“I’ll ask her when I see her,” Russ said, pulling his crutches into position.
“When’s that going to be?”
“As soon as we can get down to the car and get over to her place.”
Renee Rouse looked anguished. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said, holding out the ATM card she had dug out of her handbag. “I didn’t realize I had his. It was in the dish on my dresser, where I keep my change and things. I just grabbed it and stuck it in my bag.”
Russ took the card. It had Allan Rouse’s name along the bottom. “What about the PIN number?”
“We have the same one. Allan’s birth month and year. It makes it easier.”
Russ glanced at Lyle, then back to Mrs. Rouse. “Let me just go over this again,” he said. “You and your husband have a joint account that you can access through his ATM card.”
“That’s right, that’s where all the bills are paid from.”
“And you have your own account, with your own ATM card, where you keep a smaller amount of money.”
“Yes. Usually if I need cash I just write a little over at the supermarket. I was going to get cash back at the Kmart last night, but I forgot. That’s why I used the card. I don’t normally.”
“Have you checked the balance in your account since your husband’s been gone?”
“No. Usually Allan manages all that for me.” She started to cry. “Oh, God, he’s never coming home, is he? What am I going to do without him? What am I going to do?”
Russ left a quick message with Clare’s secretary, Lois, explaining he was going to be working and would have to take a rain check on their usual Wednesday lunch. It took a bit longer to extricate himself from Renee Rouse’s living room. The doctor’s wife whipsawed between begging for help, demanding police action, and crying. Russ guaranteed that he would check and see if anyone had withdrawn anything from her account, promised her that the Millers Kill Police Department was still treating this as a missing-persons case, and extracted her promise to call one of her friends to sit with her so she wouldn’t be alone.
When he and Lyle were finally back in the car, Lyle had that vacant, dreamy look that meant he was thinking hard.
“How do you like Mrs. Rouse as a suspect?”
“Not much.” Russ buckled his seat belt.
“Usually, the spouse is first call for the bad guy in these cases. We haven’t even looked at her.”
“We’ve confirmed that Renee Rouse placed numerous calls to friends from four o’clock onward, looking for her husband. Debba Clow was with Rouse between six and seven or seven-thirty the night he disappeared. We’ve got evidence that places him in her car. At eight-thirty, the wife is speaking with Harlene. At nine-thirty, Mark Durkee’s already spotted Rouse’s car, crashed into some trees off the road. How would you suggest we put Mrs. Rouse into this picture?”
“Maybe she was waiting in his car. Debba Clow never said she got a look inside.”
“Okay, let’s say she’s sitting in the car, freezing her tail off while her husband chats about vaccinations with Clow. Clow drives off, leaving Mrs. Rouse with her husband.”
“Who has a bashed-in head.”
“What’s she going to do with him? Even if she dumped him in the lake and crashed the car to cover her tracks, how does she get home in time to call Harlene looking for help?”
“She called on her cell phone.”
Russ snorted. “Not out there.”
“Maybe she and Clow are in on it together.”
“Would you trust your neck to Debba Clow?”
“Maybe she hitchhiked out with someone.”
Russ threw up his hands. “You’re not going to give up, are you? Okay, look into it. See if she stands to inherit a bundle from insurance, if there’s another man on the scene, the usual.”
Lyle started the car. “I know it’s a long shot. But there was something about the way she said she didn’t know anything about the accounts. Creeped me out. My ex, if I took my checkbook out of my coat pocket, she knew about it.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Linda handles most of our money.” He stared out the window at the passing yards with their rapidly shrinking patches of ice and snow. A few more days up in the forties and it’d be gone. Unless they had an April storm, which wasn’t out of the question.
“Do you know what the average date is for ice out on Stewart’s Pond?” he asked Lyle.
“Third, fourth week in April, usually.”
“You think there’s patches of open water up there yet?”
“Sure. That’s why everybody goes to Florida in March, you know. Because there’s not enough ice for ice fishing, and there’s not enough water for a boat.”
“Let’s get in touch with the staties’ dive team, see if they’re open for business yet.”
Lyle glanced over at him. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that we’re clutching at straws, with all this running around to pharmacies and trying to shoehorn his wife into the facts. I’m thinking it may be time to send someone down there, into Stewart’s Pond. Because we need to find Rouse’s body before all the evidence washes away.”
Chapter 30
NOW
Thursday, March 30
They had said the prayers together, and she had read Lauraine Johnson the Gospel and heard her confession. Now Clare spread the small linen square over the elderly woman’s rolling bedside tray and arranged the round silver container and stoppered silver bottle on top. She unscrewed the pyx and removed the wafer, holding it up to Mrs. Johnson with both hands. “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” On one of their first meetings, Mrs. Johnson had told her, a little embarrassed, that she was most comfortable with the old language from the 1928 prayer book. And why not? She had been in her sixties when the new prayer book became official. She tried to cup her hands to receive the host, but her body betrayed her, as it usually did these days, and she couldn’t get them high enough.
“Let me.” Clare leaned forward and placed the wafer on her tongue. “Take and eat this,” she said, “in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.”
