In the Bleak Midwinter

“That’s how she got to the State University at Albany? A scholarship?”

“For her tuition, yeah. She’s been covering her room and board with student loans, and working for her book and spending money.” Russ could see Kristen’s hand tighten over Clare’s. “I didn’t know—before I left home, he never touched her. And she didn’t mention anything to me. But maybe she wouldn’t have. She was, I don’t know, sort of distant her last semester in high school. We didn’t get together as much. But I knew she was busy, working at the Infirmary and studying and all that.” She looked at Russ, pleading. “I mean, she would have told me if he was, was after her, wouldn’t she?”

“You never saw any signs of her pregnancy?” he asked.

She shook her head. “She went to Albany in June, right after she graduated. The university had given her a work-study job in the computer center, and they needed her there for the summer. At least, that’s what she told me. We talked on the phone at least once a week. She sounded so good! I never guessed. I never would have guessed.” She released Clare’s hand to pick up her coffee.

“The girl who first identified Katie for us said she’s had a boyfriend, Ethan Stoner. Is there any possibility that he could be Cody’s father?”

“Ethan? Geez, that’s hard to imagine. They did go out for a long time in high school, but Katie broke it off senior year.”

“She broke it off? How did Ethan take that?”

“I don’t know. Probably not too well. Katie was . . .” she gestured widely, “. . . more than anything else he had in his life. I know she didn’t break up with him over any bad feelings. She just felt they had really grown apart over the years.”

“She was college-bound, and Ethan was going to wind up on a dairy farm, is that it?” Clare asked.

“Yeah. Plus, Katie is really smart. She used to like to talk about books and poetry and stuff like that. Ethan wasn’t much of a talker, and what he did have to say was usually about some TV show or the Nine Inch Nails. You know what I mean?”

Clare nodded. “Did she have any other boyfriends, then? Maybe someone more like her?”

“No. It was hard for Katie. She didn’t fit in very well. She didn’t have new clothes and money for fun things like the other college-track kids in school, but she didn’t have anything in common with the grounders, either.”

“The grounders?”

“You know, like Ethan. The kids who are hanging on ’til they graduate and then get married right off the bat and go to work for a gas station.”

Russ got up. “Anyone want some more?” he asked. The women both declined. “Kristen,” he said, his eyes on the hot coffee flowing out of the pot, “why do you think it was your father who got Katie pregnant, and not Ethan?”

She swiveled around to where she could see him. “I . . . I guess one is as likely as the other. She never said anything to me about sleeping with anyone. As far as I knew, she was still a virgin.” She pushed her fingers through her hair. “I guess that’s a pretty naive thing to say, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you something. I can’t imagine Ethan getting violent with Katie. But I sure as hell can picture my father doing it. He’s an evil man. An evil man. He could have killed Katie and gone home the same night and slept . . . and slept like a baby.”

The chief of police stared up at the windows of number 162 South Street from the relative warmth of his car. He had been to this address many times before, though never to the fourth floor apartment of Darrell McWhorter. Unlike his neighbors, who drank and partied and beat each other up where everybody could see, Darrell McWhorter did his lawbreaking in private.

Russ opened the door, wincing as the cold pinched his nostrils shut and stung his eyes. From the second floor, a curtain flapped aside for a moment and then fell. Cops were not welcome to this flat-faced yellow building, and he wondered how many baggies were being flushed down the john even as he crossed the sidewalk, opened the chain-link gate, and walked up the sagging steps to the front door. He ran his finger down a double row of tarnished door buzzers. MCWHORTER: 3D. He pressed the bell and waited.

“What is it?” a voice crackled indistinctly over the intercom.

“Mr. McWhorter? Chief Van Alstyne, Millers Kill Police. I need to speak with you, please.”

Russ looked at a small plastic slide and trike half-buried under the snow covering what passed for a yard in this place. On the sidewalk, a pair of teenage girls with teased-up hair were smoking and gabbing despite the cold, while two toddlers in snowsuits waited, ignored. One of them stared at Russ, slack-faced and runny-nosed. How could anyone believe in a God who let some kids grow up with everything, and other kids live out their whole lives in poverty and neglect? Or worse.

“What do you want?”

“We don’t want to discuss this over the intercom, sir. It’s about your daughter Katie.”

“Katie?” The voice, as distorted as it was, sounded surprised. The buzzer sounded, cracking the front door open. Russ climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, not holding the banister because he was resting his hand on his holster. Habit. Not a bad one.

The door was open when he reached the fourth-floor landing. “What is it about Katie?” Darrell McWhorter was no more than five-ten, squared off, with the look of a high school jock run to flab. His dark hair was pretty well thinned out on top, and he had it combed over in what Linda would describe as a spider-holding-a-billiard-ball style. He looked unthreatening and unremarkable, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, the kind of guy you’d pass a hundred times in the A&P and never think, “That one’s screwing his own daughter.”

Russ tamped down the heat behind his eyes. Kristen had emphatically refused to swear out a complaint against her father when she gave his name and address. Until he had something linking the sonofabitch to Katie’s death, Russ couldn’t touch him. Officially, he was here to break the bad news to Mr. and Mrs. McWhorter. Unofficially, he was here to see if he could shake something loose.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Sure, sure, come on in,” McWhorter said, stepping aside. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, but it was well kept, especially compared to the dumps some other tenants inhabited. The furniture was mostly old, too big and too dark for the living room. It had the look of family hand-me-downs rather than Goodwill. The TV in the corner was a built-in in a blond wood cabinet, pure Danish Modern circa 1965. His mom had had one just like it. The picture was surprisingly good for something that old. He could count every tooth in the oversized smile of the game-show hostess twirling around a shiny new car.

“Great, innit?” McWhorter thumbed toward the set. “That’s what I do, TVs and small electronics. My wife says she wants one of those big-screen jobs, but I figure, as long as I can keep this one running cherry . . .” He took a last drag on his cigarette and stabbed it out in a pedestal ashtray.

Russ turned to face McWhorter. “Is your wife here, Mr. McWhorter?”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s in the bedroom. Brenda!” he yelled down the darkened hallway between the living room and the gallery kitchen. “Get out here! There’s a cop here with news about Katie.”

“About Katie?” An enormous woman lumbered up the hall. “What about my little girl?” She looked like her daughters, blown up to Macy’s parade size, their rounded cheeks and soft chins expanded into a fleshy mask through which once-pretty eyes peered at him suspiciously.

Get to the worst of it fast, he thought. “I have very bad news for you folks. Your daughter, Katie McWhorter, was found dead out past Payson’s Park last Friday night.” Darrell McWhorter stared at him blankly. Brenda McWhorter screamed.

“My baby! My baby!” She staggered around like an elephant with a tranquillizer dart before slipping to the floor. Her husband caught her under her arms and hefted her onto an elaborately carved Victorian sofa. A man would have to be pretty damn strong to help get that woman up. Russ wondered what sort of disability kept him from working.

“How did it happen?” Darrell McWhorter asked.

Russ recounted what the coroner had found out about Katie’s death. Brenda McWhorter continued wailing, punctuating her cries with, “My poor baby! My poor little girl!” Her husband listened without comment, frowning.

“There’s one more important thing I have to tell you,” Russ concluded. “Katie had a child within a week or so of her death. DHS has custody of the baby right now.”

Brenda’s wails cut off abruptly. Darrell looked as if he were trying to get the final Jeopardy! answer within thirty seconds. “A baby?” he said.

“A little boy. Did either of you know or suspect she was pregnant?”

Brenda shook her head, her mouth still half open.

“Do either of you know what connection Katie might have had to Saint Alban’s church?”

“Saint Alban’s?” Darrell still looked as if he wasn’t going to make the buzzer before Alex Trebeck called time. “What’s that? The fancy looking church across from the old bandstand?”

The small park at the end of Church Street was a popular summer spot. The town still put on dances and concerts there, just like when Russ was a young man. “That’s the one.”

Darrell thought for a few seconds more. “A baby,” he said. Then, “No, I don’t know nothing that Katie would of been up to involving a church. How come?”

“Katie, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s, with a note directing that the boy go to the Burnses, a couple from the church that’ve been looking to adopt for several years. Would you or Katie have known them some other way? They’re lawyers here in town.”

The McWhorters looked at each other.

“A lawyer?” Brenda said. “We don’t know no lawyers. ’Cept that one who settled my dad’s estate, but that was ten years back, and he was old then. He wouldn’t be looking for no baby.”

Darrell reached for a pack of cigarettes lying atop a Soap Opera Digest magazine. “These lawyers go to that fancy church?” he asked.

“Yes sir, they do.”

“But they don’t got the baby yet?”

“No. There are several legal issues to sort out, from what I understand. For instance, we don’t know who the father of the child is.” Russ fixed Darrell with a level stare. “I had a long talk with her sister this morning, who told me Katie broke up with her boyfriend in her senior year. Kristen hadn’t heard of anyone else who might have been going out with Katie.”

Darrell lit his cigarette and took a drag. “Can’t put much store by what Kristen says. We wouldn’t help her out with money she wanted after she was out of school, and since then, she’s been bad-mouthing us something awful.”

“Never comes to see us,” his wife chimed in. “Not in almost two years. It was like we lost her. And now Katie . . .” She started wailing anew.

Russ was tempted, sorely tempted, to ask Darrell to come to the hospital right now for a blood test and cell scraping. But he didn’t want anything questioned and possibly thrown out if it went to court.

“Had either of you seen Katie recently?”

“Nope,” Darrell said. Brenda shook her head.

“Where were you two last Friday?”

“Why?” Darrell frowned. “You asking if we had anything to do with it?”

Damn right I am, thought Russ. “I’m trying to get a fix on Katie’s movements, to see where she might have gone and who she might have seen.”

“We went out to that new Long John Silver’s at the County Road shopping center,” Brenda said. “We had coupons.”

“Then we went to the Dew Drop for a few. Met up with some friends. We must of been there until eleven o’clock.”

“We come straight home after that. I remember, ’cause it was awful cold and I was worried I had left the bathroom window cracked open and things would start freezing in the bath.”

Russ never trusted people who could recall and retell their every movement without having to stop and think about it. Most folks’ lives weren’t that memorable. On the other hand, first Friday of the month, after the social security check had come in, it might be their big night out.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the names of the friends you were with, would you?” He tried to make his question as inoffensive as possible.

“Sure we do,” Darrell said, “It was the Jacksons, Dave and Tessa. They live out to Cossayaharie, where we used to. You wanna phone number so you can check up on them or something?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Russ said, omitting the “yet.” “While I’m here, do you have a sample of Katie’s handwriting I could take with me? Printing would be best. I’ll send it on to the state lab to see if they can match it to the note that was found with the baby.”

“Let me check her room,” Brenda said, hoisting herself from the couch.

“Why d’you need that if you know the baby is Katie’s?” Darrell said.

“Just another way of making sure. The medical examiner sent a scraping of Katie’s genetic material down to Albany for DNA testing. That will prove Cody is her son. That’s the baby’s name, by the way. Cody.”

Darrell rubbed his lips with the edge of his hand. “I heard about that DNA testing on some news report.”

“It’s one hundred percent accurate. Once we have an idea who the father is, we can do the same thing. It takes a few months to get the lab work back, but there’s no way to fudge your DNA. It either matches, or it doesn’t.” He paused, let that one sink in. “What kind of car do you drive, Mr. McWhorter?”

“Huh? An ’eighty Ford Ranger pickup.” He ground the cigarette stub out in the standing ashtray. “Look, Chief, I don’t know what Kristen told you and I don’t care, I ain’t seen Katie since she left for Albany this summer. And neither has my wife.”

Brenda hurried into the room, puffing from the exertion. “Here. It’s a college application she didn’t finish. She printed it, like it says on the form.”

Russ took the thin sheaf of papers from Brenda. “Thank you.”

“What do you need to find the father for, anyway?” Darrell asked.

“In the first place, the father has rights to the child. Either to take custody of the boy, or to consent to adoption. Understand, we were looking for Cody’s parents before we discovered Katie’s body. More important, now we’re working on the theory that the man who fathered Katie’s child either killed her, or has knowledge that could lead to her murderer.”

“And if the father ain’t found, we’re the closest relatives of the baby, right?” Darrell’s eyes lit up with the greatest interest he had shown so far during the interview. The thought of placing a baby with this pair started the acid sizzling along the nerve edges in Russ’s stomach. The Burnses would be Parents of the Year material compared to these two.

“Right,” he said.

“So, we should get custody of the boy, right?”

At this, Darrell’s wife frowned. “Honey, we’re kinda old to be having a baby around again.”

“Naw, naw, that baby belongs to us. How do we get ahold of the people who got him now?”

Russ pulled one of his cards out of his breast pocket. “I’ll write down the number at DHS you can call.” He leaned over an oblong table reeking of ashes and dusting spray, fishing for his pen. “The other side of this card has my number on it. Call me if you think of anything that might have slipped your mind. I know it’s been a shock.” Though they seemed to have recovered mighty quick.

“A shock,” Brenda agreed. Darrell took the card, reaching out his hand to Russ, who gritted his teeth and shook hands.

“Thank you for telling us about Katie,” Darrell said. “And about our grandson. We’ll call DHS right away and see about that little boy.”

Russ paused at the door. “DHS hasn’t gotten my paperwork yet, identifying Katie as Cody’s mother. You may have to wait a day or two.” Maybe he could lose it. Not that it would do Cody any good in the long run. Just give him an extra week with the foster mother before McWhorter got his hands on him.

Brenda looked distinctly unhappy. Darrell smiled. “It’ll be worth the wait. It’ll be just like having a little piece of Katie back with us again.”

Clumping down the stairs, Russ was in what his mother would have called “an old cow stew.” When a door inched open, revealing a bearded man with spectacularly bad teeth, Russ glared at him with such venom the man nearly caught his facial hair in the frame as he slammed the door shut. Russ toyed with the idea of shouting “Washington County Probation Department!” to see how many residents would cut and run. It would feel good to do something constructive, even if it did mean filling out packets of forms at the county jail.

What would the McWhorters want with Cody? More accurately, what would Darrell want with Cody? The monthly foster child support check from the state? Jesus Christ, what if Darrell’s tastes ran to little boys? It was a stretch, but, still . . . Russ wiped the hand Darrell had shaken on his parka before opening the outside door. Either he convinced Kristen to make a complaint against Darrell McWhorter, or he had better find another candidate as the baby’s father right quick. Because if he didn’t, Cody would be one of those slack-faced little kids sentenced to poverty and neglect. Or worse.

CHAPTER 10

Russ’s wave of determination to help Cody broke apart on that jagged rock of modern life, the telephone answering machine. He tried to reach Kristen at her apartment and was met with a blast of unintelligible music that sounded like jack-hammers destroying a guitar shop, followed by a half-screamed order to leave a name and message. Saint Alban’s office had on a machine, too, asking him to call between the hours of eight-thirty and three. In case of pastoral emergency, you can reach Reverend Clare Fergusson at the rectory. Except he couldn’t. On her message Clare sounded too enthusiastic to make her apology for not picking up the phone believable. In case of pastoral emergency, her pager number was . . . Russ began to wonder about these pastoral emergencies. What were they, deathbed confessions? Emergency baptisms?

He weighed the idea of paging her, but decided against it. Instead, he left a message describing his meeting with the McWhorters and asked her to call him back. He slapped his chest and rummaged through his pockets until he found the paper with Emily Colbaum’s number, then sat through a recording featuring a whole flock of giggling females telling him he had reached “the girlz in the house!” He left his name and number and tried the DSS case worker’s office next, only to get caught up in a voicemail system. He tried following the automated directions—press two, press the pound sign twice, if you know your party’s extension—and wound up in the mailbox of the educational scheduling department. He banged the receiver down and unloaded a piece of army vocabulary on the person who had first replaced an operator with a machine.

He stomped into the dispatch room, hoping Harlene would ask him what was wrong so he could let loose his opinion of people who were never at the damn phone when you needed them. Harlene wasn’t there. He followed her voice into the squad room, a kind of big-city name for a cluster of six desks and a water cooler. Lyle MacAuley and Noble Entwhistle must have just checked in at the end of their shifts, but instead of filling out their incident reports, they were huddled with Harlene over a big red camping cooler.

“Hey, Chief!” Noble said.

“Oh, here he is, you can give it to him now,” Harlene said, elbowing Lyle. Lyle dug into the cooler, emerging with a large package neatly wrapped in butcher’s paper.

“For you, Chief,” he said, grinning. “Steaks and the round. I hit the jackpot with a twelve-point stag the day before season close.”

Twelve-point antlers. Russ tried to suppress his pangs of envy. At least Lyle was being liberal with the venison. God damn, a whole deer season come and gone and he had been too busy working to ever get out and—the day before season close? When Lyle had been scheduled on the duty roster? “Weren’t you sick with the flu for two days before Thanksgiving?” Russ asked. “What did he do, walk into your yard and have a heart attack?”

Lyle smiled more broadly. “I guess that’s the way it happened, Chief.”

Russ looked at Harlene and Noble, both of them grinning their fool heads off. Russ pulled himself up to his full height and tucked the package of venison under his arm. “Then I’m sure it will be good and tender, Lyle, seeing as how he died peaceful-like, of natural causes.”

Their laughter followed him back to his office where he put on his parka and turned out the lights. At the door, he paused, thinking, before wheeling and scooping up the Katie McWhorter file. He returned to the squad room and laid it on Noble Entwhistle’s desk. “Noble, you read the file on our homicide yet?” he asked.

Noble ambled to his desk and flipped open the folder. “Nope,” he said.

“Take a look at it tonight before you go home. Tomorrow, I want you to get a life picture of the victim from her sister and start making the rounds of all the motels and bed-and-breakfasts and whatall. See if you can find someone who remembers a pregnant young woman checking in. We’re especially interested in any man who might have been with her. Get the bus station, too, see if anyone picked her up when she arrived in town Friday.”

The officer ran his finger down the case entry form. “Yup.”

“Thanks. Good night, all.” Noble was the right man for this job. Unimaginative, not the sharpest pencil in the box, but methodical, with an ability to put people at ease and get them to open up. Russ pulled his knit cap firmly over his head before braving the cold. Outdoors, the temperature had fallen still further. Thank God he had the Ford pickup tonight, with its fast-working heater, and not the old whore. He’d stop at his mother’s, give her the venison, and wangle a dinner invitation for later in the week, when Linda was away on her buying trip to the city. Maybe he ought to introduce Mom to Clare. Interesting to see how they’d get along.

It was out of the way to his mother’s, but he drove by the rectory just to make sure everything was all right. The lights were all off. Had he left her his number at home so she could reach him? Yeah, he had. His dashboard clock glowed. Geez, he’d better hurry, or he’d miss another dinner.

Clare folded her hands together and bowed her head. “Lord God,” she said, “for the blessings of food and fellowship we are about to receive, make us truly thankful. Open our hearts so that in the midst of plenty, we are aware of those who hunger, and in the midst of friends, we remember those who are friendless. Give us a hunger to do your will, and an appetite to see your kingdom, here and in the world to come. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

“Amen,” the rest of the room said. The silence was broken by the clatter and ring of utensils and glasses, the scrape of chairs and the sound of eleven voices, all asking to pass this and that at the same time.

The first Monday of the month was the Foyers dinner, an informal gathering of members of the parish, offering a chance to eat and get to know each other outside of the confines of Sunday service or a committee meeting. Tonight’s meal was at the home of Chris Ellis and his wife, Anne Vining-Ellis. Anne was a physician practicing in Glens Falls, and everyone, including her own husband, referred to her as Doctor Anne. The Ellises were practically neighbors of Clare’s, only three blocks away on Washington Avenue. Their huge Victorian house would have been imposing if it weren’t for the obvious wear and tear on the place from their three teenage boys. The formal dining room, where two round tables held tonight’s guests, was decorated with a chandelier, a Boaz Persian carpet, several sets of skis propped up in the corner, and a deep gash in the wall, approximately hockey-helmet high. One of the boys, pressed into service as a waiter for the evening, shambled back and forth from the kitchen to the tables on overlarge feet.

