I Shall Not Want

I

Father? I'm finished up. Them floral guild folks are still puttin' up palms for the service tomorrow, so I'm not locking the sanctuary." Mr. Hadley hovered in the doorway to the church office. Unless he was cleaning, repairing, or tending, Clare never saw him go into the offices. Fair enough. He had his own kingdom in the boiler room and the furnace room and the mysterious Sexton's Closet.

Lois, their church secretary, glanced at the clock. "School bus time?"

"Honey's out on another interview." Mr. Hadley sounded out of breath. He clapped one meaty hand against his chest. "Sorry," he said, panting. "Guess I come up those stairs too fast. Anyways, I don't want them grandbabies of mine comin' home to an empty house."

"Absolutely not. When my children were small, I was always there when they got home. Give them a good snack, make sure they've started their homework, and then you can have Happy Hour in peace."

The Reverend Elizabeth de Groot looked scandalized. She had been assigned as St. Alban's deacon in January, and two months sharing an office had not accustomed her to Lois's sense of humor. Clare was beginning to suspect it wasn't going to happen.

"How's Hadley's job search going?" she asked, before Elizabeth could say anything.

"I don't mind tellin' you, it's been disappointin'. Used t'be plenty of good jobs for a body not afraid a hard work. Now what the Mexicans don't come up and take, they ship overseas." He made a gesture that said what ya gonna do? "Eh-nh. She'll find sumpin' sooner or later. She's at the police station today."

Lois and Elizabeth did not look at Clare.

"Hard to picture her in uniform," Mr. Hadley went on, unaware of the charged atmosphere. "Allus wanted to be an actress when she was little. Pretty enough for it, too. But I guess it's hard to make a livin' at it."

"I'm praying for her," Clare said. "Let me know if there's anything more concrete I can do."

"Eh." He fished a less-than-clean handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face with it. "If you know anybody in the police department, you can put in a good word."

Lois choked, coughed, and grabbed for her water bottle. "You okay?" the oblivious sexton asked.

Red-faced, Lois waved him off. "Fine," she gasped.

"You'd better get going if you want to make that school bus." Clare glared at the secretary, who was thumping herself on the chest. "We'll make sure Lois doesn't swallow any more words the wrong way."

" 'Kay. See ya tomorrow. 'Bye, Father." Mr. Hadley thumped off up the hall.

Lois blinked several times, then ran her fingers through her strawberry-blond bob, restoring it to its usual razor-cut perfection. "Let's see. Where were we?"

Clare decided discretion was the better part of valor. "Holy Week. We need three more readers, and somebody has to let the AA group know their meeting is going to conflict with the Stations of the Cross."

"Why do you let that man call you Father?" Elizabeth smoothed her Chanel-style jacket over her woolen shift. She was the only woman Clare had ever seen who managed to turn a Little Black Dress into clergy wear. "Don't you worry he's being satiric? Denigrating your authority?" Elizabeth was big on clerical authority.

"People can call me what they want. At least it's grammatical, which is more than you can say about Reverend."

"How about Mother?" Lois suggested.

"Only if followed by Superior." Clare shook her head. "The only gender-neutral title that's both proper and traditionally Anglican is bishop, so that's what I'm going to shoot for. How do you think I'd look in a purple shirt, Elizabeth?"

A shout down the hall saved the older woman from coming up with a tactful lie.

"Clare! Reverend Clare!" Laurie Mairs appeared in the doorway. "It's Mr. Hadley! Come quick!"

Clare pelted down the hall, the flower guild member close behind her. The door to the sanctuary had been left open, and as she burst through into the church, she could see Mr. Hadley collapsed near the center aisle, his face half in a puddle of vomit.

"Oh, my God," Clare said.

Delia Hall, the other volunteer, was dancing back and forth, unable either to go to the fallen man's aid or to back away. "Oh, Clare, thank heavens! He sat down on the pew, like he was tired, and then he simply toppled over! Do you think he's-could it be-" She tipped an invisible bottle to her mouth. The Sexton's Closet was rumored to have its own stock.

