A Fountain Filled With Blood

Thirty years on, and he was still going to die in a helicopter crash. Linda, his mom, and his sister flashed through his mind, but it was Mac he fixed on, Mac laughing and smoking and drumming out a rhythm on a helmet with his hands. God, he thought, just kill me quick. Don’t hang me up and make me linger.

“Here we go,” Clare said.

The floor under his feet tilted farther and farther. Waxman, still strapped tightly to his makeshift frame, slid toward the seats, ramming into Russ’s feet. His backpack rolled and bounced against Russ’s legs. The safety webbing flapped and the bungee cords clattered wildly against the window. They were balanced on the chopper’s nose when the sound cut off just like that. The sudden silence was like the sound of the grave. Then he could hear his heart beating. He could hear the rotors overhead whistling and whirring. He could hear Clare praying. They were going down so fast, his body strained against the belt strapping him in.

He heard Clare saying, “Hold on hold onholdon…”

Then they hit.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Metal screamed. There was an impossibly loud noise as the rotors chopped into wood and dirt and stone and broke off. One knife-edged blade sliced through the tail boom, the machine eviscerating itself in its death throes. Another blade shattered into shrapnel, peppering the fuselage with a hailstorm of metallic fire. One heaved away into the dirt, still trying to do its job, and lifted and turned the body of the helicopter so that it rolled downhill once, twice, landing gear snapping off like fragile bird bones, pieces of steel sheeting peeling off like an orange rind.

A last shudder and creak. Clare, dangling from her harness, opened her eyes to find she was surprisingly still alive. Her first thought was Thank you, God. Her second was that more people die from explosion than impact when helicopters go down.

“Russ?”

There was a groan behind her. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “We need to get out and away from the ship. Can you move?”

There was another groan.

“Russ!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m going to need some help.”

She braced her feet on the twisted pieces of metal, glass, and plastic that had been the front of the cockpit and unclipped her safety belt. She sagged, lost her balance, and fell heavily against the passenger-side door, which was buckled and stained with green and brown from the forest floor. She twisted around and looked over the partial bulkhead.

“Holy God in heaven,” she said. The force of the impact had driven the tail boom into the cabin as they’d somersaulted downhill. The cargo area had imploded around the boom, the metal bunched like wet papier-mâché. The sawed-off end had come to rest less than a hand’s width away from where Russ was hanging in his seat; it looked like a steel-mouthed shark waiting to slice into his chest.

“Okay,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her terror. “Stay put.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, then coughed.

“Can you see Waxman?”

“Yeah. He’s on the floor underneath me. Well, now it’s the floor. It used to be a big window.”

“How’s he look?”

“Not great.”

She pressed up against the door on the pilot’s side and pushed hard. It popped open like a hatch and just kept going, banging and clanging its way off the nose. She looked at the edge as she levered herself carefully through. The hinges had come clean off. She perched on the door frame and took her bearings. They had come to rest on a forested slope, wedged against several thick maples. The ship was resting on its right side, its nose angled forward. They had scraped a raw gash in the hillside when they’d landed, and the remains of what looked like several young pines were ground into the freshly exposed dirt.

She shivered in the muggy air. She felt cold, light-headed, and so overwhelmed that she just wanted to lie down and wait for someone to take this disaster off her hands. But there wasn’t anyone else. She pressed one spread-fingered hand over her eyes and breathed deeply. “God,” she said, “hold me up. I can’t do this on my own.”

“Are you praying up there?” Russ’s voice came up through the open doorway.

She got her feet under her and leaned over toward the cabin door. Its handle was battered and bent out of line. “Yes, I am,” she said.

“Lemme tell you: Admitting you can’t do something isn’t very reassuring.”

She gripped the handle and twisted. “Didn’t say that,” she said, yanking and tugging. “Said I can’t do it by myself. Ooof!” Something inside the handle mechanism gave way and the door shot back several feet before jamming.

“Good girl.”

She braced herself on hands and knees and examined the situation. The sheared-off tail section looked even worse from this angle. “Can you hold on to the edge of the door?”

He turned his head awkwardly. “I think so.” He reached toward her and she took his hand, placing it near the upper edge of the frame, where he could stabilize himself.

“Great. This is what I want you to do. You’re going to push against the roof with your other hand and against the floor with your feet. I’m going to unbuckle your seat belt. At that point, I’ll pull this arm”—she touched the hand squeezing the door frame—“and you right yourself.”

“I can’t stand up. I’ll be stepping on Waxman.”

“See the seat below you? Put your feet on its side. Once you’re upright, we’ll see if we can slide you around this thing and pull you out. Ready?”

“Wait a minute!” She paused. He didn’t say anything. Finally, he pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose with his free hand and said, “Let’s do it.”

She watched as he stretched out as best he could and lodged himself between the ceiling and floor. She snaked her hand around the corner of his seat and found the buckle of the seat belt by touch. With a click, she freed him.

His knuckles went white. He lifted one leg and let it dangle down toward the second passenger seat. She couldn’t see if his foot had connected with it yet, but she could see his arms and his other leg trembling with the effort of keeping himself from falling onto the ragged steel edge of the broken tail.

“Got it,” he said.

“Careful.”

“Oh yeah.”

She moved so that she was straddling the frame of the cabin door, one sneakered foot on either side. She squatted deeply so that she could hold him with the strength of her thighs. “Give me your hand. I’ll keep you upright.”

He laughed hoarsely.

“Shut up and give me your hand,” she said, irrationally cheered that he could still see a double entendre in what she said. He let go of the door frame and she caught him around the wrist, pulling slowly and steadily upward. She heard a smack as his other foot landed on the seat, and then his head and shoulders moved, coming upright, rotating in line.

“I feel,” he said, almost whispering, “like a chicken on a rotisserie.” Then his other arm was free, thrusting through the doorway, his hand feeling for something to hold on to.

“Are you all set?” she said.

“Yeah. I’m on my feet. You can let me go.”

She released his wrist. The top of his head was level with the doorway, and the raw end of the tail section was now in front of his stomach. He thrust both arms out and banged his hands against the fuselage. Then he curled them over the edge behind his head. “If this thing wasn’t in my way, I could probably get myself up with a backward flip,” he said. “I have pretty good upper-body strength.”

“If that thing wasn’t in your way, you could get out a lot easier than that,” she said. “As it is, you aren’t going to be able to lever yourself up. I want you to lock your hands around my neck; then I’ll pull you up.”

“What, deadlifting? Forget it, darlin’. I must outweigh you by sixty or seventy pounds.”

“I’ll get you up, Russ.” A thread of fear that he might be right made her voice sharp. “Trust me.”

“I trusted you before I got into the damned chopper, and look where it got me.” He squinted up at her and attempted a smile, which made his glasses slip farther down his nose. “Damn. Fix that, will you?” She set his glasses more firmly on his nose while swallowing back the softball-sized lump in her throat.

When she could speak without her voice cracking, she said, “I told you no incoming fire and no lightning. If you wanted no mechanical failures, you should have specified.” She bent her head very close to his. “Put your arms around my neck.”

To her surprise, he didn’t argue further, just released one hand at a time and clasped them together behind her neck. She reached behind her head and flipped her braid out of the way. “Hold on.”

“I will.”

She settled her feet more firmly, took two fistfuls of his shirt, and straightened very slowly. Good Lord, he was heavy. She gritted her teeth and hissed out air as her thighs shook with the effort of bringing him out. She could feel him flexing his lower body to avoid the tail boom, but she couldn’t see anything except the top of his head and his shirt, which was peeling off his torso. Damn! She jammed her hands under the shirt, below his armpits, and dug into his clammy flesh, pressing until she could feel the bones beneath his skin. Sweat was dripping into her eyes and tickling her chest. She grunted, lifting with her arms and legs now, her muscles trembling with the strain and the fear that he was right, that she wouldn’t be able to lift him after all. Her legs, biceps, and shoulders were burning, and she was afraid she was going to let go, going to lose him.

Just then, he said, “I’m over the edge! Push me back a few inches.”

She did as instructed, and suddenly he let go of her neck. The cessation of weight and pressure made her stumble forward, and he caught her around the waist. “Steady. Easy,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of the door frame. He eased her away from the yawning cabin door, and she slid down the chopper’s half-exposed belly. When her feet hit the dirt, her legs almost collapsed beneath her.

There was a moment of silence, broken only by their labored breathing; then he said, “Thanks.”

She waved his gratitude away. She bent over and rubbed her lower back. Tomorrow, it would feel like she’d had her kidneys removed. She straightened. “We need to get Waxman out.”

“Clare, he may be dead already.”

“If he is, I want to know it. And if he isn’t, we have to do what we can to get him out.”

He sniffed in an exaggerated fashion. “Do you smell that? That’s fuel. We need to get away from here as quickly…” His voice faded away under her steady gaze. “We should at least consider that we might help him more by hurrying to get help than by trying to hoist him out of there.”

“And if something sparks and the fuel explodes?” She didn’t bother to put much heat into her argument, because she had already won. She knew Russ, and there was no way he would leave a man to burn to death, even if it was a remote possibility. She clambered up to the doorway and peered inside again. “I think I can slide in here”—she pointed to the outside edge of the door—“and slip around the side of the tail boom. I’ll go underneath it and have a look at him.”

“Then what?”

She examined the boom. Except for the serrated edge that had been facing Russ, it looked relatively safe. The problem was its size. For a relatively slim woman, it wasn’t much of a bar getting in and out: she could, as she’d said, slide around it. For a man strapped to a stabilizing board, it posed a significant challenge. She looked up at Russ. “Then I pray for inspiration to strike. Help me down?”

He grunted, but he took the same position she had just quit, feet braced on either side of the doorway, straddling the opening. She sat with her legs dangling into the cabin, her feet lightly brushing against the side of the tail boom. He reached toward her and they grasped each other’s wrists. She edged off the door frame and let him take her weight, concentrating on getting around the boom with a minimal amount of bumping and banging. She didn’t know how stable it was, and she could easily imagine it tipping and crashing onto Waxman’s unmoving body, its razor-sharp edge piercing his flesh.

