dinner dance is private by definition. We need something public. How about a rally in Riverside Park?”

“You mean like that damned antidevelopment group?” Corlew’s skin took on an alarming purple shade. “Those tree-huggers? Those backward, head-in-the-sand—”

“Well,” Clare said, “not exactly like them, no. I was thinking we would get a permit, for one….”

“I don’t think a rally is a good idea,” Mrs. Marshall said. “After all, they rather depend on a large crowd for their effectiveness, don’t they? Otherwise, all you have is a handful of malcontents talking to one another.”

“A candlelight vigil,” Sumner said.

They all looked at him. “What?” Clare said.

“What are we? A church. What do people think of when they think of a church? Quiet, hymns, candles. You want to draw attention to the church’s stance. Is this going to happen by marching through crowds of tourists in the middle of the day? No, it is not. You want contrast. People, at night. Light and darkness. Some music—not that dreadful guitar-strumming ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ protest stuff. Something that works as a counterpoint—a solo voice or a single wind instrument.”

They all looked at him.

“You’re thinking of this in terms of a military campaign. Think of it as a design problem. You have a message that may be uncomfortable or unpleasant to some. You have to create the appeal, the comfort.”

“Sterling,” Clare said. “I think you must be a remarkable architect.”

He snorted. “Mostly retired now. I do teach a bit, though, at Skidmore and down in Albany. One thing I tell my students is that there is always a solution to a design problem.”

“Sounds good to me,” Corlew said. “As long as you keep it nice and peaceful.”

“And don’t block any storefronts!” Terry added.

“In front of town hall,” Clare said. “Peaceful. And tasteful.”

The four vestry members and their priest looked at one another in wary agreement, as if not trusting the fragile accord to bear the weight of anything more enthusiastic.

“Maybe getting known as a more liberal parish won’t be so bad,” Corlew said.

“We can hardly get a rep as a more conservative group,” Terry said. “I think the last parish census showed the average age of our congregants was fifty-six. It’s not like we’ve been bringing new blood into St. Alban’s with what we’ve been doing.”

“Didn’t someone say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting new results?” Clare said.

“That holds true until you start thinking about having children, dear,” Mrs. Marshall said.

“Or playing the stock market,” Terry added.

There was another pause. Clare could hear the quick thwap-thwap-thwapping of the sail as it lost the wind. “I’m going to tack,” Corlew said. He hauled in the jib and released the boom. Clare and Terry dropped down into the bench and ducked as the boat turned and the boom sliced through the air over their heads. “Reverend Clare, can you get up there and tie off the boom?” he asked. “Terry, take the wheel. I’m going below for a sec.”

She scrambled over the hatch and secured the boom in its new position. The wind had lessened from its earlier slipstream rush and now the boat sailed up the lake like a determined woman through a crowded fairground, sweeping past the people and the glittering carny amusements, making her way steadily up the midway, headed for the open air.

She stood mastside for a few minutes, feeling the easy motion of the boat through her feet, hearing Corlew clumping around in the cabin below and the square clinking of ice in glasses.

“Reverend Clare, you want another one?” Corlew twisted backward to see her from the hatch.

She slid down to the rail deck and walked to the cockpit. “I’d better not. I’ve got to drive. And tonight’s that party at Peggy Landry’s.”

“Is that Margaret Landry? I used to know her mother,” Mrs. Marshall said. “How did you come to meet her? I don’t believe any of the Landrys have attended St. Alban’s since old Mr. Landry died, and that was before the war. World War Two,” she added.

Clare sat on the edge of the cockpit and braced her feet against the seat cushion. “Her niece Diana is getting married at St. Alban’s next month. She and her fiancé have been putting off their premarital counseling sessions, and when I pushed Diana on it, Peggy asked me to come to her house and sit down with them before this party. I guess she figured she owed me a dinner if I drove out there for counseling. I have to confess I’m not wild about attending. Standing around making small talk with a bunch of New Yorkers. Plus, I’ll have to wear heels. I hate wearing heels.” She waggled one sneaker-shod foot.

“I hope we’re getting a good donation for the use of the church,” Terry said. He reached past Clare’s legs and accepted a new beer from Corlew. “We’re becoming awfully popular with the wedding crowd. Maybe we ought to institute a series of fees. You know, one rate if you have some family connection, another if you’re a total stranger. It’s not as if their pledges are supporting our expenses.”

“Peggy ought to be good for a hefty chunk of change, after what she got in that deal with BWI.” Corlew emerged from the hatch with his own drink and took the wheel from Terry. “Word is, that spa is going to put her into the big leagues. I didn’t think she was ever going to be able to unload that white elephant, to tell you the truth. I know someone out of Albany who looked pretty seriously at trying a vacation condo community there, but it never went through.”

“Why not?” Clare asked.

“Who knows? It’s a tough site. Environmental impact, the old PCB issue, and it’s remote. People want to vacation where they can reach things, not where they have to drive half an hour to get a burger and a movie. Peggy needed an outfit like BWI, with deep pockets and a long-term plan. They’re going to need to pump a hell of a lot of money into that place for the first few years.”

“You mean to build the place? Or to keep it running?”

“To build clientele,” Terry said. “It usually takes several years for any resort or vacation-oriented property to have enough name recognition to start making money, instead of spending it. Even when there’s an established attraction nearby, like a good ski resort or”—he waved a hand, encompassing the water and mountains around them—“a lake. When the bank structures a loan for a resort-related development, we figure in a minimum of three years before we can expect any profit.”

“So BWI isn’t just going to build the place and put in the staff. They have to keep it afloat for the next several years?”

“That’s why BWI is the perfect partner for Peggy,” Corlew said. “They don’t wait for visitors to discover nearby attractions. They are the attraction. I’d love to know how a small-time player like Peggy got their attention.”

Sumner cleared his throat. “I understand that Landry’s nephew was a particular friend of the late Bill Ingraham.”

“What?”

“Get out!”

“Where on earth did you hear that?”

He affected a pained expression. “I normally avoid gossip at all costs, but still, one hears things.” He leaned forward, and everyone else leaned in, as well. “I understand that the boy is what might have been called a gold digger by an earlier generation. What I heard is that he latched onto Bill Ingraham as his sugar daddy. At some point during their friendship, the boy introduced Ingraham to Peggy and she, evidently, put on the full-court press. Next thing you know, good-bye, white elephant, hello, Algonquin Spa.”

Clare sat back up. “But I heard Ingraham broke up with his boyfriend months ago.”

Sumner flipped his hand, as if to say, Life’s like that. “In the matchup between youth and wealth, only the wealth stays the same. The youth has to be replaced periodically.”

Corlew took a drink. “So the nephew is the missing piece.” Terry snickered at his pun, and both men began sniggering.

Sterling tilted his head toward Mrs. Marshall. “You see why I rarely gossip.”

Clare slung one leg back over the edge of the seat and propped her foot against the rail deck. Mal Wintour. What was it Peggy had said? “He’s just having trouble living a life of wealth and leisure without any visible means of support.” Even if she did have to wear high heels, she was suddenly looking forward to the party tonight.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Marriage is meant to be for life,” Clare said, taking a kir royale from one of the caterer’s staff. “It gives ordinary people like you and me a chance to emulate Christ, to offer ourselves up for another person, to truly put another’s happiness first.”

The men and women clustered around her looked alternately interested, amused, and put off. Diana’s fiancé shook his head. “See? She just puts a whole new spin on it for me.” He gulped at his martini. “You should all take counseling from Reverend Clare. Keep you from screwing up so much.”

“Or screwing so much,” one corkscrew-curled young woman said to the man beside her. He was so tan and sun-bleached blond that his teeth appeared to be lighted from inside when he flashed a smile.

“Chelli!” The other woman, dangerously thin, with long nails that owed nothing to nature, frowned at her friend.

When Diana and Cary brought Clare into the enormous living room and announced her as their priest, she had immediately gathered a clump of interested listeners. She put it down to the curiosity value of her calling and gender, rather than a sudden desire for a conversion experience by anybody in the crowd, which looked as if it had been assumed bodily from the set of Sex and the City and set down in this three-story tumble of wood and windows clinging to the side of a mountain. Cary Wood—the name still made her shake her head—had dropped several interesting details about the counseling session they had just completed in the quiet home office next to the family room. “So we were talking about self-sacrifice and sticking it out, and tell them what you said about divorce, Reverend Clare!”

Clare flexed her feet inside her high-heeled sandals and thanked God for the thick carpet covering the floors. If she was trapped here, at least she wasn’t in shoe hell. She smiled at Cary. It was possible she had impressed upon him some essential wisdom he was going to need a few years down the road, but she suspected she was being asked for this tidbit again because of its thrilling break with current thinking. “I said that if marriage made two people one flesh, then divorce was like an animal gnawing its leg off to escape a trap before it dies. It should only be considered as the very last resort.”

“That sounds like me when I split from Annalise,” the bronzed sun god said. “Except she was the animal chewing on my leg.”

The perfect-fingernailed woman laughed. “You mean the only reason you can consider divorce is if you’re threatened with death? That sounds extreme.”

Clare sipped her drink. It was cool, tingly, and perfectly currant-flavored. “Not necessarily a literal death. Sometimes, a marriage can mean the death of your soul. The death of who you are. Or think of the traditional grounds for divorce or annulment: infertility, the death of your future, insanity—the death of the mind that made the vow—adultery.”

“Death if you get found out!” Chelli’s corkscrew curls bobbed as she laughed.

“What gets me, and no offense, Reverend Clare”—by this statement Clare understood that what the very tan man was going to say would offend her—“is how priests who have no experience with sex and marriage get off on telling the rest of us how to stay married.”

“My mother says that a doctor doesn’t have to have cancer in order to know how to cure it,” Chelli said.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” Clare said. “I think it’s better to think of your priest as an investment adviser. Let’s say you’re going to invest everything you have, and commit all your future earnings as well, in the hopes that you’re going to get a terrific return. Do you want to consult someone already deep into the market? Someone who may have opinions and self-interest based on his own experiences? Or do you want to hire an independent adviser, someone who has followed the market and read up on its history and all the different investment schemes? Someone with no vested interest in the outcome, other than to make sure you put your money where it will do you the most good?”

“Huh. I never thought of it like that.” The sun god stuck out his hand. “I’m Dennys, by the way. With a y.”

“Hello, Dennys with a Y.”

“And I’m Gayle. Also with a y.”

Clare took her hand gingerly. Those nails were scary. She wondered if she should figure out some way to spell her name with a y. Clayr?

“So tell me.” Dennys dropped his voice and the two women leaned in to hear him. “What’s it like? Being celibate? I mean, I can’t imagine it.”

“I bet you can’t.” Chelli giggled.

“I think you may be making a common mistake and confusing celibate, which also means not married, and chaste, which means…well, not having sex. Episcopal priests don’t take vows of celibacy. Lots and lots of priests are married and have kids.”

“You’re not married,” Gayle said.

“No, I’m not. How did you know?”

“No ring,” she said, pointing to Clare’s unadorned left hand. Clare was impressed. She knew women checked out men’s hands, but other women’s? It was a good thing she had been out of the singles scene for so many years. She’d have been eaten alive.

“Well, the church traditionally teaches that sex should be reserved for marriage. There’s been a lot of talk in the General Convention lately about redefining that to a mutually committed, loving relationship. I think…” she paused. “I believe that a priest has an obligation to be a model for her or his parish. To try to live very much in the open, in the way Christ wants us to live.”

“So no sex? Until you’re married? At all?” Dennys was clearly intrigued by the idea. She hoped he wasn’t the type of guy who got off on the idea of an unobtainable woman. Now that marriage didn’t stop people fooling around, it must be hard to find any really challenging conquests.

“That’s right,” she said, and as she said it, an image from her dream appeared in her head, the floating warmth, the hands, Russ rising out of the water. She could feel her cheeks heating up.

“She’s blushing!” Chelli said.

Clare smiled and hoped she looked composed. It was only a dream, for heaven’s sake. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me out. We priests are used to asking the personal questions, not answering them. Oops! There’s Peggy. If you’ll excuse me, I want to say hello to our hostess. Nice meeting you all.” She sidestepped quickly behind a waiter circulating a tray of chicken satay and made her escape through the crowd, headed for the open doorway through which Peggy could, possibly, have gone. If you don’t have to engage the enemy, Msgt. Wright’s voice echoed in her head, don’t stand there like an idiot, waiting to get shot. Retreat! There were times, she realized, when being a priest was a distinct disadvantage, and one of them was at a big boozy party where you were hoping to hear some hot gossip about the hostess’s nephew and his ex-lover.

The room she entered was smaller and cozier, with plump love seats and squishy chairs, instead of the sleek modular stuff in the living room. It had bookcases on its walls, mostly filled with photos and important-looking pieces of pottery. Clare decided this room must be called the library. Peggy Landry wasn’t one of the seven or eight people crowding the available seating, but Clare did spot Peggy’s nephew, Malcolm Wintour. He was even more beautiful this evening than he had been when she met him Monday morning, relaxed and younger-looking, with his honey-blond hair falling to either side of his face in perfect glossy wings. For a moment, she could feel the shade of her sister, Grace, beside her. Grace, who had always loved beautiful boys, sighing and saying, What a shame he’s gay….

The drinks waiter passed by and she deposited her empty glass and snagged a new one. She strode up to where Malcolm was standing and talking with two other guests, one a young woman whose fashion statement was “My clothes all shrank in the wash,” and the other a man a few years older than Clare, perhaps, with close-cropped hair graying at his temples.

“Malcolm? Hi, it’s nice to see you again. Wonderful party.” Malcolm smiled vaguely, his expression the one people get when they can’t recall an acquaintance. She smiled at his two companions. “Hi, I’m Clare Fergusson.” She deliberately left off her title. She was wearing an outfit that reminded her of something she had seen on the quiz-master of The Weakest Link: severely cut silk pants and a long matching jacket with a dozen small fabric buttons marching up to a stiff high collar. She had modeled it for Lois, who’d said she looked like a cross between a Jesuit and a dominatrix. Maybe the people in this room hadn’t heard Diana and Cary’s introduction. Let them figure out if she was a religious or a disciplinarian.

“Hi,” the young woman said, taking Clare’s hand limply. Clare paused for a beat, but the girl evidently wasn’t going to pick up the cue and introduce herself.

“Hugh Parteger,” the man said, shaking her hand in turn. Surprisingly, he had a British accent.

“You don’t spell that with a y, do you?”

“Not a one.” He smiled, which gave him dimples on either cheek. Cute, Grace’s shade advised.

“I’m trying to think…are you the florist?” Malcolm’s voice was slightly off, as if it were coming from someplace other than his own throat. She looked at him more closely. He had evidently had a few too many kir royales. Or something.

She took a sip from her own drink. “Nope. I like flowers as much as the next woman, but I can’t tell a dahlia from a daisy.”

“Or a lupine from a lobelia?” Hugh Parteger said.

“Or a carnation from a chrysanthemum.”

“You’re obviously not into floral sects,” he said.

She almost spit out a mouthful of kir royale laughing. Malcolm and the nameless girl just looked puzzled. She shook her head. “Mr. Parteger, I don’t discuss what I do in my garden bed with anyone.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “For most women, it’s just a matter of finding the right tool.”

She took another drink, enjoying herself immensely. The girl was murmuring something to Malcolm, who was looking around the room. “Yes, but it’s such a tedious process, finding one that fits and works really well. Better just stick to hand weeding. Fewer complications that way.”

“Ah, so you’re a master gardener.”

She actually giggled. How mortifying. She took a long swallow from her drink. “As Voltaire said, we must cultivate our garden.”

“I believe he also said, ‘Once, a philosopher, twice, a pervert.’ ”

“Hey, you two. Later.” They had not only lost Malcolm and the girl; they had driven them away. With a pang, Clare watched them drift toward the door. This was not the way to untangle the relationship between Malcolm and his late business partner.

“Ah, did I put a foot wrong?” Hugh Parteger waved over the waiter, who had reappeared in the doorway with a tray-ful of fresh drinks. “Were you after speaking with Malcolm? Because I have to tell you, you’re not his type.”

She laughed again. “So I understand. No, I just wanted to talk with him at some point. And offer my condolences, I guess.”

Hugh reached for her now-empty glass and put it on the waiter’s tray alongside his own. He handed her another drink before taking one, as well.

“Condolences?”

“I had heard that he was…that he had been particularly close to Bill Ingraham, the developer. He died this weekend.”

“I read he was knocked off.”

Again, she almost choked on a mouthful of champagne and currant liqueur. “ ‘Knocked off’?”

“Rubbed out. Done away with. Whacked. Fed to the fishes. Stop me if I’m using clichés.”

She couldn’t help laughing again, although it was horrible, too, with the sight of Ingraham’s mutilated corpse still in her mind.

“No, really. The gossip mills in Saratoga are blaming it on the mob.”

“In Millers Kill? What mob?”

“I don’t know. You don’t have a lot of Russian émigrés around, do you?”

“I believe I’m the last person to emigrate here, and I’m from southern Virginia.”

“I thought I detected more of a drawl than usual. How did you wind up in this remote and desolate place?”

“It’s not—” She stopped herself. His dimples were showing again. “I came for a job,” she said. “How about you? You sound like you’re a lot farther away from home than I am.”

“Protecting my interests. I work for a venture-capital firm in New York that’s made some investments in Saratoga. It gives me an excuse to come up during the racing season and hang about, sponging off people.” He waved a hand, indicating the house around him. “Peggy had been extolling the beauties of her hometown, and it was the perfect opportunity to pump her for information about BWI Development, so here I am. Not a houseguest, thank God. I’m billeted at a bed-and-breakfast in town.”

