I Shall Not Want

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  She cried out, and he shut her mouth with more kisses, wet and dark, remembering they had to keep quiet even though he couldn’t remember why. She pushed at him, tugging at his shirt, and he reared back, taking her with him, the two of them standing hip to hip and toe to toe, frantic to remove his uniform blouse without letting any space or light or air between them. She undid the two top buttons and he yanked the shirt off over his head, tossing it on the table, and it was Clare, warm and alive and half naked in his arms. His eyes nearly rolled back in his head from the feel of her skin on his.

  Bed. Bed. Bed. He herded her toward the kitchen’s swinging door, the two of them stumbling around and between each other’s legs, Russ dropping kisses on her hair, her ears, her temples while she pressed her face into his chest, her mouth and tongue making him mindless. They rocked through the door and staggered into the dimly lit living room, and when she bit him, he felt his knees buckling. The bed was too far away, he would never make it. He was going to burn alive before then. He hip-checked the sofa and dropped onto its squishy cushions. She let the pajama top and the robe fall to the floor, letting him look at her, look at her, and then she crawled on top of him. He gritted his teeth to keep from whimpering and begging and singing hallelujah. He seized her hips and pulled her to him, so she could feel how hard she made him, Christ, like he was seventeen again.

  “Russ,” she said, her voice unrecognizable. “Oh, God.” She fit herself around him, and he could feel the weight and the strength of her, the long muscles of her thighs and her back beneath his hands. He heard a groan tearing out of his chest as he rolled her underneath him, his arms shaking, the breath hitching in his throat.

  A light snapped on upstairs. “Señora Reverenda?” The voice sounded small and scared and about twelve years old. He stilled as best he could with his chest working like a bellows. Dropped his forehead to hers. Goddamn. It really was like being seventeen again. Next, Clare’s parents would phone to see how the babysitting job was going.

  Clare drew an unsteady breath. “It’s—” She swallowed. Tried again. “It’s all right, Señor Esfuentes. Everything’s okay. Um. . . .” She looked at him helplessly.

  He rolled off her, reaching out and snagging her robe off the floor. He handed it to her. “Es yo, Amado. Chief Van Alstyne. Acabo de venir cerca comprobar en usted dos. Vaya de nuevo a cama.”

  “Okay,” Amado said. “Buenos noches.”

  “What did you say?” Clare whispered.

  “I told him to go away, we were getting naked.”

  She whacked his shoulder, hard.

  “Ow!”

  She curled into a sitting position and put on the robe. He rolled onto his back, throwing his arm over his eyes, trying to calm the pounding of his heart. “You’re going to toss me out, aren’t you?”

  There was a pause. “Yes.”

  “Christ, Clare. . . .”

  She twisted to speak to him; then, as if she thought better of staying within arm’s reach, she stood up and stepped back. Her cheeks and chest were stained with high color, her hair a wild tangle, her lips red and swollen. He had to shut his eyes before he broke something.

  “We can’t do this,” she said.

  He could smell her from where she stood. “Come back over here,” he said, his voice heavy and full. “I’ll show you how it works.”

  She sat in one of the overstuffed chairs that faced each other across the coffee table. Her hand, clutching the edges of her robe together, was trembling. “And what happens when we wake up tomorrow morning with your wife’s dead body between us?”

  “Jesus Christ!” He convulsed upward. His feet, still booted, thudded to the floor.

  “It’s too soon, Russ. Even if we didn’t have this . . .”—she waved a hand in the air—“this mess between us, it would still be too soon. She’s only been dead five months. There’s a reason the old mourning period was a year. People who lived with death knew it took time.”

  “What is this about? You want to make me wait? For what? Payback? To see if I’ll jump through some arbitrary hoop for you?”

  She bent over, twining and twisting her hands together, letting them dangle between her knees. She finally looked at him. “I love you,” she said. “And God knows, I want you.” She laughed a little, without humor. “I think we just proved that. But I deserve to have your whole heart.”

