I Shall Not Want

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  The chief was going on about the weather and the heat, and—Jesus Christ!—he actually offered the guy a cold one. Hadley crawled out from beneath the maple’s shade, the sunlight pressing on her back like a hot iron taking the wrinkles out of her blouse. She paused at the corner of the building, wrestled her gun into a half-assed shooting position, and peeked around the side.

  Peeling white clapboards. A wheezing air-conditioning unit dripping water on the ground. Five steps leading up to a narrow roofed porch. A rusty wheel supporting a clothesline bolted next to the back door . . . the back door that was half open to the room inside.

  “Hel-lo, momma,” she whispered. If the chief could keep the guy in the front room distracted, she could sneak in and try to get the kids out. There wasn’t much cover—the land sloped away from the house, the clothesline running maybe fifty yards over open grass until it connected with a lone birch tree. But if she could get them down the porch steps and around the corner, she could keep them against the foundation, out of the line of fire.

  She crawled forward, one foot, two, then raised herself up to get a better view of the door.

  Hadley was staring into the eyes of a dead woman. She was half in, half out of the doorway, mouth still open from her last word, her blood soaked into her shirt and puddling beneath a plastic laundry basket filled with towels.

  Oh, my God.

  Hadley collapsed back onto the ground, squeezing her eyes shut like a kid hiding from the boogeyman. She swallowed, dry-mouthed, against her rising gorge. I’m not going to throw up, she thought. I’m not going to throw up. With her eyes closed, she noticed the things she should have earlier: the bright copper tang of blood, the nose-wrinkling suggestion of human waste, the buzzing of full-bellied flies.

  She could hear the timbre of Van Alstyne’s voice floating on the heat-saturated air. I have to let the chief know about this. Of course, to do that she was going to have to move, which she didn’t want to do, not now, not maybe ever. She didn’t want to deal with yet another dead person. What was this? The fourth? Fifth?

  With that, she had another realization. The chief’s promise of thirty days in the county jail—a lie to begin with, since the guy had shot at a cop, for God’s sake—wasn’t going to seduce this man. He wasn’t going to give himself up. He was already headed for Clinton. He had nothing to lose.

  Hadley reversed herself, staying as low to the ground as she could, then belly-crawled back around the side of the house. The chief was focused on the man with the gun, who was ranting about getting ripped off and not being able to trust anyone. Hadley ignored him. She stuck her hand up in the air to get someone’s attention. The chief’s eyes never wavered from the window where the shooter was hunkered down, but behind the squad car’s tail, Kevin Flynn poked his head up and nodded once. He had been the MKPD’s least experienced officer before she was sworn in, and his persistent attempts to be helpful and friendly didn’t lessen the gall of playing catch-up with a guy eight years her junior. She hoped he was good at charades—there was no way she could use her radio this close to the house—as she laid her gun on the grass next to her.

  First she jerked her thumb toward the rear of the farmhouse: back there. She used two hands to make the universal feminine shape, out, in, out: a woman. She drew a finger across her throat: dead. She held one hand like a pistol and “shot” herself in the chest.

  Flynn shook his head as if to clear it, then nodded again. His red hair disappeared, to pop up again moments later, behind the chief. The chief heard whatever it was Flynn said to him. His eyes narrowed and his skin seemed to stretch across his cheekbones. He murmured something to Flynn, who slid into one of the cruisers and grabbed a mic.

  “What’s going on?” the shooter asked. “What’s he doing on the radio?”

  “I just told him to ask the state troopers to stay back a ways.” Van Alstyne held up one hand. “I want you and me to have the time we need to talk our way out of this thing. Can’t do that with a bunch of staties with guns hanging around.”

  More likely Flynn was telling the SWAT team to detour its sharpshooters farther along the road leading to the Christies’ half-mile drive. If they went the long way around and stuck to a narrow approach through the sheep pasture, they could make it to the barn without being seen. Once inside, they would have an ideal vantage point through the haymow and upper windows.

  The same idea seemed to occur to the gunman. “You tell those bastards to stay away from us,” he shouted. “Anybody tries to mess with us, they gotta go through one of these kids to do it.” Within the house, a woman cried out. Hadley didn’t realize the man had left his defensive position at the front window until the chief shouted, “Knox! What’s he doing in there?”