She was cheek-to-cheek with the tail boom when her foot connected with the solid angle between the floor and the bulkhead. “Okay, let me go,” she said.

Russ released her wrists. She let herself fall backward, bumping hard against the floor but keeping her footing. She ducked beneath the boom and got her first look at Waxman.

He was lying facedown across the other cabin window, looking as if he had been placed over a hermetically sealed square of soil. Russ’s homemade backboard and arm splints were still in place, and it was the aluminum supports she grabbed when she rolled him over onto his back. She winced. In addition to sporting the purple welt from his initial fall, his forehead was deeply gashed and bleeding freely. In some indefinable way, his nose looked off, and she suspected it was broken. She knew immediately that he was still alive, however, because he was whistling with each exhalation, as if someone were capping and uncapping a boiling teakettle.

“He’s alive,” she said, “but I’m afraid one of his lungs may be punctured.”

“He is one hard-to-kill son of a bitch, isn’t he? ’Scuse my French.”

She crouched over the still form. She had brought the poor man to this place. How was she going to get him out of here? She considered the idea of wrestling him upright and shoving him over the tail boom until Russ could reach him. No, that wouldn’t do. Maybe it wouldn’t kill him, but the damage she could cause to his broken bones might leave him wishing he had died. The Day-Glo orange of the safety webbing caught her eye. The tail boom, spiking through the cargo area, had evidently sliced the webbing in two, scattering bungee cords in its wake. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the palm of her hand. She could use the webbing…the cords…

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Let’s hear it.”

She edged her way to where the webbing sagged from its cleats and then began unfastening it. “I’m going to wrap him as tightly as I can in this cargo webbing. Then I’m going to lift him on top of the tail boom, back here where it’s narrower. I’ll push him forward until you and I can lift him through the door.”

“What if the tail section falls down?”

“It may jar him, but after what he’s already been through, it’ll hardly be a bump. As long as neither of us is under it, we’ll be fine.” She kicked Waxman’s backpack away from where it had come to rest near his legs and threw the webbing on the Plexiglas surface beneath him. She bunched half of it along his body, then lifted him onto the web, first by his immobilized shoulders, then his feet, then by kneeling and working her arms under his buttocks to get his midsection in line.

She was collecting all the bungee cords she could see, when she heard a thudding sound from above, as if Russ had abruptly stepped across part of the fuselage. “Get off of there,” she yelled. “I don’t know how sound that—”

“Holy shit!” His cry made her break off in midsentence. There was a hollow clang and then nothing.

“Russ? Russ?”

No reply. She returned to Waxman’s side and knelt, lashing bungee cords through the webbing and onto his makeshift support. “Russ?” she called again. She stood and looked up at the rectangle of daylight visible from inside the cabin. She couldn’t hear anything, which was more unnerving than any sound of breaking helicopter parts or unwelcome visitors. “Russ?” She glanced down at Waxman, who was swathed in aluminum spars and ragged orange webbing, looking like a rejected resuscitation dummy from some Coast Guard rescue-training exercise. She would have to leave him and climb out to find out what had happened to Russ.

She half-dragged, half-lifted Waxman to the rear of what was left of the cargo section, out of the way of the damaged tail section. When she was just about ready to lever herself up on the tail to see if it would hold her, she heard the banging sound of someone climbing across the helicopter. Russ appeared in the cabin doorway.

“Thank God,” she said. “Where were you?”

“Putting out a fire. You need to get out of there now.”

“A fire!”

“Something threw a spark into a bunch of old pine needles three or four yards from here. I stomped it dead, but there could be a dozen others all around this place that we won’t see until they hit enough oxygen to bring ’em up. C’mon.” He thrust his hand down toward her. “Now.”

“We have to get Waxman out.”

“Leave him! He’s half-dead already. I’m not going to lose you trying to save somebody who’s neck-deep in Ingraham’s murder.”

She set her hands atop the tail boom and heaved herself up. With an agonized squeal, it sank beneath her like a teeter-totter, its fulcrum the hole it had blown in the rear of the helicopter. She stood up on the rounded form, her feet gripping it through her sneakers. Her head was through the doorway.

“Good. Take my hand. We’ll have you out of there in no time.”

She held up her hands, but instead of clutching his wrist, she threaded her fingers through his. “I can’t leave him behind.” She looked into his eyes, willing him to understand her. “It was my idea to bring him out with the helicopter. I was at the controls when we went down.” To her mortification, she felt her eyes begin to tear up. She squeezed them shut. “If we had done what you suggested, the Mountain Rescue people would already be on their way to get him out of the ravine.” She opened her eyes again, blinking hard against unwanted emotion. “I can’t leave him behind. I can’t.”

He let go of her hands, and for a moment she thought she had failed to persuade him. Then he took her face between his hands and rocked it back and forth. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

It didn’t seem like a question requiring an answer. He released her. “As quickly as possible,” he said. “Every second counts.”

She nodded and slid off the tail boom. “There’s a fire extinguisher behind the pilot’s seat,” she called up.

“I’ll get it,” he said. She saw him reach through the pilot’s door and yank the extinguisher free. Then he dropped over the edge of the cabin door, hitting the now-stabilized tail boom with a thud and sliding to the floor in her wake. He glanced around at the cabin wreckage. “Wait.” He grabbed Waxman’s backpack and hurtled it through the open doorway. “Okay, let’s get him on top of this thing.”

They each squatted at one end of the unconscious man, Clare at his head and Russ at his feet. “One, two, three,” she said, and they lifted him onto the tail boom.

Russ looked at the raggedly wrapped form and shook his head. “Can you climb through the door by yourself?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I’ll hand you up the webbing and then climb out myself. Between the two of us, we can fish him out.”

Clare climbed onto the tail boom and straddled Waxman’s body. She crouched down and jumped, her abdomen hitting the edge of the doorway, forcing out a loud “Ooof!” but gaining her enough leverage to swing first one leg and then another up onto the door frame. Immediately, Russ thrust two handfuls of webbing at her. She grabbed them as he began hoisting himself. In a minute, he sat facing her across the opening. She pulled up more webbing, handing him the leading edge, and he leaned forward, drawing it to him until the webbing hung between their hands like a fishing net waiting to be cast.

“Okay?” she said. He nodded.

Gripping their catch, they each got to their feet, teetering on the edge of the frame for balance while bending down so as to not loose the webbing they were drawing taut.

“Ready?” he said.

“Let’s do it.”

She reached down, tangled her fingers in the webbing, and heaved, her biceps contracting into a hard bunch. Across the doorway, Russ did the same. She reached and pulled. He reached and pulled. Waxman rose from the depths.

“ ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,’ ” she quoted. She felt almost giddy, buoyed up by the conviction that at least here and now, she was where she was meant to be, doing what she was supposed to do.

Russ grunted. One more pull and the unconscious geologist was out of the cabin, hanging between them. Russ jerked his head toward the lower edge of the doorway. Awkwardly, they sidestepped until they could rest him on the helicopter’s pitted skin. Russ sat down by Waxman’s head and she followed suit.

“Lower him to the ground,” Russ said. Leaning back, they eased him over the ship’s belly onto the raw dirt. Clare followed, sliding down with a thump, which was echoed a moment later by Russ, fire extinguisher in hand. “Now,” he said, “can we please get out of here?”

“Oh yes.”

Russ shouldered Waxman’s backpack and picked up the webbing above the man’s head. Standing at Waxman’s feet, Clare did the same. They shuffled awkwardly uphill with him, his legs bumping into Clare’s shin and the aluminum struts poking into Russ’s calves. Russ twisted back, as if he was going to say something to her, but his face went pale as he looked over her shoulder.

She turned to see, and her eyes immediately caught sight of a curl of flame and smoke scarcely bigger than if coming from a pipe bowl. It crackled through a pile of dried leaves beyond the remnants of the helicopter’s tail.

“Double time,” she said, her voice higher than usual.

Russ glanced at the fire extinguisher, which was still dangling from one hand, and threw it toward the helicopter. Lopsided, they sprinted up the hill, the geologist’s body swinging and banging into their legs with bruising force, their free arms churning to counterbalance the load. Clare beat against the hill, attempting to keep pace with Russ’s longer stride, trying not to slip as the almost-smooth soles of her sneakers skidded against the dirt and tufts of grass.

They reached the top and headed down the other side without pausing, dodging trees and saplings, picking up momentum until they were loping. Her arm and shoulder were burning and cramping with Waxman’s weight. She staggered as the ground beneath her rose again and they lurched upward to another small summit.

“Stream,” Russ gasped out, pointing with his free hand to a rock-bottomed brook below them. They plummeted down toward it, thrashing through thick ferns that obscured the forest floor. A rock rolled beneath her heel and she went down on her backside with bone-jarring force but kept her forward momentum so that she rolled up again and continued with only a break in stride.

They had just reached the stream when an enormous whumpf sent them sprawling on their bellies. It was like the hammer of God striking the forest, a sound so huge, it seemed a solid thing pressing them down. Clare could feel the air around them compress, causing pressure in her inner ears. Then came the rush of hot wind, blasting out through the forest, shaking leaves wildly and sending a torrent of birds squawking into the skies. Then the wind was gone, like a departed train, and she could hear a clattering, crackling, roaring noise from where they had left the helicopter and the pipe bowl’s worth of smoke.

She rolled over and sat up. Russ pushed himself onto his knees. She looked at him, amazed, excited, and profoundly grateful to be sitting there, filthy, sweat-stained, aching in every muscle.

“We made it!” she said.

He dropped to his hands and knees and threw up.

Chapter Thirty

Russ was conscious of two things: the sour taste in his mouth and the cold water pouring over his head and shoulders.

He heard a voice making sympathetic noises, felt the weight of the backpack being lifted off him, the straps tugging over his arms. His ribs ached, his knees were throbbing, and the slow wind rolling over him felt like waves of heat from a furnace grate. The fire. The explosion. The crash. Involuntarily, his stomach spasmed again, trying to wring out the last ounce of bile.

