To Darkness and to Death

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  He watched her roll the thought around in her mouth, tasting it. “It’d be nice,” she finally said. “Wearing short sleeves all the time. Gardening year-round.”

  “No more dark mornings,” he said.

  She smiled a bit at that. “I’d miss seeing Bonnie and the boys, though. And it would be odd having Christmas where it’s sunny and warm.” She looked at him more closely. “What are you going to do? I can’t imagine you not timbering.”

  He glanced down at the old rifle in his lap. That was the question, wasn’t it? “Man and boy, I’ve hauled wood out of those mountains forty years now. I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m not a lumberman. But change is coming, Suze.” He rubbed his thumb over her hand again. “And if we don’t change with it, we’ll get left behind.”

  5:30 A.M.

  Dressed in insulated camos and a blaze-orange vest, Russ Van Alstyne padded downstairs in his stocking feet. Every chair, sofa, and table in the parlor was piled high with meticulously folded draperies, glossy stripes and chintzes that made the room look like a dressmaker’s shop gone mad. He shifted a deeply ruffled swag to grab the new Lee Child novel he’d been reading last night and heard the dry crunch of tissue paper stuffed into the folds. No wrinkles for these babies. Unlike him. Straightening, he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the mantle. I don’t look a half-century old, he thought. Do I?

  The smell of coffee drew him on to the kitchen. Even in heavy wool socks, the drafts along the two hundred-year-old farmhouse’s floor chilled his feet. He stepped into the unlaced boots waiting for him by the mudroom door before pouring himself another cup from the coffeemaker. Boxes of rings and hooks and other curtain-hanging hardware took up all the available space on the kitchen table, so he stood by the sink, looking out the window into the pale darkness, Jack Reacher’s adventures abandoned on the counter.

  Upstairs, a whirring sewing machine fell silent. A moment later, he heard the stairs creak. “Can I help you load any of this stuff in the car?” he called out.

  “Not yet,” his wife said, toting what looked like a ball gown through the kitchen. “Let me get rid of this, and I’ll be right back.” She kneed open the mudroom door and clattered down the steps into the unheated summer kitchen they used for storage. That room led to the barn, where Russ had spent most of the last summer prying up the uneven plank flooring and laying down heavy-duty joists, making it a usable garage for the first time since the horse-and-buggy days. He was actually looking forward to the first big storm of the season, just for the novelty of getting into his truck without knocking snow off first.

  “Okay, birthday boy, you ready?” Linda Van Alstyne peeked around the mudroom door. “I couldn’t wrap it, so this is all the surprise you get.” She emerged into the kitchen cradling a pristine quilted canvas rifle case.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “Take a look inside.” She handed it to him. He unzipped the case. Nestled in the well-padded interior was a .378 Weatherby Mark V.

  “Oh. Honey.” He drew it out reverently, running a hand along the gunstock walnut, smooth and warm to the touch, like a living thing. “It’s beautiful.” Rosewood and maple gleamed in the kitchen light. He drew his fingers across the bolt sleeve, etched with scrollwork from another century. “I don’t know what to say. This is amazing.”

  Linda dimpled at him, glowing with cleverness. Dressed in a sweatsuit, her face showing the strain of the past weeks’ work, she was still gorgeous, all extravagant curves and touseled blond curls. His very own Marilyn Monroe. “How on earth did you know what to get?” he asked.

  “I asked Lyle MacAuley for a list of recommendations.” His deputy chief was an avid hunter. “Last time I went to New York to buy fabric, I got it. I’m glad you like it.”

  “Like it? I love it. I didn’t think I’d ever handle a Weatherby outside of a gun shop.” He glanced up at her. “Are you sure we can afford it?”

  Her dimples vanished. “Russ.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I love it, I really do. But Weatherbys cost an arm and a leg. I don’t want you to be shorting your budget just to get me a pretty gun.”

  “Stop worrying about the money. I’ve got more business than I can handle right now with this commission from the Algonquin Waters resort. And if I can pull it all off in time for their grand opening tonight, I’ll be able to pick up tons more business.”

  “Yeah.” He replaced the gun in the carrying case. “If that’s what you want.”

  She tugged a dishrag off the faucet and swiped the immaculate counter. “Don’t start with me. This is absolutely the right direction to take the business. No more running up curtains for one room or even one house at a time. The spa has almost five hundred installations, counting the interior accent decorations. That’s a year’s worth of work. It’s my chance to step up to a whole different level.”

  “I just don’t like to see you working so hard—”

  “Russell! Hello? Is this the man who can’t take a vacation because the police department might fall apart without him?” She tossed the rag into the sink and faced him head-on. “For years, I’ve been supportive and understanding when you’ve left dinner on the table to run to a crime scene, or when you’ve stayed out until 4:00 A.M. working a case, or when you’ve missed Thanksgiving or Christmas because you’re taking someone else’s shift. Now it’s your turn. I’ve finally found something I love to do, something I’m good at, something people will pay me for. You’ve always had that. I haven’t. You should be happy for me.”

  “I am. I know when we retired from the army it was hard on you. I’m glad you’ve found something to do with yourself.” She opened her mouth disbelievingly, and he winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just . . . you’re spending all your time at the spa these days.”

