Whitley wiggled out of her mother’s grip and promptly lay down at Clare’s feet in the gravel drive. “I’m a pancake,” she announced.
Debba made a strangled noise of amusement and frustration.
“What’s up?” Clare looked across the road, where Lilly Clow had put down her hose and was attacking the side of one bus with a soapy sponge. Skylar was walking around and around the barnyard, picking up rocks and dropping them into little hills. From the size of the piles, it looked as if he had been at the task for a long time.
“Those are for my mom’s business, Hudson River Rafting. We’re taking advantage of the nice weather to clean them off. They get dust and chaff and squirrel poop on ’em, wintering over in the barn.” Debba had a bandanna tied over her kinky hair. She tugged it where it had slipped over her forehead. “You want to go in the kitchen and talk? I was going to get a cup of tea.”
“Flip me, Mommy, flip me,” Whitley said.
Clare opened her passenger door. Her parka was turning out to be too heavy, with the sun pouring out of the sky and the wind warm and southerly for the first time in memory. She tossed her coat into the front and took out Dr. Stillman’s diary. “Tell you what.” She handed the leather-bound book to Debba. “I’ll flip the pancake here and take her back over to her grandmother. You read this.”
Debba glanced at the imprint on the cover. “You want me to read a 1924 diary?”
“Not all of it. I stuck a bookmark into the section I want you to see. Go on in and have a cup of tea and then when you’ve read it, if you want to, we can talk about it.”
Debba continued to look warily at the book, as if it were a gift-wrapped bomb, one that might go off in her hand, but one she didn’t want to offend Clare by dropping.
Clare suddenly got it. “It’s not a religious tract. I’m not trying to proselytize you.”
Debba flushed. “It’s not that I’m not a spiritual person,” she said. “I’m just not into organized religion.”
Clare bet Debba had several angel books and a copy of
“Flip me!” Whitley stretched her arms wide. While Debba climbed the steps to the house, Clare rolled the child over on the gravel. Whitley made sizzling sounds.
“I think you’re all cooked,” Clare said. “I’m going to put you on the plate.” She heaved the three-year-old off the drive and sat her on the hood of the Shelby. “Now I’m going to butter you.” She pretended to smear something over Whitley’s stomach. The girl giggled. “And pour syrup on you.” She remembered her brothers’ trick of lightly running their fingers through her hair, along her scalp, making it feel as if something slow and liquid was running down her head. She did it now to Whitley, who squealed and laughed and swatted at Clare’s hands. “And now, since you’re so big, I’m going to fold you up and see if your grandmother wants to share you with me.”
She picked the girl up and crossed the road. Lilly Clow tossed her soapy sponge into a bucket. “Hey, Reverend Clare. Whatcha got there?”
“A pancake.” Clare stood Whitley up on the muddy, hay-flecked ground. “Want some?”
Lilly lunged toward the girl’s belly, making “yum-yum” noises. Whitley darted away, shrieking. “Grab your mom’s hose and rinse off these bubbles for me,” Lilly yelled after her.
“So you run Hudson River Rafting,” Clare said. “I saw your buses go by last summer when I was visiting Margy Van Alstyne. She lives right by where Old Route 100 crosses the Hudson.”
“I know Margy. She does good work for the environment.” Lilly flipped one of her long gray braids over her shoulder. “When you’re in the Adirondack tourism business, you owe a debt to folks like her. Too much development can wind up scaring visitors away.” She grinned, her teeth white and fine in her tanned, lined face. “Of course, if it hadn’t been for developers putting a bunch of dams on the wild waters in the first place, we wouldn’t have the rafting business we do today. So I guess I like development so long as it happened a good long time ago.”
There was a splatter of water, and Clare and Lilly jumped aside. Whitley, heavy-duty black hose clutched in her hands, sprayed at the side of the bus, rinsing off the soap, the windows, the tires, and, occasionally, the top of the bus. Skylar ignored her, steadily piling small stones in one hand and then dropping them into puddles. “Isn’t it a little early to be getting your things ready?” Clare asked.
Lilly shook her head. “The season starts in April. If it weren’t so damn cold, we could take the punters out on the rivers next week. Even before the dams start releasing, there’s some amazing water out there.”
“What happens when the dams release?”
“Woo-he!” Lilly raised her hands and dropped them, raised and dropped them, like a person sketching a roller- coaster ride. “Class-four and-five rapids. Very challenging. There are places along the Sacandaga where I wouldn’t make a run in April with a raft full of expert guides.” She grinned. “I might have done it once, when I was younger, but now I gotta make sure I’m around to see my grand-kids grow up. Hey, baby, stay away from that road, or you’re going to have to have a time-out.”
Whitley had dropped the hose and was inching toward the country road.
“Look!” Her grandmother strode forward and picked her up. “Here comes a car now, silly girl. No going on the road without a grown-up.” She singsonged the last sentence, as if she had said it so many times it was mere rote by now.
The car was slowing down, perhaps responding to the sight of the little girl headed for the road. The Clows’ front door banged, and Debba rattled down the porch stairs, the leather-bound diary in one hand. She crunched down the gravel drive. She looked at Clare, opened her mouth as if to say something, then addressed her mother, who was still holding Whitley in her arms. “Is she being unsafe again?” Debba paused at the edge of the road to let the car pass, but it slowed even further, then rolled to a stop between the house and the barn. Not pulling over, just stopped. In the road.
The weirdness of it made the back of Clare’s neck prickle. Lilly glanced at her, glanced back at the car, shifted her granddaughter to her hip.
The driver was a woman, but hard to make out from their side of the road, with the morning sun bouncing straight off the driver’s-side window. Then the door swung open and Renee Rouse stepped out, as impeccable as the last time Clare had seen her, her cashmere sweater and perfectly draped pants looking so out of place compared to the Clows’ water-stained jeans and Wellies that for a moment, the gun she had in her hand seemed just another discrepancy, like the gold bangle and the leather pumps.
“Ho-ly Christ,” Lilly said.
Renee stepped away from the car and swung the gun toward Debba, stiff armed, her movements jerky. “Where is my husband?” she said.
Clare could see it better now, a big.38, the sort of gun people bought when they went into a store and said, “Gimme something with stopping power.” From the way she was holding it, Clare doubted Renee had ever done anything more with it than tell her husband to keep it locked up out of sight. She might not even have taken the safety off.
Debba’s hands went up to waist height, as if she didn’t know if she was supposed to raise them or not. “I don’t know.”
Renee took another step toward her. “You did something to him out there. I want to know what you did. I want to know where my husband is!” Her voice broke on the last word.
Lilly, her boots planted in the mud and her arms whipcorded around Whitley, swayed back and forth, as if torn between going to her daughter or retreating with her granddaughter. Skylar ambled within arm’s reach, pebbles in hand, and his grandmother snagged him one-handed and drew him to her side.
“Mrs. Rouse.” Clare was surprised at how calm she sounded, considering her heart was jackhammering in her chest and a tide of adrenaline was tripping every nerve ending she had.
Renee twisted toward her, keeping the gun pointed in Debba’s direction. Clare could see her face now, pale white and blotchy red, her eyes swollen and stained with too much crying. Clare lifted her arms in the same welcoming gesture she used in church, unhurried, unthreatening. “I know your heart’s breaking right now,” she said, “but this isn’t right. Look around you. There are children here. Are you really going to shoot a mother in front of her children?”
Renee looked at Whitley, who had stopped squirming on Lilly’s hip and was now clinging to her grandmother, whimpering. Then the doctor’s wife turned back to Debba. “If I have to,” she said, her voice flat.
