I Shall Not Want

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Clare’s mouth quirked. “You mean like Geoff?”

  Karen sighed. “I know. I could never fall for the easy guys either.” She looked at Clare. “It’s always the difficult ones that get under your skin, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.” The two women looked at each other in perfect understanding.

  Clare didn’t know if it was Hugh’s influence or not, but they topped out the silent auction almost 20 percent above projections, according to financial officer Terry McKellan’s calculations. The live auction following went faster than Clare had expected, much faster, and an hour after it had started, St. Alban’s was close to four thousand dollars richer and Terry and his volunteers were shooing her out of the sanctuary. “Go,” Terry said. “Dance.”

  “I should help with the checks,” Clare said, almost convincingly.

  The finance officer grinned, his luxurious mustache spreading like two glossy brown wings. “Think of it as an act of mercy, then. Logging in these checks is going to be the highlight of my week. Dancing? Not so much.”

  She decided not to push her luck by arguing further. She slipped into her office, locked the door, and shucked off her clericals in favor of a poppy-red dress whose skinny-strapped top was balanced by yards and yards of skirt that made her look like Ginger Rogers whenever she twirled.

  There was already a modest crowd across the street, diners who had skipped the auctions and dancers drawn by the free music. The sky over the mountains glowed with sunset’s red and orange and pink, but the fairy lights twining the gazebo and hanging over the park were lit, twinkling like a thousand lightning bugs against the green leaves and the violet shadows. Clare stopped on the church steps, listening to the laughter and the chatter and the squeals and squonks of Curtis Maurand and his Little Big Band tuning up.

  Impossible, for a moment, to believe anything bad could ever happen here.

  Then a flash of tan beneath one of the cast-iron street lamps caught her eye. Their police presence. Officer Flynn, pressed and shined and looking ready to help little old ladies across the street. And the chief himself, solid, steady, every line of his body a reassurance that they were safe. Protected. Because bad things could happen here. She smiled a little. But not if Russ Van Alstyne had anything to say about it.

  He turned. Saw her watching him. Her thread of wistful amusement tightened into a prickly awareness. She hadn’t seen him since she’d kicked her way out of his office more than three weeks ago, swallowing bile and several bad words. For which, yes, she needed to apologize. She moved down the steps and across the walkway, conscious in every step of her skirt sliding around her legs, the warm, humid air stroking her bare shoulders, the smell of St. Alban’s roses, and the heat from the street’s asphalt beneath her flat-soled shoes.

  He walked away from the streetlamp to meet her. A couple sat on the bench facing the church, the woman rifling through her purse. The Campbells, crossing from the parking lot, passed her. “Great auction!” Sabrina said. Clare waved an acknowledgment.

  “Reverend Fergusson,” Russ said.

  “Chief Van Alstyne.” She wrapped her arms around herself and inhaled.

  Before she could launch into her apology, he settled into parade-rest posture and cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that, when you told me about the men at Mike and Janet’s. I realize . . . she put you in an impossible situation. It wasn’t your fault.”

  She paused, knocked off-kilter by his preemptive apology. Although, she noticed, he never used the words I’m sorry. She decided to supply them. “I’m sorry, too. I should never have agreed to go along with a lie in the first place. And I’m sorry I lost my temper. It was very . . .”—undignified? unprofessional?—“. . . childish of me.”

  They stood there, face-to-face, not quite looking at each other. At the center of the park, the band swung into “String of Pearls.”

  “Reverend Fergusson!” The voice was lilting and Swedish. Clare turned to see Lena Erlander and her husband, Jim Cameron, approaching. Clare pasted on a bright smile. Lena’s husband was the mayor and had signed off on the use of the park, the street closing, and the police protection. Over, she had heard, the objections of some of the aldermen. “How good to see you again,” Lena said, shaking Clare’s hand. “And how wonderfully clever of you to put on this dance.”

  Jim Cameron grinned at Russ and Clare and beamed at his wife. His expression said, Isn’t she the perfect politician’s partner? They’d been married two or three years, and the honeymoon was evidently still on. Maybe it was true, what they said about Swedes.

