A Fountain Filled With Blood (18 page)

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Waxman and Ray exchange glances. Waxman tugged his baseball cap farther down over his eyes. “Are you a big, um, helicopter buff?”

“I was a pilot in the army,” she said. “And my folks have a small aviation company.” She ducked under the tail boom and peeked into the cabin window. There were two comfortable seats backed against the partial bulkhead separating the cockpit from the cabin, with a curtain of wide webbing to protect traveling VIPs from shifting cargo in the rear. She moved up a step to look into the cockpit and rested her hand on the handle of the pilot’s door. It turned in her grip. It was unlocked! She hissed in excitement and twisted the door open.

“Oh, hey, Reverend!” Ray protested, but she had already hiked herself over the lip into the cockpit.

“Hello there,” she said. She dropped into the seat. The controls were neat and streamlined, much simpler than the bulky instrument displays she had been used to. Must be the new digital systems. She hadn’t ever flown a 427, but she had logged a lot of hours in its military version, the Kiowa.

“Reverend! You shouldn’t be in there!” Ray’s voice came from behind her, through the open cargo door.

“I just want a peek at the cockpit,” she said. “Then I’ll get right out, I promise.”

“Reverend!”

The windscreen was huge, much larger than the ones she had seen in the army. The view from the air would be fantastic. She tapped at the key snug in the ignition, then looked at the fuel gauge. It was reading half-full.

The old ache to fly rose in her chest. She knew exactly what it would feel like to bring these panels to life and begin the preflight check, each movement as much of a ritual as those she used when consecrating the Host during the Eucharist. She could imagine the moment when the rumble and whine grew muffled, her headset connecting her to a world that turned and centered on the machine. The fierce vibrations through metal and bone, her eyes and hands moving over the instruments, and then, at that moment when she lifted away from earth, frustrated gravity pressing her into her seat as she broke its grip and soared into the sky.

She suddenly thought of a verse from Matthew: “Lay down all you have and follow me.” She smiled one-sidedly. God certainly shouldn’t have any complaints in that department. She had given up all this, every lovely leaping moment, to follow Him to Millers Kill, and for what? A congregation that was largely nonexistent in the summer and a man she shouldn’t try to be friends with. She let her head drop back until it almost touched the edge of the passenger seat behind her. A man whose feelings she had unexpectedly lacerated with her big mouth and her insistence that she had a monopoly on truth. The only truth was that a man was dead. And two men had been beaten. And she had no business with any of it.

Make whole that which is broken. Her head came up again. She wrapped her hands around the steering yoke. What was that? Was that a verse from Scripture? Along with the words came a memory of Paul Foubert’s face in the flashing emergency lights. Todd MacPherson’s brother in the waiting room, holding back tears. Russ’s expression when she blindsided him in his patrol car. Make whole that which is broken. “Is that it?” she said. “Is that for me? Does this come from you, or am I just remembering something? Are you there, or am I talking to myself?”

Of course, there wasn’t any answer. Just the rising heat in the cockpit and the familiar comfort of the pilot’s chair. But it wasn’t familiar. This was someone else’s ship, and she didn’t belong here. She felt suddenly stifled by the small enclosure. She kicked open the door and jumped out, nearly landing on Ray Yardhaas.

His big broad face was crinkled with worry. “I don’t think you should have done that, Reverend.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “I know. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry, Ray.” She turned, shut the door, and twisted the handle, sealing it tight. “Let’s head back, shall we?”

Waxman was looking at her with a peculiar expression.
Remember, wherever you go, you’re an ambassador for the United States,
her grandmother used to tell her. As an ambassador for the Episcopal church, she was evidently working without a portfolio. “I like to bless flying vehicles,” she said in an attempt to reassure him that she really was a priest and not an incipient thief. “Want me to do your Jeep?”

His face twitched with the strain of not showing what he thought of that offer. He shook his head. “Um, I’m headed back now, if you want a ride.”

She didn’t, particularly, but Ray was already opening the door for her. She stifled a resigned sigh and climbed back into the battered vehicle. “So why does BWI keep a fully equipped heliport out here? That costs a lot to maintain.”

