Out Of The Deep I Cry (17 page)

“Reverend Fergusson?”

The voice she recognized. “Officer Durkee?”

“What are you doing wandering around out here?”

She spread her arms open, displaying her pole, flashlight, and map. “I’m volunteering for the search and rescue team.” Before he could point out that she had no prior connection with the team or anyone on it, she added, “I was trained in search and rescue in the army.” Mark Durkee was young enough for references to a higher authority to carry some weight.

“Huh,” he said. He pushed the balaclava up, revealing his face. “I was just headed over there to talk with Jim.”

“About the search?” She glanced at the tow truck, shuddering and chuffing as it wrenched the Buick out of the trees. “Was there any sign that he walked away from the crash?”

Durkee nodded. “There were some boot prints around the car. Pretty indistinct. With the crust on the snow, every step just caves it in, leaves a big jagged hole.”

“Can you tell which way he went?” She looked at his expressionless face and thought, Don’t ever get in a poker game with this guy. “Let me rephrase that. Can you tell which way the footsteps went?”

“They intersect with the trail from the tires. Crunched flat.”

“So you can’t trace them from there?”

He shook his head.

“So maybe he made his way back to the road and was picked up…” She trailed off. “But if that happened, he’d be home by now, wouldn’t he?”

“I’d think so.”

“Did the crime scene investigation team find anything?”

“They always find something.”

“You’re a very closemouthed man, Officer Durkee.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He smiled at her.

She looked around her, to where the unfathomable darkness of the Adirondack wood was held back by a few headlights and the whirling amber flashers of the tow truck. Even though she hadn’t started yet, her search of the reservoir frontage seemed suddenly futile, an exercise designed to soothe them into thinking they had some control over this great and terrible beast all around them. “Russ doesn’t think Dr. Rouse is going to be found alive,” she said. “Do you?”

He shook his head. “No. But I think the effort is worth it. Whatever we do to find out what happened, to find him, it’ll be a comfort to his family. There’s something to that.”

“Yes. There is.” She gestured with her pole. “I better get to it.” He lifted his hand in a salute that also pulled his balaclava back over his face, and headed up the road to deliver his news to the rest of the search and rescue team.

Clare waded into the snow. She discovered right away what Officer Durkee had been talking about. The stuff was covered with a frozen sludge of snow and ice, pitted with pinecones and broken bits of branches. It was just strong enough to hold her body weight for a second or two before breaking, so that each step jarred up her spine. When she lifted her foot for another step, the powdery snow hidden beneath the crust seeped in between the top edge of her boot and her rip-stop pants, so that within minutes, she felt cold rivulets running down her socks.

She would have thought that the clear, cold air would carry the sounds from the road aloft, that she would still be able to hear the truck axle grinding and voices talking, but the tall pines swallowed everything in a fine-needled screen. The light, too, disappeared shade by shade, which surprised her, since this was a mature forest, no scrub trees or opportunistic bushes to push through. Just northern white pines, one after another after another until, when she looked back to where she had come from, there was no sign of lights or movement, no indication that there had ever been any artifacts of civilization.

She plowed on, trying to ignore her wet socks and the quiet, trying to ignore the narrow thread of panic that fluttered beneath her breastbone, chanting
Cold and snow and the woods and you’re out here all alone,
because it was ridiculous. She had a map, a light, a walkie-talkie, and probably twenty cops and firefighters within a half-mile radius. It was just a leftover fear from an older and colder encounter with the Adirondack woods in winter. She paused for a moment, braced her mittened hands against a tree, told herself she had never had a panic attack in her life and she wasn’t having one now, and pressed forward, sloping downward.

She could see the reservoir through the trees now, white and shining, and she hurried to break through into the clear air and was astonished when she did. Up on the road, all the lights casting the rest of the world into darkness had dimmed the effect of the almost-full moon. And beneath the pines, neither the moon nor the sun ever reached the ground. But here-she turned her flashlight off and blinked at the dazzle. The frozen surface of the water was neither white nor black, but glinted like layers of mica. And the size of it! When she had heard the term
reservoir,
she had created a picture in her mind of a squared-off city-block-sized container, like a giant bathtub waiting to be drained. This thing was a lake, vanishing into the curve of the forest at either end, far enough across so that it would be a challenge to swim the round-trip.

