“Third, fourth week in April, usually.”
“You think there’s patches of open water up there yet?”
“Sure. That’s why everybody goes to Florida in March, you know. Because there’s not enough ice for ice fishing, and there’s not enough water for a boat.”
“Let’s get in touch with the staties’ dive team, see if they’re open for business yet.”
Lyle glanced over at him. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that we’re clutching at straws, with all this running around to pharmacies and trying to shoehorn his wife into the facts. I’m thinking it may be time to send someone down there, into Stewart’s Pond. Because we need to find Rouse’s body before all the evidence washes away.”
Chapter 30
Thursday, March 30
They had said the prayers together, and she had read Lauraine Johnson the Gospel and heard her confession. Now Clare spread the small linen square over the elderly woman’s rolling bedside tray and arranged the round silver container and stoppered silver bottle on top. She unscrewed the pyx and removed the wafer, holding it up to Mrs. Johnson with both hands. “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” On one of their first meetings, Mrs. Johnson had told her, a little embarrassed, that she was most comfortable with the old language from the 1928 prayer book. And why not? She had been in her sixties when the new prayer book became official. She tried to cup her hands to receive the host, but her body betrayed her, as it usually did these days, and she couldn’t get them high enough.
“Let me.” Clare leaned forward and placed the wafer on her tongue. “Take and eat this,” she said, “in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.”
She said the offertory for the consecrated wine and held the bottle to Mrs. Johnson’s lips. The old woman sank back onto her pillow, her eyes closed, while Clare folded the pyx and bottle into clean linen and replaced them in their small leather carrying case.
She laid a hand on Mrs. Johnson’s forehead, pushing a weightless strand of silver hair back into place. “I don’t think I need to tell you to go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”
Mrs. Johnson smiled, but did not open her eyes. “I’m going to do that soon enough, whether you tell me to or not.”
“I need to do a shorter bedside service for you. This tires you all out. Last week your nurse chewed me out.”
Mrs. Johnson looked at her. Her eyes were pale, as if too many days living had washed all their color away. “No. I love your visits.” She lolled her head to one side. “You know what pleases me?” Clare shook her head. “That the last priest to tend to me on this earth is a woman.” She let her eyes drift closed, and she smiled. “For most of my life, women couldn’t serve on the vestry. Couldn’t be in holy orders, couldn’t sit in convention and vote with the men. I was in Philadelphia, you know, when the first eleven defied the bishops to be ordained. I was fifty-six years old.” She opened her eyes again. “How old were you?”
“In 1974?” Clare smiled. “Nine.”
“You’re just a child yet.” She managed to move her hand so that it fell on Clare’s arm. Clare hadn’t taken her alb off yet, and they both looked at the contrast between the ancient, ropy-veined hand and the fine white cloth. “I knew this,” Mrs. Johnson breathed. Her eyes closed. “I knew we were good for more than ironing the altar cloths and holding bake sales.”
When Clare slipped out of the room a few minutes later, the old woman was asleep. She had pulled her alb off and rolled it into a ball. It would mean wrinkles later, but she couldn’t go flapping through the hospital corridors looking like a dean in a cathedral close. She didn’t need to wear the long white gown when delivering the Eucharist, but the more things looked like a regular service, the more Mrs. Johnson liked it. The dying woman had precious few pleasures left in life. If it had been within Clare’s power, she would have lined the walls with cut stone and set up a stained-glass window.
She stopped at the nurses’ station. It was quiet in the early afternoon. Only the charge nurse, furiously typing her records into the computer, and a doctor buried in a file. “She’s asleep,” Clare told the charge nurse.
“Good,” the nurse said. She looked up at Clare, her fingers still keystroking, as if they were more a part of the machine than of her body. “She needs to rest up for visiting hour tonight.”
“I’ll see you next week,” Clare said. “Please call me if she wants me for anything.”
The doctor straightened. “I thought I recognized your voice.” He stepped forward. It took her a moment to place him; nondescript brown hair, a pleasant face, and the ubiquitous white jacket went a long way toward making him anonymous.
Then she remembered. “Dr. Stillman.” She shifted her bundle under her arm and shook his hand. “How are you? What are you doing up here?”
“One of my older patients had a bad fall,” he said. “Broke her hip.” He gestured toward Clare’s clericals. “Look at you. You can sure tell you’re a minister now. You were a lot more casual when you brought your friend in. How’s he doing?”
“I haven’t seen him since then,” she said. “He’s been keeping pretty busy investigating Dr. Rouse’s disappearance.”
Dr. Stillman shook his head. “Bad business. You just don’t expect something like that to happen in this area. Especially to a man as well respected as Allan Rouse. Lord only knows how they’re going to staff the clinic with him gone.”
“Not to sound like a Monty Python sketch, but he’s not dead yet.”
Dr. Stillman looked at her. “When people go missing in the Adirondacks for two weeks in winter, they don’t walk out again.” He gestured toward the elevator in the middle of the hall. “You headed out? I’ll walk with you.” He came around the work counter and fell into step beside her. “I’ve heard that there was a woman with him who was involved in his disappearance.”
“There was a woman with him, but it’s not what it sounds like. She was a former patient of his. Or rather, her children were. She’d been picketing the clinic. She thinks the preservative in their vaccinations caused her son’s autism.”
George Stillman’s whole face opened up in understanding. “That woman. Oh, Lord, yes, she was over here at the hospital, too. Total nut job. What did she do, drag him out there to kill him?”
Clare looked at him, surprised. “I doubt it. He’s the one who asked her to meet him. He wanted her to see the graves of some children who died of diphtheria in 1924.”
Dr. Stillman stopped in front of the elevator and mashed the button. “Really? And the graves were around here? I wonder if they might have been my grandfather’s patients. He lost quite a few to diphtheria in the early twenties. Couldn’t persuade people to take the serum. They used to think gargling and nose sprays would get rid of it.” He rolled his eyes.
“How do you know about it?”
He looked at her as if she were soft in the head. “Diphtheria? I studied it in med school.”
“No, I mean about your grandfather. And his patients. Did he used to talk about them?”
Dr. Stillman shook his head. “He died in ’48, before I was born. But he was a lifelong diarist. My dad kept every volume and passed them on to me.” The elevator doors whooshed open and they stepped inside. “I’ve read them all at least twice. Incredible insight into life in the early years of the twentieth century and what it was like to be a country doctor. Someday I’m going to work them into a publishable form.” He grinned. “Like when I’m retired.”
Clare rested her balled-up alb and leather case against her hip. She tamped down the electrical surge that had flashed through her at the mention of the diaries. “Do you think I could take a look at them? The ones from 1924?”
The doors chimed and opened. Dr. Stillman gave her the soft-in-the-head look again. “Why?”