Several questions crowded into her head at once, all of them jostling for attention. She grabbed the first one she could articulate. “Why ‘thank God’?”

“Peggy—look, she’s not your best friend or anything, is she? Your cousin?”

Clare shook her head.

“Well, I find a little bit of Peggy goes a long way. She’s a bit too ruthlessly organized and peppy. She’ll probably have the houseguests up at five for a brisk scenic hike. Plus, she’s been hitting me up about getting Malcolm a job at my firm, if you can believe that. Do you know him well?”

“We’ve only just met.”

“Peggy is amazingly sharp, but Malcolm couldn’t find his arse with both hands. I shudder to think what he could do if he actually had to take responsibility for something.”

“I heard he was the one who got Peggy and Bill Ingraham together for this Algonquin Waters Spa development.”

“Oh, he’s good at the social thing, no doubt about that. Which is probably why Peggy has him down for my job. There’s a lot of circulating and schmoozing you have to do. There’s also a lot of researching and interviewing and digging into company books. I suspect the last book Malcolm cracked was The Home-Brew Guide to Making Your Own Methamphetamines.”

She clapped one hand over her eyes. “You’re dropping a hint here…. I’m getting a clue as to what you think of him.”

He laughed. “Oh, God, I forgot to ask. You’re not a reporter, are you?”

She opened her eyes. “Nope. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty well known for my ability to keep things confidential.” She sipped her drink. “But I am interested in the development. It’s been a real source of controversy here in town.”

“So I hear.”

“Why are you trying to pump Peggy Landry for—”

“No, believe me, the last thing I want to do is pump Peggy.”

She giggled again—no!—and clapped a hand over her mouth. “For information about BWI,” she said firmly.

“We’ve been thinking about sinking some money into it. After the Internet bubble burst, the partners have become interested in more traditional investments. And there’s not much that’s more traditional than buying land and sticking buildings on it.”

“Are you going to go through with the investment? Now that Bill Ingraham is dead?”

“I don’t think that’s the problem. He did a terrific job, and he had a real feel for what people wanted on these luxury resorts. But he can be replaced. Maybe not by one larger-than-life guy like himself, but by an architect, a construction boss, and a marketing designer. The problem is”—he moved closer and dropped his voice—“as near as I can tell, BWI is standing on a mountain of debt. Any investment we, or others, make is just going to go into the hopper.”

In her sandals, she was exactly Hugh’s height. It made her feel like they were swapping secrets. “What’s going to happen now? Are they going to go under?”

He shook his head. “Not if they can carry off this resort. This one’s funded by private backers, not by the banks. Oppenheimer has gotten smarter.”

“Opperman. Oppenheimer invented the atomic bomb.”

“Okay. The one that didn’t invent the atomic bomb is now trying to put together consortiums of investors, rather than doing their financing through banks. Makes it a lot easier to sidestep those nasty time payments.”

“What about insurance on Bill Ingraham?”

“What do you mean?”

Clare finished off her drink. “There would have been insurance on Bill Ingraham, right? As a partner? My folks run a small aviation business, and I know my dad has insurance that goes directly into the company if he dies.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure Ingraham had insurance.” Hugh frowned in thought. “Actually, that’s a good question. I wonder how much it was?” He drained his glass and refocused on her. “But even if he was insured for a couple million, it wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket against their debt load.”

She worried her lower lip. “Something’s not making sense here.”

“I’ll say. They keep sending in the drinks tray, but we haven’t seen any of the hors d’oeuvres. C’mon, someone less hardy than ourselves has fled to find food and we can nab the window seat.”

He slid his hand beneath her elbow and steered her toward a window seat tucked behind a large desk angling out from a corner of the room. She collapsed onto the well-stuffed cushion and slipped off her sandals. “Oh, yes. That feels good.” Hugh flagged down the waiter. “No, I shouldn’t. I think I’ve had enough all ready. Eventually, I have to drive home.”

“You can ride with me,” he said, lifting two glasses from the tray.

“You’re not going to be in any state to drive, either, if you keep going like that.”

“I know.” He grinned. Those dimples really were awfully cute. “I’m getting a lift from the Spoffards. They’re staying at the same B and B. She’s preggers, so she’s the designated driver. They already have a minivan, in anticipation of the blessed event, so there’ll be plenty of room for you. You won’t even have to sit on my lap. Unless you want to.”

This man was flirting with her. Good God. When was the last time anyone had flirted with her? She instantly thought of the race on the Fourth of July, Russ saying, “I’ve let you drive me crazy,” his voice suddenly husky, like a boy’s voice changing between one word and the next. The thought of it, here in Peggy Landry’s library, made a shiver run up her spine. That wasn’t flirting. That was something much more dangerous. She blinked ferociously and took the glass from Hugh, gulping a mouthful.

“The Fourth of July race,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking of. When I said it didn’t make sense.”

Hugh sat down next to her. “How so?”

“There was an antidevelopment protest. There have been PCBs found in the groundwater in town, and some folks are blaming the construction work. There’s a movement, I guess you’d call it, to get the DEP to take another look at the site. Bill Ingraham stood up and told the whole town that if they called in the state, he’d abandon the project. Said it wasn’t worth the trouble.” She turned toward Hugh, drawing one leg up onto the cushion. “Why would he say that if BWI needed this development to go through so badly?”

“Bluffing maybe? Perhaps he didn’t know as much about the financial state of the company as he should have. Or maybe he was getting sick and tired of it all and was looking to retire anyway.”

She sipped her drink, thinking of the possibilities. Her thoughts were all loose and slippery, hard to grasp and connect. But that was okay. Tomorrow, when she was stone-cold sober, she would be able to see a pattern. She was confident of it. Bill Ingraham. The resort. The debt. Malcolm Wintour.

“And how does Malcolm fit into all this?” She wasn’t sure she had actually said the words out loud until Hugh answered her.

“Malcolm? I don’t think he’s going to have any influence on whether BWI goes under or not.”

“No,I mean…” She wasn’t quite sure what she meant at this point. “He and Bill Ingraham were an item, weren’t they? Is there any way that Malcolm could have benefited from Ingraham’s death?”

“You mean other than the fulfillment of every dumped person’s fantasy that the dumper will drop dead? I don’t think so.”

“Maybe he inherited a stake in the company. Or maybe he was the beneficiary of another life-insurance policy.”

Hugh grinned. “Are you suggesting that Malcolm bumped his ex-boyfriend off? Like some film noir tart?”

Clare swallowed another mouthful of kir royale. “You seem to know him some. Would you say he’s incapable of it?”

Hugh crossed his arms and looked up to the ceiling. “No…not incapable of it. I can imagine him being a vindictive little weasel. Although it’s hard to picture him doing anything that might muss his Brioni pants.” He looked back at her. “Problem is, I can’t imagine him doing anything without there being a direct benefit to Malcolm. And I very much doubt Bill Ingraham’s death benefited him in any way.”

“If he inherited—”

“Look, I didn’t know Ingraham personally, but I’ve certainly heard tell of him over the years. And from what I understand, Bill liked—do you know those tycoon sorts who have a new surgically enhanced blonde on their arms every year? The man keeps getting older, but the girls stay the same age, until he’s ninety-seven years old and marrying Pamela Anderson?”

Clare nodded.

“Well, Bill was like that. Only difference was in the gender.”

“I see. So Malcolm was less like his true love and more like the flavor of the month.”

“Flavor of the year, I would think. They must have been together for a while, because the initial contracts were signed on this spa deal over twelve months ago.”

“So what about Malcolm? Someone described him to me as a gold digger. Was Ingraham just the latest in a string of sugar daddies?”

“That, I don’t know. First I ever heard of him was in connection to Ingraham, after I’d gotten to know Peggy. That’s just been in the past year.” He leaned toward her, very serious now. “I do want to emphasize that none of my knowledge about Bill or Malcolm was obtained inside a gay bar, that I have never been inside a gay bar, and have no intentions so to do.”

“Are you dropping me a little hint here? You’re straight?” She grinned. “You know what they say about men who protest too much.”

“I’m quite comfortable with my own sexuality, thank you. It’s just that I realized I usually don’t spend most of my conversation driveling on about shirt-lifters with a woman I’m trying to chat up.”

“I just love those British expressions.”

“All American women do. That’s why I volunteered for the New York office. I’m really hopeless with women at home. Only in the New World do I stand a chance.”

She laughed loudly.

“Reverend Clare! There you are! I’ve been looking for you. I have some people I want you to meet.” Peggy Landry stalked through the library, making her way to the window seat. “Hello, Hugh.”

“Reverend?” Hugh looked at her goggle-eyed.

“Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t get introduced. Hugh, this is the Reverend Clare Fergusson; she’s the priest at our local church, St. Alban’s. Reverend Clare, this is Hugh Parteger, vice president of Barkley and Eaton Capital.”

“You’re a priest? An Anglican priest?”

Clare nodded, smiling weakly. “I told you I wasn’t a reporter.”

“What on earth did you two find to talk about? Never mind. Reverend Clare, I have a nice couple for you to meet. Cary’s great-uncle and-aunt. They’ve just returned from a lengthy trip to the Holy Land, and I know you’ll love hearing all about it.”

“Ah.” She tried to shore up her face into a cheerful and interested expression. From the dubious look Hugh was giving her, she doubted she was being successful.

“And Hugh,” Peggy continued, “circulate, will you? I’m counting on you to find some single ladies and charm the socks off them. And don’t sneak away later. I want to talk with you about a date for this financing proposal. John Opperman’s flying to Baltimore tomorrow afternoon, and he won’t be back until Tuesday. Now, off you go. Unmarried women only, please.”

She flipped her hands up, indicating both of them were to rise and go forth to entertain her guests. Clare thought, all in all, that Hugh was getting the better job. Oh, well. At least here the elderly couple couldn’t subject her to a slide show.

“Later for you, Vicar,” Hugh said under his breath as they entered the wide living room. “I think you owe me a bit of an explanation.” He peeled off in the direction of the nearest herd of young women.

“What was that all about?” Peggy asked, steering Clare toward the corner of the room. “Oh, look, here are the Woods, all set up on the table.”

Clare’s heart sank at the sight of a couple in their seventies, sitting on either side of an open laptop.

“You must be the minister Peggy’s been telling us about,” the sweet little old lady said. “Pull up a chair! We’re all ready for our Powerpoint slide show!”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Clare found being half in the bag did not improve a slide show on the Holy Land. For one thing, the stupefying boredom of it was lulling her to sleep. And when she wasn’t fighting to keep her chin from dropping to her chest, she couldn’t help darting glances at the party beyond the small circle of chairs around the table occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Wood and herself. The wide French doors at the end of the room had been thrown open and couples were dancing outside on the deck. People she hadn’t seen before kept appearing and disappearing at the head of the stairs, girls in fluttery dresses, their legs bare, young men in slouchy pants and open-collared shirts. Over the music, she could hear bursts of laughter drifting from the library. It was like the sort of bad dream where you show up at work, not knowing at all what to do and having to fake competence, while all around you your coworkers are having an orgy.

“And in this series of pictures, Cyrus really got up close to show the fantastic detailing in these mosaics. Honey, can you center that picture better? As I said to Betty—she was with us at this church—you can just feel the love and devotion in every tile. Oh, look, this is where they were making repairs. Cyrus, did you get a good look inside that grout bucket?”

God, Clare prayed, if you love me, help me.

“Uncle Cyrus! Aunt Helen! We’re going to take some pictures.” They looked up to meet Cary’s cheerful face.

Angels walk among us, unawares. Clare gave him a smile of such undisguised pleasure, he started. “Reverend Clare? Would you like to be in the pictures, too?”

“Actually,” she said, “I really need to escape to the bathroom.” She rose to her feet. “I’ll catch you all later.” At the wedding, she added silently. She strode off as fast as she could manage in her high heels, crossing to the opposite end of the living room and entering the dining room. It was filled with people circling around a large table, forking up tidbits from chafing dishes and trailing phyllo crumbs behind them. “Bathroom?” Clare asked a woman who was about to bite into a miniature quiche.

“In the hallway to the kitchen,” she said, gesturing to a doorway thronged with guests. As Clare watched, the caterer pushed her way through, wedging openings with her elbows to get her platter into the dining room. “But there’s been a steady stream of customers. You’re going to have a wait.”

Clare made a face. “There must be some other ones,” she said.

“There’s one in the pool house, outside. You leave through the main door and go around the—”

“Anything closer?”

The woman sighed. “Well. It’s supposed to be off-limits except for the houseguests, but there’s one on the top floor. That’s where the guest rooms are. Probably one on the floor above us, too, but I haven’t been up there. Those are the family bedrooms.” She cast a glance around, as if she were giving away a state secret. “Head back to the foyer in front of the main door. There’ll be a door to your left. It opens onto a little stairway that runs up to the bedrooms. The bathroom is in the middle of the hall; you can’t miss it. But you didn’t hear about it from me.”

“My lips are sealed,” Clare said, “and my bladder thanks you.”

She found the door in the foyer without difficulty and climbed up to the third floor, where the guest bathroom was, as promised, easy to find and unoccupied.

It was when she was washing her hands that the thought hit her. The family bedrooms. Which meant Malcolm’s bedroom. One floor below her. Staring unseeing into the bathroom mirror, she could just picture herself finding the correspondence between Ingraham and his lover. An incriminating letter promising a fortune to the younger man. Or maybe an insurance policy. Another lover. Or an offer of part ownership interest in the firm. The possibilities bubbled up in her head like champagne, popping excitedly in a currant-flavored cloud. Malcolm, the mastermind behind the attacks. She would expose him, even though it countered her theory about the reasons behind the beatings. Russ would see she was big enough to embrace the truth, whatever it was. Ron and Stephen and all the other business owners would be so pleased. Russ would be happy. Paul would find peace. Russ would be proud of her. She pictured her vestry congratulating her for finally generating some positive publicity. She pictured Russ’s face when she handed over the evidence that would put Malcolm away. She toweled off and left the bathroom, heading straight for the stairs.

The second floor was dark and hushed, thickly carpeted like the floors above and below. The hallway ran the length of the house, and the floodlight outside, on the house’s facade, provided plenty of illumination for her to see where she was going.

The first door was open, and it led into a bedroom that glowed pale and gauzy in the ambient light. Clare knew without going any farther that this was Peggy’s room. She cautiously made her way over to a door set in the wall at the end of the room, but poking her head inside revealed the muffled interior of a walk-in closet, instead of the next bedroom.

The second bedroom was much darker, its heavy curtains drawn against the outside. But it smelled strongly of Diana’s perfume and Cary’s cologne. She crossed the floor toward where she suspected another closet, intending to turn on the light inside it for a discreet look-see. She promptly tripped over an open suitcase. She went down hard, bouncing off the floor with a loud thud and an involuntary “oof” as the air was knocked out of her. Only the plush carpeting saved her from scraping her knee. She scrambled to her feet and stood motionless for a long moment, listening for the sound of steps on the stairs and an inquiring voice. What was she going to say if she got caught up here? Her mind drew a blank. No helpful advice from Msgt. Wright. No words of wisdom from her grandmother. She was on her own.

She made her way back to the door, skirting the suitcase by sweeping her foot in front of her like a blind man’s cane. Her heart rate was up, and she breathed slowly and deeply to try to calm herself as she walked down the hall and then entered the last bedroom.

The curtains were drawn back and the windows were open, which allowed the faint light and sounds from the party below to float up to the wooden beams of the angled high ceiling. Clare could see the four-poster dominating the room, the dressers against the walls, the two doors, one ajar, leading to another walk-in closet, and the other closed. She crossed the floor and pushed the door open, revealing a tiny bathroom. She took the nearest pair of curtains and drew them tightly shut before reaching into the inside of the closet and sliding her hand along the wall. When she found the light switch, she flicked it on, quickly shutting the door until only a crack of light spilled into the room. Then, confident she would be able to see and thus avoid any more unexpected trips, she circled the bed and drew the other set of curtains shut. She went back to the closet and pushed the door wide open, eager to see what she could find.

In the closet was a fortune in Italian wools and enough polished shoe leather to stock a boutique. There might be something hiding under one of the sweater boxes that marched along the upper shelf, but there were probably more fruitful hiding places to try first. She turned back to the room.

The dresser between the closet and the bathroom held an antique mirror and a brushed-steel CD player the size of her first Kenner Close-and-Play record player. A row of CD jewel boxes stood trapped between bronze bookends. A flat leather box, when opened, revealed earrings and bracelets and cuff links, all of them gleaming with the luster only pricey jewelry had. There was nothing else cluttering up the top of the dresser. Either Malcolm was innately tidy or Peggy Landry employed a hardworking maid. She opened the top two drawers and decided it was Malcolm after all, not hired help. She couldn’t imagine a maid arranging rolled socks and folded underwear with such precision. She slid her hands underneath the clothes and then worked her way through the lower two drawers, searching with her fingertips between silky cottons and feathery cashmere and finding nothing except more confirmation that Malcolm had champagne taste and caviar dreams, or however the slogan went.

She closed the drawers tightly and went on to her next search area. What she had thought was a second dresser, placed between the two windows, turned out to be a square mahogany writing desk. She drew out the spindly-legged chair that had been shoved beneath it and sat down. The surface held a cell phone, a cube calendar, and a few pieces of junk mail. She leaned over to check the wire wastebasket and saw that it was empty. So he didn’t believe in the purloined letter theory of hiding things in plain sight. She opened the top left-hand drawer. Old bills, ripped open and restuffed into their envelopes. Second notices. Third notices. She shuffled through them. A whole series of demands from a car-loan agency, leading to an official-looking notice of repossession.

