“I told you, I can’t go inside!” Her whisper sharpened. “Will you please listen to me?”
He clicked off the game. “Go ahead.”
“I was in Malcolm’s room tonight. Here. At Peggy’s house.”
“Who’s Malcolm?”
“Her nephew. He used to be Bill Ingraham’s boyfriend.”
“His boyfriend? He got out of his chair. The import of this statement struck him. “And you were in his room? What the hell were you doing in his room?”
“I’m trying to tell you!”
He pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Go ahead.”
“I got talking with someone at the party about Peggy’s business, and about Malcolm, and I thought it would be a good idea to see if there was anything connecting him to Ingraham’s death—in his room.”
“How much had you had to drink at this point?”
“That doesn’t matter! Listen. Malcolm knows something about Ingraham’s death. I’m sure of it. And he’s selling drugs!”
He walked past his mother, who was methodically folding and stuffing envelopes for a fund-raiser, listening to his every word. He opened the fridge and grabbed a soda. “Uh-huh.”
“Don’t patronize me. I know he’s selling drugs because he was talking to someone in the room with him.”
That brought him up short. “This guy was in the room at the same time you were?” His mom’s head perked right up at that. He frowned at her.
“He and another man. The other guy was talking about Ingraham’s death. At least I’m pretty sure he was. He was scared. And then Malcolm gave him something, some sort of drug.”
He put the soda can down on the counter, unopened. “What did they do? Shoot up? Do you know what they were using?”
“No, not like that. Like a payment. Or a payoff. I didn’t actually see anything. I was hiding in the bathroom.”
He lifted his keys from a row of hooks next to the back door. “You were hiding in the bathroom.”
“Yes. And then the other man left, the one who was worried, and Malcolm started making phone calls to potential buyers. And to a friend named Poppy.”
The priest he knew spoke in a clear, well-organized way, one thought flowing coherently into another. But this garbled story…He couldn’t tell if she was drunk or delusional, or maybe had been hit on the head.
“He just stayed there on the phone, with the music going, and I needed to leave, because all I could think about was that I’d be in deep trouble if a drug lord found me in his shower stall while he was peddling his wares. Not to mention the way he was talking about how they were going to take care of the other man. So I climbed out of his bathroom window and—”
“You did what? Are you nuts?”
“It was the only way out. So I climbed out of his bathroom window, jumped onto a porch roof, and made it back to my car. I thought I had better call you, because you can get a warrant and search Malcolm’s room. He keeps the stuff under his bed. Oh, and he has a gun, too.”
He pocketed his keys. “And why is it you can’t go back into the house?” His mom had given up pretending to do work and was staring with undisguised interest at him.
“I threw away my sandals. And I lost two buttons on my top, and wiped off most of my makeup. I’m a complete mess.”
It was the first time he had ever heard Clare say anything that indicated she had any awareness of how she looked at all. If her story hadn’t been so completely bizarre, he’d have teased her about it. But she spoke with an earnest literalness that undoubtedly came out of a bottle but made her sound like a kid.
“Where are you right now?”
“In the passenger seat.”
“No, I mean where is Peggy Landry’s house?”
“Um, on the Old Lake George Road. You turn off at a place called Lucher’s Corners.”
“I know where that is. What’s her house number?”
“I can’t remember. Wait—” He heard the sound of papers flipping around. She came back on. “Okay, I got the directions she gave me. Number two thousand twelve.”
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. You stay put in your car. I’m going to come get you and take you home.”
“No! That’s not why I called! You have to come and arrest him! I wouldn’t have called for a ride. That would be imposing on you.” She said “imposing on you” in the same tone of voice someone might use to say “sacrificing your firstborn child.”
“I’ll just stay here until I feel sober enough to drive safely. Do not come out here to give me a ride,” Clare told him.
He wasn’t going to waste time arguing with a woman under the influence. Not over the phone, with his mom hanging on every word. “I’ll be there in about a half hour. Stay put.” He turned the phone off and replaced it in its cradle.
“Trouble?”
He nodded. “She needs a ride. And she thinks she may have some information about this murder we’re working on.”
His mother’s face changed from amused to worried. “Maybe you should call for backup.”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that, Mom. And Clare’s a little under the influence. I don’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone else. I’ll take her to her house and then head home from there.”
Margy got to her feet and wrapped her arms around him. He squeezed her hard and dropped a kiss on her springy white curls. “Don’t worry, Mom. There aren’t going to be any bad guys.”
She tipped her head back to look him straight in the eye. “That’s not the only sort of trouble out there.”
The Old Lake George road was familiar to him, part of the regular patrol route. When he had been in school—back around the Civil War, it felt like—the road had been mostly undeveloped, except for a few scraggly cabins inhabited by cranky loners. It had been, as its name suggested, a shortcut over the mountains toward Lake George, not a place anyone with a lick of sense would build on, back when the surrounding area was all devoted to dairy farming. Things started to change in the eighties, when a “pristine mountainside between a quaint Adirondack village”—he had seen the language in an ad his mother had sent him—and the old resort area of Lake George suddenly became a hot commodity. Overnight, neo-Adirondack lodges that would have given Teddy Roosevelt nightmares had sprung up along the road, interspersed with fake Swiss chalets and Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater rip-offs. One of the latter, whose architect had insisted on flat roofs to “blend in with nature,” had come to a spectacular end when a twenty-four-hour storm dumped three feet of snow on the area and the whole house collapsed in on itself.
He recognized Peggy Landry’s house when he pulled into the long drive. She couldn’t have owned it long—it had been purchased and expensively renovated by a dot-com millionaire from New York City just a few years ago. He remembered the guy because he was constantly calling in intruder alerts during his summer stays, until Mark Durkee went up and pointed out that the open-air kitchen he had installed at the end of the pool house was attracting a steady stream of black bears.
The drive was still full of cars, but it was easy enough to pick out Clare’s god-awful Shelby Cobra. He pulled his truck into the nearest empty spot and got out. He glanced up at the facade of the house, three stories of vaguely rustic clapboarding rising up to a modern-cladded roof. He tried to picture Clare dropping out one of the windows, three sheets to the wind, and the image made him wince. An adrenaline addict, she had once described herself as. How she ever made it through a seminary and into the priesthood was a mystery to him.
He crunched over to her car. There was no sign of life until he bent down and peered into the shadowy interior. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He knocked on the driver’s door and opened it.