“Rinse your mouth with this.” Clare bent over him, water brimming in her cupped hands. He slurped a mouthful, swished it around his mouth, and spit it out.

“More?” he managed to say. She reappeared with another handful of water. He gargled it into the back of his throat and spat again. She wiped the rest of the water on his face.

He sat back on his haunches. “Sorry.”

She was all practicality. “Take off your shirt. I’ll soak it in the stream. You’ll feel better.” Her matter-of-fact attitude helped him feel less embarrassed about tossing his lunch. He peeled off the stinking, sweat-soaked garment, and when she brought it back, he rubbed the sopping cloth over his face, neck, and hair before putting it on. It was shockingly cold for a moment, before his skin got accustomed to the clinging wet. The cool barrier against the heat attacking him everywhere helped him to breathe again. He sank back into the ferns. Clare sat beside him, cross-legged. She reached out and began stroking his forehead, pushing his wet hair back, her hand cool and firm. And her touch undid him, just undid him. He felt a knot in his chest loosen, and there he was, opened like a package. He closed his eyes.

“We were flying into the central highlands. It was hot, heavy VC activity in the area, and the artillery units were hammering the place night and day, laying down fire to clear out enough space for the slicks to land and for the squads to set up their perimeters. So we’re in the chopper, me and my friend Mac and a bunch of other guys and our lieutenant.” He opened his eyes, looking into the green leaves above him. “We were kind of goofing, getting ourselves revved up, ’cause we figured we were dropping straight into a firefight. All of a sudden, we get hit. The helicopter starts to drop. The pilot’s screaming, ‘Jump! Jump!’ and the chopper’s bucking like a bronco and we’re all hanging on for dear life. I could see out the door we weren’t too far above the trees. The lieutenant yells, ‘Come on,’ and me and Mac stand up, but the other three guys are yelling that there was no fucking way they were going to jump into the fucking jungle. The pilot’s still screaming, ‘Jump, jump,’ and I look at Mac and he kind of shrugs. The lieutenant sees it, and he slaps his pistol into my hand and yells, ‘Go for it,’ like he’s got to stay with the other guys, maybe persuade them off. Like he had more than a minute anyway. So we jumped. Mac and me.”

He glanced at Clare. She was sitting very still, not looking at him directly, looking just past him, as if the ferns were something she had never seen before. She nodded without taking her eyes off the ferns.

“I bounced down through some trees, and next thing I know, I’m on the ground. Right away, I knew I had broken both my legs. I’m looking around for Mac, when the whole sky lights up. The slick had crashed and exploded. And I could hear…there was so much noise, but I could hear guys screaming and screaming like animals trapped in a burning barn.” He paused for a moment. “Then over the sound, I can hear Mac. Above me. He’s kind of sobbing and moaning. And for a while, in the light from the fire, I could see what had happened to him.” He shut his mouth for a moment. “I don’t know how long it went on. When I remember it, it seems like an hour, but it couldn’t have been. Mac hanging in the tree, going, ‘Kill me, Christ, kill me,’ and crying. And the noise from the chopper dying down, the fire burning out. And I knew…knew Charlie was closing in on us, and that as soon as the VC heard Mac, they would find us. So I…I took the lieutenant’s gun and I…did what Mac wanted.”

She took his hand in hers and squeezed hard.

“They came about a half hour after. They didn’t find me, and no one else was alive, so they went away after awhile. I tried dragging myself a ways, but where could I go with two broken legs? So I gave up and laid there in the brush beneath the tree until this squad of marines came around and hauled my ass out.”

Clare laid her other hand on top of his. “How long were you there?”

“Two days.”

“Beneath the tree.”

“Yeah.” He looked at her directly for the first time. “Only three people have ever heard about this. And you’re the third.”

She rubbed his hand between hers.

“I didn’t tell you so you’d feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you. I—” She shut her eyes slowly and then opened them again. “I hurt. For what you had to go through. For the boy you were. For what you have to keep in your head.”

They were both silent for a moment. He felt lighter somehow, as if he’d been lifting weights for a long time and then put them down and taken a cool shower. Tired out, but fresh at the same time.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being there. For going over and doing what you did. For being faithful to your country even when what your country asked of you was terrible and futile and confused. Thank you.”

He started to laugh. “Only you, Clare. Only you.”

He let go of her hand and stood up, his legs trembling and his sides aching. Clare rose in front of him, holding his glasses. He hadn’t even realized they had come off.

He put them on and glanced up the last hill. No signs of fire. He recalled, from the weekly volunteer fire department’s report, that the hazard was low to moderate. Still, it didn’t mean they weren’t in danger. He looked downstream. God. Right now, he felt as if he would collapse if he had to take one more step.

Clare touched his arm. Her hand was still wet. “Do you…Should I…” She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she said, “What do you need to do right now and how can I help you?”

He felt an ache, a tenderness so real, he thought he might see a bruise on his sternum if he looked beneath his soggy shirt. He knew if he wanted to, he could lie down in the ferns and have her bring him handfuls of water. Knew that if he sent her ahead to find help, she would do it. Knew if he said he couldn’t go on, she’d make a travois for Waxman and drag him out of this forest. She didn’t need him to be the leader, to make decisions, to stand in front. And because she didn’t, he found he could take that one more step after all.

“Let’s head downstream.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “If it doesn’t take us anywhere, at least it’ll be easier than hiking over these hills.”

She looked at him carefully, as if measuring his ability against his words. Then she smiled. “Let’s go.”

Once more, he shouldered the backpack and took Waxman’s head while she took his feet. As they walked, he kept an eye out for a branch they could sling through the webbing to carry it on their shoulders, but there were no sturdy eight-foot-long pieces of wood conveniently left about. Instead, there was a thick bank of ferns, and the occasional root or stone to avoid. The constant whack—although it was never regular enough to anticipate—of the aluminum spars hitting him in the calves slowed him down.

The heat squeezed him like a hand wringing a sponge. His shirt didn’t dry out, but warmed, until it seemed a solidified part of the humid air. Except for the gurgle of the stream and the swish, swish as they strode through the ferns, the woods were quiet. Even the usual insect droning was muted. He could feel the tension tightening inside him, the creeping fear that he was exposed, open to fire. He knew it was dumb, that there were no snipers lurking in the Adirondacks, that what he and Clare had to fear was a turned ankle or heat stroke, not a sudden shattering report through the leaves. That green and heat and wet didn’t automatically add up to death.

Then as they rounded a bend in the stream that twisted behind a bluff of earth and pines, he saw three armed men in fatigues.

He dropped Waxman to the ground and drew his gun in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Clare dived over Waxman as he crouched deep into a firing stance. “Drop your weapons,” he roared.

The three men paused from where they had been toiling uphill and stared at him. They didn’t toss down their weapons, just stood in a ragged line, curious, relaxed. One of them had his arms akimbo and another one wiped his forehead.

“Hey,” the man with his hands on his hips said. “We’re not—”

“Police!” Russ yelled. “Put your weapons down now!” He tightened his finger slightly and a round fell into the firing chamber with an audible snick.

“Holy crap,” one of the men said. “That’s a real gun.” All three threw their weapons into the ferns. They glanced at one another and raised their hands. The man who had spoken before said, “If we’re trespassing, we’re sorry.”

“We had the landowner’s permission to be on the property,” a man behind him said.

Russ lowered his gun and relaxed his stance. “Who the hell are you?”

They glanced at one another. “Um. We’re from BancNorth,” their apparent leader said. “We’re part of a paintball team.”

From the corner of his eye, he could see Clare clamber off Waxman’s half-hidden form.

“Our base camp called us maybe twenty minutes ago. Someone had reported a small aircraft going down, near our position. We decided to check it out.”

“They know where we are,” the man behind him said. “They’re sending in search and rescue teams and rangers right now.” The rest remained unspoken: So if you kill us, you won’t get away with it.

Russ was suddenly aware that he must look like an extra in Deliverance. He holstered his gun and stepped forward. “Please, put your hands down. Sorry I scared you. I’m Chief Van Alstyne, of the Millers Kill Police Department.” He thumbed back toward Clare. “This is, um, the pilot of the aircraft you’re looking for. We were transporting a badly injured man when our helicopter went down. We could use some help.”

The three bankers looked at one another. He could see the excitement crackle between them as they realized they were on the scene of a real live emergency. “Sure,” their leader said.

As they drew near, Russ could see their fatigues were streaked with dried paint. One of them had on an outfit so new, there were fold lines faintly visible on his shirt. They had the thickening waists and excellent teeth of successful forty-year-old businessmen. That he had mistaken them for soldiers was clear evidence that his in-country reflexes were running amok.

“Do you guys have a topo map I can use to figure out where we are?” he said.

“Yeah, but you may as well do it the easy way,” said one, a pale man whose cheeks were blotchy red from the heat. He fished out something the size of a glasses case and handed it to Russ. “GPS. Hooks us up to the satellite system and tells us the exact coordinates of where we are. You can zoom in and out on the map here.” He pointed to buttons along the edge of the device.

“You know,” said their leader as Russ switched it on, “that’s cheating.”

“I’m not using it during the exercise,” the pale man said. “It’s just in case we get lost.”

Russ looked at the blinking spot on the map and handed the thing to Clare. She glanced up at him. “This is the Five Mile Road,” she said. “We’re no more than a couple of miles away from the Stuyvesant Inn.” She started to laugh. The paintball team looked at her.

“Can we use those walkie-talkies to get your base camp to relay a message for us?” Russ asked.

“You could, I guess,” the leader said. “But it’d be a lot quicker using a phone.” All three fished into their commodious pants pockets and held out cell phones.

Clare laughed even harder.

Russ made a few phone calls while she calmed down enough to cobble together a better way of carrying Waxman. He watched the guys from the paintball team search for sturdy branches long enough to serve as crossbars as he confirmed the Millers Kill Emergency Department would send an ambulance to the Stuyvesant Inn. As the men worked the poles through the webbing, Russ briefed Noble Entwhistle, who was holding down the fort at the station house, on the situation. By the time he had called the volunteer fire department and warned them about the fuel explosion, the three bankers and Clare had shouldered the crossbars like native bearers in an old movie, with Waxman swinging in the middle like a bagged tiger.

