Out Of The Deep I Cry

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  And there they were, in the 1928s. Jonathon and Jane Ketchem. Fifty-five riverfront acres: $7,455. Date of possession, October 16, 1928. They hadn’t held on to the bitter end, but they had gotten close. Maybe they had brought in one last crop.

  They didn’t get any more money than anyone else. Yet with it they had bought a house in town, and Jane Ketchem went through the depression without having to work. Admittedly, it was a modest house and a frugal life. But she had still managed to send her daughter to college, start a clinic, and leave an endowment of over one hundred thousand dollars. Could the Ketchem farm have generated so much income that they had had a goodly chunk of change put away? Clare doubted it. All the farmers she knew around here wound up sinking too much into their operations to build up any significant reserve. It might have been easier for the family farmer in the 1920s, but she’d bet it wasn’t that much different from now. And anyway, if they had had money in the bank or the stock market, what happened in 1929 when the market crashed and the banks went bust?

  Her phone began playing the first notes of a Bach fugue. “Hello,” she answered.

  “It’s me.”

  “Hi, you. Let me know if driving with a broken leg and talking get too complicated, okay?”

  “You bet,” he said. “Headed down the highway,” he sang in a passable baritone, “in my mother’s Camry, lookin’ for adventure…”

  “I’ve just realized that if you’re in Margy’s Camry, she must have your pickup. That’s a scary thought.”

  “After the way she lectured me on its wasteful consumption of fossil fuels, I’ll be surprised if she ever gets into it.”

  “Remember those land-sale records I was researching? I found the Ketchems’ farm. Listen to this.” She read him the information off the paper. It had been a large ledger sheet, reduced when the copies were made, and she had to squint at it, even with the desk lamp on. Time to turn on the overhead light. “Now, does that sound to you like enough to buy a new house, send your kid to college, live on for forty years, and endow a trust fund?”

  “Maybe she used S & H green stamps.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I dunno. Her in-laws were pretty well set up. Maybe they supported her. Thinking their son had run out on her and all. Little did they know. Why is this such a big deal with you, anyway?”

  She propped her chin in her hand and stared through her reflection into the gathering night. “It’s this money. It’s in my hands now, and I want to know where it came from. It certainly didn’t make anyone else associated with it very happy, did it? I’m beginning to think it’s like the Hope diamond or something.”

  “Your Mrs. Marshall’s had it for years, and it doesn’t seem to have doomed her to a life of woe. In fact, she seems to have done pretty darn well for herself.”

  “Except that for her whole life she thought her father had walked out on her. And she never gave herself the chance to be a mother. Although, to be fair, she told me that was because of what happened to her siblings. Which is a completely different issue.” A gust of wind splattered the window with a handful of rain. It was dim enough now that the shadows were blurring into the pavement, and the winter-dead grass and the carriage house and the alley pavement beyond were all shades of gray and grayer.

  In the carriage house behind the clinic, a light went on.

  She bolted up in her seat. “Russ,” she said. “There’s somebody in the clinic. In the old garage out back.” She stood to get a better view, realized she would be outlined to anyone emerging into the alley, and snapped off her lamp. The old nursery sprang to life in shadows.

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing yet. A light just came on. There’s a window on the side, just the same as the historical society’s carriage house. I don’t see anyone moving or anything.”

  “The clinic attaches to the carriage house in the back, doesn’t it?” he said. “Could be somebody’s trying to break in, thinks he can rip them off for some prescription drugs. Hang tight, I’m turning the car around.”

  “I don’t see any other lights on at the clinic. What should I do?”

  “You shouldn’t do anything. Stay put. I’m on my way. We’ve had this discussion before, remember? Me cop, you priest.”

  “Holy crow.”

  “What?”

  “The light’s gone off.” She searched for some sign of movement through the rain-streaked window. She had good eyes. Pilot’s eyes. She could see this. “Somebody’s coming out.”

