To Darkness and to Death (34 page)

Good Lord, it had better not be Deacon Aberforth, coming back for another round. She had barely escaped intact that last time, when he asked her what she had been so apprehensive about. She had stammered something about the fund-raising for the roof repairs and stuffed him out the door.

But no, she couldn’t imagine Aberforth letting himself in. It had to be Hugh Parteger, stopping by on his way to the bed-and-breakfast where he would be spending the night. She had been surprised he hadn’t arrived before now; although New York City was light-years away from Millers Kill in every way that counted, it was only a four-hour drive.

She grabbed a towel and bent over from the waist, flip-ping her hair down before wrapping it into a terrycloth turban. She lifted her robe from its hook and slipped it on, belting it firmly. She stepped out of the bathroom in an explosion of steam and checked herself out in the mirror at the top of the stairs. Swathed in white toweling from her head to her ankles, she looked like someone auditioning to be an extra in a remake of
The Mummy
. Hugh would be amused. She briskly rubbed at her hair through its wrapping, then took the towel off and tossed it over the banister.

She padded down the stairs. “Hey,” she yelled. “Is that—”

Russ was standing next to her sofa table.

“—you?” she finished, her voice gone small.

“Uh,” he said. “Um, I was on my way back from the ME’s office…” His voice trailed off. He was holding a picture of her with her family, taken this past summer when she had gotten away to Virginia for two weeks. He tried to put it back, but he was watching her instead of his hand and wound up bumping the heavy silver frame against two others, knocking them down.

That got his attention. He tore his gaze from her and started propping the pictures up, nearly tipping over three more in his haste to clean up after himself. “Sorry,” he said. She could have sworn he blushed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I shouldn’t have so many on that table anyway. They’re bound to fall over.” Part of her was thinking at how pleased her grandmother Fergusson would have been to hear her taking the blame on herself, like a good southern belle. Another part of her was acutely aware that under her all-enveloping robe, she was naked.

That thought must have occurred to Russ as well, because when he turned back to her, he looked not at her face but at the tie belted around her waist. Her heart was trip-hammering, blood like heated honey flowing through her veins, raising her body temperature until it seemed the cloud of steam was still with her, enveloping her in dampness and warmth.

He looked at her, his blue eyes that crackled like the glaze on a Japanese pot, and the fierceness and the ache she saw there dropped the bottom out of her stomach and made her go loose-limbed.

She stepped toward him. Something flared in his eyes. She took another step. She wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t stop. She was alone with him, in her own house, on her own time, and they were both adults, and why should she stop? She
wanted
, and she realized that everything she believed in, everything she placed between this man and herself, was just another robe, and she could shrug it off and be naked. Be nothing more or less than who she was.

She took another step. It was easy. She wanted to laugh. She took another—

—and he looked away. Turned his whole body, so that he was edge on toward her, and she thought stupidly,
Oh. So that’s the cold shoulder
.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice tight.

In an instant, every cell in her body was icebound. She had never been so mortified in her life. “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out through her constricted throat. “I’m so sorry. I was—”

“For chrissakes, Clare, it’s not that.” He wouldn’t face her. “What, do you think I don’t want you?” He clenched his hands. “I can’t be responsible for both of us. You sashay across the room with your eyes saying,
Take me, take me
—what do you think I’m going to do? I’m not a monk.” He turned back toward her.

She stared at him. He stared at her. She felt her lips twitch. Then grin. Then she started laughing, hard, clutching her stomach through the robe.

“Okay, okay.” He sounded abashed, but he was grinning, too. “The monk remark was not well thought out.”

Sighing from laughter, she wiped her eyes. “I love you,” she said.

She had never told him that straight out, without an apology. He looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I love you, too,” he said.

They stood there, three feet apart, not knowing what to say. Clare glanced down to where her feet were peeking out from underneath the robe. “Well,” she said finally. “Now that we’ve covered that, would you like some soup?”