“Okay, let’s go,” Russ said, closing the cell phone and returning it to its owner. “If we follow this stream, it’ll empty into a pasture just above the Stuyvesant Inn’s land. We’ll just need to follow the cow fence at that point. I’m thinking it’ll be maybe a half-hour walk. The hospital’s sending an ambulance to meet us there. Clare, let me take that for you.”

She shook her head. “The best way to do this, since we’ve got an extra man, is to rotate.”

“Okay, five minute’s rotation.” He glanced at the bankers, who quivered with suppressed excitement. “Fall in,” he said. “March!” Clare cast him a sidelong look, but the other three sprang to it like retrievers on the scent.

By the time Russ had taken his turn lugging the unconscious geologist and then rotated out again, they were clearing the woods and entering the upper pasture. They lifted Waxman bodily over the barbed-wire fence and struck off down the fence line, their path impeded by nothing more than the occasional large rock or cow patty. Within ten minutes, Russ spotted the inn’s mauve-and-turquoise exterior, and he realized he hadn’t properly appreciated that beautiful paint job before.

The group crossed over the fence a second time and headed across the rolling meadow toward the inn. He heard a chorus of high-pitched, frantic barks as they approached, and he thought he might get down and kiss every one of those mop head–size dogs. And when Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler appeared at the back door, waving and hallooing, it felt as good as seeing his own men greeting him from the squad room at the station house.

They lugged Waxman around to the front of the inn, where Karl and Annie, two of the regular Millers Kill EMS team, were waiting to drive him to the Glens Falls Hospital.

“What’n the blue blazes happened to him?” Karl asked while Annie checked his vitals.

“He fell off a cliff,” Clare said.

“Then he crashed in a helicopter,” Russ added.

“Sounds like a bad comedy sketch,” the ambulance driver said. “You sure a marching band and a steamroller didn’t go over him, too?”

Standing beneath the shade of the big maple, watching them pull away with Waxman, Russ was still shaking his head. “I can’t believe that guy has survived to this point,” he said to Clare. “Maybe there is something to this God thing of yours after all.”

Up on the porch, the paintball–playing bankers were regaling Obrowski and Handler with the exciting tale of their adventures. The younger man was ushering them in through the double doors. “Chief, come on in,” Obrowski said. “It’s too hot to stay outside. We’ve got fresh lemonade.”

Russ shook his head. “I’ve got a squad car coming for me,” he said. “I’d better wait for it here.”

“Reverend Fergusson?”

“I think I’ll stay out here with the chief. You’d just have to burn any furniture I sit on anyway.” She plucked at her clothes. “I would surely appreciate some of that lemonade, though.”

“Coming right up.”

She plodded up the porch steps and collapsed into one of the wicker chairs. Russ followed her, dropping the backpack to the floor before sitting down. Beyond the shady maples and the thin gray road, the valley rolled away in pastures and cornfields and distant farms, a crazy-quilt landscape stitched by rocky outcroppings, steep rises, and stony brooks. The valley shimmered in the heat, oddly one-dimensional under the colorless sky, and for a moment Russ felt that he was in a dream, that the wicker furniture and the wooden floor and the far-off farms would disappear with a shake of his shoulder and he would be back in the green leaves, looking for death over every nameless, numbered hill.

Obrowski brought out lemonade, a whole pitcher of it, and two blue glasses stacked with ice. He arranged them with a flourish on a round teak table midway between their chairs. “Unbelievable,” he said, pouring their drinks. “Were you really flying the plane that went down, Reverend Fergusson?”

Clare accepted one of the glasses. “Helicopter,” she said. She had a look in her eyes that made Russ think maybe she, too, was uncertain how much of this was real.

“Those bankers of yours are quite something. I’ve never thought much of the paintball crowd that shows up on the weekends around here. I remember once when Bill Ingraham went with his business partner. He told me it was the most pointless exercise he had ever undertaken in his life, and that included his draft-induction physical.” He laughed. Russ took his glass from Obrowski and drained it so fast, all he was aware of was the slide of the cold and tart-tasting liquid over his tongue.

Obrowski looked at Russ, then at Clare, then back at Russ. “I’ll leave you two to catch your breath, then, shall I?”

The screen door banged behind him and they were alone. He poured himself another glass of lemonade and drank it more slowly. Thinking about the whole incident with the helicopter made his stomach ache, and thinking about the whole thing with Clare made the rest of him ache. So he propped his feet on the backpack, looked at the slightly unreal scenery, and thought about Waxman. Waxman taking Peggy to the gorge and hitting her up for money. Threatening her, fighting with her, a lucky push or punch—lucky, because she wasn’t a big woman and Waxman must outweigh her by quite a few pounds—and he goes over the edge.

With his backpack.

Christ.

“Clare,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Waxman’s backpack was down in the ravine with him.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

He took his feet off the pack and bent forward. This was the reason his subconscious mind had ragged at him to keep the thing with them, from the ravine, to their wild ride, to their headlong flight through the forest.

“Why would his backpack be in the ravine with him? If you’re extorting someone or fighting, would you be carrying your backpack?”

There was a pause. Her ice cubes clinked in her glass, another off-kilter piece of normality. “No,” she said finally.

“It wasn’t on him. It wasn’t even near him.” He unbuckled the flap and flipped it open. Inside, atop dirty T-shirts, plastic jars filled with algae-speckled water, and a dog-eared copy of Topographical Maps of New York State, was a plastic bag the size of a woman’s clutch. It was full of white powder. He heard Clare breath in sharply.

The backpack, thrown into the ravine. Evidence to be found with the body. Except he and Clare had stumbled on the scene too soon.

“What was it you overheard Malcolm saying to his mystery visitor about Peggy?”

“He told him to stay away from his aunt.”

One good hard shove into the gorge. Just enough evidence to link Waxman to Dessaint. He was tempted to give the powder a taste and verify that it was horse or coke, but he’d bet good money it was already cut with the same stuff that had killed the other man.

Stay away from his aunt. No kidding.

And they had met her coming down the trail. And offered to help her. And she had helped them. He remembered seeing her backing out of the cockpit door while he was pulling his headset on. He fished into his pants pocket, and sure enough, it was still there, the broken piece of plastic that had rendered the radio useless. All she would have needed was a screwdriver to jam into it. Easy to swipe one from the office and stick into that big bag of hers. Right there under the bottles of cold water. Evidently, Peggy Landry could think on her feet.

And she had been alone and unwatched with the chopper for what—ten minutes? While he and Clare were breaking into the shed.

“What do you think caused the crash?”

She kept staring at the white powder in the bag, then at the black plastic in his palm. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Something with the fuel lines?” She looked at him for the first time. “I thought I must have rushed my preflight check. I thought I’d missed something.”

He shook his head. “No. You did just right.” He reached for her hand and pressed the splintered radio control into it. “Peggy Landry,” he said.

“It can’t be.” She looked at the knob. “Helos are complicated creatures. And that ship flew. For what—twenty minutes after we had left her? That sort of delayed…”

“Sabotage,” he said, supplying the word.

“That would take a great deal of knowledge about the helo’s systems. You’d need to be a mechanic. And you’d have to open the ship up, get into the engine or something. She couldn’t have—” She stopped, frowning. She slid her fingers absently up and down her sweating glass. “Unless…All those water bottles.” She turned to him. “She could have squirted water into one of the tanks. We were low on fuel, and I switched from the first tank to the second after we made our ascent to spot the Hudson.” Her face, dirty and sweat-streaked, shone with revelation. “It would have been pretty much dumb luck, getting the second tank. If she’d put it in the first, we wouldn’t have made it to the ravine.”

“But you don’t need to know much about any machine to know putting water into the gas tank is going to screw it up.”

They looked at each other. He thought about Ingraham’s bloody death and Dessaint’s bloated corpse. He thought about Todd MacPherson and Emil Dvorak. People treated like disposable lighters. He thought about what might have happened if they had been a shade less lucky, if Clare had been slightly less skilled as a pilot, if the sparks had caught fire a few minutes earlier.

He stood up so abruptly, his wicker chair skidded back half a foot.

“What?”

He turned to the inn’s door. “I’m getting out an APB on Landry and her nephew. And telling Kevin to get here now.” She had tried to kill Clare. And had almost succeeded. “I don’t want anyone else to make this collar. I want to be the one to strap that woman to the gurney.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Russ tried to get rid of Clare, of course. First, he wanted her to stay at the inn and accept Ron and Stephen’s offer of a shower and a room to rest in. Then, when Officer Flynn arrived and drove them up to the construction site to reclaim their cars, he ordered her to go home, a direction he emphasized by driving past the rectory on his way to the Landry house and pointing his finger out his window at her driveway. When they got to the imposing modern house—Clare still dogging Russ’s Ford 250—and discovered that Peggy, her laptop, and two suitcases were gone, she could see he was tempted to leave her there, with the nearly hysterical bride-to-be and the poor confused Woods. She crossed her arms and simply ignored everything he said that didn’t involve her sticking around. His heart wasn’t really in it anyway. Maybe there was something about throwing up on another person’s shoes.

“I know why you’re doing this,” he said as he rifled through Peggy Landry’s home office. He, Kevin, Noble Entwhistle, and a friendly cop introduced as Duane were searching the house. “You’re an adrenaline junkie. I’m here to tell you that the only way to get over that is to live a life of quiet contemplation.” He tossed several folders on the floor. “Here, make yourself useful.” She sat on the Oriental rug and began paging through the documents. “Quiet contemplation,” he went on. “Like the priesthood.”

Officer Entwhistle stuck his head in the doorway. “Thought you’d like to know. We pulled a suitcase full of goodies from under the nephew’s bed. Meth and ecstasy, and some heroin, too. We’re leaving it in place until the lab guy can get here. It may be another hour.”

“Speedy as always. Any indications where Wintour might have gone?”

