Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  The kitchen door swung open again. The husband from last night—Mr. Keene—stomped in, brushing snow from his jacket and shaking off his pom-pom hat. Hard on his heels, Flynn.

  She met his eyes and he blushed, which would have been funny, except she could feel her face heating as well. She tried to look away, tried to look casual, but there was an invisible wire humming between them.

  “How’s it look out there?” Steve Obrowski’s bluff voice broke the spell. Hadley crossed back to the island, taking the first stool she bumped into.

  “We got the cars relatively clear of ice and shoveled from the parking area to the road,” Flynn said. “It should be enough to get anyone else out who needs to go.” He stripped off his snow-spattered parka and hung it on a hook near the door.

  “Is it safe to travel?” the seventyish woman asked.

  Flynn shook his head. “I wouldn’t recommend it, ma’am. At least, not until the plow gets through.”

  Mr. Keene slapped him on the back. “Well, there are certainly worse places to get stuck!” He hopped up next to his wife.

  “Fritattas are up!” Ron Handler wheeled away from the stove and deposited the two skillets onto iron trivets on the island. “You’re all welcome to stay as long as you like.” He winked at Hadley as he took one of the stools at the near end of the island. “It’s the dead time of year for us.”

  “I’m afraid Officer Knox and I need to leave as soon as possible.” Flynn sat next to Hadley. She knew she must be imagining it, but she could swear she could feel the heat of his body all along her side.

  The kids let out wails of disappointment.

  “Do you have to go?” Steve asked, setting a wooden tray piled with bacon on the center of the island. “I mean, how much crime could be going on in weather like this?”

  Flynn glanced at Hadley. “They’re going to need us for traffic control and accidents.”

  “The department needs everyone with—” She stopped herself before blurting out the chief missing. “With the chief away on his honeymoon.”

  “Oh. Well, then…” Steve sounded disappointed. Maybe that was what made someone an innkeeper—actually wanting people hanging around.

  Ron sliced the fritattas into wedges, and the noise level rose as people handed over plates, poured themselves orange juice, passed the bacon—“Might as well eat it before it spoils,” Steve said—and exchanged stories of storms and strandings. Hadley ate silently, unable to slip back into her role as Flynn’s partner, unwilling to act more intimate in front of a crowd of near-strangers and her kids.

  Flynn didn’t seem to have any problems, handing out advice on the most likely routes to travel, telling funny stories about his run-ins with Lyle MacAuley. It irked her, because dammit, she was the one with all the experience. She ought to be calm and collected instead of sitting next to him like a Catholic schoolgirl on her first date.

  “—right, Hadley?”

  She blanked. Flynn was looking at her so normally, waiting for her to say something. “Oh. Yeah. Our deputy chief is a bear. We’re going to have to do some fast explaining for being late as it is.” She laughed. It didn’t sound quite right to her ears.

  By the time they had finished breakfast, she was desperate for just a couple of minutes alone with him. When Flynn said he was going to start up his truck, she said she’d go with him, but then Genny barreled back into the kitchen looking for help gravity-flushing the toilet. By the time they had finished, Flynn had come back inside to pick up the bags and thank the innkeepers for their generosity.

  They loaded the suitcases and the kids and set off for town. Flynn drove at a conservative ten miles an hour, which made Hadley want to screech, except she knew he was only playing it safe. He remained focused on the almost invisible road ahead, his face set, his hands tight on the wheel.

  Route 57 had been plowed at some point, and the road into town was a patchwork of bare asphalt, ice slicks, and packed snow. When they finally reached the house, there was just enough space to park. Flynn snugged his Aztek nose-to-nose with her granddad’s old Dodge and grabbed the kids’ luggage while Hadley steered them inside.

  Hudson and Genny rampaged over Granddad as if they’d been gone a week, while Hadley excused herself to go upstairs and change. When she got back down, Granddad was supervising the children donning their outdoor gear. “I’m off to snowblow the church,” he said. “These two can slide down the hill on t’other side while I’m working.” Past the parish hall, St. Alban’s lawn sloped downhill toward Route 57 and the river. A century-old iron fence kept sledders from disaster.