Doctor Anne, sitting on her right, passed Clare a bowl of rice. “I recommend starting with this if you plan on having Phoebe’s green chile stew,” she said. “Hot? I can’t begin to describe it. I think she brings it to these things in order to hear people gasping and crying out for water.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Clare said. “Maybe I should go for that casserole over there instead?”

“Judy Morrison’s tuna hot dish,” Doctor Anne said. “Judy converted from Lutheranism.” She looked meaningfully at the casserole. “After she learned to cook.”

“This is a veritable culinary minefield, isn’t it? Just waiting for a wrong step. Tell me, am I supposed to take at least a taste of everyone’s offering?”

“Only if you want to gain thirty pounds in the next year. I keep trying to get people to bring light dishes to these dinners, but do they listen? Look at Sterling’s Swedish meatballs. I happen to know he uses the fattiest ground chuck he can get and then lards it with several eggs before cooking it in a butter-based sauce. Is it a miracle that man’s not dead of a heart attack? You be the judge.”

Clare laughed. She could feel the tension that had caught in her shoulders dissipating under Doctor Anne’s acidic humor. It had been a difficult day all the way around, first in the morgue and the police station, then helping Kristen at Ruyter’s Funeral Home. Ignoring the ache of old pain while Kristen ricocheted between anger and bewilderment and grief with the speed of someone fast forwarding through cable channels.

It was good to lean back and listen to the stream of culinary critiques and gossip, and have nothing more taxing to look forward to than a walk home and an early bedtime. “The only thing that could make this any better would be a cold beer,” she murmured.

“That’s definitely the missing element, isn’t it? It would certainly help wash down Phoebe’s chili.” Doctor Anne passed Clare a basket of rolls. “Sometimes there will be wine at one of these dinners. No one bothers when Chris and I play host, because I’m such a fanatic about drinking and driving I practically give Breathalyzer tests at the door.”

“We had sangria at the Foyers dinner I went to in August,” Clare said. “A barbecue.”

“This was when? During the selection process?”

“Uh huh. And it was about as comfortable a meal as one can get, when you’re eating with your prospective employers. I dreaded spilling something and making a horrible stain on myself, so I stuck to smoked turkey on a dry roll.” She made a face. “I’m surprised no one concluded I was anorexic.”

Doctor Anne laughed. “Where was this?”

“The Fowlers.”

“Oh, my lord, and you had to listen to Vaughn speechifying about the charm, intelligence, good looks, and record-breaking success of his kids, did you?” She rolled her eyes. “Me, I figure if the police aren’t actively looking for my sons, they’re doing okay. Vaughn and Edie, they’ll take the family to the beach because they want to see their children walk on water.” She laughed. “Oh, come here, darling, say hello to Reverend Fergusson.” Doctor Anne snagged her son as he shuffled past with an empty water pitcher. “I was just telling the Reverend how highly accomplished you are. This is my oldest boy, Anderson.” The teen ducked his head awkwardly, setting his long blond hair swinging around his face. He mumbled hello. “Anderson’s in his last year of school at Millers Kill High. When he’s done, we’re throwing him out of the house and forcing him to support himself as a karaoke singer in nightclubs.”

“Ma!” the boy protested. “She says that because I’m in the drama society. I’m going to Brown. I got my early acceptance,” he told Clare.

“Congratulations. That’s a great university. It’ll be a big change from Millers Kill High School, won’t it?” she asked.

“You bet. I can’t wait. Hey, they were talking about our church today, did I tell you?” Anderson looked at his mother. “It was all over the place that Ethan Stoner killed his old girlfriend and Alyson Shattham identified her from a picture right in St. Alban’s! That was way cool.”

“What?” Clare looked from Doctor Anne to her son. “Anderson, there’s no evidence that Ethan Stoner killed anyone. The police are looking for anybody who knew Katie McWhorter and who might be able to give some information on the case.”

“That’s not how I heard it. It sounded like the cops were ready to haul old Ethan into the county jail and charge him with murder. You mean like somebody else might have done it?” He sounded disappointed. “Shoot. If it was Ethan, it would have been the biggest thing to hit the high school since girls’ basketball took the state championship.”

Of course it would be, in a town of eight thousand. An awful, low, unworthy thought occurred to Clare. What if Geoff Burns was guilty of Katie’s murder? She could see the headlines in every paper in eastern New York state: SAINT ALBAN’S PARISHIONER SLAYS MOTHER OF ADOPTED SON! And in smaller type: PRIEST SPEARHEADED EFFORT TO PLACE INFANT WITH MURDERER! She shook her head. No. She knew the Geoff Burns type. All the heat and fire came right out, up front, leaving behind nothing more menacing than low-level discontent and grumbling.

“I think we’ll have to wait and see what Chief Van Alstyne comes up with in his investigation before we can make any reasonable guesses about Katie’s murderer,” she said. “Did you know Katie McWhorter, Anderson?”

He draped a gangly arm across the back of his mother’s chair. “No, not really. I knew who she was, ’cause she was in Honors track, like me, but she was a year ahead of me.”

“Millers Kill High is a big school, too,” Doctor Anne said. “It’s got the kids from this town, Cossayaharie, and Fort Henry.”

“I know most of the other seniors,” Anderson said. He pounded his fist against his forehead. “Oh, duh, I should have known Alyson was exaggerating about Ethan. She’s, like, ‘I’m the center of attention and the rest of you aren’t.’ I think she’s still fried about not getting elected to the student council in September. So now she’s like, ‘Ethan’s O. J. Simpson and I brought him down.’ ” He looked at his mother. “She never got it that the reason she was in with everyone last year was because she was going out with Wesley. But now, she wants to buddy up with the jocks or the brains—”

“Anderson is a brain-slash-jock,” Doctor Anne interrupted.

“—and they’re, like, go back to the mall girls, Alyson.”

“Do you need that translated?” Doctor Anne smiled wryly.

“I think I got the gist of it,” Clare said.

“Wesley is Wesley Fowler, he-who-walks-on-water.”

“Ma!”

“Okay, okay, Wes is a perfectly nice boy who helped you a lot last year in the plays you were in together, and the musical, in which he was, of course, the lead.” She leaned over in an exaggerated aside to Clare. “I suppose it’s not his fault his father made a golden statue of him and put it on his front lawn.”

“Ma!”

Doctor Anne laughed. “Me, I practice the traditional Chinese method of child rearing, I never say anything nice about my kids. That way, they avoid the notice of evil spirits.” She wrapped an arm around Anderson’s waist and hugged him hard.

“Ma, you are so weird,” he said. The boy picked up his pitcher and scuffled off toward the kitchen.

“That means, ‘I love you,’ in seventeen-ese,” his mother said.

Clare laughed. “He’s a nice kid. You must be very proud of him.”

“Very,” Doctor Anne said. She leaned toward Clare. “So tell me, Reverend, do you have the inside scoop on this murder? Since you’ve been helping the police?”

Clare shook her head. “I don’t know much more than you do,” she said. “I’m sure Ethan will be brought in for questioning, but I don’t think Chief Van Alstyne is anywhere near to arresting a suspect yet.” She took a bite of her roll. “Hard to believe that something like this happened here, isn’t it?”

Doctor Anne shook her head. “After thirteen years working the emergency rooms in Washington County and Glens Falls hospitals, I’ve seen way too much to think we’re invulnerable just because we’re small. Small towns have the same evils that big cities do, just in smaller numbers. And instead of some anonymous stranger, the evil is always someone’s neighbor or husband or friend. That’s the hard part, that you can’t blame some ‘other’ when awful things happen. The ‘other’ is one of us.”

CHAPTER 11

When her pager beeped in the middle of one of Mrs. DeWitt’s rambling stories about the Depression, Clare expected it to be the hospital. She was chaplain-on-call this Tuesday, responsible for the spiritual needs that might arise in the intersections between health and sickness and birth and death. Clare lowered her teacup gingerly onto the hand-tatted lace of the table runner.

“Mrs. DeWitt? May I use your phone for a moment? I have to see what this is.”

“Of course, Reverend,” the elderly woman said. “I left it . . . where did I leave it? Try the kitchen table.”

Clare would have sworn that not a thing in Mrs. DeWitt’s house, other than herself, had been made after 1935, so she almost laughed when she found the latest Toshiba micro-cell phone lying on the metal cherry-painted table. She punched in the number.

“Burns and Burns,” a pleasant voice replied.

“Uh . . . this is the Reverend Fergusson. I got a pager message to call here?”

“Oh, let me connect you with Ms. Burns, Reverend.” The voice was replaced by a symphonic rendering of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The Burnses. Now what? Oh heck, she had tried reaching Russ that morning before setting out on her home visits, but he had already left for the courthouse. Had he found something linking the Burnses to Katie’s death?

“Reverend? Karen Burns. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”

“What’s up, Karen?”

“It’s complicated.” Karen laughed humorlessly. “It’s about Cody, so of course it’s complicated. Could we meet? As soon as possible?”

“Sure. I’m at Mrs. DeWitt’s right now. I have one more home visit to make, and I can keep it brief . . . how about an hour, an hour and a half from now? I can come to your office, that’ll be closer than the church.”

“Oh, wonderful. Thank you, Reverend. We’ll see you in an hour or so.”

Clare brought the cell phone back into the living room, her mind caught up in possible scenarios involving Cody.

“Everything all right, Reverend?” Mrs. DeWitt’s heavily wrinkled face creased with concern.

“I hope so, ma’am. But I’ll have to be going soon.”

“Well then,” her hostess said, levering herself out of her faded Morris chair with the help of her cane, “before you go, let me show you an idea I had for the church.” Mrs. DeWitt braced herself against a Philco radio set as she hobbled toward the hall. “The computer room is right down here.”

“The—you have a computer, ma’am?”

“Oh, my, yes. It’s the latest Gateway, customized for me. I ordered it over the Internet. Special-ordered cable access for my modem, too. At my age, I can’t afford to wait around all day for files to download, can I?” She paused, flicked a bit of dust off a Boston fern sitting on a plant stand. “I’ve been fooling around with a Web site for Saint Alban’s, and I want you to tell me what you think.”

Russ picked up his receiver. Put it down. Picked it up. Put it down. “What the heck are you doing in there?” Harlene yelled from the dispatch room.

“What are you doing, spying on me?” he yelled back.

“I can see the active light on the phone, you cranky old buzzard,” she said, appearing in his doorway.

He tapped the folded legal papers lying next to the crumpled remains of his lunch bag. “Judge Ryswick gave me the warrants.”

“For the blood tests on McWhorter and the Stoner boy? Good. Why don’t you go on out and serve ’em, then, and leave the phone system to those of us who understand it.”

He sighed. “I want to talk to Cody’s caseworker at DSS first. If this test clears McWhorter as the baby’s father, he and his wife will get Cody faster than you can say ‘closest living relative.’ I want to try to persuade DSS to keep the baby in his current foster home.”

“They’ll have to do a home visit,” Harlene pointed out. “Maybe they’ll find some reason not to place the baby there.”

“Aw, Harlene, you have to have shit smeared on the walls to get the state to take a kid out of his home. This place looked . . . respectable. Clean. Probably a fridge full of food and the rent all paid on time.”

“So tell them about Kristen.”

“I don’t know if I can! She won’t make a complaint against her father. I can’t tell them something she told me in an interview if she won’t back it up.”

“You know, they encourage citizens to call in and report suspected child abuse.”

“Not when the child is twenty and hasn’t lived with the parents for two years. Then it becomes our business, not DSS’s. Besides, I’m not a citizen. I’m a law enforcement official. An agent of the state.”

“Look, Mr. State Representative. Call up. Let them know Grandpa McWhorter is under criminal investigation and that you have a warrant—which means Judge Ryswick thought you had probable cause—to test his blood and see if he’s the baby’s father. That alone should tell them to put the brakes on changing the baby’s custody. You don’t need to mention Kristen.”

“Damn, Harlene, you’re right!”

“Uh huh. Like usual.”

“Why don’t you leave that switchboard and become an officer, huh?”

“Because you need a mastermind sitting here in this office more than you need another uniform out there, driving around with nothing to do.”

“Something to do now,” he said, waggling the papers in the air.

“Delivering orders to get a blood test. There’s a thrilling day’s work. No thanks, I’ll stick with the phones.” She grimaced. “Besides, I look terrible-bad in brown.”

From the address, Clare had expected the Burnses’ office to be in one of the late-nineteenth century brick commercial buildings that gave upper Main Street the genteel air of another century. Instead, she found herself in a brand new post-and-beam construction that looked as if it had been lifted straight from the pages of Architectural Digest. Climbing to the second floor law office, she caught disorienting glimpses of the Christmas decorations on the street below through odd, geometric windows.

The reception area was an uneven pentagon, with narrow I-beams crisscrossing the ceiling and large, dramatically colored abstracts on the walls. No wonder Karen and Geoff had goggled at her office. It looked like a curiosity shop next to this place.

“Hello,” she said to the receptionist. “I’m the Reverend Clare Fergusson. The Burnses are expecting me.”

“Please take a seat, Reverend,” the young woman said. “Ms. Burns will be with you in a moment.” Clare sat in one of the plump chairs covered in what looked like hand-loomed upholstery and wondered when she’d stop getting the urge to whirl around looking for the real priest whenever she was called “Reverend.” When she was a kid, of course, it had always been “Father” Such-and-so, and that title still sounded more . . . authentic to her ear. Reverend is an adjective after “the,” not a title after “hello,” Grandmother Fergusson sniffed. A proper word for female priests corresponding with “Father” had been on her wish list for years. She supposed they’d think up one right about the time the Roman Catholics began ordaining women.

“Reverend Clare!” Karen strode across the reception floor, her hands outstretched. Clare rose. “I’m so glad you could come on such short notice. Come on into my office, please. Geoff is still stuck in court, I’m afraid.”

Karen Burns’s office was clean and spare, with more abstract artwork that blended perfectly with the Shaker-style furnishings. Clare sat in a severely cut chair across from the desk, surprised at how comfortable it was. The lawyer went to the window, then toward the door, then back to her desk.

“Can I get you some coffee? Tea? Water?” Karen was too elegant a woman to actually bustle, but she was close to it now.

“Karen,” Clare said. “Sit down. Tell me what’s happened.”

“Oh, God,” Karen exhaled, collapsing in her chair. “We got a call this morning from a man named Darrell McWhorter. He claims to be Cody’s grandfather, and said that he had already talked to DHS and was pressing for custody of the baby.”

Clare shook her head. “I’m sorry, I should have called you yesterday. Yes, he is Cody’s biological grandfather.” Should she say anything about Kristen’s accusations?

“Presuming that the murdered girl was Cody’s mother. That won’t be conclusive until the DNA results come in.” Karen’s shoulders sagged. “That’s the law, anyway. Cold comfort. We all know Katie McWhorter gave birth to Cody.”

“Why was Mr. McWhorter calling you, Karen?”

The lawyer sat bolt upright. “He wanted us to buy Cody, that’s why.”

“What!”

“Oh, he didn’t come right out and say it. He’s smart enough to know that baby selling is against the law. He could land himself in jail for the offense, and lose his chance at custody.”

“You didn’t . . . you didn’t agree, did you?”

“God, no. If it ever got out, it would render any adoption null and void. We’d face jail, the loss of our licenses . . . no.” She paused, took a deep breath. “But we did ask him to meet with us on neutral territory, as it were, and see if we could try to work out some sort of . . . accommodation.”

Clare frowned. “What sort of accommodation, Karen?”

Karen leaned forward, forearms against her desk. “We need your help. He’s agreed to accept you as a mediator if we can get you.”

“Get me? Mediating what?”

“We can’t pay the man off, not directly. But we can reimburse him for expenses, offer to pay for, say, improvements to his house in order to make it a better place for Cody to visit, things of that nature. And I thought, what if Geoff and I make a large donation to the church, dedicated to helping lower-income residents of Millers Kill? And what if one of the recipients of this aid is McWhorter?”

“What? You’re asking me to make the church your money launderer?” Clare stood up, pushing the chair away. “In a scheme that boils down to you paying for another human being. No. I won’t do it. It’s immoral, even if it is legal.” Karen looked up at her, stricken. Clare sat back down. “Karen,” she said, more gently, “you can’t buy motherhood. I know how much you want that baby. But this . . . this wouldn’t work. What’s badly begun has a way of turning out badly. Imagine Cody as an older child, finding out that his grandfather had essentially sold him to his parents. Imagine how he would feel about himself.”

Karen folded her arms tightly around herself. “Do you think he’d be better off being raised by the man who’s willing to sell him?”

Clare shook her head, laid her hands palm up on the desk. “No. I’ll do everything I can to help you. Let’s go ahead and set up a meeting with McWhorter, see what we can accomplish.”

“With what? Earnest entreaties and prayer? Somehow, I don’t think he’ll respond very well to that.”

“Nope. We offer him what assistance you can legally and ethically,” Clare emphasized the word, “provide. That’s the carrot. Then, we show him the stick.”

When Russ turned his cruiser onto Main Street at the end of a long day, his lights picked out Clare’s MG half in and half out of the police station’s driveway. Grinning, he pulled up behind the little car and gave it a hit of his flashers. The door opened, and the Reverend Clare Fergusson got out, reluctantly turned around, and spread-eagled against the side of her car. Russ was laughing so hard it took him two tries to find his seatbelt latch.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, once he had managed to get out of his cruiser.

“I was dropping by to speak to you between home visits, and my . . . dang . . . car got stuck.”

He looked down at the scant two inches of snow and ice the plow had thrown up on the lip of the driveway. “In that? Heck, my niece’s trike could drive through that.” The old snow had been churned to dirty slush by her spinning tires. “You gotta get yourself a real car for this climate. Not an itty-bitty wind-up toy like that one.”

“This car,” she told him, “is a marvel of precision engineering. Zero to sixty in ten point seven seconds. It handles like a dream, and it can drive a mountain road at sixty miles an hour without a shimmy across the yellow line.”

“Yeah? Well if I ever catch it doing that, it can also get impounded. C’mon, I’ll help you push it out.” He braced himself against the back fender. Clare leaned into the edge of the door, one hand on the wheel. “Okay, push,” Russ said. They heaved together. The MG slid over the low snowbank and rolled forward a foot.

“Thanks.” Clare looked at the tire marks in the snow, thrown into high relief by the streetlights. “That is an embarrassingly small amount of snow to get stuck in, isn’t it?”

“You need something heavy, with front-wheel-drive,” Russ said, opening the door to his cruiser. “Four-wheel-drive is better. Until you get that, load up the trunk with bags of kitty litter. It’ll give some weight to your rear and if you get stuck, you can always sprinkle some around for traction.”

“Great. I can see it now. I’ll get my car free just in time to run over some old lady’s cat who’s come to investigate.”

He grinned. “Why don’t you park that thing. Let me get the cruiser in, and I’ll stand you a cup of coffee.”

“Any of Harlene’s strudel left?”

“I might be able to rustle something up.” She nodded approvingly, slid into her car, and pulled it forward. A strudel person, he thought, shifting the cruiser into first. Should have guessed that.

In the briefing room, two of the sheep-and-geese mugs at hand and nothing left of the last slice of strudel except crumbs, he told her about delivering the warrant to Darrell McWhorter. “You should have seen him. So cool. The nicest guy about it you could imagine. He drove himself over to the hospital, with me following, thank God, because I sure didn’t want to have to make conversation with him in my car. Got his blood drawn and went home.”

“That doesn’t sound like a man who’s afraid the test will show something incriminating.”

“AB negative. Same as Katie’s.”

“And Cody’s father has to be Rh positive, doesn’t he?”

“You’ve got it. I’d love to be able to put the sonofabitch away for molesting his daughters, ’scuse my French, but there’s no evidence he abused Katie and Kristen still refuses to cooperate. I spoke to a caseworker at DSS and told her about the warrant and everything, but she said after the home study was completed, they could only delay giving Cody to his grandparents as long as the question of whether McWhorter had been abusing Katie remained open.”

“But if he’s not Cody’s father, there isn’t any other evidence of that.”

“Right. It’ll be a happy family reunion.” He licked his finger and picked up a few strudel crumbs.

