A Fountain Filled With Blood (27 page)

“Yeah.”

“We need to update it. Let everyone know the suspect we’re looking for may already be dead.”

It was fifteen minutes after they left Robert Corlew’s boat slip in the marina that Clare finally understood, really understood, why someone would voluntarily live through winter after brutal winter in the north country. They had motored out past the docks, the mainsail billowing, until they passed some unmarked point and Corlew turned the boat away from the wind, swung out the boom, and told her and Terry Wright to run up the jib. The forty-two-foot boat surged forward like a thoroughbred let out at the Saratoga racetrack. Clare stood clutching the mast with one hand, half-sheltered from the brilliant sunlight by the red-and-white curve of the jib sail, as the boat surged and rose repeatedly beneath the soft soles of her old Keds. Ahead of her, the long lake stretched out forever. Its water, a forbidding slab of black in the winter, was dancing blue now, a thousand sparks of spray and sunlight flashing all around her. And at the shoreline, the mountains rose up out of the water, smoky blue and alpine green. It was like living in a fairy tale. She half-expected to see a white-towered castle rearing out of the forest.

“I think Story Land amusement park is over there somewhere.” Terry Wright waved in the direction of the opposite shore, where a little town emerged from the forest in a clutter of bright-roofed houses that ran down to the water’s edge. The rotund banker eased himself down until he was sitting on the deck, his feet braced against the low lip running beneath the rail line. Clare followed suit.

“I was just thinking it looked as if there ought to be a castle here somewhere.”

“There are. Fort Ticonderoga, at the head of the lake, at the point where it meets with Lake Champlain. And behind us, Fort William Henry. Fought over by the French and the Indians, the British and the colonists. This place was called ‘the key to the continent’ in the eighteenth century. There’s been a lot of blood spilled into these waters at one time or another.” He smiled, his round cheeks sunburned underneath his enormous mustache. “That’s not, by the way, a hint that there will be today.”

Clare laughed. “Fair enough.” She leaned back on her elbows, closing her eyes and letting the sun sink into her bones. “Hard to imagine wars here at the moment. It seems like heaven to me.”

“There was a war over heaven, too, wasn’t there? And now look. The place is overrun with tourists, just like Lake George. Of course, heaven isn’t closed between October and May. I hope not anyway.” He laughed. Terry’s infectious laugh gave him a reputation as a comic because it made listeners join in even if what he said wasn’t particularly funny.

“What are you two nattering on about up there?” Mrs. Marshall’s voice cut through the rush of the water and the wind. “Come down here and join us. Robert’s breaking out the drinks.”

Clare followed Terry along the edge of the deck and dropped beside him onto a well-padded bench in the boat’s cockpit. Mrs. Marshall and Sterling Sumner were occupying the opposite bench, Sterling holding the wheel steady with one hand. His ever-present scarf, in deference to the eighty-degree weather, was of jaunty striped silk rather than wool, and one long end fluttered in the breeze.

As she bounced into place, Robert Corlew leaned out of the hatch, his wide shoulders nearly filling the space. The developer had unusually thick hair that sprang with suspicious abruptness from his forehead. Clare had thought today might be the day when she would finally be able to verify that it was a rug, but Corlew had a captain’s cap jammed firmly onto his head, hiding everything underneath. He handed two tall glasses up to Mrs. Marshall. “Lacey, gin and tonics for you and Sterling.” He turned his attention to the other bench. “Reverend Clare, Terry, what’s your poison?”

“Beer,” said Terry. “If I don’t keep working on it, this belly will disappear.” He laughed again.

“Same here,” Clare said. Corlew ducked out of sight and reappeared a moment later with two bottles, ice-cold and dripping. Clare handed Terry Wright his bottle and tilted hers back, drinking down a third of the beer at one go. “Boy, this sun sure makes you thirsty,” she said, lowering the bottle.

Mrs. Marshall was staring at her with exactly the same expression Grandmother Fergusson used the time she caught Clare in a burping contest with her cousins. Too late, Clare noticed the pair of glasses Corlew was holding in his other hand. Silently, he handed one to Terry, who proceeded to pour his beer. Corlew proffered the other glass to her.

