Out Of The Deep I Cry

Chapter 24

Clare rested the box of one dozen of Kreemy Kakes’ finest on the counter of the nurses’ station and smiled at the woman typing away at a computer behind it. “I’m looking for Russ Van Alstyne’s room?”

“Mr. Van Alstyne.” The nurse glanced at a clipboard stretched to its limit with a sheaf of papers. “Oh, yes. The broken leg. He’s in 403.”

“Thank you.” Clare settled the box beneath her arm and made her way down the hall. The door to room 403 was closed. She knocked.

“Come in,” Russ yelled.

She sidled through the door. He was alone in the two-bed room, propped up at an angle, his injured leg slung between a pair of struts assembled at the end of the bed. His cast ran from the ball of his foot to below his knee, and was highway-department orange. It reminded Clare of one of the Tonka cranes her brothers had played with back when they were kids. He was talking on the bedside phone.

“I’m sorry, go on.” He beckoned Clare into the room. “No. No, it’s not my mom.” He glanced at Clare, and his eyes fell on the box she was holding. “It’s just someone dropping off some food,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“How much extra?” he asked. He held out his hand for the doughnuts. “Six hundred bucks? For a one-way flight? That’s ridiculous! I thought it was like a fifty-dollar fee to change your departure date.”

Clare handed him the box, which he dropped in his lap. He flashed her a distracted smile, then frowned.

“Why do you have to buy a whole new ticket? That’s three times what you paid to get down there.”

Clare glanced around and spotted a boxy little chair of blond wood and fake leather in the corner. It looked as if it had been designed to discourage long bedside chats. She pulled it away from the wall.

“See, that’s why I hate the idea of those Internet specials. If you’d have paid a little more to start out with, you’d have more flexibility now.”

Clare paused before sitting down. Maybe getting a soda would be a good idea at this point. The newspaper. A magazine.

“Maybe you shouldn’t.” She glanced over toward Russ, but his face was turned toward the room’s other, empty bed. “I mean, you just got down there yesterday. You only get to see your sister once a year. I don’t want to ruin it for you.” Clare watched as he twisted the phone cord back and forth in one hand. “I could ask Mom to come stay with me until you get home.” He tilted his head back and squinted at the ceiling tiles. “I don’t know. I might be able to drive one of the squad cars. They’re automatic. There’s nothing wrong with my right foot.” He glanced over at Clare, then looked away. “I know you do. And I want you home, too. I’m just thinking six hundred dollars is a lot to pay for the privilege of playing my nursemaid.” He flicked at the hospital-issue blanket covering him from knees to stomach, brushed it as if something unclean were stuck to it. He smiled a little and pushed a laugh out. “Not until my leg’s healed up some more, we’re not.”

Enough eavesdropping. Way more than enough. Clare pasted a social smile on her face and waved bye-bye. Russ shook his head sharply. “All right, honey, if you feel that strongly about it, sure. Yep, you’re right, it’s not like we don’t have the money. But don’t try to get a flight tonight. I’m going to be here at least till tomorrow afternoon.” There was a long pause. “Do you think you can get your friend Meg to do it? Okay, that’ll be fine.” Clare took one step, then another, toward the door. Russ held up one hand. “Honey? I think I need to get off now. Yeah, there’s someone waiting for me.” His eyes cut away from Clare. “Yes. I will.” There was a final pause. “I love you, too. Bye.” He twisted away from Clare and hung up the phone.

“Linda,” he said.

“I gathered.”

He looked down at the box of doughnuts as if he had forgotten putting them on his lap. “Thanks.”

“I figured you’d like them more than flowers.”

He smiled to himself, still not looking at her. She wondered how much he remembered about his behavior while he was pumped full of painkillers and whether she ought to mention anything. Set his mind at ease.

He popped open the top and took out a French cruller. “You want one?”

She got just close enough to take a peanut-covered doughnut while still maintaining the maximum degree of personal space. Okay, she thought, now I’ll tell him he was stoned and being silly and it gave me a good laugh on the way to the historical society. And I’ll ask him all about how Linda’s doing and how soon she’s getting home. She opened her mouth, but what came out was, “Did you know that the Ketchem graveyard was part of a property that was flooded when the Sacandaga was dammed?”