  “It’s still coming down pretty hard,” Flynn observed. “You sure you want to snowblow now?”

  “Got to get ahead of it, don’t you?” He held the door open for them. Everyone trooped out onto the porch. There wasn’t going to be any chance for a private moment or a quiet word, Hadley saw.

  They made it back to the station house and pulled into the parking lot without having said a word, Flynn killed the engine, and Hadley finally opened her mouth. She didn’t know what she was going to say—something reassuring, or funny, anything except what she was thinking: Are you having second thoughts?

  “Are you having second thoughts?” His lips were drawn into a line. “Because if you are, you know—”

  “No!” She blinked at him. “Are you?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course not. It’s just you didn’t say anything—”

  “You didn’t say anything!”

  “The kids were in the car!”

  “I thought maybe, I don’t know…” She turned away to look out her window. “Some guys, once they’ve caught your heart, they get scared.” She glanced back toward Flynn.

  A slow smile curved his mouth. “Have I caught your heart?”

  “Oh, God.” She pushed at him. “You know what I mean.” For some reason, she kept her hand resting against his chest.

  His gaze dropped to her lips. “I want to kiss you.”

  Her breath caught. “I think we ought to keep it under wraps at work.”

  “Yeah. I agree.” He did not, however, stop leaning closer and closer, looking at her as if he were going to lay her out in the backseat and—

  A siren blurped behind them.

  “Shit!” Flynn jerked away so quickly his head smacked his window.

  In the side mirror, Hadley could see MacAuley getting out of his unit. “It’s the dep,” she hissed.

  “Okay. We play it cool. Like nothing’s changed.”

  “Like nothing’s changed. Got it.”

  “Once we feel comfortable with it, we talk to the chief.”

  “I’m going to need some time to—shit, Flynn, what about your job offer? Syracuse?”

  “Hadley.” He laughed. “I’m not going to move half the state away when we’ve finally gotten together.”

  MacAuley rapped on the driver’s window. “You two having a nice chat in there? Maybe I could bring you out some coffee and doughnuts?”

  Flynn opened his door. “Sorry, Dep.”

  “Well, don’t let me rush you. Just ’cause it’s after ten o’clock and the rest of the department’s been on twelve-hour shifts.”

  Hadley slid out of the truck. “We helped some tourists on the Sacandaga Road and then decided to stay at the Stuyvesant Inn until the weather broke.” That sounded good. Professional, even.

  “Shoulda stayed in Albany like I suggested.” MacAuley snorted. “Can’t imagine they have any power at the Stuyvesant Inn.”

  “Well, I did have to keep feeding the woodstove.” Flynn’s expression was bland as they walked toward the station entrance.

  “See? You were probably up half the night.” Over the dep’s head, Flynn shot Hadley a wicked grin. “Don’t think you can pull over behind a billboard and take a nap, either,” MacAuley continued. “We’re all gonna be busting our balls today. I just got the heads-up from Harlene. Your federal agents are driving up here.”

  Hadley stopped, one foot on the gr
anite steps. “They are?”

  “Ayep. Don’t know what you said to light a fire under their butts, but they’re scraping together a task force. They want to take this meth house we’ve all been looking for, and they want our help to do it.”

  4.

  Tom and Marie O’Day arrived at lunchtime. Lyle had long since sent Knox and Flynn out on patrol, so he had Harlene reel them back in for the briefing. The FBI agents looked around the Millers Kill station, with its layers of past law enforcement architecture dating back to the 1880s, and managed to avoid sniffing. Lyle, in turn, kept from rolling his eyes. He knew how the Feds worked. If it wasn’t the latest high-tech gadget or glass-walled building, they didn’t want it.

