Out Of The Deep I Cry

Chapter 14

Well, she thought, two out of three’s not bad. She might not have been prepared for her first North Country winter, but she was a fast learner, and thanks to last spring’s sales and this year’s Christmas presents, she was as well protected from the cold as any of the men clumped around the hood of the volunteer fire chief’s Jeep Cherokee.

The chief, who had introduced himself as “Huggins-John Huggins,” was scoping out her qualifications. “You ever done anything like this before?” He was a short, well-braced two-by-four of a man, wearing a hat with flaps that fell to his chin and a suspicious expression. He reminded her of a crew chief she had met on her first posting, a lifer who had called her “girly.” One of the guys handing out equipment from the Jeep looked over at her, and she felt uncomfortably like the shaky second lieutenant she had been back then.

“I was a helicopter pilot in the army for nine years,” she said. “I’ve been trained in search and rescue.” Admittedly, that was searching and rescuing from the air. Who would waste a pilot by having her walk grids on the ground? But there wasn’t any air support for this operation, and if she couldn’t persuade Huggins-John Huggins to let her join in the search party, she’d be stuck sitting in her car, going crazy.

She had driven to this spot in the middle of County Road nowhere, parked obediently where Officer Durkee directed her, and sat patiently in her Shelby while Russ escorted Debba past the halogen-light poles shoved upright in the snowbanks on the opposite side of the road and the two of them disappeared into the shadows leading toward the reservoir.

But when the cars and pickups and SUVs started to arrive, stringing along the edge of the narrow roadside and disgorging members of the volunteer fire department, it suddenly struck her: Maybe Allan Rouse really was alive, injured, disoriented, slowly freezing to death in the snowy woods. And here she was, sitting on her tail in her comfy car while other people prepared to turn out and look for him. It wasn’t so much that she decided to volunteer, but that she was out of the car, pulling on her hat, before she decided not to.

“You. Were in the army.” Huggins squinted at her. He unsnapped a kangaroo pouch on his anorak and pulled out a topographical map, similar to the ones his men were spreading out over the hood of his truck. He folded it open and handed it to her. “Can you locate us on this map?”

The moon was near full, spotlighting down on them all when it wasn’t covered by fast-skimming stratocumulus clouds promising more snow. Of course, the search and rescue boys all had flashlights trained on their maps. She glanced over at them, then squatted down, her back to the warm artificial lights, and let her eyes adjust to the moon’s hard brightness. She scanned the map, flipped it over, unfolded it, and located the road and the reservoir. “Here,” she said, rising and holding the map out to Huggins.

“Okay,” he said, slowly. “Can you show me the inside and outside search boundaries?”

This guy wasn’t as much of an amateur as she had taken him for. “What’s the average walking speed in snow?” she asked. At his expression, she said, “I trained for warm-weather operations. Desert Storm. The Philippines.”

“Say two miles an hour.”

“Do you have a grease pencil?”

Huggins fished inside his big pocket and handed her one. She knelt in the crushed and dirty snow and spared a moment to thank her brother Brian, who had sent her the ripstop snow pants she wore. Then she did the math in her head, read the contour lines of the map, and drew in two circles, smoothly rounded over the reservoir, jagged where they followed the lines of the hills around them.

She got to her feet and handed the map to Huggins. He studied it. He looked at her. “Why’d you include the reservoir?” he said.

“It’s not fifty feet from the road right here. Dr. Rouse could have walked out, thinking he was getting clear of the trees, and-” Huggins was shaking his head. “No?”

“Well, yeah, he may have wandered out there, if he was disoriented. But we’re not going out there.”

“Isn’t it still frozen over? I heard the ice doesn’t leave most of these lakes until mid-April.” Clare surreptitiously flexed her toes inside her boots to help ward off the chill. Next time, wool socks.

“Parts of it may still be a few feet thick,” Huggins said. “But the temperature’s gone above freezing more’n once over the past week. And we’ve had rain. There’ll be rotten spots all over the surface. Too much risk of…” He made an expressive gesture indicating someone falling through ice.

“Oh.”