"No." Clare knelt by the sexton. His face was pale, damp with sweat where it wasn't smeared with vomit. She touched his cheek. "Mr. Hadley?" He was clammy beneath her hand.

He pawed at his chest. "Heavy." His gravelly voice was so low she could barely hear him. "Can't…" He worked like a baby with croup, struggling for each breath.

"Clare?" Elizabeth 's voice was calm. Clare hadn't seen her come in. "What can I do?"

"Call nine-one-one. I think he's having a heart attack." She glanced up at the flower guild ladies. "Delia, get a wet soapy towel. Laurie, something to dry him with. We can at least clean him up."

The fifteen minutes before the Millers Kill Emergency Squad arrived was one of the longest in Clare's life. She thought every heave of Mr. Hadley's chest was going to be his last. The whoop and clatter of the ambulance was like the sound of an angelic host, and she could have kissed the paramedics when they hurried through St. Alban's great double doors.

"Heya, Reverend Clare, whatcha got?" Duane Adams, who cobbled together a living as a part-time cop, part-time firefighter, and part-time EMT, didn't spare her a glance in greeting her. He and his partner knelt by Mr. Hadley.

Clare backed out of their way, bumping into Elizabeth, who had returned to keep watch with her. "His name's Glenn Hadley. He's-um, seventy-four."

Duane's partner was strapping an oxygen mask over Mr. Hadley's face, sliding a blood pressure cuff on his arm.

"Any history you know of?" Duane asked.

"He smokes. He's got diabetes, but he doesn't take insulin shots for it." She rubbed her arm. "I didn't know what to do for him, other than try to make him comfortable."

"You called us," Duane said. "That's what you do." His partner unslung a radio and was rattling off a string of jargon and numbers. The only thing Clare recognized was "MI."

"They're calling it in at Glens Falls," the EMT said.

"Okay." Duane stood. "Let's get him on the stretcher."

" Glens Falls Hospital? Why not Washington County?" As soon as she said it, she knew. It was serious. Too serious for their small local hospital to handle. The bad stuff always went to Glens Falls.

"They'll want him straight to the cardiac cath lab. Any next of kin?" Duane asked.

"Oh, my Lord, his grandkids." Clare looked at Elizabeth. "I don't even know how to reach Hadley."

"You go get the children," Elizabeth said. "I'll follow the ambulance to the hospital."

"Good." Clare didn't wait to see the paramedics remove Mr. Hadley. She dashed back to her office and grabbed her coat and keys. "Lois," she yelled, "call the police station and see if they can pass on a message to Hadley Knox." She stopped in the door of the main office, shrugging into her coat. "Mr. Hadley's had a heart attack. He's headed for Glens Falls. I'm picking up her kids and bringing them back here."

"I'm on it." Lois reached for the phone.

As Clare slopped across the tiny parking lot, wet from the melt of the last stubborn snow piles, she heard the ambulance siren rise like a screaming bird into the air. Lord, be with them, she prayed. Be with us all.

II

Hadley picked a fuzz ball off her wool skirt. It was an old A-line, left behind in the closet of her grandfather's house from a Christmas visit. She had needed something to go to Midnight Mass in, and back then she had enough money to buy something she was only going to use once. Well, she'd gotten her dollar's worth from it now. She had worn it on every job interview in the past two months. Too bad the only thing it had gotten her were a few long looks at her legs.

The man scrutinizing her paperwork had certainly checked her out, coming up the hallway to the squad room and going toward his desk at the far end of the room. She hoped it was because he was a cop and not because he was going to be trouble. She eyeballed his desk. A mug with a bunch of pens. A brass nameplate: LYLE MACAULEY, DEPUTY CHIEF. No pictures of the wife. Not that that always meant anything.