He stopped, a bite of cruller half in, half out of his mouth. His expression spoke even though he couldn’t: a polite So what?

“Jane Ketchem and her husband lived there. The couple that lost the children. She’s the one who went on to found the free clinic. It was named after her late husband. He disappeared in 1930. Mrs. Marshall, who’s on our vestry, is her daughter.” She knew she was babbling, but once she got going, she couldn’t seem to stop it. “She thinks her father took off for a new life, but I’ve been thinking, and I think he killed himself. He drove off one night two days after the dam was finished. I think he went back to their old farm and drowned himself.”

Russ swallowed his cruller. “Great. As soon as I get out of here and back to the station, I’ll close the case.”

“There’s a case?” Her info dump had been as much protective camouflage as a genuine desire to share what she had found out, but his remark caught her. “What sort of case?”

He tore another piece of the cruller off. “You may be surprised to know that you’re not the first person to look into Jonathon Ketchem’s disappearance. The department spent a lot of time trying to track him down back when he disappeared. They couldn’t find him, but the chief at the time refused to close the case. It’s been handed down through the generations.” He popped the bite into his mouth and chewed with relish. “It’s probably our oldest cold case. I wouldn’t have been aware of it, but I saw the name when I was going through the files when I first came on board. I had had a”-he paused, as if choosing the right word-“very weird run-in with Mrs. Ketchem back when I was a kid. I saw the name and was curious.”

She dragged the chair next to his bed. “What sort of run-in?”

“She tried to drown herself in Stewart’s Pond. I was fishing that day, and spotted her. I jumped in and pulled her out.”

She sat in the chair, but found she was irritatingly low, like a prisoner in the docket. She stepped onto the seat and perched on the back of the chair. “That place, that reservoir-it’s a bad place.”

He laughed. “Oh, come off it. It’s just a graveyard. I may not be all up on my Christian theology, but I’m pretty sure being afraid of the dead goes counter to some of the basic tenets.”

“Not like that. I mean…” She broke her doughnut apart, trying to put into words how she had felt at the historical society. The sensation of cold water in the middle of old books and three-ring binders. “There’s a specific gravity to the place. The drowned farm and the dead children. It’s dragging people down.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Well, now we know why I broke my leg.”

“Think about it. Ketchem disappears, his wife tries to kill herself there, and now Dr. Rouse has disappeared.” She cat-cradled her fingers. “And they’re all connected to one another.”

“Three bad things happening over a spread of what-seventy years?-does not a bad place make.” He finished off his cruller and flipped the box open again, considering his choices. “You forget what a small town this is. Between Millers Kill, and Fort Henry, and Cossayuharie, we have maybe ten or eleven thousand people. Three quarters of us are related if you go back far enough. Of course there are going to be connections.” He eased a chocolate-frosted doughnut out without breaking its glossy surface.

She took a different tack. “Why was Jonathon Ketchem’s case never closed?”

“Because there’s no statute of limitation on murder.”

“Was that what they thought had happened? Back in 1930?”

“It was one theory. I guess the chief at the time didn’t want to close out any possibilities.”

“Like you, with Dr. Rouse’s disappearance.”

“Like me,” he agreed. He bit into his doughnut.

She stuffed part of her peanut doughnut into her mouth and thought while she chewed. Have you considered,” she said, after she had swallowed, “that Allan Rouse might have committed suicide? His wife told me he was acting erratically recently-sometimes manic, sometimes depressed. He’s had this protest thing with Debba Clow going on. Then Mrs. Marshall and I came along and told him the clinic was losing the funding from Mrs. Ketchem’s trust.” She felt an acid twinge in her stomach at that one, but went on. “So he takes Debba Clow to the grave site, tries to convince her one last time how important vaccinations are. She doesn’t listen, he falls and cracks open his head, then he gets into his car and drives into a tree-maybe it was all too much for him at the moment.”

