All Mortal Flesh (44 page)

“I want that for you, too, love.”

She drew her hand out of his and laid it in her lap. Looked at both her hands. Hands she used to greet parishioners, soothe the sick, comfort the mourning. Hands that cradled the holy mysteries of the Eucharist. “I’ve killed a man,” she said. “With these hands, I killed a man. How can I hold the body and blood of Jesus in these hands?”

He reached over the stick shift and enfolded her hands in his own. “I love your hands,” he said.

She shook her head.

“I love you,” he said.

She hiccupped a laugh. “Let’s not start that again.”

He didn’t let go. “I’m going to have some sorting out to do. Linda’s royally ripped at me.”

That was enough to distract her from her failings. “She was the one who left without a word. How can she be mad at you?”

“She was with me when I got Harlene’s message about you being here. She heard every word. Told me that if I left her sitting in the truck cooling her heels while I swanned off to rescue you, she was leaving with her sister. I wouldn’t back down, so off they went.”

“Oh, God.” Clare leaned forward and bumped her head against the steering wheel. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. I told her, it was police business.”

She looked at him. “Uh-huh.”

“I was driving right by here on my way to Mom’s.”

“So you had to stop right after she reappeared from the dead? And you would have done the same if it had been, say, Ben Beagle from the
Post-Star
who was chasing down Quinn Tracey?”

“Well…” He shifted in his seat. “Maybe I would have taken her and Debbie home and then come back. But I would have come back.”

A shape loomed out of the gathering dark and rapped on her window. She unrolled it to reveal Kevin Flynn’s eternally cheerful face. “Glad to see you safe and sound, ma’am!”

“Thanks, Kevin.”

“Chief, we’ve secured the scene in case the CS guys want to look it over, but we’ve got to make tracks. There’s been a bad accident on Route 57, and they’re calling everybody in. Crap weather. This’ll be the fourth accident I’ve responded to today.”

“We’ll follow you,” Russ said, leaning over Clare. “We have to go that way to get Reverend Fergusson home. You can get us past the tie-up.”

Clare turned to him. “We?”

“I’m driving you home.” His tone did not invite debate.

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Then I’m going to borrow your car. I gave mine to the woman who was with you.”

“My new deacon.” She didn’t want to think about how today’s events would affect her standing in the diocese. And she couldn’t think, yet, about how they would affect her ability to pastor. “You may be in luck. She’s probably back at St. Alban’s, typing up a report to the bishop.”

They traded places. Clare sat back, happy to leave the difficult task of driving through a snowstorm to someone vastly more experienced. She kept quiet, letting Russ concentrate on staying on the road, letting herself be hypnotized by the snow whirling out of the darkness into the headlights’ beam.

“Kevin’s right,” Russ said, his voice strained. “This is crap weather.” He sighed. “I was going to head over to Debbie’s hotel, but I guess I better report in at the station instead.”

“Aren’t you still suspended?”

He grinned in a way that made Aaron MacEntyre’s words echo in her head.
I have you pegged as a wolf
. “With Quinn Tracey in the hospital waiting to confess all? Just let Jensen try to keep my badge from me. Her and her extra
e
. Hah.”

“Is he going to be okay, do you think? I mean, healthwise?”

“Tracey? Yeah. He had a punctured lung, but the paramedics were pretty optimistic. Being seventeen helps.”

“Do you think he’ll get charged as an adult?”

“Dunno. Depends on what we can uncover about MacEntyre. I didn’t know him very long, but he sure struck me as a casebook sociopath. Tracey’s lawyers’ll probably have a pretty good argument that MacEntyre led their client down the road to hell.”

“I met him before. That day you asked me to find out—” She shook her head. “Yesterday. It was yesterday. It feels like a year ago. Anyway, I’m just realizing that when he was talking with me and his mother, it was all ‘like’ and seem’ about him. As if everything he did, every human interaction, was a performance.” She shuddered.

“You don’t need to talk about this,” he said quietly.

“Sooner or later I do.”

“No,” he said. His voice was firm. “You don’t.” He glanced away from the road for a second. “I didn’t go into any details about what happened with Flynn and Noble Entwhistle. I said MacEntyre was threatening our lives, and that he’d been killed. As the responding officer, I’m going to write up the official report. I can make it so that I did it.”

