All Mortal Flesh (10 page)

“Treat! Treat!” Meg said, patting her thigh, and the dogs bounded after her, around the corner into the kitchen. There was the rattle of something hard hitting the dog bowl, and then Meg returned, closing the door behind her. “Okay, that’ll keep them happy.” She gestured toward the sectional sofa. “Please.”

Russ sat down. It was more comfortable than it looked. The sofa and the matching armchairs were upholstered in denim, which went well with the rest of the room’s décor—early American teenager.

Meg must have been reading his mind, because she said, “This is the kids’ room.” She rapped on the blocky coffee table. “Everything’s meant to be indestructible.”

“Except that.” Lyle nodded toward the wall, where a plasma-screen TV hung in all its pricy glory.

“I want my house to be the place where all the kids hang out,” she said. “If they’re in here, scarfing down pizza and watching satellite TV, I know they’re safe.” She paused, and Russ could see the exact moment she remembered why they were there. How safe could she claim her kids were when Linda had been murdered in her own kitchen? “Do you… do you have any idea who might have…”

Lyle shook his head. “Not yet. We have some theories, and that’s why we needed to talk with you.” He leaned forward. “Did Mrs. Van Alstyne talk to you about a possible, uh, rendezvous this weekend?”

Russ watched the blush turn her face red. Meg folded her hands over her cheeks and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was looking, again, at Russ. “Yes,” she said, her voice barely audible.

“Pardon?”

“Yes.” She was louder this time. “Not in so many words, you understand. Just that there was something special going on and a man was involved. I told her to go for it.” She switched her attention from Russ to Lyle, sitting up straighter. “I told her what’s good for the gander is good for the goose.”

What Russ wanted to do was stand up and snarl,
You idiot, know-nothing busybody
! What he did instead was look out the window, as if the station wagon and pickup alongside the house were the most fascinating things he had ever seen.

“Who was Mrs. Van Alstyne thinking about seeing?”

“I don’t know his name. She was very discreet. She wasn’t the sort to flaunt it all over town.”

The pickup was rigged for plowing. One of the Tracey boys liked working outdoors—plowed in the winter and did landscaping in the summer. He and Linda had hired him a few times, but damned if Russ could remember the kid’s name.

“Do you know anything about him? Do you have any idea how she met this man?” Lyle’s voice was smooth as maple syrup. He was good at this.

“Through her work, I think.”

“Was he a customer?”

“I don’t know. He could have been. Or maybe someone she met on one of her fabric-buying trips. She didn’t share what she thought were the unimportant details with me. To Linda, what mattered, what she wanted to talk about, was the way he made her feel. Valued. Appreciated. Wanted.”

The kid’s name. The kid’s name. Maybe he should ask Meg. Maybe he should remind her that he wasn’t a scum-sucking bottom dweller when he hired her kid. Maybe he should—

“Did Mrs. Van Alstyne agree to go on a date with this man?”

“I don’t know what she decided! She asked me my opinion and I gave it to her. For chrissake, what does this have to do with finding who killed her?”

Eyeballing trucks and contemplating kids’ names wasn’t going to do it for Russ anymore. “I’m not being some sort of jealous asshole, Meg.” He was too loud. She flinched. “This guy who was promising her ‘something special’ may have been the one who killed her. That’s why we want to find him.”

Meg stood abruptly and walked to one of the windows. She yanked it open, pushed the storm window up a few inches, and dug a package of cigarettes out of her sweater pocket. She patted the other pocket. “Crap. Forgot my matches.” She looked at the cellophane-wrapped box. “I’ve been trying to quit.”

Russ heaved himself off of the sofa and pulled his Zippo out of his jeans. He tossed it to her. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Her hand shook as she lit the cigarette.

“I’m not the enemy here, Meg.” He dropped his voice. “I loved Linda. I may have done a half-assed job of it, but I loved her.”

She nodded. “She knew him before you two started having troubles. She told me that. I honestly don’t think she was all that interested in him as a man. He was more—when she talked about him, it was always with a reference to you. Comparing him to you, or how it would piss you off, or how you wouldn’t believe someone else would find her attractive.”