“Nothing yet. We’re still looking.” Entwhistle glanced over at Clare, who sat cross-legged on the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “Helping out, Reverend Fergusson?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’ll, uh, leave you two to it, then.” He retreated down the hall.

“That’s great,” Russ said under his breath.

“What?” The folder held an endless correspondence between Landry Properties, Inc., and its insurance carrier, dating back several years. Even letting weekend warriors play paintball on your mountains was apparently a potential pitfall of litigation.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just another misunderstanding.”

“Huh,” she said, trying to decipher the arcane agreement that had BWI paying a portion of Peggy’s insurance on the land not leased for the spa. Statements for January, February, March…then something different in April.

“Russ. Come take a look at this.” He knelt beside her. She laid the paper on the rug and they both bent over it. “If this says what I think it does, Peggy’s share of the BWI insurance was canceled in April.”

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Would that include that provision Opperman told me about? Where she gets paid out of insurance money if the project didn’t go forward?”

“I’m guessing so.” She flipped through another few pages. “Look at this. Her insurance company writes her that they’ve been refused payment because BWI’s dropped her policy.” She underlined the words with her fingernail. “Hugh Parteger,” she glanced at him, “a financier I met at Peggy’s party, he told me BWI was overloaded with debt and looking for cash.”

“Her insurance situation wouldn’t be that big a deal so long as the construction was going through,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “But if she thought Ingraham was going to pull the plug on the project…”

“She’d be left with nothing except a hunk of cleared land and a reputation as someone who had a major deal drop through her fingers. She’s spent years trying to make something of that property.”

He nodded. “Could be she decided that if Bill Ingraham was out of the way, the spa could be built without him. Opperman said pretty much the same thing to me. With the design all in place, all Ingraham was doing at this point was acting as the lead contractor. Could be she thought she could safeguard her investment.” He shook his shoulders. “Remind me to stay away from real estate speculation.”

There was a screeching noise outside, and the sound of flying gravel. Someone shouted from the main floor.

“What the—” Russ was on his feet and pounding down the hall before Clare had a chance to get up. She followed him, two steps at a time, up the stairs to the main floor, guided by the shouts and slamming doors. The elderly Woods were huddled beside a grandfather clock in the foyer. “Which way?” Clare said.

Cyrus Wood pointed to the front door. She burst outside in time to see both the squad cars gunning down the sloping drive, wheels spinning, stones rat-tat-tatting. Russ was flinging open the door of his pickup. She put on a burst of speed and ran headlong into the truck, banging on the hood. “Let me in! Let me in!”

The passenger door unlocked with a sharp click and she fell into the seat, clutching at the oven-hot leather as Russ spun the vehicle around and slammed on the accelerator. She couldn’t believe he had actually fallen for it and let her get in.

“What is it?”

“The nephew pulled right into the driveway. He saw our black-and-whites and backed out of there, but not before Kevin spotted him. Hang on.”

They took the turn onto the road on two wheels. His hand twitched where the radio would be in his squad car. She could hear the sirens wailing, the sound shifting, growing higher and fainter as the lightweight cars drew farther and farther ahead of Russ’s heavy truck.

“Will they be able to catch him?” she asked.

“Eventually.” His focus was all on the road as he leaned into his accelerator.

“What if he drives through town like that? That fast?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was a stupid question. She could picture the tourists jaywalking across the streets, the kids biking. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed the best she knew how, scarcely coherent, all her fear and belief laid out in the open. Please, God. Please.

The sirens cut off. Russ swore. The truck flew over the road, heading toward the intersection, lofting over bumps and jarring high and wide over asphalt patches filling last winter’s potholes.

“Hang on!” The two black-and-whites were catercorner across the intersection, blocking a Volvo sedan that had, from the skid marks, spun around in the turn and nosed into a ditch thick with daylilies and Queen Anne’s lace. Russ jammed down on the brake, throwing both of them forward until her shoulder belt caught and bit into her neck. The back end of the truck danced across the road but stopped safely in the breakdown lane. Great, she thought. Now I’ll have matching bruises on both shoulders.

The uniformed officers spilled from their cars, taking protective stances behind their open doors. Russ opened his own door, drawing his weapon at the same time. “Stay here,” he said.

She nodded.

Officer Entwhistle was yelling at Malcolm Wintour to get out of the car with his hands showing. She couldn’t see any movement inside the sedan. Lord, what if he was dead, too? The awful toll of human life and pain was already too high. And for what? To get a lousy piece of land developed. To make more money for a woman who already had more than anyone really needed.

Russ closed in on his men, staying low, his gun out in front of him. She saw him signal Noble Entwhistle, who ducked behind his own car and edged around toward the back of the Volvo, which was angled up so that the tires were barely touching the asphalt.

“Wintour,” Russ bellowed. “We’ve got your aunt. We’ve got Waxman. We know everything. Get out of the car.”

The door on the driver’s side shuddered, opened a few inches, and then stuck fast in the side of the ditch. Clare rolled her window down. She had to hear what was going to happen. A hand emerged from the opening. “It wasn’t my idea!” The thin, frightened voice she heard was not at all like the one she had heard from the bathroom. “She made me do it!”

“Get out of the goddamned car!”

“I can’t!”

Russ looked at Noble Entwhistle and nodded. The uniformed officer crept closer to the Volvo’s trunk as Russ sidled closer toward the driver’s door. Clare wanted to scream, Stay away from there, you idiot! He’s got a gun! But he knew Malcolm had a gun. He knew what he was doing. She forced her fingernails out of the palms of her hands.

She still couldn’t see the interior of the car, but from where he stood, Russ must have had a bead directly on Malcolm. He stood there, gun pointed at the car, while Noble slid into the ditch and opened the back door. It wasn’t until he had hauled Malcolm out, literally by the collar, that Clare realized she had been holding her breath.

They got him down on the ground and then Duane and Kevin came running. Clare could hear a rumble of male voices, but she couldn’t make out anything. Russ squatted down and spoke directly to Malcolm. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as if the younger man was crying. She looked away, not wanting to see any more, and so it wasn’t until she heard the crunch of his hiking boots on the road grit that she realized Russ was coming back to the truck.

She glanced up. Noble was ushering Malcolm into the backseat of his cruiser, and as she watched, the red lights whirled atop the other police car and Kevin and Duane were off, headed toward town. She looked at Russ as he opened his door.

“He says his aunt didn’t drive away, because he had her car.” He got in, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He doesn’t know where she’s gone. The only people he knows she might get in touch with are his mother or her other sister. Both of whom live more than halfway across the state. She must have called a friend to come pick her up.”

He crawled in behind the wheel and leaned back against the headrest. “We’ve got an APB out on her, but it’s not going to do us a damn bit of good if we don’t know what the hell car she’s in. ’Scuse my French.”

“Could she have rented a car?”

“That was my first thought. The nearest car-rental place is at the Fort Henry Ford dealership. I sent Duane and Kevin off to check it out.”

Officer Entwhistle’s car came to life. He pulled away from the side of the road and headed toward town, waving through the window at Russ.

“We need to get someone to secure that Volvo,” Russ said, sounding weary. “We’re so damned overextended at this point that I’m going to have to call the staties in. God, I hate that.” He reached for his keys and started the truck. “We’d better get back to the house and start calling names in Peggy’s Rolodex. Maybe we’ll find a girlfriend who just happened to have plans to drive out of town today.”

Clare’s mind returned to the party the night before. Sitting in the window seat of the Landry house while the guests swirled around her. The expression of disbelief on Hugh Parteger’s face. The smell of black currants and Thai chicken. Peggy saying, “John Opperman’s flying to Baltimore tomorrow afternoon, and he won’t be back until Tuesday.”

“I know where she is.”

He looked at her.

“No, really. I know where she is. John Opperman’s supposed to fly out of town this afternoon. I bet she called him and asked to come along. I bet he’d pick her up, no questions asked.”

He shoved his hand into his hair, spiking his sweat-stiff locks in every direction. “He would, wouldn’t he? A little freebie business trip.” He slammed the heel of his hand into his steering wheel. “Damn, that woman thinks fast on her feet. We’re not going to find her with an APB because she’s not going to be on the road. Or buying a ticket anywhere.” He threw the truck into gear and pulled onto the road. “Do you know when Opperman’s supposed to leave?”

“She just said he was leaving this afternoon. And that he was headed for Baltimore.”

He heeled the truck hard to the left and stomped on the gas pedal. “If I take the back roads, I can be at the Glens Falls Airport in twenty minutes.” He glanced at her for a split second. “I don’t suppose you have your cell phone with you?”

“In my car. Sorry.”

“Never mind. If they’re still there, we can stop them before he takes off. And if they’ve left, they would have had to tell the airport-control people where they’re going, right?”

“He would have to have filed a flight plan, yeah. And if he’s flying on instruments, he’ll be passed from one flight-control center to another. You’ll be able to call ahead and have someone waiting for her at their destination.” She grabbed the door handle as he took another hard turn onto an unmarked road. They jounced in and out of potholes as they flew through thickets of sumac and ancient overgrown apple orchards. “You know, I like to speed, but isn’t this—”

“Hang on.” He turned onto a one-lane bridge. Steel plates ca-chunk-ca-chunk-ca-chunked beneath the tires.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

He grinned at her. “Do you trust me?”

She groaned.

At one point, she was sure they’d passed under the Northway, but other than that, she had no bearing on where they were until they emerged from a tree-shaded road and saw the airport in front of them, its four runways stretched like a top-heavy X past a handful of hangars and a tiny tower. They drove through a gate marked EMPIRE EAST AVIATION.

“Where do you think he’d be?” Russ asked.

She glanced around as he slowed the truck to a crawl. There were twenty or twenty-five small planes at tie-downs and another two on the tarmac. As she watched, a Beech King took off from runway 12.

“Could that have been it?”

“No,” she said, still scanning the area. “That’s a single-engine. If he’s actually using it for long-range transport, he’s got to have a double-prop, maybe a jet, and I don’t see any around here. Head for—whoa! There! Pull over, pull over.”