Being a good-looking woman in a male-dominated field was tricky. She had always been able to handle her co-workers okay, but catching the eye of a superior meant trouble for everybody. There wasn't going to be any privacy here; it looked like everyone on the force worked out of this room. Five desks, a bunch of chairs, and a big old wooden table. File cabinets, whiteboard, and maps squeezed in between tall, elegant windows from another age. We're not in California anymore, Toto.

"You've got great scores here." Lyle MacAuley held up the results from her NYS Police Test.

"Thanks." She shifted in her sturdy metal seat.

"And your scores from the California Department of Corrections are good, too. You worked for them two years?"

"Three." She knew what was coming next. "I got laid off in a budget cutback. If you look on my résumé, you'll see my supervisor is one of my references."

"Mm." He glanced at the paper on his desk. He had bristly gray hair and bushy eyebrows that looked like they came out of a Halloween disguise kit. "You have a gap of almost two years between the end of your DOC job and now."

"I was a stay-at-home mom for a while." She had been a frantic paddling-to-keep-their-heads-above-water mom. The crap jobs she had been forced to take-scooping ice cream, handing out brochures, walking around in high heels and a bathing suit at a car dealership-weren't worth putting down on paper.

"How come you're applying for a position as a patrolman? I mean, patrol officer. I'd've thought you'd be looking for a job with the New York DOC. The pay's better."

She shook her head. "The nearest correctional facility they're hiring women guards for is Dannemora. I need to stay in this area."

"Because of the kids?"

She shrugged.

"Look, I'm not supposed to ask this, so if you get pissed off you can report me to the EEOC, but have you thought about what you, a single woman, are going to do about your kids? We can't guarantee mommy hours, you know."

He was right. He wasn't supposed to ask her this, and it did piss her off. She tried to keep it from showing in her voice. "We're living with my grandfather, Glenn Hadley. He has a part-time job with flexible hours."

The deputy chief slitted his eyes. Hadley could almost see a list of names clicking through his mind. He might look like an over-the-hill hayseed, but she suspected it wouldn't do to underestimate MacAuley's smarts. She wondered if the illegal question was just another kind of test.

"Glenn Hadley." His eyes popped open. "Works at St. Alban's?"

"Yeah. He's the sexton. That's what they call the custodian there."

"Don't mention that when you talk to the chief."

The surge of hope-she was going to talk to the chief! She was a serious candidate!-almost made her ignore MacAuley's weird advice. Almost.

"What, that granddad's a janitor?"

"Just don't mention St. Alban's or anything to do with it."

She frowned. "He doesn't have something against Christians or something, does he? Because I'm not super devoted or anything, but I do go to church."

"No, no, no, nothing like that." MacAuley compressed his lips. Thought for a moment. "The chief lost his wife this past January."

"I'd heard that."

"He was… with the minister of St. Alban's when it happened. Not with her like there was anything funny going on," he added, so quickly she couldn't help but think there must have, in fact, been something funny going on. "It's just that he feels if he hadn't been with Clare-with Reverend Fergusson-he could have saved his wife. So now, being reminded of her bothers him. Being reminded of Clare. Reverend Fergusson. You understand?"

"Uh-huh," she said, not understanding. Not caring. "I won't mention St. Alban's."

"Okay." He shoved his chair back. Stood up. "Let's go see the chief."

Hadley stood, working her face into the right expression. Ready, willing, and eager. Not desperate. She couldn't afford to look desperate. The prisons were out of commuting range. The private security firms had turned her down. There were only a handful of places where a high school grad could make a decent living, and not one of them was hiring. If she couldn't land this, it was going to be waitressing in Lake George or Saratoga, living off tips and praying nobody got sick or broke a leg. The MKPD had dental. Dental! It had been more than two years since she and the kids had seen a dentist.

MacAuley led her down a short hall, through the dispatcher's station, and rapped on a door with a pebbled glass window and CHIEF RUSSELL VAN ALSTYNE painted in gold. "C'min," a voice said.