The second drawer held several fat paperbacks. Airplane reading. Evidently, Malcolm was a fan of Clive Cussler and Danielle Steel. She riffled through their pages, just to be sure, but the only things that fell out were old ticket stubs for flights to D.C., Chicago, and Houston.

The third drawer was heavy with telephone books, none of which had anything inside or in between them except white and yellow pages. She shut the drawer in disgust, then started on the right-hand side. There was a stack of mismatched stationery, evidence that Malcolm liked to steal hotel writing paper, but nothing indicating a more serious crime. The second drawer was full of junk—paper clips and matchbooks and half-used pads of Post-it notes, the kind of things that accumulate in your pockets and car but seem too potentially useful to throw away.

The last drawer held magazines that—whoops! She shoved the drawer back in. She did not want to look at those magazines. She especially did not want to look through those magazines to see what might have been stashed between the pages. Idiot, she thought. Maybe that’s the point. Like a woman hiding her jewelry in a box of tampons. She nodded. That made sense. Reopening the drawer, she compromised by pinching each magazine by the staples and shaking it vigorously. Nothing, not even one of those annoying inserts selling perfume or subscriptions. On second thought, it was probably illegal to send stuff like this through the U.S. mail, so why would they need subscriptions? She returned the magazines to the drawer, trying not to look too long at the covers.

She stood up, light-headed, and shoved the chair back into place, staggering slightly as her heels caught in the deep carpet. For the first time, she considered that she might not be in the best-possible shape for the task she had undertaken. She tried to recall exactly how many kir royales she had taken off those circulating trays. Four? Five? Oh, well. Nothing for it but to soldier on. That, she could do. What next?

The bedside stand. It had a single shallow drawer, filled with photographs, a passport, and a well-thumbed guide to restaurants. She pawed through the photos, looking for anything that might show Malcolm with Ingraham, but they were all old—pictures of women with pin curls, wearing floral dresses, and men in shirtsleeves, fly-fishing.

There was a shelf below the drawer, holding more paperbacks—a row of Dungeons and Dragons novelizations. Yuck. She dropped to her knees and then to her belly, stretching out to check under the bed. Under the side closest to her, there was nothing, not even a dust bunny. Under the other side, however, visible as a series of black rectangles, were several suitcases or narrow boxes. They looked promising.

She clambered back up on her high-heeled sandals and circled around the foot of the bed again. She was balanced on two knees and one palm, her hand wrapped around an unseen handle, tugging the heavy suitcase out from under the four-poster, when she heard the faint noise of feet on the stairs. And voices.

She shoved the suitcase back into place and shot to her feet. Where to hide? Where to hide, where to hide, where to hide? She slapped off the light in the closet and stood stock-still, shaking, flushed, her skin hot and prickling, clenching her fists so tightly that her close-clipped nails dug into her palms. Think. Thinkthinkthink. Under the bed? Too obvious. In the closet? There was nothing to hide behind except Malcolm’s suits. All it would take would be a light on in the room and someone to cast one glance inside to notice her legs taking up the space between his jackets and the shoe rack.

The hall light came on. She could hear a mutter of voices, indistinct, male, coming closer. She darted a glance behind her and realized the curtains were still closed. She leaped to one window, jerked the fabric apart, and then ran to the next, almost stumbling over the little chair in front of the desk.

No footsteps now because of the plush thickness of the carpet, just the sound of a voice complaining and another answering shortly. The bathroom was her only hope. She bounded in, shutting the door behind her. It had been shut when she came into the room, hadn’t it? She couldn’t remember. Light from the open window picked out a pedestal sink, a toilet, and a shower stall. She suddenly thought of the crowd around the bathroom downstairs. If she were Malcolm and had to pee, would she wait in line next to the dining room when she had a private john upstairs? Her throat closed and for a second she heard a roaring in her ears.

You’re a pilot, damn it, “Hardball” Wright snarled in her ear. You know what they call pilots who panic? Dead! She drew in her breath, a quick, sharp gasp, and ruthlessly shoved everything except the problem out of her mind. She could hide behind the shower curtain. There was almost no chance he was going to shower, not with someone else accompanying him. Unless, of course, he was planning on a little private party for two.

She could hear the voices, louder now, and then there was a gleam of light beneath the edge of the bathroom door. Her choice was made for her. Slipping out of her heels and clutching them in one hand, she edged her way behind the shower curtain and into the cubicle, gritting her teeth at the quiet rustle and clank of the hooks on the curtain rod.

“I don’t understand how you can be so calm,” a male voice said, muffled slightly by the bathroom door.

“Chill out,” Malcolm said, and suddenly Dave Matthews was singing “Forty-One,” intense and seductive, pure high notes and a wicked bass coming from that suitcase-size CD player. How can his books be so lousy and his music so good? she wondered inanely, and then she heard Malcolm say, “I have to take a leak. Hang on.”

She willed herself into immobility as the door swung open and the bathroom light clicked on. She couldn’t help it—she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, like a child, as if not seeing would make her invisible, too. Her heart was tripping so fast, it was difficult to keep her breathing slow and steady. She fought the urge to hold her breath, knowing that if she did so, she would eventually make even more noise letting it out.

The toilet seat clunked up and Malcolm went about his business, peeing for what seemed like a half hour—did he have the bladder of a racehorse?—before zipping up, a noise like a small guillotine, and flushing. The water racketing down the porcelain bowl gave her enough cover to take a deep, lung-popping breath of air. Then the water was running in the small sink, and she opened her eyes, looking in horror at the half-dissolved bar of soap on the chrome caddy hanging over the showerhead. Please, she thought, please, please, please…Then she heard the sweet sound of a liquid-soap dispenser squirting and knew she had dodged the bullet on that one. When he twisted off the water and reached for the hand towel, she could actually see the tips of his fingers at the edge of the shower curtain as he grabbed the towel and then hung it up again. He clicked off the light and pulled the door behind him, so that it swung nearly—but not quite—closed.

She wanted to sag against the back of the shower and slide bonelessly to the floor. She realized she had been clutching her shoes so tightly, her hands ached. She took a deep, slow breath in an effort to settle her heart and unstring her muscles. All she had to do was remain still, quiet, and hidden, and eventually Malcolm and the other man would leave to rejoin the party.

Unless this is his new boyfriend and they’ve come up here to have sex. She tried out the idea. There was simply no way she was going to huddle unseen, like a rabbit, and eavesdrop on that. If it sounded like they were getting intimate, she would have to reveal herself and say—what? That she had come upstairs to use the bathroom? And had happened to walk all the way down the hall to the room farthest from the stairs to find one? Even if she had the excuse of being completely potted, that sounded lame.

The noise of the men’s voices brought her attention back to the room beyond the bathroom. She wasn’t hearing murmured sweet nothings. In fact, from the sound of it, she didn’t have to worry about any tryst, unless they were a couple who used arguing as a substitute for foreplay.

“All I’m saying is, I didn’t sign up for anything like this.” She could hear the second man more clearly now that the bathroom door was slightly open. He sounded vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t place a name or face to the voice. Maybe another party guest?

“Anything like what?” Malcolm spoke like someone who was very annoyed and trying not to show it.

“For God’s sake! The man is dead!”

Clare dropped any speculation about lying her way out of the bathroom. The man’s last statement stabbed through her, fixing all her attention to their words.

“So he’s dead. So what? He went cruising in a park in a town where two queers had already been beaten up. He got what he was asking for.”

The other man’s voice was barely a whisper. “You don’t—he wasn’t—that can’t be all there is to it!”

“Do you have any evidence otherwise?”

“No, of course not. I don’t want any evidence otherwise. I just want your assurances that I’m not going to get picked up by the police and questioned about anything.”

In the pause between the CD’s tracks, there was a faint creaking sound, as if one of them had sat on the bed. “Well, if you are questioned, you won’t have anything to tell them, will you?”

“How can you say that? I’m up to my ass in alligators on this thing! I feel like I’m being set up as the fall guy precisely because I don’t know—Jesus Christ! What the hell is that?” The man’s voice had shot up the scale.

“What’s the matter? You’ve never seen one of these? It’s a Lugar Five-fifty. Wicked, huh?” Over the sound of the music, she heard the click of the chamber being drawn back, but she couldn’t tell if a round had gone in.

“I’m not looking for trouble,” the other man said. His voice was thready and light.

“Hey, I know you’re not. You’re a team player. What? You think I brought this out to threaten you? No way, man. I wanted to show you what else is in here.”

Clare oh so slowly and oh so carefully laid her sandals on the shower floor. She could be out of the shower, throw open the door, and tackle Malcolm in under three seconds, she estimated. She would have to hope Malcolm was a talker, and that he would play with the other man a little before actually shooting him. That would give her time to make her move. Like a pilot reading instrument gauges, she noted that her heart rate had actually slowed down and her limbs were more relaxed at the prospect of hurling herself on a loaded gun. That probably said something terrible about her priorities and fitness for the priesthood, but she couldn’t figure out what at the moment.

“Holy shit. Is that what I think it is?”

“What, you never tried any when you were at school?”

“That’s got to be worth thousands. What are you doing with a stash like that?”

“I’m an independent businessman now. It’s funny. My cousin Diana thinks I’m a hopeless slacker. But really, I’m just as much old Eustace Landry’s descendant as she is. There must be some sort of entrepreneur gene, don’t you think? Unfortunately, I can’t open my books and let the family admire how well I’m doing.”

“Does your aunt know?”

“Leave my aunt out if it.” Malcolm’s voice was cool. “In fact, if I were you, I’d avoid my aunt at all times.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Take it as a warning.” There was a rustling, then a dull thud. Inside the shower stall, Clare tensed. “Here.” Malcolm’s voice was decidedly warmer. “Take this, as well. It’s yours.”

“Are you kidding? What am I supposed to do with this? Throw a party?”

“Sell it. That neatly sealed bag is worth about ten thousand dollars on the open market. You could use ten thousand, couldn’t you?”

“No way. If I got caught with this, I’d be looking at ten years playing girlfriend to some guy in Attica. Look, I really didn’t get into this for the money.”

Malcolm laughed.

“Well, not like that. Not for this. I didn’t think anyone was going to get hurt. I was assured—”

“I know what you were told. And I know what you want. You think I didn’t know?” His voice became caressing, persuasive. “Tell you what. You take this, as a surety. I’ll set up a sale. You return it to me, I get the cash, and the cash goes to you. Then you can go off to Texas or Alaska or something and lie low until this business about Bill blows over.”

“What’s to keep you from calling the cops as soon as I leave this house and having me picked up? With this much, I’d be charged with felony dealing for sure.”

Malcolm sighed. “Oh, for Chrissakes, use your head. If you were to get arrested, the first thing you’d do would be to roll on me. I’m not in any hurry to try to flush my entire stock down the toilet. It’s not going to do me any good to dick you over. It’s profitable for me to keep you happy. Just like it’s profitable for you to keep your head down and your mouth shut. If you don’t panic, we’ll all get out of this with what we want.”

“Except for Bill Ingraham.”

Malcolm’s voice was sharp. “Bill had a lifetime of getting what he wanted. Eventually, you have to roll off the bed and give someone else a turn. Here. Take it.”

Clare strained to hear what was happening, but the horn and floating guitar line of “Lie in Our Graves” masked any sound quieter than a voice.

Eventually, the other man spoke again. “All right.”

“Good. You going back to the party?”

“Are you kidding? I’m going to hide this thing under the seat of my car and drive slowly and carefully home. You?”

“I’m going to work the phones a bit and see if I can set up a sale. Ciao-ciao, man. You don’t have to worry. I’m going to take care of you.”

Clare thought that sounded like reason enough to worry right there. Then the realization struck her: Malcolm wasn’t going back downstairs.

There wasn’t any answering farewell, just a silence filled with quiet music. She pictured Malcolm tossing his jacket on the bed—on top of a suitcase stuffed with a gun and fat bags of heroin. Or maybe it wasn’t heroin. She wasn’t up on current trends in the drug market. She could feel a hysterical laugh waiting to bubble up from her chest, and she pressed both hands on her diaphragm and willed herself to stop.

“Hey, Joe. It’s Mal. Look, man, I’m calling because you had suggested I get in touch with you when I was ready to move a little more product than previously.”

He was getting on the phone and calling people who would be willing to spend ten thousand dollars for illegal drugs. She rubbed her lips hard, taking off what was left of her lipstick. Any guesses as to how he might deal with a woman who overheard his sales pitch? Any guesses as to what his customers might do?

Chapter Twenty-Four

Time to bail out of this plane, Clare told herself. And with Malcolm settling in for an evening of telephone conversation and music, there was only one exit still open to her. She picked up her shoes and, holding them tightly against her stomach, slipped between the edge of the shower curtain and the cool tile wall, all the while thinking to herself, flat, flat, flat.

Several hooks slid along the curtain rod with a scrape that sounded to Clare like a Klaxon. Her breath hitched up in her throat and she forced herself to keep on moving, until she was standing next to the toilet in her stocking feet. She couldn’t see out the crack in the door without getting right in front of it, but there was enough light spilling in from the bedroom to pick out all the details in the bath. The detail she was interested in was the window.

It was larger than the usual bathroom window, the same size as the two in the bedroom. Two stories up, looking out onto mountains, one wouldn’t require much privacy, she guessed. Like one of the bedroom windows, its lower pane had been pulled up almost to the level of the middle sash. She pressed her fingers against the screen’s releasing locks and slid it up as far as she could. It clicked into place on its runner with a noise that sounded as loud as a rifle shot.

Behind her, Malcolm was still chatting away and the Dave Matthews CD had looped around to the beginning and was jazzing along with “So Much to Say.” She loved the Crash album, but she wondered if she would ever be able to listen to it again after tonight. She eased the latches into place in the uppermost notches and stuck her head out the window to scope out her escape route.

The good news was that Malcolm’s suite overlooked a six-foot-square porch roof, an easy drop from the window if she were hanging from the bottom of the sill. The bad news was, the porch and its roof were attached to the kitchen. Over the jazzy beat of the Dave Matthews Band, she could hear the clang and clatter and chatter of kitchen staff engaged in a full-scale cleanup. Craning her neck to one side, she could see the outlines of several people clustered in conversation on the flagstone terrace surrounding the pool. All it would take would be someone glancing up at the wrong moment and she would look like a character from a Lawrence Block novel. She could see the title now: The Burglar Who Thought She Was a Priest.

Once she got down to the ground, the view from the pool would be cut off by a wide-planked wind fence that shielded swimmers and sunbathers from the sight of three large trash cans. How long would it take her to climb out of the window, drop, and slide off the porch roof? Thirty seconds? A minute?

She heard the thump-thump of footsteps down a pair of steps and then one of the caterers emerged from beneath the roof, striding to the nearest trash can with a white plastic bag swinging from his fist. He tossed it in and vanished back into the kitchen, never once looking up or about.

A quote from Macbeth bubbled up from the primordial English-lit ooze: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly…” She glanced at the sandals dangling from her hand. Bogatta Veneta. Italian leather. Bought back when she was flush with a captain’s pay. Praying she would be able to find them again, she leaned out the window and tossed them as hard as she could past the light spilling from the kitchen, toward the gravel drive. She wiggled through the opening until she was sitting on the sill, then stood up, clutching the window’s exterior frame. She awkwardly lowered herself to her knees and then, her hands digging into the sill, let her legs slip off the reassuring solidity of the wood and into space.

The edge of the windowsill dug into her abdomen as she slid farther and farther down. Something interrupted her descent for a moment, tugged at her, and then she felt a release as two silk-covered buttons popped off her jacket and pitter-pattered across the roof and into the darkness below. She dangled for a moment by her hands alone and then let go, dropping as limply as she could. She skidded off the side of the porch roof and tumbled to the ground with a blow that knocked the wind out of her.

Inside the kitchen, someone said, “What the hell was that?” Clare staggered upright and lurched backward, bouncing off a rubberized trash can.

A woman in a large white apron appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hello?” she said to the night air in general. Then, as she spotted Clare tottering beside the trash cans, she said, “Excuse me? Can I help you?” The woman glanced doubtfully at Clare’s bare feet and her jacket, which was gaping open over her midsection. Clare grabbed the edges and smiled cheerfully. “Great party!” she said, loosening her southern Virginia drawl to sound drunk. More drunk, she amended.

The caterer squinted at her. “Are you okay?” She looked back into the kitchen. “Look, why don’t you come in and let me get you some coffee?”

Clare clutched the jacket more closely and squeezed her bare toes in the dirt she had recently rolled in. “No, thank you, ma’am. ’M just going out front. Waiting for my ride.”

“You do have a ride.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes, ma’am,” Clare said, saluting for full effect. Her jacket swung open, revealing a great deal of skin.

The woman smiled at her uncertainly. “Okay, then. Good night.”

Clare waved, crossed the kitchen yard, and headed toward the drive, walking straight until the woman retreated into the house. Then she cast about the edges of the gravel drive, trying to spot her sandals somewhere amid the grass and dirt and sweep of stones. She failed to turn up anything except a couple more mosquito bites. She let herself curse under her breath. There was no way she could afford to replace those babies on her priest’s salary. She abandoned the search and headed for her car, parked at the other end of the house.

The top of her convertible was up because she had left her purse and her keys in the car when she had arrived. Even she wouldn’t normally be so careless, but in a secluded mountain estate, she had yielded to the impulse not to have to keep track of her things while at the party. She got into the passenger seat and let herself sag against the vinyl, which felt warm and tacky against her skin. She rubbed the soles of her feet together and thought that she had even fewer things to keep track of now. She curled over, buried her face in her hands, and gave in to the shakes, her teeth chattering, throat whimpering, skin shivering. Then she felt better. She scrubbed at her face with her hands, remembering as she did so that she was wearing makeup.