Russ swallowed another piece of his doughnut. “So he walked back to the grave site and down to the reservoir,” he said. “And kept walking until he found a spot where the ice gave way underneath him.”

“Huggins, the rescue guy, warned me not to go onto the ice. He said there would be plenty of rotten spots with the shifts in daytime and nighttime temperatures.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it. If he went into the water, the hole he went through could have been totally invisible from the shore last night. When you fall in through a weak spot, the ice that was there bobs right back up. It doesn’t fit together like a manhole cover or anything, but unless it was real close to the shore, it would have just looked like a rough patch on the surface.” He licked the chocolate icing off his fingers.

“Are you going to send a dive team down there to look for him?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. There are still too many other possibilities. We don’t have any forensics back on Debba Clow’s car yet, for one thing.”

“Do you seriously consider her a suspect?”

“She’s the only one we’ve got at this point.”

“I just can’t see it. Admittedly, she thinks he’s responsible for her son’s autism. And she was all fired up about her ex’s custody suit, and what Dr. Rouse might say against her…” She let herself trail off. The problem with Debba was, the more you thought about it, the more likely she seemed.

“You keep on thinking that people commit murder because of this reason or that reason.” Russ tore a tissue from the bedside box and wiped his hands. “But most homicides occur for one reason only. Someone becomes stupid angry and strikes out as hard as he can, with whatever he has at hand that will hurt the most.” He crumpled the tissue and pitched it toward a plastic basket beneath the window. “The thought doesn’t go into the killing. It comes, if there’s any thought at all, afterward, when it’s time to cover up the mess. And if you’re going to ask me if I think Deborah Clow could get angry and go nuts, the answer is yes. I do.”

“I have a confession to make.” Clare propped her boots on the wooden arms of the chair so she could rest her elbows on her knees. “I’d almost rather he was murdered than killed himself. Because if he committed suicide, St. Alban’s roof is going to be repaired with blood money.”

“Oh, come off it. Okay, the clinic’s lost a few thousand a year.”

“Ten thousand.”

“Nobody offs himself because of a cut in funding. Except-” His eyes focused inwardly. “No, forget it.”

“What?”

“I was thinking, except in cases where someone’s been cooking the books. But the clinic’s not a business, where there’s a profit to fiddle with or shareholders to scam. The board of aldermen go over the clinic’s budget every year as part of the annual meeting.” He looked at her. “At any rate, it’s not St. Alban’s fault. Maybe it’s not your finest hour, and maybe you’d have liked to keep funding for the clinic as well as save your roof. But you make decisions like this all the time.”

“I do not,” she protested.

“Sure you do. Every time you choose to spend the church’s money and time on one thing, you’re choosing not to spend it on another. You’ve got a group of volunteers working with teenage mothers, helping them get through school, find jobs, baby-sitting, right?” She nodded. He went on, “That means that you’re not helping divorced single moms of older kids with education, child care, and getting back into the workplace.”

“That’s not the same.”

“Sure it is. Your parishioners give money to the church, right? Put it in the basket every Sunday.”

“They make pledges and then pay on them. Sort of like public television.”

“Except you don’t give them Masterpiece Theatre video sets in exchange.”

She couldn’t help smiling, even though she knew which way he was going and it still didn’t feel convincing.

“There’s no difference between what they do and what Mrs. Marshall did,” he continued.

“But it feels different.”

“Why?” He crossed his arms over his blanket-covered chest and looked steadily at her.

She opened her mouth to respond only to realize that she hadn’t thought out the answer to that question. She sat up straighter and pulled back her hair, knotting it at the back of her skull. Russ lay there, propped up in the hospital bed, giving her all the time she needed.

“Because,” she finally said, “if it had really been up to me, I would have given the money to the clinic and stuck a tarp over the roof.” She ducked her head. “That doesn’t make me a very good steward of my church, does it?”

“No, you would have been a bad steward of your church if you had actually turned the money down in favor of the tarp. It just makes you someone whose duty conflicts with your own interest. It happens.”

