To Darkness and to Death (49 page)

“And so he did,” Clare said, so quietly Russ doubted the van der Hoevens heard her.

His phone rang. He excused himself and jumped out of the ambulance. “Van Alstyne here.”

“Russ? It’s Lyle. I’m calling to update you on the Reid-Gruyn fire.”

Russ listened while Lyle told him the news. He thought about Becky Castle, and Ed, and about Shaun and his new young wife, and about Lisa-the-housekeeper. He thought about Mark and Rachel Durkee.
It’s true
, he thought.
We are all related. If not by blood, then by bonds we don’t even realize. Until they’re gone
.

He walked back to the ambulance in time to hear Clare saying, “Let’s be thankful for at least this. No matter what the damage, it’s been confined to things. Things can be replaced. At least no people have been hurt.”

“I’m afraid that’s not true.” The ambulance dipped under his weight as he climbed in. “I just got off the phone with my deputy chief. He’s been monitoring the fire over at the Reid-Gruyn mill. It seems Randy Schoof and Jeremy Reid were caught in the old mill. They’ve both been confirmed dead.”

Millie van der Hoeven burst into tears.

10:00 P.M.

Lisa Schoof sat in the back seat of her brother-in-law’s cruiser. It was dark, very dark, except where it was lit by the light of the still-burning fire. Every once in a while someone would come up to her and ask if she was okay, if she wanted to go to the hospital, if she could answer a few questions. She didn’t reply; even if they opened the door, their voices remained behind thick glass, and eventually Mark spotted whoever was bothering her and shooed him away.

She tilted her head against the back of the seat. She was tired. So very tired.

Once, when she and Rachel were kids, they had spent the day sledding down a hill behind their grandfather’s pasture. They had been cold, then colder, and finally their toes and fingers ached and pinched with the bite of it. But they had dared each other to stay out till dark, and Lisa had found that after a while, the pain went away, and she felt nothing at all.

That was how she felt now. Numb. And tired.

She had thought, when the firetrucks arrived, that would be the end of it. So many of them, and so many men, tossing hoses into the river, sending great sprays of water arching over the old mill. She stood on the scrubgrounds surrounded by Reid-Gruyn workers, the plant emptied out, and someone had said, “Thank God it didn’t start in the new mill,” and she had turned and said, “My husband’s in there,” and they all fell silent and drew away from her.

But still, she believed the firefighters would save him. Him and the man who had gone in to get him out. She believed, right up until the moment when, with a series of cracks and pops that echoed through the night like artillary fire, the joists and braces that had held up the old mill for one hundred and thirty years gave way. The roof collapsed inward with the flaming roar of a dying forest, blasting out great gouts of fire that scattered the firefighters and made the onlookers stumble back in shock and awe.

Randy was gone.

She couldn’t remember what she had been thinking of when she ran, screaming, toward the fire. Someone had tackled her, several someones, and held her down while she thrashed and screamed and clawed, until the paramedics appeared and gave her a shot, one of them kneeling on her chest and another one immobilizing her arm.

Now she was numb.

Mark had asked her some questions—about Randy, and Becky Castle, and Shaun Reid. She had answered them because it was the quickest way to get him to stop bothering her. After that, he left her alone. And kept the others away.

Outside, she could hear someone crying, and Mark’s voice, and then the squad car door opened and Rachel was there, saying, “Lisa. Oh, Lisa,” in a tear-clogged voice.

Lisa let her weeping sister wrap her arms around her shoulders and hold her. She wanted to tell her it was okay. She wanted to ask her if she remembered that day sledding, and the sun going down, and the numbness. But she was too tired to talk. So she let Rachel choke and sob over her, and she closed her eyes against the darkness and the light.

2:00 A.M.

Clare rolled to a stop and turned off the lights. “Here we are.”

“Let’s go,” Russ said without moving. “You must be exhausted.”