  She scrambled to her feet and peered into the window she had been crouched beneath. She got a beautiful view of the front hallway and the stairs. Useless. She covered the eight feet to the next window in two long strides. The sill was just low enough for her to see into a room in chaos, children scattering, a teenager clutching an infant, a woman struggling with the man as he yanked a little boy off his feet.

  “He’s holding a kid,” Hadley yelled. “He’s—oh, shit, no!” She watched, helpless, as the man clubbed the woman in the face with the butt of his gun. The woman dropped to the floor.

  “Are there other shooters?” the chief yelled.

  “I can’t tell!” she screamed. “Maybe in the front—”

  The man holding the squirming child turned toward the window, aiming the revolver at Hadley. She ducked and covered just in time. The window shattered. Shards of glass sliced into her hands, stabbed the back of her uniform, caught in her hair.

  The chief was yelling for her and Flynn to get to the back door. She heard the muffled thud of footsteps against grass and then Flynn was beside her. He tossed her a Kevlar vest identical to the one he was wearing. She caught it, rose, and took off for the rear of the house, glass tinkling as it flew off her like water off a shaggy dog. She struggled into the vest as Flynn rounded the corner, taking the steps up to the porch in two bounds. He went high, holding the door open, while she crouched low, stepping over the body of the murdered woman—I’m sorry, ma’am, so sorry—shouting, “Police! Put your weapons down!” to the empty kitchen. She moved aside for Flynn to pass through and almost fired when a straggly boy appeared in the doorway. “Porsche!” he bawled. From unseen rooms beyond she heard Van Alstyne bellowing, a girl shrieking, and then, Holy God, the sound of gunfire, one, two shots and the .357 Magnum going off.

  “Get in here!” Hadley shouted at the boy, as one gun and then another gun fired, and fired, and fired, too many shots, way too many. She and Flynn pushed past him into the doorway, low, high, her heart beating so fast she thought she was going to die.

  She thought she was going to die.

  The teenager screamed, yanking one of the kids out of the way. They rounded the big table dominating the space and approached the front room. Through the doorway, Hadley could see the other woman, out on the floor, bleeding from a vicious cut in her forehead. Beside her, the gunman was sprawled half on and half off a sofa, his eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling, his chest a bloody mess. A second man slumped in the far doorway, folded over like a stringless marionette.

  Hadley thought she might collapse on the spot from relief. Instead, she and Flynn fanned into the room. She froze. Flynn let out a keening sound like a banshee. Omen of death. There was another body crumpled on the wooden floor.

  Russ Van Alstyne.

  Lyle MacAuley looked up from where he knelt beside the chief. “Call nine-one-one,” he snapped at Flynn. He looked at Hadley. “Get me something I can use for compresses.” His voice was as sharp-edged as ever. She and Flynn stumbled into the kitchen, where Flynn whirled and ran out the door, while Hadley stood stupidly, thinking, Compresses? Then she remembered the basket of laundry. She stepped over the dead woman, dug into the basket, and emerged with two bath towels.

  “Hurry, Knox!”
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  She dashed back to the front room, holding out the towels. MacAuley snatched them out of her hands. While he folded them into thick pads, she looked down at the chief.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said.

  “Shut up!” MacAuley nodded toward the dining room. “Get these civilians out of here.”

  Hadley turned around. The door between the two rooms was crowded with crying kids. The teenager with the infant stood weeping—the scraggly boy’s Porsche, she supposed—rocking the red-faced baby back and forth while it screamed. Best to start with her. Hadley stepped through the doorway, forcing the girl to retreat.

  “Porsche? Are you Porsche?”

  The girl nodded, openmouthed with crying.

  “Is this your baby? What’s her name?”

  The girl gasped. “Amari.” Her voice was wet and shaking.

  “Why don’t you let me hold Amari for a sec while you catch your breath.” Hadley scooped up the baby and ran her pinkie knuckle over its toothless gums. The baby stopped wailing, a startled look on its face. Then it clamped around Hadley’s knuckle and began sucking with a vengeance. An old ploy, but it still worked. “Porsche.” Hadley moved her face so she blocked the girl’s line of sight. “Let’s get these little ones out of here. They don’t need to see this anymore.”