She sat, silent for a moment. Thinking about changing history with a few keystrokes. “Thank you,” she finally said. She smiled a little. “I love you for making the offer. But I can’t accept.”

He snorted. “Kind of thought you’d say that.”

Ahead of them, Flynn’s cruiser’s brake lights flared red. Russ stepped on the brakes, muttering something under his breath that Clare figured she didn’t want to hear. The Subaru fishtailed. “Hang on,” he said, steering them into the skid. He got control of the car, and they slowly inched forward, following Flynn, who had turned on his red-and-whites. Emerging out of the darkness, they could see flares, and the whirling lights of squad cars and tow trucks and emergency vehicles, and then the intersection. A truck had T-boned a small car, crumpling it around the Peterbilt grille like a wet napkin draped over a fist.

Clare crossed herself, then folded her hands against her mouth.
Dear Lord God
, she prayed,
show Your mercy to all whose lives will be changed tonight
.

“Wait,” Russ said. He slowed even more. “Wait.” He pulled off the road. She thought. It was hard to tell.

She was about to ask if he was needed when he opened the door. In the overhead light, his face was a death mask. He slipped out, slamming the door behind him.

Alarmed, she tugged her hat and gloves on and followed him. In the blur of the storm, the rescuers and responders were anonymous, bulky figures in parkas and rip-stop pants, their faces hidden behind skin-saving balaclavas. She lost Russ immediately. She headed toward the accident, where brilliant halogen lights cut through the snow’s unending assault.

“Hey!” A masked figure caught at her sleeve. “No one allowed in there, sorry.”

She pushed her hat back and her parka collar down.

“Oh! Reverend Fergusson!” The man let go of her sleeve and peeled his balaclava away. It was Duane, an EMT and one of Russ’s part-time officers. “I’m afraid they don’t have any need of you now, Reverend.” He raised his voice to be heard above the wind. “Better say your prayers for the rest of us, that we don’t get frostbite sortin’ this mess out. It’s ugly.”

“What happened?”

“Rental car skidded through the red light right into the path of the eighteen-wheeler. The driver says he tried to stop, but… He’s pretty shook up.”

“He’s okay?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s the other two that bought it.”

A sick and terrible weight ballooned in the pit of her stomach. “I have to get in there,” she said.

Duane shrugged. “Stay out of the way,” he advised. Clare skirted an ambulance—sitting there, both EMTs waiting patiently in the cab, no rush to the hospital for them—and sloshed through a well-churned morass of snow toward the accident.

Four members of the Millers Kill volunteer fire department were attacking the remnants of the car with torches. Cutting away the tortured metal to take out what was left inside. Two fire trucks flanked the scene.

“Russ!” she yelled. She skirted the edges of the light. “Russ!”

A firefighter crossed in front of her, toting a rolled hose. “Excuse me,” she shouted. “Have you seen Chief Van Alstyne?” The man—woman?—paused, then pointed to the other end of the intersection.

Clare hurried, slipping and sliding, dodging cops and firefighters, rushing, the panic and dread growing, frantic to find Russ and not wanting to see him at all.

She spotted him standing apart from anyone else. He was facing the remains of the car head-on. The closer she got, the more slowly she walked, until she was too close not to see his face.

Then she knew.

“They…” he said, in a voice that had aged a century. “They…” He pointed to the intersection. “You can see. From the tracks.” She looked. Whatever he saw in the patterns in the snow was unintelligible to her. “And… from the angle. They were coming back.”

She didn’t want to see him like this. She didn’t want to ever see such pain in anyone’s eyes ever again. If it had been within her power, she would have switched places with the woman in the passenger seat. Just to erase what she saw when she looked at him.

“They were coming back. The hotel. Was that way. They were coming back.” He stared at Clare. “And I—” His voice cracked, and he crumpled beneath an enormous cry that tore out of his chest. “Oh, God! What I said to her!”

Clare stepped forward, opening her arms, offering whatever she had.

He turned away.

He stood there, in the snow and the light and the darkness, drowning with the first bitter waters of grief, and she waited, and she waited, until she realized he wasn’t going to turn to her. Ever. She stepped back. She stepped back. She stepped back and back, out of the light, past the fire trucks and the EMTs and the squad cars, until she had vanished into the storm.