“I found out why McWhorter is so eager to get his hands on Cody.” Russ’s eyebrows went up. Clare told him about the offer to the Burnses and the meeting scheduled for tomorrow.

“You really think you can convince this guy to allow the Burnses to adopt the baby?”

“I don’t know. I can get him to think twice about taking Cody. It’s worth a try.”

“Be careful, okay? I don’t like the idea of you drawing McWhorter’s attention. We don’t know what he’s capable of.”

“He sounds like a bully to me, plain and simple.” Clare propped her chin on her fist. “I’m not an easy person to bully. Besides, if the blood tests show nothing, he’ll be out of the running as a suspect in the murder, right?”

“Well . . . I’ll have to drop him back to third place. I haven’t forgotten the Burnses.”

Clare waved her hand dismissively. “You don’t seriously think they did it. You’re thinking it was Ethan.”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“Are you going to serve him the warrant to test his blood type tonight?” she asked, glancing out into the darkness.

“No. I have to pick up Linda and get her on the six-fifteen train. There’s a big fabric convention or something in New York, and she’s buying stock for her curtains.” He took a sip of coffee. “I’ll drive over to the Stoner’s farm tomorrow after school, bring him in then. That’ll give me enough time to question him and then decide whether to arrest him or not.”

“You’re not worried he might take off someplace?”

Russ shook his head. “His whole life’s right here. All his family and friends. I’ll bet the farthest he’s ever traveled has been New York City on the junior class trip. Where’s he gonna go?”

CHAPTER 12

“Mr. McWhorter, Karen and Geoff can’t solve your problems for you. But they can help prevent further problems.” Clare took a deep breath and thought of the Wednesday Eucharist she would be celebrating a few hours away at noon. The prospect helped her keep her cool. The Burnses shifted on her small office sofa and glowered at her, obviously frustrated and out of temper with McWhorter’s continual sad narrative about his financial woes and his declarations of affection for his dear, departed Katie. So far, he had been skirting the outright offering of Cody in exchange for cash, but the implication was clear enough. Karen and Geoff had outlined the benefits they could give Cody; the excellent home, the education, the love and attention, even the puppy dog in the backyard. McWhorter countered with how ashamed the boy would be of his poor grandparents, how he would reject his own flesh and blood, living in a shabby apartment and eating beans and rice at the end of the month when the money ran low.

When Karen asked him if he wanted to bring up Cody in that shabby apartment, he went into a song-and-dance about poor but honest hearts that could have come straight out of Little Nell. Clare, who had held Kristen’s hand until she thought her bones would grind together while the girl stammered out her story of abuse, kept her peace by picturing herself snapping McWhorter’s kneecap with a well-placed kick. It wasn’t very Christian, and she wasn’t proud of herself, but there it was. They had tried the carrot. Now it was time for the stick.

“What further problems?” McWhorter said.

Clare rose from her admiral’s chair. “Are you aware of the average cost of rearing a child these days, Mr. McWhorter?” She retrieved several sheets of paper from her desktop. “I asked a parishioner to do some research for me on the Internet, and she found several articles giving parents the costs for the first year.” She handed McWhorter a paper. “Take a look. Diapers. Formula. The medical visits. That’s going to be a sizable chunk for a couple living on disability and a pension.”

She dropped another paper into his lap. “Here’s the monthly stipend you’ll be getting as foster parents. Falls a little short of the expenses, doesn’t it?”

Clare handed McWhorter more papers. “Unless your pension stretches quite a bit further, I imagine you or your wife will have to go back to work. Child care and baby-sitters are expensive.” She gave him another paper. “Here’s the average cost of infant care in the tri-county area.” She turned to the Burnses. “Mrs. DeWitt did a great job. She’s very thorough.” The couple were sitting up straight now, staring at her with twin expressions of unconcealed surprise. McWhorter shuffled through the papers, frowning.

“You’ll be taking on a big responsibility, Mr. McWhorter. A big, expensive, time-consuming responsibility. And we’ll make sure you’re doing your job.” She smiled blindingly. “We all feel connected to Cody here at Saint Alban’s. So we’ll be keeping an eye on him. Not just Geoff and Karen, but a whole lot of us. Dropping by to see how he’s doing. Talking to the neighbors. Checking him out when he’s at the grocery store and the bank and the pediatrician’s office.” She could hear her voice loosen into a light Virginia drawl. “Chief Van Alstyne is interested, too, and I’ll bet he’d be happy to arrange for police drive-bys every day. We’ll all be watching out for little Cody. And at the first hint of neglect or abuse one of us will have DSS on you like fleas on a hound.”

“Hey!” McWhorter crumpled the paper he was holding. “You saying I’m gonna beat this kid or starve him or something? Where do you get off saying that?”

“I’m not saying what you will or will not do, Mr. McWhorter. I’m telling you what we all are going to do. I’m telling you, realistically, that you are not going to make one dime off that baby. To the contrary, you can look forward to spending a lot more than you’re used to on the child. Or, you can authorize the Burnses to take custody of your grandson, and accept their more than generous offer to pay any debts Katie left behind.”

“You’re threatening me, aren’t you? I’m being threatened by a priest and a couple of rich lawyers. For trying to give my grandson a good life and a family he can be proud of.”

Clare drank some coffee. She balanced the mug casually in her hand, where McWhorter could see the flying rattlesnake and the motto DEATH FROM THE SKY! She looked at him levelly. “I never threaten, Mr. McWhorter.” His eyes flickered from the coffee cup to her face. “You have a chance to save yourself considerable trouble and to do the right thing for your grandson. Why don’t you take it?” The Burnses were still staring at her. Yes, she thought, I am a very different priest from Father Hames. Get used to it.

McWhorter looked at the papers on his lap. He shuffled them together in a messy pile and rolled them up. “I . . .” He looked over to the Burnses, frowning. “Maybe. I’ll take this home and show it to my wife. Talk it over with her. She had her heart set on having that baby come live with us, you understand.”

“She can visit with Cody as much as she wants,” Karen said. “I’ll drive her myself if need be.”

McWhorter rose, and they all rose with him. “Maybe.” He headed into the hallway, Clare and the Burnses close on his heels. “So,” he said, eyeing the carpet and the woodwork and the prints hanging from the walls as if he were casing the joint, “Cody would come to this church if he were your kid?”

“That’s right,” Karen said. “It’s a wonderful community. Not many children now, but we expect that to change over the next few years.”

McWhorter stopped in front of the parish family bulletin board, looking at the snapshots of congregants and their families. “Hey, here’s you.” He stabbed a finger at the picture neatly labeled “Geoff Burns and Karen Otis-Burns.”

“Many of those pictures were taken during the parish picnic last June,” Karen said, her voice unnaturally cheery and light. “Maybe you and Mrs. McWhorter could come along with Geoff and me next summer. We could all show off Cody together.”

McWhorter continued to study the wall of photographs. Clare felt the back of her neck prickle. Something about the way McWhorter was acting didn’t fit with a man who had been closed into a corner. “Why don’t we all—” she began.

McWhorter shifted to face them. “I don’t think so.”

“What?” Karen’s voice was polite, but shaky.

“I’ve thought about it, and I can’t give him up. He’s the only thing I have left of my Katie. He stays with me and my wife.”

“What sort of game are you playing, McWhorter?” Geoff Burns crowded the taller man against the wall. “We aren’t going to come back with an offer of money, so you can just forget it!”

McWhorter sidled past Geoff and retreated to the parish hall. “No. Sorry. I’m keeping him.”

“Wait!” Karen said “Maybe we can work something out! What if we got you a new car, so you could drive over to see Cody?”

She tried to follow after McWhorter, snapping to a halt when her husband jerked back on her upper arm. “Stop it, Karen,” he said. “Let him go.”

“Wait,” she said. “Wait!” McWhorter reached for the doors. “God damn you!” Karen’s voice thickened. “God damn you!” Clare put her arm around the other woman. She met Geoff’s eyes and tried not to flinch away from the resigned pain she saw there. Together, they held Karen tightly as her body heaved with the effort to expel tears and venom. “I could kill you, you bastard!” she shouted after the vanished man. She laid her head against her husband, weeping with rage. “I could kill him,” she whispered. “I could kill him.”

A mid-week drive up to Cossayaharie usually relaxed Russ. Although Millers Kill policed the rural township, he seldom patrolled the mountain roads and tiny village himself. So his associations with the area were mostly good ones: visits to his sister’s farm, fishing up at the lake, hiking into the hills, or picnicking in the Muster Field, where militiamen had gathered during the French and Indian War and the Revolution after that. Returning from Cossayaharie you could drive through almost every war the men from this area had taken part in. There were the crumbling granite stones in the Muster Field, and then a big marble obelisk at the front of the old Cossayaharie cemetery, a memorial for two brothers who had drowned in the War of 1812. Before you reached Millers Kill, you passed by its cemetery, guarded by a droopy-mustached Union soldier holding a rifle and forever looking South to where his fallen brothers lay. Then over the bridge, stone cairns carrying brass plaques dedicating it to the sacred memory of those who fell in the Great War, and on into town, where a four-sided plinth listed the names of those who had served in each branch of the armed forces during World War Two. If you finished your journey at the post office, you could run your fingers over the bronze plaque memorializing men who had died on the Korean peninsula while he had been in diapers.

There was nothing marking his war. He didn’t know how he felt about that, and he didn’t want to think about it long enough to make up his mind one way or the other. There had been what his mother described as one almighty patriotic hot flash over Desert Storm, and since then, there had been talk on and off of putting up something for the rest of the veterans. He stayed away from it. He didn’t want to become one of those big-bellied guys down at the American Legion, droning on about their war adventures as if they had forgotten what it was really like. Probably file clerks and car-pool mechanics, anyway. The ones who knew what it was really like hardly ever talked about it, not in the Legion Hall bar and not in front of some committee to erect a monument.

He passed the obelisk to the brothers who had died in the waters of Lake Erie and took the next right turn. A dense stand of spruce and hemlock crowded in on either side of the road. As it wound its way into the hills, the evergreens petered out and the scenery opened up onto sprawling, uneven grazing fields bordered by bare-branched hardwoods. The road dipped and twisted, past sheltered hayfields, farmhouses, and an occasional trailer. For a mile or so, a stony creek ran alongside the road, black water barely visible under the heavy banks of snow. He drove past sleeping orchards of dwarf apple trees, modern feed silos, and century-old barns. At Jock Montgomery’s place, he saw two of the kids making a snowman in the front yard, and he slowed down, tooted, and waved.

The Stoner’s farm was a mile past the Montgomerys’. He crunched into the drive, parking next to Mindy’s Chevelle. He was relieved to see Ethan’s old pickup by the road leading up the hill toward the cow barn.

Mindy Stoner came out on the porch, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Russ,” she said. “What brings you up this way?” She was a tall, raw-boned woman, whose square, strong features had looked almost homely back when she was a schoolgirl. Time had refined her so that now, in her forties, she had the spare beauty of a mountaintop blown clean of snow.

He held up the folded paper. “I’m afraid I’m here on business, Mindy. Can I come in?”

She looked back toward the kitchen, then opened the door. “You might as well. No need to freeze out here in the door-yard.” Russ scraped the slush off his boots and followed her through the mudroom into the kitchen, a large room of wooden cupboards, blue-and-white dish towel fabrics, and children’s papers and artwork tacked up everywhere. The woodstove between the mudroom and the pantry was throwing off heat, and the overhead lamp had been lit in preparation for the four o’clock twilight. Their thirteen-year-old—her name escaped him for the moment—was sitting at the round, oilcloth-covered table, doing homework. “Hannah,” Mindy said, “run up to the barn and tell your father Chief Van Alstyne’s here and needs to speak with him.”

The girl gaped, her too-large eyes widening with a mix of excitement and apprehension. “Is Daddy in trouble?”

Russ shook his head. “No. But I am going to have to speak with Ethan, too.”

“He’s out in the barn with Wayne, hooking up for the milking. Hannah, fetch ’em both in.”

At the mention of her brother’s name, the girl had relaxed. “Oh, Ethan,” she said, heading for the mudroom. “That figures.”

Her mother sighed. “What’s he gone and done now, Russ?”

He laid the papers on the kitchen table. “Have you heard about the girl found murdered by the kill last week?”

“Of course. It was on the news. Unidentified body fished out of the kill, that’s not something you see everyday around here.” Mindy’s eyes widened as she listened to herself. She clapped her hands over her stomach. “God in heaven, don’t tell me you think my boy had something to do with that!”

“Calm down, Mindy, I’m not here to arrest him for murder. This is a warrant for a blood test. The murdered girl had a baby about a week before she was killed, and I have reason to suspect that Ethan may be the father.”

Mindy sank into a ladderback chair. “Dear Lord,” she said. “Dear Lord.” She looked up at him. “Who . . . ?”

“It was Katie McWhorter.”

Mindy pressed her hands more tightly to her stomach. “Oh. No. Oh, no. That sweet girl.” She shook her head back and forth. “That sweet girl . . .” She covered her eyes with one hand, screening any tears from his view. Russ’s hands twitched, caught between maintaining some sort of professional detachment and reaching out to comfort this woman he had known since his high school days.

She slapped her hand on the oilcloth suddenly, startling Russ into stepping back. “As far as I knew, Ethan broke up with Katie last year. If he was sneaking around without us knowing, and got her pregnant, we’ll have the truth out. And he’ll take responsibility for it.” She rose slowly from her chair, glaring at Russ. “But you listen to me, Russ Van Alstyne. My boy didn’t have anything to do with killing anybody, least of all Katie McWhorter.”

“What’s going on?” Wayne Stoner stood in the mudroom door, prying off his boots with the jack. “Russ?” Wayne had the round reddened cheeks and the ice-pale blue eyes that marked so many people of Dutch descent in the county. He reached out and shook Russ’s hand firmly before he crossed to his wife’s side. “What’s that boy gotten into now?”

“Russ wants to take Ethan for a blood test,” Mindy said. “Seems Katie McWhorter had a baby a few weeks back and Ethan might be responsible.”

“Aw, Christ,” Wayne said, pulling off his hat and slapping it onto the table. “What a damn fool thing to do. Jesus, you can practically buy condoms at the feed store nowadays!”

Hannah had slipped in and was watching round-eyed from beside the woodstove. “Did Ethan get some girl pregnant?” she asked. “Whoa. No wonder he’s been acting so weird.”

“There’s more,” Mindy said to her husband, ignoring her daughter. “Katie is the girl they found dead down by the kill. The one that was in the news?”

Wayne shook his head as if he were checking it for loose wiring. He shook it again. He squinted at Russ. “You think Ethan had something to do with that?”

Russ spread his hands. “Wayne, I don’t know. First step is to get this blood test and see if he could be the baby’s father. Then we’ll take if from there.”

“I’m calling our lawyer,” Wayne said. “I don’t want Ethan leaving this property until I’ve talked to him.” He pivoted to the phone table between the two windows looking out onto the dooryard. Russ heard the slap of the phone book opening.

“Wait a minute,” Mindy said, “wasn’t she killed on Friday? Isn’t that what it said on the news? You saw Ethan on Friday. Remember? We had to come pick him up from that video game place. He couldn’t possibly have . . . he didn’t kill Katie.”

“The girl died sometime after sundown, Mindy. I didn’t see Ethan until well after ten o’clock.” He looked out the windows. The sky was darkening, blue to lavender, masses of pink clouds floating on the icy air. He turned to Hannah, who had lost the gloating look of a younger sister seeing her big brother about to get it from the grown-ups. It was sinking in that Ethan might be in a whole lot more trouble than she had ever imagined. “Hannah, did you tell Ethan I was here when you got your father?”

She nodded. “He said he’d be right down.”

Russ looked up to the barn. It wasn’t dark enough yet to need lights on, but it would be in half an hour or so. He wanted to get this over with. “I guess I’d better walk up there myself.”

“I’ll come with you,” Mindy said, pulling on her jacket. Outside, they crossed the path separating the barn drive from the house driveway and tramped up the well-plowed gravel road. To the northwest, the clouds were dark blue and heavy, rising from behind the mountains in a solid mass. Snow later tonight or tomorrow.

“You can’t tell for sure from a blood test if Ethan’s the father,” Mindy said.

“No. It’s more in the way of eliminating or confirming him as a possibility. If he has the right blood type, they’ll send his sample down to a lab in Albany that can compare his DNA to the baby’s.”

Mindy opened the cattle gate to the barnyard. “If he has the right blood type, what are you going to do?”

“Ask him some questions. He can have a lawyer present. Depending on what he tells me, we’ll go from there.” He stepped carefully, avoiding half-frozen cow patties.

“Ethan!” Mindy called. The road ended at the gaping two-story-high entrance to the old barn. Even in the antiseptic winter air, the smell of manure and hay and machine oil was strong. “Ethan!”

“Maybe you ought to stay out here,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. This is my son we’re talking about.” Inside, the barn was warm with animal heat. The cows on the left-hand stalls had all been hooked up to their milkers, while the ones on the right waited their turn with bovine patience. The machinery was silent, however, and Ethan was nowhere in sight. The low ceiling was punctuated by four trap doors that Russ could see, leading up to the huge hayloft. The back of his neck felt hot and prickly. Something in the situation read wrong, very wrong.

“Where’s that lead to?” He pointed to the door at the opposite end of the barn.

“The tank room. See where the tubing goes in through the collars on the wall?”

“Anything after that?”

“Storage. We have a machinery shed for our tractors and such, but that’s not connected to the barn. Ethan must be having some problem in the tank room. The pressure valves have been acting up lately. Ethan!”

The tank room door bounced open. Ethan stood framed in the doorway, a big, scared young man with a shotgun pointed straight at Russ.

Russ shoved Mindy into a stall and dove in beside her. “Ethan!” she screamed. The cow sharing the space tried to turn her head around to see what was going on, but her bit chains held her to the feed trough. Mindy jumped up. “Ethan, what are you doing?!?”

Russ yanked her down so hard she hit the floor and lost her breath for a moment. “Shut up, Mindy,” he hissed.

“Get out of here, Mom!”

“Ethan?” Russ said, projecting a calm he didn’t feel into his voice. “Your mother is going to get out of this stall and walk out of the barn. She’ll be alone. Then you and I can talk. Is that okay?”

“I’m not leaving!” Mindy whispered.

“Both of you get out of here!”

“You get out and run to the house and call nine-one-one. Tell them what’s happened. Then keep Wayne and your girl away from here. Let me handle this.”

“You’ll shoot him! You’ll shoot him!”

“What are you doing?” Ethan shouted.

“Mindy, I haven’t fired my gun off the range in over four years, and I don’t intend to start now. Let me talk to the boy.” He raised his voice. “Ethan? Your mom’s coming out of the stall now. Don’t shoot.” He hauled Mindy to the edge of the wooden wall. “Go, goddamnit.”

She stood shakily. “Ethan, please, don’t do this.”

“Get out, Mom. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.” Mindy looked back at Russ.

“Go!” he hissed. “Go, go!” She stumbled back a few steps, moving to the doorway while still facing her son. Russ nodded encouragement. Even when you trust someone, it takes a steel sphincter to turn your back on a loaded weapon pointed at you. When she disappeared into the barnyard, he rested his forehead against the low wooden wall for a few seconds worth of sheer relief.

“Ethan? How about you and me talk now? Okay? Let’s work this out.”

Mindy Stoner was scrambling up her porch steps two at a time when she heard the shot fired.

CHAPTER 13

Mark Durkee had his head in between two half-unscrewed pipes when the phone rang. “Daddy, issa phone,” Madeline said helpfully.

“Yeah, cupcake, Daddy hears it.” He backed out from under the kitchen sink carefully. The phone kept ringing as he wiped off his hands and moved his toolbox out of Maddy’s reach. He hoped it wasn’t Rachel with more car problems. He’d have to leave an hour early if he wanted to fetch her home from work and still make his shift on time.

“Yeah,” he answered. Maddy was trying to pick up some of the washers he had left on the floor. Were those small enough for her to swallow?