  “Where? The front? The back?”

  “The back. Out of the carriage house.”

  “How many? Male or female?”

  “One. Looks sort of like a man, but it’s hard to tell. Whoever it is, he’s pushing a bike.” She watched the figure pause at the corner of the carriage house. It seemed to be oddly proportioned, bulky, long and flapping, a huge hat tied down around its head.

  “Rouse kept his bike in the carriage house,” Russ said.

  “I think he or she’s a street person. Oh Lord, I hope it’s not someone who comes to our soup kitchen.” Another possibility struck her and she sucked in her breath. “Russ, maybe this is your missing link to Dr. Rouse.”

  “The thought had occurred to me.” His voice was dry.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “He’s walking the bike up the alley.”

  “Which way?”

  “Um, left. Toward Washington Street.” She snatched up her coat and headed toward the hall. “I’m going to follow him.”

  “Clare, no. Stay put.”

  She took the stairs two at a time. “I’m not going to get near him. I’m just going to tail him.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Well you’re not about to get out of the Camry and run him down on foot if he vanishes between some houses, are you?” She snapped the switches on the brass-plated light fixtures. “I’ll tell you where he is and then you get the car in front of him and cut him off.”

  “Clare, this guy could be an addict. That means dangerous, desperate, and unpredictable.”

  Roxanne had left a Post-it note over the alarm. “Trigger here, then 60 seconds,” it read. Clare turned on the alarm. “Too late,” she said. “I’ve just armed the building security. I have to get out in one minute or sirens go off.”

  “Great! Let the sirens go off. I’d prefer it. It’ll trigger a call to the station and we’ll have a squad car there in ten minutes.”

  She shrugged into her coat, buttoned it to the neck, and yanked the door open. The wind almost tore the knob from her hand. “You call the station if you think we need backup.”

  She could hear him chomping off obscenities before they could tinge her delicate ears. She clattered down the steps and crunched over a shell-and-gravel path to the garden gate, set in the middle of a tall iron fence.

  “Listen to you,” he said. “We do not need backup because we are not trained law enforcement officers.”

  The gate groaned open. Clare dashed across the garden, her boot steps squish-squish-slapping against the soggy ground. She tried the door to the carriage house. Locked. The iron fence that divided the historical society from the clinic and alley was bolted into the side of the carriage house. “Crap,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t get out the back of the garden. Unless…” She ran to the other side of the carriage house, where a brick wall bristling with dead ivy took the place of the fence. In the summertime, it must look like an impenetrable barrier, but now-“Yes,” she said. “Hang on, I have to drop you in my pocket.” She flattened herself against the carriage house and squeezed through the claustrophobic gap, the ivy tugging and snapping the back of her raincoat. She could hear Russ’s voice in her pocket, demanding that she talk to him.

  She burst out of the opening and stumbled into the alley. She retrieved the phone from her pocket. “Got out of the garden,” she said. “I’m after him.” The rain splattered over the stone, and she splashe
d through widening puddles that were already runneling down the center of the alley.

  The narrow street emptied out between a Dumpster and a plastic garden shed. She stopped on the sidewalk, looked left, right, and found her target, a dark shape pedaling up Washington Street, bent against the rain that had already plastered her hair against her head and run beneath the collar of her coat. “He’s headed up Washington Street. Toward, um, Elm.”

  “I’ll be there in just a few minutes. Clare, hang back. Getting this guy isn’t worth risking your getting hurt.”

  “I am hanging back. I’ll be fine.” She crossed the road and strode toward the street person, keeping him in sight but not breaking into a run. She kept hard to the edge of the sidewalk, where she could duck into a front walk or driveway in order to avoid being spotted. On a street empty of everything except darkness and the rain, she was going to stick out like a lighthouse. A car sped down the street from the opposite direction, throwing up sheets of water, and for a moment she thought it might be Russ and said, “Is that you? Can you see me?” but it was a Camaro that went past, picking her out in its headlights, almost drenching her. She jumped out of the way, and when she looked up, the figure had stopped on the corner. Watching her.

