I Shall Not Want

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “He was . . . with the minister of St. Alban’s when it happened. Not with her like there was anything funny going on,” he added, so quickly she couldn’t help but think there must have, in fact, been something funny going on. “It’s just that he feels if he hadn’t been with Clare—with Reverend Fergusson—he could have saved his wife. So now, being reminded of her bothers him. Being reminded of Clare. Reverend Fergusson. You understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, not understanding. Not caring. “I won’t mention St. Alban’s.”

  “Okay.” He shoved his chair back. Stood up. “Let’s go see the chief.”

  Hadley stood, working her face into the right expression. Ready, willing, and eager. Not desperate. She couldn’t afford to look desperate. The prisons were out of commuting range. The private security firms had turned her down. There were only a handful of places where a high school grad could make a decent living, and not one of them was hiring. If she couldn’t land this, it was going to be waitressing in Lake George or Saratoga, living off tips and praying nobody got sick or broke a leg. The MKPD had dental. Dental! It had been more than two years since she and the kids had seen a dentist.

  MacAuley led her down a short hall, through the dispatcher’s station, and rapped on a door with a pebbled glass window and CHIEF RUSSELL VAN ALSTYNE painted in gold. “C’min,” a voice said.

  She followed MacAuley into a messy office, heaps of magazines and papers piled on a battered credenza, the walls covered with posters and bulletins and a huge map of the tricounty area. A leggy philodendron was dying atop two old file cabinets.

  The chief was on the phone, one hand cupped over the receiver. “Hang on,” he said. MacAuley tossed her folder onto an equally messy desk. She watched as the chief picked it up one-handed. Long, square fingers. Brown hair with an equal sprinkling of blond and gray, as overgrown as the philodendron.

  “Yeah,” he told the phone. “Okay. Put us on the list if you find out anything.” He laid the folder down without opening it. “No, but send us any prints. We’ll run comparisons when we do the ground search in August.” Looking at Russ Van Alstyne, she found it hard to picture August. His face was winter-pale, with deep lines etched on either side of his mouth. Ice-blue eyes. She figured him to be about her dad’s age, although there was a solidness to the chief that her dad, the king of adult ADD, had never had.

  Van Alstyne hung up the phone. “Chief, this is Hadley Knox,” MacAuley said. The chief nodded to her. “What’s up?” MacAuley went on.

  “The rental truck.” He glanced at Hadley, including her in the story. “Somebody abandoned a Ryder truck last week at a local farm stand that’s still closed for the winter.” He looked at Lyle. “Stolen from Kingston. We’re getting copies of any prints CADEA pulls.”

  “Cad-dee-ay?”

  Both men looked at Hadley. Uh-oh. Maybe she was supposed to know what that was?

  “Capital Area Drug Enforcement Association. It’s a sort of regional cooperative, with investigators from departments all over the area.” The chief handed another folder to MacAuley. “Their lab tech agreed with your theory that the bales were shrink-wrapped. They didn’t find a trace of plant material or THC on any surfaces.”

  MacAuley tapped his sizable honker. “They don’t have this.”

  “Mmm. Maybe we should hire you out.”

  “What was it?” Hadley asked. In for a penny, in for a pound, she figured. “In the truck, I mean.”

  “Marijuana,” MacAuley said.

  “Pot?” She didn’t mean to sound so disbelieving, but pot? Who cared?

  “Ten million dollars’ worth.” Van Alstyne tapped the paper on his desk. “If the truck was full.”

  “Holy shit!” The second it was out of her mouth, she wanted to call it back. Swearing on a job interview. Genius. “Sorry,” she said.

  MacAuley looked amused. “I’ll just leave you both to it, shall I?”

  “Thanks, Lyle,” Van Alstyne said. MacAuley exited the office, leaving the door ajar. “Sit down, Ms. Knox.”

  There was only one chair that didn’t have junk on it. She took it.