  “I’m not going to stop loving her just because she’s dead.” His voice was harsh.

  “I know that. I don’t expect you to. I meant you need to love me wholly, not half want me, half blame me for Linda’s death.”

  “I don’t—” he began.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” She glanced toward the stairs and continued in a lower tone. “Can’t we at least be honest about that? If you hadn’t stopped to get me out of trouble, if you hadn’t been with me, Linda would be alive right now.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s true!” She jumped to her feet. “Admit it! Admit it!”

  “All right, dammit! Yes! If I hadn’t gone into that goddam barn, my wife would still be alive.” He surged to his feet and grabbed her by the upper arm. “But don’t you see? You would have been dead. You would have been the one to die. And that’s what’s killing me. I can’t regret that. I can’t be sorry. Christ, I can’t imagine a world without you in it, Clare. But that means Linda was an acceptable loss. It means I chose you over her.” He dropped her arm and ground his fists into his temples. “If you knew how many times I’ve replayed that afternoon over and over and over in my head, every decision I made, every word I said . . . and the hell of it is, I never, ever make the right decision. Because there is no right decision. I’ll never be right on this. And if I just . . . come to you with open arms and a big smile on my face, it’s like I’m spitting on her grave.”

  He turned away from her. Ran his good hand over his face. It came away wet. She touched his back, pressed her palm between his shoulder blades. Skin to skin.

  “Don’t,” he said, not sure what he was forbidding her. Don’t love me? Don’t comfort me? Don’t touch me, because I don’t know how many of your touches I can withstand before I break?

  “Dear heart,” she said, “you have got to see a therapist.”

  It was so practical, so Clare, that he almost laughed. Instead he made a noise. “I don’t need a goddam therapist. I just need some time to figure things out.”

  Her hand dropped away. “Because you’re doing such a good job of it.” Her voice was dry.

  He looked at the reddened flesh on his knuckles. The bruises were starting to emerge. “I have to go,” he said, his voice almost inaudible. He strode toward the kitchen, pulled his shirt back over his head, and put his glasses on. The kitchen sprang into focus, cheap white fittings and warm pine. Yanking on his jacket, he kept his eyes on the calendar by the door. A bunch of men in togas stared at each other, drop-mouthed at the flames sprouting from their heads. He wondered if the fiery hairdos were a blessing or a punishment. He took hold of the brass knob. Opened it to the cooling darkness beyond her door.

  Behind him, he heard a ca-chunk as she walked into the kitchen. He inhaled. He was a jerk, but he wasn’t enough of a jerk to walk out without facing her. He turned around.

  She looked as miserable as he felt. Great. He had come here to make sure she was all right. Instead, he had screwed with her head and kicked her in the teeth. And still—still—he wanted her. If she opened her arms, he’d take her right here on the kitchen floor, no questions asked. God, he was pond scum.

  “How do you stand me?” he asked her. “Most of the time, I can’t even stand me.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. She opened her mouth. Shut it again. Shook her head.

  His throat tightened so that he wasn’t sure he could get anything out. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

  She nodded. Wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I knew what I was getting into, remember?” She gave him a fractured smile. “I said we were going t
o break our hearts.”

  TRINITY SUNDAY,

  THE LAST DAY OF PENTECOST

  May 26

  I

  She shouldn’t have come to the parish picnic. She was behind on her reading for the criminology course. The house was an ungodly mess, and she had at least four loads of laundry to do. And to top it off, every time she turned around, there was another cheerful Episcopalian trying to get to know her. It made her miss the enormous Christian Community church she had taken the kids to in LA. It had been big enough to disappear into.