She followed MacAuley into a messy office, heaps of magazines and papers piled on a battered credenza, the walls covered with posters and bulletins and a huge map of the tricounty area. A leggy philodendron was dying atop two old file cabinets.

The chief was on the phone, one hand cupped over the receiver. "Hang on," he said. MacAuley tossed her folder onto an equally messy desk. She watched as the chief picked it up one-handed. Long, square fingers. Brown hair with an equal sprinkling of blond and gray, as overgrown as the philodendron.

"Yeah," he told the phone. "Okay. Put us on the list if you find out anything." He laid the folder down without opening it. "No, but send us any prints. We'll run comparisons when we do the ground search in August." Looking at Russ Van Alstyne, she found it hard to picture August. His face was winter-pale, with deep lines etched on either side of his mouth. Ice-blue eyes. She figured him to be about her dad's age, although there was a solidness to the chief that her dad, the king of adult ADD, had never had.

Van Alstyne hung up the phone. "Chief, this is Hadley Knox," MacAuley said. The chief nodded to her. "What's up?" MacAuley went on.

"The rental truck." He glanced at Hadley, including her in the story. "Somebody abandoned a Ryder truck last week at a local farm stand that's still closed for the winter." He looked at Lyle. "Stolen from Kingston. We're getting copies of any prints CADEA pulls."

"Cad-dee-ay?"

Both men looked at Hadley. Uh-oh. Maybe she was supposed to know what that was?

"Capital Area Drug Enforcement Association. It's a sort of regional cooperative, with investigators from departments all over the area." The chief handed another folder to MacAuley. "Their lab tech agreed with your theory that the bales were shrink-wrapped. They didn't find a trace of plant material or THC on any surfaces."

MacAuley tapped his sizable honker. "They don't have this."

"Mmm. Maybe we should hire you out."

"What was it?" Hadley asked. In for a penny, in for a pound, she figured. "In the truck, I mean."

"Marijuana," MacAuley said.

"Pot?" She didn't mean to sound so disbelieving, but pot? Who cared?

"Ten million dollars' worth." Van Alstyne tapped the paper on his desk. "If the truck was full."

"Holy shit!" The second it was out of her mouth, she wanted to call it back. Swearing on a job interview. Genius. "Sorry," she said.

MacAuley looked amused. "I'll just leave you both to it, shall I?"

"Thanks, Lyle," Van Alstyne said. MacAuley exited the office, leaving the door ajar. "Sit down, Ms. Knox."

There was only one chair that didn't have junk on it. She took it.

For a minute, he studied her. If it had been someone else, she would have been getting the creepy vibes that came with unwanted sexual interest. But Van Alstyne wasn't looking at her like a man looks at a woman. It was more like a doctor examining an X-ray. Diagnostic.

"You ask questions," he said.

Was that a complaint? A compliment? She swallowed. "I have two kids, and I'm always telling them there's no such thing as a bad question. I guess it's rubbed off on me."

"Why do you want to be a cop?" His question caught her off guard. Damn, she had prepped for this. What had she been going to say?

"I worked as a prison guard for three years in California." She nodded toward the folder still lying on his desk, unopened. "I found it challenging and fulfilling-"

"Why do you want to be a cop?"

She was left with her mouth half open from her incomplete canned response.

"Just give it to me straight."

She shut her mouth. "I've got a family to support. I need a good-paying job here in Millers Kill. I don't have any college, but my DOC training in California means I already qualify as a probationary peace officer, if I'm enrolled in the Police Basic course."

"What about administering justice? What about getting the bad guys off the street and behind bars?"

She let out a puff of air. "When I was working as a prison guard, I met a lot of guys who claimed they were innocent. I don't know. I figure, administering justice is somebody else's job. As for getting-uh, the bad guys…" She trailed off. "I suppose everybody wants that."

He tilted his head to one side and gestured for her to keep going.