She dug into her purse for the lighted compact her sister Grace had given her years ago and examined the damage. Her lipstick was long gone, her skin was blotchy, and her mascara and eye shadow were smeared. She popped open the glove compartment and retrieved one of the little wet foil-wrapped towels she kept there, a habit of her mother’s that had stuck with Clare throughout the years. After she mopped off her face, she used the compact light to check out the rest of her appearance, which was even more disreputable-looking than she had imagined. Her elegant pantsuit was crumpled, the jacket gaping open where her buttons had come off, one leg stained with something dark and unidentifiable—though from the smell, she thought she must have picked it up when she rolled into the trash can.

She snapped the compact shut and closed her eyes. She didn’t care if it was rude; she was not going back in to join the partygoers. She might not be sober enough to drive, but she sure wasn’t drunk enough to appear looking like she had been out for a roll in the clover. She could hide away here in her car, and when the rest of the alcohol had worked its way out of her system, she would drive home. Then tomorrow, she would call Russ and tell him that—

Her eyes snapped open. Call Russ. Holy cow, he needed to know about Malcolm’s little business venture. And that it sounded like Bill Ingraham’s ex-lover knew a lot more about his death than what he had read about in the papers. She fumbled in her purse for her phone, letting her grandmother’s voice—which was saying No lady would ever call after ten o’clock at night—wash away on a tide of exhaustion, relief, and the remnants of several kir royales.

As she pressed the send button, she had a flash of panic. What do I say if his wife answers? The phone rang. Once. Twice. She clicked it off, sagging back into her seat. Coward. Then she remembered. Friday. Dinner at his mother’s. Maybe he was still there. She called information for the number and dialed it, hoping against hope that she wasn’t about to wake Margy Van Alstyne, who might have retired early.

“Hello?”

Margy’s voice sounded crisp. Clare closed her eyes in relief.

“Mrs. Van Alstyne? Margy? It’s Clare Fergusson.”

“Clare Fergusson. Well, I’ll be. What can I do for you this hour of the night?”

You see? Her grandmother said. Calling after ten is an imposition. Clare repressed the urge to apologize and hang up. “I was just wondering…I needed to speak to Russ, and I recalled he said he was going to be at your house for the evening. Is he there?”

“Yes, he’s here.” Margy Van Alstyne’s voice sounded as if only good manners kept her from asking why St. Alban’s rector was calling her son at 10:30 on a Friday night.

“It’s business,” Clare assured her.

“Oh, it’s none of my—never-mind. Let me give him the phone. Here he is.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Russ had been lying back in his mom’s ancient La-Z-Boy recliner, watching Roger Clemens getting shelled by the Angels. He had stayed well past the time it took to replace a few boards on the porch and have dinner, enjoying the comforting familiarity of his mom’s house, where no one ever redecorated and the walls had been the same color since she moved in a quarter of a century ago.

Clemens had given up five runs in the last two innings, and the Yankees were going down hard. Now Mel Stottlemyre was marching out toward the mound. “Give him the hook, already,” Russ told the pitching coach. “Any relief pitcher could do better than that. My mother can do better than that.”

Stottlemyre was talking to Clemens, who was evidently arguing. Now the catcher was coming out to the mound. “Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not the UN. Get him offa there.”

His mother walked into the living room, holding the phone and eyeing him speculatively. She clamped her palm over the handset. “It’s Clare Fergusson,” she whispered. “Says it’s a business call.” She handed him the phone.

“Clare?” His mother stood there watching. He frowned and shooed her away. “What’s up?” He glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you up?”

“No, I’m not spending the night. I was just hanging out, watching the Yankees lose to Los Angeles. What’s going on?”

“I’m at a party at Peggy Landry’s house.”

He listened for the usual background noises you could hear during a phone call in the middle of a party. Nothing.

“It’s a pretty quiet party.”

“I’m calling from my car. I can’t go in.”

“You can’t go in. Clare, you’re not making any sense.” A thought struck him. “Have you been drinking?”

“Yes, but that’s not why I—”

“You’re not planning on driving that car anyplace, are you?”

“No. Well, not yet. I’m going to wait here until I’m fit to drive again.”

He closed his eyes. Christ on a bicycle. “Okay,” he said, enunciating clearly. “Get out of the car and give someone your keys. Then ask Peggy Landry to fix you up with a ride home.”

“I told you, I can’t go inside!” Her whisper sharpened. “Will you please listen to me?”

He clicked off the game. “Go ahead.”

“I was in Malcolm’s room tonight. Here. At Peggy’s house.”

“Who’s Malcolm?”

“Her nephew. He used to be Bill Ingraham’s boyfriend.”

“His boyfriend? He got out of his chair. The import of this statement struck him. “And you were in his room? What the hell were you doing in his room?”

“I’m trying to tell you!”

He pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Go ahead.”

“I got talking with someone at the party about Peggy’s business, and about Malcolm, and I thought it would be a good idea to see if there was anything connecting him to Ingraham’s death—in his room.”

“How much had you had to drink at this point?”

“That doesn’t matter! Listen. Malcolm knows something about Ingraham’s death. I’m sure of it. And he’s selling drugs!”

He walked past his mother, who was methodically folding and stuffing envelopes for a fund-raiser, listening to his every word. He opened the fridge and grabbed a soda. “Uh-huh.”

“Don’t patronize me. I know he’s selling drugs because he was talking to someone in the room with him.”

That brought him up short. “This guy was in the room at the same time you were?” His mom’s head perked right up at that. He frowned at her.

“He and another man. The other guy was talking about Ingraham’s death. At least I’m pretty sure he was. He was scared. And then Malcolm gave him something, some sort of drug.”

He put the soda can down on the counter, unopened. “What did they do? Shoot up? Do you know what they were using?”

“No, not like that. Like a payment. Or a payoff. I didn’t actually see anything. I was hiding in the bathroom.”

He lifted his keys from a row of hooks next to the back door. “You were hiding in the bathroom.”

“Yes. And then the other man left, the one who was worried, and Malcolm started making phone calls to potential buyers. And to a friend named Poppy.”

The priest he knew spoke in a clear, well-organized way, one thought flowing coherently into another. But this garbled story…He couldn’t tell if she was drunk or delusional, or maybe had been hit on the head.

“He just stayed there on the phone, with the music going, and I needed to leave, because all I could think about was that I’d be in deep trouble if a drug lord found me in his shower stall while he was peddling his wares. Not to mention the way he was talking about how they were going to take care of the other man. So I climbed out of his bathroom window and—”

“You did what? Are you nuts?”

“It was the only way out. So I climbed out of his bathroom window, jumped onto a porch roof, and made it back to my car. I thought I had better call you, because you can get a warrant and search Malcolm’s room. He keeps the stuff under his bed. Oh, and he has a gun, too.”

He pocketed his keys. “And why is it you can’t go back into the house?” His mom had given up pretending to do work and was staring with undisguised interest at him.

“I threw away my sandals. And I lost two buttons on my top, and wiped off most of my makeup. I’m a complete mess.”

It was the first time he had ever heard Clare say anything that indicated she had any awareness of how she looked at all. If her story hadn’t been so completely bizarre, he’d have teased her about it. But she spoke with an earnest literalness that undoubtedly came out of a bottle but made her sound like a kid.

“Where are you right now?”

“In the passenger seat.”

“No, I mean where is Peggy Landry’s house?”

“Um, on the Old Lake George Road. You turn off at a place called Lucher’s Corners.”

“I know where that is. What’s her house number?”

“I can’t remember. Wait—” He heard the sound of papers flipping around. She came back on. “Okay, I got the directions she gave me. Number two thousand twelve.”

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. You stay put in your car. I’m going to come get you and take you home.”

“No! That’s not why I called! You have to come and arrest him! I wouldn’t have called for a ride. That would be imposing on you.” She said “imposing on you” in the same tone of voice someone might use to say “sacrificing your firstborn child.”

“I’ll just stay here until I feel sober enough to drive safely. Do not come out here to give me a ride,” Clare told him.

He wasn’t going to waste time arguing with a woman under the influence. Not over the phone, with his mom hanging on every word. “I’ll be there in about a half hour. Stay put.” He turned the phone off and replaced it in its cradle.

“Trouble?”

He nodded. “She needs a ride. And she thinks she may have some information about this murder we’re working on.”

His mother’s face changed from amused to worried. “Maybe you should call for backup.”

He shook his head. “It’s not like that, Mom. And Clare’s a little under the influence. I don’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone else. I’ll take her to her house and then head home from there.”

Margy got to her feet and wrapped her arms around him. He squeezed her hard and dropped a kiss on her springy white curls. “Don’t worry, Mom. There aren’t going to be any bad guys.”

She tipped her head back to look him straight in the eye. “That’s not the only sort of trouble out there.”

The Old Lake George road was familiar to him, part of the regular patrol route. When he had been in school—back around the Civil War, it felt like—the road had been mostly undeveloped, except for a few scraggly cabins inhabited by cranky loners. It had been, as its name suggested, a shortcut over the mountains toward Lake George, not a place anyone with a lick of sense would build on, back when the surrounding area was all devoted to dairy farming. Things started to change in the eighties, when a “pristine mountainside between a quaint Adirondack village”—he had seen the language in an ad his mother had sent him—and the old resort area of Lake George suddenly became a hot commodity. Overnight, neo-Adirondack lodges that would have given Teddy Roosevelt nightmares had sprung up along the road, interspersed with fake Swiss chalets and Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater rip-offs. One of the latter, whose architect had insisted on flat roofs to “blend in with nature,” had come to a spectacular end when a twenty-four-hour storm dumped three feet of snow on the area and the whole house collapsed in on itself.

He recognized Peggy Landry’s house when he pulled into the long drive. She couldn’t have owned it long—it had been purchased and expensively renovated by a dot-com millionaire from New York City just a few years ago. He remembered the guy because he was constantly calling in intruder alerts during his summer stays, until Mark Durkee went up and pointed out that the open-air kitchen he had installed at the end of the pool house was attracting a steady stream of black bears.

The drive was still full of cars, but it was easy enough to pick out Clare’s god-awful Shelby Cobra. He pulled his truck into the nearest empty spot and got out. He glanced up at the facade of the house, three stories of vaguely rustic clapboarding rising up to a modern-cladded roof. He tried to picture Clare dropping out one of the windows, three sheets to the wind, and the image made him wince. An adrenaline addict, she had once described herself as. How she ever made it through a seminary and into the priesthood was a mystery to him.

He crunched over to her car. There was no sign of life until he bent down and peered into the shadowy interior. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He knocked on the driver’s door and opened it.

“I’m here,” she said loudly, bolting upright.

“Take it easy. You’re not asleep on duty.” The light from the house reached the interior of the car dimly, but even in the shadows, he could see she hadn’t exaggerated. She looked like she’d been dragged through the bushes backward.

“No, of course not, I was just—” She blinked several times. “Russ! What are you doing here? No, wait, I remember. Are you going to arrest Malcolm?”

He squinted past her into the tiny sports car. “I don’t think I can fit inside this tin can. Why don’t we get into my truck? We can talk there. Grab your purse and keys.”

She nodded, and a moment later they were crossing the gravel drive to his pickup, Clare muttering quiet “Ouch” noises as she, barefooted, picked her way across the stones.

As soon as they were both inside, he fired up the ignition and shifted into gear.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“Taking you home,” he said, craning over his shoulder to see as he backed up. “Fasten your seat belt.”

“You’re supposed to be searching Malcolm’s room! Didn’t you hear anything I said on the phone?”

“Yep.” He threw his pickup into first and headed down the drive to the road.

“You can’t just drive away! There are illegal drugs in that house. And persons with knowledge of a murder!”

“You been watching Law & Order again, haven’t you?” He grinned at her. “Listen. I’ll give you a free tutorial on the way the criminal-justice system works in our country. I am a law-enforcement agent. Before I go into anyone’s house and search it, I have to get permission from a judge, called a warrant. I convince the judge to issue me a warrant based on evidence I can show or information I can give that will persuade him that there’s a reasonable chance I can find some evidence of a crime. Now, while it’s true that there are some jurisdictions where an honest cop can get a warrant based on his say-so, here in Washington County I have to deal with Judge Ryswick. And Judge Ryswick likes solid evidence before issuing a warrant. Especially when he’s asked to issue warrants against well-heeled businessmen. Judge Ryswick would be very unhappy with me if I woke him up and asked for a warrant to search Peggy Landry’s home based on a drunken woman’s statement that she overheard what she thinks was a drug deal while going to the bathroom. Although I admit that the fact you’re a priest is good. The DA always likes to tell juries that priests and bishops don’t normally witness crimes. To explain the scumball witnesses he has to put on the stand, you see?”

“I wasn’t going to the bathroom! I was hiding there. And I’m not drunk. I only had four drinks. Or five. I’m just a tad…tipsy.”

He laughed.

“Don’t patronize me!”

“I’m practically old enough to be your father. That gives me the right to patronize you. Plus, I’m sober and you’re not.”

She clicked her seat-belt buckle into place. He gunned the truck and turned onto the Seven Mile Road as she opened her mouth several times, inhaling sharply, as if she were about to light into him but couldn’t make up her mind where to start. Finally, she said, “You are not old enough to be my father.”

“I’ll be forty-nine in November.”

“Well, there you are. My father is fifty-eight.” She crossed her arms.

The fact that he was a lot closer to her father’s age than to hers was not a comfortable thought. “What the hell were you thinking of, leaping out a window onto a porch roof? You could have broken both your legs.”

“Believe me, it wasn’t my first choice. I was planning—” She stopped and thought for a minute. “Actually, I have to confess that I didn’t go into Malcolm’s room with any plan for getting back out again. I wasn’t thinking very far ahead.”

“There’s a surprise,” he said under his breath.

She twisted in her seat. “Mal Wintour is selling drugs,” she said. “He’s got a stash in a suitcase under his bed. The man who was in the room with him said it must be worth a million.” She jabbed her hands reflexively at her French twist and whatever had been holding it in place slid and a quarter of her hair tumbled down. “Darn it.” She fumbled with a clip. “Just because I wasn’t in the same room with them doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear them.”

“Okay. I believe you thought you heard what you did. I’ll even accept that you may be right that he is holding. I’m still not going to get anywhere based on your say-so.”

“Russ—”

He held up a hand. “Let me finish. I’ll put Mark on him, do some background checking, see if we can connect him to any known dealers or buyers.”

“But it’s more than that. I think he’s connected to the murder.”

“Which one?”

“What do you mean, which one? Bill Ingraham’s, of course. Why? There hasn’t been—has there been another murder?”

“Maybe. We found Chris Dessaint’s body. He’s the guy I told you about—the one McKinley fingered as the ring-leader of those punks. Looks like he OD’d. Scheeler’s doing an autopsy to see what he can find out.”

“Wasn’t he the one who was supposedly giving the others drugs and money?”

“That’s him.”

“It makes perfect sense!” She smacked her hands together. “Malcolm gave him drugs and money, and he did the dirty work. Mal said something to the other guy in his bedroom—‘I know what you were told.’ Doesn’t that sound as if there was someone else involved?”

“Huh.” He glanced away from the mountain road to look at her for a moment. “Did you hear the other guy’s name?”

“No.” She bit her lip and dropped her eyelids, as if she were concentrating intently on remembering. “He said, ‘I didn’t sign up for anything like this.’ He told Mal he wasn’t in it for the money, and Mal laughed at him. Then Mal gave him the…well, whatever it was and told him it was worth ten thousand dollars, and he—Malcolm, that is—would arrange a sale for the other guy. So he could take the money and leave the state. ‘Until this business about Bill blows over’—that’s what he said.” She opened her eyes and looked at Russ. “What do you think? Do you have an idea of who it might be?”

He returned his attention to the road. “Dunno if it’s an idea. A possibility, maybe.” He tapped the steering wheel with two fingers. “According to Elliott McKinley, there was a third man involved in the beatings. Jason Colvin. No priors on him, although we know he used to hang in the fringes of our little local hate-mongering group. We’ve tracked him to his girlfriend’s house, but the last time she saw him was Monday morning.”

“The morning after Bill Ingraham was killed.”

“Yep. Noble’s checked his work, hangouts, family—no one’s seen him since then. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth. Since we found Dessaint, I’ve been wondering if he took a camping trip, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dessaint. He was camped out in a remote location in the woods. If he hadn’t died and attracted a flock of carrion birds, we wouldn’t have found him on a bet.”

Clare wrinkled her nose. “That’s awful. And he died of an overdose? Accidentally?”

“Don’t know. It’s mighty convenient that the only person who knew who was passing out drugs and money in exchange for the assaults happened to OD a couple days after Ingraham’s death.”

“But if you think it might have been this Jason Colvin guy who was talking to Malcolm, then Chris Dessaint couldn’t have been the only one to know.” She brought one leg up and tucked her foot under her other leg. “If Malcolm Wintour’s been pulling the strings, maybe he’s trying to tie off all the loose ends. Maybe he adulterated whatever it was that he gave to Dessaint. And now Jason Colvin’s come to him. Maybe the package he gave to him wasn’t a payoff. Maybe it was meant for personal use.”

“If Colvin is a regular user, it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to think he’d dip into the goods. Even if he did plan on selling most of it.” He slowed the truck down as they approached a T-junction, then turned left and headed back into town. “The problem I have is seeing Malcolm Wintour as the bad guy. Why? What’s in it for him? Even granted the spurned-lover scenario, this is way too complicated. People who are enraged that their lover left grab the nearest gun and blow the person away. They don’t hire a bunch of guys and arrange incidents to cover their tracks. Besides, McKinley said the guy who was bankrolling them felt like they did about queers. Wanted to teach ’em a lesson. Wintour’s gay. He’s not going to beat up on his own kind.”

