broken leg. He’s in 403.”
“Thank you.” Clare settled the box beneath her arm and made her way down the hall. The door to room 403 was closed. She knocked.
“Come in,” Russ yelled.
She sidled through the door. He was alone in the two-bed room, propped up at an angle, his injured leg slung between a pair of struts assembled at the end of the bed. His cast ran from the ball of his foot to below his knee, and was highway-department orange. It reminded Clare of one of the Tonka cranes her brothers had played with back when they were kids. He was talking on the bedside phone.
“I’m sorry, go on.” He beckoned Clare into the room. “No. No, it’s not my mom.” He glanced at Clare, and his eyes fell on the box she was holding. “It’s just someone dropping off some food,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“How much extra?” he asked. He held out his hand for the doughnuts. “Six hundred bucks? For a one-way flight? That’s ridiculous! I thought it was like a fifty-dollar fee to change your departure date.”
Clare handed him the box, which he dropped in his lap. He flashed her a distracted smile, then frowned.
“Why do you have to buy a whole new ticket? That’s three times what you paid to get down there.”
Clare glanced around and spotted a boxy little chair of blond wood and fake leather in the corner. It looked as if it had been designed to discourage long bedside chats. She pulled it away from the wall.
“See, that’s why I hate the idea of those Internet specials. If you’d have paid a little more to start out with, you’d have more flexibility now.”
Clare paused before sitting down. Maybe getting a soda would be a good idea at this point. The newspaper. A magazine.
“Maybe you shouldn’t.” She glanced over toward Russ, but his face was turned toward the room’s other, empty bed. “I mean, you just got down there yesterday. You only get to see your sister once a year. I don’t want to ruin it for you.” Clare watched as he twisted the phone cord back and forth in one hand. “I could ask Mom to come stay with me until you get home.” He tilted his head back and squinted at the ceiling tiles. “I don’t know. I might be able to drive one of the squad cars. They’re automatic. There’s nothing wrong with my right foot.” He glanced over at Clare, then looked away. “I know you do. And I want you home, too. I’m just thinking six hundred dollars is a lot to pay for the privilege of playing my nursemaid.” He flicked at the hospital-issue blanket covering him from knees to stomach, brushed it as if something unclean were stuck to it. He smiled a little and pushed a laugh out. “Not until my leg’s healed up some more, we’re not.”
Enough eavesdropping. Way more than enough. Clare pasted a social smile on her face and waved bye-bye. Russ shook his head sharply. “All right, honey, if you feel that strongly about it, sure. Yep, you’re right, it’s not like we don’t have the money. But don’t try to get a flight tonight. I’m going to be here at least till tomorrow afternoon.” There was a long pause. “Do you think you can get your friend Meg to do it? Okay, that’ll be fine.” Clare took one step, then another, toward the door. Russ held up one hand. “Honey? I think I need to get off now. Yeah, there’s someone waiting for me.” His eyes cut away from Clare. “Yes. I will.” There was a final pause. “I love you, too. Bye.” He twisted away from Clare and hung up the phone.
“Linda,” he said.
“I gathered.”
He looked down at the box of doughnuts as if he had forgotten putting them on his lap. “Thanks.”
“I figured you’d like them more than flowers.”
He smiled to himself, still not looking at her. She wondered how much he remembered about his behavior while he was pumped full of painkillers and whether she ought to mention anything. Set his mind at ease.
He popped open the top and took out a French cruller. “You want one?”
She got just close enough to take a peanut-covered doughnut while still maintaining the maximum degree of personal space. Okay, she thought, now I’ll tell him he was stoned and being silly and it gave me a good laugh on the way to the historical society. And I’ll ask him all about how Linda’s doing and how soon she’s getting home. She opened her mouth, but what came out was, “Did you know that the Ketchem graveyard was part of a property that was flooded when the Sacandaga was dammed?”