She said the offertory for the consecrated wine and held the bottle to Mrs. Johnson’s lips. The old woman sank back onto her pillow, her eyes closed, while Clare folded the pyx and bottle into clean linen and replaced them in their small leather carrying case.
She laid a hand on Mrs. Johnson’s forehead, pushing a weightless strand of silver hair back into place. “I don’t think I need to tell you to go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”
Mrs. Johnson smiled, but did not open her eyes. “I’m going to do that soon enough, whether you tell me to or not.”
“I need to do a shorter bedside service for you. This tires you all out. Last week your nurse chewed me out.”
Mrs. Johnson looked at her. Her eyes were pale, as if too many days living had washed all their color away. “No. I love your visits.” She lolled her head to one side. “You know what pleases me?” Clare shook her head. “That the last priest to tend to me on this earth is a woman.” She let her eyes drift closed, and she smiled. “For most of my life, women couldn’t serve on the vestry. Couldn’t be in holy orders, couldn’t sit in convention and vote with the men. I was in Philadelphia, you know, when the first eleven defied the bishops to be ordained. I was fifty-six years old.” She opened her eyes again. “How old were you?”
“In 1974?” Clare smiled. “Nine.”
“You’re just a child yet.” She managed to move her hand so that it fell on Clare’s arm. Clare hadn’t taken her alb off yet, and they both looked at the contrast between the ancient, ropy-veined hand and the fine white cloth. “I knew this,” Mrs. Johnson breathed. Her eyes closed. “I knew we were good for more than ironing the altar cloths and holding bake sales.”
When Clare slipped out of the room a few minutes later, the old woman wa
s asleep. She had pulled her alb off and rolled it into a ball. It would mean wrinkles later, but she couldn’t go flapping through the hospital corridors looking like a dean in a cathedral close. She didn’t need to wear the long white gown when delivering the Eucharist, but the more things looked like a regular service, the more Mrs. Johnson liked it. The dying woman had precious few pleasures left in life. If it had been within Clare’s power, she would have lined the walls with cut stone and set up a stained-glass window.
She stopped at the nurses’ station. It was quiet in the early afternoon. Only the charge nurse, furiously typing her records into the computer, and a doctor buried in a file. “She’s asleep,” Clare told the charge nurse.
“Good,” the nurse said. She looked up at Clare, her fingers still keystroking, as if they were more a part of the machine than of her body. “She needs to rest up for visiting hour tonight.”
“I’ll see you next week,” Clare said. “Please call me if she wants me for anything.”
The doctor straightened. “I thought I recognized your voice.” He stepped forward. It took her a moment to place him; nondescript brown hair, a pleasant face, and the ubiquitous white jacket went a long way toward making him anonymous.
Then she remembered. “Dr. Stillman.” She shifted her bundle under her arm and shook his hand. “How are you? What are you doing up here?”
“One of my older patients had a bad fall,” he said. “Broke her hip.” He gestured toward Clare’s clericals. “Look at you. You can sure tell you’re a minister now. You were a lot more casual when you brought your friend in. How’s he doing?”
“I haven’t seen him since then,” she said. “He’s been keeping pretty busy investigating Dr. Rouse’s disappearance.”
Dr. Stillman shook his head. “Bad business. You just don’t expect something like that to happen in this area. Especially to a man as well respected as Allan Rouse. Lord only knows how they’re going to staff the clinic with him gone.”
“Not to sound like a Monty Python sketch, but he’s not dead yet.”
Dr. Stillman looked at her. “When people go missing in the Adirondacks for two weeks in winter, they don’t walk out again.” He gestured toward the elevator in the middle of the hall. “You headed out? I’ll walk with you.” He came around the work counter and fell into step beside her. “I’ve heard that there was a woman with him who was involved in his disappearance.”
“There was a woman with him, but it’s not what it sounds like. She was a former patient of his. Or rather, her children were. She’d been picketing the clinic. She thinks the preservative in their vaccinations caused her son’s autism.”
George Stillman’s whole face opened up in understanding. “That woman. Oh, Lord, yes, she was over here at the hospital, too. Total nut job. What did she do, drag him out there to kill him?”
Clare looked at him, surprised. “I doubt it. He’s the one who asked her to meet him. He wanted her to see the graves of some children who died of diphtheria in 1924.”
Dr. Stillman stopped in front of the elevator and mashed the button. “Really? And the graves were around here? I wonder if they might have been my grandfather’s patients. He lost quite a few to diphtheria in the early twenties. Couldn’t persuade people to take the serum. They used to think gargling and nose sprays would get rid of it.” He rolled his eyes.
“How do you know about it?”
He looked at her as if she were soft in the head. “Diphtheria? I studied it in med school.”
“No, I mean about your grandfather. And his patients. Did he used to talk about them?”
Dr. Stillman shook his head. “He died in ’48, before I was born. But he was a lifelong diarist. My dad kept every volume and passed them on to me.” The elevator doors whooshed open and they stepped inside. “I’ve read them all at least twice. Incredible insight into life in the early years of the twentieth century and what it was like to be a country doctor. Someday I’m going to work them into a publishable form.” He grinned. “Like when I’m retired.”
