resigned pain she saw there. Together, they held Karen tightly as her body heaved with the effort to expel tears and venom. “I could kill you, you bastard!” she shouted after the vanished man. She laid her head against her husband, weeping with rage. “I could kill him,” she whispered. “I could kill him.”
A mid-week drive up to Cossayaharie usually relaxed Russ. Although Millers Kill policed the rural township, he seldom patrolled the mountain roads and tiny village himself. So his associations with the area were mostly good ones: visits to his sister’s farm, fishing up at the lake, hiking into the hills, or picnicking in the Muster Field, where militiamen had gathered during the French and Indian War and the Revolution after that. Returning from Cossayaharie you could drive through almost every war the men from this area had taken part in. There were the crumbling granite stones in the Muster Field, and then a big marble obelisk at the front of the old Cossayaharie cemetery, a memorial for two brothers who had drowned in the War of 1812. Before you reached Millers Kill, you passed by its cemetery, guarded by a droopy-mustached Union soldier holding a rifle and forever looking South to where his fallen brothers lay. Then over the bridge, stone cairns carrying brass plaques dedicating it to the sacred memory of those who fell in the Great War, and on into town, where a four-sided plinth listed the names of those who had served in each branch of the armed forces during World War Two. If you finished your journey at the post office, you could run your fingers over the bronze plaque memorializing men who had died on the Korean peninsula while he had been in diapers.
There was nothing marking his war. He didn’t know how he felt about that, and he didn’t want to think about it long enough to make up his mind one way or the other. There had been what his mother described as one almighty patriotic hot flash over Desert Storm, and since then, there had been talk on and off of putting up something for the rest of the veterans. He stayed away from it. He didn’t want to become one of those big-bellied guys down at the American Legion, droning on about their war adventures as if they had forgotten what it was really like. Probably file clerks and car-pool mechanics, anyway. The ones who knew what it was really like hardly ever talked about it, not in the Legion Hall bar and not in front of some committee to erect a monument.
He passed the obelisk to the brothers who had died in the waters of Lake Erie and took the next right turn. A dense stand of spruce and hemlock crowded in on either side of the road. As it wound its way into the hills, the evergreens petered out and the scenery opened up onto sprawling, uneven grazing fields bordered by bare- branched hardwoods. The road dipped and twisted, past sheltered hayfields, farmhouses, and an occasional trailer. For a mile or so, a stony creek ran alongside the road, black water barely visible under the heavy banks of snow. He drove past sleeping orchards of dwarf apple trees, modern feed silos, and century-old barns. At Jock Montgomery’s place, he saw two of the kids making a snowman in the front yard, and he slowed down, tooted, and waved.
The Stoner’s farm was a mile past the Montgomerys’. He crunched into the drive, parking next to Mindy’s Chevelle. He was relieved to see Ethan’s old pickup by the road leading up the hill toward the cow barn.
Mindy Stoner came out on the porch, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Russ,” she said. “What brings you up this way?” She was a tall, raw-boned woman, whose square, strong features had looked almost homely back when she was a schoolgirl. Time had refined her so that now, in her forties, she had the spare beauty of a mountaintop blown clean of snow.
He held up the folded paper. “I’m afraid I’m here on business, Mindy. Can I come in?”
She looked back toward the kitchen, then opened the door. “You might as well. No need to freeze out here in the door-yard.” Russ scraped the slush off his boots and followed her through the mudroom into the kitchen, a large room of wooden cupboards, blue-and-white dish towel fabrics, and children’s papers and artwork tacked up everywhere. The woodstove between the mudroom and the pantry was throwing off heat, and the overhead lamp had been lit in preparation for the four o’clock twilight. Their thirteen-year-old—her name escaped him for the moment—was sitting at the round, oilcloth-covered table, doing homework. “Hannah,” Mindy said, “run up to the barn and tell your father Chief Van Alstyne’s here and needs to speak with him.”
The girl gaped, her too-large eyes widening with a mix of excitement and apprehension. “Is Daddy in trouble?”
Russ shook his head. “No. But I am going to have to speak with Ethan, too.”
“He’s out in the barn with Wayne, hooking up for the milking. Hannah, fetch ’em both in.”
At the mention of her brother’s name, the girl had relaxed. “Oh, Ethan,” she said, heading for the mudroom. “That figures.”
Her mother sighed. “What’s he gone and done now, Russ?”
He laid the papers on the kitchen table. “Have you heard about the girl found murdered by the kill last week?”
“Of course. It was on the news. Unidentified body fished out of the kill, that’s not something you see everyday around here.” Mindy’s eyes widened as she listened to herself. She clapped her hands over her stomach. “God in heaven, don’t tell me you think my boy had something to do with that!”
“Calm down, Mindy, I’m not here to arrest him for murder. This is a warrant for a blood test. The murdered girl had a baby about a week before she was killed, and I have reason to suspect that Ethan may be the father.”
Mindy sank into a ladderback chair. “Dear Lord,” she said. “Dear Lord.” She looked up at him. “Who . . . ?”
“It was Katie McWhorter.”
Mindy pressed her hands more tightly to her stomach. “Oh. No. Oh, no. That sweet girl.” She shook her head back and forth. “That sweet girl . . .” She covered her eyes with one hand, screening any tears from his view. Russ’s hands twitched, caught between maintaining some sort of professional detachment and reaching out to comfort this woman he had known since his high school days.
She slapped her hand on the oilcloth suddenly, startling Russ into stepping back. “As far as I knew, Ethan broke up with Katie last year. If he was sneaking around without us knowing, and got her pregnant, we’ll have the truth out. And he’ll take responsibility for it.” She rose slowly from her chair, glaring at Russ. “But you listen to me, Russ Van Alstyne. My boy didn’t have anything to do with killing anybody, least of all Katie McWhorter.”
“What’s going on?” Wayne Stoner stood in the mudroom door, prying off his boots with the jack. “Russ?” Wayne had the round reddened cheeks and the ice-pale blue eyes that marked so many people of Dutch descent in the county. He reached out and shook Russ’s hand firmly before he crossed to his wife’s side. “What’s that boy gotten into now?”
“Russ wants to take Ethan for a blood test,” Mindy said. “Seems Katie McWhorter had a baby a few weeks back and Ethan might be responsible.”
“Aw, Christ,” Wayne said, pulling off his hat and slapping it onto the table. “What a damn fool thing to do. Jesus, you can practically buy condoms at the feed store nowadays!”
Hannah had slipped in and was watching round-eyed from beside the woodstove. “Did Ethan get some girl