"I'm sorry, sir, but if you're looking for Robocop, I'm not the right person. I guess I see policing as sort of like being a mom. I don't want to catch my kids doing something wrong. I want to stop 'em before they do it. Or head them off before a little problem becomes a big one." He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't define. She snapped her mouth shut. Policing is like being a mom. Great. Maybe she should tell him she wanted to knit scarves and serve hot cocoa.

"If you're hired, you'll be the only woman sworn into the department. The first woman, actually." There was an edge of discomfort in his voice, but she couldn't tell whether it was from the prospect of letting a girl into the club or embarrassment that they hadn't integrated the force up to now. "Have you thought about how you'll handle that?"

He had said he wanted her to give it to him straight. "Are the men in your department likely to require handling?"

"No. Well…"-he pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his steel-rimmed glasses-"not most of 'em, of course not. I was referring to the job itself. It's not like guard work. You'll be doing traffic stops, pulling apart guys who've had too much to drink, walking into houses where the husband and wife have been beating up on each other. You'll be shorter and lighter than any other officer here. How do you deal with that?"

That was a question she had prepped for. "Just like I did as corrections officer. The trick is to never, ever, let them think you're vulnerable. That means controlling the situation, and that starts right up here." She tapped her temple. "It doesn't matter how big you are if you can't project control. And if it comes down to using force, I have an advantage your other officers don't. The drunk guys see these"-she thrust her forearm beneath her breasts and hoisted them, and sure enough, his eyes followed-"and they don't see me coming in with this." She touched the side of his head lightly with the magazine she had picked up with her free hand.

He let out a short laugh. "It's not always that simple."

"Nope. But men still tend to underestimate women."

His smile changed to something wistful. "Yeah. I know-I knew-a woman who used to take advantage of that fact."

"Did it work for her?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, it did…" He shook himself. "Okay." His voice was once again no-nonsense. "If you want it, you've got the job."

"I do? I mean, great! Yes! I do want it."

"You'll be on probation until you've completed the Basic course. I don't want to throw away the time and money we're going to spend training you, so I expect you to pass. With high marks."

"I will. I'll be in the top ten percent. You won't be disappointed."

"Plus, you'll have to put in some serious time on the firing range." He tapped the folder, which he still hadn't opened. "The scores from your shooting test are way too low."

"Absolutely," she said. "That won't be a problem."

Van Alstyne stood up. Hadley stood up. He held out his hand and she took it. "Welcome to the Millers Kill Police Department, Officer Knox."

A rap on his door kept her from gushing her thanks. The dispatcher, a square stack of a woman with an iron-gray perm, stuck her head in. "If you're all finished, Ms. Knox has a phone call."

"Me?" She looked at Van Alstyne. He waved her off.

"Go ahead. Harlene here can set you up with the paperwork."

Harlene closed the door behind them and surprised Hadley by dragging her past the dispatch room into the hallway. "You don't actually have a call. It's a message. From St. Alban's." As she said this, she glanced around, as if ensuring no one could hear her. "It's your grandfather. He's been taken to the Glens Falls Hospital with a heart attack. Reverend Fergusson's going to fetch your kids over to the church."

Hadley stood there. "I'm sorry. Did you say-" and then her mind caught up to Harlene's words and her eyes flooded. "Oh, shit," she said. "Oh, shit."

Harlene was saying something about Glens Falls not necessarily meaning it was bad, and that she wasn't to worry about her children, and all Hadley could think was that she had uprooted their lives and come three thousand miles and now her granddad was going to die and she'd be on her own again. All on her own. Again.

III

"Don't take your coat off. We're going to your sister's for dinner."

Russ paused by the coat hooks in his mom's kitchen, halfway out of his jacket. "That's okay," he said. "I don't feel much like socializing."

Margy Van Alstyne marched out of the tiny dining room. Cousin Nane must have been over with the home perming kit-her white hair was curled so tightly it looked as if it could power the entire North Country electrical grid if you could figure out a way to release its chemical energy. She braced her hands on her hips, increasing her resemblance to a fireplug. "It in't socializing when it's family."