  Hadley fished another Coke out of the ice-filled red-and-white cooler and rolled the dripping can over the back of her neck before popping the top. The things she did for her kids and granddad. At least the view was spectacular. The Muster Field stretched out a good quarter mile atop one of the rolling hills that characterized Cossayuharie. Across the two-lane county highway at its front and on either side, the land fell away in hillocked pastures studded with outcroppings of flinty bedrock and bouquets of nettles. Behind her, the forest that threatened to cover everything in this northern kingdom pressed against the uneven stone wall that outlined the field.

  It was one of the few spots that she had seen in Washington County where the sky was huge: summer blue, piled with mountain-high cumulus clouds as bleached-white as the linen shirts worn by the other group that had come out for the Memorial Day weekend, a company of Revolutionary-era reenactors. They were marching and kneeling, loading and reloading in front of their canvas tents, authentically decked out in mid-eighteenth-century breeches and coats. How they didn’t keel over in those layers of wool was a mystery to Hadley.

  “They look hot, don’t they?” A middle-aged woman dug through the fast-melting ice to pull out a root beer.

  “Mmm-hmm.” The minimum response to be polite.

  “One year, they had two men pass out from sunstroke. They had to get the ambulance up here, there was a big hullabaloo, and then as soon as they’d been carted away to the hospital? The rest of them started drilling again.”

  Hullabaloo? What next, twenty-three skiddoo?

  “I’m Betsy Young,” the woman said, reaching for Hadley’s hand. “I’m the music director.”

  Hadley shook. They both had palms as cold and damp as fish from the chest-sized cooler. “Hadley Knox,” she said.

  “I know. We’re all so thrilled you came out from California to take care of your grandfather.”

  Whoa. Was that what they were saying? “Actually, he invited me before he ever had his heart attack and surgery. He was the one helping me out, not the other way around.”

  “Really?” Betsy Young’s bright expression invited Hadley to Tell Her All About It.

  “Really.”

  “Ah. Well. I actually wanted to speak to you about your son.”

  “Hudson?” Hadley scanned the area around the grumbling granite stones at the shady rear of the Muster Field. The children, bored by the authentic firearms and tactics—Hudson complained they only fired their muskets once every half hour—had converted the three-century-old memorials into a combination obstacle course and battlefield. Their reenactment had far more explosions, automatic gunfire, and light sabers than that of the reconstituted Fifth Volunteer Highlanders.

  “How old is he?”

  “Nine. Why?”

  Betsy took a drink of root beer before answering. “I’ve wanted, for a long time now, to have a children’s choir here at St. Alban’s. When Father Hames was rector, there just wasn’t any opportunity. He was a wonderful man, very learned, but he did tend to appeal to an older crowd, God rest his soul. Since we’ve had Reverend Clare, things have perked up quite a bit.”

  Hadley wondered if the music director had heard about the assault at the church Friday night. Reverend Clare hadn’t mentioned it at the service this morning; hadn’t shown any sign of it—except, maybe, for a kind of emotionally bruised look in her eyes. Which Hadley might never have noticed if she hadn’t heard about the Christies’ arrest from Deputy Chief MacAuley.

  “We’ve had quite a few families join in the past three years, and we finally have enough children in the right age range for me to give it a go. So what do you think?”

  “Hmm? About what?”

  “Do you think Hudson would be interested in singing in the youth choir?”

  Hadley pictured her boy decked out in the sort of choir robes she saw in Christmas specials. She’d love it, but she knew she’d never get him into anything with a frilly neck. “What would he wear?”

  Betsy looked surprised. “Um . . . a cassock, same as the adult choristers. With a surplice on special occasions.”

  Hadley thought for a moment. She wasn’t keen on getting involved in any extracurricular activities herself, but she did want Hudson and Genny to take part, make friends, be comfortable in their new town. “What would the practice schedule be like? I don’t want anything to interfere with his homework. We’re still trying to come back from switching schools midyear.”

  “We wouldn’t start until next fall,” Betsy assured her. “Then it’d be an hour Wednesday afternoon or evening, depending on what works for most parents. And he’d have to be here at nine o’clock for the ten o’clock service.”