She could make out more details of the surface now that her eyes were light adapted, and she could see grayer spots and pockmarks where the ice had melted, broken, re-formed, and refrozen. But even with Huggins’s warning playing in her head, the urge to step out onto that dazzling openness was strong. The Gospel writers had had it right when they described Jesus walking on water. What could feel more godlike than standing in the middle of a lake, water stretching away from you on all sides, the night turned to day by the light of the moon?

The walkie-talkie in her pocket crackled. She tugged her mitten off, retrieved it, and keyed the mike. “Fergusson here,” she said.

“Where are you, Reverend? Over.”

O-kay. So much for being one of the boys. She glanced at her map to remind herself of her distances. “I’m at the reservoir shore, about a quarter mile west of the cemetery site. Over.”

“Head east until you hit the cemetery and then come back up the hill to the road. Over.”

“Why? That’ll be the world’s shortest search.”

“Chief Van Alstyne wants you to drive Debba Clow back to her home. Over.” Additional emphasis on the “Over” to point out how she had forgotten that detail in her last message.

She was tempted to ask exactly how long it had been between the time Chief Van Alstyne found out she was here looking around and his decision Debba could be released. However, considering that every man on the search and rescue team could hear the conversation, she resisted the urge. “Will do. I’m headed that way now. Fergusson out.”

She turned her eyes away from the frozen water and began slogging east, driving her pole through the crusted snow, scanning left, right, left, looking for any sign that someone had come this way before her. They could pull her off this duty assignment, but she by God would do it to the best of her abilities until the end.

Unfortunately, no broken branches, conveniently torn-away bits of clothing, or telltale footprints appeared for her to triumphantly report. From the edge of the reservoir as far into the woods as she could see, the icy snow lay unbroken.

She forgot to check her progress against the map, and was startled when a flashlight beam splashed across her face. For a moment, she was back on a logging road, hearing a cold voice slithering out of the darkness, the snick of a gun’s safety releasing. Her heart tried to squeeze up through her throat.

“It’s me.” Russ’s voice came out of the shadows. “I came back down to make sure you-are you all right?” He crunched into the moonlight and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, bunching his fingers in the insulated fabric as if to keep her from falling.

She nodded, pressed her free hand against her mouth, breathed against the mitten. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said when she could. “Your flashlight… it startled me, that’s all.”

He looked at her closely, his eyes washed colorless in the moonlight. When had he developed that look, like he was seeing right through her, right into her? She made herself busy with stuffing her map back into her pocket. “I’m fine,” she repeated, although he hadn’t asked. “Let’s go.”

“It’s real slippery through here,” he said. “Take my hand.” He reached toward her. She stared at his glove for a moment, knowing that if Mark Durkee had been there, offering to help her keep her balance, she wouldn’t have hesitated; hating that voice inside her that wondered,
Is this okay? Is this safe?

She put her mittened hand in his and squeezed. He pointed the flashlight past a shadowy, cleared area-the cemetery-through the pines. “That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Don’t want you falling and cracking your head open, too.”

“Is that what happened to Dr. Rouse?”

He flashed his light on the gravestones. They were crumbling at the edges, their carving blurred by decades of acid rain. “It looks as if there’s been a lot of thawing and freezing around the stones. They soak up the heat from the sun during the day. The snow melts, then when night falls, everything ices over again.”

She tightened her grip on his hand as she struggled for footing. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“We found smears of blood on the corner of one of the stones consistent with Debba’s story.”

“Can I see?”

He pointed with his light, and she could just make it out, dark blackish spots along the rounded edge of the stone. She would have taken them for moss if she hadn’t known. “So do you believe her version of events now?” She could pick out the name on the marker in the wash of the flashlight beam. JACK KETCHEM. JULY 21, 1920.

“At this point, I don’t know what happened here.” Russ played his beam over the ground. “This was all churned up even before the CIS guys started tromping around.”