“Tell you what. You say you came out with Chief Van Alstyne?”

“I drove the woman who was out here with Dr. Rouse.” Huggins’s eyebrows went up, and she realized how that sounded. “I mean, she was the last person to have seen him. They were, um, visiting the cemetery.”

“Don’t worry,” Huggins said, “I’ve been doing this job for twenty-five years now and I’ve seen it all. Doesn’t matter to me what folks do. I only come in if they get lost after doing it.” He spread the map open again. “I’ll give you this section, along the reservoir edge. It’ll be easy viewing and less chance of you stepping into a woodchuck hole and breaking your leg. Seeing as how you trained for warm-weather operations. Hey, Duane!”

A mustachioed man in a Day-Glo orange parka detached himself from the rest of the team. “Duane, this is Clare Fergusson. She’s been trained for search and rescue by the army.”

She forcibly squashed her irritation and reminded herself that Huggins was doing her a favor by letting her help. Calling him a Neanderthal wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Besides, he probably thought it meant a brand of German beer.

Duane nodded at her, then looked at her more closely, interested. “Are you Reverend Clare Fergusson? The priest?”

“She’s a priest?” The disbelief in Huggins’s voice would have been priceless if she hadn’t been worried he was going to turn her down for sure now. “I been a Catholic my whole life. There aren’t any women priests.”

“Ah, I guess you haven’t been to mass lately, have you?” She let the shot hit home as she turned to Duane. “Have we met?”

“No, no, but I work part-time as a patrol officer. In Millers Kill. I’ve heard a lot about you at the station house.”

Huggins was now looking uncertainly at her, as if wondering what other surprises were forthcoming. “You don’t have a record, do you?” He looked up at Duane. “Has she been in trouble?”

“She hasn’t been arrested or anything.” Clare thought that answer artfully sidestepped the question. “She’s a good friend of Chief Van Alstyne.”

Oh, crud. She could see on Huggins’s face the same expression he had shown when she stumbled over her description of Dr. Rouse and Debba. “Ah,” he said. “You know Russ from his army days?” Evidently he had just decided to ignore the whole priest thing. Too much to try to fit in.

“Nope,” she said. She was saved from further explanation by a pair of headlights coming toward them. Huggins stepped into the road and waved his light back and forth. The vehicle, a Chevy Suburban with skis racked on top, slowed to a halt. The driver unrolled the window. “What’s up?” he said. Clare could see a woman and a couple of teens in the car.

“A man’s gone missing along this stretch,” Huggins said. “Mid-sixties, about my height, gray hair. You haven’t seen anyone, have you?”

The driver shook his head. “Sorry. We’re heading home from Hidden Valley.” He pointed toward the roof. “Last ski trip of the season.”

“Where’s home for you folks?”

“New York City.”

“Okay, drive safe.”

“Thanks.” The Suburban’s window scrolled up and the car resumed its trip down the mountain.

“Flatlanders,” Huggins said. “That’s the third group so far tonight. Nine times out of ten, when we’re called for search and rescue, it’s one of them. I don’t go down to the city and get lost and make them come looking for me. I don’t see why they can’t return the favor.” He looked at Clare. “You’re from away, too, aren’t you?”

Hardball Wright had been a big believer in retreating to a ground of your own choosing. She decided now was the time, before she got lumped in with all the other incompetent flatlanders. “Do you want me to take that waterfront stretch now, or do I need to wait until you’ve organized the rest of the team?” She gestured toward the Jeep, where the map meeting had evidently ended.

He followed her hand, saw the men waiting for him to be done with her. “The waterfront. Yeah.” He marked off a section rounding the edge of the reservoir and handed her the map. “Duane, give her a walkie-talkie and a flashlight.” Duane handed over the goods. She shoved the walkie-talkie in her parka pocket and switched on the flashlight, testing it. “Walk slowly,” Huggins went on, thankfully sounding less interested in her relationship with the police chief and more like a man delivering a well-rehearsed spiel. “Better to cover less ground thoroughly than more ground and miss something. You see anything, give a squawk. You get into trouble, give a squawk. We’re on-what channel are we on, Duane?”