  “Thank Elizabeth de Groot and Karen Burns, not me,” Clare said. “They put the whole thing together.”

  “Perfect timing, either way,” the mayor said. “Proof positive there’s nothing to fear in Millers Kill, no matter what trash the reporters like to throw up.”

  “I saw your handsome friend from New York over by the refreshments table,” Lena said. “He was looking for you.” She smiled at Clare as if the two of them shared a secret. “I think you were smart to have the old-fashioned band. Dancing close, it gives a man romantic ideas, right, alsking?” She wrapped her arm around her husband’s.

  Mayor Cameron’s smile glazed over. He looked from Russ, to Clare, then back at Russ. “I think it’s smart to attract the right sort of people. Older couples who want to spend money and then go home at a reasonable hour. Not like the god-awful crowds we get at the Riverside Park on the Fourth of July, eh, Russ?”

  Russ looked over the mayor’s head at the well-heeled dancers swinging to Glenn Miller. “I don’t think we’ll have any broken beer bottles or fistfights with this group, no.”

  Lena tugged on her husband’s arm. “Come on, I want to dance. Oh, and tell Chief Van Alstyne he can’t just stand like a stuffed bear. There are never enough men to go around. He must dance once or twice.” She smiled up at Russ. “You must dance with some of the single ladies.” She winked at Clare. “Since I don’t think you’ll be loaning out your date for the cause.”

  Mayor Cameron dragged her away in what was either a passion to dance or a fervor of embarrassment.

  “String of Pearls” ended. The crowd clapped. “So,” Russ said. “Hugh’s here.”

  “Thank you very much!” Curtis Maurand said. “This next one’s for all you guys and gals who were in the armed services. It’s called ‘American Patrol.’” The band blew out a full-fledged jitterbug.

  “He’s staying at the Stuyvesant Inn,” she said, then mentally kicked herself. She didn’t have to explain anything to Russ.

  He made a rumbling noise in his chest. It sounded to her like disapproval.

  Pricked, she said, “Of course, if it gets too late, I could always put him up at the rectory. I’m sure I have a spare toothbrush somewhere.”

  Russ slanted a look at her. “Why not? He could room with Amado.”

  She couldn’t help it. The thought of Hugh’s face, confronted with the temporary sexton and the guest room, made her laugh. “Poor Hugh,” she said. “That certainly would not be what he was expecting.”

  “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Russ quoted, which made her snort, which was how Hugh found them.

  “Vicar,” he said, taking her hand and kissing it. “You look like the proverbial long cool woman in a red dress.” He glanced at Russ. “Chief Van Alstyne. Imagine my surprise at seeing you here.”

  “Mr. Parteger.”

  “Isn’t all that unrelieved polyester hot on a night like this?”

  “You sure notice a lot about clothes. I bet you’re real good at home decorating, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Russ’s face was bland. The jitterbug ended, and the band segued into “Steppin’ Out with My Baby.”

  “Gosh,” Clare said pointedly. “I love this song.”

  Hugh redrew his expression into something more pleasant. “Of course, Vicar. By all means, let’s dance.” He paused, as if a thought had just occurred to
him. “Unless,” he said to Russ, “you’d like to escort Clare onto the dance floor.” He swept one arm toward the low wooden platforms that had been bolted together over the largest wedge of the park that afternoon. “After all, you’re free to ask her now, aren’t you?”

  Clare would have killed Hugh, except that she was caught, stomach clenched, wondering what Russ would say. Loathing herself for hoping like a girl at a middle-school dance.

  He stood very still. Finally he said, “I’m on duty.” He nodded to her. “Enjoy yourself.” Then he walked away, leaving Hugh looking triumphant and Clare wishing she were a lesbian. Maybe then she’d never have to deal with male idiocy again.

  II

  That damn skimpy red dress drew his eye all night long. He patrolled the edges of the park, exchanging hellos and commenting on the weather and answering the few folks brave enough to ask questions about the so-called Cossayuharie Killer. And all the time, he kept spotting her, like a flame in the dark. He saw Parteger begging and begging hard after that stunt he pulled, following her around like a dog while she flitted from parishioner to parishioner. The Brit eventually hit on the right apology or wore her down, because she let him dance with her.

