Mr. Madsen took his time before answering. “People can do surprising things, Lacey.”
Clare thought of what he had said to her after the emergency vestry meeting that started her whole involvement with Jane Ketchem. She was the only woman who could ever scare me. And the fact that she’s dead doesn’t make me any less scared.
“She never…” Mrs. Marshall peered more closely at her old friend. “She never said anything to you about it?”
Mr. Madsen actually tore his gaze from the road and looked at her. “Good Lord! Of course not.”
She sagged back into her seat for a second and then stiffened again. She twisted to face Clare. “Do you remember what Allan said, that day we went to tell him? About my mother?”
“He said you had no idea what the clinic had meant to your mother.”
“Do you think he knew? Do you think she told him?” She pressed her spindle-fingered hands against her sunken cheeks. “Oh my God, what if he knew what happened to my father all these years and he never told me!”
Clare rubbed her knuckles against Mrs. Marshall’s arm. “Even if he had some sort of knowledge of your father’s death, I’m sure the only reason he would have kept quiet was to protect your feelings. He must have known how much you loved your mother. He wouldn’t have wanted to do anything to tarnish her memory for you.”
Mrs. Marshall closed her eyes for a moment. “All these years, I thought he had left me. I thought my father abandoned me.” She opened her washed-blue eyes, and Clare was struck by how much the pain of the very old looked like the pain of the very young. Vulnerability, and disbelief, and nowhere to hide from it.
“But he didn’t. He was taken away, but he didn’t leave me. All this time, I thought…” She blinked, and the tears spilled down her cheeks and collected in the soft folds of her skin. “He used to tell me he loved me, when I was a little girl. And for years now, years, I didn’t believe him. But he was telling the truth. All those years.” She pressed her hand against her mouth. “He didn’t leave me.”
When Clare reached her office, it was to find Lois with a handful of pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips. “If anyone sends you clippings, make sure I get a copy for the parish scrapbook,” Lois said, handing them over.
“Sure,” Clare said. “It’ll make good reading for the next priest. Kind of a what-not-to-do list.” There was one from a Post-Star reporter and another from a columnist at the Albany Times Union. There were two new messages from the diocesan office, one from the bishop’s secretary and the other from the editor of the newsletter. Three were blessedly normal, someone with a question about Easter Eve baptisms, a couple wanting to reschedule a premarital counseling session, a dinner invitation from Dr. Anne. One was from Hugh Parteger.
She ought to get right back to the bishop’s office. She could ask them what to do about the reporters. And of course she needed to return her parishioners’ calls. She picked up the phone and dialed Hugh’s number.
“Vicar!”
“Is this a bad time?”
“I’m just going over a proposal from a pair of twentysomethings who feel now is just the right time to break into the dot-com market with a luxury-car directory and delivery service. All they need from us is a half mil for start-up and a big, encouraging hug.”
“Are they going to get it?”
“Indeed not. I’m going to smack them upside the head, as the natives say, and tell them to go get real jobs. The Internet is dead. Silly buggers.”
“So, you called me.”
“Vicar, I’ve called you four times the past month. You’re hard to get hold of. Listen, there was an article in the Times yesterday.”
“The New York Times?”
“No, the Kankamunga Times. Of course, the New York Times. It’s all about how this lady whose husband went missing showed up at the home of his alleged mistress-”
“Oh God, it doesn’t say mistress, does it?”
“-and said lady proceeded to hold the mistress, her mother, her two children, and the town’s Episcopal priest at gunpoint until the police arrived. Dateline, Millers Kill, New York.”
“It doesn’t give out my name, does it?”
“Hah! I knew it must have been you. No, it only named the wife and girlfriend. The article said it was the priest who phoned the cops.”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“Good God, you’re a regular Xena, Warrior Priestess, aren’t you? I’ve got to get you down here so I can show you off to my friends. You poor baby. Were you frightened?”