Ray grunted as he took his seat. “The way I heard it, they install one of these at every one of their project sites. Most of their resorts are in pretty hard-to-reach places. That’s Opperman’s strategy: buy up good land before the roads get put in and everyone and his brother catch on to it. I guess it’s not worth their time to drive to a local airport.”

Waxman shifted, reversed, and they shot forward onto the rutted road. “Plus, there are a lot of advantages to having a helicopter when you’re in the planning stages of a major project. Mapping, surveying, bringing in the first crews fast…”

They went over a rock and everyone levitated for a moment. “Ooof!” Clare clutched at her seat. “Do they have a full-time pilot?”

“John Opperman flies it,” Waxman shouted over the grinding noise of the Jeep’s clutch. “He’s the one who needs the flexibility, because he’s traveling between here and Baltimore so frequently as well as to other developments.”

“He’s the bagman,” Ray yelled, grinning.

They lurched into a rut that almost overturned the Jeep and then they were out again on the dirt track at the upper edge of the main site. Waxman roared down the earthen ramps and came to a neat halt beside the collection of pickups and old cars that constituted the crew’s parking lot.

“I have to get to the lab with this stuff,” Waxman said as Ray clambered out and tipped the seat for Clare. “Nice to meet you, Reverend. Ray, I’ll see you around.” He barely waited for Clare’s sneaker to clear the door before throwing the Jeep into gear and disappearing down the forest road.

“That’s a man in a hurry,” Clare said, waving some of the Jeep’s dust cloud away from her face.

“Yeah, well…From what I’ve seen, when Mr. Opperman says, ‘Hop,’ Leo Waxman asks, ‘How high?’ Remember how he was talking about all those good-paying jobs with private companies? I think he’s hoping BWI will take him on permanently.”

Clare handed Ray her hard hat and brushed dust off her shirtfront. “I may be naïve about how these things work, but doesn’t that create a conflict of interest?”

Ray smiled, stacking her hard hat on top of his. “It kind of seems like it would, doesn’t it?” He tucked the hats under his arm and turned toward the office trailer. The crew had abandoned their vigil in front of the steps and had retreated to a pair of wooden picnic tables under the fringe of trees behind the trailer. Clare could see a couple of coolers on the tables.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else to see, Reverend. Sorry Ms. Landry hasn’t shown up. You can use the phone in the office to give her a call, if you want.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t have the number for her cell phone.” Her mind churned furiously. Her last chance to find out anything about Bill Ingraham was about to come and go.
Aw right, ladies, it’s time to fly or die.
Msgt. Ashley “Hardball” Wright used to say that during her survival training. Male or female, he had called all his trainees “ladies,” unless he was calling them something much worse. She tended to recall his aphorisms in situations her grandmother would never have found herself in—like pumping Ray Yardhaas for information about a man he didn’t know was dead.

“I want to ask you something.” She shaded her eyes from the sun’s glare when she looked up at him. “You seem to think highly of Bill Ingraham. Do the rest of the crew feel the same way?”

Ray shifted the stacked hard hats from one arm to the other. “Pretty much, I guess. There’s always a few who see management as the bad guy. But the new guys on the crew are making fourteen bucks an hour, and the senior guys are making up to twenty, so most of ’em don’t have a problem with the boss taking his profit. I figure, you want everybody to earn the same, go to Cuba.”

“Actually, I was thinking more about his…personal life.” She wiped a trickle of sweat off her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Does anyone have a problem with Mr. Ingraham, um, being, you know…gay?”

Ray frowned. “Why?”

“Well, because sometimes straight men don’t relate well to—”

“No, I mean why do you want to know? You’re not one of those preachers who go around telling folks God hates queers, are you?”

She recoiled. “Good Lord, no!” She wiped her hands against her jeans reflexively. “That’s a…sick perversion of God’s work. No. Just the opposite. I’m trying to get a handle on who might be propagandizing that kind of hate around here. I don’t know if you’ve kept up with the news, but there have been two assaults in Millers Kill recently. Two decent men beaten half to death because they’re gay.” She caught herself. “At least that’s the most likely explanation for the attacks. I want to understand where that rabid homophobia comes from, do what I can, as a priest, to stop it.” The image of Bill Ingraham’s savaged body came to her, causing her words to get stuck momentarily in her throat. Too little too late, she thought, and took a deep breath. “I can’t exactly waltz into the nearest pool hall and say, ‘Hey, guys, what do you really think of homosexuals? And be honest now!’”