“It’s not a club with a secret handshake and vows of fraternal loyalty, Russ. Besides, from everything I’ve heard about Malcolm, the only person he feels loyalty to is himself. And maybe his aunt.” She twisted in her seat again. “And that’s another reason he may have done it. He’s living with Peggy Landry, relying on her for his housing and his support.”

“If he’s been selling…”

She waved a hand impatiently. “Details. I’m going for the big picture.”

“Oh.”

“He’s living with his aunt, the only other person to whom he’s attached, by both self-interest and affection. He thinks she’s likely to go under if the Algonquin Spa doesn’t go through, which is what Bill Ingraham is considering. So he does away with Bill. Or arranges to have him—” She closed her mouth abruptly.

He knew without asking that she was remembering what Ingraham’s body looked like the night she found him.

“The problem with that scenario,” he said, hoping to distract her, “is that Emil Dvorak was attacked the same night that Ingraham was making his threat at the town meeting to close down the project.”

She looked at him, her expression alert, indicating she’d returned to the present. “Sure, but chances are good that Ingraham had at least discussed the possibility with his other business partners. And if Peggy knew, Malcolm could have known. Or he might have talked about it with Malcolm himself before they broke up. Of course”—she flipped her hand over to indicate another possibility—“no one I’ve spoken with claims Malcolm is a genius of any kind, let alone a criminal one. His aunt described him as a sort of family project, and a man I was speaking with tonight said he couldn’t find—he wasn’t very smart.”

“Well, see, that’s something you would think of, because you’re used to dealing with smart people. Believe me, most crimes are committed by idiots. That’s why we usually catch them. It wouldn’t take intellect for Wintour to set up a series of hits on his ex and the others, just meanness and a few bucks. From what McKinley told me, they had control over the people they targeted and how they did it. The only instruction they had from the lead guy was that there be no thieving. Which, I have to admit, was smart, because once stolen goods start reappearing on the market, we usually have a much better chance of tracking down the thieves.”

“So you do think it could have been Malcolm.” She looked pleased with herself. “Hah.” She twisted toward him. “What are you going to do?”

He felt an unaccustomed warmth, centered in his chest and seeping outward, making his skin flush. It wasn’t sexual arousal, or embarrassment—he couldn’t identify the feeling.

“About what?”

“What are you going to do to be able to get a warrant to search Malcolm’s room? Besides sending Officer Entwhistle out. I can’t imagine he’ll find much, since Malcolm hasn’t been back in Millers Kill very long. He used to live with Bill in Baltimore. Hey, do you think the guys over at the Stuyvesant Inn might know more? Since he and Bill used to stay there together?”

It was pleasure, he realized. Simple pleasure at her genuine interest in him, in what he did, in what was important to him. A cold wave of guilt instantly washed over him. He was comparing Clare to his wife, which was completely unfair. Linda’s lack of interest in his work was her way of protecting herself from fear and anxiety. Her interests and her way of thinking were very different from his, and he had known that when he married her. He had welcomed it, as a respite from all the crap he’d had to deal with day in and day out as an MP. She hadn’t changed; he had. And the fact that Clare somehow seemed to…fit with who he was now should never, never reflect poorly on his wife, who was beautiful and funny and faithful. Not like him, who was driving around in his truck close to midnight, committing adultery in his heart.

“Russ? Yoo-hoo. Let me in. What are you thinking about?”

“Jimmy Carter,” he said. He quirked his mouth in a half smile and glanced at her, but instead of the amusement or puzzlement he expected, she met his eyes with a look of such utter understanding that he had to shift in his seat from discomfort and chagrin.

She ducked her head and straightened in her seat as well, facing forward. She looked straight ahead as he slowed and turned onto Meersham Street, with its small, neat houses and evenly spaced trees. “What are you going to do?”

“About Malcolm?”

“Yes, about Malcolm.”

Screw Malcolm, he wanted to say, but instead he forced his mind into the familiar and safe channels of investigation and deduction. “I’d like to have a talk with Peggy Landry about him. Nothing formal—just feel her out. What his relationship was to BWI Development, instead of just what it was to Ingraham. If he has any income she knows about, and where it’s coming from. If she’s noticed any behavior that might indicate drug use.” He glanced at her for a second and then returned his attention to driving. “Do you think she’d talk to me about him? Willingly?”

“She seemed more exasperated with him than protective,” Clare said. “She strikes me as the sort who would throw him out of the house if she knew he had illegal drugs there, for his own good. You know. Tough love. He seemed protective of her, though, in his conversation with the other guy.”

He nodded. “I’ll think of a good reason to drop in on her, then. I don’t want to ask her to the station or make it seem like another round of questioning on what she knows about Ingraham.”

“Help me get my car.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow. It’s still parked at her house. I’ll need someone to drive me up there so I can retrieve it. If you take me, it will seem completely unrelated to the investigation. I can come up with something to ask her—a question about the wedding. Then you can get into a conversation with her.”

“You’re very sneaky, for a priest.” He felt her shrug, rather than saw it.

“What can I say? I was a sneaky kid. Probably a sneaky officer. I was trained to fly under the radar.”

He turned onto Elm Street, approaching the rectory the back way. Her house was the last one on the street, just before you reached the church on the corner. He turned into her drive and twisted the key in the ignition. “Okay,” he said into the silence once the engine had died. “I’ll take you there. Do you need to have your car back at any particular time?”

She opened the passenger door and climbed out. “I have a wedding in the morning. I was going to do some grocery shopping in the afternoon, but I can always walk over to the IGA.”

He popped his own door open and swung himself out. “I’ll walk you up,” he said.

“That’s not necessary.”

“When are you going to get an automatic floodlight so you can see if someone’s in your yard after dark? They’re butt-easy to install. ’Scuse my French. You could probably do it yourself.”

Instead of heading up the drive toward her kitchen door, she walked across the lawn to the wide front porch. “I hate those things. They go off every time a squirrel walks across the lawn. I don’t like lights coming on and waking me up.”

She walked up the three steps, and he followed her. “Get some curtains,” he said. Unlike his own heavily accessorized windows, Clare’s didn’t have a single valance, balloon shade, or drapery.

“There’s an idea. You think maybe I could hire your wife to do them up for me?” The twist in her voice when she said “your wife” startled him. He stopped where he stood, one foot on the top step. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

He could smell roses heavy in the warm, humid air. He wondered if the church’s flower committee worked on her garden, as well. He looked at Clare, who was standing between the steps and the double door, almost invisible in the dark because of her black clothing.

“Thanks for bringing me home,” she said.

“I’ll call you tomorrow about retrieving your car.”

“Thanks.” She didn’t move. Neither did he. “You’ve walked me to the door. I’m safe. You can go now.”

“You go in first. And lock the door behind you, for once.”

There was a rustle as she crossed her arms. “Why can’t you leave first?”

He took the last step up onto the porch. “You know why.”

Her chin jerked up. Her face a pattern of pale and dark. She stood absolutely still, watching him. Measuring him. He didn’t think he could move even if a car jumped the curb and came straight toward them. Then she was gone, a whirl, the swish of cloth, and the door clunked shut behind her. He heard the clack of the bolt turning.

He backed down the steps, watching the house, but no lights came on. He climbed into his seat, fired up the truck, and pulled away. He unrolled the window, hung his arm outside, and, half-seeing the stars, drove all the way home.

Chapter Twenty-Six

When Clare woke up Saturday morning, she lay in bed for a long time, not moving. She hadn’t turned the fan on last night, and the air was thick and still, like another blanket weighing her down. From her open window came the drone of a lawn mower as someone got to their yard work early, before the heat and humidity became unbearable. She knew she should get up and get her run in early for the same reason. She lay on her back and studied the ceiling. There was a smear in the semigloss paint that looked like a bank of cumulus clouds. If she didn’t get up now and run, she would be cutting it too close to the time of the Veerhoos-James nuptials. The bride-to-be had described it as a “brunch wedding,” although no one would be eating before noon, since the service didn’t begin until eleven o’clock. Clare had turned down the invitation to the reception, so she would be free after the photos in the church. She wouldn’t want to run then, because it would be too hot. Or raining, from the feel of it. And she had to get her grocery shopping done and pick up her car.

The night before reassembled in her memory, the pieces clicking into place—the kir royales, Hugh Parteger, her raid on Malcolm’s bedroom, the porch roof. What in God’s name had she been thinking of? Then riding home with Russ—no, with Chief Van Alstyne. Her attempt at distancing him was so transparent, she sneered at herself as soon as she thought it.

She rolled over and buried her face in her pillow. She tried lying in that position until her mind went blank, but she couldn’t breathe very well. If she didn’t get up and strap on her running shoes right now, it wasn’t going to happen. With a groan, she surrendered to the demands of life and climbed out of bed.

She had known several priests and seminarians who liked to use the early-morning hours for private prayer and contemplation. She got the same results from running. Rain or shine, hot or cold, at some point during her five-mile run, the worries and questions that swarmed around her head like blackflies always blew away and she could feel that simple, bell-clear connection to the world around her, the weather, the working of her body. Being in the moment, that was being with God. One of her seminarian friends told her she should have been a Buddhist. One of her army buddies had pointed out that her spiritual experience was more likely the result of endorphins kicking in than opening a channel to the divine. Clare didn’t care. She would take whatever peace and certainty she could get. And run with it.

She was in a much more balanced state of mind a few hours later when she stood before the lower altar, facing Michael Veerhoos and Delia James. The bride and groom kept looking away from her and at each other, their expressions mirroring a kind of awed disbelief that they were doing this monumental thing. Clare looked at their family and friends during the prayers, at the wistful smiles and silent tears, at the way couples glanced at each other or took hands when she prayed, “Give them wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life, that each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.” The parents of the bride and the groom—each post-divorce, each with a new spouse—were all pride and teary tenderness. It never ceased to amaze her, the power of this act, that people who had been through the worst of marriage, its ruin and desolation, still beamed with happiness as another couple bound themselves together in hope and ignorance and courage.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Veerhoos still looked shell-shocked by delight during the photo session afterward. Clare had to be in a couple of obligatory shots, re-creating parts of the ceremony the photographer had missed during the actual event, and then she escaped to the sidelines. The photographer herded family members in and out of formation in front of the altar while his assistant darted back and forth, adjusting lights and reflective umbrellas. Clare accepted three damp, crumpled envelopes from the best man, addressed to “Priest,” “Organist,” and “Custodian.” Mr. Hadley wouldn’t like that last. He was proud of his title of sexton of St. Alban’s. She heard him banging around in the supply closet as the picture taking wound down, and by the time she had ushered out the last guest, he had fired up the floor polisher and was already attacking the tiles in the center aisle. It was 12:15. Excellent time for a wedding without Communion.

Clare retreated to the sacristy to remove her vestments, then walked to her office, wishing she had had the foresight to bring shorts and a T-shirt from the rectory. The offices and meeting rooms didn’t have the advantage of the church’s stone walls, which were thick enough to repel cannon fire, so Clare was damp and sticky by the time she reached her desk. She flicked on the standing fan, which cheerfully began blowing hot air at her. She sank into her chair, intent on finishing the paperwork she would have to mail to the state’s Department of Records.

Over the rush of her fan, she heard the floor polisher shut off. There was a pause, and then it started up again. She bent her head over the officiant’s record. There was a rap on her doorjamb, and Russ stuck his head inside. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi there.”

He leaned against the door frame, not entering the office. “There’s birdseed on the walkway in front of your church. I’m afraid I tracked some in.” He lifted one foot and examined the deep tread of his hiking boot. A few minuscule pellets dropped to the floor with a faint tic-tic. The wind from the fan immediately blew them into the hallway.

“Did Mr. Hadley yell at you?”

“Not yell, exactly. He wasn’t very happy, though.”

She squared off the marriage papers and stood. “You’re not in uniform.”

He looked down at himself, as if surprised to see jeans and a polo shirt instead of brown poplin. “It’s my weekend off, so I’m not officially on duty.” He grinned at her, showing a bit of his eyeteeth. “You look like you are, though.” He gestured toward her short-sleeved clerical blouse and black skirt.

“I’m finished up for now. Let me hit the rectory and change; then I’ll be ready to get my car.” She glanced at him before unnecessarily squaring off the documents again. “If you still want to take me.”

“I told you I would, didn’t I?”

“I could always get a ride from”—she drew a blank on any of her parishioners who might be headed out toward Peggy Landry’s house—“someone.”

“But you don’t have to, because I’m taking you. Besides, you’re supposed to smooth the way so I can question Ms. Landry about her nephew, remember?”

She wished she didn’t. It was amazing how drink-induced ideas looked in the clear light of day. “Okay, then.”

“I’m parked out back.”

“I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

“Bring some water. It’s going to be easy to get dehydrated today.”

She fled before she could drivel on with increasingly meaningless sentences. In the rectory, she threw on shorts and a sleeveless blouse, grateful to be shucked of her hot black uniform. She took a quick look at her hair in the bathroom mirror, but she had taken the time to braid it tightly against her scalp after her shower, so it was still neat and cool. She slipped on her sneakers, grabbed a bottle of Poland Spring from the fridge, and ran back to the small parking lot behind St. Alban’s.

The seat in Russ’s pickup stuck to the back of her thighs. He had both windows rolled down, but the wind that blew through the cab felt like exhaust from a dryer. “Don’t you have any air conditioning in this thing?” she said.

“Oh, yeah.” He patted the dashboard affectionately. “This is my baby. She comes fully loaded.”

Clare looked at him pointedly and let her eyes drift toward the temperature controls. “What?” he said. “You want me to turn it on? We’re only going thirty-five miles an hour. The breeze feels good.”

“You have a speed limit for your AC? When does it kick in?”

“When I’m driving so fast that I can’t hear the radio over the sound of the wind.”

“What is it with you people and air conditioning? One of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, and folks in the north country act as if it were some sort of leprous beggar. You know, something you occasionally have to put up with in public but not something you’d ever take home.”

He stopped at a red light. Several shoppers staggered across the crosswalk, sucking iced coffees and clutching bags labeled ADIRONDACK GIFT SHOPPE. “I guess,” he said slowly, “it’s because air conditioning feels like an indulgence. An imported indulgence, like paying someone to detail your car, or installing an in-ground swimming pool.” The light turned green and he drove on to a residential street. “Look there.” He pointed to the backyard of a house where several children were jumping into a round aboveground pool. “See? That’s the sort of pool we have here. Not something that costs ten thousand dollars to install and only gets used three months out of the year.”

“But an air conditioner only costs a few hundred bucks!”

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

She sat back in her seat, trying to ignore the way her shirt slid against her damp skin.

“Oh, all right. Wussy.”

“I am not a wussy.” They drove the rest of the way in silence, the thrum of the truck’s air conditioning and the music from a country station taking the place of conversation.

When they pulled into the long driveway leading up to Peggy Landry’s house, Clare’s car was still where she had left it. There were several other vehicles pulled off to the edges of the gravel. “Houseguests,” Clare said in response to Russ’s dubious look at the vehicles. She climbed out of the cab as soon as he stopped the truck. “How do you want to do this?” she asked.

“How about you thank her and introduce me as the guy who brought you up here. Then I’ll ask her if I can take a little of her time. I don’t want to scare her off.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Their brilliant plan hit a major roadblock when the door was opened by the bride-to-be, looking considerably less vivacious than she had the night before. “She’s not here, Reverend Clare,” Diana said after Clare asked for Peggy. “I don’t know where she went to. Cary and I were still asleep.”

From the foyer, Cary’s great-uncle called out, “I talked to her before she left.”

Clare leaned around Diana. “Hi, Mr. Wood. Did Peggy say where she went?”

“Got a phone call, she said. Had to go out to her construction site. Say, we’re just about to sit down to lunch. Care to join us? Helen and I can show you the rest of our trip.”

“I’m afraid we have to head back into town,” Russ broke in. “Thanks for the info. You don’t happen to know if Malcolm is here?”

Diana waved a hand. “He borrowed my car. God knows if I’ll ever see it again.” She pushed her hair away from her face. “Do you want to leave him a message?”

“No,” Russ said. “No message. Thanks for your time. Sorry to bother you.”

Russ and Clare retreated back to his pickup. “I don’t like it,” he said.

“I’m sure she gets called out to the construction site frequently.”

He waved a hand. “The work site’s been closed down since Monday. What would she be doing?”

“The office is still there.”

He shook his head, squinting up at the dull glare of the sky. “If you heard what you thought you heard—”

“Please don’t say ‘if,’ ” she said.

“If you heard what you thought you heard, there’s a scared co-conspirator out there who has already gone to Malcolm for help. He’s gotten a Baggie of trouble for his time, worse than useless, because now he’s carrying, and if he gets stopped while holding, he’s in deep sh—trouble.”

“You think he might try to shake down Peggy?”

“Maybe. Try to hit her up for money. Or try to hold her until Malcolm comes up with cash. I don’t know; I’m just feeling my way here. But I don’t like the feeling.”

She dug her keys out of her pocket. “Let’s go, then.”

“Whoa. What is this ‘we,’ kemosabe?”

She crunched over the gravel to her car. “I am going to go to the Algonquin Spa construction site now to see if I can offer any aid or comfort to Peggy Landry. You can come along if you like.”

“Clare, you have no business—”

She shut the door, partially blocking out his harangue. She cranked up the air conditioner as high as it would go and turned on the radio. She checked the rear window to make sure he was following. He was stomping across the ground, evidently talking to himself, or swearing. Clare readjusted the rearview mirror and reversed in a smart turn, kicking up gravel. She grinned. She didn’t want anything to happen to Peggy, of course, but she was alive with the prospect of finally answering the questions surrounding Bill Ingraham’s murder and Dr. Dvorak’s and Todd’s assaults.