  For a minute, he studied her. If it had been someone else, she would have been getting the creepy vibes that came with unwanted sexual interest. But Van Alstyne wasn’t looking at her like a man looks at a woman. It was more like a doctor examining an X-ray. Diagnostic.

  “You ask questions,” he said.

  Was that a complaint? A compliment? She swallowed. “I have two kids, and I’m always telling them there’s no such thing as a bad question. I guess it’s rubbed off on me.”

  “Why do you want to be a cop?” His question caught her off guard. Damn, she had prepped for this. What had she been going to say?

  “I worked as a prison guard for three years in California.” She nodded toward the folder still lying on his desk, unopened. “I found it challenging and fulfilling—”

  “Why do you want to be a cop?”

  She was left with her mouth half open from her incomplete canned response.

  “Just give it to me straight.”

  She shut her mouth. “I’ve got a family to support. I need a good-paying job here in Millers Kill. I don’t have any college, but my DOC training in California means I already qualify as a probationary peace officer, if I’m enrolled in the Police Basic course.”

  “What about administering justice? What about getting the bad guys off the street and behind bars?”

  She let out a puff of air. “When I was working as a prison guard, I met a lot of guys who claimed they were innocent. I don’t know. I figure, administering justice is somebody else’s job. As for getting—uh, the bad guys . . .” She trailed off. “I suppose everybody wants that.”

  He tilted his head to one side and gestured for her to keep going.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but if you’re looking for Robocop, I’m not the right person. I guess I see policing as sort of like being a mom. I don’t want to catch my kids doing something wrong. I want to stop ’em before they do it. Or head them off before a little problem becomes a big one.” He was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t define. She snapped her mouth shut. Policing is like being a mom. Great. Maybe she should tell him she wanted to knit scarves and serve hot cocoa.

  “If you’re hired, you’ll be the only woman sworn into the department. The first woman, actually.” There was an edge of discomfort in his voice, but she couldn’t tell whether it was from the prospect of letting a girl into the club or embarrassment that they hadn’t integrated the force up to now. “Have you thought about how you’ll handle that?”

  He had said he wanted her to give it to him straight. “Are the men in your department likely to require handling?”

  “No. Well . . .”—he pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his steel-rimmed glasses—“not most of ’em, of course not. I was referring to the job itself. It’s not like guard work. You’ll be doing traffic stops, pulling apart guys who’ve had too much to drink, walking into houses where the husband and wife have been beating up on each other. You’ll be shorter and lighter than any other officer here. How do you deal with that?”

  That was a question she had prepped for. “Just like I did as corrections officer. The trick is to never, ever, let them think you’re vulnerable. That means controlling the situation, and that starts right up here.” She tapped her temple. “It doesn’t matter how big you are if you can’t project control. And if it comes down to using force, I have an advantage your other officers don’t. The drunk guys see these”—she thrust her forearm beneath her breasts and hoisted them, and sure enough, his eyes followed—“and they don’t see me coming in with this.” She touched the side of his head lightly with the magazine she had picked up with her free hand.

  He let out a short laugh. “It’s not always that simple.”

  “Nope. But men still tend to underestimate women.”

  His smile changed to something wistful. “Yeah. I know—I knew—a woman who used to ta
ke advantage of that fact.”

  “Did it work for her?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it did. . . .” He shook himself. “Okay.” His voice was once again no-nonsense. “If you want it, you’ve got the job.”

  “I do? I mean, great! Yes! I do want it.”

  “You’ll be on probation until you’ve completed the Basic course. I don’t want to throw away the time and money we’re going to spend training you, so I expect you to pass. With high marks.”

  “I will. I’ll be in the top ten percent. You won’t be disappointed.”

  “Plus, you’ll have to put in some serious time on the firing range.” He tapped the folder, which he still hadn’t opened. “The scores from your shooting test are way too low.”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “That won’t be a problem.”

  Van Alstyne stood up. Hadley stood up. He held out his hand and she took it. “Welcome to the Millers Kill Police Department, Officer Knox.”

