reservoir,” he said. “And kept walking until he found a spot where the ice gave way underneath him.”
“Huggins, the rescue guy, warned me not to go onto the ice. He said there would be plenty of rotten spots with the shifts in daytime and nighttime temperatures.”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it. If he went into the water, the hole he went through could have been totally invisible from the shore last night. When you fall in through a weak spot, the ice that was there bobs right back up. It doesn’t fit together like a manhole cover or anything, but unless it was real close to the shore, it would have just looked like a rough patch on the surface.” He licked the chocolate icing off his fingers.
“Are you going to send a dive team down there to look for him?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. There are still too many other possibilities. We don’t have any forensics back on Debba Clow’s car yet, for one thing.”
“Do you seriously consider her a suspect?”
“She’s the only one we’ve got at this point.”
“I just can’t see it. Admittedly, she thinks he’s responsible for her son’s autism. And she was all fired up about her ex’s custody suit, and what Dr. Rouse might say against her…” She let herself trail off. The problem with Debba was, the more you thought about it, the more likely she seemed.
“You keep on thinking that people commit murder because of this reason or that reason.” Russ tore a tissue from the bedside box and wiped his hands. “But most homicides occur for one reason only. Someone becomes stupid angry and strikes out as hard as he can, with whatever he has at hand that will hurt the most.” He crumpled the tissue and pitched it toward a plastic basket beneath the window. “The thought doesn’t go into the killing. It comes, if there’s any thought at all, afterward, when it’s time to cover up the mess. And if you’re going to ask me if I think Deborah Clow could get angry and go nuts, the answer is yes. I do.”
“I have a confession to make.” Clare propped her boots on the wooden arms of the chair so she could rest her elbows on her knees. “I’d almost rather he was murdered than killed himself. Because if he committed suicide, St. Alban’s roof is going to be repaired with blood money.”
“Oh, come off it. Okay, the clinic’s lost a few thousand a year.”
“Ten thousand.”
“Nobody offs himself because of a cut in funding. Except-” His eyes focused inwardly. “No, forget it.”
“What?”
“I was thinking, except in cases where someone’s been cooking the books. But the clinic’s not a business, where there’s a profit to fiddle with or shareholders to scam. The board of aldermen go over the clinic’s budget every year as part of the annual meeting.” He looked at her. “At any rate, it’s not St. Alban’s fault. Maybe it’s not your finest hour, and maybe you’d have liked to keep funding for the clinic as well as save your roof. But you make decisions like this all the time.”
“I do not,” she protested.
“Sure you do. Every time you choose to spend the church’s money and time on one thing, you’re choosing not to spend it on another. You’ve got a group of volunteers working with teenage mothers, helping them get through school, find jobs, baby-sitting, right?” She nodded. He went on, “That means that you’re not helping divorced single moms of older kids with education, child care, and getting back into the workplace.”
“That’s not the same.”
“Sure it is. Your parishioners give money to the church, right? Put it in the basket every Sunday.”
“They make pledges and then pay on them. Sort of like public television.”
“Except you don’t give them
She couldn’t help smiling, even though she knew which way he was going and it still didn’t feel convincing.
“There’s no difference between what they do and what Mrs. Marshall did,” he continued.
“But it feels different.”
“Why?” He crossed his arms over his blanket-covered chest and looked steadily at her.
She opened her mouth to respond only to realize that she hadn’t thought out the answer to that question. She sat up straighter and pulled back her hair, knotting it at the back of her skull. Russ lay there, propped up in the hospital bed, giving her all the time she needed.
“Because,” she finally said, “if it had really been up to me, I would have given the money to the clinic and stuck a tarp over the roof.” She ducked her head. “That doesn’t make me a very good steward of my church, does it?”
“No, you would have been a bad steward of your church if you had actually turned the money down in favor of the tarp. It just makes you someone whose duty conflicts with your own interest. It happens.”
The tone in his voice made her raise her head, and she found him looking at her as if he were touching her face. Their eyes met, and she remembered an afternoon years ago, flying along the coast of Panama, her helo low over the impossibly blue waters, the smell of the sea everywhere and the rush of the sky and feeling as if the whole world were out there for her taking.
Then he dropped his gaze to the doughnut box and smiled. “I bet you always vote for universal health-care coverage, don’t you?”
She tipped her head back and laughed, and that was how Margy Van Alstyne found them.
“Well! Looks like I’m missing the party.” She bustled in, a short, rotund fire-plug of a woman, dropping her car coat on the other bed. “Hello, Clare.” Clare scrambled off the chair and barely got out a greeting before Margy swept to the head of the bed. “Hello, sweetie.” She leaned up on tiptoe and kissed her son. “How are you feeling? Is it a bad break? Is it in the same spot where your old break happened?” She glanced at Clare. “Russ fell into a foxhole and busted his leg back when he was in Vietnam,” she explained.
It had been both legs, and he broke them jumping to escape a helicopter that had been blown out of the sky. Russ gave Clare a warning look. She nodded.
“Breaking a bone at eighteen is a lot different from breaking it when you’re fifty,” Margy went on. She smoothed his hair back from where it had flopped over his forehead.
“I’m not fifty yet, Mom.”
“Close enough as makes no difference. What did they do? What did the doctor say?”
“He put in two pins. I have to be in the cast six weeks.”
Margy Van Alstyne turned to Clare and they shared a moment of total communion over the ability of men to turn the most dramatic, complex subjects into two sentences. Short sentences. With one-syllable words.
“And how did this happen?” Margy asked her.
“Ah.” Clare recalled the script. “Russ and I were taking a walk. In the woods.”
“Really?” Margy turned again and pinned Russ with a skeptical eye. “When I called the station, Harlene told me you had been tramping around a crime scene, looking for someone who disappeared last night.”
“Busted,” Russ said.
“It was in the woods,” Clare said. “We were walking.”
“You see what can happen?” Margy said to her son. “And this was after the fact, not right there, confronting some criminal. Sweetie, you’ve been at this too long. Sooner or later the odds are going to go against you and you’re going to wind up at the wrong end of some maniac’s gun.” Her voice was tight. In all of Russ’s exasperation over his mother’s protectiveness, Clare had never thought what it was like from Margy’s point of view, to be afraid that one day your son would stop a car or enter an apartment and never walk away.
“Mom, it was just a stupid accident. It could have happened anywhere.” Russ had a tone in his voice, half pleading, half jollying. “It’s Allan Rouse who’s gone missing,” he said. “The doctor who runs the free clinic. He was last seen up by Stewart’s Pond. We found his car, but no sign of him.”
Margy’s expression clearly said she wasn’t fooled by this transparent attempt to change the subject. But she went along with it anyway. “What did he do, jump in?”
“We don’t know,” Russ said. “There was a woman with him right before he disappeared. We’re going to be questioning her further.”
Margy’s eyes rounded out. “Why, that old dog,” she said.
“No, Mom, not like that.” He frowned at her. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to repeat a word. It was this woman who’s been picketing the clinic. Deborah Clow.”
“I know her!” Clare and Russ both blinked. “She came to one of our meetings once,” Margy went on. “Wanted us to get behind her crusade to stop vaccinations. Said they caused autism.” She rolled her eyes. “My first reaction was to send her packing outright. I remember when polio was around, when they closed down public pools and