  He had run into the O’Days before, on an interstate domestic that had lit up Millers Kill because the perp, a New Hampshire guy who had killed his wife, briefly squatted with a cousin in town before fleeing farther west. That had been before Russ became chief, so more than ten years now. Which meant, despite their nose-up attitude toward the local yokels, they weren’t any different from him. They had peaked in their careers and they weren’t going up or out until the Albany office threw their retirement party.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to do much entertaining. As soon as they’d gotten coffees—more proof that law enforcement runs on caffeine—they’d hunkered down with Harlene, who was fighting her way through a jam-packed bandwidth so they could pick up what sounded like an ongoing argument with a sergeant from NYSP Troop G. “We don’t need an entire SWAT team,” Tom O’Day was saying. “We just need a couple of guys.”

  “Call the Essex County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “They’re flat out with traffic, and they don’t have a Special Forces team.”

  “What about your own shooters?” the statie asked. “You Feds spend more on your teams than we get for the whole damn troop.”

  “We need to keep this as quiet as possible. And with this weather, it’ll take our team the rest of the day just to get into place. Your station’s thirty miles away.”

  “In case you didn’t know, we’re a little busy with the weather as well. We got accidents, downed live power lines, and stranded civilians from here to Ogdensburg, and one of Troop B’s men has gone missing in the park. These are the Adirondack Mountains, Agent. We usually do our drug busts in the summer, when you can get up the damn roads.”

  Tom O’Day looked at his wife and made a now what? gesture. She leaned toward the mic. “Sergeant, we’d like to speak with your supervisor.”

  “I’ll be sure to have her call you back, ma’am.” Even over the uncertain radio signal, Lyle could hear the statie’s kiss-off-and-die tone. “She should be back within a few hours.” The sergeant signed off.

  Marie O’Day handed the mic back to Harlene. “You know if we go up there into their jurisdiction without at least some NYSP support, we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “The Essex County Drug Task Force?” Lyle suggested.

  She waved her hand. “Would be great, if we had three or four days to coordinate. Your Officer Knox kept yapping about how the missing girl is going to die at any second without medical care.”

  Lyle decided to ignore the agent’s poke at Knox. They were here, after all, which meant however Hadley nettled them, she did it right. “Where’s LaMar’s meth house located?” Maybe he could call in a few favors, if it wasn’t too far off the beaten path.

  Tom O’Day stood, towering over Lyle. “Do you have an area map?” Lyle led the agents into the squad room, where a New York State map shared wall space with a window-sized map of Washington County. O’Day went to the smaller map.

  “Here.” O’Day pointed to the tip of a lake. “There aren’t any actual towns around. See this spot on County Highway 16? There’s a road that branches off here. You follow it all the way up past the lake—”

  “Lake Inverary.”

  “Yes. As I was saying—”

  Lyle didn’t wait to hear the rest. He bolted back to the dispatch center. “Harlene, get that sergeant from Crown Point back on the line.”

  Harlene bent to the task of routing her signal across the depleted network. The O’Days followed him, both wearing identical frowns. Marie O’Day crossed her arms. “What’s going on? That place isn’t anywhere near your jurisdiction.”

  Lyle held up a hand as the state troopers’ station came on the line. “Sergeant, this is Deputy Chief MacAuley of the Millers Kill Police Department.”

  “Deputy Chief, I already told those feebs they were barking up the wrong tree. We’re busting our nuts up here. We don’t have time to send a squad on a wild goose chase.”

  “Sergeant, is the missing trooper Lieutenant Bob Mongue? From Troop B?”

  There was a pause. Then a suspicious “Ye-es.”

  Lyle grinned at the agents. “Then Sergeant, this is your lucky day. I know where he is.”

  5.

  “Ready?” Russ looked at Clare. She nodded. “Count of three. One, two, three.” They lifted the blanket beneath Bob Mongue. Russ, who was kneeling in the narrow rear well of the Ford, grunted as he scootched backward. Clare strained to get her end of the blanket higher than her chest.

  They were trying to transfer Bob from his berth in the canoe to the backseat of the pickup, which they had moved from the garage onto the road in front of Roy’s house. She and Russ had dragged Bob across the ice in the canoe, which he hailed as the only civilized way to travel. Of course, he was hopped up on Oxy again, so his opinion was a little suspect.

