decedent.”
Harry snorted a laugh.
“How about this,” Niels said. “You let me use those records detailing all the steps you’ve taken to find him. You don’t need to draw any conclusions. We’ll let the court do that. The fact that you haven’t closed the case after seven years and there’s still no sign of him may work in our favor.”
“And then what happens?”
“And then Mrs. Ketchem gets to become a widow. We can give her her life back.”
Harry thought about the woman he had first seen on the marble steps of the police station. Over the years they had met, at first frequently, then at longer and longer intervals, and each time, Harry felt the weight of letting her down, of failing to live up to his first ignorant promise to bring her husband back to her.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone can give Jane Ketchem her life back.”
Chapter 23
Monday, March 20
Clare was debating whether to grab some lunch from the hospital cafeteria or make the trek to the Kreemy Kakes diner, grateful it was her day off and she didn’t have any appointments eating up her time, when it suddenly struck her that she had promised to volunteer Monday at the historical society after missing last Saturday. Her first thought was to call Roxanne and beg off again. She’d understand that waiting for a friend to get out of surgery took precedence over sorting out one-hundred-year-old advertising circulars. Except she heard Roxanne’s voice, when she had shown Clare the boxes and boxes of uncataloged donations.
Then, of course, her conscience took her by the chin and forced her to look at whether she would hang around the hospital for hours waiting for anyone else to get out of surgery. She had sat with family members before, anticipating good or bad news, but never just for herself. And she had to admit a broken leg wasn’t in the same league as a triple bypass or a bone-marrow transplant. If Mr. Hadley, for instance, ever took one of those tumbles off a ladder she feared would happen eventually, she knew she would go to the historical society, and simply call in periodically to find out how he was.
Which is how she found herself driving the chief of police’s pickup through town. She prayed no one would take a good look at who was behind the wheel, and she parked in the first spot she could find on the street, envious, with the part of her brain that wasn’t worried about her reputation, at the ease with which the truck crunched over the snow and ice to muscle its way into the parking space.
She trotted up the sidewalk, too late not to make an effort but also too late to think an outright dash from door to door would make any difference. She looked at the clinic as she went by, noting the legend THE JONATHON KETCHEM CLINIC carved in the granite door lintel. The sign bolted next to the door, the way everyone in town referred to it as the free clinic-it was as if Jonathon Ketchem were disappearing in his memorial, just as he had disappeared in life. Even though the sign indicated it was open, the clinic somehow looked abandoned, bereft without the man who had been its driving force for the past three decades. Clare thought about dropping in to find out how Laura Rayfield was doing manning the ship all alone, but her guilty conscience spurred her on to the historical society.
Another volunteer let her in, let her know that Roxanne wasn’t working today, and then sank back into a chair by the door with an open book. As she climbed the stairs, Clare could hear the voice of a docent leading a tour through the public rooms and the soft thud of a researcher taking down one of the massive tax-enrollment books in the second-floor library. She reached the third floor and went into the former nursery, closing the door behind her to discourage any of the other volunteers from drifting in and chatting. She switched on the lights, dumped her coat and scarf in the extra chair, and turned on the computer, all with a weird sense of disconnection from her surroundings-a few hours ago she had been listening to Russ grinding his teeth against the pain as she hobbled him up the trail, freezing, sweating, and here she was now, in a clean, well-lit room, surrounded by white boxes and history.
She logged on to the catalog and scrolled down to her entries from last Saturday. She had been going through the records of the long-defunct Fonda-Johnston-Gloversville Railroad, whose primary claim to fame seemed to be hauling passengers to the Sacandaga Amusement Park, which had apparently closed down about 1930. She reached into the acid-free storage box and pulled out another set of folders stuffed with ads, timetables, newspaper clippings, and photographs.
She grouped a small stack of ads together-one of them, which promised “a gay holiday,” made her smile-and entered them as one item. The clippings, brown and brittle as dead leaves, had to be layered between sheets of archival tissue paper. Most of them were so dull-notices of stockholder meetings, appointments to the board-Clare found it hard to believe anyone, before or after her, would read them, but then she saw a lengthy story that made her stop. DAM PROJECT APPROVED: MAN-MADE RESERVOIR TO BE STATE’S LARGEST. She skimmed over it to see what it had to do with the railroad. The Conklingville Dam to be built… flooding the Sacandaga River valley… preventing flooding of Hudson downstream… over forty square miles to be submerged… ha, here it was, “including large sections of the F,J &G line.” So that was why they folded. There was a map, too, taking up two columns’ worth of space between the story and a Sears Roebuck ad, and after comparing it to the landmarks in her head, she realized that the reservoir in the story was the Great Sacandaga Lake. Huh. She hadn’t known it was a man-made lake. She examined the tiny dot-towns on the map and had another realization. Stewart’s Pond had also been created by the flooding of the Sacandaga.
She wasn’t aware she had been hunched over the table until she tipped back into her chair. She had known it was a reservoir. Someone had described it that way to her. But she had assumed, somehow, that the Ketchem graves were there because of a connection to the man-made lake. Maybe a summer camp there, or a sentimental attachment to the spot. But those children had been buried five years before there was a reservoir. What had it been then? A shady spot beneath the trees growing at the edge of a farm? Jonathon and Jane Ketchem’s farm?
She folded the clipping in a sheet of tissue paper and left the nursery. Down one flight of stairs, she found the library, two rooms that had once been bedrooms, fitted out with oddments of shelving: everything from utilitarian gunship gray steel to glass-encased mahogany. A gaunt man whose brown sweater looked as if it had fit him thirty pounds ago was bending over one of the reading tables.
“Excuse me.” Clare glanced at the stack of leather-bound books at his side. “Are you the librarian?”
“Yes,” he said. He stood up, like a heron righting itself. He inspected her over his reading glasses. “You’re not one of our regulars.”
“I’m Clare Fergusson,” she said. “I’m a new volunteer. Logging in the collections upstairs.” He continued to stare at her, as if he couldn’t imagine what she might want with him. She got the impression that the historical society’s library was underutilized. “I ran across this newspaper article”-she unfolded the tissue paper and laid it on the table-“and I was wondering if you knew anything about it.”
He bent over again to study the clipping. “Yes, of course,” he said. He sat up. She waited for something else, an explanation, but he continued to look at her.
Okay, then. He evidently didn’t feel compelled to share information like most reference librarians. She was good at asking questions. “From the look of that map”-she pointed to the clipping-“several towns were flooded. What happened to them? To the farms?”
“The Hudson River Regulating Board bought out the landholders in the late twenties and either tore or burned everything down. Houses, towns… chopped down all the trees, too.” He glanced around the room. “We’ve got a nice collection of original photographs… Where is that archive?”
“Where did the owners go?”
“Most of the residents who were displaced relocated nearby.”
“Like to Millers Kill.”