She walked to the kitchen without waiting for his reply, knowing that doing something, keeping busy, was the safest course. And even though she wasn’t the least bit hungry at the moment, she also knew she’d be starving once he left.

She had her head in the fridge when Russ pushed through the swinging doors separating the kitchen from the living room. “What kind of soup?” he asked. She could hear it in his voice, too, a deliberate attempt to be casual, as if the two of them hanging out in her house while she was practically undressed was a normal thing.

“Butternut squash. I made it yesterday. It has squash, onions, chicken broth, peanut butter.” She pulled the Tupper-ware bowl from the bottom shelf and placed it on the counter.

“Uh…” He looked dubious. “I’ll pass.”

She shrugged. “More for me.” She retrieved a pot from the dish drainer and poured the soup in.

“So,” she said, opening the fridge again and bending down for the good bakery bread. “If you didn’t come here to have your way with me, why did you come?”

Silence. She straightened, turning, in time to catch him staring at her rump. His eyes looked glazed. “Uh,” he said.

Flustered, she nearly dropped the bread. She grabbed at the first topic to come to mind. “You said you were on your way back from the ME’s office. What’s happening in the van der Hoeven case?”

His eyes snapped into focus. “Ed Castle’s off the hook. Dr. Dvorak confirmed that Eugene died from a fall. As in, off the tower where we found his body.”

“The tower?”

“I told you about it, remember? A nineteenth-century folly.” He flattened his hands on the kitchen table. “Even if I could spin a theory whereby Ed chased Eugene up to the top of the tower and threw him off, the weird setup we found would argue for something entirely different. What different thing it was, I don’t know yet.”

“What did you find?”

“It looks like someone was being held there. There was food, articles of clothing, blankets…”

“Good Lord. Millie van der Hoeven?”

“That’s my thought. The crime tech guys didn’t find any prints, but there were a number of long blond hairs around.”

“Becky Castle has long blond hair,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but she wasn’t unaccounted for for any length of time. Besides, we know who assaulted her. Lyle interviewed her when she got out of surgery.”

Clare stopped, her serrated knife halfway through the loaf. “Who?”

“A guy named Randy Schoof.”

“Is he related to Lisa Schoof? The woman who works at Haudenosaunee?”

“They’re married.
And
he’s Mark Durkee’s brother-in-law. It’s a small town.”

She shook her head. That poor young woman. “How do you handle something like that?”

“Obviously, we keep Mark away from that investigation. Believe me, there’s more than enough to keep him busy elsewhere. He’s following up on a black Mercedes some of the search and rescue guys saw driving up to Haudenosaunee before Eugene died.”

“You think the driver might be Eugene’s killer?”

“At this point, I’m more concerned with finding Millie van der Hoeven. There’s nothing I can do to help Eugene now. But Millie… hell, I have no idea if she’s alive, if she’s dead, what she was doing in that tower room, who was keeping her there.”

“Sounds frustrating.”

“It is.” He sniffed at the soup. “Can I have a taste of that?”

She slid the bowl along the counter. He downed a spoonful. Then another. He looked at her, surprised. “Is it too late to change my mind?”

She grinned. “According to my theology, never.” She fetched another bowl from the cupboard and filled it from the pot. “Let’s eat in the living room,” she said. “My feet are cold.”

He took both bowls from her while she slapped the bread on a plate and followed him through the swinging doors. He laid the bowls carefully on the square coffee table before sinking into one of the cushy chairs facing each other across it. She settled the bread plate between the bowls, then turned on two lamps and the CD player. She glanced out the window before sitting down. “It sure gets dark early these days.”

“It’s November.”

She tucked her feet under her and smiled. “I didn’t get a chance to say this before, but happy birthday.”

He looked embarrassed.

“So you’re fifty now.”

He leaned forward, put his face in his hands, and groaned.

“That’s really, really old.”

He gave her a stony look. “Brat.”

