All Mortal Flesh

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Clare was silent for a moment. “And will you be missing her?”

  “Yes.” He knew she was half-hoping for a different answer, but he couldn’t be anything less than honest with her. “We’ve got twenty-five years together. Half my life. That’s too much to just walk away from. I stood up in front of my family and friends and promised to stay with her until death. She’s kept her promises. Why should she suffer because I couldn’t?”

  “And you love her.”

  “And I love her. It’s different than the way I love you, but yes.”

  Clare looked away from the fire. She was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “I think what you have with her is love. What you have with me is novelty. I’m new and different, and we’ve been catching bits and pieces of each other over the past two years.” He had never known her to sound so bitter. “I expect that if we ever spent any real time together, the infatuation would wear off pretty damn quick.”

  “Clare.” He pushed out of his chair and knelt on the rag rug before her, pinning her in place. “Don’t say that.” Pain and frustration roughened his voice. “Say what’s true. You know things about me that no one else ever will, not in twenty-five years, not in fifty. You know me. Goddammit, if I was just looking for a quick thrill, don’t you think I would have ended it by now? Do you think I like making my wife cry? Do you think I like lying awake at night, caught between destroying her and destroying myself? ’Cause that’s what it feels like when I think about never being with you again. Like I might as well walk up into the mountains and lie down and let the snow take me.”

  She was shaking beneath his hands, and he realized she was crying. He pulled her against him, tumbling her out of her chair, and they rocked together in front of the hissing fire. “Christ, Clare,” he said. “Christ. Tell me what to do. I can’t leave her and I can’t leave you. For God’s sake, tell me what to do.”

  She was standing by one of the windows, looking out. It was snowing, softly, fat flakes that looked like the paper-and-scissors ones his nieces taped to their windows all winter long. He had gone out to the shed and brought in more wood, triggering the sensor light over the deck, and the snow pinwheeled through the brightness and vanished into the dark.

  “We have to end it,” she said.

  “No.” He was sitting on the polished wooden floor, his back to the wall. It seemed appropriate.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m not willing to buy my happiness with your marriage. And neither are you.”

  “I love you,” he said. His voice sounded bewildered in his own ears. “Am I just supposed to stop loving you?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Then I wouldn’t feel as if someone put a stake through my sternum. No. We just . . . go on.”

  “That sounds like that idiotic Céline Dion song.”

  “Yeah.” She stared at the falling snow. “You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from Titanic describes your relationship.”

  She had taken his seat on the floor, back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her. He was sitting on the second-from-bottom tread of the stairs leading to the loft. “No lunches at the Kreemy Kakes Diner anymore,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “I won’t drive by the rectory to check things out anymore.”

  “No.”

  “But it’s a small town. We’ll wind up seeing each other. We won’t be able to help it!” He suddenly felt wildly, irrationally angry with her. It was his town, dammit. He was here first. She should go. He was happy before she came.

  Happy like the dead in their well-loved graves. Unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling.

  “How often do you run into Dr. McFeely, the Presbyterian minister?”

  “Uh . . . I don’t know. Once in a while I bump into him at the post office or the IGA. I’ve seen him at the hospital a couple times.”

  “It’ll be the same with me, then. Less. I’ll start shopping over in Glens Falls.”

  “You don’t want to make that drive in bad weather,” he said automatically.

  “I don’t care!” Her voice cracked. “If it means I won’t be coming face-to-face with you buying groceries or mailing letters, I’ll do it!” She took several short, jerky breaths, then a deep one. “With luck, we won’t see one another more than once a month or so. I signed another one-year contract with my parish in December. Next year, I’ll tender my resignation and ask the bishop to reassign me. Or maybe I’ll just go home to Virginia.” She knocked the back of her head against the wall. “I’m such a screwup as a priest. I should never have left the army.”

  He wanted to tell her no, she was a wonderful priest, and if he could ever believe in a God, it was when he saw Him shining out of her, but the words were stopped in his throat by the realization that she would be going away. In a year or less. And he would never see her again.

  He would get back into his coffin. He would pull the lid down himself. He supposed, after a few years, he might even grow to like it again.

  There was an old hi-fi near the sofa and chairs, the kind with a stacking bar so you could put on four or five records in a row. They had turned on the lights in the kitchen and one of the lamps, so she could make coffee while he riffled through the albums. Some of them were probably old enough to qualify as antiques. Lots of mellow fifties jazz and classic American pop. He put on Louis Armstrong.

  “Here you go.” She handed him a mug. “Hot and sweet, just the way you like it.”

  “Except I’m usually not drinking it at eleven o’clock at night.” He put the mug on the coffee table. “Dance with me.”

  She smiled a little. Put her own coffee down. Went into his arms. Her head fit neatly beneath his chin.

  “Give me a kiss to build a dream on,” Louis sang as they swayed back and forth, “and my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.”

  They were sitting on the sofa staring at the fire across the room. The fifth album was playing quietly. Mel Tormé.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “Okay. Um . . . sometimes I floss my teeth while watching TV.”

  “Everybody does that.”