  She wasn’t a great dancer, not like some of the older women on the floor who had learned to swing and foxtrot back in the white-glove days, but damn, she looked like she was having fun with it. Between dances with Parteger, she partnered Norm Madsen and Robert Corlew and even Geoff Burns, who managed to look semihuman, twirling Clare past the gazebo.

  She started smiling—really smiling, not just being polite—and then she started to laugh, and he swore he could hear her laugh over the music and the talk and the dull rumble of the traffic, rerouted through streets a block away.

  Linda would have liked this. She would have laughed like that and danced like that and pushed her hair off the nape of her neck like that—such a tender, intimate gesture in a public place, and then he realized he was thinking about Linda and about Clare, holding them both in his mind at the same time, and he waited for the bitter black weight to come over him and it didn’t. He felt a lingering sadness, like the clarinet line, but he also felt the excitement of the brass, and he caught a glimpse of a realization, that something of Linda, in some way, survived in Clare, but he couldn’t get a handle on the wisp of a thought and his concentration was busted by the growl and crunch of one of his patrol cars, slipping up the street and pulling in next to the park’s fire hydrant.

  His deputy chief stepped out of the cruiser. “Hey,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? What’re you still doing here? You were scheduled to go off duty an hour ago. I figured you forgot to call in.”

  “Huh. Guess I lost track of the time.”

  Lyle shoved his hands in his pockets as he joined Russ. “Bucking for overtime won’t do you any good, y’know. You’re on salary. That’s why you wouldn’t catch me taking your job.”

  “You wouldn’t take my job because you might actually have to show up for work during hunting season.”

  “Yeah, well, there is that.” Lyle looked between the trees to where the dancers were going around to “Begin the Beguine.” “How’re things goin’?”

  “Nobody dragged off to a shallow grave yet. Although the night’s still young. What’s happening out there?” He gestured with his chin toward the rest of the town and beyond.

  “Quietest damn Sunday night I’ve ever seen. I think the Cossayuharie Killer’s keeping everybody home. Or headed down to Saratoga. Paul called in, said he’s given out a few tickets on the Schuylerville Road.”

  “Jim Cameron’s not going to like that.”

  “What, tickets? Sure he will. Paul’s scoping out the cars from away. No skin off his voters’ noses.”

  “I meant, people taking their money out of Millers Kill.”

  “On a Sunday night?” Lyle blew a raspberry. “The only things to spend money on in this town are those idiot arcade games at Alltechtronik and a couple ounces of grass. You have to go to Glens Falls to bet on bingo.”

  “I dunno about that. I think Geraldine Bain’s running a floating canasta game around here. Penny a point.”

  Lyle laughed. Russ grinned. They stood side by side, watching the dancers, and for a moment it was like it used to be. The music slid smoothly into a new song, the bandleader’s voice sweet and melancholy. I can see, no matter how near you’ll be, you’ll never belong to me—

  “Who’s the fellow with Reverend Fergusson?”

  Russ blinked. “Hugh Parteger. Forty. Unmarried. He’s an investment banker from the city. Resident alien. One DUI, got it bargained down to DTE. No other record.”

  Lyle looked at him sideways. “It was more in the line of a social question.”

  He felt his cheeks heat up and hoped the light from the streetlamps wasn’t enough to give him away. “Guy comes dropping into my town for no good reason every couple of months, why shouldn’t I run him? Forewarned is forearmed, or however the saying goes.”

  “Mmm.” Lyle turned back to the dancing. Anne Vining-Ellis and her husband blocked Clare from view, but as the Ellises twirled out of the way, Russ could see her, locked up tight in Hugh’s arms, the overdressed bastard sliding one hand all up and down her half-bare back.

  “Looks to me like he’s got a perfectly good reason for coming to town.”

  But I can dream, can’t I?

  “Whyn’t you go over there and ask her to dance?”