  “M-m-my aunt.”

  “The ambulance is on the way. The best thing you can do for her is help calm the children down.”

  The girl nodded. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Let Hadley slide the baby back in her arms. The girl copied her pinkie-nursing trick. “C’mon, everybody,” she said, in a fake-calm voice that Hadley herself used when she was trying to keep it together in front of her kids. “We’re going outside.” She stepped into the kitchen, saw what was blocking the door, and whirled around. “No, Aston! Not that way! Out the front hall.”

  Hadley helped steer the kids toward the mercifully blood-free front hall. The little boy she had seen in the kitchen stopped beside the door to the front room, his eyes fixed on the unconscious woman. He looked up at Hadley. “Is Izzy gonna die, too?”

  Hadley scooped him up in her arms. “An ambulance is coming to help her, sweetie. She’ll have to go to the hospital, but she’ll be fine.” She prayed she wasn’t lying. She took the last child’s hand and followed Porsche out the front door and across the drive, to where a small grove of large maples cast a deep shade over the grass.

  Kevin emerged from one of the squad cars. “Ambulances coming.” He headed for the house. “Harlene called them in before we got here. Support team from emergency services and Children and Family, too.”

  Hadley shot a glance at the traumatized family, then followed Kevin.

  Without the crying children, the farmhouse sank into the deep dreaming silence of a hot July afternoon. The only sounds were the clunk and rattle of cubes falling from the icemaker and a hoarse, wet churning as Russ Van Alstyne tried to breathe. MacAuley had folded one towel around the wound in the chief’s thigh and cinched it tight with his belt. As Hadley watched, a pulse of blood appeared on its white surface. MacAuley pressed the other towel, already sodden, against the chief’s chest. Flynn was dragging cushions off the couch, wedging them beneath the unconscious woman’s legs, getting more blood flow to her injured head. Hadley scooped some ice cubes out of the freezer, knotted them into a dishrag, and laid the improvised ice bag over the woman’s eyes and nose. None of them said anything, as if a single word would break open their pretense at composure.

  A wracking, phlegmy sound split the silence.

  “Can’t . . . breathe.” The chief’s voice was a whisper. Flynn nearly tripped over himself getting to Van Alstyne’s side.

  “I think you’ve punctured a lung,” MacAuley said. “The EMTs will set you to rights. Listen.” Far away, a faint siren sounded. “They’re almost here.”

  The chief inhaled. It was liquid, choking, horribly wrong. Hadley looked down. The towel around his thigh was crimson. Almost here, she realized, would not be fast enough.

  “Lyle . . . tell Clare . . .”—the chief breathed in again—“tell her. . . .”

  “You can tell her yourself when you see her.”

  Hadley’s stomach turned. She looked at Flynn. Tears smeared his sunburned cheeks. Without thinking, she reached over and grabbed his hand. The siren was louder now.

  “Russ?” MacAuley sounded panicked, which was almost as scary as the chief’s struggle to breathe. “Don’t you die on me, Russ!”

  The sucking, gurgling sound was louder, accompanied by a hiss, as if Russ Van Alstyne’s air was pumping out of him along with his life’s blood.

  “Clare,” he said. And then there was silence.

  Six Months Earlier

  THE SEASON AFTER EPIPHANY

  January and February

  I

  Hadley pulled into the parking lot across the street from the church with a sense of relief she hadn’t felt since she delivered Geneva. Maybe more. Three and a half days on the road with two kids under ten easily matched twenty-plus hours of labor in the awfulness sweepstakes.

  She twisted around to check the backseat. Genny was asleep, her booster seat almost lost in a litter of stuffed animals, crayons, water bottles, and picture books. Hudson looked up from his Game Boy, his face pinched and tired. “Where are we, Mom?”

  “We’re here, lovey. Millers Kill. This is the church where your grampy works.”

  His eyes widened, giving him the appearance of a starving orphan. She kept stuffing food into him, but his jittery energy seemed to burn it all off before he could put any meat on his bones. The climate here was going to be hard on him.

