Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery (Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (12 page)

She did indeed prop her feet up on the hearth. The fire popped and snapped. Oscar circled thrice and thumped to the floor next to her chair. She picked up her book.

Maybe the last renters had left a bottle of something behind in one of the cabinets?

Stop it.
She pressed her hands against the hard curve of her belly.
Haven’t you done enough damage already?

4.

Sitting in the obstetrician’s office on that first visit in November had been one of the most humiliating experiences of Clare’s life. She knew—she
knew
—that every other pregnant woman in the waiting room had been taking folic acid six months before conceiving and had stopped drinking as soon as the stick turned blue. The doctor, who looked like someone’s kindly grandmother, laid the sonographer’s report on her desk as she indicated the chairs opposite. Clare and Russ sat.

The doctor tapped the sonograms. “Based on the fetal measurements, I’d estimate you’re fifteen weeks along, Ms. Fergusson. When was your last period?”

“Well … that’s part of the problem. I was taking birth control pills. I had several … they seemed light but I
thought
—”

“We weren’t trying to get pregnant,” Russ said.

The doctor frowned and folded her hands. “We don’t do terminations at our practice, but I can refer you to—”

“No,” Clare said firmly.

Russ cleared his throat. “There’s also an issue of…” He glanced at Clare.

“Substance abuse.” She was amazed she could get the words out, her throat was so dry. “I didn’t realize I was pregnant, as I said…” Her voice trailed off. She took a deep breath. “I was taking sleeping pills. And amphetamines.” Her eyes felt hot and prickly. “And I was drinking pretty heavily.”

Russ took her hand and squeezed tightly. He gave her a look of complete and utter understanding. He himself had been dry for over a decade, but his experience as an alcoholic made him uniquely sympathetic to the temptations to drink. “She just got back from a tour of duty in Iraq five months ago. She was having a hard time readjusting. As soon as she found out she was pregnant, she stopped.”

He didn’t want to be here, he disagreed with her decision, and he still leaped to her defense. Even under these excruciating circumstances, it made her heart lift.

“I see. Are you getting any support for your sobriety?”

“I’m seeing a therapist twice a week,” Clare said.

“Is there any way to tell if there’s been any damage?” Russ leaned forward. “At this point, I mean?”

The doctor pursed her lips. “There’s no evidence at this time that amphetamines or sleeping pills are teratogenic—that they cause any birth defects. Although obviously, I don’t recommend you take either during pregnancy.” She looked down at the sonograms. “It looks like the fetus has good spinal closure; there’s no evidence of hydrocephaly or any of the other developmental defects we might be able to see at fifteen weeks gestation. We can do amniocentesis in another two weeks—that will enable us to rule out Down syndrome and a few other genetic problems. The issue is going to be the alcohol. Can you give me an idea of how many drinks per day you were consuming before you knew you were pregnant? And when you stopped?”

Clare swallowed. “Probably two or three on average. Some days only one. Some days … a lot more. I had my last drink around the twentieth of October.”

“So about two weeks.” The doctor nodded. “That’s actually encouraging. While the effects of drinking vary from woman to woman, as you’d expect, I wouldn’t expect to see fetal alcohol syndrome resulting from that level of consumption.”

“Really?” Russ asked. He shook his head. “I thought, you know, they say no drinking at all for pregnant women.”

“That’s right. But FAS requires a lot more than your wife was putting away, for a lot longer time.”

Clare felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted off her chest. She looked at Russ.

“However.” The doctor’s voice sent her thudding back to earth. “It is possible the baby will show signs of fetal alcohol effect.”

Russ frowned. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“The symptoms aren’t that much different than what we see in certain types of processing spectrum disorders. Learning disabilities, poor impulse control, attention issues—that sort of thing.”

“Can we…” Clare reached for a life preserver. “Can we test for that? So we know in advance?”

The doctor shook her head. “I’m sorry, no. FAE can only be diagnosed after birth.”

“Is there anything I can do? To ameliorate the effects?” Clare raised her hands, as if she could pluck something hopeful out of the air. “Eat … organic? Take vitamins?”

“No. At this point,
if
there’s been any damage—and I reiterate, that’s still very much an if—it’s irreversible.”