Clare rested her balled-up alb and leather case against her hip. She tamped down the electrical surge that had flashed through her at the mention of the diaries. “Do you think I could take a look at them? The ones from 1924?”
The doors chimed and opened. Dr. Stillman gave her the soft-in-the-head look again. “Why?”
“It’s complicated. Have you got a half hour?” They stepped out of the elevator into the first-floor admissions area. Before he could answer, she went on, “Short version is, the surviving child of that family is one of my congregation. And a hefty sum of her mother’s money-the mother who lost the other four children to diphtheria-used to go to support the clinic and now is going to go to St. Alban’s. I’ve been digging out bits and pieces of the Ketchems’ family story ever since I learned we were going to be recipients of their money. If he was their physician, your grandfather’s journals might be the only contemporary eyewitness account of what happened.”
“That’s the short version?”
“I told you it was complicated.” She pressed her hand against her chest, not so subtly highlighting her clerical collar. “I promise I’ll be very careful with them. I know how to work with old and valuable books.” She had researched original sources occasionally in the seminary. Of course, that had been under the direct supervision of the rare-collections librarian, a man who had been known to turn the pages for seminarians whose skin-oil level he found fault with.
Dr. Stillman was waving his hand, demurring. “It’s not that they’re really old and valuable,” he said.
“They are to you.”
He looked at her. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, you can borrow them. The volumes you need.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got another half hour before I’m done with rounds. How ’bout I meet you at my office after that? It’s right next door, in Medical Building A.”
“You keep them in your office?”
“I’ve got two teenagers and a back-to-the-nester in my house,” he said, looking pained. “I keep everything I don’t want torn apart in my office.”
Clare had time to swing over to St. Alban’s, collect her messages, and get back to a few people before heading out to Dr. Stillman’s office, Lois’s admonition to “return that man’s phone call!” ringing in her ears. Hugh Parteger had called again. Clare couldn’t help but think that if he phoned her in the evening, from his apartment, instead of using the company line at his office, he’d be more likely to reach her.
Medical Buildings A, B, and C were as unique and graceful as their names promised. Large concrete shoeboxes two stories high, they housed most of the specialists who practiced at the Washington County Hospital. Stillman shared a receptionist and waiting room with three other doctors, and when Clare gave her name to the woman behind the glass divider, she was told to go right on in.
“You found me,” Dr. Stillman said, rising from his desk.
“Well, you know. Medical Building A stands out. I hear it’s the status address in town.”
He laughed. “These places went up in the early sixties. I think it was one of those projects designed to wow the public with the creative uses of concrete.” He stepped over to one of the bookcases lining three walls and ran his hand along a shelf of identical leather-bound books, untitled. “According to my grandfather, the land we’re sitting on was the hospital farm in the thirties and forties. It supplied milk and fresh produce for the kitchens.” He grinned. “The cafeteria would probably be a long sight better if they had kept it going.”
“Are these the diaries?”
He pulled one off the shelf and handed it to her. AMSTERDAM STATIONERY SUPPLIES DIARY 1939 was stamped on the cover in gold. “They were freebies,” Stillman said. “Grandfather got all his writing paper and ledgers and whatnot from them, and they threw in the diary every year as a thank-you.”
“Like the old advertising calendars.”
“Yes.” He looked a
t the shelf again. “What years were you interested in?”
“Nineteen twenty-four. Probably ought to include 1923 as well.” He removed two volumes and she swapped them for the 1939 diary. “And could I also look at 1930, too?” Maybe old Dr. Stillman had had something to say about Jonathon Ketchem’s disappearance.
Stillman handed her a third book. “You know,” she said, tucking them into the crook of her arm, “you should make some provision to leave these to the historical society. In case you don’t get a chance to publish them.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I shudder to think what might happen to them if my kids get their hands on them. My oldest is a so-called artist. She’d probably tear the pages out to use in one of her collages.”
Clare thanked him and promised again to take good care of his grandfather’s work. On her way back to St. Alban’s for the five o’clock evening prayer, she dropped the three volumes at her house. She resisted the temptation to take a quick peek, knowing that if she did so, she’d wind up reading and probably be late for the service.
Evening prayer had a whopping seven attendees, but they were evidently as eager to get home as Clare, and after she concluded the service with a verse from Ephesians, they all scattered, and she was back in the rectory by dinnertime.
She figured that the rare-collections librarian would never have approved reading the diaries while scarfing down pasta, so she plunked her plate in front of the tube and ate with Jim Lehrer, who was never put off from discussing the day’s events by the sight of her chewing rigatoni.
After she had washed up, she started a fire, stretched out on the sofa, and began reading.
Mar. 6th. V. Rainy & cold. Called to Mrs. B.G.’s house for delivery, got stuck in the mud as their creek had risen & had to walk the last mile. Mr. G. took his team & rescued my automobile. Mrs. G delivered of a boy, 6 lbs 5 oz at 6:00 pm, good color & sound lungs. Home early for supper-Hard rolls & sausages, chocolate cake.
Out Of The Deep I Cry Page 27
