“Hurry!”
A moment later he appeared, a backpack slung over his shoulder and one of their sleeping bags beneath his arm.
“Good idea,” she said.
He stood before her, unsure, not Jesse James making a break for the border but a kid heading out to summer camp for the first time. She hooked him around the neck with her arm and pulled his face close to hers. “First thing,” she said quietly, “is that I love you. Second thing is, if you ever, ever lift your hand to me, I’ll cut off your balls and feed ’em to the fishes. And then I’ll move out west and you’ll never see me again. Got it?” She pulled him tighter into the crook of her arm.
“Yeah,” he breathed.
She released him. “When it’s safe, give me a call.” She handed him the bag of groceries.
At the door, he hesitated. “Maybe I-”
“Go on,” she said, cutting him off. He nodded. Stepped outside and closed the door behind him. She didn’t stand at the window to see him pulling out. Randy could talk of omens and foretelling, of bad luck and good luck. She knew it was thinking and planning that made the difference between success and failure. She flung herself onto the sofa and picked up the Aruba pillow. She had a lot of thinking to do if she was going to save them from disaster.
Kevin bounded up the granite steps to the Millers Kill Police Department. He knew Mark Durkee thought it was an old dump, the brick-and-stone exterior unchanged since it was built over a hundred years ago, but it still pumped Kevin up every time he passed beneath the carved sign. Knowing that he belonged here. He had wanted to be a cop since he was six years old, and how many other people could say they were living out their dreams?
He yanked his cap from his head and struggled out of his jacket as he headed up the hallway to the squad room.
“Hey! Kevin!” Harlene’s voice. He swerved into the dispatcher’s office, where she was enthroned on her swiveling, adjustable, ergonomically correct Aeron chair in front of a bank of phone lines. He had asked her once, on a dare, how she rated a seat that cost ten times more than any other piece of furniture in the station. She had looked up and up and up at him-like the chief, he was over a foot taller than she was-and said, “Because I’m worth ten times more than any runny-nosed police academy graduate.”
“Where’s the chief?” he asked, throwing himself into a chair. “Still up to Haudenosaunee?”
“The birthday boy just called in. He’s en route to the ME’s office. Don’t you get comfortable over there,” Harlene said. “Lyle’s been trying to get ahold of you. He interviewed the assault victim, and she’s ID’d her attacker. The deputy chief wants you to meet him and be in on the arrest.”
Kevin felt a warmth, like the sun rising in his chest. “Me?”
She looked over her half-glasses at him. “It’s Randy Schoof.”
The sun sank. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.” She swiveled away from him, needlessly snapping one of her monitors on. “The chief asked me to call Mark in early before we heard about this latest development. God only knows who’s going to tell him his brother-in-law’s put a girl into the hospital.”
Randy Schoof. He had stood on the man’s front steps and talked with him, smiled at him, taken his information. And all the time he had been eating a bunch of lies.
“Not that any of us will have time to sit and soothe him,” Harlene was saying. “Everybody’s coming in, off duty or not. Part-timers, too. Chief’s found something up at Haudenosaunee, mark my words.”
No. Not lies. He had been asking the wrong questions. And Schoof had taken advantage of his idiocy. Thank God Harlene had caught him before he entered his report. He would have never lived it down.
“In all the years I’ve worked dispatch I’ve never seen the like. A murder, a missing person, and an assault case all in one day? It’s like one of those signs of the Apocalypse, that’s what it is.”
Kevin jammed his hat on his head. “I’m outta here.”
“You be careful.” Harlene always made the words sound like a direct order.
“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “If anybody’s getting hurt today, it’s not gonna be me.”
Randy Schoof was on the road toward Lake George when he heard the siren. He floored the gas pedal, one eye on the road and another on the rearview mirror.
When he saw an intersection ahead, he slammed on the brakes and fishtailed into a turn. He immediately stood on the gas again, sending the truck leaping forward on the deserted road, and when he spotted a farm stand whose sign read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, he didn’t hesitate. He spun into the U-shaped drive and bumped over the dying grass to pull in behind the small wooden building. He killed the engine and rolled his window down.
The siren wailed through the rapidly cooling air, faint and getting fainter. He waited, his heart pounding, until he heard nothing. Then he started up the truck and headed for Route 57.
He had had the idea in the back of his mind the whole time Lisa had been talking about hiding out at a buddy’s cabin or finding a motel. The problem with both those ideas, he figured, was that wherever he was, somebody would know. But there was a place he could go-at least for tonight-that no one would know about. He wouldn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t had been for his earlier visit to Reid-Gruyn.
The old mill. He could park his truck right in the regular employee parking lot. No one would think twice about it being there-there were always cars and trucks around, and if anyone realized his truck was there and he wasn’t, they’d put it down to a mechanical problem. Then he could hike over to the old mill and sneak inside.
He grinned. Lisa would be pleased. It was the perfect spot. No one ever went there. No one would ever think to look.
Despite having the bathroom door shut tight to keep the steamy warmth in, she heard the kitchen door open as she shut the shower off. The rectory was an old house, and it thumped and creaked and popped with every change of pressure, whether it was a door opening or a footstep on the floor or a stair tread swelling and shrinking as the humidity rose and fell.
Good Lord, it had better not be Deacon Aberforth, coming back for another round. She had barely escaped intact that last time, when he asked her what she had been so apprehensive about. She had stammered something about the fund-raising for the roof repairs and stuffed him out the door.
But no, she couldn’t imagine Aberforth letting himself in. It had to be Hugh Parteger, stopping by on his way to the bed-and-breakfast where he would be spending the night. She had been surprised he hadn’t arrived before now; although New York City was light-years away from Millers Kill in every way that counted, it was only a four-hour drive.
She grabbed a towel and bent over from the waist, flip-ping her hair down before wrapping it into a terrycloth turban. She lifted her robe from its hook and slipped it on, belting it firmly. She stepped out of the bathroom in an explosion of steam and checked herself out in the mirror at the top of the stairs. Swathed in white toweling from her head to her ankles, she looked like someone auditioning to be an extra in a remake of
She padded down the stairs. “Hey,” she yelled. “Is that-”
Russ was standing next to her sofa table.
“-you?” she finished, her voice gone small.
“Uh,” he said. “Um, I was on my way back from the ME’s office…” His voice trailed off. He was holding a picture of her with her family, taken this past summer when she had gotten away to Virginia for two weeks. He tried to put it back, but he was watching her instead of his hand and wound up bumping the heavy silver frame against two others, knocking them down.