“Unless you’d rather…”
Swill it down like that
, Clare thought, finishing the sentence for him. She smiled weakly and accepted the glass, then dutifully poured and handed her bottle back to Corlew.

I’m thirty-five years old, she reminded herself. I’m these people’s spiritual adviser. I’m not going to be intimidated by the fact that they’re all old enough to be my parents. She glanced at Mrs. Marshall. Or grandparents.

Robert climbed back out of the hatch with his own beer,
in a glass,
and slipped behind the large wheel to sit on the transom locker at the very stern of the boat. “Cheers, everyone,” he said, and raised his glass.

“Cheers,” they all replied.

Clare twisted in her seat to look back at the shoreline slipping past them. A boardwalk jutted into the water, crammed with arcades, T-shirt shops, and rickety stands selling Italian sausages and fried dough. A redheaded man, bearded and bespectacled, was trying to keep a pair of skinny kids from falling off the edge of the pier. The children, holding clouds of cotton candy bigger than their heads, waved energetically at the boat. Clare waved to them and turned back toward her companions, inexplicably buoyed up again. It was too beautiful a day to feel bad, and the thought gave her another epiphany. The long, hard winter had given her an appreciation for the summer that she had never had before. The sun, the clear blue sky, the green and growing things were blessings that she enumerated day by day, because they would be gone in a twinkling, in a heartbeat. Winter was the default here, with summer a brief and glorious escape. She felt that this ought to provide her with some solid spiritual insight, but all she could think was that she now understood why no one was attending the Sunday services.

“You’re looking particularly thoughtful, Ms. Fergusson.” Mrs. Marshall, silver-haired and elegant, could never bring herself to address Clare either by her first name or as Reverend Fergusson. Clare couldn’t blame her for the latter—she herself had grown up hearing that the word
reverend
was an adjective, not a title. Her grandmother Fergusson would no more have addressed a priest as Reverend than she would have attended services without a hat. Of course, Grandmother Fergusson’s priests had all been male. Father was not a title that Clare would choose. She supposed she would have to either get her doctorate in divinity or rise to a post in the Episcopal hierarchy in order to get a proper gender-free title. Bishop Fergusson…

“Isn’t this the point where you say, ‘I’m sure you’re all wondering why I brought you here’?” Sterling Sumner said. The word Clare usually applied to Sterling, in the deepest recesses of her mind, was
disagreeable.
In vestry meetings, the architect was impatient and prone to dismiss the opinions of others as uninformed. Today, his face was pinched into an expression that suggested irritable bowel syndrome.

Robert Corlew broke in before she could answer him. “I think we all know what we’re here to talk about. Let me try to frame the issue. We’ve had some very unfortunate episodes of violence this summer around Millers Kill.”

Clare opened her mouth to point out that a bloody murder was a bit more than an unfortunate episode, but then she thought better of it and shut it again.

“It appears that there may be a connection between the attacks and the victims’ lifestyle. In other words, all the men involved were homosexuals. Reverend Clare made a statement to the press, expressing her opinions. I’m sure you all saw it. Now, if I understand what she’s told me, she wants St. Alban’s to get involved in some way.” He sat back down on the transom chest so abruptly, Clare was startled. She had expected him to start in on what he wanted to see happen.

Everyone looked at Clare.

She could feel things slipping out of control, her own waspish reaction ready to burst forth, her impatience with having to deal with these people.

Not
these
people.
My
people, came the thought. Her thought? She wasn’t sure. But she knew what she had to do. She put her glass into one of the cup holders molded into the side of the bench.

“I’d like us to start with a prayer,” she said. Corlew looked surprised, then nodded. She watched each of them as they gathered into themselves. Mrs. Marshall folded her hands neatly beneath her chin. Sterling ducked his head and covered his face with one splayed-fingered hand. Corlew, still standing at the wheel, tilted his head back, a practical position that left his eyes half-lidded but still able to see. Terry Wright laced his fingers together easily and rested them in his lap, head bowed. For a moment, she wished she could bring them together, hold hands, and pray, but they were all Episcopalians, after all, and holding hands was not the way things were done. It would only make them uncomfortable.