  “Why aren’t we at Grampy’s house?”

  “I don’t have a key to get in. We’re here sooner than I thought, so Grampy’s going to be surprised. C’mon, pull on your sweater and let’s go say hi.”

  He looked doubtfully at his sister. “Are we gonna wake Genny up?”

  Hadley unbuckled herself and twisted around to get a better look at her six-year-old. Out like the proverbial lightbulb. In LA, she wouldn’t have even considered it—she never would have left one of the kids in the car. Here . . . she glanced at the ice-rimmed snowbanks framing the parking lot, the lead-colored snow-heavy clouds. Air weighted with chill slid in through her partly open window. “It’s too cold,” she said. “She’ll have to come with us.”

  “Mo-om,” he protested. “You could leave the car running. Nobody’s going to steal it.”

  Wasn’t that the truth. She opened her mouth. Transformed I’ve been smelling something since we left Ohio, and I’m afraid we have another exhaust leak into, “Fresh air will do her good.”

  “Fresh air,” Hudson said, with all the scorn a nine-year-old could muster. “We’ve had two windows wide open since we got into New York.”

  “They’re an inch open. Stop complaining.” She leaned over the seat and shook Geneva gently. “Wake up, baby girl.” Considered, as she wrestled her groggy daughter into her sweater, how much time and effort she took, every day, to avoid saying We can’t afford that. The bag of toys and books from Goodwill. The Styrofoam box of sandwich fixings and no-name sodas. The tote filled with books on CD—which she had to mail back to the Glendale Public Library. All so that when she heard Can we go to Toys ’R’ Us? Can I get a book? Can we stop at McDonalds? Can we rent a DVD player? she had a plausible answer. Something that wasn’t we can’t afford it.

  For a moment, the outside didn’t feel too cold. Then, as she waited for Hudson to finish saving his game, she could feel it against her bare skin and her hair, seeping in through her jeans and her sweater. She wondered if the frog-boiling analogy worked the other way. If you started out at normal temperature and it gradually got colder and colder, would you even notice when you froze to death? She shivered. This was where she had brought her children to, this cold place her own mother had abandoned at eighteen, never to return. Now she was doing the opposite, turning her back on the world and everyone who knew her.
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  Hudson spilled out of his door. Finally. “Close it!” she reminded him, then lifted Genny onto her hip. She hustled them across the street toward the church. Hadley had at least one parka stored in Granddad’s house that would still fit her, but the last time the kids had visited in the winter they had been one and four. She would have to get them coats. Hats. Gloves. Boots. She hoped there was a Goodwill around here somewhere.

  The interior of St. Alban’s was marginally warmer than the outside. She had been here before, of course, over the ten years Granddad had been its caretaker, but the richness of the place, the stone pillars and the wood carvings and the elaborate stained-glass windows, always gave her goose bumps. Like walking into the Middle Ages.

  Geneva lifted her head off Hadley’s shoulder. “Momma, is this a castle?”

  Hadley laughed. “No, baby, it’s a church. C’mon, Hudson, this way.” She headed for the door leading to the offices.

  “Can I help you?”

  Hadley choked back a screech of surprise. Beneath a window where stained-glass children were forever led toward the Throne of God, a woman emerged out of shadow and stone. Black shirt. Black skirt. It took a second before Hadley realized she wasn’t wearing a turtleneck but a white clerical collar.

  “I’m Clare Fergusson.” She moved close enough for Hadley to make out her face, cheekbones, chin, and nose, all points and angles. “I’m the rector here at St. Alban’s.” She smiled a welcome, but there was a bone-deep sadness about her that the smile couldn’t dissipate.

  “I know,” Hadley said. “I mean, I’ve heard about you. My grandfather’s Glenn Hadley.”

  Reverend Fergusson’s smile tried to brighten. “You must be Hadley Knox. Mr. Hadley’s been talking about your visit for two weeks now.” She glanced toward the church door. “Um, if you’re looking for him, I’m afraid he ran out to grab lunch and go to the hardware store. He’ll be another hour, I’m guessing.”