She gunned the Shelby and sped down the drive. A quick glance in the mirror confirmed that Russ’s truck was behind her. She envisioned herself triumphantly bearing the truth to the MacPhersons, and to Stephen and Ron. You don’t have to be afraid because of who you are! she’d say. She pictured herself laying her cleverness before the vestry—the man responsible caught! And imagine if her role in uncovering Malcolm was recounted in the Post-Star. It could deliver a huge boost in attendance at a candlelight vigil. Maybe she could follow up with organized discussion groups at St. Alban’s, involve the outreach commission….

With plans cascading through her head, she went back through town on autopilot, just aware enough of her surroundings to avoid rear-ending a tanker trailer whose driver had stopped shy of the Route 117 bridge in order to back into a Stewart’s convenience store. Waiting for a truck to turn would normally have had her drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and glancing at her watch, but at this point in her daydream, her activities and outreach had brought large numbers of new members into St. Alban’s, and she smiled so beatifically at the overflowing pews that the startled truck driver smiled and waved back.

By the time she passed the Stuyvesant Inn, she was being feted by the vestry and acclaimed by the bishop for her fearless dedication to the truth. The little Cobra bounced and jounced up the road to the construction site, clouds of dust roiling up behind her for Russ’s pickup to drive through.

As he had said, the site was closed to work. It would have been obvious even if there had been other vehicles alongside Peggy Landry’s Volvo in the dirt parking area. The excavators and bulldozers rested in exactly the same positions they had been in when Clare visited five days before. The clear plastic tarpaulins on the pallets of brick and Sheetrock were dusted over with a gold-green layer of pollen, giving them the look of tomb relics.

She pulled in a few feet away from Peggy’s sedan and got out. No piney mountain breezes today. The air was thick with humidity and smelled of the rich humus composting on the forest floor all around them. Russ had driven past Peggy’s car and parked the truck farther away, angled sharply, its nose out. So he could pull out and onto the road without having to reverse and turn, she realized. Probably picks the corner seat on a bar, Clare thought, with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. She leaned on the hood of her car, scuffing the toe of her sneaker through the talc-fine dirt.

Russ walked over. “Well, her car’s here. Let’s try the office.”

But the office door was locked. “Now what?” Clare asked.

“I don’t like this.” Russ looked at the ground, which had been beaten into a formless wash of fine dirt by the constant pounding of feet and machinery. “We’re never going to be able to track her here.” He took his glasses off and polished them with the corner of his polo shirt, squinting at the woods surrounding the site.

“The only car around is hers,” she said. “What if he’s already met her and taken her away?”

“Her purse is still in her car,” Russ replied. “If this guy you heard is really up against the wall, I doubt he’d leave behind her credit cards, cash, and ATM card.”

“Oh. I didn’t see that.”

“Didn’t look, did you?”

She ignored the amusement in his voice and pointed to the edge of the site. “There’s a rough road back there. Just a couple of ruts between the trees, but if I were walking away from here”—she swept her arm around, encompassing the work zone, “I’d use it, instead of bushwhacking through these woods.”

“Do you know where it goes?”

“The foreman took me around. If you head to the left, there’s a helipad.” He looked at her. “Yeah, I know; I thought it was pretty cool myself. In the other direction, it leads to the old quarry. It branches off there and follows the gorge farther up the mountain. The less attractive stuff is going to be up there—their power plant, their laundry, the garage, things like that.”

“How far does it go?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t go there.”

“Okay. Hang on a sec.” Russ returned to his truck, bent the driver’s seat forward, and pulled something from the back. He emerged with a standard-issue gun belt. He buckled it on and drew the gun, inspecting the ammunition clip before returning it to the holster. In his jeans and knit shirt, he looked almost like a tourist playacting at Frontier Town, but the heavy solidity of the belt and holster could never be mistaken for a toy.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked.

“I sure as hell hope not,” he said. “But it’s better to have it and not need it than the other way around.” He paused in front of her. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to get back into your car and go home.”

She shook her head, her braid thumping against her neck.

“Wait for me here?”

She laughed.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He headed for the nearest earthen ramp. She fell in beside him. “Stick close. If we see anything funny, get behind me and let me do the talking. Got it?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“And don’t ‘sir’ me. You were the captain. I was just a lowly warrant officer. And I had to work my way up to that from being a dumb grunt.”

“We’re civilians now. Who do you think outranks, the chief of police or the rector?”

“The chief of police does. I’ve got more years on the job and more people I have to worry about.”

“Plus, you’re older than I am. A lot older.”

He shot her a look as they entered the forest track. Unlike the last time she had been here, there was no current of cool air running beneath the trees. The leaves around them hung limp in the humidity, and the smell of rotting vegetation was everywhere. “This way,” she said, pointing toward the quarry.

They trudged through the green tunnel in silence. Clare’s blouse clung to a damp patch at the small of her back. She waved away a mosquito that was attempting to land on her thigh. Russ slapped his forearm and flicked off a tiny corpse. They passed a tree-clinging vine dotted with starry white flowers that gave off a sickly-sweet smell. “Pretty,” she observed.

He just grunted. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Y’know, Ray Yardhaas was a lot more entertaining as a hiking companion than you are,” she said.

“Be quiet,” he replied. “If there’s somebody in here with Peggy Landry, I don’t want to give him advance notice we’re coming.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He waved her apology away. They reached the fork in the track she remembered from Monday. “Quarry,” she said, pointing right.

He gestured with his head that they should go right. After a few yards, the forest canopy opened up and she could see the hazy sky, colorless and cloudless. He waved her behind him and walked toward the edge slowly. When he got within a few yards of the rocky outcrop that Clare and Ray had stood on to view the quarry, Russ dropped down on his belly and crawled forward. Clare did the same, the small rocks and scrub grass scraping her exposed skin.

“Anything?” she asked as she drew near to the edge.

He pushed back and clambered to his feet. “No.” She stood up as well, gratefully brushing away the bits of rock embedded in her thighs. They looked over the smooth chunks of shale that marked the upper rim of the quarry. “What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing to where the crevasse opened into the rear of the quarry. After several days without rain, the waterfall was a weak trickle down the rock face. “Is it part of the construction?”

“No, it’s a natural gorge. Runs down from the mountain.”

“Could they have hiked up there?”

“I don’t think so. I met the state’s geologist when I was here on Monday, and he described it as knifing down the mountain. I suppose someone could climb up the back wall of the quarry and get in, but I can’t imagine this Colvin guy getting Peggy up there under duress. Look at it. That’s a real toe-and-fingerhold climb for at least fifteen or twenty feet.”

“Yeah.” Russ squatted on his haunches and took a long, slow look at the quarry beneath them. “What about past those dump trucks? Where the forest takes up again?”

“I don’t know. I guess if you headed downhill long enough, you’d eventually run into the road. I can’t say I took a close look around when I was down there, but I sure didn’t see anything that leapt out at me as a trail.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. He stood up again, rubbing his hands on his jeans. “If she really is here on spa business, why the hell isn’t she at the office? I don’t see her as the type to take spontaneous hikes through the deep woods on a ninety-degree day.”

“Not with a houseful of guests,” she said.

“And if Colvin or someone was trying to lure her here, where did he take her? If you want to rob someone, you take the valuables and leave. If you want to kidnap someone, you take the person and leave. Except this guy, from the way you describe hearing him, sounded too chickenshit for an actual kidnapping. ’Scuse my French.”

“Maybe he took her in his car and left the purse behind.”

“In which case, we’re back to square one.” He twisted around, looking back into the woods. “What I worry about is that he might have met up with her here, tried to intimidate her into paying him off, and—”

“And then something went wrong,” she said.

He looked at her. “There’re lots of places to hide a body in these woods.”

Despite the heat, she felt a prickle of gooseflesh along her arms. “Let’s try the other trail, the one that heads up the mountain.” Even as she made the suggestion, she knew that it was more an attempt to deny the awful possibility that Peggy was lying dead out there than a realistic hope that they might find her.

He shifted his weight. “Okay. We’ll try it for a ways. But if we don’t see anything, we’re turning around and heading into town.”

“Will you put together a search team?”

He nodded. “And get a dog up here.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The track up the mountain was harder. They walked side by side, silent once more, although Clare had stopped expecting they would find anyone lurking ahead. At least anyone alive. Silence in the woods seemed to come naturally to Russ. She slogged along, one foot in front of the other, feeling as if she were hiking with a wet Turkish towel draped around her, but his back and arms had a line of tension about them, and each step he took was deliberate. He kept looking into the trees, left, right, scanning overhead.

They passed a dump site barely hacked out of the woods, filled with cracked pallets and bags of rubbish. One of those golf carts Ray had mentioned to Clare lay tipped over on its side. Russ made her get behind him, then drew his gun from its holster before approaching the pile of trash. He peered into an open barrel before retreating back to the trail. He shook his head and motioned to Clare to keep walking as he reholstered his gun.

She didn’t know if it was the quiet, or Russ’s behavior, or the tangled thicket of underbrush, which reminded her of where she had found Ingraham’s body, but she was getting seriously creeped out. When he paused at the sound of a woodpecker’s knock and searched the trees, she hissed at him, “Why are you doing that?”

“What?” He turned to her. “Doing what?”

“Acting like we’re about to come under fire. I ferried guys to the front during Desert Storm who were less tense than you are.”

“I didn’t know you were in the Gulf.”

“Cut it out. You’re making me more nervous than I already am.”

“Sorry.” A dried-up streambed cut across the trail, and they picked their way across the smooth stones. His eyes flicked across the trees.

“Do you really think that the guy who took Peggy is waiting to ambush us?” She kept her voice close to a whisper.

He shook his head. “No. I don’t know. It’s just…” He flipped his hands out. “The green. The heat. The humidity.”

“I thought you liked to go into the woods. Don’t you hunt?”

“That’s in the fall. Not when everything’s green.” He looked again, left, right, up. “I like the fall. And the spring. Nothing good ever happened to me in green leaves.” The trail twisted to the right, running parallel to a dense stand of hardwood. Clare could feel her calf muscles sigh with relief at the chance to travel on more level ground.

“Sometimes I have dreams,” he said. “Red on green.”

“Oh,” she said, and then, after a moment, “Tell me about them.”

He smiled at her, but his eyes were still far away. Lost in the green. “I would, but I’d have to have a bottle of whiskey while I was doing it, and then the folks at my AA meeting would be cheesed off at me.”

There was a sound from up the trail. They both stopped. She heard it again, a beat, or a rustle. Hard to tell. Not a sound made by nature. He motioned her to the side of the trail and she pressed herself into the underbrush, hardly feeling the sharp twigs and tickling leaves, her heart pounding. She had a second to wonder if he was just going to stand there in the middle of the track, and another second to start to feel irritation along with fear, and then he faded into the shadows of the big trees on the opposite side of the trail. She peered through the tiny branches to where the rutted track turned uphill again and disappeared from view.

Peggy Landry walked around the bend. Clare looked at Russ, but he held up one finger. She waited. Peggy was a mess, her arms scratched, a sleeve half-torn off her camp shirt, a reddening mark across her temple and eye that looked as if it would bloom into a very bad bruise. She was walking quickly, watching her footing on the trail, but not running. Clare looked over at Russ again. He was still holding up a finger, looking well past Peggy to the bend in the trail, clearly waiting to see if she was being pursued. Clare held her breath and tried to ignore an itchy trickle of sweat on her chest. Peggy walked past their concealed positions. She was almost at the next turn of the track when Russ stepped out from the trees. “Ms. Landry,” he said.

She screamed. Clare stumbled out of her hiding place. Peggy screamed again.

“Peggy!” Clare shouted. “It’s me! Clare Fergusson!”

Russ threw his hands up into the air. “And Chief Van Alstyne.”

Peggy staggered back, clutching her chest, and collapsed on the ground.

“Oh, my God!” They both ran toward Peggy, Clare reaching her first and skidding as she dropped down next to the older woman. “Peggy! Are you okay?”

Russ knelt on Peggy’s other side. “Let me take a look at her,” he said, brushing Clare’s hands away. Peggy was hunched over, panting so fast that Clare was sure she would pass out from hyperventilation. Russ took Peggy’s head between his hands and tilted her face toward him. Her eyes were wide and white-rimmed, like a spooked horse. “I don’t think she’s in shock,” he said. He brushed her hair away from her temple. “This looks nasty, though.” He looked at Clare. “Run your hands over her torso. Make sure she doesn’t have any puncture wounds.”

Clare did as he asked. “Nothing,” she said.

“Peggy,” Russ said slowly and clearly, “you need to calm down and tell us what happened. Was someone with you? Were you threatened? Did he injure you?”

“How…what…” Peggy gasped for air.

“We went to your house,” Clare said. “Mr. Wood told us you had left for the construction site after getting a phone call.” She glanced up at Russ, uncertain how much to say to the woman huddled between them.

“We had reason to believe you might be in danger from Jason Colvin.” Russ said. “He’s wanted for questioning in the Ingraham murder.”

Peggy buried her face in her hands and rocked forward. “Please, Peggy, tell us what happened,” Clare said.

Russ looked grim. “Ms. Landry, were you sexually assaulted?”

That seemed to reach her. She sat up straighter and pushed her hair out of her face. “No,” she said. She covered her eyes with her hands again. “But I think he was trying to kill me.”

“Who?” Clare could hear Russ trying to keep a tight rein on his voice.

“Leo Waxman.”

Clare rocked back on her heels. “Leo Waxman?”

Russ spread his hands with a look of complete confusion on his face. “Who’s he?”

“The state’s geologist for the project. Remember I told you he showed me around the quarry when I was here Monday? That’s him.”

“What the hell does the geologist have to do with any of this?” Clare could empathize with the bafflement in Russ’s voice.

“He called me,” Peggy said. “He told me he had something very important to show me at the site. Something that could affect the project going forward. I met him at the spa area and he insisted on driving me way up here to show me something. He wouldn’t say what.” She hunched over again. “He took me as far as you can on this road, up to where it gets very close to the gorge. He—he demanded money from me. Told me Bill had promised him a job with BWI and a fat salary, and then Bill reneged. He was crazy. Furious.” She looked up at them. “I think he may have murdered Bill.” She closed her eyes. “I was terrified. He came at me. We fought. Somehow—I’m not sure how—he went over.” Her voice thinned out into little more than a whisper. “Into the gorge. I didn’t know what to do. So I started walking back. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Russ looked over her head to where the trail twisted out of sight. “How far from here?”

Peggy shook her head. “I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying much attention. Everything seems sort of unreal. Like in a horrible dream.”

“Peggy,” Clare said. “Is he injured? Is he dead? Did you get a good look at him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He was near the stream, facedown, very still. I yelled, but he didn’t move or answer. I was going to call for help when I got back to my car. He was just lying there. It’s a deep gorge. My grandfather would never let us hike near it when we were kids.”

“How come you didn’t drive back down?” Russ said.

Peggy blinked. There was a pause, as if she was trying to remember her thoughts at the scene of the accident. “I can’t drive a standard,” she finally said. She looked up at them. “I’m sorry. I guess I should have tried.”

Clare looked at Russ. “What do you think we should do?”

“I gotta go up and see. Will you take Ms. Landry back down to the cars?”

“Do you want me to call for help?”

He shook his head. “It’ll have to be Mountain Rescue. I want to be able to tell them if it’s a medical emergency or a body recovery. It can’t be that far, and I can travel faster without her. I’ll scope it out and get back to you as soon as possible.” He hunkered down to get close to Peggy again. “Did he park on the trail? Did you wander far from the vehicle?”

“No. I mean, yes, he parked on the trail. We walked from there to the gorge. You can hear—there’s still a bit of water running in the stream at the bottom. You can hear it.”

He stood up, rubbing his hands on his jeans. “I’ll meet you back there as soon as I can.”

Clare nodded. She watched until he disappeared from view. Then she stood up. “Do you think you can get up?” she asked Peggy, extending her hand. Peggy took it and let Clare haul her into a standing position. “Are you sure you’re not hurt anywhere? You’re going to have a bad bruise around your eye.”

Peggy touched her face lightly. “I’m not hurt. Other than this. I’m more shaken up than anything.”

Clare squeezed her arm. “You have every right to be.”

She led Peggy down the trail, murmuring assurances and encouragement, listening to her rattle on while keeping an ear cocked for the sound of Russ behind them. Peggy kept returning to Leo Waxman and how he was lying at the bottom of the gorge. “What if he’s still alive? Will the Mountain Rescue be able to help him? Won’t they take an awfully long time? What are his chances?”

“If that gorge is as steep as I think it is, yes, it’ll take a long time to rescue him,” Clare said. “They’ll have to rappel men and equipment down, fix him on a board, and then carry him out the long way, through the quarry. Either that or figure out a way to lift him back up the wall of the gorge without hurting him more. I think you need to prepare yourself. Unless he was only stunned when you looked at him, the chances are good that he’s not going to survive.”

Peggy moaned. “Oh, God.”

Clare looked ahead. They were getting closer to where the trail joined the rutted road leading from the quarry to the helipad. She recognized the rottingly sweet white-flowered vines running up the trees and—The force of her thought literally made her stop in her tracks. She whirled on Peggy. “I know how we can get him!”

“What?”

“Waxman. We don’t have to wait for the Mountain Rescue team. I can get him out. With the BWI helicopter.”

“What?” Peggy’s second “What?” was closer to a screech than a question.

“BWI keeps a helicopter right here at the site. I’ve been in it. It has a first-aid pack and, more important, it’s rigged with a cargo net and boom.” She looked up, as if she could see through the leaf canopy to the skies overhead. “It’s lousy flying weather, of course. The humidity will make it slow going, but there’s no wind. Once I’m over the gorge, I can just hover there and let Russ bring Waxman up.”