  A rap on his door kept her from gushing her thanks. The dispatcher, a square stack of a woman with an iron-gray perm, stuck her head in. “If you’re all finished, Ms. Knox has a phone call.”

  “Me?” She looked at Van Alstyne. He waved her off.

  “Go ahead. Harlene here can set you up with the paperwork.”

  Harlene closed the door behind them and surprised Hadley by dragging her past the dispatch room into the hallway. “You don’t actually have a call. It’s a message. From St. Alban’s.” As she said this, she glanced around, as if ensuring no one could hear her. “It’s your grandfather. He’s been taken to the Glens Falls Hospital with a heart attack. Reverend Fergusson’s going to fetch your kids over to the church.”

  Hadley stood there. “I’m sorry. Did you say—” and then her mind caught up to Harlene’s words and her eyes flooded. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Oh, shit.”

  Harlene was saying something about Glens Falls not necessarily meaning it was bad, and that she wasn’t to worry about her children, and all Hadley could think was that she had uprooted their lives and come three thousand miles and now her granddad was going to die and she’d be on her own again. All on her own. Again.

  III

  “Don’t take your coat off. We’re going to your sister’s for dinner.”

  Russ paused by the coat hooks in his mom’s kitchen, halfway out of his jacket. “That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t feel much like socializing.”

  Margy Van Alstyne marched out of the tiny dining room. Cousin Nane must have been over with the home perming kit—her white hair was curled so tightly it looked as if it could power the entire North Country electrical grid if you could figure out a way to release its chemical energy. She braced her hands on her hips, increasing her resemblance to a fireplug. “It in’t socializing when it’s family.”

  “I’m tired. It’s been a long day. Give Janet my regrets.” He shrugged the jacket off and hung it on a hook. His mother grabbed its collar and thrust it back at him.

  “Mom!”

  “I want you to drive me. It’ll be dark coming back, and I don’t like to drive in the dark.”

  “Since when?”

  “A woman of seventy-five has the right to develop a few little quirks. Now, are you going to take me, or are you going to sit here in my house, eating food I’ve made, with your big feet up on my hassock watching my television?”

  He glowered down at her. “Now you’re trying to guilt me into going.”

  “You’re darned right I am. Is it working?”

  He took the jacket. He had been living at her house since his wife died. No, since before. He had moved in with his mom when Linda had thrown him out of their house in what he had thought was going to be a temporary separation. It had become a permanent and irrevocable separation two weeks later, with her death. Her stupid, senseless, preventable death.

  He couldn’t stand to go back to his own house, and he couldn’t stand to sell it, so he puttered along in limbo, buying groceries, fixing odds and ends, paying Mom’s bills when he could get hold of them before she did. She hadn’t asked him how long he was staying or what he was going to do. She hadn’t asked anything of him.

  “All right.” He jammed an arm back into his jacket. “I’ll take you. And I’ll pick you up. But I’m not staying for dinner.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  In his pickup, she chattered on about Janet and Mike’s girls, and about Cousin Nane, and about the latest meeting of her antiwar group, Women in Black. He let her words wash over and around him, as unnoticed as the late-afternoon sun slanting through chinks in the clouds or the faint green traces of spring emerging from the last clutches of winter’s gray and brown tangle. It was all part of a world that kept moving and changing, and he didn’t want anything to do with it.

  They passed an enormous Hummer, pimped to the nines and radiating a bass line that rattled his windows. “Those vehicles ought to be illegal,” his mom huffed, and then she was on about greenhouse gases and blood for oil and American entitlement. Same-old same-old. In the dips and hollows, where snow still covered the ground, a thick white mist hovered knee-high, like a company of ghosts unable to break the bonds of earth.

  He was startled into awareness by guitar strings thrumming their way out of the cab’s speakers. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Well, since you weren’t listenin’ to me, I thought you might like to hear some music instead.”

  He reached over and snapped the CD player off. “No,” he said. “No music.”

