Shattham standing by while her boyfriend gets . . . serviced. She strikes me more as the kind of girl to keep him on as tight a leash as possible.”
“Yeah, I know that type. Gets her kicks from making some poor slob jump through hoops for the promise of some—” Clare was looking at him with undisguised interest. He felt the tips of his ears redden. “Never mind. I agree, it’s more likely Alyson didn’t know that Katie was sleeping with Wes.”
“But then, at some point, it’s more than just sleeping with her. He gets her pregnant. Could he have come running to Alyson then?”
“What for?”
“Help. Advice. Forgiveness. Knowing a little bit about the psychology of teenage boys, I’m willing to bet a non- pregnant girlfriend suddenly looked a lot more appealing to him.”
“She looked genuinely surprised to me that morning at your church. Of course, I’ve been fooled before.” He watched Clare twist a strand of hair around her finger and chew her lip. “Okay. Let’s say he did tell her. What do the king and queen of the prom do when he’s gotten another girl knocked up?”
“They make the problem disappear?”
“Let’s say Wesley persuades Katie to give away the baby.”
“That could explain Alyson’s visit to Albany. Maybe she was the go-between, trying to talk Katie into it.”
“But a few days after leaving the baby at your back door, Katie gets back in touch with Wesley. She says she can’t stand it, she wants the baby back.”
“I don’t think Wes Fowler would have been too keen to have it come out that he got a girl from Depot Street pregnant and then abandoned the baby outside St. Alban’s on a freezing winter’s night. The West Point commandant and the ethics commission take a dim view of that sort of thing.”
Russ snorted.
“And there had already been a story in the paper, remember? The day after we found the baby? There wouldn’t have been much chance of him keeping it quiet if Katie tried to reclaim Cody.”
“So one of them—Wesley or Alyson—decides to stop Katie before she can tell anyone she’s the baby’s mom. One of them gets her out by the kill and cracks her head open and leaves her there to die.”
She swished her feet through the water.
“But then another problem rears its ugly head,” he said. “Darrell, who evidently once saw Katie and Wes together.”
“He must have seen the Fowlers’ family picture on our parish bulletin board Wednesday morning when he met with me and the Burnses. That would explain why he broke off the discussion so quickly, if he had a name to put with a face, finally.” She shook her head, silent for a moment.
“If he did, it’s not your fault, Clare.” She glanced up at him. “You’ve got your responsible look on,” he explained. She gave him a half smile. “We know he called somebody. Maybe he was putting the squeeze on Wesley, and the kid high-tailed it back to town and put a bullet through Darrell’s slimy little brain.”
“Or Alyson did.”
He looked at her, nonplused. She spread her hands. “You think she couldn’t? Maybe she’s the shooter while Wes went to the house in Albany to collect any incriminating evidence.”
“The guy who said he was Katie’s father? The roommate described him as older, with a mustache.”
“According to Dr. Anne’s boy, Wes Fowler was in the Millers Kill High School Drama Society. He appeared in several plays and in the yearly musical. A little left-over gray tint in his hair, a fake moustache . . . it might been enough to fool a couple of freshmen who had had a few too many beers.”
Russ slid out of his chair and squatted on the floor in front of her. “Let’s have a foot.” She lifted one, dripping, out of the water and let him squeeze it. “Need to heat it up a bit,” he said. He held a hand against the copper teakettle, checking to make sure it was still warm before pouring a stream of warm water into the tub.
She made a noise in the back of her throat, flexing her toes. “If he did kill Darrell and clean out Katie’s room, he must have thought at that point he had covered all the bases. There wasn’t anything to link him to Katie except Cody himself, and who would think to ask for Wes Fowler’s DNA to test for paternity of poor Katie McWhorter’s abandoned child?”
“Nobody, until the Reverend Fergusson got her hands on a photo of the two of them together and immediately rushed over to confront his proud parents with evidence that one plus one makes three.” He turned to the fireplace and tossed another log in. “Holy Christ, Clare. You really could have died up on that mountain. You were supposed to have died.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Would he have had time to get from West Point to here and set up that ambush for me?”
He stood slowly, turning around, scanning the dark corners of the room without meaning to. “I don’t see why not. It’s a three-hour drive at most, another hour to get himself parked somewhere safe on a camp road on Tenant Mountain. It’s not as if he needed to come up with an elaborate way to trap you. All he needed was a good way to get you up to that mountain and someone pretending to be Kristen McWhorter.”
“Which brings us back to Alyson.”
“She knew you were helping Kristen, didn’t she?”
Clare nodded.
“And she must have known you’re the sort to charge off to help first, without asking questions until later.”
She cocked her head at him. “You make me sound like the Lone Ranger.”
“Doesn’t make it untrue. The fact that you’re impulsive is not a deeply hidden character trait.”
“I prefer to think of it as making decisions quickly.”