Ray snorted.

She tilted her head toward the picnic tables at the edge of the construction area. The guy in the Desiderata T-shirt had opened one of the coolers and was passing out cans. It looked like it was Miller time. “Here you are, a bunch of manly men doing manly construction work, and your boss is a homosexual. An out-of-the-closet gay man. How do your coworkers feel about that? Have there been any problems?”

“You think maybe some of the crew could have been involved in those beatings?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who knows them.”

Ray looked over at the men sprawling in the shade and then glanced at Clare. “You’re not running back to Ms. Landry with any of this, are you?”

“No.”

“Or some kind of reporter?”

“I’ve told you the truth, Ray. I’m the rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church.”

He crossed his arms, obscuring the plumbing company ad on his chest. “I guess the reaction’s been mixed. I don’t think it really makes any difference to most of the guys, although you hear a whole lot more pansy jokes than at the last job I worked. Most guys figure what you do in your private life is your own business, and so long as nobody prances through playing the Sugar Plum Fairy, they don’t say much.”

“I hear you saying ‘most’ of the guys. What about the rest of them?”

Surprisingly, Ray grinned. “We got one Gen Xer, I guess you’d call him, thinks it’s totally cool to be working for someone like Bill. Of course, Carter’s got both ears pierced and these weird tattoos around his biceps.”

“So not only is he out of the mainstream but he’s got enough self-confidence to wear earrings on the job. Is there anyone else on the opposite end? Maybe some older guys? Or somebody who has to spend all his time proving what a jock he is?”

Ray’s smile faded away. “There are a few who just can’t seem to let it alone. Like Charlie back there. They always gotta have some snotty remark about Bill and his ‘lifestyle.’” Ray made quotation marks with his forefingers. “You work on a construction site, you expect to hear some pretty raw stuff. And the guys like to rib you. If I had a dime for every ‘dumb Dutchman’ joke I’ve heard, I could retire to Florida right now. But there’s a difference between making queer jokes to be funny and garbage-mouthing someone personally.”

Clare, who had endured way too many sexist jokes during her years in the army, thought the difference might not be all that apparent to the person who was the butt of the joke. But she knew what Ray was trying to convey. The former was the casual cruelty of ignorance, like the major who had been truly baffled when she took offense at his endless string of dirty jokes. The latter was viciousness, designed to fence someone off from the group with a line as subtle as barbed wire. She thought of the
Hustler
babes she used to find taped up in her cockpit. “Yeah,” she said, “I know what you mean.” She swiped away another trickle of sweat. “So who is it doing the trash talking? And does it stop at talk?”

Ray squinted up at the sky, frowning in thought. “Well, there’s Charlie; you met him. Matt Beale and Toby, they have a pair of potty mouths on ’em, but they’re both so lazy, I can’t imagine either of ’em working up the sweat to beat on somebody. Elliott McKinley, him I can see doing it, but not on his own. He’s like a dog that slinks around on the edges of a pack, whining. He wouldn’t dare come out to bite until another, bigger dog had done it first. Gus Rathmann is the sort who could definitely do it. You should hear the way he talks about his wife. I’ve never met her, but I’ll bet good money he’s beating up on her.”

“Could he be the big dog that this McKinley would follow?”

“Nah. Gus can’t stand Elliott. The thing I’m wondering is, Would he risk it?”

“Gus or Elliott?”

“Gus. He’s on probation. I don’t know what for. But I’ve heard him turn down offers to go out for a beer after work. I got the impression he was trying to keep straight for his probation officer.”

“Either of these guys here today?”

Ray looked at her, alarmed. “These are not people you ought to be hanging around with, Reverend.”

“I know. But are they here?”

Ray sighed. “Gus Rathmann was here this morning. He took off when we were told to stand down until further notice. Which wasn’t unusual—half the guys left after Opperman called.”

“Did Elliott leave, too?”

“He had to. Whitey Dukuys was leaving, and he’s Elliott’s ride.”

“Are they roommates or something?”