"I'm tired. It's been a long day. Give Janet my regrets." He shrugged the jacket off and hung it on a hook. His mother grabbed its collar and thrust it back at him.

"Mom!"

"I want you to drive me. It'll be dark coming back, and I don't like to drive in the dark."

"Since when?"

"A woman of seventy-five has the right to develop a few little quirks. Now, are you going to take me, or are you going to sit here in my house, eating food I've made, with your big feet up on my hassock watching my television?"

He glowered down at her. "Now you're trying to guilt me into going."

"You're darned right I am. Is it working?"

He took the jacket. He had been living at her house since his wife died. No, since before. He had moved in with his mom when Linda had thrown him out of their house in what he had thought was going to be a temporary separation. It had become a permanent and irrevocable separation two weeks later, with her death. Her stupid, senseless, preventable death.

He couldn't stand to go back to his own house, and he couldn't stand to sell it, so he puttered along in limbo, buying groceries, fixing odds and ends, paying Mom's bills when he could get hold of them before she did. She hadn't asked him how long he was staying or what he was going to do. She hadn't asked anything of him.

"All right." He jammed an arm back into his jacket. "I'll take you. And I'll pick you up. But I'm not staying for dinner."

"We'll see about that."

In his pickup, she chattered on about Janet and Mike's girls, and about Cousin Nane, and about the latest meeting of her antiwar group, Women in Black. He let her words wash over and around him, as unnoticed as the late-afternoon sun slanting through chinks in the clouds or the faint green traces of spring emerging from the last clutches of winter's gray and brown tangle. It was all part of a world that kept moving and changing, and he didn't want anything to do with it.

They passed an enormous Hummer, pimped to the nines and radiating a bass line that rattled his windows. "Those vehicles ought to be illegal," his mom huffed, and then she was on about greenhouse gases and blood for oil and American entitlement. Same-old same-old. In the dips and hollows, where snow still covered the ground, a thick white mist hovered knee-high, like a company of ghosts unable to break the bonds of earth.

He was startled into awareness by guitar strings thrumming their way out of the cab's speakers. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Well, since you weren't listenin' to me, I thought you might like to hear some music instead."

He reached over and snapped the CD player off. "No," he said. "No music."

His mother looked at him. "No music."

"I don't like listening to music."

"Since when?"

Since my life went straight into the crapper. Since every other goddam song makes me think of Clare. He did not say what he was thinking. He had a great deal of practice, each and every day, in not saying what he was thinking. Instead, he said, "A man of fifty has the right to develop a few little quirks."

"Huh," his mother said, but she left him alone as the county highway twisted and turned through densely packed trees, skirting the mountains to the west of Millers Kill. Eventually, the forest gave way to a broad valley, the road falling away like a fast-moving stream to run up and down the gentle hills between one dairy farm and the next.

They were closing in on Janet and Mike's quarter-mile-long driveway when his mother said, "Go on past. We're meeting them at the neighbor's."

Russ took his foot off the gas. "Mom. This isn't some sort of setup, is it?"

She looked-not guilty, she never looked guilty as far as he could tell-but like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. "I'm not sayin'. It's a surprise."

"Listen, Mom. If they're fixing me up with some sweet little widow woman or divorcée, I'm turning this truck around and heading home right now."

His mother made an exasperated noise. "It's not that sort of surprise. Honestly, Russell, it's not all about you all of the time."

There wasn't any good reply to that. He mumbled something that might have been either an apology or an accusation and accelerated up the road.

The neighbor's place was a pretty bungalow, probably bought in kit form from Sears, Roebuck back in the twenties. He started to turn up the short drive. "No, not there." His mother pointed. "The other side of the road."

"The barn?" Like many of the newer farms in this part of the world-newer meaning one century old instead of two-the barn and outbuildings were across the two-lane highway instead of attached to the house, giving some breathing room, literally, to the residents. Between the main building, the double silos, and the cow byre stretching out toward the pasturage, the neighbors' barn took up four or five times the space of their house.

