All Mortal Flesh

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  She left her new deacon to either pull together more information on donor programs or plot her downfall and went into her office. Mr. Hadley had left her wood and kindling in a big iron basket next to the hearth, and she laid a fire in the grate, thankful for the soothing manual task, thankful, once the kindling had caught and flames were crackling up in the strong draft, that she spent her days in a beautiful old building with real working fireplaces. And uneven floors. And drafty windows. And a yearly oil bill that probably paid for the president of Exxon’s yacht.

  Her first appointment arrived promptly at eight. Chris Ellis, father of three, husband to Dr. Anne Vining-Ellis, had had a panic attack two months ago in his office. His doctor prescribed Valium and counseling. It had taken two sessions for Clare to figure out Chris Ellis’s problem: He hated his job. He hated the work, civil engineering; he hated his younger, more ambitious colleagues; he hated the management, which was bent on taking the firm national; and he hated his two-hour daily commute to Albany. In one more session, he admitted he wanted to pursue his true passion, fine furniture making, currently relegated to a basement hobby. Since then, he had been working toward either taking the leap or living with what he had. Clare privately thought he ought to go for it, but with his eldest son at Brown and the second due to start college next year, she could see why he was reluctant to abandon the regular paycheck and benefits.

  She was delighted when he told her he’d accepted a paying commission. “It’s for four classic Adirondack antler chairs and a matching table. Just like the ones I did for my friend David’s restaurant. Get this—the owner of the Algonquin Waters was having lunch at David’s, saw my pieces, and asked about them. He wants a set for the hotel!”

  “The owner of the Algonquin resort? Was lunching in Saratoga?”

  “Yep. Name’s Oppenheimer.”

  “Opperman,” Clare said. “John Opperman.”

  “I didn’t actually meet him. He left word with the general manager before he left town, and she contacted me. Apparently, they’re very committed to using local craftsmen and material in the hotel.”

  She blinked. First Linda Van Alstyne, then Chris Ellis. Before they knew it, half the town was going to be employed by Opperman’s company. It probably wouldn’t do any good to mention her belief that the owner of the Algonquin Spa and Resort had manipulated his two business partners to their deaths. The only other person who shared her opinion was Russ Van Alstyne, and he wasn’t about to be propping up her arguments any time soon. It was a moot point, anyway. Businesses killed people every day in some part of the world or another. Though she suspected they did it with less personal involvement than Opperman.

  She said something encouraging, and Chris talked for a while about seeing if he could structure a part-time position at his firm, or maybe independently consult for them, and when they wrapped up, she was guiltily aware that she’d only given him half her attention. Encountering the same people, businesses, gossip—that was life in a small town. She thought of Ben Beagle, and his big hog-killing story. It was not a conspiracy to make her see the Algonquin Waters at every turn. It was just where she lived.

  The Garrettsons were next. Clare took a large slug of coffee and threw another log on the fire. Tim and Liz were always a bit of an ordeal. They entered either bickering or in a stony silence, which was worse. This morning it was silence.

  “So,” Clare said. “How are you?”

  Liz gazed at her husband with Laser Beam Death Ray eyes.

  “She’s hacked off about her mother,” Tim said. “Again.”

  Clare picked up her coffee mug. Wished she had thought to pour some whiskey into it first. “Last week we agreed we were going to stay off the subject of—”

  “I brought her back from the hospital and her cats were dead!”

  “You can’t blame me for her dead cats, Liz.”

  “I’m confused,” Clare said. “I thought there was a neighbor who looks after your mother’s house when she’s away.”

  “A very responsible neighbor who brings in the mail and the paper and leaves the check for the snowplow and feeds the damn cats,” Tim said. “We slip her thank-you money in a card every few months.”

  “We wouldn’t need someone else to help Mom if she were living with us.”

  “We wouldn’t have to worry about any of her needs if she was in the Infirmary!”