“Lord God,” she said, “if there’s one thing we know about you, it’s that you love boats. You chose fishermen to be your companions, and you walked to them across the water to quell their fear and doubts. Be with our company in this boat, Lord, and help us to remember that, quarreling and disputatious as we might be, we are all your apostles. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Everyone repeated the amen, and there was a moment when they all looked up and around them at the taut sails and the sun and the fast-slapping water racing past their hull.

“My thought is this,” Clare said. “I believe we have an obligation to speak out against hate crimes. I believe that we can’t, in conscience, stand aside and witness attacks like these happening and not come forward and say, ‘This is wrong.’”

“But there’s no doubt that it’s wrong,” Terry Wright said in his mild, reasonable voice. “It was obvious from the papers that the attacks were horrific and that the police are going after the culprits with everything they’ve got. What more could
we
do?”

“It’s not as if the news of Ingraham’s murder was followed by editorials ripping up gays for their lifestyle choice,” Corlew said. “I can personally attest to the fact that not one person I’ve met over the course of the past week has said anything along the lines of ‘Good, they’ve got it coming to ’em.’”

“My position is very simple. I don’t want to see St. Alban’s name dragged through the mud again,” Sterling Sumner said. “After last winter’s debacle, I say we need to keep our heads down and our noses clean. Where is all this going to lead? People associating our name with crime and homosexuality. That’ll be bringing new recruits in by the busload. You do remember that we wanted you to increase membership, don’t you?”

“There are three new families attending St. Alban’s since I became rector,” she said.

He sniffed. “That’s a start….”

“I haven’t been here a year yet!”

“Calm down, Reverend Clare. No one is questioning your ability to get the job done. Get up on top of the bench, will you?” Corlew turned the wheel slightly and released the jib several inches. The boat responded by keeling starboard, away from the wind, and Clare and Terry stepped up on the padded seat and sat on the outer edge of the cockpit, leaning against the yaw of the boat.

“Sterling’s raised a valid point,” Mrs. Marshall said, taking a small sip from her gin and tonic. “How do you answer it, Ms. Fergusson?”

“I don’t think anyone would mistake our concern for victims of crime as an association with crime, any more than our mentoring program for teen mothers is a stamp of approval for girls getting pregnant.”

“Another idea of which I did not approve,” Sterling said.

Clare ignored that. “And as for people shunning us because of our known association with homosexuals”—here she wiggled her eyebrows, because she sounded ridiculously like Joseph McCarthy—“I say we don’t want new members who would think like that. We want people who will admire us for taking a stand and who will say, ‘Yes, that’s Christianity; that’s how I want to live it and that’s the church I want to belong to.’”

“So what is it you envision us doing, dear?”

Clare bit back a smile. She thought Mrs. Marshall’s endearment was a slip of the tongue, but it was a sweet one. She had to confess that it didn’t throw her so much when the eighty-year-old lady treated her as a girl instead of a leader. It was the men she had to whip into shape.

“Nothing aggressive or in-your-face. But noticeable. Something that makes us and our support of our neighbors visible.”

“How about a one-eighth-page block ad in the
Post-Star
?” Sumner said.

She looked directly at him. “Sterling, what would you do if you wanted to tell your community that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, were accepted and valued?”

“Huh.” Sumner jerked one end of his scarf. “The truth is, not all people are accepted and valued. Whether it’s because of their so-called sexual orientation or just because they’re unlettered idiots.” Mrs. Marshall murmured a reproving sound. “I can’t help it, Lacey,” Sumner said. “It goes against my grain. These men running around, doing whatever they want to, with no sense of discretion—”

“I rather think that’s the point,” Mrs. Marshall said. She laid a hand over Sumner’s arm. “That people can live their lives without having to fear that a slip of the tongue or being seen in the wrong place at the wrong time will make them pariahs.”

She knows. That was Clare’s first thought, and she realized there was something very old here between these two friends, old and buried, but not forgotten. She felt suddenly ashamed that she had been trying to maneuver Sumner into a corner.

Corlew looked at Terry Wright, discomfort and determination chasing each other on his face. “We’re not trying to make anyone a pariah. We’re simply looking out for our own.” Clare opened her mouth and he shot a hand up, waving the words away. “No, no, sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”