He shut his eyes. Linda had always been the most physically perfect woman he knew. Every man found her attractive. They would go out to dinner and busboys would trip over themselves passing their table. How could she not have known?

“She never told me his name or anything. However, I got the impression from some of the things she said”—she took a long drag on her cigarette—“that she had something going with him years ago.”

What
? Russ squinted at her, as if he could make what she said come into focus.
What
?

“What do you mean, Mrs. Tracey?”

She had almost finished off the first cigarette. She flicked it through the window into a snowbank and tapped out another. “I mean I think she had a relationship with this guy several years ago. Not long after she moved to Millers Kill. She…” Meg lit her second cigarette with a much steadier hand. “She never came right out and said it was the same guy. But I—” She looked at Russ, finally meeting his eyes through a veil of smoke. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Russ. I may be wrong about this. I may have been misreading what she said entirely.”

“You think… she implied she had had an affair?” He sounded as if he were the one who had been smoking. “Linda?”

Meg and Lyle both looked away.

“I gotta—” He could not have said what he had to do. His feet moved, and he was walking, and the next thing he knew he was standing outside, leaning against the bed of his Dodge Ram pickup, losing his breakfast.

He was scrubbing his mouth out with snow when Lyle caught up with him. “Chief?” He glanced down. “Oh, Christ almighty.”

Russ spat out some icy water and scooped up another handful. He stuffed his glasses in his coat pocket and washed his face with snow.

“This is all news to you.” Lyle pitched his sentence halfway between a question and a declaration.

Russ kicked snow over the mess he had made. “Yeah.” He replaced his glasses. The stinging cold over his skin felt good. He wanted to scour the inside of his head the same way, turn it cold and clean.

Lyle held out the Zippo. “I got your lighter back.”

Russ cradled it in one wet hand. “It was my dad’s.” He flipped it over. Ran his thumb across his father’s initials. “Y’know, I always thought he and my mom had a perfect marriage. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized how much his drinking hurt her.”

Lyle’s wary look almost made him smile. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to start hitting the bottle again.” The doctors who said alcoholism was partly genetic got his vote. Like his father before him, he had been a drunk. The difference was, he had managed to stop before it killed him. Thanks, in large part, to Linda.

“Good.” Lyle opened the passenger door for him. “I’ve never seen you boozing, and I for sure don’t want to start now.”

Russ climbed in obediently and let his deputy shut the door behind him. God, he felt wiped out. And it wasn’t even noon yet.

Lyle took the driver’s seat and started the truck. “I’m not going to say I told you so. You know that. But goddammit, Russ, if this doesn’t show you why you ought to sit this one out, I don’t know what will.”

“You’re right.”

Lyle stared.

“Didn’t expect me to agree with you, did you?”

“No, frankly.”

“I’m not taking myself off the case. But you were right. I was nothing but a liability in there. I think maybe I need to leave the boots-on-the-ground work to you and stick to analyzing what you and the other guys bring in.” He pressed his lips together. The next thing he had to say was hard. “If we can, I’d like to limit the number of guys we have directly investigating this lead. If it turns out there’s something to all this… stuff that Meg Tracey says. I just—I don’t want to—”

“I understand.”

Russ relaxed against the seat. “Thanks.” He stared out the window. House, house, farm, house. Featureless fields, corn stubble and hay roots buried beneath December’s snows. “Where are we headed?”

“Back to the station. Look, as long as I’ve got you in a temporarily agreeable state, how ’bout you take my advice and go home for a while? You’ve had a hell of a morning.”

Funny how his mother’s place had become “home.” He wondered if he would ever be able to live in his own house again. “The autopsy report’s coming in,” he said.

“Dr. Dvorak won’t have anything until this afternoon at the earliest. You want to see it, right?”

There was nothing he had ever wanted to see less. “Yeah.”

“Then give yourself a break. Rest up, eat a meal, let your mom take care of you. You don’t want to be losing your cookies in front of the ME ’cause you’re overstressed.”

Russ grunted. It was as close as he could get to acknowledging Lyle was right.

“If I drop myself at the station, will you be able to drive home?” Lyle asked.

“Yes.” Jesus, he needed to get a grip, before his men slung him in a wheel-chair and started spoon-feeding him farina.