  “What happened to the cats?” Clare asked.

  “The cats are a side issue,” Tim said. “There’s always something that’s going wrong. It’ll always be something going wrong until we put her in a home, where she belongs.”

  “They were killed,” Liz said, ignoring her husband. “It was horrible. I went into the barn to get the rock salt to scatter on her walk and steps”—her angry glance at Tim led Clare to guess that was supposed to be his job—“and there they were. Sliced to pieces.”

  “It was probably a fisher,” Tim said.

  “A fisher would’ve eaten them,” Liz said. “Not left their little frozen carcasses behind.”

  Clare frowned. “When I saw her in the hospital, your mother said something about someone trying to kill her cats.”

  “It’s not about the cats,” Tim repeated. “It’s about the fact that Liz’s mom isn’t competent to manage her own household anymore.” He turned to his wife. “It’s going to be one disaster after another until you realize putting her in the Infirmary isn’t setting her out on a goddamn ice floe.”

  Liz gasped. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Oh, for chrissake, of course I didn’t kill your mother’s cats!”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  Both Garrettsons looked at Clare as if she were crazy. “They were cats,” Liz said. “It was awful, but it’s not like, you know, Quinn Tracey’s mother discovering the police chief’s wife’s body.”

  Clare’s first thought was, Oh, good, they haven’t read the Post-Star yet today. Then Liz Garrettson’s phrasing struck her. “Quinn Tracey’s mother?”

  The Garrettsons looked at each other again. “We figured . . . you probably had heard about that,” Tim said tactfully.

  “No, I mean, why call her Quinn Tracey’s mother? Instead of Meg Tracey?”

  “Oh.” Liz’s face cleared. “I guess I thought of her that way because we know Quinn. He’s the one who does Mom’s plowing for us.”

  ________

  Clare normally walked the Garrettsons to the church door to bid them goodbye. This morning, she shook their hands, abandoned them where they sat, and was in Lois’s office before they had gotten their coats on.

  “Lois, what was the name of the family that wanted me to pray for their lamb?”

  Lois was never flustered by Clare’s more unusual outbursts. “The Campbells. Abigail Campbell is the mom.”

  “Can you get me their number? Is she likely to be at home?”

  Lois was already flipping through her personal copy of the parish directory, hand-annotated with all sorts of facts not readily available to the general public. “She works at Sheehan Realty in Glens Falls.”

  Clare grabbed the Glens Falls phone book off the shelf.

  Elizabeth de Groot was by now standing in the doorway of her minuscule office. “What’s going on? Did I hear you say someone wanted prayers for a lamb?”

  “A memorial service, really,” Lois said.

  The new deacon’s winged eyebrows knitted together in a delicate frown. “Is this metaphorical?”

  “I assure you, it’s quite flesh-and-blood.” Clare trapped the number beneath a finger and gestured to Lois for the phone.

  “I have to point out it’s probably chops and stew meat by now,” the secretary said. “Maybe a couple of little legs for roasting.”

  A bland voice answered the phone. “Sheehan Realty.”

  “Could I speak to Abigail Campbell, please?”

  “May I say who’s calling?”

  “Her priest.”

  There was a pause. Then: “Oh! Of
course. Please hold.”

  Clare looked up to see de Groot nervously glancing back and forth between her and Lois. Then the Muzak cut off and she was live.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Abigail? Clare Fergusson here.”

  “Oh, Reverend Fergusson.” The woman on the other end of the line sounded embarrassed. “I’m sorry I left you that message last week. It’s just that the kids were so upset, and I was, too, of course, and we were trying to come up with something to make us all feel better, you know, and not so violated—”

  “I have a question that’s going to sound a little odd,” Clare said.

  “—but we had a sweet do-it-yourself service and we donated his body, as it were, to the food kitchen, so he didn’t die in vain—”

  “Abigail?”

  “—and frankly right now I think that having you do anything, you know, official will just open up the wounds again.”