She was scrambling out of her door before he turned the engine off. In front of the next hangar, past the tie-down area and ready to roll onto runway 1, was a Piper Cheyenne II, twin turboprop, six seats—the biggest plane she had seen so far. A skinny young man in greasy overalls was rolling back a fuel hose. Whoever was in the plane was in a big hurry—finishing the refueling only minutes before getting the go-ahead. She could hear Russ behind her, yelling, “Millers Kill PD. Stop that plane!”

Clare skidded to a halt in front of the fuel attendant’s tubing spool. “Who owns this?” she said. He gawped at them. “Who owns this turboprop?” she demanded.

“Uh…uh…”

She snatched an order pad from the front pocket of his overalls.

“Hey!”

“Is this the order?” she asked, pointing to the top sheet.

“Yeah, but—”

She had already read the owner’s name beneath the grimy fingerprints. She waved the pad at Russ. “It says BWI!”

She heard the engine turn over, the plane purr to life. Russ flashed his badge at the fuel attendant. “Police! There’s a murder suspect on board that plane! Go tell whoever’s in charge to shut it down!”

The kid’s eyes bulged out of his bony face. He turned and fled toward the tower.

Russ sprinted the rest of the way to the plane and banged on the tail. “Stop! Stop!”

She caught at Russ’s arm and dragged him away. “You idiot! If that plane turns, those props will slice you into julienned fries! Don’t ever, ever get next to a plane with its props running!”

“There’s no way the tower can stop him if he wants to take off, can it?”

She shook her head.

“Then I have to do it.” He ran wide around the Cheyenne’s wing, drawing his gun. The plane slowly pivoted toward the runway. She saw the flaps moving as the pilot adjusted them before running up his engines.

Russ skidded to a halt a dozen feet from the Cheyenne’s nose. He leveled his gun toward the cockpit. The self-sacrificing stupidity of it took her breath away. She didn’t think one bullet, or even a full clip, would ground that plane, unless he could hit the pilot. And she knew he would never shoot Opperman just to stop Peggy Landry from escaping.

The plane’s twin engines whined and it began to roll forward. Evidently, whoever was inside had realized the same thing Clare had. The plane changed its angle slightly, so that instead of the nose facing Russ, it was the right wing prop. Russ jogged sideways until he was dead-on the nose again, but this was a duel he couldn’t win.

Stop the plane, stop the plane—Possibilities flipped through her mind as the Cheyenne rolled forward and Russ backed away ahead of it. He was shouting something about being under arrest, but she couldn’t pay attention to his words as she cast about for something, anything to—Then she spotted the wheel chocks. Long wooden and rubber triangles, each hanging from a length of rope, flight equipment unchanged since Orville and Wilbur Wright flew at Kitty Hawk. There were two pairs resting next to an empty tie-down cleat on the tarmac.

She grabbed three by their rope handles and sprinted toward the back of the plane. She ducked low and scurried under the right wing. The plane was moving at a brisk pace now, and the trick was going to be to get the chock in front of the wheel without walking straight into the propeller, which was whirring five feet in front of her. She twirled the handle and tossed one, wishing fervently that she had spent more time playing horseshoes with her brothers. The chock hit the tarmac, bounced, and came to rest at a slant.

The right wheel hit it. The whole plane trembled. There was a pause; then the engines revved louder. The pilot was going to push it. And with only one wheel blocked, and that at an angle, he would be able to roll over the chock within a minute.

“What the hell are you doing?” Russ yelled.

The Cheyenne was pivoting again, this time against the obstruction. She had maybe ten seconds left before it was free—nine—she threw herself on the tarmac and rolled under the tail—eight—staggered to her feet and ducked under the left wing—seven—took the second wheel chock and jammed it under the left wheel.

The plane seemed to hiccup. Its engines screamed in complaint as the pilot revved them higher. She could see the chock in front of the right wheel skid as the plane’s tire ground it out of the way. Her eyes went to the nose wheel—small, unpowered, there to hold up the plane on an even triangle of support. She stooped under the belly and ran, crouching so low, her knees were hitting her nose. The props roared, each less than two feet from her head. If the wheel got over the chock, the plane would turn and Russ would have to ship her home to her parents in Baggies. She flung herself on her belly and thrust the last chock beneath the nose wheel. Then she scrambled to her hands and knees, crawled forward a couple of yards, and lurched to her feet, well away from the spinning propellers.

For a moment, she could hear the voice of her survival school instructor. You like to live on the edge, don’t you, Fergusson?

Sir, yes, sir.

Russ grabbed her arm and hauled her behind him. “Now, who’s the idiot?” he hissed.

“It worked,” she said. She stepped away from him so she could see the cockpit windows. The height and tilt of them made it impossible to make out any details about who was sitting there, but she knew he—or they—could see her. She gestured, using the universal language of flight crews: Three. Wheels. Stop.

Nothing. She and Russ stood there in front of the immobilized plane while the engines roared fruitlessly on. She had just enough time to wonder if the cockpit’s side windows were sealed, or if they could open, and if so, whether someone would stick a gun out and start firing at them.

“Maybe we should—”

“Let’s move to—”

The cabin door opened. It was Opperman, his face a mask.

“Turn off those engines and get down from there,” Russ shouted. “I’m here to arrest Peggy Landry for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.”

“I’d love to oblige you, Chief,” Opperman said. His eyes shifted toward something inside the plane. “Unfortunately, Peggy has taken possession of my gun and is quite determined to have me fly her out of here.”

“Christ,” Russ said under his breath. “This is why guns in the cockpit are such a bad idea.” He raised his voice. “Peggy, what do you want?”

Opperman held one edge of the door frame and moved to one side. And there was Peggy, pressing a handgun into his side. She wasn’t the cool, acerbic hostess Clare remembered from her party, nor the nearly hysterical victim from earlier today. This was a woman stripped to the bone. Her eyes were red-rimmed and teary, but not with remorse or self-pity. With rage. Peggy Landry looked ready to jump over the edge, not caring whom she took with her.

“Ms. Landry,” Russ said, raising his voice to be heard over the thrum of the propellers, “put down the weapon and come with me. There’s not any way you’re going to get out of this.”

“I might have said the same thing about you and the helicopter,” she said. “I understood it wouldn’t fly if the gas supply was compromised. But here you are.” Her voice was firm, but the gun in her hand trembled.

“The helicopter went down. It was Clare’s piloting that kept us alive.”

Clare thought it was more likely dumb luck. However, she wasn’t going to try to put her two cents in.

“Waxman?”

“He’s still hanging on. You pushed him into that ravine, didn’t you? Why?”

Opperman looked at Peggy, his expression pained. Clare couldn’t tell if it was from the news of his helicopter’s fate or Waxman’s. From what she had seen of the man, she suspected the former.

“He thought he knew things he didn’t. He was trying to blackmail me, the little weasel. He had discovered PCBs in the groundwater around the quarry pond on my land. He…was promised a job if he kept his mouth shut about it.” Her eyes flicked down, as if to make sure the gun was still firmly against Opperman’s waist. “He knew if the DEP found out, it would be the end of the project. He was threatening me! He threatened me!”

Opperman was shaking his head. “There’s no PCB contamination.” He spoke loudly enough for them all to hear. “Leo found contaminated water when he first came to the site, but the levels have been going down every time he tested. I was suspicious—I thought maybe he was setting us up. I hired a diver to check things out this past week. He found an empty chem-hazard container at the bottom of the quarry pond.” He looked directly at Russ. “My guess is that Leo seeded the pond with sludge from the Allen Mill cleanup site, or those antidevelopment environmental extremists did.”

“What?”

Clare’s amazement was so strong, she could almost believe her thought rang out loud. But it was Peggy who spoke, clutching at the door frame and the gun with equal fervor.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘There’s no PCB contamination’? I saw Waxman’s test results. I know—if he—”

“I just found out myself,” Opperman said. “I hadn’t had the chance to tell you. I was going to talk to some people I know at the EPA on Monday and report the sabotage.” He looked at Russ again. “Of course, I thought—we all thought—that if there was residual contamination from when the quarry was used for storage, we’d have to shut down the project.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me any of this when I interviewed you Monday?” Russ’s voice cracked with frustration.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Peggy added, jabbing Opperman in the ribs for emphasis.

He stiffened against the gun’s prodding. “I told you—I just found out myself!” He looked at Russ. “And when you spoke to me, I thought Bill had been killed as a result of a sexual encounter gone wrong. How was I supposed to guess there was some connection to a confidential business situation?” Clare was amazed that, even held hostage, Opperman managed to play the autocrat. “Besides, I already suspected tampering from that tree-hugger group. And we certainly know where your sympathies lie, don’t we?”

Clare could feel the tension radiating from Russ, but he ignored Opperman’s jab. “Ms. Landry,” he said, “did you order Bill Ingraham killed?”

“The son of a bitch was going to pull the plug on the project,” Peggy protested. “He was going to fold up and go home because of the goddamned PCBs….” For a moment, she looked lost. “I would have been left with nothing. With nothing!” She practically howled her words.

“Russ,” Clare said in his ear.

“I know.”

She had seen suicidal people before, people driven to the brink of utter hopelessness. That mad despair was in Peggy’s eyes.

Evidently, Opperman saw it, too. “Peg,” he said, almost too softly to be heard over the engines’ roar. “Let’s sit down and talk about this. I can help you. I know some of the best lawyers—”

“You!”

Now the madness turned outward.

“You! Always being so damn helpful! Always telling me everything’s going to turn out all right! Well, it hasn’t, has it? My life is ruined! And I swear to God yours will be, too!”

Opperman lunged at her, knocking her off her feet. They both disappeared into the plane’s shadowed interior.

“Oh, Christ!” Russ launched himself at the lip of the door. A shot resounded. Clare flung her arms over her head and ducked, a useless, instinctual move. Just as Russ was heaving himself over the edge, Opperman crawled into view.

