A Fountain Filled With Blood

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “You miss this, don’t you?” he yelled over the noise. She shrugged, never taking her eyes from the helicopter. He could feel the vibrations through the soles of his shoes. Looking inside the cockpit, he saw the outline of the pilot, dimmed and warped behind the reflective smoke-colored Plexiglas. The beat of the rotors increased to a sound he still heard sometimes in nightmares. And then the skids left the ground, bumped, rose, hovering half a foot off the parking lot, and the chopper was away, its fat insect body rising smoothly and improbably into the darkness over Glens Falls.

  They both looked up into the sky. A freshening wind sprang up, and from the mountains Russ could hear a distant rumble. “Is it safe for them to fly with a storm coming on?” he asked her.

  “Mmm. They’re headed south, in front of the leading edge. They’ll stay ahead of it with no problem.” Another gust sent a scrap of paper skittering across the asphalt. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  “I hate helicopters,” he said.

  She looked at him with surprise. Over her shoulder, there was a tapping from the ambulance windshield and the driver leaned out of his window. “Would you folks mind stepping out of the way? I’ve got to get back to the hospital. My shift’s just starting.”

  Russ and Clare retreated to their parked cars. Russ waved as the ambulance pulled away.

  “You hate helicopters, the machines, or you hate riding in them?” Clare asked, crossing her arms over her wilted black blouse.

  “I don’t know. Both, I guess. I had a bad experience in one.” His brain caught up with his eyeballs. “Shit! I wanted to talk to the doctor! ’Scuse my French.”

  “I was listening while he spoke with Paul. I think I got the gist of things. Dr. Dvorak has a lot of fractured ribs, a fractured skull, internal bleeding…. It sounds like someone kicked the crap out of him.” She glanced up at him. “Excuse my French. What happened to him? Why on earth would anyone try to murder the county’s pathologist?”

  He shook his head. “That may be it right there. He’s been our medical examiner for ten years now. I don’t think he was ever involved in a capital case, but I’m sure he’s had a hand in sending lots of men to Comstock. Maybe he gave evidence against someone’s brother or buddy. Maybe someone he put away has been released without managing to rehabilitate himself into a model citizen.”

  Clare glowered at him. “Don’t start in with that. If we made more services available to support prisoners—” She huffed and waved her hands. “Never mind. That scenario seems a little far-fetched. I mean, suppose you were this guy, just released and slavering for vengeance?”

  “ ‘Slavering’?”

  She ignored him. “Would you go after the medical examiner who gave some of the evidence first? Or would you go after the prosecuting attorney, or the arresting officers, or even your own attorney first?”

  “Well, you know how I feel about lawyers. I’d definitely go for them first.” She whacked his arm. “No, I know. Point well taken. There’s another possibility. His car was in an accident, not bad enough to cause his injuries, but enough to give everyone involved a good smack. Maybe the other driver went ballistic. Cut loose on him.”

  “Road rage run amok?”

  “It happens.”

  She worried her lower lip. “Could it have been personal? Someone he knew?”

  He nodded. “In most assaults and homicides, the victim and the perpetrator know each other. That’s why I asked Paul about where Emil had been.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. There are too many possibilities right now. I don’t like that. The only thing we know for sure is that the vehicle he hit was red. We got some paint scraping on his left-front fender.”

  “We know he wasn’t robbed.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “One of the nurses gave Paul Dr. Dvorak’s belongings—clothes and stuff. He had a very expensive watch and a wallet full of credit cards. Untouched.”

  “I almost wish he had been robbed. We’re going to have some good prints off Emil’s car, but they’re not going to do us any good if whoever did this hasn’t been arrested before.” Thunder rumbled, closer and louder than before. He glanced up. Heavy clouds had moved in, their under-bellies reflecting a faint sodium glow from the lights of Glens Falls. “Time to go. You can follow me back to Millers Kill if you need to.”

  She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out her keys. “I need to.” He watched her get into that ridiculous mosquito of a car. Another impractical sports car, and a convertible to boot. He shook his head. She had slipped, slid, and stuck in her old MG last winter, finally wrecking the thing trying to drive through a snowstorm on Tenant’s Mountain. He had assumed that would have taught her to buy a sensible four-wheel-drive vehicle. He had assumed wrong.