He stopped, a bite of cruller half in, half out of his mouth. His expression spoke even though he couldn’t: a polite
“Jane Ketchem and her husband lived there. The couple that lost the children. She’s the one who went on to found the free clinic. It was named after her late husband. He disappeared in 1930. Mrs. Marshall, who’s on our vestry, is her daughter.” She knew she was babbling, but once she got going, she couldn’t seem to stop it. “She thinks her father took off for a new life, but I’ve been thinking, and I think he killed himself. He drove off one night two days after the dam was finished. I think he went back to their old farm and drowned himself.”
Russ swallowed his cruller. “Great. As soon as I get out of here and back to the station, I’ll close the case.”
“There’s a case?” Her info dump had been as much protective camouflage as a genuine desire to share what she had found out, but his remark caught her. “What sort of case?”
He tore another piece of the cruller off. “You may be surprised to know that you’re not the first person to look into Jonathon Ketchem’s disappearance. The department spent a lot of time trying to track him down back when he disappeared. They couldn’t find him, but the chief at the time refused to close the case. It’s been handed down through the generations.” He popped the bite into his mouth and chewed with relish. “It’s probably our oldest cold case. I wouldn’t have been aware of it, but I saw the name when I was going through the files when I first came on board. I had had a”-he paused, as if choosing the right word-“very weird run-in with Mrs. Ketchem back when I was a kid. I saw the name and was curious.”
She dragged the chair next to his bed. “What sort of run-in?”
“She tried to drown herself in Stewart’s Pond. I was fishing that day, and spotted her. I jumped in and pulled her out.”
She sat in the chair, but found she was irritatingly low, like a prisoner in the docket. She stepped onto the seat and perched on the back of the chair. “That place, that reservoir-it’s a bad place.”
He laughed. “Oh, come off it. It’s just a graveyard. I may not be all up on my Christian theology, but I’m pretty sure being afraid of the dead goes counter to some of the basic tenets.”
“Not like that. I mean…” She broke her doughnut apart, trying to put into words how she had felt at the historical society. The sensation of cold water in the middle of old books and three-ring binders. “There’s a specific gravity to the place. The drowned farm and the dead children. It’s dragging people down.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Well, now we know why I broke my leg.”
“Think about it. Ketchem disappears, his wife tries to kill herself there, and now Dr. Rouse has disappeared.” She cat-cradled her fingers. “And they’re all connected to one another.”
“Three bad things happening over a spread of what-seventy years?-does not a bad place make.” He finished off his cruller and flipped the box open again, considering his choices. “You forget what a small town this is. Between Millers Kill, and Fort Henry, and Cossayuharie, we have maybe ten or eleven thousand people. Three quarters of us are related if you go back far enough. Of course there are going to be connections.” He eased a chocolate-frosted doughnut out without breaking its glossy surface.
She took a different tack. “Why was Jonathon Ketchem’s case never closed?”
“Because there’s no statute of limitation on murder.”
“Was that what they thought had happened? Back in 1930?”
“It was one theory. I guess the chief at the time didn’t want to close out any possibilities.”
“Like you, with Dr. Rouse’s disappearance.”
“Like me,” he agreed. He bit into his doughnut.
She stuffed part of her peanut doughnut into her mouth and thought while she chewed. Have you considered,” she said, after she had swallowed, “that Allan Rouse might have committed suicide? His wife told me he was acting erratically recently-sometimes manic, sometimes depressed. He’s had this protest thing with Debba Clow going on. Then Mrs. Marshall and I came along and told him the clinic was losing the funding from Mrs. Ketchem’s trust.” She felt an acid twinge in her stomach at that one, but went on. “So he takes Debba Clow to the grave site, tries to convince her one last time how important vaccinations are. She doesn’t listen, he falls and cracks open his head, then he gets into his car and drives into a tree-maybe it was all too much for him at the moment.”
Russ swallowed another piece of his doughnut. “So he walked back to the grave site and down to the