For an endless second, Clare waited for Peggy to follow, imagining her looming over the injured man in the doorway. Russ would never be able to get his weapon up in time. Peggy would gun them all down and eat the last bullet herself. And the only thing Clare could think of was the Act of Contrition from her eighth-grade confirmation class—“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee and I detest of all my sins”—and it wasn’t even an Episcopal prayer.

Then Opperman clambered to his feet and reached down to help Russ into the plane. Russ disappeared for a moment and then returned. He looked at her, his face more grim than she had ever seen. And she realized Peggy Landry was never going to appear in that doorway, or any other, again.

Chapter Thirty-Two

When the farmhouse door opened, Clare thrust her flowers into Paul’s hands. “Welcome home,” she said.

He wrapped one meaty arm around her shoulders and hugged her close. “I’m glad to be here, believe me.” He glanced over her shoulder. “Hello! I’m Paul Foubert.”

“You said I should bring a date,” Clare said, stepping aside to let the two men shake hands. “Paul, this is Hugh Parteger.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Hugh said, handing Paul a bottle of wine.

“Whoa. You’re not from around here, are you?”

“You can tell,” Hugh said, his face falling. “No matter how I work on the accent, people can always tell I’m Swedish.” Paul laughed.

“Hugh is based in New York City, but he has ambitions to be a summer person in Saratoga,” Clare explained. “He was up this weekend, so when he called me, I asked him along.”

“Wonderful!” Paul said. “Stephen and Ron’s inn was full up tonight, so they couldn’t get away. Now it’ll just be us and the Van Alstynes.”

Clare kept her smile firmly in place. “I’m looking forward to meeting Mrs. Van Alstyne.”

Paul looked at her oddly. “From the way she’s been talking about you since she got here, I assumed you two had already met.”

“Linda Van Alstyne was talking about me?” Her stomach lurched. Which was ridiculous. She had nothing to feel guilty about. Nothing.

Paul’s face relaxed. “No, Margy Van Alstyne was talking about you.” He turned to Hugh. “Chief Van Alstyne’s mother. Dynamite woman. She took care of our dogs for us while I was with Emil in Albany.” He gave them as much of a confidential glance as his broad, open face was capable of. “We invited her first, before the chief and his wife. I get the impression that the daughter-in-law doesn’t show up at social events where the mother-in-law will be present.”

Clare felt almost giddy with relief. “Speaking of the dogs, where are—” A chorus of happy dog noises cut off her sentence.

“The hairy beasts are out back, on the patio. We’re taking advantage of the breeze. I decided to have dinner at 6:00 because Emil gets tired so early, but it’ll work out perfectly with the weather. The thunderstorms should hold off for a few more hours. That gives us lots of time to eat, talk, and swill down this very nice merlot you’ve brought.”

“Oh, Lord,” Hugh said. “I hope mine isn’t the only drink available. From what I’ve seen of the vicar, she’ll polish it off before the hors d’oeuvres.” He grinned at Clare, who elbowed him in the ribs.

Paul led them through the living room and dining room to a set of French doors open to the evening light. The dogs rushed them in a wiggling mass of silky hair and wet noses as they came out onto the flagstone patio. Clare scratched their heads and shoulders as they ecstatically butted against her linen shift.

“Go lie down, Bob.” Paul tugged at the Bern’s collar. “No, Gal. Down.” The dogs retreated to a spot beneath a glass-topped iron table already set for dinner. “No,” Paul warned. The dogs gave him a pitiful look and dragged themselves into banishment next to a low stone wall. “Hey, Emil. This is Clare and her friend Hugh Parteger.”

With the help of a cane, Emil Dvorak rose from one of the teak benches that edged the patio. Clare took his outstretched hand.

“I’m happy to meet you,” he said. He had a precise, almost European way of talking. His speech evidently hadn’t been affected by his brain trauma. “Paul’s told me so many wonderful things about you. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

She felt her cheeks go pink. “It wasn’t anything.” Where he grasped his cane, his knuckles were white. “Please, sit down.” Beside the medical examiner, Russ had risen, as well. He nodded to her.

“Reverend Fergusson.”

“Chief Van Alstyne.” She tucked her hand behind Hugh’s elbow and pulled him forward. “I’d like you to meet Hugh Parteger. Hugh, this is Russ Van Alstyne.”

Russ was in his civvies, but as he shook hands with the Englishman, he managed to make jeans and a button-down shirt look like a uniform. “What brings you to Millers Kill?” he asked. It sounded like the beginning of an interrogation, rather than a social pleasantry.

As Hugh explained his presence in Russ’s jurisdiction, Paul dragged over a pair of slouchy canvas chairs and offered two glasses of fruit-clotted sangria. “Mrs. Van Alstyne’s using the little girls’ room,” he said, and, as if called by his words, Margy waltzed through the French doors.

“Clare!” She hugged her firmly. “And who is this Russ is talking to? Is this good-looking fellow your date?”

Clare introduced the two. Hugh looked relieved to have someone to speak with besides Russ, who, when Clare pressed one of the glasses of sangria into Hugh’s hand, asked, “One of you is a designated driver tonight, right?”

They all sat down, ranged around Dr. Dvorak. Seven weeks after his near-fatal beating, Emil Dvorak looked frail and stitched together. His hair was a stubble of new growth around pink lines of scars, and the left side of his face wasn’t quite symmetrical with the right—his eye didn’t open as wide and his smile didn’t reach as far. But as he told them stories about his hospital stay, he spoke clearly, displaying an acerbic humor that she liked right away.

The conversation turned to health care, with Margy Van Alstyne telling them the trials of life under Medicare and Hugh weighing in on the British National Health system. Clare let the talk flow around her while she sipped her icy sangria. It wasn’t until she accepted Paul’s offer of a second glass that Russ spoke to her.

“You’re not going to want to break into their bedroom and climb out the bathroom window if you have that, are you?”

She snorted. The other four looked at her with polite incomprehension. “Just…it’s a long story,” she said. “I was trying to find out more about Malcolm Wintour.”

“I trust they’re going to put him away for a long time,” Hugh said.

“The victim’s advocate interviewed me,” Emil said. “She told me Wintour’s going to plead guilty to possession and dealing but is trying to duck the murder charges.”

Russ pinched the bridge of his nose. “The DA thinks she won’t have much of a problem hanging Chris Dessaint’s death on him, but conspiracy’s difficult to prove, and we haven’t been able to give her much evidence.” He looked at Clare. “From what we can tell, Peggy was giving orders to her nephew, who, in turn, was giving orders to Chris Dessaint, who was bringing in Colvin and McKinley.”

Clare’s shoulders twitched. “It’s like puppets playing puppets.”

“Yeah. But there’s not much of a paper trail, other than a few phone calls from Wintour’s cell phone to Dessaint. And with Peggy and Dessaint both dead, there isn’t much hope of ever getting all the details. I tell you what really bugs me.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “We still don’t know how Peggy hooked up with Chris Dessaint.”

“I thought Malcolm was the one giving him orders,” Clare said.

“He was. But Wintour didn’t know him before. He claims his aunt fingered Dessaint, gave him his name and phone number.” He made a noise of frustration. “You can imagine how hard it’s going to be to get the conspiracy charge to stick.” He glanced around at the others, as if recalling that he wasn’t in a private conversation. “But to get back to Mr. Parteger’s statement…You can rest assured that the three surviving stooges will be going away for a long, long time.”

Emil smiled slightly. “You know, I don’t really care. Nearly dying has a way of giving you perspective.” He looked at his partner, the strained lines of his square face softening. “We all have only so much time. I don’t want to waste what’s left to me on things that aren’t important.”

Paul smiled back. “And that makes me think,” he said. “Clare, how did your candlelight vigil go?”

“Huh? Oh, it was great. More people than I expected.” Thanks to Todd MacPherson’s new friends from the Adirondack Pride team, she said to herself. She had spent much of the evening dodging their attempts to interview her. She wanted to do the work she needed to do, but she wasn’t interested in becoming their poster priest.

“What did your congregation think of it?”

“I think it boosted attendance the next Sunday. I actually had forty people in the pews.” She decided not to mention that half of them had wanted a “little word” with her about her activism.

“Good,” Paul said. He took his partner’s hand and breathed deeply. “Because Emil and I would like to ask you to marry us.”

Clare blinked.

“Well, I guess that calls for congratulations,” Margy said stoutly. Hugh and Russ glanced at each other. Hugh cleared his throat.

“Yes, congrats and best wishes,” he said.

Everyone looked at Clare. In the meadow beyond the overgrown lawn, cicadas were chirping their end-of-August call. The thick wineglass suddenly felt heavy in her hand. “New York State doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages,” she said, throwing out the first thing she could think of. “No ceremony is legally valid, no matter who officiates.”

“We know,” Paul said. “We can call it a commitment ceremony or a celebration of union. The important thing is, we want to stand up together and make promises in front of our friends and family. We want to say we’ll be together until we die.”

“The church I was raised in can’t do this for us,” Emil said. “But I have…reconnected to the fact that my belief in God is part of my life. I know that the Episcopal church is more liberal about these issues.”

“The church is in conflict about these issues,” Clare said, stressing the word conflict. “Some dioceses allow commitment ceremonies, or at least look the other way while individual priests perform them. But the bishop of Albany—my bishop—is a traditionalist.” Not wanting the bishop to come across as some sort of hide-bound old crank, she added, “I mean, he’s very much in favor of civil rights for gays and for including them—you—in the church community. Just…not…”

“Just not giving the stamp of approval to them actually living together,” Russ said.

She shot him a look. He should talk, Mr. I’m Uncomfortable Around Them. “Please try to understand,” she said. “I don’t have the authority to decide policy on my own. I’m part of a hierarchy, under the direction of my bishop, who’s under the direction of the General Convention. It’s not that I’m against it, but I…”

They were all watching her dig her own grave. Paul looked as if she had gotten up and kicked Bob and Gal. Emil’s face was sinking into lines of resignation. And Russ looked…disappointed in her.

You like to live on the edge, don’t you, Fergusson?

Make whole that which is broken.

“But I have to live as I believe Christ leads me. If that doesn’t sound too pompous.” She laid one hand on Paul’s arm and one on Emil’s. “Yes. Okay. I will celebrate your union.”

