Out Of The Deep I Cry

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “It’s too cold to sit in the park,” Niels said, although he followed Harry out of the store. Harry didn’t see what the lawyer had to complain about-his long woolen coat looked far more substantial than Harry’s own police-issue jacket, which hadn’t been replaced in over eight years. He paused at the curb, looked both ways, and then jaywalked across Church Street toward the park.

  Despite the early-April chill, Harry wasn’t the only person to have thought of an open-air lunch. The benches were filled with people eating, talking, sitting with their faces turned up, starved for the spring sun after the long winter. “How ’bout over there?” he said, pointing to a bench beneath an enormous old elm. It faced St. Alban’s, the age of the tree gently reproaching the church’s fake-medieval front. “Nobody’s sitting there.”

  “That’s because it’s in the shade,” Niels said.

  Harry ignored him and sat down. He took the paper napkin out of the sack and spread it over his knees. Niels grunted as he joined him. Harry removed the sandwich and unwrapped it, careful to not let any of the lettuce fall out. “So what’s up?” he asked.

  Niels shifted on the bench. “How are your kids?” he said.

  “Fine,” Harry said. “And yours?”

  “Fine,” Niels said. “How’re things at the station?”

  “Great,” Harry said. “And at the law firm?” He bit into his sandwich, closing his eyes for a second at the harsh tang of the mustard.

  “Oh, great,” Niels said. He seemed fascinated by St. Alban’s red doors.

  “Niels,” Harry said around a mouthful of cheese, “what were you looking for me for?”

  Niels kept studying the church front. “Jane Ketchem came to see me last week.” Harry felt the twinge at the base of his skull he always got when he heard the Ketchem name. Like a bell ringing out over a defeated fighter, telling him he was out of the ring, his time was up. He waited for Niels to continue.

  “She wants me to petition the court of probate to have her husband declared legally dead.”

  Harry managed to swallow his bite. “Don’t you need to have some sort of reasonable belief that he’s actually dead?”

  “I could get her a divorce based on abandonment easily enough.” Niels seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Harry. “But no, she wants to be a widow.” He turned to Harry. “You investigated his disappearance. What conclusion did you come to?”

  Harry dropped his sandwich onto his napkin. “I never came to a conclusion. It’s still an open case. Every few years I send the description of Jonathon Ketchem out on the wires. Nothing ever comes back.”

  “You’re joking,” Niels said.

  “I wish I was.” Harry picked his sandwich back up. “I interviewed everyone who knew the man. I sent wires out all over the state, describing him and his car. I even had the police department of Santa Barbara, California, go out and talk to one Darlene Henderson, whose father worked at Ketchem’s dairy and who left town around the time Jonathon disappeared. Nothing.” He eyed the sandwich. His appetite was suddenly off. “I even checked out Jane Ketchem.”

  Niels’s eyebrows shot up to where his hairline had been a decade before.

  “Don’t look at me like that. Wives have been known to kill their husbands before. Of course, they don’t usually come running to the police the next day, asking for help in finding the body.”

  “And?” A barely repressed quiver of interest ran through Niels’s voice.

  “And her story checked out. The neighbor across the way was taking out his trash can and heard them arguing around the time she said. Not too much later that evening, the lady next door spoke to Mrs. Ketchem in person and then saw her return to her house.” He looked up to where the gnarled limbs of the elms wrote patterns in the sky. He could just make out the fuzzy gray buds studding the branches. Hard to imagine now, with the chill air pushing against his less-than-adequate coat, that they could swell and burst into voluptuous, intemperate green. Other people thought February or March were the worst, the time you got so sick of winter you wanted to take an ax to your wall and chop your way out. But for him, this was the longest stretch, these cool, ascetic days of early spring, when he most wanted the hot sun on his skin and the smell of new-mown hay making him dizzy with desire.

  “So that was the end of it?” Niels’s question brought him back into himself.