She laughed. “Then don’t be in such a funk about it. As my grandmother used to say, getting old isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” She picked up her soup bowl. “What do you want for your birthday?”

“To find Millie van der Hoeven alive and well and to nail Eugene van der Hoeven’s killer.”

“Any ideas?”

He plunked his spoon into his soup. “The guy didn’t get out and about enough to make enemies. Unless he was harassing somebody through the mail for the past umpteen years, I don’t see how he could have whipped anyone up enough to kill him.”

“He whipped Becky Castle up when he chased her away at gunpoint.”

He flipped his hand open. “I’m damn sure Becky Castle didn’t kill him.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that. I was suggesting that the land sale itself may have stirred somebody to kill him. There’s a lot of money involved.”

“Yeah, but the main players are all benefiting. GWP gets glory and a big tax break, the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation gets more protected parkland, and the van der Ho-evens carry home bags of cash.”

“There are people who depend on access to Haudenosaunee land for all or part of their livelihood.”

“Like who? Ed Castle? I told you, he simply doesn’t fit as the killer.”

“What about Shaun Reid?”

Russ sat back. “What about Shaun?”

“Do you know him?”

He paused for a moment, as if thinking her question over. “He was my best friend in high school.” He leaned forward again and took another spoonful of soup. “We drifted apart after I went into the army. He was in college when I was in Nam, and by the time he returned to live in Millers Kill, I was long gone.”

“You didn’t pick things up again after you moved home for good?”

“Too many differences. Too much water under the bridge. Besides, you put on a uniform, people look at you differently.”

“I’ve noticed that,” she said dryly.

“Yeah, but at least you don’t have to worry that you might wind up arresting one of your buddies.” He shifted in his seat. “You start to get kind of friendly with someone, you think, here’s a guy I’d like to hang out with, go fishing, and then you think, what is it gonna be like when I pull him over for DUI? Or go to his house because he’s been brawling with his wife? Or surprise him at work because his boss finds he’s been cooking the books?”

“You don’t have a very upbeat view of human nature, do you?”

“Linda said the same thing to me this morning.”

Clare smiled a little. “She knows you well.”

“Yeah.”

She studied him for a moment while he ate his soup.

He lifted his head. “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking something.”

She smiled. “I wonder if one of the reasons you let yourself get close to me is because you felt, somehow, that a woman priest was less likely to fail you.”

He thought about it. “Less likely to wind up in trouble, you mean?”

“Or less likely to have any human frailties.”

“Well, if that was what I was thinking, the joke’s on me, isn’t it? I’ve never met anybody who attracts trouble like you.”

“That’s not fair! Just because I’m called to get involved—”

The smirk behind his soup spoon alerted her to the fact that her chain had been yanked. She picked up her bowl, trying to keep a scowl on her face. “You think you’ve got me all figured out, don’t you?”

“No.” His voice was low. “I think you continually surprise and delight me. And that’s why I let you get close.”

She stared at him, her face growing hot. He looked back at her, steadily, and it felt as if they were sinking in deep water, holding each other by their words alone. If she looked up, she would see the pale blue surface of the ocean, far, far above her.

The kitchen door crashed open.

“Vicar?” a British voice called. “Are you home?”

5:00 P.M.

They looked like a hokey tableau in one of those British sex farces. There she sat in nothing but a robe, which, she discovered as she followed Hugh’s eyes, had loosened up noticeably while she was bending and stretching in the kitchen and was now showing off a good deal more of her chest than she had intended. There sat Russ, superficially relaxed, tension radiating from every line, his attempt at appearing casual and friendly marred by a defensive glare that screamed guilt. And there stood Hugh, wine bottle in hand, storm clouds rumbling across his face, glancing back and forth between them as if waiting for someone to say the first line and start the scene.

Clare resisted the urge to yank her robe tightly together and insist,
It’s not what you think
. Instead she smiled brightly and said, “Hugh! I was wondering where you were. I hope the drive wasn’t too bad. You remember Russ Van Alstyne, don’t you?”