Dinner was a much more festive affair after that, although Clare had to work at ignoring what might happen to her if—when—her bishop found out what she had agreed to do.

Emil held up well throughout the meal and dessert, but by the time Paul poured them coffee, his face was gray and strained. “Paul,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ve overdone it a bit. Could you…”

Russ pushed his chair back. “We ought to be going.”

“No, no,” Emil insisted. “I need a little help, but Paul would love to visit some more.”

“Do me a favor,” Paul said, turning to Clare as he pulled Emil’s chair away from the table and guided him to his feet. “Take the dogs for a turn around the meadow. They haven’t had a chance to get much exercise since we’ve gotten home. I’ll be down as soon as I’ve gotten Emil all set.”

Russ glanced at Clare. “Sure,” she said. She looked around the glass-topped table at Margy and Hugh.

“Not me,” Margy said. “I’m going to sit here and digest that wonderful meal.”

Hugh smiled apologetically at Clare. “Can you manage without me, Vicar? I hate to sound like a weed, but I’ve got allergies on top of allergies. My medication’s holding them at bay, but if I go strolling through all that goldenrod, I’ll turn into a giant inflated sinus. I won’t bore you with the details. It would be too disgusting.”

Clare laughed. “That’s fine. You two save some coffee for us.”

The men scraped their chairs away from the table as she stood, and, as if they had been eavesdropping, Gal and Bob bounded over. Russ and Clare both called their good-nights to Emil, who was making his way with difficulty through the French doors.

“After you,” Russ said, sweeping his hand toward the edge of the patio. She stepped into the grass, the dogs dancing ahead. “So,” he said. “This Hugh seems like a nice guy.”

“Yeah.”

“You been seeing much of him?” He fell into step beside her.

“We met at Peggy’s party, that night I…the night you came to get me. He called me a few days later and asked if we could get together next time he was in Saratoga.” She shrugged. “So here he is. It’s our first time out together.”

“Oh.” He yanked a cluster of goldenrod off its stalk and flicked it, piece by piece, into the air. “You think this is going to go someplace?”

She looked him square in the face. “I thought,” she said, speaking deliberately, “that it would be a good idea for me to start dating. It doesn’t much matter with whom.”

He looked down, brushing the goldenrod fuzz off his hands. They walked on in silence. The dogs flushed a red-winged blackbird off its perch on a maple sapling and leaped about wildly, trying to catch it. “I understand you visited Leo Waxman before he went into rehab,” he said after awhile.

She welcomed the change of subject. “I felt like I had to apologize to him—for dropping him. You know the state’s fired him for not reporting the PCB contamination in the quarry pool. Although I understand there are hardly any traces of it now.” She tugged at a stem of Queen Anne’s lace and snapped it off. “They’ve confirmed it was planted there?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Do you have any idea who did it?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to tell.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I know it wasn’t my mother. If she had done it, she would have done it right, and stopped the project cold.”

She laughed.

“He’s going ahead with the construction. Did you know that?” he said.

“Who?”

“Opperman. He’s renamed the business BWI/Opperman and hired some guy from out of state to act as the general. He bought the land outright, too. No more leasing.”

“Peggy’s sisters sold it to him?”

“I guess after everything that happened, they couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.”

“Huh. What do you want to bet he got the fire-sale rate?”

He laughed shortly. “He’s one of those guys who can fall into a pile of manure and come up with a fistful of diamonds.”

She paused. The sun had dropped below the mountains while they had been eating, and the gathering thunderheads were underlined by the dull red glow of the sunset’s echo. The dogs, nosing into a woodchuck hole, were making snuffling noises. She breathed in the smell of the long, ripe grass. “It’s beautiful out here.”

“Yeah.”

“I feel so bad for her.” He didn’t ask her to whom she was referring. “It was like she was poisoned by the contamination in the water. And it spread all around her, like a sickness. Everyone lost. No one won.”

“Opperman did.”

She swished the stalk of Queen Anne’s lace through the tall grass. “Yeah, well, like you said.” She paused. “He did win, didn’t he?” She looked up at Russ. “He’s got total control now—of the business, the land, the project.”

Russ nodded.

“What you said about not knowing how Peggy knew Chris Dessaint?”

“Yeah?”

“Aren’t there any connections between his life and hers?”

“Not that we can see. He worked at Shape Industries, which had no connection to her real estate and development business, he moved in completely different social circles, and, according to witnesses, he didn’t use drugs. Wintour hasn’t confessed, but Dr. Scheeler thinks Dessaint was knocked out by a blow to the head and then injected with an overdose of heroin. The only way in which he and she intersect is that he was one of those hard-core paintball players. But even if he did use her land once in awhile, she only dealt with the league organizers. Just made arrangements over the phone. She never laid eyes on the players.”

She closed her eyes. A refreshing breeze sprang up, the leading edge of the front carrying the storm over the mountains. She shivered, and her arms goosefleshed. She opened her eyes. Looked at Russ.

“Opperman played paintball.”

He looked as if she had slapped him.

“Remember? Stephen Obrowski said so. Opperman stayed in the area lots of weekends. He played paintball.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, you’re right.”

They stared at each other. It was a horrible feeling, like opening up a nice, neatly wrapped package to find something dead and rotting inside.

Russ strode off, his head bowed. She skip-hopped to keep up with him. “Opperman,” he said. The dogs bounded beside them. “He could have seeded the pond himself before that poor sucker Waxman tested it.”

“The night of the town meeting, Ingraham said something about them being involved once before on a project that had PCB contamination. He said they were still involved with the cleanup.”

“So Opperman has access to some of that sludge. Waxman tests it, comes up with an off-the-chart level, and runs to Opperman, who offers him a job to keep him quiet. Then he makes sure Peggy knows. Maybe he even drops rumors around town.” He stopped abruptly, causing Clare to stumble to a halt. “But there really is contamination in the groundwater. That little bit in the quarry pool couldn’t have caused that.”

She caught at his arm. “Don’t you see? Leo Waxman was right. Even though he thought he was lying, he was right. The PCBs are coming from the Allen Mill cleanup.”

Russ spun on his heel and struck off in another direction. “Peggy thinks she’s about to be screwed out of her deal. Opperman—what? He whispers in her ear? Makes suggestions? If it was just the two of them, he wouldn’t back away from the project? They could split the profits two ways instead of three?”

“And then he points her to Chris Dessaint, who has already proven his mettle by beating up some unlucky soul outside a Lake George bar.”

“She does the rest. She thinks fast; we saw that. He must have known how smart she was.”

“Not smart enough to know she was being manipulated.”

He turned to her and clutched her upper arms. “She got rid of his partner for him. And then he got rid of her. In self-defense.”

The speculation, the whole idea, gave her a sour feeling in her stomach. “Puppets playing puppets,” she said. “And over them all, one puppet master.” She shuddered. “God, it’s vile. And she turned to him in the end. Like an abused woman running back to the man who beats her.”

“Where else did she have to go? Maybe she thought he could protect her. After all, there was no warrant out for his arrest.”

Russ was still holding Clare by the arms. “And now?” she asked.

He leaned forward until his forehead was touching hers. “And now nothing.” His voice was flat. “This is all just you and me talking. I can’t think of a shred of evidence to back up anything we’ve said. And even if we could prove he knew Dessaint, what’s he guilty of? Giving away someone’s phone number?”

She broke away from his grip. “No! That’s wrong.” She walked away, as if movement could bring about a different result. She wrapped her arms around herself. “He can’t play with people’s lives and then take his toys home, the winner. He can’t. It’s not…right.”

“I do law enforcement, not good works. That’s your field. Isn’t ultimate justice supposed to rest with God anyway?”

“Stop it! Don’t say it like that. Like it’s a bad joke on us.”

He moved toward her, the grass swishing around his legs. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s wrong.”

“I know it is.”

They were silent for a moment. Bob thumped into her legs and she bent down to scratch between his shoulders. “I don’t believe that God allows bad things to happen, that He can choose thumbs-up or thumbs-down for us.” She straightened and looked at Russ. “But sometimes it’s very hard to resist asking Him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ”

His hands moved as if he wanted to hug her, but he stopped himself. “Come on. Let’s take the dogs as far as the cow fence before we go back.”

They walked through the fading light, the long grass rustling around them. Over the mountains, the sky was the color of bruised flesh. The Berns coursed ahead, black-and-white flashes amid the grayed gold and darkening green. The fence, rusty barbed wire and weathered posts, stopped them. They stood side by side, looking at the mountains and the sky. They did not touch.

He took his glasses off and polished them on his shirtfront. “Remember when you were getting me out of the helicopter? You told me to hold on tight?” He replaced his glasses and looked back to the high horizon. “I’m still holding on.” He glanced down at his hand. “I don’t know how to let go.”

“Holding on…” She bit her lip. Cleared her throat. “Doesn’t do you much good when the person you’re holding is falling, too.”

Gal bumped the side of her knee. She reached down to scratch her head. Bob barked once, twice. She turned and looked back along the way they had walked. The house seemed a long way off from this perspective.

“We better head back,” he said. “There’s a storm coming.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know there is.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to first thank my husband, Ross Hugo-Vidal, without whom, literally, this book could not have been written. Thanks to my thoughtful readers, Roxanne Eflin, Mary Weyer, and my mother, Lois Fleming. Thanks to my perspicacious editor, Ruth Cavin, and my inestimable agent, Jimmy Vines. Thanks to everyone who helped me with the details, especially my father, John Fleming, who let me fly his helicopter; Rachael Burns Hunsinger, for information on PCBs in the Hudson River Valley; Lt. Col. Les Smith (USA, Ret.), who taught me about falling; and the staff and clergy of St. Luke’s Cathedral, Portland, Maine, who continue to inspire me.

Finally, thanks to all the readers I met through e-mail or signings or at book group conference calls. This book exists because of you.

A FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD

Copyright © 2003 by Julia Spencer-Fleming.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002032502

ISBN: 978-0-312-99543-0

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.