  “Oh, crap, he’s seen me.”

  “Where are you?”

  Then the shape bent over the handlebars and was gone, almost before she could register the movement. “He’s taken off!” She loped after the vanished form.

  “Where?” Russ’s voice was all patience, cut with strangled worry.

  “He went left at the intersection. Don’t know the street name. Away from where the Rouses and the Burnses live.” It was hard to run clutching the phone to her ear. “I’m gonna drop you in my pocket for a sec.” She did so as she rounded the corner. The clinic intruder was at least a block ahead of her, coat flapping past the rear wheel of the bike, hat jouncing. For a moment, she saw the white blur of a face, seeking her out, and then the bulky form was gone again. Where? She lengthened her stride, her boots pounding against the pavement, her breath rasping in her ears. The rain lashed her face, forcing her to screw up her eyes and look sideways. She splashed across one roadway and skidded to a halt at the second.

  She grabbed her phone. “I think he’s ducked down Fisher Street.”

  “There’s a whole warren of short streets down there. I’m driving toward the riverfront, so I’ll be ahead of you.”

  “ ’Kay.” She dropped the phone in her pocket and jogged down Fisher Street, swinging her head from left to right, praying for that one telltale glimpse out of the corner of her eye. And she got it. Just a flicker of movement, a faint gleam on metal, a rosy wink from the rear reflector.

  She cut across the street, cleared the sidewalk with one leap, and dodged a pair of waterlogged yew bushes to shortcut through someone’s yard. She almost skidded out of control on the soggy remains of last year’s lawn, but stumbled through to the cross street, the intruder’s long coat skirling ahead of her, leading her on.

  She held her phone up like a mike. “He’s going through the cemetery.” She dropped it again and charged ahead, the water splashing up her coat with every stride, so that she was more wet than dry. She ducked through the cemetery’s low brick entrance, dashing rain out of her eyes to keep the fleeing figure in sight. Please don’t let him hide in the mortuary, she thought. The winter dead of Millers Kill had to wait for their burials until April; the long semisubterranean mortuary would be full right now.

  But whoever it was showed no signs of stopping. The pinwheel rain hat bobbed in and out of Clare’s view, pedaling headlong toward the cemetery’s side entrance. She pelted over walkways turned to stony brooks and graves where the spongy earth sagged under her bootfalls. She zigged and zagged past fenced-in family plots and curved stone benches. The figure vanished through a screen of trees. Sprinting to catch up, Clare dodged a Civil War-era oak and found herself one footfall away from James and Nancy McKeller, husband and wife. She hurdled their stone with a wild launch into the air and came down hard, stumbled, recovered, and dashed through the side entrance.

  A muffled voice was coming from her pocket. It took two tries to grab the phone, her wet fingers slipping over its plastic case. “Where are you?” Russ was asking.

  She glanced up at the dripping street sign. “Second Avenue.” A grandiose name for a single block of one-and-a-half-story houses. She jogged down the sidewalk, the phone pressed against her ear. “Where are you?”

  “On Lower First Avenue. I figure he’s headed for the old chandleries.”

  “The what?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Is he still in sight?”

  She glanced between the houses as she jogged past. “No. I think he went to the end of the street, but I don’t know which way he turned.”

  “He couldn’t have gone to the right.” She reached the end of Second Avenue and saw what Russ meant. The street petered out into a marshy tangle of elephant grass and cattails. “All these streets dump into First Avenue, and that’s-”

  She swiveled and ran to the left. One house, two houses, three, and there she was, at the intersection with Upper First Avenue and Lower First Avenue. She heard a shout, muffled and distant from down the street, echoed over the phone.