  That was doable. “Okay,” she said. “He’s in. But don’t hold me responsible if he turns out to be tone-deaf.”

  “There’s no such thing,” Betsy said with confidence.

  “Hey, you two.” Hadley and Betsy turned to see Reverend Fergusson striding toward them, looking more like a well-toned soccer mom than a priest in her sleeveless blouse and shorts. “Have either of you seen Cody Burns?”

  Betsy shook her head.

  “Little guy with curly dark hair?” Hadley said. “Two, two and a half?”

  “That’s him.” Reverend Clare’s face relaxed.

  “I saw him earlier with the kids playing around the tombstones, but I haven’t noticed him recently.”

  The relaxation disappeared. The rector muttered something under her breath that Hadley and Betsy pretended they didn’t hear. “C’mon,” she said grimly. “We’ve got to find him.”

  Across the wide and grassy field, Hadley could see the word passing, people talking in little clumps and then separating to wander away from each other, scanning the horizon or peering at the ground. Picnickers flung open their coolers and looked inside. At the minutemen encampment, drilling halted, there was a confusion of wool coats and rectangular backpacks, and then the play soldiers began crawling through their canvas tents.

  “Go check the cars!” someone yelled, and several men ran off to the front of the field, where the St. Alban’s cars had pulled off the narrow highway to park in a ragged, overheated row.

  Hadley followed Clare into the center of the maelstrom, where the trees from the forest stretching beyond the old gathering place cast their deep green shadows over lichen-blurred stones. She looked at the wall, the practical leavings from the harvest of rocks that came out of every field here. In places it had tumbled down to a few smooth pieces of granite. Nothing that would stop an adventurous two-and-a-half-year-old.

  “I thought you had him!”

  Hadley knew Geoffrey Burns by sight from church and by reputation at the station, where the male half of the law firm of Burns and Burns was known as “that officious little prick,” and the other officers all wondered what the good-looking Mrs. Burns was doing with such a short, slight spouse. Hadley figured it out the first time she saw the man, radiating power, decked out in a five-hundred-dollar camel-hair coat.

  “Thought? Why didn’t you check with me instead of swanning off to drink beer?”

  She had never seen Karen Burns looking anything less than rich, well-groomed, and perfect. She guessed, by the look on other spectators’ faces, that they would have said the same. Evidently no one had ever caught a glimpse of this mottle-faced woman screaming at her husband.

  “Because I assumed you’re competent to look after our son!”

  “And I assumed
you had the decency to get your head out of your ass and notice what’s going on around you!”

  More and more congregants and reenactors drifted within earshot. Several started to look more interested in the Burnses’ fight than in finding the boy.

  “Break it up,” Reverend Clare said, hooking Karen Burns’s arm in hers and neatly turning her away from her clench-fisted husband. “We need to organize now.” The rector raised her voice. “Parents, let’s get a head count of the other kids. I want to make sure no one else wandered off with Cody.”

  Karen let out a terrible moan. Reverend Clare gave her a little shake. “We’ll find him, Karen.”

  The remaining children were rounded up, some protesting, some demanding hot dogs and hamburgers. Genny wanted another soda, and after making sure she and Hudson were included in the count, Hadley sent them both off to the cooler, with orders to stay where they could see her. No one else was missing. None of the kids could remember seeing the preschooler leave.

  “I want four volunteers to walk the road, one on each side, in both directions,” Reverend Clare said to the assembled throng. Several hands shot up. The rector pointed. “Laurie and Phoebe, you go north. Judy and Terry, you head south.” She turned to a couple Hadley knew as Sunday school teachers. “David and Beth, can you take charge of the other kids? Get some food into them and organize a game so they won’t be underfoot?” They nodded. “Can anyone get a cell phone signal out here?”

  Three quarters of the crowd began digging in their pockets for their phones, including, Hadley observed, several Revolutionary war soldiers. Most people glanced at their screens and shook their heads.