He laughed. “No kidding? I never would have guessed that about you!”
“Cut it out! I’m trying to say I’m sorry here.”
He waved a hand, erasing her words from the air. “Don’t beat yourself up. We were both tired and had had too much to do on a very long day. I should have thought about what you had just been through before I snapped your head off. You weren’t saying anything I wasn’t already telling myself.” He was surprised, as he said it, to find it was true.
“That’s part of why I feel so bad,” she said, leaning forward again, her elbows on her knees. “I know how personally you take your responsibilities to this town. For me to accuse you of lying down on the job was just…jabbing you in your weak spot.”
He was still trying to figure out where that little confession had come from. “You know, I was still ticked off at you when I came over here. I didn’t even quite know I was coming over here until I pulled into your driveway.” He leaned against the back of the love seat, crossing his arms over his chest. “You just said what lots of other folks would have said in the same situation. I gotta ask myself why it bothered me so much when you said it.” He watched as she pulled her knees up until her sneaker-shod feet were resting on the chair seat. “I guess I’m afraid that, deep down, all my reasons for not issuing a general warning or going to the press with the gay-bashing idea are because of…who the victims were. Because I don’t, you know, feel comfortable around gay guys.”
She let her knees drop back down and crisscrossed her legs again. “But Dr. Dvorak was—is—a friend of yours. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“We were friends at work. I knew who he was and what he was, but it never impinged on our relationship. He never talked about Paul, just like I never talked about my wife. The fact that he was gay was like having a friend at work who’s Jewish, or vegetarian. You know about it, but you don’t have to think about it, because what you do together never intersects with that other part of the person’s life.” He looked away, focusing on the framed and matted aeronautical sectional charts covering the wall next to Clare’s desk. “But then all of a sudden, there’s this reality—that my friend sleeps with a big bearded guy. And hangs out with the prissy innkeeper and his limp-wristed boyfriend.”
“Ron Handler is not limp-wristed.”
“He’s very obviously gay. Which made me uncomfortable. Then I meet Bill Ingraham, who I knew was gay but who never gave off a single clue, which made me even more uncomfortable.”
“Why do you think that is?”
His mouth quirked in a half smile. Her voice had the tone of a professional counselor now. He glanced back at her. He didn’t know how she managed to concentrate, listening until it seemed as active as speaking, but her focus on his words made him feel as if he could say anything and it would be okay.
“I’m a straight guy? Someone who spent twenty-five years in the army? As you yourself said, it’s not exactly a hotbed of tolerance for sexual diversity.” He snorted. “Furthermore, I was military police. And with cops, God forbid you ever touch another guy in any way except a slug in the arm.”
“You don’t strike me as someone who indulges in groupthink.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You don’t base your decisions about what you’ll believe and who you’ll be on what the people around you think.”
“No, no, I’m not saying the army made me prejudiced against gays. But I don’t feel comfortable when some guy is rubbing my nose in it.”
“Bill Ingraham didn’t rub anyone’s nose in it.”
He twitched in his seat. “I know. Which makes me worry that maybe I am prejudiced against gays. Maybe Emil Dvorak is like my trophy friend, somebody I can point to in order to prove what a cool, open-minded guy I am. And maybe somewhere inside me this…dislike, distrust, distaste of homosexuality influenced my decisions about notifying the press and warning the town.” He looked down at his hands. “Maybe all that stuff I thought I believed about businesses and outing people and copycat hate crimes was just a smoke screen, hiding what was really inside me.”
“Russ.”
He looked up at her.
“If you have enough self-awareness and insight to ask yourself these questions, I believe you’ve already proven that you didn’t act out of some deeply buried homophobia.” She opened her hands. “I’ve never known you not to confront your thoughts and feelings head-on.” Her cheeks flushed again, and he wondered if she was thinking about last Christmas Eve, the two of them in this office, him holding her tightly in his arms. He felt the tips of his ears getting hot. She smiled a little. “You are a very congruent personality, to throw out some jargon. Who you are on the outside is the same as who you are on the inside.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I thought you were wrong when you decided not to notify the press about the pattern of gay-bashing. I still think you were wrong.”
He opened his mouth. She held up one hand. “But despite my disagreement with your decision, I believe—I absolutely believe—that your motives and reasons were exactly as you stated them and that you were acting in the best interest of everyone involved.” She grinned suddenly. “And you can bet if I thought you were snarking around, I would have called you on it then and there.”
“Huh. You didn’t know how I felt about gays then.”
“Oh please. I was there at the Stuyvesant Inn, remember? I saw you with Stephen and Ron. You were like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs, as my grandmother Fergusson would have said.”
“I was?”
“Yes.” She twirled the single strand of hair around her finger and attempted to poke it into her twist. “In all honesty, I have to say there was a lot right with your decision, too. Especially if McKinley and whoever else were working their way up to attacking Bill Ingraham. You very well may have prevented those other things you were worried about—having a sort of witch-hunt for suspected homosexuals going on in the name of protecting them. You put a lot more thought into your approach than I did when I spoke with whats-her-name, that reporter—”
“Sheena.”