“Okay, then.”

The way from the Traceys’ brought them into town on Route 117, up the hill along the river, curving by the gazebo to where Elm and 117 converged onto Church Street.

Through the snowy silver maple trees, he could see the gray stone stronghold of St. Alban’s. She was in there, behind one of the diamond-paned windows, a block away and as far out of reach as the moon.

On his CD player, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks was crooning,
Without you, I’m not okay, and without you, I’ve lost my way…

If he lived through this mess, he was never listening to country music again.

Clare Fergusson looked at the glossy pine-green door and wondered why it was that a closed door was the most frightening thing in the world. In her day, she had hauled soldiers into the open bay of her helicopter with enemy fire splattering the sands around them. She had been held at gunpoint by an angry, terrified woman. She had crawled through snake-infested swamps to prove to her survival instructor that she was as tough as any man in his course.

Those things had never scared her like a closed door. The door to her sister Grace’s hospital room, the first time she had to enter, knowing there was no hope. The door to her colonel’s office, the day she told him she was resigning her commission to enter the seminary. The door between the sacristy and the nave, stepping through to celebrate her first Eucharist as St. Alban’s rector.

The door to Margy Van Alstyne’s house.

Okay. She would give Margy her condolences and see if there was anything she could do. That was, if Margy didn’t slam the door in her face. She took a deep breath. The cold air burned her lungs, and she coughed.

The door opened. “You gonna come in, or are you gonna stand out there until your feet freeze?”

Well, when you put it like that…
Clare stomped up the low granite steps and kicked her boots against the doorjamb. Margy held the door wide to allow her to pass. The small kitchen was steamy, and Clare could hear the sloshing of the washing machine in the corner.

“Take off your coat before you parboil,” Margy said. Clare shucked her parka and barely had time to drape it over one of the ladder-back chairs before she was caught in a fierce hug. “I’m glad you’re here, and that’s a fact,” Margy said. “Want some coffee? It’s shade-grown, fair-trade.”

Clare almost laughed at the normalcy of it all. “That sounds good,” she said.

“Help yourself to some of the coffee cake.” Margy waved at the table, where cellophane-and tinfoil-wrapped platters crowded against stacks of antiwar tracts. “The food started arriving this morning and hasn’t let up yet.”

Clare’s grandmother Fergusson reared up out of her head.
I can’t believe you made a condolence call without so much as a store-bought pie
! “Uh,” she said, “I should’ve—”

Margy finished scooping coffee into the machine and shook her head as she poured the water in. “Don’t worry. If I get any more casseroles, I’ll have to store ’em outside in a snowbank.”

She took two mugs out of the dish drainer and gestured for Clare to take a seat. “I didn’t know if I’d get to see you,” she said, at the same moment Clare blurted, “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me.”

They smiled uncertainly at each other.

“I’m sorry, Margy. I’m so very sorry.”

The older woman laid a cracked and mended sugar bowl on the table. Inside were brown crystals the size of fine gravel. “You may need to get a bit more specific with that.”

“I’m sorry about Linda’s death. I’m sorry I… came between her and your son. I’m sorry—” Clare’s voice broke, and she tried to stop the tears rushing into her eyes. “I’m sorry I made her last days unhappy.” She covered her mouth, but she couldn’t silence her crying. Margy rested her hands on Clare’s shoulders and rubbed her back. “I’m sorry…” Clare hiccupped. “I came here to comfort you. Not to…” A noisy sob cut her off.

“Seems like you’re sorry for an awful lot.”

Clare, wet-faced and choking, nodded.

“You let it all out.” Margy continued to rub her back. “Best thing for a body, to cry it all out.”

So Clare blubbered and wept at Margy Van Alstyne’s kitchen table until her sobs settled to shuddering breaths and her tears dried up.

Margy tipped her chin up. “That’s better, in’t it?”

“I deed to blow my dose,” Clare said.

Margy went to a basket next to the dryer and plucked a handkerchief from the mound of clean laundry. “You’re in luck,” she said, handing it to Clare. Clare blew lustily while Margy ran one of her dishcloths under the faucet. Then she mopped Clare’s face with cold water.