“I’m not, surprisingly. I think I’ve gotten my second wind.” She had shuttled Hugh to the Stuyvesant Inn and Deacon Aberforth to the rectory before returning to the Algonquin Waters resort—or what was left of it—to pick up Russ. He had been adamant about getting a ride with one of his officers, but when she pointed out that they could drop her at the rectory first, and that he’d be doing her a favor by returning Hugh’s car to him on Sunday, he agreed.

“How’s Mark?” she asked.

“Okay, I guess. I took him off duty as soon as I found out about Randy Schoof. I think they were all planning on going over to his in-laws’ house. I’m sure it’ll help the girls, being with their parents.”

“Mmm. I have to remember to call tomorrow and ask if I can do anything.”

“You mean today. It’s Sunday.”

“Is it?”

“Has been for two hours.”

She wrapped his dinner jacket, which she hadn’t taken off yet, more tightly around her. She liked the smell of it. “Now you’re fifty years and one day old.”

“I’ve decided I’m not going to have another birthday until I turn sixty. Maybe by then the town will have recovered from this one.”

“I wonder what you’ll be like when you’re sixty?”

“A geezer, just like everybody else.”

She grinned into the darkness. “Nah. I bet you’ll be all dashing and sexy, like John Glenn.”

“John Glenn? The astronaut? You think he’s sexy?”

“Yep.”

“You have some serious father issues you’re working out, don’t you?”

She laughed.

“Clare?”

Something in his voice made her laughter die away. “Yeah?”

“I decided something tonight.”

She took a breath. “What?”

“I’ve decided to tell Linda. About us. About my feelings for you.”

Say something, Clare. Say something
. “Oh.”

“I can’t be dishonest with her anymore. She’s been beside me every step of the way for the last twenty-five years, and now I’ve walked so far afield we can’t even find one another with a map. I need to do something about it. I’ve decided to start by being truthful.”

“What do you think her reaction is going to be?”

He laughed briefly. “Damned if I know. Somewhere between shooting me and giving me her blessing, I think.”

“What if she asks you to cut off all contact with me? That wouldn’t be unreasonable, you know. A lot of marriage counselors would probably recommend it.” She forced herself to consider, dispassionately, what might be best for Russ. “Maybe it would be better.”

He looked at her in the darkness. “It wouldn’t be better. It would kill me. The thing about all this is, Linda loves me. I don’t think she’d ask me to do something that will”—he searched for the right word—“eviscerate me.”

She reached for his hand. He interlaced his fingers with hers.
I’m going to have to be the one
, she thought.
When the time comes, I’m going to have to be the one to break it off
. She squeezed his hand, and he tightened his fingers in return.
Lord God, give me strength
.

“C’mon,” he said. “Time to get you into bed.”

She laughed. He paused, not getting it for a second, and then groaned. She opened the door, leaving the keys in for him. He held out his hand, and she went around the side of the car and caught it, interlacing her fingers in his again.

“Look at that moon,” he said.

She looked to where it was riding, halfway to the horizon.

“We had dinner,” he said, “but we never danced.”

“Nobody danced. The bandstand blew up and the instruments melted.”

He tugged her off the driveway and onto the front lawn. The frost on the grass was pure silver in the moonlight. She could feel it, chilling her feet.

“Dance with me,” he said.

“You’re moonstruck,” she said.

He placed one hand at the small of her back and took the other in a proper dancing position. “No, I’m not. I’m alive, and you’re alive, and we don’t know where we’ll be twenty-four hours from now. So let’s dance while we can.”

He began singing a melancholy, wordless tune. “
Dum-da-dum, da-dee-da-dumdum, dum-da-dum, da-dee-da-dumdum
.” His free hand nudged her back, and the next thing she knew, they were waltzing, her skirts swishing through the frost, his feet crunching the frozen grass. She recognized the melody suddenly. “Ashokan Farewell,” from the Civil War documentary.

She chimed in, her alto humming above his baritone, the sleeves of his dinner jacket falling over her hands, and they danced, beneath the November moon, to sad, sweet music they made themselves.