“Mark, it’s Harlene. Listen, we’ve got an officer in distress in Cossayaharie and I want you there.”

His first thought was that it must be some sort of prank. Except Harlene sounded dead serious. “What’s going on?” He’d have to get Maddy into her snowsuit. Where could he leave her until Rachel got home?

“The Chief went to Wayne Stoner’s to serve a warrant on his boy, Ethan. Ethan’s holding the chief in the barn with one of their hunting rifles. At least one shot has been fired.”

“Shit! The chief?”

“We don’t know. The state troopers are sending a squad there, and I’ve called Lyle and Ed off patrol, but you’re closest.”

He was. Maybe a ten-minute drive from the Stoner’s farm. He knew from experience that it would take the troopers at least thirty minutes or more to reach Cossayaharie. A man who’d been rifle shot could bleed to death in fifteen minutes. Less.

“Harlene, I’m gonna drop Maddy off with the Slingers, next door. Will you call my wife and let her know? I’ll call you on the situation when I get there.”

“Be careful. You know what Russ would say. Don’t try to be a hero, okay?”

“Yeah.” He hung up. No squad car, no shotgun, no spray, no vest. Shit. He scooped up Maddy, who squealed in delight. “Come on, cupcake. Daddy’s going to work early tonight.”

Old instinct had sent Russ flat into the straw and the cowshit when Ethan’s shotgun went off. A second later, he was back up, crouching against the wall, where he had a chance of keeping the terrified Holstein from crushing him. Throughout the barn, he could hear disturbed lowing and thuds and clanks as the agitated cows tried to flee their stalls.

Ethan couldn’t reach him from that tank room door. The boy would have to shoot directly into the stall, opening himself up to Russ’s fire. So as long as they both stayed put, they were safe. The cow’s white-rimmed eye rolled back and fixed on him. She kicked ineffectually, then tried to rid herself of the intruder by leaning against the wall. Russ rolled into a ball and went underneath her, hitting his head on her udder. She bellowed and stamped, narrowly missing taking the fingers off his left hand. He imagined his obituary in tomorrow’s Post-Star: POLICE CHIEF SLAIN BY COW. He rolled out the other side of her and stood up as far as he could without exposing himself to Ethan’s fire. He hit the cow hard with the flat of his hand, as he’d seen his brother-in-law do when his stock got unruly.

She bellowed again, but it seemed to settle her. “Good girl,” he said, thumping her a few more times for good measure. “Ethan!” He raised his voice to be heard down the dimming length of the barn. “I’m willing to say that gun went off by accident. Right now, you’re facing resisting arrest and threatening a police officer. Don’t make it attempted murder. Put the shotgun down and walk out of the barn with your hands on top of your head.”

“Don’t jerk with me! I know you came here to arrest me for Katie’s murder! I didn’t do it!” Ethan’s voice had the shaky, defiant sound young men get when they’re half-wild with fear and half-drunk on the power of the weapon in their hands. Russ had heard it in jungles and in Third World cities and in squad cars and coming from his own mouth.

“If you say you didn’t do it, Ethan, I’ll believe you. I came here to ask you to take a blood test, to see if Katie’s baby was yours.”

“You lie! Everybody thinks I did it! I didn’t! I could never hurt her! I loved her!”

“Then let’s go to someplace more comfortable than this, and you can clear everything up for me. If you loved Katie, help me find who did kill her.”

“I can’t clear anything up, you asshole! I was drinking alone in my car before I went to Videotek that night. I know I don’t have any damn alibi. Nobody saw me, I got no one who can say I didn’t do it. You don’t give two shits about who really killed her. You just want to arrest someone, and I’m the easy suspect. You think I’m just a punk anyway.”

“I think you’re a guy who’s in trouble and who needs someone to listen to him seriously. Look, Ethan, you know me. I don’t come off like Joe Friday.” Jesus, had this kid ever heard of Joe Friday? “I cut you a break last week, when I knew you’d been drinking. Because I’m not interested in an arrest record. I want to help people keep out of trouble. Let me help you now.”

“You can help me by getting the hell out of here and leaving me alone! I didn’t kill her!”

Russ spread his hands against the cow’s warm flank. Somewhere, there was a magic combination of words that would get the kid to lay down his gun and walk out with no one hurt. All he had to do was find them. “Ethan, I’m not gonna tell you what to do. I am going to give you the facts, so that you can make an informed decision. Fact. You picked up a shotgun and fired on a peace officer. That’s not going to go away. Fact. Right now, there are cops from the town and the sheriff’s department and the state all converging on your farm. Some of them aren’t gonna be too particular if you leave this barn walking or feet-first. Fact. I will listen to anything you have to say about Katie and the night she died with an open mind, and I will pursue this investigation until I’m satisfied we have the real killer. Fact. You’ve got the power, right here and now, to stop this thing. You can put down your weapon, walk out of here, and make your parents the happiest people alive tonight. Or you can choose to shoot it out with a state SWAT team. What do you think the outcome of that will be?”

The cows lowed. Chains rattled. Somewhere, water dripped from a faucet.

“This is Officer Durkee of the Millers Kill Police,” a voice shouted from outside the barn.

“Mark! This is Russ! I’m okay!” Now. Now was the moment to take a chance. He eased his 9mm Glock out of its holster. The click of a round chambering sounded as loud as a gunshot in his ears. Keeping the weapon down by his side, he straightened to his full height, shoulders and head above the cow’s broad back. In the fading twilight, he could see Ethan’s outline at the back of the barn. “Stay where you are, Mark,” he shouted. “I think Ethan’s going to put down his gun and come out.” He ignored the feeling like ants crawling up his neck and through his hair. Ethan could blow his head off before he’d be able to get his piece up past the cow. “Aren’t you, Ethan?”

The boy was a space of stillness in the dark. Hay rustled. A cow kicked against her stall with a loud thump. “Yeah,” Ethan said.

Russ hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until he let it out in a whoosh. “Okay. Put the gun on the floor, then lace your fingers together and put your hands on top of your head. We want to make sure everyone can see you’re unarmed when you leave the barn.”

When Ethan walked past him, hands on head, Russ slipped from the stall and fell in behind him. He holstered his gun, but left it unfastened. Just in case.

Mark Durkee was beside the barn door. He leveled his gun at Ethan. “Ethan Stoner, you’re under arrest,” he said. His glance flickered to Russ. “Chief?”

“I’m fine, Mark. Take Ethan to the car while I go talk to his parents, please.” He let himself through the cattle gate while Mark read the boy his rights. A Millers Kill squad car flashed its red lights at the base of the driveway. Lyle and Ed were getting out. On the porch, Wayne and Mindy stood with their arms wrapped around each other, straining to see the barnyard in the twilight. Far down the road, he could hear another siren approaching. Russ felt flushed and shaky, his legs almost too heavy to carry him down the barn drive and across the dooryard. The bite of the December air, the dazzle of the house lights on the snow, the sound of people’s voices all flooded his senses. It was good to be alive. He forced a smile to his face and began the long, long climb up the porch steps.

Clare smiled when she saw that the driveway to the police station had been thoroughly plowed. She eased her car over the sidewalk and into a parking space. She really was going to need a vehicle that wouldn’t get stuck if someone threw a snowball under its tires. Problem was, the only way she could afford a new car was to sell the old one. The thought of which sent her into a blue funk. This MG was the closest she had ever gotten to flying on the ground. She thought of the dark, mid-sized anonymous American cars so many of her teachers at the seminary had driven. Clergymobiles. “Baby, climb inside my car,” she sang as she strolled up the sidewalk. A municipal employee leaving City Hall next door looked pointedly at her collar and frowned. Probably a Baptist. Clare winked at him before charging up the steps to the police station.

Inside, she shucked off her jacket. “Harlene?” she said, approaching the dispatch room. “Has the chief left yet? I was hoping to—” She shut up when she saw Harlene’s face. “What is it?”

“I really shouldn’t talk to civilians yet,” Harlene said, her crumpled expression at odds with her formal words.

“Harlene, is anyone hurt? Please . . .”

The dispatcher pushed her headset further back over her springy gray curls. “The chief went to bring Ethan Stoner in for his blood test and the boy pulled a shotgun on him.”

The rest of the room faded to a blur, and Harlene’s face came into exquisite focus. Clare could see every mole, every hair, the wrinkles around her lips as she pursed them together, the light on her lashes as she blinked quickly, over and over again.

“What happened?” Clare’s voice was even.

“I don’t know. They’re both in the barn. Mindy Stoner heard a gunshot, but I haven’t had any news since then.”

Clare nodded. She kept nodding as the possibilities flitted through her mind. “Harlene,” she said, “I’d be grateful if you’d let me stay. I’d like to find out if . . . if anything has happened.”

Harlene held her hand out toward an old office chair next to the filing cabinet. “You just sit right down. I’d be glad for the company, to tell the truth.” Clare tossed her coat under the chair and sat. The two women looked at each other.

“Who has—” Clare began.

“Do you—” Harlene said. They smiled weakly at one another. “Go on,” said Harlene.

“Who has been sent out to help? With the situation?”

“Three of our own officers. The sheriff’s department is sending a car or two, and the state troopers are mustering their SWAT team.” She worried at the inside of her cheek. “And an ambulance.”

“Oh. Of course.” Clare looked at her hands. “What was it you were going to say?”

Harlene looked embarrassed. “I was going to ask if you believe praying can really help at a time like this.”

Clare folded her hands together and pressed them to her lips. She paused. “I believe that prayer focuses our human thoughts and energies, sends them to the people we’re praying for. I believe that helps, in ways we can’t yet understand.” Harlene looked surprised. She had probably expected a quick yes. Followed by an exhortation to the Almighty to keep everyone safe. “I believe that God hears our prayers, and cherishes them. I believe He answers by sending us His spirit, giving us strength, and peace, and insight. I don’t think He responds by turning away bullets and curing cancer. Though sometimes that does happen.”

Harlene frowned. “In other words, sometimes, the answer is no?”

“No. Sometimes the answer is ‘This is life, in all its variety. Make your way through it with grace, and never forget that I love you.’ ”

Harlene creaked back in her wheeled dispatcher’s chair. “You’re not one of those strict fundamentalist preachers, are you?”

Clare laughed. The phone rang. Harlene had it off the hook before the sound died away. “Millers Kill Police,” she said. There was a pause. Her face crinkled up into a huge smile. “Oh, it’s good to hear your voice, too.”

“Is it him?” Clare whispered. “Is he okay? Is the boy all right?”

Harlene nodded. “No, no, he’s absolutely right. You let them handle the arrest and the initial report. You go home!” Another pause. “Then go to your mother’s house. I don’t care. If you show up here, I’ll chase you off myself.” She laughed, then listened for awhile. “Are you really okay? You sound kinda funny.” Harlene glanced over at Clare again. “Hold on, there’s somebody who’s been waiting here to find out how you are. Do you feel like speaking to Reverend Fergusson?” She nodded to the phone and held it out to Clare.

“Hello,” she said, feeling unaccountably shy.

“Hi,” Russ said.

“Remember when you warned me Millers Kill wasn’t a sleepy little town? I believe you now.”

He laughed. “Good.”

“So, it sounds like you’re under strict orders not to come into the office.”

He sighed. “I guess I should go home. Linda’s out of town. And my mother . . . she doesn’t need to hear about this just yet. I’m still . . .” he drifted off.

“I know.”

“You know?” He sounded surprised.

“I know that you’re still . . .” She let her voice trail off, echoing his. “Meet me for a drink somewhere. We can talk.”

“Oh, God. I don’t think I can handle going out in public right now. Besides, I smell like cowshit and the scared-cold sweats.”

“Then tell me where you’ll be, and I’ll come to you.”

“Do you think . . . would my place be okay? I could shower and change, rustle up some burgers or something. Would that be, um, unpriestly or anything?”

She laughed softly. “I think what would be unpriestly would be to let a friend sit at home all alone with no one to talk to. Give me directions and tell me when to be there. Preferably after you no longer smell like cowshit, et cetera.”

He laughed. After she had his address, she handed the phone back to Harlene, who said into it, “You gonna confess your sins to Reverend Fergusson? Make sure she has a few hours.” She listened, snorted at something he said. “Okay. Yes, I will. Yes, I promise. Don’t you trust me? Wait, don’t answer that.” Harlene laughed. “Good. I hope you feel good about this, Chief. You just captured Katie’s killer.” There was a pause. Her smile faded. “Well . . .’Bye then. See you tomorrow.” She hung up.

“What did he say?” Clare asked.

“Said he didn’t know about that. He didn’t know what he had just done.”

CHAPTER 14

When Russ opened the door to her knock, he looked . . . different. It was . . . it was . . . the jeans and a sweater. “You’re in civvies!” she said. “I was beginning to think of you like the sheriff of Mayberry, you know, always dressed in brown poly.”

He laughed. “You obviously didn’t watch enough. He had a plaid shirt and jeans he wore fishing.” He looked over her shoulder. “Where’s your car?”

She grimaced. “I didn’t want to risk getting stuck, so I left it parked at the base of the drive and walked up.”

He moved out of the way and let her enter the mudroom. “In that leather jacket and your oh-so-practical boots, too.” She looked down at her soggy, salt-stained suede half-boots. “Talk about unprepared for the weather. You’re worse than a little kid. I’m gonna get you a pair of mittens with a string attached, so at least your hands will stay warm.”

“I remembered the important stuff,” she said, holding up a six-pack of micro-brewed beer. She dropped it with a thud and bent to remove her boots. “And I could have worn my warm parka. Unfortunately, it actually belongs to the police, and I’m afraid if you see it, you’ll confiscate it.” She handed him her jacket.

“Stolen property.” He hung it up on one of the many hooks running along the wall.

“I prefer to think of it as permanently on loan.”

“Situational ethics.” He opened the door to the kitchen.

“Oh. A wood cooking-stove!” she said. “I always wanted one of those. They’re supposed to be great for baking bread.”

“I hate to disillusion you, but the only thing we make on that stove is hot water.” He unhooked a bottle of beer from the cardboard container and opened a paneled pine cabinet to get a couple of glasses.

“I thought your house was two hundred years old,” Clare said as Russ retrieved a liter bottle of soda from the fridge. “This kitchen looks kind of forties.” The floor was an old linoleum patterned with big flowers, the walls and floor-to-ceiling cupboards warm, glowing pine. The windows over the sink and in front of the table were hung with layer after layer of fruit and flower prints that reminded Clare of the old dish towels in her grandmother Avery’s kitchen. Matching fabric-covered balls hung from the evergreen ropes swagged along the cornice.

“You have a good eye,” Russ said, pouring their drinks. “The first modern kitchen was built here in the mid-forties. Before that, there was just the summer kitchen, which is on the other side of the mudroom, and a keeping room. I put in the brick wall and hearth for the wood stove, but other than that, we just peeled away the so-called improvements the last owners had made to get to this.” He handed her her beer. “You should have seen it. Vinyl flooring and all the woodwork painted in southwestern colors. Took me three months to get down to the pine.”

She sat at the round oak table and touched a finger to the tiny Christmas tree serving as a centerpiece. “I like it like this. It’s like a bright, warm quilt keeping out the cold.”

“Huh.” He sat opposite her. “I’ll pass that on to Linda. She does the decorating. I’m just the hired help.” He drank from a tall glass of soda. She propped her chin in her hand and studied him. He had a fit, outdoors look to him, still slightly tan from last summer, his dark brown hair picked out with gold and copper. She’d have to disagree with Lois, his nose was too big and his lips were too nonexistent to call him handsome. But he looked like a man who had lived comfortably within his skin for the past forty-odd years.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he agreed. His eyes were Fourth-of-July blue, high and bright with the snap of a flag in the wind. But behind them she could see something moving, like pages turning in a book no one was allowed to read.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He took another sip of soda. “Fine. No one got hurt, and Ethan’s in jail. I count it as a victory for the good guys.”

“Have you called your wife yet? To let her know what happened?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No.”

“Don’t want to scare her?”

“No, it’s my mother who gets scared.” He smiled wryly. “I figured something might be on the news by tonight, so I called my sister Janet and asked her to talk to Mom. I’ll still have to face one of her ‘Why can’t you get into some other line of work’ lectures, but I can duck it for a few days until she’s cooled off.”

“Uh huh. And you didn’t talk to Linda because . . .”

He frowned. She kept her face open, waiting. He glanced around the kitchen, shifted in his chair, cleared his throat. She sat still, her hand lying palm up on the table. “So this is like PTSD counseling?” He laughed a little. She tilted her head a fraction of an inch. Listening. No threat. “Okay. Linda and I have been married sixteen years now. So she’s been with me through a lot of shit. Armed deployments, police work, bullets flying, the whole nine yards. And, I don’t know if she started out like this or if she cultivated it, but she thinks I’m invulnerable. I’ve learned that I can’t go to her and say, ‘I was frightened out of my wits today,’ because she won’t understand why. What I do, what I’ve done in the past, is like an action-adventure movie or a television show to her. Nothing’s quite real, so why should it bother me?” He flicked a tiny calico ornament on the tabletop tree, then looked at Clare and smiled slightly. “Did I just do an elaborate version of ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’?”

She smiled. “Uh huh. But you don’t have your shirt unbuttoned halfway down your chest to show off your gold chains, so it’s legitimate.”

“Oh, God save me from male menopause.” He laughed a little, shaking his head.

She leaned forward, crossing her arms on the table. “You know, it’s not unusual, being unable to share that kind of thing with your wife or your family. I used to see a lot of that, guys who had spent time in very intense, very dangerous situations, couldn’t talk about it with their wives. Couldn’t admit to being scared to their buddies, of course, except when it’s a joke. It builds up after a while, all that stuff inside and no way to let it out. I think that’s why there’s so much drinking and wild-ass behavior in some units.” She dropped her glance to his glass. “Are you an alcoholic?”

He choked on a mouthful of soda. “Holy shit! You don’t beat around the bush, do you? ’Scuse my French.”

She looked at him mildly. “You don’t need to be handled with kid gloves. Answer me.”

“Christ on a crutch. Yes, I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’ve been dry for five years now. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m just wondering, if you can’t talk about it with your wife, and you can’t pour it into a bottle, who do you talk with? Where do you go?”

He crossed his arms against his chest and leaned back in his chair, looking up toward the ceiling. “I don’t, I guess,” he said, finally. He looked at her. “But let’s face it, it’s not like I’m a homicide detective in the city. I’m not looking at dead bodies week after week, or having guns pointed at me on a regular basis. I’m just the chief of an eight-man police force in little ol’ Millers Kill. Hell, the entire three town area we’re responsible for doesn’t have more than twelve thousand people, tops.”

“Twelve thousand people for whom you feel personally responsible.” She pointed one blunt-nailed finger at him. “Tell me, what feels the worst about what happened today? Being scared you might die?”

“No.” He braced his elbows on the table. “Only an idiot isn’t scared when somebody pulls a gun on him. I’m not ashamed of it. Not inclined to think about it too much afterwards.”

“The rush you get when you walk away and you haven’t died? Do you like that?”

“No! I mean, yes, I like walking away, but no, I’m not an adrenaline junkie. I’d be perfectly happy if the most action I ever saw was being dunked at the police booth during the county fair, believe me.”

“Is it the fact that you should have known that Ethan was on edge and ready to blow? That if you had handled the situation differently, he never would have picked up that shotgun?”

He dropped back into his chair, his face paling. “Holy shit! Do you believe that?”

“Do you?” She leaned farther across the table, crowding him against the truth.

“When you put it that way . . . shit.” He swallowed. “Yeah, I do feel responsible. It was a stupid situation to get into. I kept thinking, what a piss-awful waste it would be if Ethan didn’t make it, because I hadn’t taken the time to find out the kids in his school already had him tried and convicted and on death row. Instead, I waltzed in there with my patrol car and my service piece and my warrant. Not even a phone call ahead of time so his parents could set him straight about what would happen. That’s just plain careless. Careless and lazy and stupid.” He clenched the edge of the table tightly.

“I knew about what the kids were saying at the high school. Heard about it on Monday night. I didn’t do anything about it.”

He scowled at her. “That’s different.”