  When Clare had awakened midmorning, after an uncomfortable night plagued with dreams she thankfully couldn’t remember, Russ tried to persuade her to stay with the lieutenant while he retrieved the truck and went hunting for Travis and Hector, where they were hoping Mikayla would also be. She countered by offering to go get the Ford while he stayed with Bob, on the grounds that he would be a more effective protector if the bad guys came back. They bickered about it for a while until Bob declared them both ready for martyrdom and pointed out that splitting up that last time hadn’t worked well for anyone.

  Russ had reached the point where they could hoist Bob onto the seat. “Can you get him a couple inches higher?”

  Clare gritted her teeth and heaved. Bob and the blanket slid onto the backseat. Clare handed up the duffel bag. Russ stuffed it behind the lieutenant, then settled a blanket over his injured leg, stretched out along the seat. Bob leaned back against the duffel, brushing snow off himself.

  “How is it?” Russ asked.

  “’S fine. I’ll probably want to brace my good foot on the floor when we’re moving, though.”

  “Be grateful you’re such a string bean. I can barely squeeze in back there.” Russ shut the narrow crew door. “Clare, I’m going to want you to drive. Climb on in and let the heater blast, will you? I’m going to check the house to see if there’s anything else useful for us.”

  Clare got behind the wheel. The cab had already started to heat up while they were parked, and for a moment, she simply lay back against the seat, soaking up the sensation of warmth. She unzipped her coat so as to heat up her inner layers, then rubbed her belly as the baby began to roll and kick inside her.

  “Acting up, is he?”

  She laughed a little. “Yeah. Lately, it seems as if as soon as I stop moving, he starts.”

  “He?”

  “Or she.”

  “You’ll pardon me for sticking my oar in, but you two seem more than usually nerved up for first-time parents.”

  Clare adjusted the blowers to send more heat into the back. “Well. The baby was unplanned.”

  “Hell, our first three were unplanned. After that, my wife and I just decided to expect she’d get pregnant. That way, we weren’t shocked when it happened.”

  Clare laughed. “How many children do you have?”

  “Five. Including one with Down syndrome.”

  Clare’s smile died away.

  “So I know what it’s like to be facing … well, let’
s say a different outcome than you had hoped.”

  She turned around in her seat. “How did you know?”

  “Heard you two last night. Him asking you if you’d dipped into the Oxys. You talking about your problem.”

  Her voice stuck in her throat. “I was … it’s not really the pills. I was drinking. A lot. After I finished my tour of duty in Iraq.” She wiped her hand over her eyes. “I don’t usually talk about this.”

  “Yeah, I can see why. Your husband’s kind of an asshole about it.”

  “No! He’s not! He’s just feeling out of control. It’s not his fault. Before we married, we agreed—”

  “Not to have kids. Yeah, he told me.”

  Unwillingly, Clare’s mouth quirked up. “Do you always get people to open up about their deep, dark secrets?”

  “It’s a useful trait for a cop. Or, I’m guessing, a minister.” He shifted, bringing his good leg down. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re good for him. He used to be stodgy.”

  “Stodgy?”

  “Like a superannuated Eagle Scout. He needed some shaking up. You know what they call him over at the Troop B barracks?”

  “What?”

  “Russ Van All-shine.”

  She was giggling when Russ opened the passenger door. “I see you two are getting along.” He tossed a plastic grocery sack into her lap and brushed the snow off before climbing in. He unzipped his parka and held his hands next to the vents. “Colder’n a witch’s tit out there.” He nodded toward the sack. “Peanut butter and crackers and some of those pudding cups. As soon as they thaw out we can eat ’em.” He reached for the mic and switched on the radio. “Might as well try this one more time.” He scanned up the dial, then down. Nothing but static. He set it to the emergency frequency. “Troop G Dispatch, this is Russ Van Alstyne of the MKPD, do you copy?” He paused. Nothing. “Any emergency service on this channel, this is Chief Russ Van Alstyne of the MKPD. Officer in need of assistance.” Nothing.

  “The tower’s down,” Bob said. “Up here, with all the mountains around, they need those physical relays to get through.”