  “If there had been some reason for her to want him dead-if he had a girlfriend, or she had another man on the side. Or maybe a big insurance haul. But there wasn’t. That was the problem. No one had a reason to want Jonathon Ketchem dead.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  “I finally boiled any evidence I got-not that there was much of it-down to two theories. The one thing everyone I spoke with agreed is that Jonathon Ketchem had had a hard few years. He had lost four kids and his farm, he was blue and distracted, he didn’t know what to do with himself next.” He took another bite and let Niels wait while he chewed and swallowed. “First theory. He walked. He left behind everything bad that’d ever happened to him and he took off for a new life somewhere out west.” He bit off another piece and ate it. “Second theory. He killed himself. Of course, there’s a problem with that one.” He took another bite to give Niels time to find it.

  “If he committed suicide, where’s his car?”

  “Right. Now maybe he left the car on the side of the road with the keys in it for someone to steal and he hiked into the mountains so deep no one has run across his body. But I wouldn’t put money on it.”

  Niels nodded. “My son Norman says the kids at school have a theory. The Ketchem girl is in his class, you know. Anyway, he says Ketchem was set upon by desperate men.”

  “Yeah, that’s the prevailing Ketchem theory. Except for his parents, they’re all convinced he was iced by bootleggers.” He balled up the paper the sandwich had come in.

  “Isn’t that possible? From what I read in the paper, there were some pretty desperate characters back in those days. Judge DeWeese was handing out eight-year sentences and ten-thousand-dollar fines back in the twenties, for heaven’s sake. I’m sure there must have been some who were willing to kill to keep their money and their freedom.”

  “Yes. There were.” Harry breathed in through gritted teeth, damming up the rage that washed through him whenever he thought of those days, good men’s lives poured out in defense of an idiot law that the government later turned around and repealed. Already, not five years on, people were starting to talk about the bootleggers as if they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men, as if they were some sort of gentlemen bandits instead of goddamn killers and thieves. He worked his jaw, trying to relax so he wouldn’t look as if he were glaring at Niels. “Yeah, there were.” He sighed, letting go of some of the heat in his head. “But even if he had stumbled across some gang unloading their cache, you have the same questions. Where’s the body? Where’s the car?” He shook his head. “He walked. Away from his wife and his kid. He’s a different person now, and maybe that helps him sleep nights, the selfish bastard.”

  Niels sat silent for a moment. “So,” he said finally, “I guess I can’t count on your testimony as to his status as a decedent.”

  Harry snorted a laugh.

  “How about this,” Niels said. “You let me use those records detailing all the steps you’ve taken to find him. You don’t need to draw any conclusions. We’ll let the court do that. The fact that you haven’t closed the case after seven years and there’s still no sign of him may work in our favor.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “And then Mrs. Ketchem gets to become a widow. We can give her her life back.”

  Harry thought about the woman he had first seen on the marble steps of the police station. Over the years they had met, at first frequently, then at longer and longer intervals, and each time, Harry felt the weight of letting her down, of failing to live up to his first ignorant promise to bring her husband back to her.

  “I’ll do what
I can,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone can give Jane Ketchem her life back.”

  Chapter 23

  NOW

  Monday, March 20

  Clare was debating whether to grab some lunch from the hospital cafeteria or make the trek to the Kreemy Kakes diner, grateful it was her day off and she didn’t have any appointments eating up her time, when it suddenly struck her that she had promised to volunteer Monday at the historical society after missing last Saturday. Her first thought was to call Roxanne and beg off again. She’d understand that waiting for a friend to get out of surgery took precedence over sorting out one-hundred-year-old advertising circulars. Except she heard Roxanne’s voice, when she had shown Clare the boxes and boxes of uncataloged donations. I’m afraid everyone who tackles this job gets bored too quickly to do much good.