“Two.”

“We’re on channel two. Do not step onto any surface if you don’t know where it bottoms out. In fact, Duane, grab her one of the poles.” Duane ambled over to the Jeep and pulled something that resembled a long ski pole out of the back. He returned and handed it to her. “Use that to test for objects beneath the snow,” Huggins went on. “Return to the base, that’s here at the truck, after you’ve finished your section. And don’t take any risks. We’re here to rescue someone else, not you. Got it?”

“Got it.”

He waved her off, and she broke for the other side of the road before he could think of one of the many good reasons why she should be back in her car instead of joining in the search. She glanced back and saw Huggins pulling Duane in by the shoulder, as if to get the confidential on her “friendship” with the police chief. Double crud.

She paused at the edge of the road. If she plunged straight ahead toward the reservoir, she was likely to run into Debba and Russ, who wouldn’t pass on her search and rescue experience no matter how many topo maps she plotted. Instead, she headed down the road, walking around the Millers Kill cruisers and the state crime scene investigation van toward where a loudly huffing tow truck was maneuvering into place to ratchet Dr. Rouse’s Buick out of the woods. As she got closer, she could hear the clank of heavy chains as the tow truck operator went to work hitching up the ditched vehicle.

In the yellow-white glare from the various headlights, she could see deep ruts in the crusty snow where the car had gone off the road. She glanced behind her. There was a definite downward slope from the area where the doctor and Debba would have emerged after their visit to the cemetery. She could easily imagine a dizzy, possibly concussed man getting behind the wheel of his big old boat of a car, shifting it into drive, and then passing out, letting the car steer itself off the pavement, through the scrub brush at the side of the road, and finally into the tall pines, where it had hit nose first, crumpling the hood back to the engine block. She could also imagine someone-a voice inside her head supplied Debba Clow-opening the driver’s door, shifting the car into neutral, and running it down the road until it tore away toward the trees.

“Hey! You!” The bulky figure of a man hailed her out of the near-darkness just beyond the lights. She squinted to see who it was as he came closer. She could make out the brown police parka and winter hat, but his features were obscured beneath the balaclava protecting his face from the cold.

“Reverend Fergusson?”

The voice she recognized. “Officer Durkee?”

“What are you doing wandering around out here?”

She spread her arms open, displaying her pole, flashlight, and map. “I’m volunteering for the search and rescue team.” Before he could point out that she had no prior connection with the team or anyone on it, she added, “I was trained in search and rescue in the army.” Mark Durkee was young enough for references to a higher authority to carry some weight.

“Huh,” he said. He pushed the balaclava up, revealing his face. “I was just headed over there to talk with Jim.”

“About the search?” She glanced at the tow truck, shuddering and chuffing as it wrenched the Buick out of the trees. “Was there any sign that he walked away from the crash?”

Durkee nodded. “There were some boot prints around the car. Pretty indistinct. With the crust on the snow, every step just caves it in, leaves a big jagged hole.”

“Can you tell which way he went?” She looked at his expressionless face and thought, Don’t ever get in a poker game with this guy. “Let me rephrase that. Can you tell which way the footsteps went?”

“They intersect with the trail from the tires. Crunched flat.”

“So you can’t trace them from there?”

He shook his head.

“So maybe he made his way back to the road and was picked up…” She trailed off. “But if that happened, he’d be home by now, wouldn’t he?”

“I’d think so.”

“Did the crime scene investigation team find anything?”

“They always find something.”

“You’re a very closemouthed man, Officer Durkee.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He smiled at her.

She looked around her, to where the unfathomable darkness of the Adirondack wood was held back by a few headlights and the whirling amber flashers of the tow truck. Even though she hadn’t started yet, her search of the reservoir frontage seemed suddenly futile, an exercise designed to soothe them into thinking they had some control over this great and terrible beast all around them. “Russ doesn’t think Dr. Rouse is going to be found alive,” she said. “Do you?”

He shook his head. “No. But I think the effort is worth it. Whatever we do to find out what happened, to find him, it’ll be a comfort to his family. There’s something to that.”