She smiled at the conjunction of Warrior Priestess and poor baby. “It was scary. But I was pretty sure Mrs. Rouse didn’t really want to hurt anyone. She just cracked under the strain of her husband’s disappearance.” Unlike Jane Ketchem. “I knew if we could just keep her talking, the police would get there and everything would be okay.”
“Did that surly chief of police show up? Rip Van Winkle?”
“Russ Van Alstyne. And he’s not surly.”
“Hah. At that dinner we went to last summer, he practically patted me down and administered a field sobriety test before he let me drive you home.” His voice shifted, went warmer. “Look, I really do mean it about you coming to the city to visit me. And not just because you’re a fifteen-minute celebrity.”
“Please tell me no one else has seen the article.”
“It was on the third page of the Region section. Must have been a slow news day.”
She groaned.
“What do you say?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “It’s not a good time. Three Sundays from now is Easter. Things are going to get frantic.”
“And after Easter?”
She hesitated. “If I came down to see you, I’d need someplace to stay. Not with you.”
“My animal sexual magnetism is simply too much in close quarters. I know. I get that all the time.”
One of the things she liked best about him was the way nothing was ever serious. Nothing ever counted for too much or weighed too heavily. “When I get caught up in the middle of things, I’m not always as careful as I ought to be about what people will think of my actions. So when I can spot a problem in advance, like my congregation’s reaction if I overnight in New York with a handsome single man, I like to take steps to cut it off at the knees.”
“Handsome single man, eh?”
“With a British accent. Known to be devastating in the U.S.”
“You do realize, don’t you, that you’re the only girl I’ve ever dated that I didn’t have sex with. I feel like the reformed rake in one of those Barbara Cart-land romances.”
“So shineth a good deed in a naughty world.”
He laughed. “Okay. If I get a female friend to issue an invite, will you come for a visit after Easter?”
“This wouldn’t be one of those innumerable girls you’ve had sex with, would it?”
“Despite what you see on HBO, New York isn’t entirely overrun with single women desperate to sleep with a heterosexual investment banker. Alas. So no, I think I can find someone whose favors I haven’t shared.”
“Maybe you know a nun?”
“A lesbian nun.”
“A blind, senile lesbian nun. With a flatulent dog.” She smiled into the phone.
“All right. I’ll get you a berth with a blind, senile lesbian nun and you’ll let me take you out to dinner. Sounds fair.”
“It’s a deal.”
She said good-bye smiling. She always felt better, talking with Hugh. Lois was right, she ought to keep in touch with him more regularly. Her mother would love him.
Her intercom buzzed and Lois’s voice came into the office, the Ghost of Phone Calls Yet to Be Returned. “While you were on, Karen Burns called. She wants to talk to you about this Debba Clow person. Also, Roxanne Lunt called from the historical society. She has some research packet the librarian there left for you.”
She didn’t know exactly what Karen wanted, but it was bound to take longer and be less
pleasant than Roxanne’s research packet. She rang the historical society director.
“I’m so glad you called!” Roxanne’s energy level hadn’t dimmed since their last conversation. “Look, Sonny Barnes told me you had been asking about the Hudson River Regulating Board and the Sacandaga land buyouts.”
“Sonny Barnes?”
“Our librarian. I bet he didn’t introduce himself, did he? Sonny’s a little challenged on the social-adeptness front.” That was an understatement. “Anyway, about your research?”
“I was interested in what had happened to a local family. The Ketchems. But as it is, I’ve just recently found out-”
Roxanne steamed forward. “I have, right here in my hands, the financial records of the long-defunct Adirondack Land Development Partnership.”
“Say what?”
“They were one of the groups that popped up like mushrooms when the HRRB was formed. They were land speculators who had friends on the board. They bought up properties that were going to go underwater and resold them to the board for a nice profit, and they also snatched up land near areas that were undergoing development.”
“Sounds like a recipe for success, if not for sleeping soundly at night. How come they went under?”