  This time Clare waited a moment to make sure she had run down. When she was sure there was nothing else, she said, “No service, then?”

  “No service. Maybe we could do something else to remember him.”

  “Abigail, do you have someone plow your driveway?”

  This time, there was a definite pause. “Ye-e-es,” Abigail said. “I’m divorced. It’s one of those jobs I’m willing to pay someone to do.”

  “Who does your plowing?”

  A longer pause. “A young man named Quinn Tracey. I sold his family their house a few years back. Why?”

  THIRTY-NINE

  As soon as she got off the phone with Abigail Campbell—Clare agreed to insert the lamb’s name in the weekly prayers for the dead—she whipped through the pages of the phone book, looking for the number of the Glens Falls newspaper.

  “Who are you calling now?” Elizabeth asked.

  “A reporter from the Post-Star. The one who’s writing about the Linda Van Alstyne–Audrey Keane screwup.”

  The deacon looked at Lois, who shrugged. Clare found the number, stabbed it in, and, getting an automated directory, punched in the first three letters of her party’s last name.

  “Hi! Ben Beagle here!” The reporter sounded much too bright and cheery, as if he’d already been up five hours, run four miles, and filed the first story of the day.

  “Hi. This is Clare Fergusson.”

  “Ah! What can I do for you, Reverend?” He didn’t sound anything less than happy to hear from her. She really ought to read today’s paper. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as she imagined. Then he went on, “I have to warn you, the Post-Star only prints retractions when a subject has clear and convincing proof that we used false information in a story.”

  Maybe it was worse than she imagined.

  “Actually, I’m not calling about the, um, Van Alstyne business. I had a question about the story you mentioned to me yesterday morning.” Was it really only yesterday morning? It felt like a year had passed.

  “Shoot.”

  “The guy whose hog had been killed—what actually happened to the hog?”

  “It’d been sliced up. Throat slit, cut open from stem to stern, hacked up a bit around the hams.”

  “Did you see it? Did he report it to the police?”

  “Yeah, he filed a report. I didn’t see the pig in situ, but he had taken pictures to show to the cops. A full-grown pig’s worth three, four hundred bucks, according to him.”

  “Can you tell me who it was? The farmer?”

  “He isn’t a real farmer. He’s a pediatrician down in Clifton Park. He has a big old place, raises chickens and a couple pigs every year.” In the background, she could hear paper rustling. “His name’s Irving Underkirk. Why so interested?”

  “A parishioner of mine had a lamb killed last week. It sounded similar to what you described.”

  “You think someone’s out there running a do-it-yourself butcher shop?”

  Clare made a noncommittal noise. “Do you have a number where I could reach him?”

  “I’ve got his home and work.” Beagle rattled off the numbers. Clare jotted them down in the margin of the phone book.

  “ThanksMr.BeagleIappreciatethis,” Clare said. “ ’Bye.”

  “Wait—” she heard, but the receiver was already in the cradle.

  She immediately dialed the pediatrician’s office number.

  “Clare,” Elizabeth said. “Help me out here. I’m not quite seeing how tracking down dead animals fits in with your pastoral duties.”

  “She’s tackling animal welfare and snow removal at the same time,” Lois said. “I think that’s very efficient, don’t you?”

  Elizabeth sidled away from the secretary.

  “Clifton Park Pediatric Services,” the phone said in Clare’s ear.

  “I’d like to speak to Dr. Underkirk, please.”

  “Do you have an emergency?”

  “No, it’s, um—” Clare had forgotten that it was impossible to actually pick up a phone and speak with a physician. “It’s not an emergency.”

  “Well, then, I’m afraid—”

  “Could you put me through to his nurse?”

  “We have a triage nurse you can speak to.”

  “It’s not a medical issue at all.” Clare breathed in. It didn’t do any good to tear the head off the hapless receptionist. “I’m looking into a series of animal killings. I understand the doctor lost a pig—”

  “Oh, Lord, yes. We all heard about the pig.”