"Just pull into the drive."

Russ obeyed, parking his truck on the least-muddy section of the short wide road leading to a pair of tractor-sized doors. "Mom, what's this about?" he asked.

His mother, ignoring him, slipped down from the cab and squelched toward the double doors. He jumped out and hurried after her. "Open this for me, will you?" she said.

A vision of hordes of well-wishers waiting inside, balloons tied to the rafters, filled his head. But there wasn't any occasion for a surprise party, was there? His birthday was five months gone. It wasn't the anniversary of his joining the MKPD.

"Criminy's sake, Russell. You going to make a poor old lady haul this back by herself?"

He snorted. Margy Van Alstyne was about as weak and feeble as a steamroller. But there wasn't anything to be gained by standing out in the cold and gathering dark. He wrapped his fist around one curved handle and rolled the door open.

They were greeted by the familiar farm smells of machine oil, hay, and manure, nothing more. His mother strode in, turning pale beneath the cool fluorescent lights dangling from the three-story-high ceiling. "Huh." She put her hands on her hips. "They must be in with the cows." She threaded her way between a tractor and a baler and disappeared through a small door beneath the haymow.

"Who? Mom, what's going on?" He rolled the door shut behind him and followed her, dodging a conveyor belt that led from a hay cart to the mow above. Overhead, Russ could see a few scattered bales in the shadows, ready to eke out the five or six weeks remaining until the arrival of the tender grass of spring. He ducked his head and entered the cow byre.

It was long and low and bright and modern, and it made his heart start to pound. He found himself looking left, right, past the rows of neat stalls that stretched out and out, one silky black-and-white back after another, trying to pinpoint an exit. He took a deep breath to steady himself, but the smell of warm cow and wet straw stuck in his throat as if it would strangle him.

"There you are!" His sister's cheerful voice focused him a little. Janet and Mike waved from halfway down the center aisle. They looked impossibly far away. A clank to his left made him jerk his head around, and he found himself face to face with a marble-eyed, wet-nosed heifer, staring incuriously at him while chewing its cud.

His brother-in-law laughed. "Look at him. He's gotten all wide-eyed." He spread his arms. "It's pretty impressive, isn't it?"

No, it pretty much reminds me of the cow barn I nearly got shot in two months ago. Where the best person I know had to kill a sociopathic monster to save my life.

It reminds me of where I was when my wife died. He wanted to say it, so they'd have some idea of who he was and what was going on in his head. But he couldn't. His mother would get scared and his sister would spend the rest of the evening being forcefully jolly. Trying to "make him feel better." They didn't want to know crap like that.

Clare would understand.

As always these days, the thought of her brought with it a wave of longing and loss and guilt and self-loathing. For once, he welcomed the acidic brew. It blew away the fog of fear and made this barn just another barn, just another place he had to be before he could climb into bed and achieve his fondest desire: total unconsciousness.

His relations were looking at him expectantly. "Yeah," he said. "Impressive."

Janet and Mike beamed at each other. "I knew you'd think so," Janet said. "It's ours."

"Well, ours and Mom's." Mike put his arm around his mother-in-law.

Margy grinned. "Surprised ya!"

"What?" Russ stared at them. "Yours?"

"The Petersons wanted to sell out and retire," Mike said. "It was the perfect opportunity to expand our operation."

"We're doubling our herd to two hundred and forty head!" Janet said. "Plus an additional fifty acres with hayfields-"

"We'll be able to grow most of our own feed corn," Mike broke in.

"-and produce three million more pounds of milk a year!"

Russ held up his hands. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm no farmer, but even I know doubling the size of your herd means a big jump in expenses. Not to be nosy, but how are you swinging this?"

His brother-in-law grinned. "Well, we thought first we might raise a cash crop of wacky weed, but we figured that wouldn't fly so well, with you being the chief of police and all. So we got a loan from the bank of Mom." He put his arm around Margy's shoulders and squeezed.