“Yes. There is.” She gestured with her pole. “I better get to it.” He lifted his hand in a salute that also pulled his balaclava back over his face, and headed up the road to deliver his news to the rest of the search and rescue team.

Clare waded into the snow. She discovered right away what Officer Durkee had been talking about. The stuff was covered with a frozen sludge of snow and ice, pitted with pinecones and broken bits of branches. It was just strong enough to hold her body weight for a second or two before breaking, so that each step jarred up her spine. When she lifted her foot for another step, the powdery snow hidden beneath the crust seeped in between the top edge of her boot and her rip-stop pants, so that within minutes, she felt cold rivulets running down her socks.

She would have thought that the clear, cold air would carry the sounds from the road aloft, that she would still be able to hear the truck axle grinding and voices talking, but the tall pines swallowed everything in a fine-needled screen. The light, too, disappeared shade by shade, which surprised her, since this was a mature forest, no scrub trees or opportunistic bushes to push through. Just northern white pines, one after another after another until, when she looked back to where she had come from, there was no sign of lights or movement, no indication that there had ever been any artifacts of civilization.

She plowed on, trying to ignore her wet socks and the quiet, trying to ignore the narrow thread of panic that fluttered beneath her breastbone, chanting Cold and snow and the woods and you’re out here all alone, because it was ridiculous. She had a map, a light, a walkie-talkie, and probably twenty cops and firefighters within a half-mile radius. It was just a leftover fear from an older and colder encounter with the Adirondack woods in winter. She paused for a moment, braced her mittened hands against a tree, told herself she had never had a panic attack in her life and she wasn’t having one now, and pressed forward, sloping downward.

She could see the reservoir through the trees now, white and shining, and she hurried to break through into the clear air and was astonished when she did. Up on the road, all the lights casting the rest of the world into darkness had dimmed the effect of the almost-full moon. And beneath the pines, neither the moon nor the sun ever reached the ground. But here-she turned her flashlight off and blinked at the dazzle. The frozen surface of the water was neither white nor black, but glinted like layers of mica. And the size of it! When she had heard the term reservoir, she had created a picture in her mind of a squared-off city-block-sized container, like a giant bathtub waiting to be drained. This thing was a lake, vanishing into the curve of the forest at either end, far enough across so that it would be a challenge to swim the round-trip.

She could make out more details of the surface now that her eyes were light adapted, and she could see grayer spots and pockmarks where the ice had melted, broken, re-formed, and refrozen. But even with Huggins’s warning playing in her head, the urge to step out onto that dazzling openness was strong. The Gospel writers had had it right when they described Jesus walking on water. What could feel more godlike than standing in the middle of a lake, water stretching away from you on all sides, the night turned to day by the light of the moon?

The walkie-talkie in her pocket crackled. She tugged her mitten off, retrieved it, and keyed the mike. “Fergusson here,” she said.

“Where are you, Reverend? Over.”

O-kay. So much for being one of the boys. She glanced at her map to remind herself of her distances. “I’m at the reservoir shore, about a quarter mile west of the cemetery site. Over.”

“Head east until you hit the cemetery and then come back up the hill to the road. Over.”

“Why? That’ll be the world’s shortest search.”

“Chief Van Alstyne wants you to drive Debba Clow back to her home. Over.” Additional emphasis on the “Over” to point out how she had forgotten that detail in her last message.

She was tempted to ask exactly how long it had been between the time Chief Van Alstyne found out she was here looking around and his decision Debba could be released. However, considering that every man on the search and rescue team could hear the conversation, she resisted the urge. “Will do. I’m headed that way now. Fergusson out.”

She turned her eyes away from the frozen water and began slogging east, driving her pole through the crusted snow, scanning left, right, left, looking for any sign that someone had come this way before her. They could pull her off this duty assignment, but she by God would do it to the best of her abilities until the end.

Unfortunately, no broken branches, conveniently torn-away bits of clothing, or telltale footprints appeared for her to triumphantly report. From the edge of the reservoir as far into the woods as she could see, the icy snow lay unbroken.