She scowled back. “Why? Because it’s not my job to know everything about everybody? Because I’m not personally responsible every time one of the citizens of Millers Kill falls off the straight and narrow? Because I shouldn’t do all I can to . . . to . . . to protect and to serve?”

He laughed quietly. “That’s the LAPD, not Millers Kill.”

“No, that’s you.” She took a drink of her beer. “The angel at the gate with the flaming sword, that’s you. Guarding your own little paradise from the evil of a fallen world.”

He closed his hand around air as if he were holding something in front of him. “A flaming sword, huh?”

“Yep.”

“So you think I should—what? Stop caring so much?”

She slid her elbow next to her glass and leaned her cheek on her hand. “No. Not at all. I think it’s a fine thing that you bring such dedication and passion to your work. But I think you should stop beating yourself up when you fall short of some imagined standard of perfection.” She smiled lopsided at him. “Come talk to me next time, instead. I’d be happy to point out the flaws in your image of yourself.”

“As opposed to pointing out my actual flaws.”

“I think I need to know you better before I start in on those.”

He smiled at her. “Seems like you already know me a little too well for comfort.”

She shook her head, smiling, dropping her gaze to the table. She traced meaningless designs on the tabletop with the water condensation that had dripped from her glass. There was a muffled mechanical roar as the furnace kicked in. The thermostat must have been set high, because the kitchen was plenty warm already. A clock ticked in the next room.

“Would you—” he began.

“Now we’ve—” she said at the same time. They both laughed.

“You first,” he said.

“I was going to say, now we’ve solved all your problems, how about that burger I was promised?”

“And I was going to ask you if you’d like dinner. Another example of great minds thinking alike.”

“More like hungry stomachs rumbling in unison, but, yeah.”

Russ made what Clare always thought of as he-man burgers, the same three-inch thick monstrosities her brothers would put together at family cookouts. She asked to be made useful, and he put her to work on a salad, although when she started rummaging through the pantry, pulling out cans of artichoke hearts and mandarin oranges, he looked as if he might have regretted not limiting her to setting the table. They talked about cooking as a chore and as a means of expression, and argued about which state had the greatest barbecue, and agreed that vinegar-and-salt potato chips were better with burgers than home fries, and a lot faster, too.

She would have pegged him as a paper-plate-and-napkin guy when his wife wasn’t around, but he surprised her by laying out beautifully pieced place mats and huge cloth napkins, along with old ironware that could have come from the earliest years of the kitchen. As they ate, he listened very patiently when she got carried away describing all her gadgets from Williams-Sonoma, only laughing once, when she told him about her latest acquisition, a shrimp de-veiner. She asked him plainly if he ever missed wine with a meal, and he raised his eyebrow at her and said he had never been a wine drinker, but he sometimes missed a bottle of whisky after.

“You mean a glass,” she said.

“I mean a bottle,” he corrected. Afterwards, he washed and she dried. She made several pointed comments about historical authenticity nuts who wouldn’t have a dishwasher because it didn’t fit with the kitchen’s time period. He smiled serenely and reminded her not to leave any water spots on the glasses. When the kitchen had been restored to its pristine state—she could hardly believe it looked like this all the time, since hers wasn’t as immaculate even when it had been scrubbed for company—she grabbed another bottle of beer and he gave her the grand tour.

It was a jewel-box of a house, small and beautifully crafted. Russ told her funny stories about all the mistakes he made and had to redo when he first began its restoration. She oohed and aahed over the elaborate draperies and slipcovers and pillows, so he took her upstairs to where he had built an enormous workroom for Linda out of the old under-the-eaves space. He showed her the half-finished bathroom that was his latest project, and complained about his inability to find a tub anywhere near long enough for him.

She told him about her father, whose mechanical expertise began and ended with aircraft, and who persisted in do-it-yourself projects that had become family legends. Or horror stories. That led to a discussion on the workshop as a sacred place for the American male, and he trotted her all the way down to the cellar, where his impressive collection of power tools looked like high-tech instruments of torture hanging on metal gridwork over the original hewn-rock foundation. Just like her dad’s, Russ’s workshop had a TV and a suspiciously comfortable chair, although it lacked the dozens of model planes that hung from her father’s ceiling.

“How come I’ve never seen any pinups in one of these workrooms?” she asked. “I’d think that would be the perfect place for a little cheesecake.”

“Introducing the feminine would disrupt the whole Iron Male, sweat lodge, men’s-only aspect of the space, though,” he said. “For instance, what kind of calendar does your dad have in his workshop?”

“Uh . . . World War Two nose art.”

“Nose art?”

“Paintings on the noses of planes. Please don’t ask me to explain.”

Russ opened one of the cabinet doors. Inside was a glossy calendar showing a man in blaze orange creeping up on a twelve-point stag, who seemed to be waiting patiently to meet his fate. “See? All male, all the time.”

Clare laughed. “Okay, I get it. Do you have to blow smoke around the room when I leave, to purify it?”

“No, but if you reveal any of our secrets, the Society of Masks comes to your house in the middle of the night and plays ‘Louie, Louie’ until you repent.”

“Society of Masks?”

“Iroquois ceremonial group. Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about the Iroquois?” She went back upstairs to a lecture on Iroquois history. She snagged another beer while hearing about their political structure and made herself comfortable on the Chippendale sofa in the living room while learning about their culture, past and present. When she confessed to her abysmal ignorance on anything that had happened in the Adirondack region before, say, last March, Russ rummaged about making disapproving noises until he came up with five books she had to read, to get a grounding in her new home.

“History! That’s what it’s all about,” he said.

“I guess so,” she said, craning her neck to look at all the history titles jammed into the bookcase.

“I see a lot of police work as a kind of history,” he said, flopping into a high-backed Martha Washington chair.

“Really?” she said, her attention drawn away from the books he had handed her. “How so?”

He propped his sock-clad feet on a footstool. “First, you have to recreate the history of the crime. Who did it, when, where, all that. Then, it’s usually the history of the individuals involved that helps you to understand why. This guy was molested as a kid, so he, in turn, molests other kids once he’s grown.”

Clare made a face. “Like Darrell McWhorter, you mean? I don’t get it. I can see where knowing his history would help if he were in counseling. But what effect does it have on your ability to put him behind bars?”

“If you know a person’s history, you can use it to help predict what that person might do. A person’s history can be the key to understanding his motivation for committing a crime. For instance, in Katie’s murder.” Russ leaned forward, feet hitting the floor, elbows on his knees. “We know Ethan may be Cody’s father. But why would he kill Katie? Is there something in his past or in their history together that would make him likely to do it? What about McWhorter? Apparently, he’d be willing to kill Katie to cover up his molestation of her. But it looks damn sure that the baby isn’t his. What’s in his history that makes him a suspect?”

“A need to control his daughters?” she suggested. “Katie demonstrated her control of her own body by having another man’s child, so he killed her in a rage?”

“Maybe. But compare that to the Burnses’ history. A couple tries for years to get a baby, stressing their marriage and their financial resources in the meanwhile, and then a kid falls in their laps. But, the mother shows up and says it was all a mistake, she wants Cody back now. I think that’s damn good motive for murder.”

“Except for one thing.” Clare scooted to the edge of the loveseat and skewered the air with her finger. “If Katie had wanted Cody back, she could have just gone to DSS. She’s the birth mother, she doesn’t need to deal with the Burnses to get him back.”

“Okay, she doesn’t want him back. She wants money to stay away.”

“Now you’re ignoring history. Does that sound like the Katie McWhorter we’ve been hearing about? And anyway, the Burnses wouldn’t pay to get Cody. This morning they—”

The phone rang, cutting her off. “I gotta get this.” Russ vaulted out of his chair. “I’m expecting word on the blood test results and how Ethan’s interrogation went.” He glanced at his watch. “Geez, it’s almost ten o’clock! Where did the evening go?”

She rose and followed him into the kitchen. “I’ll take that as a compliment on my ability to be a distraction.”

He grinned. “You are that,” he said, picking up the receiver. “Hello?”

Clare went into the chilly mudroom to retrieve her boots and jacket. She looked glumly out the window. When had it started to snow? Please God, let the plows be out and the roads clear. She didn’t relish the idea of getting stuck between here and the town. She carried her things back into the kitchen. “Russ?” she asked.

He waved her off, still holding the phone. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll be there. Half an hour, forty-five minutes at the most.” He hung up the phone and leaned on it, shaking his head.

“I was going to impose on you for a ride into town, since it’s really coming down out there. But I can see it’s a bad time . . .” She bit her lower lip, unsure if she should ask what was wrong or not.

He passed a hand over his face. “That was the night dispatch out of Glens Falls. A motorist called in what he thought was a deer beside the road. It was a body. Durkee and Flynn went to check it out. Wallet was in the guy’s pants.” He looked at her. “It’s Darrell McWhorter. He’s been shot to death.”

CHAPTER 15

If Katie McWhorter had resembled a frozen story-book princess in death, her father looked like roadkill. Russ tried to summon some basic human identity with the corpse, but the only emotion he could come up with was irritation that Darrell had died before Russ had had a chance to dig any more information out of him. That, and the conviction that the world—or at least his small corner of it—was a slightly cleaner place tonight.

He and Clare had been the last to arrive at the scene on the old Schuylerville Road. Durkee and Flynn had done a good job securing the area, with tape and flares and cones to redirect the infrequent traffic to the other side of the road. The state crime scene unit was already in place. Two technicians this time, since it wasn’t a matter of humping the equipment a half-mile into the woods. They were working as fast as they could, racing the snow that had already covered up tire tracks and footprints, turning Darrell into a blurred heap. Russ turned his collar up against the thick flakes melting along the back of his neck, and wished he had stopped to get his hat. The snow was wetting his unprotected glasses, turning the scene into a kaleidoscope of splashing red lights and a blur of white.

Darrell had died from a single gunshot at the back of his head, delivered only inches away. He had died with his coat on, unzipped, falling face forward onto the narrow pull-off, just missing the guardrail. He had died with a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers. The soggy butt was in a plastic baggy in the evidence box right now.

“Whaddya think?” Mark Durkee swung his flashlight in the direction of the state trooper who was methodically combing through the snow between the body and the road.

“I think he has a better chance of finding the winning lottery ticket than finding a shell casing in all that,” Russ said. “We’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope Dvorak can give us ballistics information from the autopsy.”

“Actually, I meant, what do you think happened?”

Russ glanced down the road, past the ambulance with its anonymous, snow-suited paramedics, past his pickup, where Clare sat steaming at his orders not to leave the cab. “He was in a car,” Russ said, recreating the scene in his mind. “Not his car. The killer was driving. McWhorter wants a smoke. They’re going someplace . . . not local. He doesn’t want to wait for his nic fix until they get there. The killer says, no smoking in my car. But I’ll pull off up ahead, you can get out, have one there. McWhorter gets out. The killer gets out, maybe to brush snow off the rear window or snap the wiper blades. There aren’t any cars going by. It’s an opening, and the killer takes it. Bang, he does McWhorter, gets back in the car, and drives off. Anybody hears the gunshot, they’d think it was backfire, or someone jacking deer.” He looked past the guardrail, where a few stunted sumacs thinned out as the land fell away into a sloping valley. On the opposite hillside, a mile or so away, he could see the lights of two or three farms. “It’s been coming down hard. If the killer had been a little luckier, Darrell here would have been a mound of snow covered up by the plows when they came through.”

“That’s somebody very cool. Somebody who can put it all together fast.”

“Yeah. Or somebody who has fantasized about killing McWhorter so often that when the opportunity arose, she was ready to snatch it.”

“She?”

“Sure. Don’t be a sexist, Mark. You think only men can kill?”

“Hell, no. I’m a married man.”

Russ laughed. The technician waved at them. “We’ve got all we’re going to get,” he shouted. “Tell the medics they can bag him.” Durkee nodded and trudged off through the growing drifts toward the ambulance.

A van was coming up the road, slowing down, then pulling in past the crime scene. CHANNEL 7: LIVE! LATE BREAKING! Russ read on its side. He knew it was fashionable to bash the press, but publicity could be a big assist in a case. There was a reason the FBI fought to keep America’s Most Wanted on the air. He watched a burly guy unload a hand-held camera. He’d have to give them the usual speech about not releasing the identity until the family had been notified. Would anything be likely to shake loose if he mentioned the probable connection to the previous murder and the abandoned baby?

He waved Durkee over again. “Mark, as soon as you can wrap this up, I want you to head over to Geoffrey and Karen Burnses’ house and find out where they’ve been this evening. Do they own a gun, all that. Ask to see the inside of their cars. If they give you any problems, call me. We’ll get a warrant tonight, if necessary.”

“Okay. Want me to bring them in for questioning?”

“Go with your gut. You get a reasonable suspicion, go ahead. But remember, these two are the sort to sue the department for false arrest, so make sure you cross your T’s and dot your I’s.”

“Will do, Chief.”

“As soon as I’m done with the TV crew, I’m going to pay a visit to McWhorter’s daughter Kristen. See if after two years, she finally agreed to meet with her dear old dad tonight.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Clare announced when Russ climbed into his truck.

“Congratulations,” he said, tossing his parka in the back. The cab was almost too warm, undoubtedly the result of leaving Clare in possession of the keys.

“I’m going to come with you when you go to talk with Kristen.”

Russ buckled his seatbelt and shifted the pickup into gear. “No, you’re not. I said I’d drop you home, and I will. I didn’t say anything about making you junior deputy. And what makes you think I’m going to talk with Kristen anyway?”

“She’s a logical suspect, isn’t she?”

“So are the Burnses.” He cautiously pulled into the road. The slap of the wipers barely kept up with the pelting snow. “As a matter of fact, they’re the only ones I can think of who had reason to kill both Katie and her father. McWhorter did say he wouldn’t let them have custody of Cody this morning, right?”

Silence. He risked letting his eyes leave the road and glanced over at Clare. She was limned by the dashboard light, arms wrapped around herself, frowning. “What?” he said.

She hummed in the back of her throat.

“What, Clare?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her turn toward him. “I’ve been debating telling you something. I’m not sure if it’s covered by pastoral confidence or not, since it was kind of in a public place. Heck, for all I know, Lois could have overheard it.”

“What?”

“This morning, things seemed to be going well at first. I thought we had convinced McWhorter to release Cody to the Burnses. But then, just like that, he changed his mind. Karen went absolutely wild. She was yelling, ‘I could kill you’ at McWhorter.” Clare hunched her shoulders and sighed.

“They do start to look more and more like couple number one, don’t they?”

“Was McWhorter killed and then dumped?” she asked abruptly.

“Nope. He got out of the car and was shot there on the side of the road.” Flashing yellow lights up ahead. Plows and sanders were out, trying to keep up with the relentless accumulation of snow.

“Why would he be in a car with the Burnses? Where does this road go?”

“Away from town, it heads toward Schuylerville and Saratoga and the Northway. As for why he’d be in the car with them, I’d guess they were making a payoff.”

Clare shook her head. “No. Even if they were going to exchange money for the baby, which would be a complete turnaround from their earlier position, why would they be heading out of town together? McWhorter was . . . not smart, exactly, but crafty. Looking out for himself as well as the main chance. Why agree to go off on a lonely road with someone who’d been screaming she was going to kill him this morning?”

He tried to come up with a reason that made sense. The frustrating feeling that this case was getting more complicated rather than less was creeping up like a fog around his head. It had been a long, hard day, and he wanted to go home and tumble into bed and forget half-frozen corpses and bloody snow and shotgun-toting teens and sisters who cried until their cheeks ran black.

“The Northway—that’s the highway that runs the length of the state, right?”

“Route Eighty-seven, right.”

“That’s how you get to Albany.”

“Yeah . . .” he nodded. His head was working slowly, but it was working. “Katie’s things. McWhorter and whoever killed him could have been headed for Albany to get something from the house she lived in.”

“You haven’t been there, yet, have you?”

“No, the Albany P.D. is supposed to cover that.” His numb brain finally sparked the right connections. “Shee—it!” he said, snatching at the radio. “Do you remember the address?”

Clare spread her hands helplessly. Russ clicked on the mike. “Dispatch, this is Chief Van Alstyne of the Millers Kill P.D. Can you connect me direct to cruiser Fifty-seven-fifteen?”

There was a blare of static and then Kevin Flynn’s voice from the speaker. “Fifty-seven-fifteen. Go ahead.”

“Kevin? This is the chief. Cancel the Burnses. I want you and Mark to go to the station, get the Katie McWhorter file, and find the address of her student digs in Albany. Then get on the horn to Albany and have them send someone there immediately. I think whoever killed McWhorter may be headed for that house.”

“Ten-four, Chief. Fifty-seven-fifteen out.”

Clare looked out the window at the snow-blotched roadway. “You think they might catch the killer?”

“Maybe. The paramedics weren’t sure about the time of death, ’cause the cold and the snow do funny things to body temperature. But McWhorter wasn’t killed much more than three hours ago, I’ll bet. If the snow slowed his killer down enough, and if he takes his time at Katie’s house, maybe the Albany P.D. will walk in on him. Worth a shot.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Now? Now I’m going to drop you off at the rectory. What do you think, you’ve got a free pass to tag along every step of the way?”

Evidently, she did. It wasn’t that her arguments for coming with him were irrefutable. She didn’t actually refuse to get out of the truck. But somehow, she was still there when he cruised past the Burnses, noting the lit windows and the two vehicles in the driveway. “That doesn’t mean they’re not involved,” he said to her smug smile. “It just means they aren’t in Albany right now.” He put another call through to the station, asking Durkee and Flynn to head over to the Burnses after they had gotten hold of the Albany police. “And for god’s sake make sure someone in Albany calls me if they manage to collar anyone!” he concluded.

Clare’s smile disappeared when they drove up to the tiny rental park where Kristen McWhorter lived. “What’s she drive?” Russ asked as they cruised slowly along a row of tightly packed, two-story town houses.

“An ’eighty-nine Honda Civic,” she said, rubbing condensation off the window, trying to spot Kristen’s car somewhere in the parking lot. “Black.”

“I don’t see it.”

They parked in the first available space and waited. After a while, he turned on the truck’s radio and fiddled until he had the all-talk station. A gravelly-voiced man was dispensing investment and business advice to callers who identified themselves with names like “Randy from Salt Lake City” and who started each conversation with “I have an extra thirty thousand dollars in convertible debentures to invest . . .” The show broke frequently for mutual fund advertisements and the local weather, which could be summed up as deep and getting deeper.

“I can’t believe Kristen had something to do with her father’s death.” Clare’s voice broke in on a guy complaining about his wife sheltering her income in off-shore banks.

“I think you can’t imagine people you like doing bad things, that’s what I think,” Russ said. “You said the same thing about Karen and Geoff and Ethan.”

“I never said I liked Geoff Burns,” she said, grinning.

“Too bad it wasn’t McWhorter,” he said. “He made such a satisfying heavy.” She nodded. “Too bad it isn’t like ninety percent of murders,” he continued, “where the husband or the wife or the friend is standing there with the weapon in hand when the cops arrive, saying, ‘But I didn’t mean to do it!’ ”

Headlights gleamed at the entrance to the parking lot. A small car crept in, tires churning against the snow. The black Honda Civic pulled in a few spaces away from the pickup. Its interior light flashed weakly as someone opened and shut the door. Russ could barely make out the figure struggling up the sidewalk through the screen of heavy snow, something sizable clutched in her arms. He and Clare both opened their doors, the contrast between the almost too-warm cab and the bone-chilling wind taking his breath away for a moment. He could hear the noise Clare made as her stupid little indoor boots sank into five inches of fresh snow.

“Kristen?” he called.

She whirled, bringing her fist up. Her keys stuck up between her fingers like stubby claws. She held a bulky knapsack against her chest.

Russ raised his hands. “It’s me, Chief Van Alstyne. Reverend Fergusson is with me.”

“What? What’s going on? Is it Katie’s baby?”

“We need to talk to you. May we come in?”

