educational scheduling department. He banged the receiver down and unloaded a piece of army vocabulary on the person who had first replaced an operator with a machine.
He stomped into the dispatch room, hoping Harlene would ask him what was wrong so he could let loose his opinion of people who were never at the damn phone when you needed them. Harlene wasn’t there. He followed her voice into the squad room, a kind of big-city name for a cluster of six desks and a water cooler. Lyle MacAuley and Noble Entwhistle must have just checked in at the end of their shifts, but instead of filling out their incident reports, they were huddled with Harlene over a big red camping cooler.
“Hey, Chief!” Noble said.
“Oh, here he is, you can give it to him now,” Harlene said, elbowing Lyle. Lyle dug into the cooler, emerging with a large package neatly wrapped in butcher’s paper.
“For you, Chief,” he said, grinning. “Steaks and the round. I hit the jackpot with a twelve-point stag the day before season close.”
Twelve-point antlers. Russ tried to suppress his pangs of envy. At least Lyle was being liberal with the venison. God damn, a whole deer season come and gone and he had been too busy working to ever get out and—the day before season close? When Lyle had been scheduled on the duty roster? “Weren’t you sick with the flu for two days before Thanksgiving?” Russ asked. “What did he do, walk into your yard and have a heart attack?”
Lyle smiled more broadly. “I guess that’s the way it happened, Chief.”
Russ looked at Harlene and Noble, both of them grinning their fool heads off. Russ pulled himself up to his full height and tucked the package of venison under his arm. “Then I’m sure it will be good and tender, Lyle, seeing as how he died peaceful-like, of natural causes.”
Their laughter followed him back to his office where he put on his parka and turned out the lights. At the door, he paused, thinking, before wheeling and scooping up the Katie McWhorter file. He returned to the squad room and laid it on Noble Entwhistle’s desk. “Noble, you read the file on our homicide yet?” he asked.
Noble ambled to his desk and flipped open the folder. “Nope,” he said.
“Take a look at it tonight before you go home. Tomorrow, I want you to get a life picture of the victim from her sister and start making the rounds of all the motels and bed-and-breakfasts and whatall. See if you can find someone who remembers a pregnant young woman checking in. We’re especially interested in any man who might have been with her. Get the bus station, too, see if anyone picked her up when she arrived in town Friday.”
The officer ran his finger down the case entry form. “Yup.”
“Thanks. Good night, all.” Noble was the right man for this job. Unimaginative, not the sharpest pencil in the box, but methodical, with an ability to put people at ease and get them to open up. Russ pulled his knit cap firmly over his head before braving the cold. Outdoors, the temperature had fallen still further. Thank God he had the Ford pickup tonight, with its fast-working heater, and not the old whore. He’d stop at his mother’s, give her the venison, and wangle a dinner invitation for later in the week, when Linda was away on her buying trip to the city. Maybe he ought to introduce Mom to Clare. Interesting to see how they’d get along.
It was out of the way to his mother’s, but he drove by the rectory just to make sure everything was all right. The lights were all off. Had he left her his number at home so she could reach him? Yeah, he had. His dashboard clock glowed. Geez, he’d better hurry, or he’d miss another dinner.
Clare folded her hands together and bowed her head. “Lord God,” she said, “for the blessings of food and fellowship we are about to receive, make us truly thankful. Open our hearts so that in the midst of plenty, we are aware of those who hunger, and in the midst of friends, we remember those who are friendless. Give us a hunger to do your will, and an appetite to see your kingdom, here and in the world to come. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
“Amen,” the rest of the room said. The silence was broken by the clatter and ring of utensils and glasses, the scrape of chairs and the sound of eleven voices, all asking to pass this and that at the same time.
The first Monday of the month was the Foyers dinner, an informal gathering of members of the parish, offering a chance to eat and get to know each other outside of the confines of Sunday service or a committee meeting. Tonight’s meal was at the home of Chris Ellis and his wife, Anne Vining-Ellis. Anne was a physician practicing in Glens Falls, and everyone, including her own husband, referred to her as Doctor Anne. The Ellises were practically neighbors of Clare’s, only three blocks away on Washington Avenue. Their huge Victorian house would have been imposing if it weren’t for the obvious wear and tear on the place from their three teenage boys. The formal dining room, where two round tables held tonight’s guests, was decorated with a chandelier, a Boaz Persian carpet, several sets of skis propped up in the corner, and a deep gash in the wall, approximately hockey-helmet high. One of the boys, pressed into service as a waiter for the evening, shambled back and forth from the kitchen to the tables on overlarge feet.
Doctor Anne, sitting on her right, passed Clare a bowl of rice. “I recommend starting with this if you plan on having Phoebe’s green chile stew,” she said. “Hot? I can’t begin to describe it. I think she brings it to these things in order to hear people gasping and crying out for water.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Clare said. “Maybe I should go for that casserole over there instead?”
“Judy Morrison’s tuna hot dish,” Doctor Anne said. “Judy converted from Lutheranism.” She looked meaningfully at the casserole. “After she learned to cook.”
“This is a veritable culinary minefield, isn’t it? Just waiting for a wrong step. Tell me, am I supposed to take at least a taste of everyone’s offering?”
“Only if you want to gain thirty pounds in the next year. I keep trying to get people to bring light dishes to these dinners, but do they listen? Look at Sterling’s Swedish meatballs. I happen to know he uses the fattiest ground chuck he can get and then lards it with several eggs before cooking it in a butter-based sauce. Is it a miracle that man’s not dead of a heart attack? You be the judge.”
Clare laughed. She could feel the tension that had caught in her shoulders dissipating under Doctor Anne’s acidic humor. It had been a difficult day all the way around, first in the morgue and the police station, then helping Kristen at Ruyter’s Funeral Home. Ignoring the ache of old pain while Kristen ricocheted between anger and bewilderment and grief with the speed of someone fast forwarding through cable channels.
It was good to lean back and listen to the stream of culinary critiques and gossip, and have nothing more taxing to look forward to than a walk home and an early bedtime. “The only thing that could make this any better would be a cold beer,” she murmured.
“That’s definitely the missing element, isn’t it? It would certainly help wash down Phoebe’s chili.” Doctor Anne passed Clare a basket of rolls. “Sometimes there will be wine at one of these dinners. No one bothers when Chris and I play host, because I’m such a fanatic about drinking and driving I practically give Breathalyzer tests at the