  “I need to ask him a question related to the”—animal cruelty? Vandalism?—“incident,” Clare decided. “If you can put me through to his nurse, she could relay the question for me.”

  “Well, that’s a pig of a different color, isn’t it. He’ll definitely want to hear about this. Hang on, you may be on hold for a while.”

  Muzak again. Clare clapped her hand over the receiver and said, “Lois, would you get on the other line and call Harlene Lendrum at the police station? Ask her if there’ve been any other reports of animals being killed. Try to get the names and numbers if there have been any.”

  “This just doesn’t strike me as being the church’s business,” Elizabeth said.

  “Business? Mankind is our business,” Lois quoted, picking up her notepad and swiveling off her chair. “Mind if I use your phone, Deacon?”

  Elizabeth made a wilting gesture toward her tiny office. Lois disappeared inside.

  “I’m beginning to understand how you get sucked into these things,” the new deacon said. “You let yourself get swept away in the rush of events, and you don’t stop to think about whether or not this is something you ought to be sticking your nose into.”

  Clare was about to admit that was a pretty fair assessment of her character, but the sound of a voice on the line brought her back to the pediatrician’s office.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Underkirk’s nurse, Violet.” She had the kind of voice that made Clare think of overstuffed sofas and starchy, nourishing meals. “Marcy tells me you know something about Tom, Tom the piper’s son?” Nurse Violet let out a peal of laughter. Clare began to get the idea that his office staff had been less than sympathetic to Dr. Underkirk’s plight.

  “I’m looking for information, actually. My name’s Clare Fergusson, and I’m trying to see if there are any common elements between Dr. Underkirk’s case and two others.”

  “What do you want to know?” Nurse Violet said. “He’ll be that happy hearing someone’s looking into it. He’s had his tail in a twist since it happened. Get it? Tail in a twist?” The nurse giggled.

  “Uh-huh.” Clare closed her eyes for a moment. “Does the doctor have a snowplowing service, and if so, who does the work for him?”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Clare said.

  “Hang on.” She heard a clunking sound on the other end. Elizabeth looked at her, frustration and unhappiness thinning her lips, throwing previously invisible lines into relief. Great, thought Clare. I’m causing the bishop’s deacon to age before my eyes. Maybe that says som
ething about the way I’m running my life.

  “You still there?” Nurse Violet came on. “Dr. Underkirk says he gets plowed out by one of his patients. A young man named Tracey.”

  Clare forgot all about Elizabeth’s premature decay.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” Nurse Violet said. “And by all means, let us know if you catch the little porker!” She was still laughing when Clare hung up.

  Lois emerged from the deacon’s cubbyhole. “Bingo,” she said, turning her notepad around so Clare could see her writing on the other side. “Three reports of animals being killed in the past month, according to the dispatcher. One of them was the doctor, one is an old fellow named Herb Perkins who lost a dog, and the last is a couple of professors at Skidmore who lost one of their goats.” She pointed to the paper. “Names and addresses right there.”

  Clare took the notepad. “You’re wonderful, Lois.”

  “I know. And I’m not the only one. Guess who had just gotten off the phone with the dispatcher right before I called?”

  Clare blanked. “Who?”

  “Ben Beagle of the Post-Star.”

  “Damn. He’s a tad too quick off the mark for comfort.” She tried the professors’ number first and got their answering machine. She left as abbreviated a message as she could: She was looking into a series of animal cruelty cases, and was their driveway plowed by Quinn Tracey? Herb Perkins, who was home, didn’t seem happy to hear from a stranger nosing about his business.

  “Yeah, I get my dooryard plowed out,” he said in a voice like a crumbling cigar. “Don’t see what that’s got to do with somebody killin’ one of my dogs.”

  “I’m looking for a common thread between several incidents, Mr. Perkins.”