To Darkness And To Death

Do you really think you are the best judge of what is a sin or not?”

She kept silent.

“Are you willing to confess and repent?”

Are you now, or have you ever been… Ridiculous, the way her mind ping-ponged sometimes. She took a deep breath. “I confess my disobedience. And I’m sorry to have caused the bishop any distress by failing to follow his guidance on these issues.”

“You’re equivocating again.”

“Father, I cannot repent of what I did. I don’t think I was wrong.”

He sat in silence. What happened next? Was the bishop going to issue a commination against her in the pulpit, denouncing her? Was she going to be kicked out of St. Alban’s and bounced to another diocese?

And even now, the treacherous thought: If I leave Millers Kill, I’ll never see Russ again.

“The bishop asked me to call him after I spoke with you. I will lay this information before him.”

She nodded.

Aberforth stood. “If you have anything further you wish to add, or if, upon prayerful consideration, you change your stance, you can reach me at the Algonquin Waters.”

She stood as well. Great. Let’s meet up tonight after the dinner dance. You and me and Hugh and Russ. We’ll all have a drink together.

“One more question, before I go.”

“Yes, Father?” She sounded as if she were being catechized.

“At the start of our conversation, you were listening closely to what I was saying, and you were obviously concerned. Yet when I mentioned performing the illegal ceremony, you were”-he twisted the word-“surprised. To say the least.”

“I am sorry about laughing. I didn’t mean to offend or belittle-”

He cut her off. “What I want to know, Ms. Fergusson, is why you were so distressed.” From his stoop- shouldered height, he examined her. “What did you think I was going to say?”

3:50 P.M.

Lisa shut the door, locked it, and barred it with her body, facing her husband.

“What’s the matter, babe?” he said.

She had heard naughty six-year-olds fake innocence better. “You beat up Becky Castle.”

His face went white. His eyes bugged out. “N-no,” he stammered.

“You worked her over so bad she wound up in the hospital getting surgery to stop her internal bleeding!”

He shook his head, his mouth working.

“I know you did, you shit!” She started to cry. “My sister was her postop nurse! She called to warn me.”

In the middle of the living room, he fell to his knees. “Oh, babe.” He reached for her. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do it, I was just trying to get a break, to save my job, and Ed Castle turned me down flat and she laughed at me and said she was going to spread my picture around and have me arrested, and I got so mad, so out-of-my-skull mad, and she was such a smug-faced bitch, one of those people who get everything handed to them and can’t understand what it’s like to try so hard, and then she was so still, and I thought she was dead, I really thought I had killed her…”

Lisa wiped her arm across her eyes. Randy’s agonized expression, his pleading confession, steadied her. “For God’s sake, Randy. Get up.” She reached down a hand. He staggered to his feet. He looked as if he wanted to hug her but was afraid to move closer. “How could you think she was dead? Didn’t you feel for a pulse? See if she was breathing?”

His face sagged. “I didn’t think of that.”

She sighed. “That’s because you’re not the detail person. I am.” She rubbed her hands over her eyes and looked at him wearily. “So did you think of what you could do to not get your butt hauled into jail?”

He stared at the wall-to-wall carpet. “I… I didn’t think…” He looked up at her hopefully. “Maybe she won’t remember?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Shook her head as if to dislodge something from her ear. “For God’s sake, Randy, she already told Rachel. Any minute now she’ll be speaking with her doctor, and as soon as she points to you, he’ll have the cops on you. We’ve got maybe thirty minutes before Kevin comes back. If we’re lucky. And he won’t be smiling and all ‘Hey, Randy, how’s it going?’ this time.”

“I never meant to hurt her in the first place!” Randy looked as if he were going to cry.

“Baby, that’s not going to stop them from putting you in Clinton for the next ten years.”

“Look. There’s no evidence. It’ll be my word against hers if she tells the cops.”

“Oh, Randy.” She couldn’t help it. She wrapped her arms around him. “You spilled your guts to me in fifteen seconds. How much longer do you think you could hold out to the police?”

He buried his face in the crook of her neck. “What should I do?”

That was the question. She hadn’t had a chance to gather her thoughts since Rachel’s call. “Did you leave anything behind? Any evidence?”

She felt him shake his head. “I drove her car to the Reid-Gruyn plant.”

“The mill? Why on earth did you dump her car there?”

He leaned back so she could see him. “I was thinking, there should be another story, right? Another version of how it happened. So I parked it in Mr. Reid’s space. Then I left some of her personal stuff in the office.” He held his hands out. Don’t you get it? “Reid belongs to some of those environmental groups. And he likes young babes-look at who he dumped his first wife for. I figured, if worse came to worse, I could argue that they were getting it on, and he hurt her, and she didn’t want to turn him in.”

She squeezed him. “That was smart. But what about fingerprints and bloodstains and stuff like that?”

“I wore my gloves.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek, staring into the middle distance. He waited. Finally she said, “I think you need to disappear for a while.” He opened his mouth to protest, and she went on. “Just for a while. You made a good start, making it look like Mr. Reid was involved. If we have a little time, I can think of a way to back that up, so the cops will seriously look at him instead of you. If it comes down to a trial”-he made a whimpering sound, and she gripped his shoulders-“if it comes down to a trial, all we’ll have to do is cast a reasonable doubt that you did it.”

She wasn’t sure if he followed her reasoning, but he grasped the essential thing. “Where do I go? And how long do I have to stay away?”

“Go to one of your buddies’ hunting cabins. Or, here.” She broke away and hurried into the kitchen, where she kept cash payments in the cookie jar until she could deposit them. “Head up north and stay in one of those no-tell motels.” She handed him the cash. “Wherever you go, you need to stick to the back roads, because they’ll probably be looking for your truck.”

He had been thumbing through the bills, impressed, but mentioning the police tracking him brought his head up. “That’s right,” she confirmed. “Whatever you do, don’t let anybody see that license plate.” She turned him toward the stairs. “Grab one of the duffle bags and throw in enough clothes for a few days. I’ll pack you some food. It’d be better if you stayed out of stores. Especially convenience stores. Those places have security cameras every two feet.”

He stopped, his hand on the banister. “You really do think of everything.” His voice was threaded with awe.

“Go on, you don’t have much time.”

Lisa unhooked one of the plastic IGA shopping sacks from behind the pantry door and began emptying out the refrigerator. A loaf of bread, a jar of mayo, an unopened package of bologna. Hard cheese and applesauce in a jar and Randy’s favorite pickles. Stuff that could fill him up and last, if not in a fridge, then hanging outside a window in the cold November air. All the while, the back of her mind kept count of how many minutes it had been since Rachel called. She tossed in a bag of Chips Ahoy and a jar of instant coffee, on the chance that he’d have hot water. She threw in a couple of spoons and a knife sharp enough to slice the cheese and twisted the bag handles in her fist and lugged it to the foot of the stairs.