  “Really? Huh. Well, it still counts as something you didn’t know about me. Your turn.”

  “Okay. I once had jungle rot on my feet.”

  “Eugh! Gross! I don’t want to know that about you. When?”

  “In Nam. I went for five weeks without a change of socks in the rainy season. To this day I still compulsively sprinkle Gold Bond powder before I put anything on my feet.”

  “You were right. This is true love.”

  “Hmm? Why?”

  “Because even with that disgusting image in my head, I still find you irresistible.”

  They were spooned on the sofa, her back on his chest, his arm around her. The lights were off again. The music had ended. He could hear the hiss of the fire in the woodstove and the silence of falling snow all around them.

  “I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “You know how I said I was drafted? I wasn’t. I enlisted.”

  “What?” She shifted around so they were facing each other. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “I swear.”

  “In 1970? You enlisted during the height of the Vietnam War? And then lied about it?”

  “Technically, 1968 was the height of the war—”

  She laid a finger across his lips. “Russ.”

  “I was desperate to get away from home, but I felt like my mom needed me to be the man of the house after my dad died.” He rubbed his fingers along the curve of her waist. “I was eighteen years old, and I could see my whole life playing out in front of me. A job at the mill. Living with my mother until I married one of the girls from my class and then moving next door. Going to the Dew Drop Inn every Friday and to Mom’s for dinner ever Sunday. I thought I’d rather go out in a blaze of glory than that.” He smiled, fond and rueful of the idiot kid he
had been.

  “But—the Selective Service office—there must have been a paper trail! How did you keep it a secret?”

  “More by luck than design. I paid a visit to the local draft board president. Old Harry McNeil. Used to be the chief of police in my grandparents’ day, if you can believe that. Looking back, I’m amazed he went along with it. He did ask me, at one point, if I was sure I’d rather face the VC than my mother.” He grinned.

  “I know your mother. That’s a tough call.”

  “I guess he sympathized with a young man who wanted to get as far away from Millers Kill as he could. He gave me an official notice to show my mom—they were just form letters, with the info typed in—and I took the bus to Saratoga and enlisted the same day.”

  “And no one ever found out?”

  “Mr. McNeil died before I left. My mother didn’t start kicking up until after I was through basic and got my orders. If anybody else from the draft board ever checked the records, I guess they must have assumed old Mr. McNeil’s mind had wandered and he had misplaced my paperwork.”

  “That draft notice turned your mom into an activist. You changed her whole life.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I’ve never told anybody before. Who wants to find out her reason for living was based on a lie?”

  She traced the outlines of his face with her thumb. “I’m glad you told me.”

  He measured himself. He felt . . . lighter. And why not? She was helping him carry the secret now.

  The fire was low. No words now. He framed her face in his hands, stroking her hair, her cheekbones, the line of her jaw. If he were a young man, he might believe he would never forget her skin, or her smile, or the strength of her. But he had learned that the mind didn’t always hold on to what the heart demanded. Remember, he told his hands. Remember this.

  He woke up at some point. The embers in the woodstove were a smudge of orange. He lifted himself up on one elbow, careful not to disturb Clare, and looked out the window. The snow had stopped. The stars were blazing with the fierce light that only comes in the hour before dawn. Part of him knew he should go, but then Clare gave a little snore and burrowed closer against him. He drew the knitted afghan from the back of the sofa and tucked it around them. He lay awake for a long time, watching her sleep.

  Bright sunlight streamed through the windows when he woke the second time. He was alone, covered in the afghan. The cabin was warm again. He sat up, fumbled for his glasses on the coffee table. The first thing he saw was the woodstove, stuffed with logs, heat rolling off it in waves. The second thing he saw was the note on the coffee table. My dearest Russ, it read, I’m sorry, but I can’t say any more good-byes to you. I’m taking my snowshoes and my lunch and I’m going, like Thoreau, to be alone in the woods. He almost wanted to smile. How many guys got Thoreau quoted at them in a Dear John letter? “Only you, Clare,” he said to the empty room. “Only you.”

  He threw the note into the woodstove. Then he left, to start the rest of his life without her.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Inspector Jensen came back into the interview room. “His story jibes with yours,” she said.

  “That’s because we’re both telling the truth,” Clare said.

  Jensen looked at her as if she had just offered to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. “Reverend Fergusson, there’s a saying we learn in law school. ‘Most crimes aren’t witnessed by priests and bishops.’ It’s a way of explaining to juries why the prosecutor trusts the testimony of some scumbot who’s got a record almost as long as the defendant’s. But I’m thinking there must be a flip side to that saying. How can there be a crime if a priest or a bishop is a witness?”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”

  Jensen sat on the table. Clare had to look up to see her face. “Here you are, a priest. Rector of the local church. And you’re alibiing Mr. Van Alstyne. Normally, I’d say, ‘Okay, that clears that up! Thanks very much, Reverend!’ ” She leaned closer. “But you two weren’t exactly at an all-night prayer meeting, were you? You were lovers.”

  “That’s . . . not exactly accurate.”