The tone in his voice made her raise her head, and she found him looking at her as if he were touching her face. Their eyes met, and she remembered an afternoon years ago, flying along the coast of Panama, her helo low over the impossibly blue waters, the smell of the sea everywhere and the rush of the sky and feeling as if the whole world were out there for her taking.

Then he dropped his gaze to the doughnut box and smiled. “I bet you always vote for universal health-care coverage, don’t you?”

She tipped her head back and laughed, and that was how Margy Van Alstyne found them.

“Well! Looks like I’m missing the party.” She bustled in, a short, rotund fire-plug of a woman, dropping her car coat on the other bed. “Hello, Clare.” Clare scrambled off the chair and barely got out a greeting before Margy swept to the head of the bed. “Hello, sweetie.” She leaned up on tiptoe and kissed her son. “How are you feeling? Is it a bad break? Is it in the same spot where your old break happened?” She glanced at Clare. “Russ fell into a foxhole and busted his leg back when he was in Vietnam,” she explained.

It had been both legs, and he broke them jumping to escape a helicopter that had been blown out of the sky. Russ gave Clare a warning look. She nodded.

“Breaking a bone at eighteen is a lot different from breaking it when you’re fifty,” Margy went on. She smoothed his hair back from where it had flopped over his forehead.

“I’m not fifty yet, Mom.”

“Close enough as makes no difference. What did they do? What did the doctor say?”

“He put in two pins. I have to be in the cast six weeks.”

Margy Van Alstyne turned to Clare and they shared a moment of total communion over the ability of men to turn the most dramatic, complex subjects into two sentences. Short sentences. With one-syllable words.

“And how did this happen?” Margy asked her.

“Ah.” Clare recalled the script. “Russ and I were taking a walk. In the woods.”

“Really?” Margy turned again and pinned Russ with a skeptical eye. “When I called the station, Harlene told me you had been tramping around a crime scene, looking for someone who disappeared last night.”

“Busted,” Russ said.

“It was in the woods,” Clare said. “We were walking.”

“You see what can happen?” Margy said to her son. “And this was after the fact, not right there, confronting some criminal. Sweetie, you’ve been at this too long. Sooner or later the odds are going to go against you and you’re going to wind up at the wrong end of some maniac’s gun.” Her voice was tight. In all of Russ’s exasperation over his mother’s protectiveness, Clare had never thought what it was like from Margy’s point of view, to be afraid that one day your son would stop a car or enter an apartment and never walk away.

“Mom, it was just a stupid accident. It could have happened anywhere.” Russ had a tone in his voice, half pleading, half jollying. “It’s Allan Rouse who’s gone missing,” he said. “The doctor who runs the free clinic. He was last seen up by Stewart’s Pond. We found his car, but no sign of him.”

Margy’s expression clearly said she wasn’t fooled by this transparent attempt to change the subject. But she went along with it anyway. “What did he do, jump in?”

“We don’t know,” Russ said. “There was a woman with him right before he disappeared. We’re going to be questioning her further.”

Margy’s eyes rounded out. “Why, that old dog,” she said.

“No, Mom, not like that.” He frowned at her. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to repeat a word. It was this woman who’s been picketing the clinic. Deborah Clow.”

“I know her!” Clare and Russ both blinked. “She came to one of our meetings once,” Margy went on. “Wanted us to get behind her crusade to stop vaccinations. Said they caused autism.” She rolled her eyes. “My first reaction was to send her packing outright. I remember when polio was around, when they closed down public pools and shipped kids off to the country to escape it. But I thought, I’ll look into it. See if there’s anything to what she says.”

“And?” Clare said.

“It’s all hooey. No reputable scientific study has ever shown a relationship between vaccinations and autism. I told her we couldn’t support her. There are too darn many real scary things out there for us to be wasting our time on imaginary monsters.” She crossed her arms over her low-slung bosom and burrowed her hands up under her sweatshirt sleeves. “Everybody wants something or someone to blame when bad things happen. You have to learn how to figure out if there was a fault or not, that’s what I think. Otherwise, it’ll drive you crazy. Nobody can live with thinking that right out there, just out of reach, is the person who hurt you. It’ll drive you crazy.”