“It was a huge, racy scandal. In 1932, the three partners and a bunch of friends were whooping it up at one of their twenty-five-room cottages. There were lots of scantily clad girls at the party, none of whom were their wives, and at the end of the night, two women were dead. There were rumors of orgies, the whole nine yards. Nowadays, they would have just gone on Live with Regis and Kelly and tearfully apologized, but in those days it wasn’t so easy. One of the partners killed himself, and the Adirondack Land Development Partnership went bankrupt.”
“How did the historical society wind up with their financial records? Wouldn’t they have been confidential?”
“We don’t actually have the original documents. That’s probably why Sonny didn’t think of it. He loathes copies. In the early eighties, a true-crime writer who summers around here researched the case for a book. She got copies of the partnership’s records, and when she was done, she donated them to us. Wasn’t that thoughtful?”
“Yeah.” The question of what had happened to Jonathon Ketchem was over. She wasn’t going to find anything in a bunch of financial documents about why his wife killed him, then spent the rest of her life insisting he was dead and building up a living memorial to his name. Unless it was the question of where the money for the clinic came from. Had the Ketchems made a bundle when their farm was sold? Or had there been some sort of insurance on Jonathon Ketchem that no one except his wife knew about? “I’d like to take a look,” Clare said. “Can I come by tomorrow?”
“Nobody’s going to be around tomorrow. I’m here this afternoon.”
“I’m tied up for the rest of the afternoon and then five o’clock evening prayer.”
There was a pause. Clare thought she heard the tap-tap-tap of Roxanne’s manicured nail against the phone. “How long does that last?”
“I’ll be free by six.”
“Okay, you nip over here right afterward and I’ll let you in. I won’t be staying, but I’ll set the alarm for you so that all you have to do is trigger it when you leave. How does that sound?”
“Terrific. Thank you.”
She hung up feeling as if she’d accomplished something, recognizing, even as she let herself warm to the feeling, that it was really just busywork, no different from when she had been a teen and had prided herself on working on one of her dad’s engines while she should have been writing a paper or cleaning her room. It was always easy to escape into work that didn’t matter. The hard part was settling down to the unpleasant tasks of life. She picked up her sheaf of pink papers, shuffled them, and then picked up the phone again. It was time to explain to the bishop’s office how the rector of St. Alban’s had gotten herself into the newspapers. Again.
Chapter 36
NOW
She was sitting at the worktable, gazing out the window in the historical society’s old nursery, when she realized she hadn’t ever called Russ. She had wanted to talk with him out of earshot of Mrs. Marshall, but in the rush of the day, the intention had slipped away from her. She reached into the pocket of her oversized trench coat and pulled out her phone. At least she could count on it to work in town. Usually.
She hesitated, considered where he might be at 6:30 on a Monday night, and dialed his cell phone. She was avoiding calling him at home because of who might answer. Could there possibly be a clearer indication that her relationship was inappropriate? If you want to be good, don’t put yourself in places where you’re tempted to be bad, her grandmother Fergusson would say. When your gut says to retreat, listen to it! Hardball Wright would say.
And yet, she wasn’t hanging up, was she?
“Van Alstyne here.”
“Hey. It’s Clare. Is this a bad time?”
“Hey.” She could hear some sort of machine noise in the background, a rhythmic chittering. “I’m still at work. Getting in some faxes. Trying to cross off some possibilities for either of our missing men. Where are you?”
Pellets of rain, reconnaissance for the coming storm, strafed the window. “I’m sequestered in the top floor of the historical society.”
“Look, when I suggested you try a volunteer stint there, I didn’t mean you had to move in.”
She laughed. “I’m not cataloging. I’d been asking questions about when the dam went in on the Sacandaga and what happened to the people who were displaced. Roxanne called me with this cache of documents that have lots of the records of the financial transactions. You know, who bought the land, how much they paid for it.”
“Sounds deadly. The only time I go through financial records is when I’m forced into it.”