Under her black knit cap, Kristen looked at them suspiciously. “Okay.” She waded through the snow drifting across her walkway and unlocked the town house door. She kicked her boots against the side of the door to knock off the snow. Russ and Clare followed suit. Inside, they all crammed together on a tiny patch of tile, trying to wrestle off jackets and tug off boots without spreading any more snow than necessary onto the pale green wall-to-wall carpet.

Kristen’s place was not what he’d expected from her all-black wardrobe and gothic hair. Instead of vinyl upholstery and posters of thrash groups on the walls, she had import-shop bamboo furniture in white with flowery pastel fabric. Reproductions of gauzy paintings of ballerinas hung over shelves filled with thin paperbacks and stuffed animals. The room of a young girl. One more thing Darrell McWhorter had taken away from her.

“What are you doing out here so late?” Kristen asked, dropping the knapsack on a glass-topped coffee table. “Is there news on Katie’s case?”

Clare looked at him as if to say, okay, how do you do this? Damned if he knew. Your father’s had his brains blown out tonight. And by the way, did you do it? If she didn’t have anything to do with McWhorter’s murder, he was going to start to look like her personal angel of death. First her sister, then her dad. “Where’ve you been for the last few hours, Kristen?” he asked.

She raked her hand through her ink-black hair, ruffling it upwards. “I went out for some ’za with my friends tonight after class. I’m studying for my CPA at WCCC.” At Clare’s raised eyebrows, she explained, “The community college.” Russ suspected Clare had been reacting to the idea of Kristen as an accountant rather than puzzling over the acronym. “Look,” Kristen said, “Will you please tell me what all this is about?”

The college class and the pizza joint should be easy to check out. “How long did it take you from the time you left the pizza place to the time you arrived here?” he said.

Her face shifted, from annoyed and curious to alarmed and cautious. “Maybe half an hour,” she said. “Has something happened?”

Clare stepped close to Kristen and laid a hand on the girl’s arm. “Kristen, your father was found dead tonight. He’s been murdered. If you know anything about it, please tell us.” She cut to the chase as quick as any cop he’d ever seen. Somehow, he’d thought a priest would be more . . . euphemistic.

Kristen gaped. “He’s dead?” she asked in a shrill voice. Then she burst into tears.

CHAPTER 16

Russ felt like he was in a rerun of a bad television show. Kristen, sobbing and bleeding out her makeup, Clare holding the girl’s hand . . . if he wasn’t so goddamn tired he’d swear it was Monday morning instead of the middle of Wednesday night.

“Why’s she broken up over this guy?” he half-whispered to Clare.

She glared at him from over Kristen’s shoulder. “She’s not broken up like she was for Katie, for heaven’s sake. She’s angry.”

Kristen wailed. “Now I’ll never get a chance to tell him what I thought of him!” She sucked air in great noisy gulps. “Now I’ll never know about Katie!”

“If your father killed her, Kristen, he’s already paid for it. And if he didn’t, we’ll find who did. I promise you.” He watched Clare rock the girl in her arms and wondered if she would come to distance herself more from the people she wanted to help. She was going to crash and burn in a few years if she kept wading right in and feeling all this personally.

She met his gaze and he saw how tired she was, smudgy dark circles under her eyes, the fine lines on either side of her mouth noticeable. “Kristen,” she said, “do you have any idea who your father was meeting tonight? Do you have any ideas who might have killed him?” Russ wasn’t entirely convinced Kristen was innocent, for all that her tears might be real. But until her alibi checked out one way or another, he’d go with it.

Kristen shook her head. “I told you, I haven’t spoken to him since I left home. I got an unlisted number so he can’t call me. I was working up the nerve to call him and Mom about Katie’s funeral.” She jerked her head up, blinking swollen eyes at Clare. “Oh, God, now I’m going to have to make arrangements for him, too! Mom won’t be able to handle it.” She closed her hands over her face and wept, frustrated, angry tears that even Russ, who had learned to ignore crying from witnesses, could recognize.

“I can help you,” Clare said, rubbing her hands briskly along Kristen’s upper arms. “I can help.”

Kristen shook her head, dumb animal grief, over and over. “All I wanted was some peace to bury my sister in. Now he’s even taken that, the bastard. Why couldn’t he leave me and my sister alone. My sisterrrr . . .”

Russ mumbled his excuses and went into the kitchen to look for a telephone and to escape the pain and anger ricocheting through the living room. He suppressed a twinge of guilt at letting Clare take on all the burden of dealing with the girl. There wasn’t anything useful to be had out of her, not tonight, and maybe a priest was what she needed now, anyway.

He dialed the station first, and when the message to dial 911 clicked on, he hung up and called the Glens Falls dispatcher. She had the number of the detective in Albany who had been sent out with the black and white to Katie’s former home. In Albany, they got cell phones. Better pension plans, too, he’d bet.

Two rings and a brisk, feminine voice answered, “Ramirez here.”

“Uh . . . Detective Ramirez?”

“The one and only.”

“Detective, this is Chief Van Alstyne, from Millers Kill. I understand you’re assisting with a murder we’ve had up here.”

“Chief Van Alstyne. Yeah, I spoke with your man, what’s his name? Doofee?”

“Durkee,” he said. She owed him that for his obvious surprise at hearing a woman’s voice.

“We got a unit here right after we got your message, but your man had already been and gone.”

Russ slapped the receiver against his thigh and swore quietly. He jerked the phone back up to his ear in time to hear Detective Ramirez say, “. . . identified himself to the girl as your decedent’s father.”

“There’s a witness?”

“For what it’s worth. We’ve got her downtown with an artist right now, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. She’s eighteen, she’d had a few beers earlier in the evening, and she thinks everyone over the age of twenty-eight is, and I quote, a wrinkly.”

Russ laughed in spite of himself.

“The description we have so far is average height, average weight, no discernible identifying features except for a bushy mustache, which may be fake, and that he was one of the previously mentioned ‘wrinklies.’ ”

Geoff Burns was what, forty? forty-two? Certainly would look like a wrinkly to Emily Colbaum or one of her housemates. And “average” would describe him to a T, until he opened his mouth. Russ sighed. “So, what did the perp do at the house?”

“According to the witness, there had been a call earlier from someone identifying himself as the murder victim’s father. Said he was coming down to get some of the girl’s things. This guy shows up around nine-thirty, goes to her room, and comes back out ten or fifteen minutes later with a backpack. It’s hard to tell at this point if the room was left messy or if he tossed it. We’re hoping for prints, of course.”

“I know this is a long shot, but do you have any idea what he took from the room?”

“Something that could fit into a student backpack?” Ramirez snorted. “Sorry, Chief. Could be almost anything. Was your girl into drugs?”

“Not that we know,” he said. “Was there anything pregnancy-related there?”

“Yeah, there was, as a matter of fact. Couple of books stashed under the bed. What To Expect When You’re Expecting, that sort of thing. Some used feminine napkins in the wastebasket, but that could have been her period. Look, give me your fax number, and I’ll have the complete report and the artist’s sketch to you by tomorrow morning. Uh, make that later this morning.”

Russ looked at his watch. Christ, it was after twelve. He was going to have to switch shifts with Lyle MacAuley. No way he could be working this case and still be alert enough to pull Friday night patrol tomorrow. He told Detective Ramirez the station’s fax number, thanked her for her help, and hung up.

In the living room, Kristen was sitting quietly, her head dropped back against the top of her flowery love seat, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Clare, in the bamboo chair next to her, looked up as he walked in. She asked a question with her eyebrows.

He shrugged. “Someone showed up at Katie’s house tonight claiming to be her father. He took something out of her room in a knapsack. One of her housemates was there, she’s talking to a police artist right now, trying to give us a description.”

Clare glanced at Kristen, who didn’t move. “Any chance it was Darrell?” she asked.

“Doesn’t sound it. Supposedly an older man with a mustache. I’m not discounting the idea that it might have been a disguise.”

Clare looked skeptical. “Who the heck could it be? Ethan? He’s in jail.”

“Kristen,” he said, then again, louder, “Kristen?” She rolled her head to face him without stirring from her position on the love seat. “I’ve asked you this before, but was there anyone else your sister might have been seeing? Maybe an older man?”

“I told you,” she said, her voice raw and tired. “If she was seeing someone else, she never let on to me.”

He glanced over to Clare. “The detective in Albany asked if Katie might have been into drugs. Maybe we’re on the wrong track, thinking her murder had something to do with the baby. Maybe she got on the wrong side of some bad people.”

Clare opened her mouth to respond, but she was cut off by Kristen. “My sister didn’t do drugs! Or kiddie porn or illegal adoptions or passing bad checks or anything else! She was a good person. A good person! If you weren’t such a cluck-ass small town cop you might have caught the man who did this to her by now!” She lurched upright in the middle of her tirade and stood pointing a shaking finger at Russ.

“Kristen!” Clare jumped to her feet. “That’s not fair.”

Kristen jerked her head around to face the priest. “What do you know about it! My sister is dead! And the best this guy can do is come here and ask me if I know any reason why she might deserve it? Oh, and by the way, did you kill your father tonight? Well, Chief Van Alstyne,” she made his name an insult, “if my sister’s murder didn’t have anything to do with her baby, maybe some nut case is out to kill off all the McWhorters! Who’s gonna be next? Me? Cody?”

“That’s enough, Kristen.” Clare’s voice cut through the air like a helicopter blade, sharp and no-nonsense. “You’re exhausted and upset and not thinking.” She moved to the door, pulling her coat off the rack and finding her boots with her feet, her eyes never leaving the angry young woman twisting her hands back and forth in front of the loveseat. “You call me tomorrow if you want any help with the arrangements.”

She waved a hand at Russ, who was still standing, stocking-footed and wool-headed, in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He switched into motion, getting his coat and boots while Clare continued. “Chief Van Alstyne will let you know as soon as he finds out anything about the murders.” She laid her hands on Kristen’s shoulders and shook her once, like a mother cat settling a kitten. “In the meanwhile, I want you to get yourself something hot to drink and go straight to bed. Try to get a good night’s sleep and make sure you eat something in the morning. You have my number.” Kristen nodded. “Then we’ll say good night.” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry, Kristen. About everything.” Clare opened the door and jerked her head at Russ. “Time to go.” He kept himself from saying, “Ma’am, yes ma’am,” but he hustled out the door just the same.

“Good night, Kristen. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She shut the town house door and hunched her shoulders against the pelting snow, high-stepping past him to the truck in a futile effort to keep her boots from getting even more wet. She was inside, brushing off her jacket, by the time he climbed up into the cab, wincing a little at the ache in his hip. Definitely too long a day. He fired up the engine and sat for a moment, too wiped out to shift into gear and begin the long, slow ride back home. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. Back to the rectory, that was. Had to take Clare home first. On the radio, a psychiatrist was incredulously quizzing her caller who had fallen in love with her sister’s husband. “Reality Check!” Dr. Adele barked like a drill instructor.

He smiled as he reversed out of the parking space, his four-wheel drive chugging against the accumulated snow. “So you really were an officer,” he said.

“Sorry if I rolled over you in there, but I—”

“No, no, I appreciate it, really. I never know the right way to handle these scenes. Try to comfort someone and you’re just as likely to get an ashtray over the head. Hang tough and be professional, and next thing you know you’ve got a reputation as a heartless monster or worse, there’s a suit for police brutality on your desk.”

“Mmmm.” She turned her face away from him and leaned against the window.

He concentrated on the road, turning the defroster on full to clear the steam from his windshield. The snow came at him horizontally as he drove, as if nature were trying to sandblast his truck with the icy flakes. Traction was bad, even with his weight and the four-wheel drive. It had been a hell of a night. Thank god he hadn’t let Clare drive home in that ridiculous little mosquito of hers.

Between the roar of the heater and the annoying jingle for an auto dealership on the radio—“Fort Henry Ford for Quick Credit Cash Back Cars!”—he missed the first two or three muffled gulps from the other side of the cab. He risked taking his eyes off the road for a moment. Clare was twisted so he couldn’t see her face, her arms wrapped tightly around her midsection. He heard her again, the sound of something noisy being swallowed.

“Clare?” For a selfish second, he thought please, please, not another distressed woman. I can’t handle any more today. “Are you okay?” The back of her head jerked up and down. He saw the bank of yellow lights ahead and coasted to a slow stop well before the oddly angled intersection of Route 39 and Tanco Road. He had once waited here while the Millers Kill fire department used the jaws of life to remove three mangled bodies from a station wagon that had tried to beat the light in bad weather. The driver had been a guy his age. “Clare,” he said, turning toward her, “if you’re okay, will you please look at me?”

The back of her head jerked back and forth. “Clare?” He thought back to how he felt earlier this evening, the weight and tension dropping off of him as he sat across from her at the kitchen table, talking. “Clare, who do you talk to? You asked me that, remember? Who do you talk to, Clare?”

Her voice was thick and tight. “I’ll be all right. It’s just been a long—” she couldn’t continue. The lights turned green. He didn’t move. “It’s just—” she tried again. “She makes me think of my sister,” she finally got out.

“Your sister,” he said. “The blond girl in those pictures on your table? What about your sister?”

She turned to him, her eyes bright, her face drawn and pinched. “She died. Five years ago this Thanksgiving.” She scrubbed her face with her open hands.

In the mirror, he could see distant lights headed up Route 39. He shifted the truck into gear and carefully drove on through the icy intersection. “Tell me,” he said, wondering as he said it why he was asking. He respected people’s privacy more than most, and this was clearly a private pain. “What was her name?”

“Grace. She was . . .” She coughed. “She was like a beautiful decoration on a Christmas tree. Funny and loving and frivolous. She was the sweet little sister and I was the tomboy know-it-all big sister. She was the beautiful one and I was the smart one.” One side of her mouth crooked up. “She was always trying to get me more interested in clothes and makeup and dating and all that girl stuff that came so naturally to her.” She plucked at the leather sleeve of her coat. “She gave me this jacket when I made first lieutenant, because she thought it looked like something a dashing aviatrix would wear.”

“She sounds like a very special person,” he said quietly.

“She was to us,” Clare said. “She never did anything that would make you stand up and take notice. She worked for our parents’ aviation company, secretarial work and bookkeeping. Enough to make minimum payments on her credit cards, she used to say. Mostly, she wanted to get married and have lots of kids. She would have, too. She had guys left, right, and center.” Clare smiled, a small, inward smile. “She volunteered at the local hospital because she wanted to meet a doctor.”

Russ didn’t want to hear more. He hated the dread creeping along the edges of his nerves, knowing how the story ended. He wanted the details left off, so he wouldn’t have to feel the ache under his sternum that had already begun. Aching for Clare, who had dried her eyes and was speaking in a low, thick voice.

“She was four years younger than me. Twenty-five when she—when it happened. She had had this pain on and off in her abdomen, thought it was indigestion or gas. It finally got bad enough for her to have it checked out.” She closed her eyes. “It was colo-rectal cancer, well advanced. She didn’t suspect. No one suspected. No one in our family had ever had cancer. She went in for a checkup in the morning and by that evening she was under a death sentence. In one day.”

He made the left-hand turn onto Main Street, the truck’s rear fishtailing gently before he got it straightened out. The shop lights were almost invisible in the snowy haze.

“I was stationed at Fort Bragg at the time, about four hours from home, so I didn’t ask for compassionate leave. Grace moved back into our parents’ house and I visited them every weekend. For awhile, I really thought she was going to get better. They treated it very, very aggressively, and I thought, she’s twenty-five, she’s under the best medical care possible, she has people all over the country praying for her, writing her letters, of course she can’t die. Of course she can’t die.” She folded her hands and pressed them to her mouth as if she were pushing a prayer back into her throat. “Four months. After four months, ‘she can’t die’ became the problem, not the expectation. Do you know anything about colo-rectal cancer?”

He shook his head.

“She was in agony. She was half-dead from the chemo and the half of her that was alive was suffering every day, all day. The fact that she was young and strong became a . . . a curse, because her body hung on, and hung on . . .” She rested her chin on her tightly clasped hands. “There was an intern she had dated, a friend of hers. Harry Jussawala. He would visit her, sometimes stay with her during treatments in the hospital.” She breathed deeply. “He came for Thanksgiving dinner. My folks always have friends as well as family for Thanksgiving. Their house is always open. I wasn’t there, I was on duty so one of the married guys could be at home with his family. Anyway, while the rest of them were in the kitchen or outside, Harry went into Grace’s room and gave her fifty crushed Valium pills suspended in a solution of cranberry juice and vodka.” She looked at Russ. “Does that sound stiff? That’s how I always think of it, you know, because that’s how I first heard about it from the investigators.” Her mouth quirked. “It was a Cape Codder, get it? Her favorite drink. She died within a half hour. She was dead when my mom went in to check on her.”

He didn’t know what to say. His heart hurt for her. “Oh, Clare. I’m so sorry.”

“Harry was never arrested. They talked about murder, then about manslaughter, but in the end, no one could prove anything except that he had brought the crushed Valium to her room. His medical license was revoked. I still don’t know, to this day, if it was really her idea to kill herself or if he acted out of his own sense of compassion. She didn’t leave a note or anything.” Her face crumpled at last. “I never got to say good-bye to her.” She furiously blinked back tears. “And you know what’s awful? To this day, I don’t know whether to curse him or bless him. She was suffering, I know that, and it was going to end in her death. But she was alive! To be put down like a hurting dog . . .” she shook her head sharply, her lips closing tightly over her grief. She rubbed her face again, hard, and sniffled wetly. “I’m sorry. I never talk about this, I don’t know what got into me.”

He turned onto Church Street, swerving to one side to let a snow plow get by in the other lane. “It’s late and you’re tired,” he said. “Fatigue is like a truth drug, you know. Makes you do and say things you ordinarily wouldn’t consider.” He stopped at a red light and looked at her. “I think with all this stuff about Kristen and her sister, you needed to talk about Grace, and you needed a friend. I like to think I qualify there.”

She wiped a finger under her nose, smiling a little at him. “You do. You surely do. Thanks.”

He drove forward, past the park, past St. Alban’s, onto Elm Street. Over her protests about not trying to make it into her driveway, he shifted into second and churned a path up to her kitchen door. He was damned if he’d make her walk any farther than she had to in those skimpy boots she had on.

The truck idled quietly. “The guys on the graveyard shift always swing by my place around dawn,” he said. “Give me your key. I’ll radio them tonight before I turn in, ask if one of them will drive your car back into town if the roads are plowed by then.” She nodded, rubbing her eyes once more before fishing a key chain out of her pocket. She looked like a little kid at the end of an overlong day, all flushed cheeks and exhausted, tear-bright eyes. She pulled a key off the ring and handed it to him. “You need me to come in?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I started out this evening hoping I could help you get it all off your chest,” she said, smiling. “Didn’t expect to be on the receiving end.”

He draped his arm over the back of the seat. “Will I embarrass you if I tell you I admire you? The way you listen to people, the way you want to help?”

She smiled more emphatically. “Yes, you will. But thanks. For everything. You’re right, you know. I do need a friend.” She looked at him seriously. “Thanks. For letting me be just Clare. Instead of the Reverend Fergusson. It’s been a long time since I—it’s a rare thing to have someone you can just be yourself with, you know. Your whole self.”

He was going to make a crack about hanging out with heathens more, but he couldn’t, not with her looking at him that way. He shifted his gaze to the dashboard, unable to meet her eyes. “Good night, Clare.”

“Good night, Russ.” She opened the door and slipped from the cab.

“Clare—” he said. She paused, her hand on the door, the snow swirling around her and into the passenger seat. Her hair stirred in the wind, already hung with feathery snowflakes.

“Nothing,” he said. “Talk to you tomorrow.” He waited until he had seen her inside the kitchen before he shifted the truck into gear. She waved at him from the window. He pulled out of her snow-drifted driveway and drove away from the rectory at a much faster speed than was safe.

CHAPTER 17

Clare paused in front of the parish bulletin board, a packing box of Christmas banners propped against one hip. Still woolly-headed from the late night and high emotion, she had tackled the messy, mindless task of digging the church’s Christmas decorations out of the undercroft this morning. The Sunday-best of her parishioners’ photographs contrasted with her rumpled, sweaty, dusty state and reminded her that she would have to wash and change in order to be presentable. The picture of Karen and Geoffrey Burns caught her eye. They looked so happy and relaxed in the photo, with the kind of sleek contentment that more than enough money brings.