  Then, of course, her conscience took her by the chin and forced her to look at whether she would hang around the hospital for hours waiting for anyone else to get out of surgery. She had sat with family members before, anticipating good or bad news, but never just for herself. And she had to admit a broken leg wasn’t in the same league as a triple bypass or a bone-marrow transplant. If Mr. Hadley, for instance, ever took one of those tumbles off a ladder she feared would happen eventually, she knew she would go to the historical society, and simply call in periodically to find out how he was.

  Which is how she found herself driving the chief of police’s pickup through town. She prayed no one would take a good look at who was behind the wheel, and she parked in the first spot she could find on the street, envious, with the part of her brain that wasn’t worried about her reputation, at the ease with which the truck crunched over the snow and ice to muscle its way into the parking space.

  She trotted up the sidewalk, too late not to make an effort but also too late to think an outright dash from door to door would make any difference. She looked at the clinic as she went by, noting the legend THE JONATHON KETCHEM CLINIC carved in the granite door lintel. The sign bolted next to the door, the way everyone in town referred to it as the free clinic-it was as if Jonathon Ketchem were disappearing in his memorial, just as he had disappeared in life. Even though the sign indicated it was open, the clinic somehow looked abandoned, bereft without the man who had been its driving force for the past three decades. Clare thought about dropping in to find out how Laura Rayfield was doing manning the ship all alone, but her guilty conscience spurred her on to the historical society.

  Another volunteer let her in, let her know that Roxanne wasn’t working today, and then sank back into a chair by the door with an open book. As she climbed the stairs, Clare could hear the voice of a docent leading a tour through the public rooms and the soft thud of a researcher taking down one of the massive tax-enrollment books in the second-floor library. She reached the third floor and went into the former nursery, closing the door behind her to discourage any of the other volunteers from drifting in and chatting. She switched on the lights, dumped her coat and scarf in the extra chair, and turned on the computer, all with a weird sense of disconnection from her surroundings-a few hours ago she had been listening to Russ grinding his teeth against the pain as she hobbled him up the trail, freezing, sweating, and here she was now, in a clean, well-lit room, surrounded by white boxes and history.

  She logged on to the catalog and scrolled down to her entries from last Saturday. She had been going through the records of the long-defunct Fonda-Johnston-Gloversville Railroad, whose primary claim to fame seemed to be hauling passengers to the Sacandaga Amusement Park, which had apparently closed down about 1930. She reached into the acid-free storage box and pulled out another set of folders stuffed with ads, timetables, newspaper clippings, and photographs.

  She grouped a small stack of ads together-one of them, which promised “a gay holiday,” made her smile-and entered them as one item. The clippings, brown and brittle as dead leaves, had to be layered between sheets of archival tissue paper. Most of them were so dull-notices of stockholder meetings, appointments to the board-Clare found it hard to believe anyone, before or after her, would read them, but then she saw a lengthy story that made her stop. DAM PROJECT APPROVED: MAN-MADE RESERVOIR TO BE STATE’S LARGEST. She skimmed over it to see what it had to do with the railroad. The Conklingville Dam to be built… flooding the Sacandaga River valley… preventing flooding of Hudson downstream… over forty square miles to be submerged… ha, here it was, “including large sections of the F,J &G line.” So that was why they folded. There was a map, too, taking up two columns’ worth of space between the story and a Sears Roebuck ad, and after comparing it to the landmarks in her head, she realized that the reservoir in the story was the Great Sacandaga Lake. Huh. She hadn’t known it was a man-made lake. She examined the tiny dot-towns on the map and had another realization. Stewart’s Pond had also been created by the flooding of the Sacandaga.

  She wasn’t aware she had been hunched over the table until she tipped back into her chair. She had known it was a reservoir. Someone had described it that way to her. But she had assumed, somehow, that the Ketchem graves were there because of a connection to the man-made lake. Maybe a summer camp there, or a sentimental attachment to the spot. But those children had been buried five years before there was a reservoir. What had it been then? A shady spot beneath the trees growing at the edge of a farm? Jonathon and Jane Ketchem’s farm?