  He rounded on Lyle. “Why don’t you mind your own business?” He turned back toward Clare and her date, determined to poke the knife in himself a little deeper. “You’re the last person who oughta be handing out advice.”

  Lyle was still a moment. “You’re right,” he finally said. “I’ve managed to ball up every relationship I ever had. Includin’ our friendship. But you know what? That means I can recognize when someone’s making a dumb-ass mistake.” He waited, as if inviting Russ to chime in. Russ kept his mouth shut. “Whatever.” Lyle sighed. “I’m gonna take a turn around the park and check in with Kevin. See ya around.” He strolled off beneath the trees.

  The song ended to a clamor of applause. Russ turned on his heel and strode across Church Street without looking, headed for his truck, parked in the lot across from St. Alban’s. He unlocked it and stripped off his gear belt, dropping the whole thing into his lockbox along with his pump-action shotgun and .40-.40. There. Officially off-duty.

  He climbed behind the wheel and fired up the truck. Wondered if his mother was still out at Cousin Nane’s. Probably not. He wished he had someplace to go where he could be alone.

  How about your own house?

  He shook his head. He had been back to the house on Peekskill Road several times since Linda’s death, but he was never, he realized, going to spend the night there again.

  What was he going to do? Sell it? Then what? Buying another house seemed pointless. Keep living with his mother? He had a sudden vision of himself, a decade on, sixty years old, coming back to his eighty-five-year-old mother’s house—the women on her side of the family lived a long time, he had no doubt she’d still be alive and kicking—eating the same low-carb dinner, watching the Yankees kick the hell out of the Red Sox, nothing changing, everything exactly the same as it was now. As it had been since Linda died. That’s what he had wanted, wasn’t it? To stop time? To never let go of her?

  God Almighty. What was he doing to himself?

  He swiped his hand over his face. Rolled down the window. In the park across the street, the band was playing “In the Mood,” and somewhere in the crowd Hugh Parteger had his hands all over Clare Fergusson.

  Jesus Christ. What the hell was he doing sitting in this damn truck?

  He twisted the key out of the ignition, popped open the door, and thumped to the asphalt. He recrossed the street. The dancing had been going on long enough that people had wandered out to the edges of the park, women fanning themselves, men tuggin
g at their ties and unbuttoning their cuffs. He passed a “Chief Van Alstyne!” and a “Hey, Russ,” but kept his course single-mindedly toward the bandstand.

  The music stopped, and applause burst like champagne bubbles in the air around him. He looked around, but for the first time that evening he couldn’t spot the red dress. His stomach tightened. I could always put him up at the rectory. What if she decided . . . What if they had—

  “Why, hello, Chief Van Alstyne.” He looked down to see Mrs. Henry Marshall, one of Clare’s vestry, smiling up at him. She was in bright pink tonight, with matching lipstick that was almost fluorescent compared to her white hair. Her hand was looped through the arm of her—‘gentleman friend’ was the right term, he guessed.

  “Evening,” Norm Madsen said.

  “Hi,” Russ said. “Have either of you seen Clare?”

  The elderly lawyer frowned. “Not more trouble, I hope?”

  Mrs. Marshall gave her escort a look of loving contempt. “I don’t think that’s why he’s asking, dear.” She cocked her head at Russ like a sharp-eyed sparrow. “Is it?”

  He shook his head.

  “She said she was going to get something to drink. But I’m sure she’d be happy to dance. . . .”

  He didn’t stay to hear the rest of her comment. He tossed a “Thanks!” over his shoulder as he elbowed his way through the crowd.

  He found her as promised, near the refreshment table, sitting on one of the folding chairs strewn haphazardly beneath the chestnut trees, drinking from a paper cup. Parteger, standing behind her, was trapped in conversation with Robert Corlew. Clare looked up. “Russ.” She sounded surprised. “Is something wrong?”

  Her eyes were large and dark in the half-light filtering through the leaves. She was faintly flushed, a little damp, as if she had just toweled off after a shower. She looked . . . edible.

  “I’m off duty,” he said.

  She dropped her gaze to his hip. “Oh,” she said.

  “Dance with me,” he said.

  She jerked her head back up to meet his eyes.