For all of Geoff’s raging and Karen’s desperation, Clare still couldn’t believe that their desire for a child could lead them into murder. She had seen them with that baby in the hospital, seen the instant love and tenderness that was ordinarily lost in the brassy blare of their personalities. Within their small universe of two, they were gentle, caring people. It struck her that perhaps they needed a child most of all so they could show that vulnerable side to another human being.

“Reverend Clare?” Lois’s voice broke her concentration. She hoisted the box higher and walked into the secretary’s office.

“A few messages for you,” Lois said. “Karen Burns called, and Mr. Felton’s daughter, to reschedule your visit. He’s going in for some tests and he won’t be back to the Infirmary until tomorrow.”

“Anything serious?”

“She didn’t sound too concerned. The last one was Kristen McWhorter. Is she related to the—”

“Her sister. What did she say?”

“She’s going to see her mother, and wondered if you’d come along.” Lois pushed the pink message memos across her desk. “Her number’s there.”

“Thanks.” Clare dropped the box against the wall and took the paper slips. “Say, Lois, you don’t know anyone who could get the mold spots out of these felt banners, do you?”

The church secretary sniffed a few times. “That’s what that smell is.” She tilted her head so that her perfectly cut bob swung sideways. “You’ve come to the right person. Not that I ever have to deal with mold, you understand, but I do know the best dry cleaner in the three-county area.”

“Somehow, I knew you would.”

In her office, Clare flung herself into her chair with a creak and a snap. She picked up two of the pink papers and held them up, one in each hand, as if weighing Karen Burns against Kristen McWhorter. She looked out the window at the diamond-pieced sky, longing for a four-hour nap. Steam off the smell of moldy old boxes, burrow under her grandmother’s quilt, turn her Thelonious Monk CD on low and forget about the world for awhile.

Too bad the inward voice that gently and relentlessly urged her on could find her, even under a Baltimore quilt. And make itself heard even over jazz from the ’68 Monmartre session. Heck, God was probably playing at that session. She picked up the phone and dialed.

“Kristen? It’s Clare Fergusson. You left a message for me?”

“Yeah. I was hoping . . . I have to go see my mom today to start sorting things out. I was wondering . . . would you come with me?”

“Are you sure you don’t want some privacy with your mother? I mean, if you want to do more than go over the funeral plans with her. You two have some very intense issues to discuss.”

Kristen groaned over the phone. “Yeah. The thing is, I think if you were there I’d, you know, be more likely to get to the tough stuff. I know it’s asking a lot . . .”

“No, I’d be more than happy to come if I can be helpful, Kristen. It’s not asking a lot. I’m glad you thought to call me.”

There was a pause. “About last night? I’m sorry I got all weird on you. I was just . . . it was all too much, you know?”

“I know. Believe me, I understand.” Clare pulled her oversized agenda toward her. “I’ve got a counseling session at three, but I’m free until then. Give me the directions to your mother’s apartment, and I’ll meet you there.” She scribbled the address on a piece of scrap paper and wrote KRISTEN: NOON in the agenda. “Okay. See you in about half an hour.”

Someone had hung a pair of plastic wreaths on the front doors of 162 South Street. The peeling apartment facades must have been workingman’s flats a hundred years ago. Utilitarian and cheap back then, and not improved by the last thirty years of unemployment and neglect. Still, Clare could see evidence of the coming Christmas as she fishtailed slowly down the street. Crayon-colored reindeer taped in windows, strings of fairy lights wrapped around the posts of one battered and sagging porch.

She parked as close to the curb as she could. No sign of Kristen’s black Civic. She kept her engine running to ward off the cold and turned up the Top Forty station on her radio. Everything was calm in the afternoon’s watery sunlight, but she couldn’t be far from where Russ had answered a domestic disturbance call last Friday when she had gone on patrol with him.

A girl with a toddler balanced on her hip trudged past Clare, ignoring the unusual sports car, intent on keeping her cigarette ash from blowing into the child’s face. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and Clare wondered if it was choice or a lack of them that kept her out of school. This was the sort of young woman and child her proposed program could help, if she could only get the vestry behind her. She blew out her breath in frustration.

A slamming door jerked her back to the here and now. Kristen had arrived. Clare killed the engine and slid out of her car. Kristen walked around the MG, her eyes wide, nodding. “This is your car?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Wow. Way cool. I didn’t think priests had enough money for this sort of thing.”

Clare laughed. “I don’t. I’ve had it for seven years and if something big goes, I’ll be in deep pockets. I really ought to sell it and get something more practical.”

“Must be lousy in the snow.” Kristen opened the passenger-side door and peered in at the leather interior. “But, oh, man, it sure has some style.”

Clare caressed the curve of the hood. “It sure does, doesn’t it?”

Kristen clicked the lock and slammed the door shut. She pointed to Clare’s side. “You oughtta lock up around here.” She glanced up at the third story windows while Clare complied.

“Are you ready for this, Kristen?” Clare asked, picking her way over the sidewalk snowbank to keep her boots dry.

“No. I feel kinda sick to my stomach, to tell you the truth. But I’m here, so hey. Let’s do it.”

Mrs. McWhorter buzzed them up without comment. The stairs were steep and poorly lit, and Clare wondered if this place could pass a municipal safety inspection. Did Millers Kill have safety inspectors?

The door to 4A swung open at Kristen’s knock.

“Hello, Ma,” she said, her voice forcibly calm. Clare tried to school her shock at the size of the woman who embraced the ramrod-stiff girl.

Brenda McWhorter pulled away from her surviving daughter, her expression a mixture of hurt and frustration. “Aw, Kristen, don’t be like that.” Her eyes flickered to where Clare stood in the hall. “Aw, now don’t tell me you’ve brought a cop with you. Krissie . . .”

“She’s not a cop, Ma, she’s a priest. She’s the one who was there the night they found Katie’s—the night they found Katie. She’s been helping me out. This is Reverend Clare Fergusson.”

Clare stuck out her hand. “Mrs. McWhorter,” she said, rummaging for something to say. “Pleased to meet you” and “Sorry about your husband” seemed grotesquely inappropriate under the circumstances. “I’m so very sorry about your recent losses,” she said. “From everything I’ve heard, Katie was an exceptional girl. She’ll be missed.” And as for your husband, good riddance to bad rubbish, Grandmother Fergusson added.

Brenda McWhorter shook hands and led Kristen and Clare into the apartment. They bunched awkwardly in front of a massive maple sideboard. “Well, go ahead, take your coats off,” Mrs. McWhorter said, gesturing toward a row of hooks by the door. “Same place, nothin’s changed since you left.”

Kristen rolled her eyes but obediently gathered up Clare’s bomber jacket and hung it alongside her own bulky coat.

“What interesting pieces you have,” Clare said. “They look like antiques.”

Brenda surveyed her kingdom. “They were my parents’. Came from the big farmhouse we had out toward Cossayaharie. We had to sell it when my dad passed, but I kept some of the furniture.”

Kristen plunked herself into the narrow Victorian settee and crossed her arms. “What are you gonna do now that he’s gone, Ma? Move back out to Aunt Pat’s? Get a job? What?”

Her mother sat, an operation that required her to lower her center of gravity over a well-used, well-sprung chair and then drop in a controlled fall. “Well, honey, I thought I’d stay right here. I know that we’ve had some problems in the past, but I figured now your daddy’s gone you and I can take up again, get to be friends. I got enough money to keep me . . .”

Clare sat on a cane-seated ladder chair, her face composed and pleasant, wondering how another human being could let herself get that large. She shifted in her chair. No, that wasn’t fair. Not everyone grew up in an active family and started off in a career that demanded physical fitness. On the other hand, basic self-respect should get you off the sofa and on your feet—she twitched. She didn’t call alcoholism a lack of self-respect. She shouldn’t see obesity that way, either. If some people didn’t have the discipline to push away from the table after a third helping—her cheeks warmed at her persistent failure of compassion. Dear God, she thought, help me to accept as Christ accepted. Keep my mind on helping, not judging. And remind me to put in a five-mile run this evening.

Kristen was going over her mother’s financial situation, asking to look over the pension and insurance documents, quizzing her on any other benefits. Mrs. McWhorter was at best vague about money matters.

“Ma, you’re going to have to learn to keep a checkbook now. Come on down to the bank tomorrow and I’ll set you up. That way, I can help you balance your account for awhile. You got the information on the CDs and the savings? Can I see it, please?”

Mrs. McWhorter heaved herself up from her chair and waddled down the hall. “Isn’t she smart?” she tossed back to Clare.

Clare turned to Kristen, still sitting back with her arms crossed defensively over her chest. “You are smart about finances,” she said.

“Everybody’s good about something, they say. I like it. I like numbers.”

“So consistent, aren’t they? So easy to control.” Kristen shot her a look. Clare went on. “It can be a lot easier to throw yourself into your work than to face personal problems, have you noticed that? It’s comfortable and distracting.”

Kristen shot up from the settee and threaded her way through the heavy furniture to the pass-through kitchen. “You want something to drink? I know Ma’s got soda in here.”

“I’m fine. Are you going to ask your mother about what she’d like for the funerals?”

Brenda McWhorter lumbered up the hallway, a sheaf of papers and envelopes in her hand. She stopped dead at Clare’s words. “Aw, Krissie,” she said. “We do gotta talk about that. You’re gonna take care of the details, aren’t you, honey? You know I’m no good at that sort of thing.”

Kristen slammed the refrigerator door with enough force to set the contents rattling. “Yeah, Ma, I’m gonna take care of the details. I know you’re no good at that sort of thing.” Her voice began to crack. “You don’t like to deal with life’s crappy little details.” She slammed a liter bottle of orange soda on the counter and knocked over two plastic glasses in the drainboard before grabbing hold of one.

“Krissie . . .”

“Ma, I’m the kid here, remember? You’re the mom. You’re supposed to be taking care of me, not the other way around.” The soda slopped over the pebbled sides of the glass. “You were supposed to take care of me and Katie and I gotta tell you, Ma, you did a piss-poor job of it.” A barking sob escaped her before she covered her mouth.

“Krissie . . .” Brenda’s hands fluttered ineffectually. Clare suddenly saw, very clearly, the small woman inside that bulky disguise. Had she done that to herself? Or was it more of Darrell’s handiwork? “I tried . . . you don’t understand. You never understood what it was like to need someone.” She looked down at the paperwork charting how her and Darrell’s money had grown over the years. She looked beseechingly toward Clare. “In a lot of ways, he was a real good husband and father.”

Clare clenched her teeth tightly to keep her gorge down.

“Ma, I gotta know. Was he doing Katie? Did he start messing with her after I moved out?”

“Kristen! How can you say that!”

Her daughter leaned over the speckled countertop, hands braced. “I know. We never say that, do we? We none of us ever came right out and said what was happening, did we? Not even Katie and me. Did he, Ma? Did he?”

Brenda dropped her gaze to the carpet and shook her head. “He . . . I dunno if Katie told him something or if it was . . . if it was just you. He was good around Katie.” She looked up at her daughter again. “I couldn’t lose him, Krissie. I didn’t think . . .” She looked at the papers in her hand. “I didn’t think about it, that’s all. You gotta learn to overlook some things when you’re married. He took good care of me, and he loved me.” She started to cry.

“Aw, Ma. Jesus, Ma. You didn’t think about it.” Kristen plodded around the counter and put her arms as far around her mother as she could. “Ma, he used all of us.” Her voice cracked, but she went on, “I made myself into the kind of person who will never get used again, and you can, too. It’s not too late.”

Her mother shook her head. “I ain’t tough like you nor smart like Katie. I’ve always needed somebody to help me get along. I know you hate him, and I can’t blame you, you got that right. But I don’t know what I’ll do without him. God damn him for thinking he could make one last big deal.”

Clare stepped forward involuntarily. What?

Kristen wiped her eyes and nose with her sleeve. “Geez, him and his big deals . . .”

“Kristen.” The girl looked at Clare, red-nosed and blotchy-eyed. “If your father was killed while involved in one last ‘big deal,’ whoever he was dealing with may have been his killer.” Brenda jerked her head off her daughter’s shoulder. “It may have been Katie’s killer.”

Kristen and Clare both looked at Brenda, who stepped back out of her daughter’s hold. “No,” she said. “I don’t wanna borrow trouble, Krissie, and neither do you.” She darted a glance at Clare. “I already said my piece to the cops, I don’t got anything else to say.”

“Ma . . .” Brenda shook her head, backing away another step. Kristen’s eyes narrowed. “Ma,” she hissed, “if you know something and don’t tell me, I’m heading out this door and you can bury Dad in a shoebox by yourself for all the help you’ll get from me.”

Clare laid a hand on the girl’s arm. “I don’t think your mother’s reluctant so much as she’s scared. Is that it, Mrs. McWhorter?”

The woman shifted from foot to foot, her gaze darting from Kristen to Clare to Kristen again, her face a mask of misery. “I don’t want no trouble from the police,” she said.

“The police will have to know what you tell us,” Clare said, “but I don’t see that they need to know who told us.” She caught Brenda’s eyes, wide and white, and made herself still, wiping out everything she already knew about the woman, her whole body open, listening.

Clare held Brenda’s gaze until the older woman sighed and quivered in relaxation. “Darrell said he knew who the baby’s father was. Said he had surprised Katie and him together last winter, in a car.” She looked at the sheaf of papers trembling in her hand. “He said he could get money from the guy. He called him that afternoon, that last afternoon.”

“Darrell called someone?”

“Oh my God, Ma, do you know the phone number? Do you know his name?”

Brenda’s face quivered. “He didn’t tell me none of the details, honey. You know I’m not good—”

“Not good with details. Yeah, I know.”

“There was a phone number written down.” Clare’s heart squeezed with excitement. Now they were getting somewhere. “I thought about doing something with it, but I wound up throwing it into the disposal.” Clare couldn’t help a small groan of frustration. “I was scared. I figured whoever this man was, he’d killed your father and maybe your sister and who’s to say he couldn’t kill me, too. I may not be smart, but I know when to keep my mouth shut.”

“Mrs. McWhorter, when Darrell told you that he was going to get in touch with this man, did either one of you consider that you were going to be making a deal with the man who probably killed your daughter?” Clare knew she was speaking too sharply, but Brenda’s monstrous self-absorption was sucking the patience out of her.

“Well . . .” Brenda looked uncertainly at Clare. “You know, there wasn’t nothin’ gonna bring Katie back, was there? And maybe Darrell would have turned him in after he’d gotten what he wanted.” She opened her hands. “I didn’t really . . . think about it.”

CHAPTER 18

Russ was dropping piles of papers on the big scarred-oak table in the briefing room when Mark Durkee strolled in, fifteen minutes early for the evening shift. “Hey, Chief. How y’doing?”

“This goddamn case is giving me a goddamn headache,” Russ informed him, slapping down a manila folder next to a reprint of Katie McWhorter’s high school photo.

“Actually, I was thinking more like, how are you feeling after that shootout at the Stoner’s place yesterday? Everything cool?”

Lyle MacAuley stopped in the doorway, already changed into his civvies. “Yeah, Chief. That post-cow stress disorder can be a killer.” Mark laughed. “Maybe you ought to have yourself checked out,” Lyle went on helpfully, “make sure you didn’t pick up any hoof-and-mouth disease.”

Russ gave both of them what he hoped was a killing look.

Mark laughed harder. “Really, Chief, we were worried about you.”

Lyle nudged past the younger officer. “Hell, Mark, it’ll take a lot more than some pumped-up kid with a shotgun to take out the chief here. It takes a solid ton of muscle, hide, and milk to make the man sweat.” He leaned over the assorted folders and files, his bushy, graying eyebrows rising in interest. “Whatcha got here?”

“I’m drowning in reports on the McWhorter case. I’m sorting everything out, trying to shake something loose.” Russ slid a broken stick of chalk across the table to Lyle. “Get up to the board there, Lyle, help me time line this thing out.”

Lyle moved to the school-room sized blackboard hanging on the windowless wall of the briefing room.

Russ opened the medical examiner’s report on Katie McWhorter. “Friday, December fourth.” Lyle chalked the date in the upper left-hand corner. “Sometime between seven and nine o’clock, the killer—no, wait, better make that killer A—bashes Katie’s head in and drives off.” Underneath the time, Lyle added “A→Katie McW.”

“A could be one or both of the Burnses. They have no alibi other than each other for Friday night. It could have been Darrell McWhorter—”

“Those names he gave you checked out, though,” Lyle reminded him. “Dave Jackson?” He stepped back to the table and ran his finger over the single-sheeted investigative reports. “Here it is. He was ready to affidavit that he and his wife had been with the McWhorters from seven to eleven that night.”

“Yeah, I know. Okay, erase McWhorter. Ethan Stoner could have done it, too. He had the truck, he had the time, and he was mighty riled up about something that night when I saw him around ten or so.”

“I took his initial statement,” Mark said. “He said his friends would testify that he’d been with them all that evening.”

Lyle and Russ looked at each other. “Is it me, or does that boy seem awful young to you?” Lyle asked.

Russ pushed the bridge of his glasses up his nose. “I’m sure his friends would say just that, Mark. And I’m just as sure that five minutes of grilling would bust that story wide open if the Stoner boy hadn’t been babysat all night by his buddies.”

Lyle wrote down the name.

“Ethan’s blood type checks out as the possible father of Katie’s baby. But,” Russ tapped the hospital’s test report, “Noble showed Katie’s picture around to the local motel owners and found that the guy who runs the Sleeping Hollow Motor Inn saw Katie with some man who wasn’t Ethan Stoner right around Thanksgiving. Had a record of the car and everything. We ran a match on the ’86 Nova they were driving. Turns out it’s one of Katie’s roommate’s cars. We haven’t been able to match the name and the numbers on the license the guy showed the clerk, which leads me to believe it’s a fake I.D. So, Katie and whoever stayed three days, and when they left, they took a blanket with them that’s an exact match to one of the blankets the baby was wrapped in.”

“So Ethan’s not the father?” Mark hitched a hip onto a wide sill and leaned back against the wire mesh covering the lower half of the tall, turn-of-the-century window.

“I don’t like Ethan as the father,” Russ said. “It doesn’t fit with what we know about Katie. She broke up with him clean, and according to her sister, she was nice to him, but not friends with him, after that. She doesn’t strike me as a girl who’d have jumped in the sack with her old boyfriend on a whim.”

“Doesn’t mean Ethan couldn’t have killed her when he found out about the baby,” Lyle said. “He wouldn’t be the first rejected guy to build up a fantasy about getting together with a girl and then turn violent when reality intrudes. And let’s face it, we’ve seen he’s capable of picking up a gun and threatening to kill someone.”

“I know. That’s why I haven’t discounted him as her murderer.” Russ flipped open the medical examiner’s report on Darrell McWhorter. “Let’s take a look at the next one. Darrell McWhorter meets with the Burnses on the morning of December eight.” Lyle noted the date. “He tells them he and his wife are keeping the baby, because it’s the last link to their little girl or some cowpuckie like that. Sometime between eight and ten that night, he’s shot to death by the side of the Old Schuylerville Road. Probably while on his way down to Albany. In Albany, some man shows up at Katie’s house around ten o’clock, says he’s her father and ransacks her room.”

“It couldn’t have been Ethan Stoner, because he was sitting in the county jail in Glens Falls at the time,” Mark reminded him.

Lyle tapped the chalk stick against the Burnses’ names. “How ’bout these two?”

“How ’bout them?” Russ said. “Again, no alibi except each other. Reverend Fergusson and I drove past their place at eleven-thirty that night, and both cars were in the drive.”

“It only takes an hour to get to Albany,” Lyle said. “An hour and a half in bad weather.”

“Was the Northway speed limit reduced to forty-five last night?” Russ asked.

“Nope. Snow wasn’t that bad, the plows kept up with it.”

“So it’d be tight, but possible.”

“Maybe they have a winter rat,” Mark said.