"Not all Mom," Janet added. "We took out a mortgage on our place."

"I'm a partner." His mother beamed. "It's an investment."

"An investment?" Russ gaped at the trio. "In a dairy farm? There's been at least one farm closed in this county every year for the past twenty years!" He rounded on Janet. "You think that's a safe investment for a seventy-five-year-old woman on a fixed income?"

"Russell!" His mother sounded shocked.

"Mom, I can't believe you'd do something so irresponsible."

"It's my money," she said, at the same time Janet said, "Who are you to tell Mom what she can and can't do?"

"I'm looking out for her future. And if you thought a little bit more about her and less about yourself-"

"Oh!" Janet stepped toward him, her eyes-the same eyes he had inherited from their father-blazing hot blue. "All those years you were gallivanting all over the world in the army, who was looking out for her then? I was! I was the one who stayed here in Millers Kill and spent every Sunday with her year in and year out when the only thing she'd see from you was a postcard!"

"And that gives you the right to get her involved in this idiotic-ow!"

Janet let out a similar screech of pain. Margy had reached up-way up, since they had also both inherited their dad's height-and pinched hold of their earlobes.

"Ow! Ow, Mom, stop it!"

"Not until you two stop behaving like a pair of brats fighting over a lollipop."

Russ hadn't heard that voice from her in years. He had no doubt she would tear his ear half off if he didn't back down. He raised his hands in surrender. Janet did the same. Their mother let go. They both stumbled back a few steps, rubbing their respective injuries.

"Russell, I'm sorry you don't approve of my investing in Janet and Mike's farm, but I've been handling my own money for nigh on thirty-five years, and I'm not about to start having somebody else make my decisions now." Janet's tense shoulders relaxed until Margy turned on her. "Janet, if you're trying to tell me the reason you stayed in Millers Kill after you graduated was to keep me company-"

"No! I mean… no."

"Good. Didn't think so. One of you stayed and one of you went and it never made no difference in how I felt about you. So don't start with that now."

Janet shook her head.

"Russell?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She sighed. "I think you better go on home, after all. Give us all a chance to cool off. Mike'll drive me back after supper."

"Yes, ma'am." Jesus. Fifty years old, and she could still dress him down like he was a kid. He glanced at Mike, who had gotten very interested in one of the heifers during the argument, and then at Janet. She looked at him warily. He knew he ought to apologize, but he couldn't. It was selfish and stupid to drag Mom into such a risky venture. "I guess I'll see you later," he said.

Janet nodded. He beat a retreat, out the byre, through the barn, into the frosty evening. Opened his truck door and stood for a moment, trying to settle. Across the road, a car had pulled into the bungalow's driveway. A woman got out.

A woman in black clericals.

Oh, no. Not this on top of everything else.

But a second later, he realized the woman was too short and slight to be Clare. She turned, maybe attracted by the light spilling out of his pickup, and he could see she was the new deacon from St. Alban's. What was her name, Groosvoort?

"Chief Van Alstyne? Is that you? Is there some trouble?"

"Uh, hi"-the name came-"Deacon de Groot. What? You mean because I'm here? No. No trouble." He kept his voice neutral. "My sister and her husband-uh, farm around here."

"Well. How nice to see you again." She pushed at her immaculate mass of ash-blond hair. "Excuse my appearance. I've been at the Glens Falls hospital since this afternoon."

She didn't do hospital visits, did she? Wasn't that Clare's job? Had something happened to-"I hope everyone's all right," he managed to squeeze out.

"Our sexton, Mr. Hadley, had an acute myocardial infarction." She said it with the careful pronunciation of someone repeating what she was told. "Poor man had to have a quadruple bypass. I stayed until he was moved to the ICU. No visitors there, so I figured it was time for me to come home."

"Home?"

Even in the half-light, he could see her charmed smile. She pointed to the bungalow with pride. "No more commuting down to Johnstown for me. I've just bought the Petersons' house."