  “Even more of a reason to help him off his wife. He wouldn’t sleep with you while she was still around, so—” Jensen sliced her finger across her neck. “Your church doesn’t have a problem with widowers remarrying, does it?”

  “That’s ridiculous! I wouldn’t sleep with a married man, but I’d be okay with murder? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “One thing I’ve learned, Reverend, is that most of the time, there is no sense behind killing someone. A sixteen-year-old kills a twelve-year-old because the kid hit him with a water balloon. A guy beats another guy to death outside of a bar because he thought he was hitting on his girl. A couple of drifters drag a grandma behind the shopping center and shoot her for twenty bucks and the keys to a ten-year-old minivan.” She shook her head. “A pair of lovers conspiring to kill a spouse so they can be together? Hell, that’s not just reasonable. It’s one of the oldest stories in the book. David and Bathsheba, wasn’t it?”

  “Russ Van Alstyne didn’t kill his wife.”

  “Can anybody else place him at that cabin between sunset and sunrise?”

  “Of course not! That was the point.”

  “Hey, I understand. I wouldn’t want any witnesses if I was boinking somebody’s husband, either.”

  “I wasn’t—” A thought stopped her. “Deacon Willard Aberforth came to visit me on Monday. Around one or two o’clock. I have his number somewhere.”

  “Did he see Mr. Van Alstyne?”

  “No. Russ was gone by the time I got back.”

  There was a sharp rapping at the door. Noble Entwhistle stuck his head in. “What is it now, Officer Entwhistle?” Jensen didn’t sound pleased to be interrupted.

  “Sorry, Investigator.” He didn’t look at Clare or Jensen. “Sergeant Morin’s back. He wants to see you.”

  “Okay.” She rose. Glanced at Clare. “We’ll continue this in a moment. While I’m gone, I’d like you to think about the vocabulary word of the day: accessory.”

  Alone, Clare folded her head into her hands. She didn’t want to think about the last half hour. Every person in the dispatch room now thought she was sleeping with Russ Van Alstyne. No, everyone in the tri-county area, as a reporter from the Glens Falls Post-Star had also been present for her declaration. She would have to leave the country. She could work with the poor in the slums of Calcutta. After twenty or thirty years, the gossip would die down. Not in Millers Kill, of course, where she had probably enshrined herself as a local legend, but there might be somewhere in the United States where she could show her face without shame.

  She heard voices outside the door and hastily sat up again. It sounded like an argument. Then the door opened and, to her surprise, Karen Burns, Geoff Burns’s wife and law partner, strode in. It must have been one of her days spent working at home and taking care of their toddler—she was in jeans and a sweater that had undoubtedly been hand-loomed by Kashmiri goatherds.

  “What are you doing here?” Clare said.

  “Geoff called me. Right after you made your announcement. Wish I had been here for that.”

  Clare covered her face with her hands again.

  “Come on, we’re getting out of here. You’re done answering questions.”

  “But . . .” Clare stood up. “I don’t think Investigator Jensen believed me.”

  “The woman with the too-tight suit and the Payless shoes? I spoke with her. The archbishop of Canterbury could show up and swear the three of you were playing pinochle all night and she wouldn’t believe it.” Karen smoothed her already immaculate auburn hair and looked at Clare with exasperation. “Why did you agree to talk with her without a lawyer?”

  “Well, Geoff was here.”

  “Geoff can’t help you. He’s representing Russ Van Alstyne, and the two of you have adverse interests.”

  “No, we don’t!”

  “Come on,” Karen urged. “I want t
o get home to Cody. Then we can talk.”

  “Oh, my God, you didn’t leave him alone to come down here and bail me out, did you?” She let Karen lead her out the door and into the hall. A phone was ringing in Harlene’s dispatch board. Voices, indistinct but excited, leaked from the squad room.

  “One, you haven’t been arrested. No arrest, no bail. Two, I would never leave a two-year-old by himself. Fortunately, the new deacon was over to talk about the capital campaign. She was great. She volunteered to watch Cody for me as soon as she heard what had happened.”

  “Jesus wept!” Clare peeked into the dispatch room. It was empty, except for Harlene, entering information on a keyboard with furious strokes. Clare lowered her voice. “Please don’t tell me Elizabeth de Groot knows about this. Please.”

  Karen gave her the same look of compassionate contempt her mother had the time Clare righteously walked out on a high school date who had been telling racist jokes and then had to hike five miles home. In heels. “What did you think was going to happen when you told a room full of people that Russ Van Alstyne spent the night with you?”

  Clare forced herself not to drop her head like a fifteen-year-old. “I didn’t really think.” She gave herself a shake. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. The important thing is that the investigator understands Russ didn’t kill Linda Van Alstyne.”

  “I understand that now.” Jensen emerged from the chief’s office clutching a manila folder. “Sergeant Morin’s just gotten back to me with the oh-so-belated fingerprint report.” Geoff Burns followed the investigator into the hall, and behind him came Russ, looking dazed. Thunderstruck. Jensen narrowed her eyes and spoke directly to Clare. “It seems the woman found dead in the Van Alstynes’ kitchen wasn’t Linda Van Alstyne at all.”

  THIRTY-FIVE