Lyle and Russ looked at each other again. Lyle nodded thoughtfully. It was a common practice for people to protect their good cars from the ravages of rock salt, potholes, and cycles of freezing and thawing water by garaging them between December and March and driving a winter rat instead; any junky old heap with a heater and a defroster that worked.

“If they did,” Mark went on, “One of them could have taken it out while the other one stayed home, parking the cars in the drive, turning on the lights, maybe even making phone calls to establish an alibi.”

“Is it just me, or does that boy seem awfully smart to you?” Russ asked. Lyle grinned. “Okay, Mark,” Russ continued, “run with it. Get into the DMV records and find out how many vehicles are registered to Mr. and Mrs. Burns. Don’t forget to check any that might be under her maiden name. Or registered to their law practice instead of to them as individuals.”

“If it was Geoff Burns who tossed the student apartment in Albany,” Lyle said, “what was he after?”

“Maybe there was something there that would tie him to Katie’s murder,” Russ said. “A letter, a note she wrote to herself—something.” He leaned one-handed against the table and tapped the folder containing the Burnses’ statements. “The way I see it, during the negotiations with the Burnses, Darrell thinks of whatever it is that could prove Geoff Burns killed his daughter. So he calls everything off. Tightens the screws, makes the Burnses see he’s going to play hardball. Then he calls Burns later, tells him about the evidence or whatever, and arranges the meeting. On the way to Albany, Burns shoots him.”

“Burns shoots him because . . .”

“Hell, I don’t know. To cover up the blackmail? Because Darrell pissed him off bad enough? Geoff Burns has a temper like a bantam rooster, and believe me, Darrell McWhorter was the kind of guy you could easily get pissed off at.”

Lyle took aim at Mark with a half-cocked finger. “Did you ask ’em about owning any firearms when you spoke with ’em last night?”

“She’s got a nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson registered in her name. Said she keeps it in the trunk of her car for when she’s traveling long distances alone. I didn’t even ask to see it at the time. It was late, and the chief had said to go real carefully.”

Russ nodded. “We’re gonna need a warrant to be able to test that weapon, sure enough.”

Lyle crossed his arms over his flannel shirt and looked at the worn-down green chalkboard, where abbreviations and arrows connected the Burnses to Katie and Darrell McWhorter. “You think you got enough to convince Judge Rys-wick to let you take a look at that gun? These are a couple of lawyers, remember. People like him. Not the usual type to get hauled up on a murder charge.”

Russ sighed. “Dunno. Maybe.” He pointed at the three events Lyle had written down and circled. “We’ve got an abandoned baby. We’ve got a dead mother and a dead grandfather. So, do we have three separate suspects, one who fathered the baby, one who killed Katie, and one who killed Darrell?”

“Too complicated. I don’t like it,” Lyle said.

“So maybe we have one suspect. The same man who was at the motel with Katie when her baby was presumably born, later killed her and her father. It’s a lot neater, but we’ve got squat evidence.” He rapped his knuckles on Katie McWhorter’s autopsy report. “Or we have one man, identity unknown, who is Cody’s father, and one other suspect who did both the McWhorters.” He smiled one-sided at Mark, who squinted up at the blackboard’s crisscrossing lines. “Maybe I should take the chalkboard in with me to Ryswick, you think?”

“I think finding another car will help.” Lyle dropped the chalk into Russ’s hand and headed for the door. “Maybe we’ll luck out and find a bloody baseball bat locked in the trunk.”

“Oh, yeah,” Russ said. “A signed confession, too. Get out of here, stop bucking for overtime.”

Lyle rounded the corner, waving good-bye. Over the sound of his boots clumping down the wooden stairs, Russ could hear him mooing.

“That guy,” he said to Mark. “Tell you what, you do the run-down on the Burnses’ registration, and I’ll cover your patrol time until you’re done. I’ll just drive the squad car home afterwards if I’m not near the station.”

“You don’t have to be home?”

“Nope. I’m batching it until Linda gets back on Saturday.”

“You got a deal.”

The streets had been plowed clear early in the morning, and the day’s sun, though intermittant, had warmed things up enough to dry up the slush. It was a pleasure to drive without having to pay too much attention to the condition of the road. Russ headed south, where the scenery opened up into long valleys between easy, rolling hills. The lights of farmhouses and barnyards scattered across the landscape, familiar and comforting. To the west, and behind him, to the north, the Piedmont rose in wave after rounded wave. The great hills broke the sky into two darknesses, the one above glittering with stars, the one below glowing, here and there, with snow.

He loved this part of the world more than any other, loved the sight of those old hills surrounding him. There was something unknowable about them, a mystery that had been there when the first Dutch and Scottish settlers had carved farms for themselves along the rivers running out of the vast wilderness. With the dark hills looming and the lights few and far between, it was easy to imagine what it had been like nearly three hundred years ago. The Adirondacks were still a wild and sometimes dangerous place, sparsely settled, with few roads in and out of the great Adirondack Park, a wilderness stretching thousands of square miles over ten counties. Every year, a few unprepared or incautious people went into these mountains and never came out.

He thought about that fight he had had with Linda their first winter here, when she was planning on driving up to Gore Mountain to consult on a curtain order for somebody’s chalet. He had insisted she pack the car with a blanket, a self-heater, a flare, and even rations. She couldn’t believe a stalled engine or a car in a snow-covered ditch could be fatal. He had won that one, and was rewarded, when she got back, by her casual observation that the chalet hadn’t had another neighbor within twenty miles. Twenty steep, single-lane, hardly plowed miles.

“Ten-fifty to Ten-fifty-seven, over.” The crackle of the radio brought him back to his squad car.

“Ten-fifty-seven, go,” he said.

“Mark’s all done, Chief,” Harlene said, “and he says to tell you he hit the jackpot. There is another car.”

“Yes!” He pumped the radio receiver in truimph. “Give that man a kiss, Harlene.”

“Well, if I gotta . . .”

“I’ll sign off and take this unit back to my house if he’s ready to roll.”

“Okay, I’ll log you off duty. You had a phone call a while back. Reverend Fergusson.”

“Clare called?”

“Ayeh. Said she wanted to talk with you about the McWhorter case.”

“Oh. That all?”

“Yes, that’s all. She’s a smart girl, she knows better than to waste a police dispatcher’s time with a lot of chit-chat.”

“Uh huh. Don’t forget who signs your paychecks, honey.”

“The town clerk. I won’t.”

He laughed. “Okay, thanks, Harlene. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He realized a second after he clicked the unit off that he didn’t have Clare’s number on him. He thought about calling Harlene back and getting it, but it was only fifteen, twenty minutes into town. He’d feel better if he could check up on her, make sure she was doing okay after everything that had happened last night. And while he was there, it would be worthwhile checking that MG of hers, making sure she was prepared for a winter breakdown. He swung the squad car across lanes and headed back north, toward the ancient hills half-hiding the winter stars.

St. Alban’s was dark when he swung past it from Church Street onto Elm. For a moment, he thought the rectory was dark, too, until he saw the lights shining out the back of the house. Of course, it was seven o’clock. She was probably making dinner. Nothing like showing up uninvited and unexpected at suppertime. He parked behind her car and trudged along the beaten-down snow. Didn’t she have anyone to plow for her? He kicked his boots against the lowest stairstep before mounting to the door.

The kitchen door was as uncurtained as the rest of the house, and Russ could see the rector of St. Alban’s sipping red wine and cooking up a storm on her gas stove. She was wearing jeans and a University of Virgina sweatshirt hacked off around the waist. From the bulk of the sleeves pushed up her arms, it must have belonged to one of her hulking brothers at one point. He could hear music through the glass, the pounding of the bass vibrating throught his palm when he touched it. Some group from the ’eighties, Sons of the West or something, singing, “Live it up, live it up, Ronnie’s got a new gun,” and as he watched, smiling helplessly, Clare shimmied back and forth shaking some sort of dried herb from a little glass bottle into an enameled pot on the stove. He started laughing at the point where the music blasted, “You can take all your flags and march ’em up and down,” because she did just that, swinging her hips and jabbing a wooden spoon in the air. Russ knocked loudly on the door before he could scare her by suddenly appearing in her window when she turned around.

He startled her anyway. She spun at the sound, dropping the spoon, her stockinged feet slipping on the floor. She didn’t screech, but she did clap a hand dramatically to her chest as she reached for the door. “Holy cow, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” she said, standing in the doorway.

“Sorry.” He retreated down a step, so her eyes were almost level with his. Coming over in person suddenly seemed intrusive. “I’m sorry, I should have just called.”

“I tried to reach you at the station,” she said, crossing her arms around herself against the cold. A gust of wind stirred her hair. “Good lord, it’s freezing out here. Please, come in.”

He paused. “Just for a minute.” He stomped more snow off on the top step. There was a wide rubber mat inside the door and beside it, a cardboard moving box held rubber rain-boots and a pair of wet running shoes. A coat tree tilted precariously toward the telephone, weighed down by the Millers Kill police-issue parka she still hadn’t returned.

She shut the door behind him. Her arms were still crossed, the wooden spoon clenched in one fist. “Please. Take your things off. Can I—oh, dang!” A dollop of tomato sauce had dripped off the spoon onto the worn white linoleum. Clare grabbed a rag and swiped at it while Russ shucked off his parka and hung it on the opposite side of the tree. There was a calendar thumbtacked into the wall next to the phone, picturing a stained glass window. There were saints listed in most of the days, and each Sunday was highlighted in red.

Clare tossed the rag into a bland, stainless steel sink, and replaced the spoon in the pot. She leaned one hip against the counter, her arms crossed again, while Russ rocked back and forth in his boots, reluctant to tread muck all over her floor, hesitant about taking them off.

“Oh, take off your boots and sit a spell,” Clare said, as if he were a book she could read. Bent over unlacing, he could hear her deep breath. “I wanted to apologize for last night,” she said. “I never just break down like that. It was inappropriate and poorly timed and I’m sorry.” It sounded as if she had practiced the speech.

Russ straightened, sliding his boots off heel by heel. “Never? You never break down and cry?”

A flush rose in her cheeks. “Okay, almost never. Certainly not with someone I haven’t known for very long.” She clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, this is embarrassing.”

He sat in one of the four wooden chairs clustered around the kitchen table. “Funny. It doesn’t feel as if we haven’t known each other for very long. Does it?”

She blinked. “Honestly? No. It doesn’t.”

He spread his hands. “Remember what you asked me last night? ‘Who do you go to when you feel this way?’ ”

She smiled faintly, then laughed, a breathing out kind of laugh. “You’re doing me, aren’t you? That’s supposed to be me. Okay, okay, you’re right. I guess I don’t need to apologize for dumping on you.”

“I bet you’d call it ‘sharing’ or ‘venting’ if somebody did it to you.”

“Hmmmm.” She turned to the stove to transfer sauteed mushrooms from an iron skillet to the sauce pot.

The rectory kitchen was a faded white, with a dull and unpolished white linoleum floor, unornamented white cupboard doors, a serviceable white refrigerator, and a matching dishwasher next to the sink. The whole room had been turned out as cheaply and inoffensively as possible around fifteen or twenty years ago, he guessed. Reminded him of army housing.

Clare had evidently dealt with the blandness by littering the refrigerator door with photos, clippings, and cartoons, and hanging up a series of framed prints, each one featuring a single vegetable: an improbably wide carrot, a voluptuous eggplant, an aggressive tomato.

Crimson and yellow canisters marched across the white and gray-veined countertops, accompanied by thick glass jars filled with exotically shaped pastas. The sauce pot she was vigorously stirring was a startling cobalt blue, and whatever was in it, it smelled to him like he had died and gone to Provence.

She turned back to him in time to see the expression on his face. She laughed. “Hungry? Why don’t you stay for supper?”

“Oh, no. No, I couldn’t,” he said, as unconvincingly as possible.

She opened the refrigerator door, retrieved a wedge of cheese and plunked it on a cutting board in front of him. “You can grate the Parmesan,” she said. She rummaged in one of the drawers a moment before handing him what looked like the top of an egg beater with no beaters attached. “Just stick a chunk of cheese in that opening there and turn the handle,” she said, pointing. “It does all the work. Grates hazelnuts, too.”

She opened the oven door, releasing a cloud of bread-flavored steam. His stomach rumbled at the smell like a dog whining to be fed. “Almost done,” she said, shutting the door and retrieving her wine glass. She leaned against the counter. “I went with Kristen McWhorter today to her parent’s apartment.”

“That dump? Jesus, you—sorry—you shouldn’t be wandering around that neighborhood by yourself. And for God’s sake, stay away from that family until we’ve closed on whoever killed McWhorter.”

“For God’s sake? For God’s sake I should stay away?” She grinned at him hugely. He shook his head, pushed his glasses up his nose and applied himself to the overcomplicated grating gadget she had stuck him with.

“As I was saying, I met Brenda McWhorter, and she told me that between the time I saw him at St. Alban’s and the time he showed up dead, Darrell McWhorter got in touch with the man he said was Cody’s father. Evidently, he had seen the two of them together some time before Katie left for college, although Brenda didn’t know anything about it. Obviously, he thought he could get money out of the guy by threatening to reveal his identity.”

“What?” He let the grater drop to the cutting board, a pungent chunk of Parmesan still stuck in its basket. “He made a call to Cody’s father? Was she sure? It couldn’t have been to Katie’s killer? Darrell knew who had killed her and was preparing to blackmail him?”

She tucked her hair behind her ears. “He told Brenda he knew who had fathered Katie’s baby. She didn’t know his name or their plans for meeting.” She grimaced. “The woman was so self-absorbed, it was scary. She hadn’t even been bothered that Darrell was going to cut a deal with the man who might very well be her daughter’s killer.”

He picked up the grater and pressed the cheese further into the opening. “That’s assuming we’re dealing with one person. That Katie’s lover was also her killer. And Darrell’s.”

She sipped her wine. “It certainly indicates they were one and the same.”

He finally jammed the Parmesan in and slid the cover shut. He cranked hard, nearly wrenching the gadget from his hand. He gripped it more tightly and tried again. The nutty-sweet smell of Parmesan burst from the grater as he showered the cutting board with fine shavings. “I was going with this scenario: Geoff Burns killed Katie, Darrell had something that linked Burns to her murder and threatened him, Burns met with Darrell and iced him. Literally.”

“But if Darrell was blackmailing the father of the baby, and not Geoff Burns . . .”

“Maybe he was working both of them. There’s no guarantee whoever it was met with Darrell, after all. Maybe he had the wrong guy, anyway. What if he was thinking of some boy she walked home from school with, or went to the sock hop with?”

Clare pulled a chair from under the table and straddled it backwards, still holding her wine glass. “Listen to you. Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”

“No. What is it, like a Columbian necktie?”

“It’s a principle of logic that says that the simplest theory is usually the right one. Which is simpler, that Geoff Burns killed Katie, negotiated with Darrell, was blackmailed by Darrell who also and at the same time was blackmailing Cody’s biological father, and shot him? Oh, also rifling Katie’s student digs and returning home in time for us to see both their cars in their driveway at eleven thirty?” She pointed a finger at him. “Or is it simpler to say there’s one man, who fathered Katie’s child, and in a panic to cover it up, killed both Katie and her dad, the only two people who could reveal his identity?”

“Murder isn’t something you can apply principals of logic to, Clare. Bad guys kill people for reasons that are too stupid to believe.”

“I’m not saying his reasoning was logical. I’m saying we need to be logical.”

“We do?” He shook a last few flakes of Parmesan free and laid the grater on the board. “We?”

She pushed back her chair and took the cutting board to the counter. “You know what I mean.” She pointed to one of the cupboards. “Plates are in there.”

Dinner was a lamb stew thick with winter vegetables, garnished with Parmesan. He went through half the loaf of golden-crusted bread sopping up the sauce. “Where’d you learn to cook like this?” he asked between mouthfuls.

“My grandmother Fergusson. We went to live with her and Pawpaw when I was seven. I was a handful. A tomboy in a household of Southern ladies and mad at the world to boot. One day she caught me dropping eggs off the veranda to see what would happen to ’em. She marched me into the kitchen and tied about an acre of apron around me and said, ‘I’m going to teach you to put those eggs to better use, missy.’ ” She smiled. “First thing she taught me to make was meringue. Talk about starting at the top.”

He grinned. “I can just see you. You must have been a cute kid.”

“Lord, no. I was a homely little girl. My sister got the looks.”

He shook his head. “There isn’t such a thing as a homely little girl.” He tore off another hunk of bread. “And I’ve seen pictures of your sister. She was pretty, yeah, but pretty like hundreds of other girls. You,” he dabbed the bread in the air as if sketching her, “you’re . . . memorable. Who you are just shines through your face.” He popped the bread in his mouth and watched, amused, as she blushed bright red. “You’re one fine-looking woman, Reverend.” She clapped her hands over her cheeks. He laughed.

She snorted loudly and jumped up from the table to ladle more stew into her bowl. “I should have you meet my mother. She loooves,” she drawled out the word, “a flatterin’ man.” She turned and batted her eyelashes hard enough to create a breeze. “More stew, Chief?”

He surrendered his bowl. “Yeah. Sounds like you miss your family.”

“Sometimes.” She put his stew in front of him and sat down. “Sometimes I’m glad we have some distance between us. My decision to enter the priesthood, coming on the heels of Grace’s death, was hard for them. It wasn’t what they had wanted for me.”

“You can’t blame them. It’s a lot to give up.” He blew on a spoonful of stew. “All parents want their kids to have the same things they had. Marriage and a family. I know my mom regrets that Linda and I never had any children.”

She leaned back in her chair, her head cocked. “Marriage and a family?”

“You know, giving that up to be a priest.”

She grinned, then quickly covered her smile with her hand. “I think you’re under some misapprehension here. Episcopal priests don’t take a vow of chastity. We can get married, have kids, the whole nine yards.”

“What?” He dropped his spoon into the bowl and stared at her. “But the old priest, the one you replaced, he was there forever and he never—”

“Some priests choose to remain celibate. But it’s just that, a choice. Not an obligation.”

“Huh. If that don’t beat all.” He watched as she devoured a wad of sauce-soaked bread. He felt unsettled and annoyed, as if she had deliberately kept the truth from him. He tried to picture her going out for a night on the town with a man and his mind drew a blank. “You’d think they’d just call you ministers, then, instead of all this priest business and the white collar and all.”

She sighed, pushed her chair back and headed for the living room. “Hang on,” she said. She reemerged a minute later to hand him a large paperback.

“The History and Customs of the Episcopal Church in America,” he read. “Sounds like a real page turner.”

“If I can read up on the Iroquois Nation, you can read up on my church. Now, finish that stew up and you can have some pumpkin roll for dessert.”

He declined dessert on behalf of his waistband, which had a tendency to shrink in the wash when he ate too much. She turned down his offer to help wash the pots and pans, but she did let him load the dishwasher.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No, I’d better get going. It’s late.” He climbed back into his boots and parka. “Thanks for the dinner.”

“It was my pleasure. Company makes the meal, Grandmother Fergusson used to say.”

He stuck out his hand just as she wrapped her arms around herself. Like an idiot, he shoved his hands into his pockets just as she reached out to shake. Finally, he slapped his hand around hers and pumped her arm like he was at a Rotary Club Meeting. Over the lingering odors of dinner, he could smell her, fresh and green, like new-mown hay in his brother-in-law’s field. “Night, now,” he said, and yanked open the door so hard he could hear the hinges bite into wood. They both looked at the door frame. He turned to her, frowning. “And for God’s sake, lock your doors.”

The squad car was freezing. He cursed the heater, cursed the weather, cursed the drive back to a dark and empty house. Why the hell had Linda gone on this fabric-buying trip anyway? He wanted her home. Only two more days. Then he’d feel better.

CHAPTER 19

Clare knew she ought to be more interested in the boiler. She flexed her chilly fingers together and glanced at the papers on the black oak table, listening for the telltale hiss and rattle of the radiators. She seemed to be the only one who noticed that the meeting room—the entire parish hall—never warmed up, so Robert Corlew’s projections on repairing the aging water heater ought to have her spellbound. Contractors, unfortunately, rarely made compelling speakers.