“Like in Dr. Rouse’s case?”
“Yep. Although Lyle pitched in and did a fair share of the scut work, especially with the Rouses’ personal finances.”
“Anything that gives you a lead?”
“Nothing that looks any different from every other professional who has to buy a new SUV every third year to impress the neighbors. Three cards carrying big balances, but no signs that they ever went over the limit or couldn’t pay on time. Line of equity, car loans-again, nothing that stands out.”
“So your theory that Allan Rouse might have been dealing prescription drugs…?”
“Doesn’t look like it holds water. Or my idea that maybe he was abusing. Kevin Flynn hit every pharmacy between here and Gloversville, and no one could remember ever seeing him. We’ve run down his phone log in case we could spot an accomplice, but no luck.”
Clare removed a stack of pages from the box in front of her and flopped them on the table. The copied documents were just that, loose-leaf copies stored three inches deep in a manuscript box. “What about the clinic’s records?”
“They’re more complicated, so we’re not through with them yet. So far, it looks like all the funding from the town is accounted for.”
“What about the money from the trust?”
“I’m still trying to track everything down that doesn’t come from the town. He only had to account to the board for their money, so everything else-donations, sliding-scale fees, the trust-is all stuck in around the edges, as it were.”
“What?” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘what’?”
“You had a funny note in your voice.”
He laughed quietly. “Busted. Until I pin down every penny, I’m still not giving up on the idea that there might have been some financial shell game going on.”
“What about Mrs. Rouse? That was what I wanted to talk to you about earlier today.” She flipped through a few pages. It looked as if the entries were in chronological order. She tipped the whole box over until the papers flopped into an upside-down pile and picked up the last several documents. No index. Shoot.
“What about her?”
�
�Remember what you said to Mrs. Marshall, about how the police would treat a suspected spouse nowadays? How come you haven’t grilled Mrs. Rouse?”
“Because she can account for her whereabouts. She was already making phone calls all over town, trying to track down her husband, while he was alive and well at Stewart’s Pond with Debba Clow. We’ve interviewed people who spoke with her, and her phone records confirm those calls were made from her home phone. Lyle suggested she and Debba might have been in cahoots, but I find that hard to believe.”
She flipped over pages until she started seeing “1929.” She began working her way forward from the last of the Adirondack Land Development Partnership’s documents in that year. “If they were, it’d certainly put a different complexion on Mrs. Rouse’s visit to the Clows, wouldn’t it?”
He laughed. “You make a great conspiracy theorist. Have you figured out who killed JFK yet?” She heard someone calling out a good-bye in the background.
“I ought to let you go,” she said.
“I’m fixing to head out right now. Tell you what, give me a minute to hobble downstairs and find my hands free and I’ll call you from my car.”
“You drove yourself in to work? How can you manage the clutch?”
“I swapped with my mom. She has a Toyota Camry. Plenty of room for my leg, and no shifting.”
“I thought Linda was taking you in.”
“That wasn’t working out as well.”
As well as what? she thought, but kept her mouth shut. “Okay, give me a call when you get settled.”
She glanced out the window again after he hung up. The threatening rain clouds had closed off the sky, darkening the soggy back garden and the tree-shrouded alley beyond. She could see her own face in the glass, its lines soft, her eyes dreamy. She looked as if she ought to be singing the chorus of “Hello Young Lovers.” She rolled her eyes and went back to the partnership’s accounts.
McThis and McThat, with the occasional MacWhosit and Someonesson thrown in for light relief. The location of the land, the structures there on-she supposed that was so they would know what would have to go before the flooding started-the agent who handled the purchase. Date of transaction and price. Date of possession, which she guessed meant when the prior owners beat it. She had an uneducated eye, but it seemed as if most of the farmers were getting a raw deal. Even in the 1920s, $7,000 couldn’t have been much for forty acres, a house, and a barn.
Out Of The Deep I Cry Page 33