  His mother looked at him. “No music.”

  “I don’t like listening to music.”

  “Since when?”

  Since my life went straight into the crapper. Since every other goddam song makes me think of Clare. He did not say what he was thinking. He had a great deal of practice, each and every day, in not saying what he was thinking. Instead, he said, “A man of fifty has the right to develop a few little quirks.”

  “Huh,” his mother said, but she left him alone as the county highway twisted and turned through densely packed trees, skirting the mountains to the west of Millers Kill. Eventually, the forest gave way to a broad valley, the road falling away like a fast-moving stream to run up and down the gentle hills between one dairy farm and the next.

  They were closing in on Janet and Mike’s quarter-mile-long driveway when his mother said, “Go on past. We’re meeting them at the neighbor’s.”

  Russ took his foot off the gas. “Mom. This isn’t some sort of setup, is it?”

  She looked—not guilty, she never looked guilty as far as he could tell—but like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “I’m not sayin’. It’s a surprise.”

  “Listen, Mom. If they’re fixing me up with some sweet little widow woman or divorcée, I’m turning this truck around and heading home right now.”

  His mother made an exasperated noise. “It’s not that sort of surprise. Honestly, Russell, it’s not all about you all of the time.”

  There wasn’t any good reply to that. He mumbled something that might have been either an apology or an accusation and accelerated up the road.

  The neighbor’s place was a pretty bungalow, probably bought in kit form from Sears, Roebuck back in the twenties. He started to turn up the short drive. “No, not there.” His mother pointed. “The other side of the road.”

  “The barn?” Like many of the newer farms in this part of the world—newer meaning one century old instead of two—the barn and outbuildings were across the two-lane highway instead of attached to the house, giving some breathing room, literally, to the residents. Between the main building, the double silos, and the cow byre stretching out toward the pasturage, the neighbors’ barn took up four or five times the space of their house.

  “Just pull into the drive.”

  Russ obeyed, parking his truck on the least-muddy section of the short wide road leading to a pair of tractor-sized doors. “Mom, what’s this about?” he asked.

  His
mother, ignoring him, slipped down from the cab and squelched toward the double doors. He jumped out and hurried after her. “Open this for me, will you?” she said.

  A vision of hordes of well-wishers waiting inside, balloons tied to the rafters, filled his head. But there wasn’t any occasion for a surprise party, was there? His birthday was five months gone. It wasn’t the anniversary of his joining the MKPD.

  “Criminy’s sake, Russell. You going to make a poor old lady haul this back by herself?”

  He snorted. Margy Van Alstyne was about as weak and feeble as a steamroller. But there wasn’t anything to be gained by standing out in the cold and gathering dark. He wrapped his fist around one curved handle and rolled the door open.

  They were greeted by the familiar farm smells of machine oil, hay, and manure, nothing more. His mother strode in, turning pale beneath the cool fluorescent lights dangling from the three-story-high ceiling. “Huh.” She put her hands on her hips. “They must be in with the cows.” She threaded her way between a tractor and a baler and disappeared through a small door beneath the haymow.

  “Who? Mom, what’s going on?” He rolled the door shut behind him and followed her, dodging a conveyor belt that led from a hay cart to the mow above. Overhead, Russ could see a few scattered bales in the shadows, ready to eke out the five or six weeks remaining until the arrival of the tender grass of spring. He ducked his head and entered the cow byre.

  It was long and low and bright and modern, and it made his heart start to pound. He found himself looking left, right, past the rows of neat stalls that stretched out and out, one silky black-and-white back after another, trying to pinpoint an exit. He took a deep breath to steady himself, but the smell of warm cow and wet straw stuck in his throat as if it would strangle him.

  “There you are!” His sister’s cheerful voice focused him a little. Janet and Mike waved from halfway down the center aisle. They looked impossibly far away. A clank to his left made him jerk his head around, and he found himself face to face with a marble-eyed, wet-nosed heifer, staring incuriously at him while chewing its cud.