  As he climbed into his cruiser, it struck him that he didn’t feel like a hormonal teenager anymore. He felt…pleasant. Friendly. He had enjoyed Clare’s company without making an idiot of himself. He reached for the mike to let dispatch know his destination. He was going to work out this friendship thing after all.

  Chapter Four

  Thursday morning, Clare woke early with the sound of helicopter rotors in her mind. She ran through the tree-lined streets of her neighborhood as the sun was rising, looping east to return along Route 117, parallel to Riverside Park and the abandoned nineteenth-century mills. A short run on Thursdays, so she could shower and be ready for the 7:00A.M. weekday service of Morning Prayer. It was one of her favorites: cheerful and intimate, with the same five or six faces showing up regularly. Since Memorial Day weekend a month back, the size of her Sunday-morning congregation had dropped like a stone through water. She was lucky if she saw thirty faces at the ten o’clock Eucharist. But she could rely on her Morning Prayer people, and no matter how much turmoil she brought with her, she always found her center in the orderly succession of prayers, psalms, and canticles.

  Today, though, she was seized by the thought of Paul and Dr. Dvorak as she and her tiny congregation read the Second Song of Isaiah, the Quaerite Dominum. “ ‘Let the wicked forsake their ways and the evil ones their thoughts; And let them turn to the Lord, and He will have compassion….’” Paul’s broken, lost expression. Dvorak’s still form at the eye of a whirlwind of activity. “ ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.’ ” She tried to imagine what would lead someone to stomp an unoffending man half to death. It seemed infinitely more vicious, more personally hateful than that American classic, murder by cheap gun. “ ‘So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty….’” Sometime during her once-a-week visits to the Millers Kill infirmary, Paul had become her friend, one of the very few people in Millers Kill who didn’t look at her and stop when they got to her collar. A man who spent his days caring for the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. His world had collapsed in the space of a few minutes because of—what? Careless malice? Cool calculation? An explosion of anger? “ ‘But it will accomplish that which I have purposed, and prosper in that for which I sent it.” She wanted to know. She wanted to know why. And who. Was it a monster? She didn’t believe in monsters. She believed in redemption. But some days, it was awfully hard.

  After the service, she checked the calendar. Two premarital counseling sessions today and another three next week. Whoever said Generation X was not interested in marriage hadn’t been looking in the Adirondack region. And the MacPherson-Engals wedding rehearsal Friday evening. She underlined that. She left a note for Lois, the church secretary, asking her to contact the organist, and another for the sexton, reminding him to unlock the door by eight o’clock Saturday morning to give the florist time to arrange the wedding flowers. Then she dashed back to the rectory next door and changed into an outfit that compromised between the weather and her customary clerical uniform: a long, loose-fitting shift in black linen, with a collar attached by hand.

  Outside, it was promising to be another ninety-degree day, but the storm
last night had cleared the air. The light, dry breeze reminded Clare of the best sort of weather at her parents’ home in southern Virginia. She had dropped the top of her convertible, and once she had taken care of Paul’s dogs, she might have time for a little spin through the countryside before the first of her two counseling sessions that afternoon.

  The first hitch in her plans came when she got to Emil and Paul’s handsome old farmhouse. For some reason, she had pictured little dogs, Jack Russells or toy poodles perhaps. The pair that bounded out of the attached barn were big. Really big. Big, hairy, bouncing, barking black-and-white Bernese mountain dogs. She turned around and looked at the minuscule backseat, which would have been a snug fit for Jack Russells. She looked back at the dogs, which were excitedly tearing along the limits of an invisible fence. “Oh…shoot,” she said.