“So you’re saying it’s a crap shoot?” Russ’s voice was rough. “She goes through the pregnancy, and if she makes it to the end, we may or may not have a kid with brain damage?”

“‘Brain damage’ is an unnecessarily severe way of thinking about it, Mr. Van Alstyne. You may or may not have a child with special needs and challenges, and even those can occur in such varying degrees. An enormous amount can be done with early intervention. I’ll put you in touch with our counselor. She can give you all the information you’ll need to prepare yourselves. If it proves necessary.”

They left the obstetrician’s office under a cloud of silence, Clare clutching a prescription for prenatal vitamins and a date card for her next appointment. She couldn’t look at Russ. He had conquered his alcoholism before he could harm anyone but himself. She wasn’t sure if he would be able to forgive her for what her drinking might have done to their future child. He opened the truck door for her and shut it behind her after she climbed into the cab. He got in behind the wheel. He sat there, keys in hand, his eyes in the middle distance, doing nothing.

Finally she broke. “Say something.”

He shut his eyes. “I’ve already told you what I think.” The lines of his face stood out.

“I know I’ve made mistakes, Russ. If I could go back and change what I did—” She swallowed to get her voice under control. “But I can’t. And I can’t correct those mistakes by making another one.”

“Oh, Christ, Clare.” He bent his neck until his head rested against the steering wheel. “Do you have any idea what having a disabled kid can do to a marriage?”

She reached out and touched her fingertips to his back. “Yes. But I also know what having strong and loving parents can do for a disabled child.”

“And what’s this going to do to you, Clare?” He turned toward her. “You’re barely off the drugs. You’re seeing two counselors twice a week, and you’re
still
having nightmares and flashbacks. Hell, you can’t drive to the IGA without drifting into the middle of the road to avoid IEDs. Now you’re looking at
more
stress with a special-needs kid?”

“Two weeks ago, you told me that if we just kept holding on, if we didn’t let go, you and I could get through anything.”

“I didn’t mean we ought to go looking for more problems! Pregnancies are dangerous. You wake up every morning wondering if it’s going to last. You can’t talk about what-ifs and you can’t think about it like there really might be a baby, because then what happens when things don’t pan out? So there’s nothing but silence and stuff you didn’t say and grief and anger…” He trailed off.

“Whoa. Why do I get the feeling we’re not talking about this pregnancy all of a sudden?”

He leaned against the side window and grunted.

“Is this about what happened to Linda?” She knew Russ’s late wife had lost several pregnancies.

“No. Maybe. Some of it.”

“Her sister said she’d had three miscarriages—”

“Five. Two were early, before we’d told anyone she was pregnant.”

“Oh, Russ.” She took his hand in both of hers. His skin was chilled. “I’m so sorry. That must have been awful. Did she have some sort of uterine condition?” Clare was vague on the details, but she knew there were women whose wombs simply couldn’t carry to term.

He shook his head. “No. That was the hell of it. It was always something different. Infection. Failure to develop. Cord death—Jesus, that was a hard one.”

She put her hand on his cheek and turned his face toward hers. “There’s no reason to think any of that will happen this time.”

“So instead we get to burn ourselves out and risk your mental health taking care of a dependent special-needs kid?”

“It might not—”

“Of course you think it might not, Clare. That’s how you operate. You live in a world of belief, and faith, and half-full glasses. I live in a world of bad news and worse outcomes.” He pushed away from her and started the ignition. “Look, I can’t change you. I never wanted to change you. But don’t ask me to change, either. I’ve been on this ride too many times before. I know where it comes out, and I don’t want to go there again.” He threw the truck into reverse and backed out of the parking spot. “I won’t say a word against you on this. But don’t expect me to pretend to be happy about it.”

5.

If you had asked Lyle MacAuley what was the least favorite investigative task he could think of, it would have been visiting men on the sex offenders registry. First off, they were scum. Second, there were way too many of them. There were a few guys who had gotten on for stupid reasons—usually sleeping with their underage high school girlfriends after they’d turned eighteen—and he could eliminate them from his checklist, but that still left dozens of sickos who liked to flash little kids, or molest their stepdaughters, or liquor up twelve-year-old boys and rape them. Lyle had been dealing with criminals for thirty-five years, but nothing got under his skin like these guys.