  “Have you run out of groceries? Is the house a filthy mess? Are the monthly bills unpaid? I’m keeping up my end, so get off my back.”

  “Linda.” He was making a hash of this, but some shambling monster of marital discord made him open his mouth and wedge his foot deeper in. “It’s not the time. You’re . . . I hate that you’re working with John Opperman.” He couldn’t stop his voice from tightening when he said the resort developer’s name.

  She shoved one of the wooden chairs against the table. “Mr. Opperman has been both a perfect gentleman and a generous employer who’s committed to hiring locally. If he had gone with a big commercial furnishings company, he’d have his curtains up this morning, instead of having to wait and wonder if I can pull it off before the opening ceremonies tonight.” She stalked into the living room. “I have to load the rest of this into my car. You can help, or you can go. Whatever.” She scooped up a stack of quilted shades piled so high they looked like bedding for a princess and a pea.

  “For chrissakes, give me those. They must weigh a ton.” He relieved her of the stack. “I’ve dealt with Opperman. He smiles at you and he talks real smooth, and all the time he’s got the knife out, waiting to stick it in.”

  “You haven’t dealt with him. You’ve investigated him. Of course you think he’s the bogeyman.” She shook out a plastic bag and slid several tissue-stiffened swags inside. “One of his business partners was murdered. His other partner tried to kill him. I’m sorry if the case didn’t turn out like you thought it would, but honey, it’s been over a year. The trial has come and gone, and Mr. Opperman wasn’t implicated in any way. Don’t you think it’s time to let it go already?”

  He stomped through the kitchen with unnecessary force.

  “He could have taken the insurance money and run,” Linda went on. “Instead, he built the resort. He gave a lot of local people jobs, including yours truly.” She trailed him through the open mudroom door into the unheated summer kitchen. “Let’s face it, honey, you divide the world into two categories, criminals and potential criminals.” Her words made vapor puffs in the cold air. “I’ve worked with him. Believe me. He has a clear conscience.”

  In the barn, Russ lif
ted the back gate of her boxy old Volvo wagon and slid the quilted shades in. “Careful of those sheers,” she said.

  “Jeffrey Dahmer had a clear conscience, too, you know.”

  She dropped her swags in the back and slammed the tailgate. “You. Are. Impossible.” She stomped up the barn steps, strode through the summer kitchen, and let the mudroom door swing in his face.

  “Honey,” he started, but she held up her hand.

  “I don’t know why you’ve been such a grouchy old bastard lately, but it’s going to stop.” She threw open the refrigerator and pulled out an insulated lunchbox. “Here. I made you a lunch. Take your pretty new gun and go shoot something.”

  “Honey . . .” He tried again.

  She paused in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “And don’t think all this talk about how terrible Mr. Opperman is will get you out of going to the grand-opening party tonight. I expect you to be here, wearing your tux, car keys in hand, by seven-thirty tonight. Do us both a favor and work out your aggressions on the deer, okay?” She leaned against the doorjamb, crossing her arms over her chest. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He was rewarded with the dimples again. “You’re impossible, but I love you.”

  “I am impossible,” he agreed.

  “And . . .”

  “And I love you, too.”

  She disappeared into the living room. God, she was still so beautiful. When he had married her twenty-five years ago, he had wanted nothing else than to grow old with her. And now, that had happened. He was fifty years old today. Fifty years old, and in love with another woman.

  5:45 A.M.

  Clare pulled over to the side of the dirt road and fished her flashlight out of the glove compartment. Her sweet little Shelby Cobra, which had been such a bargain because it was rebuilt, didn’t have a working dome light. She thumbed the light on and studied the directions John Huggins had given her. She kept her right foot tromped down hard, because her car also didn’t have a functioning parking brake. The timing chain had broken twice since she bought it, and the muffler was about to fall off in a shower of rust flakes, but the Shelby went like she had a 455 rocket, and the heater was a regular blast furnace, a fact she was grateful for on this below-freezing morning.

  Okay, she had gone off the paved road and had already passed two dirt roads to her left. Huggins had warned her that the multiple access roads to the Haudenosaunee land would be confusing. According to her directions, she had another half mile to go, and then a right turn into a dirt road marked with stone pillars should bring her to the main camp.

  Sure enough, in a matter of minutes she was turning past two riverstone obelisks and wending her way even higher into the mountains over a switchback road drifted deep with dead leaves. She was just starting to worry that she had taken a wrong turn despite the directions when the trees crowding in on both sides of the road opened up and her tires crunched onto gravel.

  Her first glimpse of Haudenosaunee surprised her. She was expecting something grand, an Adirondack-themed fantasia with peeled-birch Gothic trim and a rack of antlers over the door. Instead, she faced a simple, two-story log building with a deep-eaved roof and a broad porch that looked more like Wyoming than New York State to her. The house—camp?—fronted a gravel drive almost as wide as it was long. On the far side of the drive, opposite the porch, the trees had been thinned rigorously, leaving a dramatic view of the mountains rolling away to the north. Meant as a summer house, then. One thing Clare had learned in her almost two years in Millers Kill was that no one built a house facing north if he could help it. The view was bracketed by a three-bay garage on one end, also constructed from logs. Its doors, like the house’s door and shutters, were trimmed in Adirondack green.

