can’t hurt my children now.”
“Where is my husband?” Renee Rouse’s voice dropped so that it was almost a whisper. She would do it, Clare thought. She would kill Debba. They had to tell her something. Anything. Keep her talking.
“I don’t know,” Debba said through her tears. “I told the police everything I knew. I told them. I don’t know anything else.”
Mrs. Rouse shook her head. “Turn around.” Debba stared at her. “Turn around!” Debba did as she was told. Renee jammed the gun against the back of Debba’s skull. “I’ll give you one more chance. I don’t care what happens to me. I won’t go on without my husband.”
Oh, holy God. This was going to be a murder-suicide. “Debba,” Clare said.
Debba was crying harder now, her voice muffled and wet.
“Debba,” Clare said. “You’re going to have to tell her the truth.”
Renee stared at her. “You know what happened?”
“I’ve been acting as Debba’s spiritual adviser,” she said. “She’s made her confession to me.”
“What?” Mrs. Rouse’s eye lit up. “Tell me!”
What, indeed. If they said the doctor was still alive, Mrs. Rouse would demand that Debba take her to him. And going someplace with Mrs. Rouse would be a death sentence. They had to stay out of the car, out of the house, away from anyplace she could hole up in when the cops got here. They had to be right out here in the open when Russ arrived. What could they tell her? What?
“Go ahead, Debba,” Clare said. “It’s all right. Tell her about you and the doctor having an affair.”
“What?”
“They were having an affair and Dr. Rouse wanted her to run away with him. So he took off first.”
Debba, bless her heart, picked up the ball and ran with it. “Except I changed my mind. I decided to break it off. I couldn’t uproot my kids.”
Mrs. Rouse’s eyes bugged out. “You’re saying my husband had an affair with you? You slept with my husband?”
They heard the noise of an engine. A red pickup truck crested the hill, followed by a police car. Then another. No lights, no sirens, but they swooped down the hill almost faster than the eye could follow, faster than the time it took to decide what to do, faster than the heartbeats between waiting and hoping. Clare looked at the barrel of the gun, pressed into Debba’s head, and she looked at Mrs. Rouse.
“Your husband does not want you to throw your life away,” she said, knowing, of all the things she had said this horrible morning, it was the most true.
And then Russ’s pickup and the squad cars were whipsawing over the yard and onto the drive, spinning up gravel and clots of mud and dead grass, and the doors were open and men tumbled out and there were one two three four five guns all pointed toward Mrs. Rouse. Debba buried her face in her hands and fell silent.
Renee Rouse looked at the officers, at Clare, at the sky, and she lowered her gun and let it drop to the ground.
Noble Entwhistle was the first to her, drawing her away, pulling her hands behind her back, reciting her Miranda rights.
Debba touched the back of her head, feeling the absence of the gun, and turned toward Clare. She opened and closed her mouth. “How?” she finally said.
Clare fished her phone out of her pocket. “What a friend we have in cell phones,” she sang softly.
Debba started to laugh wetly, then jerked away as her mother and kids emerged from behind the bus. She ran blindly across the road, weeping and laughing, and crashed into her family.
Clare felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around.
“Are you all right?” Russ was looking at her. That was all, just his hand on her shoulder and his eyes. For a moment, she wanted to lean into him and let him hold her. Instead, she propped a smile on her face.
“It wasn’t me with a gun to her head.”
“Oh.”
“What did you think of my preaching?”
He smiled. “Pretty good for an Episcopalian. Kevin Flynn was listening, too. I think he had a conversion experience on the way over here.” He jiggled her shoulder, a small remonstrance. “What the hell were you thinking of?”
“Lilly Clow was trying to get the children out of sight. Mrs. Rouse got distracted when I was in the car, but when I got out, I was afraid she’d look back and stop Lilly. I figured if I acted strange but unthreatening, she’d keep her eyes on me for a few more seconds.”
He glanced over to where Officer Entwhistle was guiding Mrs. Rouse into the back of the squad car. “I should have done something to stop this. Had someone with her. She really fell apart when Lyle and I spoke to her Wednesday.”
“Do you honestly think anyone in Millers Kill could have foreseen she’d go around the bend?” She shook her head. “I guess this gives new meaning to the phrase ‘crazy in love.’ ”
“It’s not love. It’s dependence. He was the oak, she was the vine, all that sort of garbage.” He glanced down at the crutches he was balanced on. “You take away someone’s crutch and what happens? They fall down.”
“Poor lady.” Clare watched as Officer Entwhistle closed the car door behind Mrs. Rouse. “She must have been building up to this every day since her husband disappeared.”
“I don’t think so,” Russ said. His voice, dark and heavy, made her look at him. “I think I’m the one who tipped her over. Up until this morning, she was still hoping we were going to find her husband alive. All this”-the sweep of his arm took in the barnyard, the Clows huddled together talking with one of the officers, Renee sitting in the squad car-“all this is just a massive case of denial.”
“What happened this morning?”
“I shouldn’t have just told her-I should have prepped her more. But I was afraid she’d hear about it on the news first.”
“What?”
“The divers started searching Stewart’s Pond yesterday. This morning, I got the call. They found human remains.”
Chapter 32
We were on our way over there when I got your stealth call,” Russ said. “Emil Dvorak should already be there.” The county medical examiner. So Allan Rouse really was dead. Russ glanced across the street, to where Kevin Flynn and Lyle MacAuley were questioning the Clows. “As soon as Kevin’s finished up, I’m headed for Stewart’s Pond.”
“I’ll take you,” Clare said.
Russ’s mouth twitched. “Oh, you will, will you?”
She looked at the outline of Mrs. Rouse in the car. Clare sighed. “I suppose I ought to go sit with Mrs. Rouse and see if I can help her in any way.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you ought to do that.” When she looked sharply at him, he said, “Let her simmer down, Clare. I want her in the right state of mind when Lyle interrogates her.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
He leaned forward into his crutches. “Pointing a gun at people and threatening them is a felony. We in the law enforcement field frown upon it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes. You know what I mean. She’s no criminal. She just went over the edge because of what happened to her husband.”
He lifted his chin toward where the Clows stood, Debba rocking Skylar, Whitley hugging her grandmother tight. “What would you have said about her if she had hurt one of those kids, Clare?”