It didn’t help that he was working his way through the list alone. He didn’t dare put Eric McCrea on this—the man was a father with anger-management issues. Lyle didn’t want to imagine what Eric might do if he snapped while interviewing one of these perverts. He had tried calling Russ twice already to bring him up to date, but the only person he reached was the computer operator, telling him the chief’s number was “unavailable due to network failure.” Kevin and Hadley were trying to track down the little girl’s father, in the hopes that might shake something loose.

That left Lyle, ringing bells and looking into slack, panicked faces, asking if he could “come in out of the cold” so he could listen for the sound of a child somewhere in the house or apartment. He listened to their protestations of how clean they were, how recently they had checked in with their parole officers, how diligent they were about therapy. He wrote down their alibis—he figured Eric could run those down safely enough—and got their numbers and work addresses. Mostly, he looked for the guy who was off. The one who sweated a little too much or smiled too widely or who just smelled wrong.

He found him on his third stop after grabbing a greasy sack lunch out past the Super Kmart. Wendall Sullivan, twenty-seven, last known address 8 Smith Street, Fort Henry, a listing two-story house with asphalt shingles flaking off the exterior. Lyle parked on the street in front, marched up to the front door, which was flaking paint, and rang the bell. It was answered by a guy flaking dandruff, making the place a perfect trifecta of neglect.

“Yeah?” Flaky Shoulders said. He was too bored at the sight of a cop to be the guy Lyle was after.

“I’m looking for Wendall Sullivan.”

“He’s at work.”

Lyle waited a beat. Nothing else was forthcoming. “Which is where, exactly?”

“Huh? Oh. Maid for You. They’re over on River Street, by the Italian bakery and the comic book shop.”

Lyle thanked the roommate and got back into his cruiser, resisting the urge to brush off his uniform. He found Maid for You right where the guy said it would be, housed in a small storefront with a sign featuring a pin-up-style drawing of a girl in a saucy French maid’s costume. Lyle guessed it was either a cleaning service or a kinky escort business, and since he couldn’t picture a two-time con in high heels and a frilly black skirt, he was betting on the cleaning service.

Inside was bare—just two benches, industrial-strength carpeting, and a receptionist behind a desk. Sadly, she looked more like someone’s chain-smoking granny than a naughty maid. She was on the phone when he came in, so he stood at parade rest while she went over the sanitary wonder that could be the client’s home for the low, low price of two hundred dollars.

Evidently, that wasn’t low enough, because she hung up with a disgusted look on her face. “Damn economy,” she said. “People’d rather live in a damn pigsty than break out their checkbooks.” She took a drag on her smoldering cigarette. “Help you, Officer?”

“Yes, ma’am. I understand you’ve got an employee named Wendall Sullivan.”

“Yep. Good worker. Came with a great recommendation. Punctual, too.” She exhaled a stream of smoke. “Please don’t tell me he’s in trouble, because I’m having a bitch of a time finding cleaners. Everybody’s too damn good to scrub a toilet these days.”

“I just need to ask him a few questions, ma’am. Do you know where I can find him?”

“Of course I do. He’s with the B crew, out on a job. You need to talk with him now? I hate to interrupt a team when they’ve got the process going.”

“It sure would make my life a lot easier.” Lyle smiled at her. The old MacAuley charm worked its magic, because she tore a piece of paper off her pad and scribbled down an address.

“Here you go.” She took another drag. “If it turns out you have to arrest him, will you for God’s sake wait until he’s done steam-cleaning the carpets?”

The B team was working in the Mountain View Park development, which was the sort of place Lyle would have expected to have maid service. Houses the size of barns, with those giant half-moon windows and brick driveways. Four bedrooms but six baths, and granite-and-copper kitchens with five-thousand-dollar ovens for people who always grabbed takeout on their way home from Albany.

There were several beater cars and a Maid for You van on the street. Lyle parked in the drive and headed for the front door across a walk that had been snowblowered with a surveyor’s precision. The door was opened by a forty-something woman before he had a chance to knock. “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”