Clare let go of his hand and removed her own flashlight from her pocket.

“What?” he said.

“I want to see,” she started, then turned her light directly on the blood-marked gravestone. JACK KETCHEM. JULY 21, 1920-MARCH 14, 1924. OUR ANGEL.

“He was just a baby,” she said. She redirected her light to another stone. LUCY KETCHEM. JANUARY 8, 1918-MARCH 14, 1924. BELOVED DAUGHTER OF J. A. AND J. N. KETCHEM.

Clare stepped closer. “This was what Dr. Rouse wanted her to see? This?” She turned her light on another stone. PETER KETCHEM. JUNE 3, 1916-MARCH 18, 1924. BELOVED SON OF J. A. AND J. N. KETCHEM.

She turned back to Russ. “My God.”

He nodded. “I know. There’s one more of them.” He flashed his light onto a fourth stone. A lump of ice half obscured a bas-relief carving of a lamb near the bottom. Above it, Clare read, MARY KETCHEM. NOVEMBER 5, 1921-MARCH 15, 1924. OUR LITTLE LAMB.

Two and a half years old. She reached back, and Russ took her hand again, holding hard. “Children,” she said. “Just babies.” She looked at the dates again. “They all died within a week of each other.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Jane Ketchem was their mother, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said. “I met her here, when I was still a kid myself. I didn’t know at the time. Later, I heard the story.”

The money for the clinic, for Allan Rouse’s medical training, it all fell into place. This is where it sprang from. This was what Jane Ketchem had been thinking of. And Clare was taking it, using it for roofing. Inside her mittens, the palms of her hands crawled. She turned her face toward Russ. “Let’s go, please.”

He nodded, and tugged her away, his arm helping her find her footing over the icy patches. Long after they had disappeared into the pines behind her, she could feel their stone faces watching her. Peter. Lucy. Jack. Mary.
Our Little Lamb
.

Harry McNeil heard the commotion as soon as he pushed through the doors of the police station. Some woman gabbling upstairs for Sergeant Tibbet to
do
something, to
help
her. Not knowing that “doing something” was no longer in the vocabulary of Sam Tibbet, who had been slated to retire this spring but who was staying on because his son had recently lost his mill job and the whole extended family was eating off one police salary. Harry had pulled Sam off foot patrol two years ago when he had discovered the old guy was mostly working the seat instead of the beat. He wasn’t a praying man, but the Millers Kill chief of police devoutly hoped that Tibbet junior would find good employment. Soon.

Stevenson and Inman came in behind him, both officers looking as tired as he felt. “You boys sign in your hours and then head on home. Get some sleep,” Harry said.

Ralph McPhair, spiffed up with fresh-shined shoes and his gloves on, descended the stairs, heading out for morning traffic duty. “You three look like you got dragged through the bush backward. I hope the rumrunners came off the worse.”

Roll Stevenson rubbed his face. “We thought we had one of ’em leaving that old barn behind McAlistair’s place. Chased him almost to the gee-dee county line. Turns out it was Roscoe Yarter’s kid, up all night sparking McAlistair’s girl.”

Pete Inman laughed, a short, sharp gasp of a sound. “We could have plugged the kid, and he woulda thanked us, just so long as we didn’t turn him in to MacAlistair.”

“You going out again tonight, Chief?” McPhair asked.

“Maybe. I’ll get on the phone to Glens Falls, see if they had more luck than we did last night.” Harry tried not to let the complete lack of hope show in his voice. Attempting to plug the constant flow of illegal liquor running from Canada down to New York City was a mug’s game. The bootleggers had as many men and more money than any of the police departments coming up against them, and appeals to citizens’ civic virtue couldn’t compete with hard cash in your pocket for leaving your barn unlocked and looking the other way. Harry knew, like he knew his kids’ names, that within ten miles of where he was standing there were at least two or three delivery vans stashed out of sight in some farmers’ hay barns, their drivers and gunmen snoring safely in the lofts. He knew, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He forced a smile, grinned at his men. “You see any bootleggers passing through town, Ralph, you be sure to stop ’em, you hear?”