  She folded the clipping in a sheet of tissue paper and left the nursery. Down one flight of stairs, she found the library, two rooms that had once been bedrooms, fitted out with oddments of shelving: everything from utilitarian gunship gray steel to glass-encased mahogany. A gaunt man whose brown sweater looked as if it had fit him thirty pounds ago was bending over one of the reading tables.

  “Excuse me.” Clare glanced at the stack of leather-bound books at his side. “Are you the librarian?”

  “Yes,” he said. He stood up, like a heron righting itself. He inspected her over his reading glasses. “You’re not one of our regulars.”

  “I’m Clare Fergusson,” she said. “I’m a new volunteer. Logging in the collections upstairs.” He continued to stare at her, as if he couldn’t imagine what she might want with him. She got the impression that the historical society’s library was underutilized. “I ran across this newspaper article”-she unfolded the tissue paper and laid it on the table-“and I was wondering if you knew anything about it.”

  He bent over again to study the clipping. “Yes, of course,” he said. He sat up. She waited for something else, an explanation, but he continued to look at her.

  Okay, then. He evidently didn’t feel compelled to share information like most reference librarians. She was good at asking questions. “From the look of that map”-she pointed to the clipping-“several towns were flooded. What happened to them? To the farms?”

  “The Hudson River Regulating Board bought out the landholders in the late twenties and either tore or burned everything down. Houses, towns… chopped down all the trees, too.” He glanced around the room. “We’ve got a nice collection of original photographs… Where is that archive?”

  “Where did the owners go?”

  “Most of the residents who were displaced relocated nearby.”

  “Like to Millers Kill.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Wow.” She tried to imagine what it must have been like for the Ketchems, leaving their home, knowing it was going to be razed to the ground and drowned. Did Mrs. Marshall remember it? She would have to ask. If she wasn’t hunting with the wrong dog over the Ketchem burying ground. “What about cemeteries?” she said. “There must have been a lot of them inside that forty-square-mile line.”

  “Bodies were dug up and reburied. There are quite a few transburial cemeteries around these parts.”

  She didn’t want to imagine what that job must have been like. “I’ve been to a tiny family plot right on the banks of Stewart’s Pond. Could that be a relocated cemetery?”

  “Stewart’s Pond
Reservoir,” the man said, frowning. He stood up abruptly and circled the table, one hand held out as if to grasp the spine of a book. He circled again, closer to the bookshelves along the perimeter of the room, and with a grunt he darted forward and drew a three-ring binder from a high shelf.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Copies of the land-grant information. Deeds, parcels, all that. We don’t have the originals. Have to go to Saratoga for those.” He sounded distinctly put out about that. He flipped rapidly through the pages. “Where is it?”

  “Uh… you drive up Old Route 100 and get on a county road… um, and then you go a few miles…”

  He looked up from the binder with an expression that said Spare me. “See that cord hanging down from that bookcase there?” He pointed.

  “Sure do.”

  “It’s a map of the area. Pull it down.”

  Moving next to the shelves, Clare could see the long black tube fastened to the bookcase’s uppermost molding. She pulled the cord, and a large map unrolled, smoothly as a window shade. “We had these in my classroom when I was in grade school,” she said.

  “Show me the place you were talking about.”

  Maps were much easier than remembering the names of roads. She found the location of the Ketchem children’s burial ground and stabbed it with her finger.

  “Ah,” the man said. He flipped some more. “Yes, yes, yes yes. Here it is.” Clare looked over his shoulder. He was turning back and forth between a page showing a line drawing of what appeared to be property boundary lines and a reduced-sized, badly photocopied legal document. “Your cemetery is on its original ground. See here?” He pointed to the drawing. “It would have been at the back end of the property. That county road didn’t exist back in the twenties. The road ran down here”-he pointed to another spot-“along the Sacandaga River.”

  “Was this the Ketchems’ land? Jonathon and Jane Ketchem?”