  The dogs were ecstatic at meeting her. As she crossed from the driveway onto the lawn, they leapt and wiggled against her, pawing at her ankle-length dress and frantically licking at her hands. “Not exactly standoffish, are you?” she said. They discovered her sandal-clad feet and immediately began licking her toes. “Stop!” she shrieked. “Sit!” They plunked down, looking up at her hopefully, their tails thumping hard against the grass. She fished for their collar tags among handfuls of silky hair. “Okay, Gal and… Bob?” The dogs thumped more energetically. “Who names a dog Bob?” She sighed. When he had mentioned the dogs while they were waiting in the emergency room, Paul had said their bowls and leashes were in the barn. “C’mon, then,” she said. “Let’s get your things. Then we’ll try to fit you into my car.”

  She wound up squeezing Gal, who was the slightly smaller of the two, across the backseat, the dog’s head out one side of the car and her tail out the other. Bob sat in the passenger seat, his dinner plate–size paws precariously balanced on the very edge of the smooth leather. Clare’s trunk lid barely shut over leashes, bowls, fifty pounds of dog chow, and an assortment of squeaky toys the dogs had brought and dropped in her way while she was loading the car.

  The second hitch came at the Clover Kennels. “I’m sorry, Reverend Fergusson,” the plump, blonde owner said. She vigorously scratched the dogs’ heads. “All of our big dog runs are booked up through next week. It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and lots of folks are traveling.” She crouched, running Gal’s floppy ears through her hands and kissing her nose. “And we can’t fit these two into anything smaller. You wouldn’t be able to move, would you, you sweet thing?” She looked up regretfully at Clare. “There are a couple kennels over to Saratoga, of course, but I’d call first before going over. It’s going to be hard to find any spaces this weekend. Maybe some friends could watch them?”

  And so Clare found herself taking her spin through the countryside with two hundred pounds of dog packed in the car. The only friends of Paul and Emil she knew of were the two Paul had mentioned last night, the owners of the Stuyvesant Inn. Maybe they would take the dogs off her hands. Bed-and-breakfasts were supposed to have cats or dogs hanging around.

  The road to the inn ran along the river—what the early Dutch settlers had called a “kill”—through green shade and sunlight. Falling away from the water, it climbed westward through lush fields of tender-leaved corn and grazing pastures landscaped by Holsteins and Herefords, grass as trim and tight as a broadloom carpet, set off by lichen-mottled rocks and bouquets of thistles and wildflowers. The road rose and dipped, rose and dipped, until it came to a high spot and Clare saw the exuberantly painted inn, a well-maintained fantasy of Carpenter Gothic, with mauve and coral and aqua trimmings. Behind the inn, perennial beds and ornamental trees gave way to a meadow that rolled over the top of a hill and was surmounted by the first in a series of mountains, sea green and smoky in the morning sun. She pulled into the semicircular drive and was not surprised to see a Millers Kill police car already parked in the shade of one of the massive maples sheltering the dooryard.

  She had barely pulled the key from the ignition when the dogs bounded out, Gal squashing Clare’s shoulder as she squeezed herself from the narrow backseat and over the door. They snuffled around the cars, the trees, and the neatly edged bed of annuals before relieving themselves against an iron hitching post and the rear tire of the squad car. “Gal! Bob! Come!” They fell in behind her as she climbed up to the wide porch and rang the doorbell.

  The mahogany door opened a moment later, revealing a gray-haired man with a face as pleasantly rumpled as an unmade bed. “Hello, can I—Why, Bob! And Gal! Hi there!” The dogs abandoned Clare to butt their heads against the man’s knees. “Come in, come in,” he said, trying to scratch the dogs’ heads and offer his hand to Clare at the same time. “I’m Stephen Obrowski.” He swung the door wider and stepped back into a wide hallway papered in velvet flock and furnished with chairs and tables that were so ugly, she knew they must be authentic Victoriana.

  The dogs pushed past Obrowski, their toenails clicking on the polished wooden floor. “Thank you. I’m Clare Fergusson, the rector at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church.” She reflexively fingered the clerical collar attached to the neckline of her shift, then noticed that the linen dress now resembled mohair, with great quantities of white dog hair sticking out every which way.