  She pounded down Lower First, a street as much a mausoleum as that in the cemetery. Low, shuttered buildings with spray-painted doors and rusting hulks of unidentifiable origin in their yards. A two-story inn untouched so long that its paint had peeled totally away, leaving it raw, gray, and warping. A series of store-fronts, roofs rotting, porches leaning, windows boarded with plywood turned silver with age. And there, crutching toward the last building in the row, Russ.

  His mother’s car, windows steamed, lights off, was parked at the street’s terminal point, where the pavement ended and a tumble of boulders sloped down into the Millers Kill. It looked as if a pair of lovers had driven down to enjoy some privacy and a view of the fast-moving, snow-charged river. The bike was overturned in the middle of the street, its rear wheel still spinning.

  “What happened?” She skidded to a halt in front of him, sucking breath to speak.

  He balanced between his crutches, one hand awkwardly pinching his gun to the palm rest. “I was talking to you on the phone and I saw the guy.” Rain was rolling down his hair, dripping off the ends. “I opened the car door and swung my gun out and ordered him to stop. He dumped the bike and ran in there.” He pointed to the decrepit wooden building squared between the street and the river. Rotting stumps of pilings ran along its waterfront side. “Here, take this,” he went on, handing her his gun. She took it stock down and automatically checked the cartridge and the safety.

  “I’m not going to use this on anyone.” She wiped her forehead in a useless attempt to keep the rain out of her eyes.

  “I’m not planning on using it on anyone, either. It’s too damn hard to move while holding on to it, and if I stick it back into my belt holster it’ll take me too long to get it out. Goddamn broken leg. Pardon my French.”

  He crutched toward the door. “Stay behind me, and when I say gun, put it in my right hand.”

  She fell in behind him. “You’re not ordering me to stay in the car?”

  “Would you listen if I did?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then. May as well take advantage of you.”

  There was no porch fronting the building, only two granite steps leading up to a gaping doorway. Clare looked up to the second story, where shattered windows stared endlessly into the past. “What is this place?” She pitched her voice low.

  “It was a chandlery about a hundred and eighty years ago. A ship’s provisioner. This is the oldest part of the town, from back in the seventeen hundreds when everything moved in and out by boat.” She heard his crutch tips thunk wetly on wood, and then she stepped through the doorway, careful to stay at his back.

  “Good God.” She had to fight not to gag. The dark empty space reeked of urine and hum
an waste.

  “I know.” He shifted forward into the darkness, thump-step, thump-step. The wooden planks beneath them were uneven, swollen with age and soaking up things Clare didn’t want to imagine. “This is one of the hidey-holes for the hard-core homeless in the area. Every six months or so, we come in here, roust everybody out, and cart them off to shelters or the hospital. It’s useless, of course. There aren’t enough beds in the addiction unit or the mental-health facility for people asking for help, let alone for these guys, who don’t want anything to do with it. We only round ’em up because the aldermen are scared someone’s going to wreck himself up here and sue the town.”

  There was a creak ahead of them and Russ froze. Clare stood still behind him, letting the rain drip off her. “C’mon,” he said.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anyone here now,” she whispered.

  “We were down here in early March. There’d been a fight, and one guy cut another one up real bad. We had the ambulance, a fire truck, the works. Usually they stay away awhile after something like that. They don’t want to get caught if we show up again.”

  “What happened to the man?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one who was hurt.”

  “He got patched up in the ER and then hung around town for a while. He had some sort of chronic illness. TB? He hung around the clinic for a while, getting treatment. Yeah, it must have been TB. Of course, as soon as he was well enough, he vanished.”

  They came to an open doorway. The waterfront wall to their right was pierced with glassless windows, but the rain and the hour seemed to slow the gray light, so that it sluggarded across the floor and died before it reached the middle of the room.

  “I’m going to go through that door and back up against the wall on the right-hand side.” He pitched his voice just above a whisper. “I want you to point the gun in front of you right after I’m out of the way, then step in beside me. Got it?”