“You’re joking.” Peggy’s expression reminded Clare that declaring oneself capable of aerial extractions was not something most people did with confidence.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I was a pilot in the army. I’ve logged thousands and thousands of hours in helicopters.”

“You’re not joking.”

“Hurry up.” Clare quickened her pace. “Let’s get down to the site and get your cell phone. We can call ahead to the hospital and find out what to do for him. Then I can run back up to the helipad and do a preflight check.” She frowned. “I hope Mr. Opperman didn’t fly it back to Baltimore or anything.”

They trotted along at a fast pace. Peggy looked drawn and ashy, and Clare felt a wash of guilt at pushing her after her ordeal. But no matter what Leo Waxman had done, he didn’t deserve to die all alone at the bottom of a gorge. Not when she had within her the power to help.

She sighed with relief when they reached the turnoff to the spa site.

“Wait,” Peggy said, clutching at Clare’s arm. “Let me go get the phone. And maybe get a couple bottles of cold water from the office fridge?” She smiled weakly. “You go ahead and do what you have to with the helicopter. I’ll join you there. It’ll be quicker.”

“You’re right,” Clare said. “Are you sure you’ll be okay on your own?”

Peggy smiled, more forcefully this time. “I’ve made it this far, haven’t I?”

Clare threw her arms around the older woman and hugged her quickly. “You sure have. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She jog-trotted the rest of the way to the helipad, arriving there slick with sweat and breathless.

The Bell was right where she had left it last, center stage on its tarmac square. She tried the door. Unlocked. Key still in the ignition. “Thank you, Lord,” she said. She flicked the key switch on, grabbed the fuel pipette, which the previous pilot had left wedged in the off-side seat, and hopped out to check the fuel.

It wasn’t full up, but there would be more than enough to get her safely to Glens Falls, or even Albany, if necessary. She drew down some fuel into the pipette and held it up to the colorless sky, looking for water or sediment that could spell a serious problem. It looked clean.

She climbed back into the cockpit and checked the buss and batt switches. She tapped the control panel. She knew she should test all the lights, since this was a new ship for her, but it wasn’t absolutely necessary, and right now, time was of the essence. Reflexively, she did verify that the fire extinguisher behind the pilot’s seat was full before clambering outside again to untie the Bell and do the exterior preflight check.

She had finished the right-side fuselage check, had untied the main rotor blade, and was closing up the tail rotor gearbox when she heard sounds coming from the track.

“Hey! Clare!” Russ emerged from the woods, closely followed by Peggy, who was carrying a large sailcloth L. L. Bean bag. Clare ducked under the tail boom to talk to them. Russ’s shirt was clinging to his chest in damp patches and his hair was plastered to his scalp. Peggy reached into the bulging bag and handed him a bottle of water dripping with condensation. He unscrewed the top and dumped half the contents over his head, shaking his shaggy hair like a dog.

“Is he still alive?” Clare asked. Peggy pulled an identical bottle out of the bag and handed it to her.

Russ swigged most of the rest of his water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yes. He didn’t answer me when I called to him, but he shifted a bit. He’s about twenty, twenty-five feet down. Ms. Landry says you have some cockamamy idea about using the helicopter to get him out?”

Clare swallowed a mouthful of the almost painfully cold water and turned back to the ship. “It’s not a cockamamy idea.” She moved to the left side of the fuselage to check the engine compartment and the transmission.

“The hell it’s not. It’s not that I doubt you can fly this monster, but how do you think you’re going to rescue him?”

She looked up from the hydraulic servos. “I’m not going to do it alone. You’re going to help me.”

He held up his hands. “Whoa.”

“The chopper is fitted out for cargo. I fly over to where Waxman is and hover. You get in the net, I lower you to the bottom of the crevasse, you get Waxman, and I pull you both up.”

His face was set in a mask of denial. “That’s insane.”

“No it’s not. I admit that I wouldn’t want to try it on a gusty day, but it’s perfectly calm. The winch can be controlled right from the cockpit. I can do it all without getting out of my seat.” She secured the transmission cowling and climbed up to the top of the fuselage to check the hydraulic reservoir.

“What if something happens? What if you have a choice between leaving the cockpit and…and me falling?”

She looked up from where she was examining the main rotor system. He sounded almost panicky. “It has a four-axis autopilot, Russ. If you need me, I’ll be there.” She gestured toward the locked shed at the edge of the clearing. “I didn’t see any headsets in the cabin, so I suspect they’re in there. We’ll have to break in, I’m afraid. But with those on, we’ll be able to communicate with each other the whole time.” She swung herself down and crouched under the ship’s belly to check the landing gear.

Russ crouched down across from her. “I can’t do this.”

“Sure, you can.”

“No. You don’t understand. I can’t do this.” He spoke each word slowly and distinctly.

The import of his words finally sank in. “Are you afraid? To fly?”

His jaw worked. “Helicopters,” he said.

“You’re afraid to fly in helicopters. You were in the army, for heaven’s sake. You must have used helicopter transport before.” She stood up on tiptoe to check the wind-screens. He stood up as well, leaning across the Bell’s pointed nose.

“I had a bad experience.” His voice was barely louder than a rumble. He obviously didn’t want Peggy to hear anything. “A very bad experience.”

She slapped the windscreen. “Get over it.”

“What?”

She backed away from the ship and strolled slowly around it, giving it a last once-over with her eyes, half her attention on looking for anything out of place, the other half on getting Russ to fall in with her plan. It wasn’t the first time she had had to deal with a panicky crew member. “What happened? You took incoming fire? Lightning fried your electrical system?” She looked up at him. “It’s not going to happen here and now. Here and now, a man may very well die if we don’t get him up out of that gorge. So get over it.”

He stopped dead. “I can’t believe you. This isn’t some sort of whim I just made up. This is real. You think I go around confessing to anyone how I feel? What kind of priest are you anyway?”

She swung around to face him. “I don’t know, Russ. I guess I’m the kind who flies helicopters and speaks without thinking and screws up on a regular basis.” She wiped her oily hands on her shorts, instantly converting them from good to trash. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, stepping into his space, crowding him, hissing her words. “I’m not the sort who would let a man die because she’s too chickenshit to climb into a machine!” She pointed to the shed, never breaking eye contact with him. “Now break into that shed and get me those headsets!”

He stepped back. She saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down. He stared at her. “Ma’am,” he said. “Yes, ma’am.”

She marched behind him to the shed. Although the door was chained and padlocked, the shed itself was a flimsy affair, the sort you could buy prefab at a home and garden center. Russ circled the shed, ran his fingers assessingly over the chain, then headed straight for one of the two Plexiglas windows set into the side walls. He pushed against it and felt around the edges. “You care if this looks pretty or not?” he said.

“No.”

“Okay. C’mere.” He pulled her to him, turned her around, and wrapped his arms around her waist. “You’re going to be the battering ram. Keep your feet about as wide apart as the window.”

She didn’t have a chance to respond, because with a grunt, he hoisted her off the ground, squeezing the breath out of her. She drew her legs up and braced her feet. He staggered back a few steps and then lumbered forward. Her sneakers struck the window with a jolt that made her legs buzz up to her knees, and the entire window, Plexiglas and frame, flew into the shed, crashing and clattering as it fell into a rack of shelves.

He set her on the sill and she slipped through into the oven-hot interior. It was pretty much what she had expected, shelving filled with tools, several small barrels of transmission and hydraulic fluid, rags in a plastic grocery bag. There was a metal cabinet set next to where the window had been, and she pried it open. Bingo: four headsets hanging on a dowel. She took two and passed them out to Russ, then turned to case out the shed more carefully, looking for something that might be helpful. The shelving was too heavy, the clipboards way too small; then she spotted two grimy lawn chairs, folded and tossed into the corner. They would do nicely. She grabbed them and stuffed them through the window.

“What are these for?” he asked.

“Waxman’s going to need some sort of restraint before we move him,” she said. She went back to the shelves, took the bag of rags, and thrust it out, as well. “You can stomp on the chairs to flatten them and tie him down to the webbing with these.”

“The gunk on these rags will kill him, if the lift doesn’t.”

She glared through the window. “I’m open to suggestions, if you have a better idea.” He lifted his hands and backed away. She turned back to the shed’s interior. Now, all she needed to find was…Frowning, she went through the rest of the cabinet.

“No charts,” she said half to herself.

“What?”

She pulled a paper towel from a roll in the cabinet and wiped the sweat off her face. “No charts. I didn’t see any in the cockpit, and I was hoping they would be stored here. Opperman must have taken them with him.”

“Is this something you need to fly?”

She almost said yes, then remembered to whom she was talking. “I just needed them for the radio frequencies. But it doesn’t really matter. Whoever flew the ship the last time would have tuned the radio to the right approach control. Probably Albany. Maybe Boston. It’ll be there.” She up-ended a pail in front of the window space. “Help me out.”

She levered herself over the edge, the shed wall shaking hard beneath her weight, and Russ grabbed her under her arms and dragged her out. She shook herself. “I wouldn’t have believed it, but it actually feels cooler out here after that.”

“You sure you don’t need those charts?”

She looked up at him. “I’m sure.”

“Did you turn on the radio to make sure?”

“We’re in the mountains, Russ. I’m going to have to be at a couple thousand feet before I can get any signal.” He looked pale again. She laid her hand on his arm. “Do you trust me?”

He nodded.

“Then you let me worry about the piloting. You’re the dumb grunt, remember?”

He laughed, an explosive choked sound that was very close to the edge, but not going over. She scooped up the bag of oily rags, satisfied. “Let’s get those helmets and go.”

Peggy was backing out of the passenger-side cockpit door. “I put another two water bottles in,” she said. “I thought you might need them.”

“Thanks, Peggy.” Clare kept her eyes on Russ as he tossed the lawn chairs through the cargo doorway and then clipped his headset over his ears. He adjusted the mike into the proper position. He may not have liked choppers, but he had certainly done this before.

“I didn’t have a chance to tell you because”—Peggy tilted her head toward Russ, indicating his attempts to keep his problem under wraps hadn’t been entirely successful—“but I phoned the Glens Falls Hospital while I was down in the office and told them what you were attempting. The triage nurse I spoke with said you should take him straight to Albany Medical Center.”

Clare bit her lower lip. “Without stopping for any medical personnel first?”

“That’s what she said.”

Clare gestured at the sailcloth bag, which was drooping on the ground near the tail boom. “You didn’t bring your phone with you, did you?”

Peggy spread her hands. “I forgot. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m having a hard time stringing two thoughts together.”

“That’s natural. Look, are you going to be okay to drive yourself?”

“I think I will be. I know the route so well from here that it’s like the old gray mare returning to the barn.”

“Okay. We’ll let you know what’s happening as soon as we get into Albany.” Clare stuffed the bag of rags under her arm and placed the headset on her head, tilting the mike into position. “Better get back to the edge of the tarmac. Don’t approach the ship once I’ve got the rotors going.”

Peggy nodded, scooped up her bag, and retreated to the trailhead. Clare switched on the set-to-set transmitter. “Russ?” she said. He didn’t respond. She glanced over to where he stood staring into the cargo area. She walked over, tapped him on one of the headphones, and switched him on. “Can you hear me?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah,” he said.

She pointed up to the cargo boom jutting out over the open door. “That’s what the net hangs from, obviously.” She tossed the rags inside, jumped up into the cargo area, and found the manual control. She unlocked it and cranked the handle, letting the wide web strap clipped to the net spool through the boom until several feet of it lay on the tarmac at Russ’s feet. She secured the control and squatted at the edge of the door. “Can you wrestle that in here?” she asked. He gathered up the pile of netting and tossed it through the doorway as Clare scrambled to get out of the way. She dragged the net toward the opposite side of the ship, pulled back the edges, and slid the folded lawn chairs and the plastic rag bag inside. She looked around for something to secure the stuff during the flight. Hanging from a grommet in the bright orange safety web were half a dozen short bungee cords.

“Perfect,” she said, hooking the end of one through the D ring connecting the net to the boom strap. She hooked the other end through another grommet. It wasn’t very ship-shape, but the bungee cord held the boom strap off the floor and away from the cargo door, so that even if she should have to angle hard during the flight, the net wouldn’t be able to slip though the door and out of Russ’s reach.

She squatted at the edge of the door again. “Hop on up here,” she said. Russ backed against the door and levered himself up until he was sitting beside her. In the small cargo area, his head almost touched the roof. “Okay, I’ve secured the net back here,” she said, thumbing toward the pile on the floor. “This is what we’re going to do. When we reach Waxman, I’ll hover overhead. You take off the bungee strap, drag the net over to the doorway, and get inside.”

“Right.” His tone was so flat, she couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or was just scared.

“Once you’re in the net, I’ll use the cockpit control to pull the boom strap up tight. That’ll swing you out the door. Then I’ll lower the netting nice and easy until you’re on the ground.”

“Nice and easy.”

She ducked her head. “You may take a couple of bumps when you reach the ground. I’ll do everything I can to set you down smoothly.”

He bent over and put his head between his knees. “Oh, God,” he said. She thought it might be as authentic a prayer as she had ever heard.

“If anything happens, if you need me, I’ll be right behind you. Look.” She pointed to where one of the passenger seats rested against the partial bulkhead. “You’ll sit there. You can see the pilot’s seat right behind it. I can be up and over in a few seconds.”

“I have to tell you that’s not a big comfort right now.”

“You ready?”

He nodded. He looked like a man going to his own execution, but he gave her a thumbs-up.

“Then let’s fly.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. Russ had been there before. Pilots could never just get you on board and go. They had to stretch it out, playing with switches and revving up the engine until it sounded like it was going to explode, and all the time poor jackasses like him had to sit in a puddle of sweat and misery. His skin was itching and creeping, until he wanted to scratch it off, tear off the headphones that made his skull feel like a china cup in a vise, jump out of the chopper, and run far enough away that he would no longer hear the thwap-thwap-thwap noise that was the sound track to all his nightmares.

He was strapped into the left-side passenger seat, hands on knees, eyes forward. He fixed his field of vision on the hunter’s orange of the safety web hanging between him and the cargo area. He tried not to look out the open cargo door, or out the window to his right, although that was damn hard, because the thing was as big as a minivan’s windshield. He tried not to listen to the whine of the engine and the beat of the rotors, which, although muffled by his headphones, penetrated straight into the back of his neck.

Instead, he listened to the sounds of Clare getting ready for takeoff. She had the same habit as one of the helo jocks he had flown with in ’Nam. She was singing under her breath as she worked her controls.

“I don’t know why I love you like I do, all the things you put me through,” his headset sang. Jesus Christ, he thought, I think that’s the same song. What do they do, give them a sound track in flight school?

“Take me to the river,” his headset sang. “Drop me in the water.” Over his head, the rotors powered up into a dull roar. Under his feet, the skids shifted. He braced his elbows on his knees and shut his eyes. Clare was making ch-ch-ch sounds between her teeth, accompanying her mental music.

“Here we go,” she sang out. The floor lurched beneath him and then they rose slowly, slowly into the sky. Beyond the open cargo doors, the world sank out of view. He thought if he looked at the seat to his left, he would see his buddy Mac, his transistor radio blasting between his boots, his hands slapping out the rhythm of the song.

“I-I-I want to know, can you tell me?” his headphones sang.

Mac would have liked Clare. Except she was sixteen years older than he would ever get. And he, Russ, would look like an old man to Mac. How had he gotten to be so old when he still felt the same inside?

“I need your help here.” Clare’s voice cut through his reverie. “I don’t know where the gorge is. I’m having a hard time sighting the road through all these trees.”

He opened his eyes and looked out the window in the cabin door. Forget the minivan. This was a frickin’ picture window. He shifted sideways in his seat and pressed his hands against the solid metal edges of the door to hold back the sensation of falling. “Um,” he said, taking a deep breath. They were creeping along a dozen yards above the trees. “That’s it, down there. The road. Keep heading in that direction and you’ll be over the gorge.” If he turned his head, he could look at the back of Clare’s.

“There?” she asked, twisting and pointing at the window in the cockpit door.

“Shouldn’t you keep your eyes on the instruments?”

“The army gives us special training on how to look out the window and fly at the same time.”

He could tell she was having a good old time. He leaned forward and closed his eyes again. The rotors whined and the chopper tilted forward slightly as she brought it around and headed toward the crevasse.

“Okay, I’ve got it in sight,” she said. “Russ—where are you?”

He sat up again. He could see the curve of her jaw beneath her helmet as she twisted back, craning to see him.

“Are you feeling airsick?” She sounded doubtful. As she should be, since the drive up the mountain road to the spa site had bounced him around a lot more than anything she had done.

“No.”

“Okay. Can you unbuckle and shift seats? I want you to look out the other cabin window. It makes for a better search if you cover both sides.”

“Okay.” He didn’t have the wherewithal to answer in anything more than single-word sentences. He unclipped and shifted to the ghostly Mac’s seat. The geologist’s description of the gorge knifing down the mountains was more clearly accurate from this height. The crevasse looked a lot narrower than it had when he’d peered over the edge. He thought of descending into that crack in the rock, wrapped in nothing but cargo netting. It’d be a miracle if he didn’t end up a smear on the rock wall.

“See anything?”

“No.”

“Are you doing okay?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to drop her down a bit.” The chopper sank in a series of jerks, like an elevator on the fritz. He pressed his lips tightly together and braced his hands for another look out the window. Green leaves, everywhere green pulsing in the hazy sunlight, with a gray slash through the jungle, a scar in the earth.

Jesus, he thought. Get a grip. He forced himself to focus on the crevasse, picking out boulders and scrubby plants, the tobacco brown trickle that was all that remained of the brook at summer’s height, the flash of metal—

“Wait! I think I see something.”