“Was that her name? Good Lord. What were her parents thinking of?” She paused for a moment before getting back on track. “My point is, you think about things before acting. And the way you think is well reasoned, informed by your experience and your morals. So stop worrying that you’re subconsciously in cahoots with creeps like McKinley.”
He crossed his hands behind his head and worked his shoulders into a more comfortable position against the love seat’s uneven back. “You know, it’s true. Confession really is good for the soul.” At that moment, his stomach rumbled loudly.
“Hungry?” she asked, pinching back a grin.
“Starved. You don’t—” He stopped himself before asking her if she had something to eat at home. He could barely justify being here with her in her office after hours. He’d come here on police business. He had found out what he needed to know. He had no call to invite himself into this woman’s house for a meal. Better his own abandoned kitchen and an intact marriage than a three-course dinner followed by divorce. He heaved himself out of the love seat. “You don’t have a bathroom around here, do you?”
“Down the hallway, right before you get to the parish hall.”
After he had used the facilities and washed up, he wandered back down the narrow hallway that ran from the huge parish hall past Clare’s office, the church office, and something labeled “the Chapter Room” and then doglegged into the church. This time, the lights were on. Clare was at the high altar again, putting out the candles with a four-foot-long brass snuffer. As it died, each candle sent a ribbon of smoke streaming up toward the gloomy reaches above, veiling the elaborately carved wooden reredos mounted on the wall behind the altar. The air was full of the smell of smoke and beeswax and stone.
“So, nobody came to the service tonight?” he asked, stepping hard on the floor so as not to startle her.
“Hmm? No, I hadn’t scheduled Evening Pra
yer. I just wanted to read the office of Compline for myself. I could have done it at home, but every once in a while I like to come here without it being a job requirement.” She finished the snuffing and swung the gently curved brass pole over her shoulder. “I’m discovering that I have to work at making this my place of worship, and not just my place of employment.” She descended the steps from the high altar and slid the end of the candle snuffer into its wooden stand near the wall. “Sometimes, when I’m leading the whole congregation in the Eucharist, I find myself thinking about what I have to do next—whether I remembered to tell the crucifer to stand up before the final hymn, and if I’ll able to get Mrs. so-and-so to volunteer to lead the white-elephant sale. I didn’t expect that when I became a priest.”
“Huh. I never thought about it like that. I imagined someone could easily get burned-out doing the social-work part of the job. I guess I always figured priests and ministers kind of entered another world when they did their”—he stopped himself again, this time before saying “mumbo jumbo”—“worshiping thing.” Lame.
She dug into her chinos and pulled out a jangle of keys. “I wish. Maybe there’s something to be said for religions that engage in ecstatic rituals.”
He wasn’t sure what that was—it sounded sort of sexual. He figured it was better not to ask.
“As for me, I get charged up by the social-work side of it, as you aptly put it. I love counseling and visiting and helping people. Ah, here it is.” She dangled the key ring from an old-fashioned long key that looked as if it had been cast a century ago. “Main doors. No, for me, it’s the sacramental side I have difficulty with.” She headed off down the center aisle. He fell into step beside her. “I wish I could be more like some of the students I knew at the seminary. You could just see the Holy Spirit working through them. Like it came out of their eyes. Makes me feel like a ‘sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’ ”
He wasn’t sure what that meant either, but he could guess it wasn’t someone with spirits shining from their eyes.
She swung one of the great double doors open. “Get the lights, will you? There, on the right.” The air outside was warm and flower-sweet. She tugged the door into place and locked it.
“I’m glad to see you lock something,” he said.
She looked up at him as she pocketed the keys. There was just enough twilight to see the prim expression on her face. “The church,” she said, “does not belong to me.”
“I’ll walk you back to your place before I go.”
“The rectory is the first house on this street. It’s all of fifty yards down the sidewalk.”
“Yeah, well, I also parked my cruiser in your driveway.”
“Ah. Okay, then.”
They walked in silence to the rectory. He opened his cruiser door, and she stopped on her lawn, halfway to the front porch. “Good night, then,” he said. “Thanks for letting me use your office. And you did right, letting Lyle know right away about McKinley.”
She shrugged. “I just hope you don’t find he’s loaned his truck to his aged mother and has been spending his nights working at the food pantry.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.” He leaned on the door frame a moment, instead of sliding directly into the car.
She looked down at her sneakers. “So.” She looked up at him, her face faintly etched by the light from the corner lamppost. “Am I forgiven?”
“What, for speaking your mind?”
He saw the flash of her grin. “No, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever repented speaking my mind. I meant for how I did it. Hurting your feelings.”
He was going to say his feelings didn’t matter one way or another, that you take a hit and you keep on going, but he realized he would sound like an outtake from a Knute Rockne biopic. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”
A flash again in the darkness as she smiled. She turned toward the porch. “Hey, Clare,” he said. She turned back toward him. “You know that Holy Spirit thing?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’ve got a little shine, too.”