She forgot to check her progress against the map, and was startled when a flashlight beam splashed across her face. For a moment, she was back on a logging road, hearing a cold voice slithering out of the darkness, the snick of a gun’s safety releasing. Her heart tried to squeeze up through her throat.

“It’s me.” Russ’s voice came out of the shadows. “I came back down to make sure you-are you all right?” He crunched into the moonlight and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, bunching his fingers in the insulated fabric as if to keep her from falling.

She nodded, pressed her free hand against her mouth, breathed against the mitten. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said when she could. “Your flashlight… it startled me, that’s all.”

He looked at her closely, his eyes washed colorless in the moonlight. When had he developed that look, like he was seeing right through her, right into her? She made herself busy with stuffing her map back into her pocket. “I’m fine,” she repeated, although he hadn’t asked. “Let’s go.”

“It’s real slippery through here,” he said. “Take my hand.” He reached toward her. She stared at his glove for a moment, knowing that if Mark Durkee had been there, offering to help her keep her balance, she wouldn’t have hesitated; hating that voice inside her that wondered, Is this okay? Is this safe?

She put her mittened hand in his and squeezed. He pointed the flashlight past a shadowy, cleared area-the cemetery-through the pines. “That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Don’t want you falling and cracking your head open, too.”

“Is that what happened to Dr. Rouse?”

He flashed his light on the gravestones. They were crumbling at the edges, their carving blurred by decades of acid rain. “It looks as if there’s been a lot of thawing and freezing around the stones. They soak up the heat from the sun during the day. The snow melts, then when night falls, everything ices over again.”

She tightened her grip on his hand as she struggled for footing. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“We found smears of blood on the corner of one of the stones consistent with Debba’s story.”

“Can I see?”

He pointed with his light, and she could just make it out, dark blackish spots along the rounded edge of the stone. She would have taken them for moss if she hadn’t known. “So do you believe her version of events now?” She could pick out the name on the marker in the wash of the flashlight beam. JACK KETCHEM. JULY 21, 1920.

“At this point, I don’t know what happened here.” Russ played his beam over the ground. “This was all churned up even before the CIS guys started tromping around.”

Clare let go of his hand and removed her own flashlight from her pocket.

“What?” he said.

“I want to see,” she started, then turned her light directly on the blood-marked gravestone. JACK KETCHEM. JULY 21, 1920-MARCH 14, 1924. OUR ANGEL.

“He was just a baby,” she said. She redirected her light to another stone. LUCY KETCHEM. JANUARY 8, 1918-MARCH 14, 1924. BELOVED DAUGHTER OF J. A. AND J. N. KETCHEM.

Clare stepped closer. “This was what Dr. Rouse wanted her to see? This?” She turned her light on another stone. PETER KETCHEM. JUNE 3, 1916-MARCH 18, 1924. BELOVED SON OF J. A. AND J. N. KETCHEM.

She turned back to Russ. “My God.”

He nodded. “I know. There’s one more of them.” He flashed his light onto a fourth stone. A lump of ice half obscured a bas-relief carving of a lamb near the bottom. Above it, Clare read, MARY KETCHEM. NOVEMBER 5, 1921-MARCH 15, 1924. OUR LITTLE LAMB.

Two and a half years old. She reached back, and Russ took her hand again, holding hard. “Children,” she said. “Just babies.” She looked at the dates again. “They all died within a week of each other.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Jane Ketchem was their mother, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said. “I met her here, when I was still a kid myself. I didn’t know at the time. Later, I heard the story.”

The money for the clinic, for Allan Rouse’s medical training, it all fell into place. This is where it sprang from. This was what Jane Ketchem had been thinking of. And Clare was taking it, using it for roofing. Inside her mittens, the palms of her hands crawled. She turned her face toward Russ. “Let’s go, please.”

He nodded, and tugged her away, his arm helping her find her footing over the icy patches. Long after they had disappeared into the pines behind her, she could feel their stone faces watching her. Peter. Lucy. Jack. Mary. Our Little Lamb.