  Huggins’s black Dodge Ram was parked out front among several other pickups and SUVs. Clare pulled in beside them, a midget in the Land of the Four Wheel Drive.

  The clammy chill of the predawn air seized her as soon as she got out of the car. She ducked back in to get her parka and gloves from the passenger seat and nearly cracked her head when someone called, “Reverend Fergusson?” from the camp house’s shadowy front porch.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she said.

  “Glad you could make it.” He stepped off the porch into the gray light, a compactly built man in a blaze-orange jacket. “Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Duane.” He shook her hand.

  “Sure,” she said. “You’re one of Russ’s—one of Chief Van Alstyne’s part-time officers, aren’t you?”

  His teeth gleamed in the half-light. “Part-time police, part-time rescue, part-time EMT, full-time pain in the neck, my wife tells me. You got something orange or reflective in there?”

  She pulled her Day-Glo green running vest out of the backseat. “I thought this would do.”

  “Good enough. We don’t want you getting shot up by somebody mistaking you for a buck.”

  She shrugged the vest over her parka while following Duane back to the house. “Is that a real problem?”

  He glanced up at the lightening sky. “A beautiful Saturday in November? These woods’ll be full of hunters by daybreak. Which could work to our advantage in finding the missing girl. Provided nobody shoots her or us first, of course.” Duane led her up the porch steps and opened the door. “We’re meeting in here.”

  Clare tried not to goggle as they entered the house. The outside may have been spartan, but the interior was everything she had hoped for. Turkish carpets covered polished floorboards, twig rocking chairs sat before a crackling fire in a massive stone fireplace, and the walls were hung with Hudson School landscapes and animal heads. She expected Teddy Roosevelt to stride into the room and welcome her at any moment.

  Instead, she got John Huggins. “Fergusson! Come on over here. You’d been any later, we would have had to leave without you.”

  Huggins and the five other members of the search and rescue team were clustered around a dining room table whose shining mahogany surface was cluttered with topographical maps and grease pencils.

  Huggins slid a map toward her and continued from where he had apparently left off. “Okay, I want regular check-ins on the radio. We’ve notified the Fish and Game folks; they’ll be telling anyone they come into contact with. If you run across any hunters or hikers, give them the girl’s description and remind them of the emergency signal—two shots into the air. But tell ’em to get close and make sure it’s the girl—otherwise we’ll have excitable fools blasting an alarm every time they spot an old log. We’ll regroup and take a break in about three hours.” He waved a hand at the men. “You may as well get started. I’ll brief Fergusson here.” He turned to her. “You bring a GPS unit?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  He made a noise indicating that this lapse didn’t surprise him. “Duane, give her a unit and a radio. You do know how these things work, right?”

  “The global positioning system enables the carrier of a unit to position him- or herself on an exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinate by receiving and relaying information through the global satellite system,” Chief. Huggins reminded her of an old-school crew chief she had worked with in the Philippines who had always referred to her as “the girl” despite the fact that she outranked him. Clare had spit-and-polished him into a grudging acceptance. She figured the same approach might work for Huggins. She flicked on the unit, glanced at the coordinates, and ran one finger across the topo map. “Here we are.”

  Huggins grunted, but from the corner of her eye she saw Duane grin.

  “Who are we looking for? And what are the parameters? How young is the girl?”

  “Twenty-six.” A rusty voice behind them startled her. She turned to see a thirtyish man detach himself from the deep shadows framing the thick-walled fireplace. Flickering firelight made a crazy quilt of light and darkness out of his face, and as he drew nearer, she saw it wasn’t an effect of chiaroscuro. Fire itself, at some time in the past, had shaped half his face
, leaving behind taut, glazed skin and ropy keloid scars. “It’s my sister. Millie van der Hoeven.”

  Clare blinked, realized she was staring. “Um, hi,” she said. “I’m Clare Fergusson.”

  He took her hand. The left side of his face was perfectly normal, although he was looking haggard and worn at the moment. The scars ran down his neck, disappearing behind the collar of his plaid flannel shirt, and she guessed the rough, creaking tone of his voice was due to damage, not just emotion over his sister going missing. “Eugene van der Hoeven. You’re the priest at the Episcopal church in town, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said, surprised he knew of her. “I haven’t seen you around.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she could have kicked herself.

  “I don’t get into town much.” His head twitched almost imperceptibly to the right. Clare could guess why.

  “Mr. van der Hoeven, can you fill Reverend Fergusson in on what happened?” John Huggins’s usual brassy tone was downright respectful.

  “My sister Millie—Millicent—has been staying with me for the past three months or so. Last night, after dinner, she said she wanted to take a walk. When I got up this morning, she still hadn’t gotten home.”

  “What time did she leave the house?”

  “Around eight.”

  “Didn’t take her cell phone?”

  “It’s still plugged into the recharger in her room.”

  Clare glanced at Huggins. “That’s kind of late to go wandering out into the Adirondack forest, isn’t it?”