Out Of The Deep I Cry

Chapter 19

Russ was sitting in the cab, idling the engine and scanning the radio for music performed by someone free of piercings or tattoos. Nowadays everything on the air seemed to be by so-called artists who were younger than his favorite pair of jeans or by groups he had first listened to on 45s and AM radio. He could live happily without ever hearing “My Generation” again. He pressed the play button on the CD, taking his chance with whatever he had left in there last. The voice of Bonnie Raitt poured out of the speakers like a long, tall branch-and-bourbon.

Clare popped the passenger door open, and he turned the music down a notch while she swung up into the seat. She grinned at him. “It was okay. One of the other ladies had corralled Yvonne Story, and Mrs. Rouse’s sister is on her way over. They didn’t need me.” She buckled up, worrying her lower lip. “I’m bad. I shouldn’t feel this relieved to escape.”

He shifted the truck into gear and pulled away from the curb. “What, you mean Yvonne? Don’t be. My mom used to volunteer at the library when she was there. Had to quit. Said she was going to commit homicide if she didn’t.”

She laughed. “How is your mom?”

“Happy as a clam. She’s decided coal-fired electrical plants in the Midwest are responsible for our acid rain problem, so she and her cronies are busing to Illinois in April for a big protest rally.”

“Uh-oh. What if she gets into trouble again?”

“If she does, at least it won’t be me arresting her, thank God. Janet and I will stand by with bail money and Western Union.”

Clare twisted sideways in her seat and looked at him. “You look tired.”

“I am. I was up at the Stewart’s Pond site until one o’clock.” Talking about it made him feel the fatigue, and he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It would have been nice to sleep in, but we’re short staffed as it is, with Lyle and Noble knocked out by this stomach thing going around.”

She glanced over the seat, to the evidence box in the back. “Can you leave this stuff at the station and go home for a quick nap?”

“Nah. I’m headed back to Stewart’s Pond after I drop you at your car.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. Clare got that look in her eyes-the unholy light, he was coming to think of it.

“Take me with you,” she said.

“No.” He downshifted to slow for a red light up ahead.

“Take me with you.”

“No. Why do you want to go, anyway?” He knew starting to argue with her was a mistake, but he couldn’t resist it.

“Probably the same reason you do. To see it in daylight. To try to get a feel for the place. To imagine what happened there.”

“Before you get on your high horse about Debba Clow, I want to assure you that the Millers Kill Police Department does not officially consider her a suspect.”

“At this time.”

“At this time,” he agreed. “I’m still open to the idea that Rouse is alive somewhere, although since we’ve contacted every hospital within a fifty-mile radius, I’m not holding out much hope. But who knows? Maybe the Amish took him in, and he’s mending up in a beautiful widow’s bedroom, like in that movie.”

“Are they going to continue searching the area?”

“Mountain rescue got there right as I was leaving, with two dogs. When I checked in at seven this morning, they hadn’t found any sign of the doctor.” He turned up Main Street. “I’m driving you back to your car.”

“Take me with you,” she said. “I want to get a better look at those gravestones. I spoke with Mrs. Marshall this morning.” She reached up and touched her neck where her collar would be if she were wearing clericals instead of a sweater. “She said all of her brothers and sisters died of diphtheria while her mother was pregnant with her. The parents chose not to use the vaccine, and they died. Can you imagine anything so awful?”

His mind slid to Stuttgart, and the Dumpster, and opening the garbage bag, slick and rancid from a splash of rotted fruit, and the baby inside. One of his fellow MPs had started to cry. Something must have shown on his face, because she leaned over and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Of course you can. I’m sorry. That was a thoughtless question.”

“No,” he said. “Seeing terrible things shouldn’t make any other terrible thing less…” He couldn’t find the right word.

“Hurtful?”

“Yeah.” He flicked on his turn signal and swung the truck onto the Mill Road. They drove past the old mills, ornate brick mausoleums for the town’s prosperity, headed for Old Route 100, which would take them into the mountains.

“How many years have you been a cop?” she asked.

“Over twenty-five, now. Most of it as an MP, of course.”

“But you don’t feel… I don’t know, jaded by everything you’ve seen? Inured to tragedy?”

He wasn’t sure what inured meant, but he could guess. “For a while I was. Toward the end of my army career, some days I felt like I was encased in clear plastic. Like I could see and hear everything around me, but nothing touched me. No feelings about anything. Of course, I was drinking real heavily, but I never felt drunk. You know, happy and loose and uninhibited. All I ever was was numb.” He glanced out his side window at the Millers Kill, the river that gave his town its name, running low and slow in these last winter days before the snowpack melted and the ice-clotted water came roaring out of the mountains.

“What happened?”

“Linda,” he said. “She had been going to these Al-Anon meetings, for families of alcoholics? She gave me an ultimatum. Booze or her. Then she flew to her sister’s. She had been gone three days when I realized she meant it. I spent two of the worst weeks of my life, missing her like crazy and hating her for what she was putting me through. Man, I had it all drying out-shakes, sweats, cravings, nausea-I looked like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Then she came home, and I went back to work, and I sort of fell apart.”

“Fell apart?”

“I started-I couldn’t-I had to come home from the office. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. Linda thought I was dying or something. I had what I guess you could kind of describe as a sort of nervous breakdown. So that’s when I retired.”

Her hand was still on his shoulder. “You’re lucky to have Linda.”

“Don’t I know it. I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for her.” It was an old thought, and a well-worn one, like a stone he carried in his pocket, reaching in to rub it every now and then.