The chopper stopped its forward motion and hovered, twisting slightly back and forth. He saw it again, a glint of metal on a lumpy bundle rolled against a small boulder. A backpack? He hadn’t noticed one when he’d surveyed the accident scene the first time. “Can you go a little lower?”

Clare dropped the chopper another few yards. He let his eyes spiral out from the backpack, searching, searching…. He spotted the geologist’s hiking boots first.

“I’ve got him.”

“Where?”

“See where there’s a clump of birch saplings growing low on the wall?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“That’s ten o’clock. Look at two o’clock.”

There was a pause as she searched over the floor of the ravine. “Okay, I see him, too. I’m going to maneuver us so that the cargo door is above him. Good Lord, he’s still. Are you sure he’s not dead?”

“If he is, and I go through all this for nothing, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”

There was a sound in his headset that might have been a stifled laugh. The chopper dipped and swayed into position.

“Okay, you’re on.”

He rose from his seat and, crouching, crossed back to the left side of the chopper and pushed the webbing out of the way. The thing he noticed—and he wished he had noticed it when Clare was going through how all this was going to work—was that there was nothing beside the safety webbing and the bungee cord to hold on to while he got himself inside the net. And he was going to have to unclip the bungee cord anyway.

“Clare,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“There’s nothing to hold on to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Getting into the net. There’s nothing I can hold on to.”

“We went over this. You hold on to the edges of the net while you step inside.”

“It’s in front of an open door!”

There was a pause. Then she said in the patient voice of a kindergarten teacher explaining something to a new student, “I’m holding the ship dead even. There’s nothing to cause you to lose your balance and fall.”

“What if I trip?” He realized how whiny he sounded, but he couldn’t help it.

“Russ.” The teacher was gone; the officer was back. “Get into the net.”

He took a deep breath. With his fingers clutching the safety webbing, he took the D ring in a death grip. Then he let go of the webbing and jerked the bungee cord out. It sprang back against the bulkhead with a metallic clang. He looked along the wide strap running from the ring in his fist, out the door, and up out of sight to the boom. One twitch of the helicopter and he would be dangling sixty feet above the gorge’s rocky bottom. His palm was so sweaty, the D ring was already slipping in his grasp. He pawed the edges of the net open and tumbled inside with a tailbone-bruising jolt.

“I’m in,” he said. The relief of it made him laugh.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I just can’t believe I’m doing this. It reminds me of the time I tried to trim one of the old trees in our yard with a chain saw.”

“That sounds pretty normal to me.”

“I was twenty feet up on a limb at the time. Without a safety harness.”

“What happened?”

“I fell.” He laughed again, this time with the realization that he now had to scoot over to the door so she could reel in the net and lift him out. He tugged the folded lawn chairs half over his knees and kicked against the floor, pushing with his thighs. He and the netting skidded a foot. “It was just two years ago, and I remember thinking that at my age, it was the last really stupid thing I’d ever do. I’m glad to see that I still have it in me.”

He kicked again and moved along another foot. The lawn chairs bumped into his head. The cargo door yawned open behind him like the gateway to the next world. His back was to it, deliberately, so he wouldn’t have to see the tops of the trees shaking madly in the chopper’s wash below. He kicked a third time, but his butt jammed up against a line of smooth-headed rivets sunk into the cargo floor. He shifted his weight and tried again. Nothing.

“What are you doing back there?”

“I’m just getting myself closer to the door. I’m hung up on some rivets.”

“Don’t bother,” she said as he wiggled himself over the obstacle. Then just as she said, “I’m going to pull in the strap from there,” he kicked out hard with his legs. There was a rush and a grinding sound and a scrape as his rear end went over the edge, and then he was falling and yelling until he came up hard with a jerk and a snap.

The lawn chairs slammed flat against his face as the cording of the net tightened around him, cutting into his skin. The helicopter tilted hard. He swung wide, away from and then toward the landing gear. Clare was snarling something into the earphones, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. The jolt as the strap caught had cut him off mid-yell, and the spasms in his lungs and ribs made him cough violently. The downwash from the rotors made his eyes water. He fought to clear his face of green webbing and aluminum, shoving and twisting until the chairs were at his side instead of pressing against his nose and chest. The net swung in ever-decreasing arcs as the helicopter circled tightly, slowly tipping back into a stable position.

“I didn’t ask you to jump out the door!” He heard that one. “Okay, I’m leveled out. I’m going to lower you now. For God’s sake, don’t try any more stunts.”

“No,” he wheezed.

There was a vibration along the strap. The net quivered and then began to descend. He glanced up, but the blur of rotors and the fat tadpole-shaped body of the chopper made him queasy, so he looked down instead. The bottom of the crevasse was rushing up at him, its boulders and shale suddenly a lot larger and more alarming than they had been from the air. He was between the trees, then below the lip of the gorge, then descending between its narrow walls, every striation in the rock and every plant clinging to a minute cleft burning itself into his vision with a kind of hyperclarity. The part of his brain that wasn’t numbed over marveled at Clare’s precision. He went down, down, down—and stopped with a jerk.

“Where are you?”

He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his mind back into its normal channels. Opening them again, he peered at the ground, estimating his distance. “You done good,” he said. “I’m maybe five feet above the stream.”

“Okay. Get ready. Here we go.”

The net jerked, jerked, jerked down, and then his butt was in the cold water, sliding over slick round rocks. “I’m down, I’m down,” he said.

“Okay, I’m letting it go,” she said. The net collapsed all around him as several yards of the wide strap ribboned over itself. He flailed out of the wet netting and sloshed the two steps to dry ground. He reflexively patted himself down to make sure everything was there and wiggled the bows of his glasses where they were clamped to the side of his head by his headset. He was intact. He glanced up and waved his arms. “I see you,” she said. “You’re a couple yards downstream from Waxman. Can you see him?”

He picked his way upstream over loose stones. He could clearly see Waxman’s backpack resting against the cutaway curve where the sides of the crevasse met the bottom. Then he spotted Waxman. He was sprawled awkwardly near the stream, half-hidden by a boulder.

“I’ve got him.” Russ crouched next to the unmoving form and placed two fingers at the side of his neck. “He’s got a pulse.” He ran his hands lightly over Waxman’s body and head. “I’m pretty sure both his arms are broken. His legs may be okay. God only knows about his spine.” He looked up to the chopper as if he could see Clare’s face. “Even with the stuff we brought, we’re taking a risk by moving him.”

“I could fly us to Glens Falls and alert the life-flight helicopter. That’ll tack on another hour and a half, two hours before he gets any treatment. You’re the man on the ground, Russ. Literally. It’s your call.”

He looked back down at Waxman. His face was pale despite his tan, and a swollen purple bruise spread across his forehead and disappeared into his hair. Russ pried open one eyelid, but Waxman remained unconscious, his pupil fixed and unresponsive.

“I don’t think he’s got that kind of time,” he said finally. “Let me get the stuff and I’ll bind him up as tightly as I can.” He picked his way back to the net and hauled out the lawn chairs and bag of rags. Opening one chair, he leaned it against the boulder and jumped on it like a kid engaged in vandalism. The flimsy rivets snapped, and he had a floppy chaise longue. He wrenched off the U-shaped leg pieces and stomped them into relative flatness before jamming them through the webbing in two parallel lines. He held up his impromptu backboard and shook it. It still shifted more than he liked, but it would give Waxman a chance to get out of this without being paralyzed. He laid it on the ground next to the unconscious man and carefully rolled him into place on top of the aluminum poles, praying that he wasn’t causing more unseen damage.

The rags needed to be knotted together before he could stretch them across Waxman’s chest and tie them to the chair’s webbing. Waxman’s breathing was shallow and sparse, more like hiccups than actual breaths. Russ pulled his headphones off to listen for the telltale hiss of a punctured lung, but he didn’t hear anything. He tied Waxman’s shoulder, chest, and waist to the supports and stood up to tackle the other chair.

This one he smashed against the boulder until it broke apart into pieces. He took the aluminum poles, splinted them against Waxman’s arms, and tied them in place with the remainder of the rags. Then he tore the plastic grocery bag in two and used it to tie Waxman’s immobilized arms to the jury-rigged backboard. He stood up and surveyed his handiwork, wiping the sweat from his eyes. Waxman looked like a victim of backyard bondage gone awry. If we don’t kill this guy trying to save him, it’ll be a miracle, he thought.

“Okay, I’m going to load him in,” Russ said. He picked up the top edges of the lawn chair contraption and dragged the injured man travois-style to the net. He unfolded the edges of the net and pulled it out of the water before wrestling Waxman into place at the center. He stood up, looked around the area one more time, then hefted the abandoned backpack onto his shoulder and rolled it into the net, next to its owner.

Russ stepped into the net, sat down tailor-style facing Waxman, and tugged the backboard onto his lap. It was awkward, but he figured he could give some added support with his crossed legs. “Clare,” he said, “we’re good to go.”

“Great. Here we go.” The boom strap began to rise out of its loose folds like a film running backward. He had thought he was prepared, but the jolt when the strap caught and yanked the netting off the ground still knocked the breath out of him. He threw his arms across Waxman’s chest. The man’s legs were forced upright by the press of the net until his knees fell forward and he spraddled like a roadkill frog. The backpack wedged itself against Russ’s shins, its metal buckles biting into his jeans. The net spun so that he had to close his eyes against the stomach-churning whirl of the horizon.

Clare was hauling him in a lot faster than she had thrown him out. The net spun up and up, then stopped with a jerk that vibrated into his bones. He opened his eyes and looked up. The sausage-shaped boom was overhead, maybe three feet away, and above it, the blur of the rotors, their hard chop pulsing through his ears and into his brain. The cargo area gaped open a couple of feet away from where he and Waxman hung. He suddenly realized that Clare had never discussed this part of the plan.

“Clare!”

“Don’t yell. I can hear you fine.”

“How am I supposed to get back in?”

“You’re not.”

The chopper rose from where it had been hovering and ascended slowly, crossing the lip of the crevasse and leaving it behind.

“You can’t just leave me hanging here!”

The voice over his headphones was soothing. “I’m heading back to the helipad. We’ll be there in a minute. Then we can get you out of the net and get Waxman settled into the cargo area.”

He closed his eyes and began counting to sixty out loud. He had reached thirty-one when her amused voice said, “Are you looking?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Go ahead. Open your eyes.”

He did, and then shut them again with relief when he saw the helipad rising up to meet them. The thwap-thwap-thwap of the rotors reverberated from all around and the downwash threw a whirl of grit and dust into the air. Then there was a gentle rocking and they were down. A few seconds later, Clare appeared in the cargo doorway.

“Climbed over the seat,” she said. “I don’t like to leave the ship while the engine is on.” She leaned to one side of the doorway, and the strap holding him and his load off the tarmac rolled out of the boom again, dropping him to the ground. He threw the netting off his shoulders and rose in a crouch, intently aware of the rotors still chopping overhead.

“How come it’s still going?” he yelled.

She winced, poking at her headphones. He snapped his mike off and she did the same. “I want us back in the air ASAP. Tilt him up this way and I’ll grab one end.”

He wrapped his hands around the aluminum struts protruding above Waxman’s shoulders and gave a heave. Clare knelt at the edge of the door and grabbed, pulling up and back. He worked his arms under Waxman’s legs and together they slid the unconscious man into the cargo area. Russ tossed the backpack in beside Waxman.

“Are you coming or going?” she yelled.

He opened his hands, indicating he didn’t understand the question.

“Are you flying with us to Albany? I’d like the help, but I’m not going to make you.”

He stopped, his hand on the edge of the cargo door. He hadn’t thought about just heading back to his truck and driving away. He could do that. It wasn’t as if he could do anything more for Waxman than he already had. He could head back to the station, get the paperwork started on this incident, track down Peggy, and get her statement. He looked up at Clare, who was waiting for him to make up his mind. “I’m coming with you,” he said and hauled himself up into the cargo area.

She didn’t say anything, merely winched the net back up and yanked the cargo door shut, but he could see her smiling to herself. She fiddled with her headset and tapped one of his headphones. He switched his back on. “Help me move him closer over there,” she said, gesturing past the safety web. She picked the web up and draped it over her back to keep it out of the way; then, hunched over, they half-dragged, half-lifted Waxman’s still form into place within arm’s reach of the passenger seats. She nodded, stepped into his seat, and climbed over the partial bulkhead into the pilot’s chair. “Strap in and let’s get going,” she said.

His butt was barely in the seat when the chopper rose. This he remembered, too, the scramble to get off the ground, the wounded on the floor, the trees bending and shaking as the slicks rose out of the grass. Clare was at it again. “Fee-fee-fi-fi-fo-fo-fum, Lookin’ mighty nice, now here she comes,” his headphones sang. He rested his elbows on his knees and laughed. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. All she had to do was throw in some Doors and she’d have the complete sound track to his youth. He looked at Waxman’s pale face and was suddenly consumed with the urge for a cigarette, something he had given up in1985.

Up they went. Up and up, angling slightly to the east as Clare sang “Devil with a Blue Dress” into the headphones and the rotors thundered to her rhythm. “Wearing her perfume, Chanel Number Five, got to be the—what the heck?”

He sat up again and looked out the window, immediately wishing he hadn’t. They were up. Way up. As high as an airplane. The mountaintops stretched out beneath them in rough and rounded shades of dark green and smoky blue. Clare had gone silent. In his experience, it was never good when a pilot went silent.

“What is it?”

She didn’t answer him. He craned around. She was leaning over, working a control he couldn’t see. “Clare, what is it?”

“The radio,” she said. “I can’t use it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that instead of leaving the last station on, whoever was flying this spun the dial. It’s on dead air now. And that’s not all.” She reached over her head. “Look at this.” She had a small black plastic cylinder in her hand. He took it from her. “That’s the control knob. It came off in my hand. Take a look.”

Inside the cylinder was a small hollow tube, meant to fasten tightly over whatever metal stud actually connected to the radio’s workings. The tube was splintered apart, as if someone had jammed a screwdriver or awl into it.

He tried to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach. “What’s this mean? Are we in trouble? Do we go back down?”

“It means I can’t rely on the local air-control stations to lead me to Albany. I’ll have to do it by sight. I’m going to bring her up a little higher so I can get my bearings. The visibility is lousy today because of the humidity.”

She sounded very calm and authoritative, which didn’t reassure him one bit. Pilots always sounded the most calm when they were in the deepest trouble. The chopper whined, but now the engine had a shrill note that made his back teeth ache.

“What’s that? Is the engine supposed to sound like that?”

“It’s having to work a little harder, that’s all. The humid air means there’s not as much lift under the rotors as there would be if it were cool and dry.”

“How far up are we going?”

“Four thousand feet.”

“Four thousand feet! I thought choppers only went five hundred, a thousand feet high.”

She actually laughed. “We’re only going to be about two thousand feet above the ground. Where we started from was almost two thousand feet above sea level to begin with. Okay, help me out here. I’m not very familiar with the geography around here. I see two fairly big rivers, a handful of smaller tributaries, a medium-sized lake. I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

As before, he braced his hands against the metal frame and looked out the window. He tried to pretend he was safely stowed away in a small airplane, but the laborious chop-chop-chop of the rotors made it impossible. “Which way are we pointing?”

“North.”

“Okay.” He took a breath. “The lake must be Lake Luzerne. The river to the west is the Sacandaga. It heads west, to the Great Sacandaga Lake. The river to the east has to be the Hudson.”

“Are you sure? It looks kind of small.”

“It is small this far north. It broadens out past West Point.”

“And Albany is on the Hudson?”

He leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. “It was the last time I was there.”

“Okay. I’ve got my bearing on the compass. I’m going to take us back down to five hundred feet and head east.”

He shoved the useless control knob into his pocket and tried to ignore the queasy sensation their descent was giving him. Clare was still silent. He wished she would start singing again. He looked at Waxman, whose face was damp and pale beneath his trendy goatee, and thought how young he was. And that even at that, the men he had seen dying on helicopter floors had been younger still. Boys. Waxman would have been an old man in ’Nam.

The chopper bumped abruptly, emitting a sound like a leaky cough. He lurched in his seat belt, reaching down to keep the unconscious geologist from sliding. Waxman’s backpack rolled across the floor. Clare was talking to herself under her breath, something about airflow.

Waxman’s backpack. Which had been lying several feet away from the man. He had been fighting with Peggy before he fell. How had his backpack gotten down there? He unbuckled his seat belt and started toward where the backpack rested against the orange cargo webbing.

That was when he heard the sound, the spluttering, coughing, choking sound that sounded like some great beast dying.

“What is it?” he asked. “Clare?”

“Fuel,” she said, her voice tight. “Get into your seat and strap down.”

He could feel the question howling behind his clenched teeth: What do you mean? Didn’t you check it? He kept it there. Of course she’d checked it. She was snapping off words like items on a list in a subaudible whisper. He heard a brief roar, then another choke.

“Strap yourself in and get into the crash position!”

He dived for his seat and yanked the restraint across himself. The helicopter tilted abruptly, and his inner ear sloshed sickeningly out of balance. Through the windows, he saw nothing but colorless sky, but his stomach and head felt as if they were spinning down in a spiral. Another roar. They jerked up so violently, Waxman lifted off the floor a few inches at the apogee, then slammed back down. The machine seemed to wheeze. “Come on, come on,” Clare was urging.

“Clare? How bad is this?”

“Bad.” Her voice was short, clipped, professional. “Something’s keeping the gas from getting to the engine.” She hissed, then resumed speaking in the same matter-of-fact way. “I’m going to do something called an autorotation. I’m going to plunge the ship nose down while cutting power to the rotors. They’ll spin on their own, giving us lift and slowing our descent. It’ll be a controlled crash.”