Chapter Seventeen
Russ was parked behind number 2 Causeway Street when Elliott McKinley finally made it home. Russ’s squad car was strategically wedged between the sagging two-car garage moldering at the rear of the lot and the rooming house Dumpster behind it. No one had emptied the Dumpster in a long time. He tried rolling his windows up to keep the smell to a bearable level, but as the sun rose and the morning heated up, he began to feel like a hunk of grizzled beef in a slow cooker. He wound up opening his door and praying for an upwind breeze.
He had been there since their shift change at 6:00 A.M. The neighborhood had been emptying out when he arrived, since even those who had had Monday as a holiday were back to work today. He had listened as the Chevy Camaros and the ten-year-old Skylarks and the occasional tiny import fired up and headed off for the first shift at the G.E. plant in Hudson Falls, or the software-packaging plant in Fort Henry, or to construction sites and auto-repair shops. Causeway Street was a neighborhood that worked in shifts, round the clock. At 4:00 P.M., all the bartenders and waitresses and bouncers would be off to the honky-tonks or the fake rodeos that lined the roads up to Lake George, or to hushed white-linen restaurants that had been serving the summering rich since Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. Finally, at 10:00 or 11:00 P.M., the cleaning women and the night clerks would leave, returning too sleepy-eyed in the morning to give much thought to a few cop cars passing them in the streets.
Russ, Noble Entwhistle, and Eric McCrea had taken over from Lyle and Mark. Eric and Noble were in an unmarked car parked a few doors down from the rooming house. Eric made a radio check religiously every fifteen minutes, reporting that nothing had happened in the last quarter of an hour. That, the bluebottle buzz of flies feasting at the Dumpster, and the occasional shriek of children in danger of toppling rickety swing sets were the only company Russ had.
At 9:45, his radio buzzed. He reached for the mike, wondering why no one had invented a noiseless air conditioner that you could run while still hearing what was going on outside the car. “Yeah, Eric, I’m here.”
“So’s our boy.”
Russ sat up straight. “What’s happening?”
“A burgundy Ford Taurus wagon just dropped him off. A guy and a girl are in the front seat.”
“Call in the plates and tell Harlene I want a unit on them.”
“Already did.”
“You guys get any better at this, I’m going to have to retire. What’s he doing?”
“He’s just entered the front door. He didn’t check his mailbox.”
“Has the postman been by?”
“Nope. Either he doesn’t care what he gets or he was home yesterday in time to get the mail.”
“Somebody must have reached him in the afternoon to let him know that the BWI construction site’s closed today.”
“Okay, I think he’s had enough time to get to his room. Noble and I are gonna go in.”
“Be careful.” This was the thing Russ liked least about his job: sitting and waiting while his men stood on the wrong side of a door, behind which lay—what? A resigned perp who went without comment, or a nutcase with an arsenal? He held himself motionless, listening, waiting.
There was a noise from inside the rooming house, the sound of confusion, an indistinct shout. Then the back door banged open, and he got his first look at Elliott McKinley, skinny, with the thick, ropy arms of someone who breaks his back for a living. McKinley bounded down the four back steps in one stride and jackrabbited to the fence marking the end of the lot.
Russ tumbled from his seat, yanking his weapon from its holster as soon as he was clear. “Stop! Police!” he shouted, taking two steps forward to be clearly seen and dropping into a marksman’s stance. McKinley didn’t spare him a glance. He vaulted the waist-high fence, a ramshackle collection of wire and lathing, and tore off under the neighbor’s laundry-heavy clothesline.
; Russ spat out a curse as he jammed the gun back into its holster and heaved himself over the fence, which wob-bled alarmingly under his hands. He was too old for this crap. He plowed through the laundry, board-stiff jeans and towels whacking him in the face. Behind him, he could hear Eric and Noble clattering down the rooming house’s back steps. “Get the car,” he screamed. “Go around the next street!”
He pounded down the short driveway to the sidewalk and spotted McKinley to his left: he was running like an Olympic contender toward the intersection. Russ didn’t waste breath on a warning, just tore off after him, his hard footfalls slapping on the asphalt. Sneakers. Should have worn sneakers, he thought, and God, please don’t let me have a heart attack, and then, What the hell is he doing? as McKinley abruptly veered off the road between two houses and disappeared.
Russ streaked after him, pulling hard with his elbows tucked to keep his pace up, his heart bludgeoning his chest. It was a beaten-down path that ran between the houses, vanishing into a row of dense bushes. He would have slowed down, but he could hear the thudding of McKinley’s feet up ahead, so he plunged through the shrubbery at top speed, only to rebound violently against a chain-link fence.
“God! Damn!” Russ said, clapping his hand to his stinging face and reeling backward. He blinked tears from his eye. He ran down a dusty rut between the fence and the bushes until he spotted a place a few yards down where the chain link had been pried away from a support bar. He pulled the sharp-edged fencing away and squeezed himself through.
On the other side was a wide swath of overly long grass tipping gently downward into the featureless end wall of the old Kilmer Mill. Russ pushed himself into a trot, loping down the lawn toward the old brick pile below. There was no sign of McKinley. He stopped at the corner of the building and leaned against the cool brick while he clawed at the two-way radio on his belt.
He sucked in air. “Fifteen oh three? This is Van Alstyne.”
A Fountain Filled With Blood Page 17