  “Please, come on back to the kitchen. We were just talking with Chief Van Alstyne about last night. Poor Emil. It’s unbelievable. You read about these things, but when it’s someone you know…”

  Clare followed him down the long hallway, through an alcove formed by a spindle-banistered stairway, and into a kitchen that was mercifully not true to the period. Russ was standing next to a stainless-steel cooking island, polishing his glasses with a tissue. He looked up as they came in, eyes vague and out of focus. An attractive man in his mid-thirties was pouring coffee into chunky ceramic mugs. He had the look of a German skier—lean, tan, blond. She wouldn’t be surprised if his name was Hans or Ulf. “This is Ronald Handler, chef extraordinaire. Ron, this is the Reverend Clare Fergusson. And I take it you two know each other?” he said, looking at Russ.

  Russ replaced his glasses and tucked the tissue in his pocket. “Yup. What brings you out here, Reverend?”

  Before she could open her mouth, the dogs muscled open the door and swarmed into the kitchen, tails whipping like rubber hoses, tongues hanging, mouths drooling. Ron Handler stepped to a curtained door tucked away to the left of a large commercial range. “Gal! Bob! Out!” He opened the door and the Berns galloped out into the sunshine.

  “Bob?” Russ said.

  “Coffee?” Handler offered, tilting the pot toward Clare.

  “Please. So have you found anything new? Do you know what happened last night?”

  Obrowski picked up his mug and blew across the steaming surface. “We were just telling the chief. We had a small dinner party last night—just us, Emil, Samuel Marx, and Rick Profitt. Samuel and Rick are staying with us. They’re up from New York City.”

  Handler handed Clare a mug. “They own a travel agency. They send us a ton of business.”

  “We put it together very spontaneously, because it was a free night in what’s otherwise a pretty busy season for us. I don’t see how anyone who might have been intending to hurt Emil could have known about it.”

  Russ shifted his weight. “Your other guests, Marx and Profitt. Did they know Emil beforehand?”

  “No,” Obrowski said. “And they both retired before Emil left. They didn’t even realize we had had a drive-by.”

  “Maybe Chief Van Alstyne thinks they shimmied down the drainpipe in the rear and went after Emil while we were distracted washing up,” Ron said. “Like in one of those British murder mysteries on PBS.”

  Russ ignored this and continued looking at Obrowski. “Anyone else invited who didn’t show? Did you tell any vendors, any delivery people?”

  “No. No need. Ron can throw together a five-star meal out of whatever we have in stock.” Stephen Obrowski swept his hand toward the chef, who bowed. “We had invited Paul, of course, and our other
guest, Bill Ingraham, but they both had to attend the aldermen’s meeting instead.”

  “Bill Ingraham?” Clare said. “The developer?”

  “That’s right. He’s been staying with us at least once a month since this winter.” Obrowski pointed at a mullioned window centered over a stainless-steel sink framing a view of the mountains. “The Landry property, where he’s working, starts about a mile west of us. As a matter of fact, this house used to be the Landry mansion. The family made their fortune in logging and real estate speculation. Archibald Landry built his own railroad line into Adirondack Park to transport timber and holidaymakers, but the connecting lines that other developers were supposed to build never came through, so his track just petered out in the wilderness.” Obrowski took a sip of coffee. “Then a son died in World War One. When the stock market collapsed, it took most of the family money with it. They sold this place in the thirties.”

  “So this guy Ingraham, he’s the one who’s building the new hotel?”

  “Luxury spa,” Obrowski corrected. “Very exciting. It’s going to bring in lots of people, lots of money. Lots of traffic past our door.”

  “And he couldn’t make it to your dinner last night.”

  “He was definitely at the meeting,” Clare said. “There was quite a to-do about PCBs in the area maybe coming from the old quarry on the Landry property. He stood up and told everyone what a good thing the spa was going to be, but he said that he wouldn’t be building it if the town called in the DEP for another go-round.”

  “You’re kidding! That would be a disaster. Let’s hope they don’t jump the gun and call in the DEP prematurely. Lots of people are counting on that resort going forward.”

  “Not the least of whom is that Landry woman.” Handler rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, cut it out. She’s not that bad.”

  “Joan Crawford on hormone-replacement therapy.”

  Russ snickered. Clare pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. “How about his partner?” she asked. “Did he stay here, too?”