And she was lost again.

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

It is a cliché that there are no secrets in a small town. It is also true. Despite the fact Kilmer’s Funeral Home had no visiting hours for the late Mrs. Russell Van Alstyne and her funeral had been unlisted in the
Post-Star
, the Center Street Methodist Church in Fort Henry was packed. The pews at the front of the church were so crowded, Mayor Cameron had to squeeze in next to Wayne and Mindy Stoner in the third-from-the-last row.

Mindy, who had been in Russ’s class at MKHS, sighed when she caught sight of him. “Poor man. He looks awful.”

“You speaking today?” Wayne asked Cameron.

The mayor shook his head. “I’m keeping a low profile. The aldermen and I met yesterday and told him he’s getting six weeks off whether he likes it or not. Poor bastard just sat there and nodded. I don’t want to give him the chance to change his mind.”

“Can’t say I’d like to sit home and think about it if my wife got turned to jelly in a car wreck.”

“Wayne!” Mindy elbowed her husband.

“Why d’you think it’s a closed coffin, hon?” He turned back to Jim Cameron. “Where’s the other one? The sister?”

“Florida. She had a couple of grown kids who brought her remains back.” Cameron shook his head. “What a mess. This is going to screw up our state highway fatality rating for the rest of the year.”

Wayne relayed the news about Russ Van Alstyne’s leave of absence to Scotty McAlistair at the Agway feed store the next day, and Scotty, in turn, told his daughter Christy at dinner time. When Christy arrived at the Free Clinic for an appointment she thought her father knew nothing about, she was disappointed to find out the nurse pratictioner had already heard that the chief of police was off duty for the next month and a half.

“Yeah, Lyle MacAuley’s acting chief,” Laura Rayfield said, helping Christy sit up. She snapped off her gloves and popped open a cupboard door.

“Oh. Well, did you hear that Quinn Tracey’s already been charged? He’s in the Glens Falls hospital, but nobody’s allowed to see him. He’s like, locked down in intensive care. We had an assembly about what happened with him and Aaron. They had a counselor there and everything.”

“I hadn’t heard, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” She handed Christy three boxes. “I want to make it very clear these don’t prevent STDs,” she said. “You should have your partner use a condom each and every time to protect yourself.”

Christy grimaced. “There won’t be very many times,” she said. “My boyfriend’s in the marines. He’s going off to California for advanced training.”

Laura Rayfield wouldn’t have dreamed of talking about Christy McAlistair’s sex life, but she had no qualms passing along the information about Quinn Tracey when she met several nurses at the Main Street yarn shop for their weekly stitch and bitch session. They, in turn, told her that one of their colleagues was in the market to sell her house.

“She’s spitting mad about it, evidently,” Laura said to Roxanne Lunt at lunch the next day. “The husband’s taken a new job with the state police in Middletown. Alta Brewer, who’s the senior charge nurse and who hears everything, said it was very last minute. He had to do it. No one at the police department will talk to him, evidently.”

Roxanne’s passion was preservation, but selling houses paid her bills. “Have they signed with a Realtor yet?”

“I don’t think so. You should call them. Until they sell the house, he’s got one godawful commute.”

Roxanne fished her Palm Pilot out of her purse. “What’s the name?”

“Rachel Durkee. Mark and Rachel Durkee.”

Roxanne was delighted with the house. It was, she told the Durkees, in “move-in shape,” and the only fix-up she recommended was a new coat of paint in the kitchen. She was thinking about possible buyers when she got a visit at the historical society from St. Alban’s new deacon, who had broadened the reach of the church’s fundraising.

“I know you’re the mover and shaker behind the historical society, Ms. Lunt.” Elizabeth de Groot shook Roxanne’s hand warmly before taking a seat. “I feel that your organization is a natural to help us in our efforts to maintain one of Millers Kill’s most architecturally significant buildings.” She spread several photos of the church from the 1800s on Roxanne’s desk.

“I think most of these are originally from our collection.” The director smiled. “I think we might be able to make a grant.” The niceties observed, Roxanne leaned forward. “Now let me ask you, you’re commuting from the Schuylerville area, is that right?”