They drove in silence for a few minutes, which was okay, because silence with Clare never felt like you had to quickly start filling it up with words. Bonnie Raitt was singing about cool, clear water, and wanting to go under, and he could get that, for sure. He eased to a stop before the Veterans Bridge and turned right, away from the river.

“This isn’t the way to Mrs. Marshall’s house,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’ve bent you to the awesome force of my will again, haven’t I?”

He laughed. “If I don’t take you, you’ll just drive up there yourself in that idiot car of yours and get stuck in the snow. At least this way, I know I can get you in and out safely.” He could see her out of the corner of his eye, smiling to herself in a satisfied way.

They wound up into the mountains, quiet again, so that they were really listening to the music, and when Bonnie sang “I sho do… want you,” he wanted to mash the button and eject the CD so it wouldn’t be there, hanging in the air between them. But he didn’t.

Both sides of the road along the trail to the little cemetery were churned to slush, the ground-in tire tracks and foot-flattened snow looking as if an army had been encamped there. “Wow,” Clare said, after they had parked and gotten out of the truck.

He paused, listening for any sounds of the mountain rescue team or the search dogs nearby, but the only thing he heard was the thin, cold air moving through the pines. He started to tell Clare to bundle up, but she was already wrapping her scarf around her neck and pulling her mittens out of her pocket. “This way,” he said, gesturing toward the trees.

The legion of footsteps that had compacted the snow along the trail didn’t make the walking any easier. The hard, dense surface had slicked up under the midday sun, and he found he had to keep his arms outstretched to counter the unpredictable terrain beneath his boots. “Careful,” he warned Clare.

“Uh-huh,” she said, her eyes and attention focused on the path. They crept down the trail like toddlers learning to walk, lacking only the all-enveloping snow-suits to complete the picture.

A crack echoed through the air. “Oh my God,” she said. “Was that a gunshot?”

“Ice breaking up.” He pointed ahead, to where portions of the reservoir gleamed through the trees, gray ice slicked over with pale green water. “It makes all kinds of noises. Loud bangs, groaning, creaking. Very dangerous this time of year.”

“I hope Dr. Rouse knew that,” she said, and then, “There they are.” The headstones looked smaller, softer, sadder today than they had last night; more like the memorials connected to real human beings, less like objects at a crime scene. Clare picked her way through the few snow-covered lumps representing the older graves and sank to her knees in front of the Ketchem children’s stones, sitting back on her heels, Japanese style.

She was silent while he stepped closer, getting a better look at the smear of blood that might or might not have been the last trace of Allan Rouse. He envisioned Debba Clow and the doctor, arguing in the darkness with the dead all around them. When he had questioned her here late last night, she had been upset but had kept herself reined in, uncomfortable but cooperative. Earlier, though, out here with the older man haranguing her, worried about her own kids and exasperated with him driveling on about the Ketchems… what had she been like then? He couldn’t imagine her planning a murder, but he could see her fed up, blaming Rouse for her troubles-in his experience people like Debba always blamed someone else for their troubles-maybe yelling at him to just shut up and then a good hard shove to get him out of her face…

When Clare crossed herself, he realized she had been praying. “This makes me think of Debba Clow,” she said.

“Me, too.”

She looked up at him. “I mean about the children. About the weight of responsibility parents take on. Mrs. Marshall told me her parents chose not to inoculate their children with the diphtheria vaccine. They did what they thought was best, and this was what they got.” She spread her hands, encompassing the stones. “Her mother spent the rest of her life grieving, and her father skipped town.” She dropped her hands to her thighs. “Debba’s the same. She tried to do everything right, and she’s got an autistic son and an ex-husband trying to take away her kids.”

“I’d be a lot more sympathetic to her plight if I hadn’t seen her trying to brain the doctor with a stool.” He held out a hand to help her to her feet.

“Do you really think she dragged him away somewhere, unconscious?”

“That’s a thought. Maybe he’s in her basement, chained to the wall until he agrees to sign a statement declaring she’s the best mom ever and he’s a quack for vaccinating kids.”

She ignored his flippant remark. “If she hit him here, or he fell, and then she left him to die, where’s his body?”

They both looked through the pines toward the reservoir. “I wish I had a few weights I could chuck out there, see if there are any thin spots that break right through,” he said. His fingers shaped a large imaginary rock.

“Like those stones they slide for curling,” she said.

“Yeah.” He faced her. “Okay, you’re Debba and I’m Rouse. I slip and fall, hitting my head on this gravestone. I’m bleeding.” He knelt at an angle to Peter Ketchem’s stone. “What do you do?”

“I try to help you up,” she said. She reached down and wrapped her hands around his upper arm.

“But I’m heavier than you, and disoriented.” He stood up. “Plus I’m a cranky old bastard and I don’t want your help.”

“So I’m reaching for you, trying to grab you to take a look at your head.” She thrust her arms out toward him.

“And I step backward.” He did.

“Be careful,” she said.

“What do you do next?”

“I’m still trying to get ahold of you.” She put her mittened hand against her mouth, frowning in thought. “I’m scared and probably getting ticked off. So maybe I’m yelling at you to stay put.” She advanced a step toward him.

“I’m backing away,” he said, “because you’re looking crazy, backing away and-” He was moving as he did so, not looking back because, of course, Rouse hadn’t been looking back, he had been wiping blood out of his eyes, and when Clare shouted, “Look out!” he started to turn to see where he was going but it was too late, his heel stepped down into nothingness and he tilted crazily, his whole boot sliding into the frozen maw of a woodchuck hole, and he was going over, arms careening, Clare yelling something, and then there was a split second where it felt as if a mallet smashed against his leg, pain, agonizing pain above his ankle, and then he hit the frozen snow with a thud that snapped his skull and threw his glasses off.