Fergusson put the brake on his chair and set off for the coffee table. “How are things now that you’re home?” Sarah asked.
“Better. More honest.” He rubbed his thighs. “We started family therapy while I was an in-patient, and we’re going to keep it up for a while.” He smiled briefly. “Never saw myself as the kind of guy who’d be seeing two therapists a week.”
“If you had diabetes and, say, an ulcer, you’d see a specialist for each condition. It’s no different for mental health. Eric? How are you doing? You’re still on suspension?”
“Yeah.” He bent forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, his face toward the floor. “It’s been… tough. My wife…” He looked up at her. His face changed. “She just doesn’t get that I need a little time! I was gone for a fucking year, and she won’t even give me a few months to readjust to being back.”
“Have you thought about entering marriage counseling? Or family therapy, like the Ellises?”
“Oh, Christ, don’t you start, too. That’s what she said.”
“So?” Fergusson dropped into her seat with her customary cup. “What’s holding you back?”
“I’m a cop. Do you know what that means? I have the most fundamental job in the world. Because nothing else matters if people and property aren’t safe and if the law isn’t enforced.” He smacked himself on the chest. “ We’re the line between civilization and the jungle. The only line. You trust me to do that job, you gotta trust me to have my head on straight.”
Sarah waited a beat. “So… what does your suspension mean?”
Eric turned away. “I made a bad call. I’ll take my punishment and that’ll be the end of it.”
Sarah waited, but he didn’t seem inclined to continue. “Clare? How about you?”
“I think he ought to accede to his wife’s request. Even if he doesn’t think he needs it, it would strengthen their relationship.”
Sarah pursed her lips. The caretaker strikes again. “I was asking how you are this week.”
“Oh.” Fergusson rubbed the end of her nose. “Good. Busy. Stressed.” She paused, and Sarah opened her mouth to ask about drinking, but Fergusson went on. “There’ve been a lot of developments in the police investigation around Tally’s death. They may break open part of the case soon.”
That snapped McCrea out of his sulk. “What’s going on? I called Lyle MacAuley yesterday, and all he’d tell me is that they were bringing in somebody from the army for a possible arrest on the theft.”
“There really was money stolen?” Will sounded bemused. “I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined that conversation or not.”
“The MKPD found it Saturday,” Fergusson said. “Something like six hundred thousand dollars. It was hidden at the Algonquin Waters.” Fergusson was quite effectively derailing any inquiries into her own emotional life. Sarah wasn’t sure if the priest was aware of it or not.
“So what was MacAuley talking about?” McCrea said. “Why didn’t they just tag it and ship it back to the army? Or hand it over to the Feds?”
“Russ-the chief-thinks Lieutenant Colonel Seelye may have been after the money for herself when she showed up here asking questions.”
Sarah didn’t want to get sucked into Fergusson’s self-protective behavior, but she had to ask. “Was that the other officer we saw at Tally’s funeral?”
“Uh-huh.” Fergusson drank some coffee. “The MKPD and Russ’s JAG contact-the Judge Advocate General’s Corps-are trying to get her to incriminate herself.”
“How?” Will asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen Russ since last Friday. Most of this I got from a phone message he left me.”
McCrea’s glance sharpened. “Does the chief think this lieutenant colonel had something to do with Tally’s death?”
Fergusson’s face, which had been rosy and animated during her conversation, fell into disapproving lines. “He still insists she killed herself. He won’t listen to any-” Her mouth worked, as if she were trying to find the right word.
“Other evidence?” Will offered.
“Sensible arguments.” Fergusson frowned into her coffee.
“The ME’s conclusion was pretty well grounded,” McCrea said.
Fergusson gave him a look. “Don’t you start, too.”
Time to steer this into a therapeutic mode. Sarah looked around the tiny circle, gathering each of them in. “If Tally McNabb did, in fact, kill herself, we have some hard work to do. How do we accept an unacceptable death? How do we find meaning in an act that denies meaning?”
“I got the chance to talk with my other therapist about her while I was in the hospital,” Will said. “It sounds weird, but looking at her situation helped give me a different view of my own stuff.” He glanced at Sarah, as if for permission to continue. She nodded encouragement. “See, I can look at Tally and think, she could have returned the money, she could have gotten a different job, she could have kicked her husband to the curb. Things were hard for her, real hard, but she had options. She could’ve taken them.” He rubbed his thighs. “It kind of made me see that even when I don’t feel like it, I have options, too.”
Fergusson put her coffee down and leaned toward Will. “Yes, you do. And you have your family and friends and a great cloud of witnesses all around you. Wherever you look, there’s someone who loves you looking back.”
“Oh, I know that. I knew it when I… when I did it. The problem was, they loved me too much. Too much to stand seeing me hurt and mad all the time. Too much to let me touch bottom.” Will glanced across the room to where the Crayola witches flew between construction-paper cats. “And I had to touch bottom.” He twisted in his chair, as if settling himself into the present. “Anyway, we’re talking about it in family therapy. They’re trying to see me the way I really am now. As much as they can.”
“See? That’s the hard part,” McCrea said. “Getting the people in your life to admit that you’ve changed. Been changed.”
Fergusson smiled crookedly. “Some days I fantasize about starting fresh in a new town. Nobody to have to put up a front for.” She looked at Sarah. “Of course, in my business, you always have to put up a front. No one wants to see their priest spit and swear and fall apart.”
“I dunno,” Will said. “I’m getting kind of used to it.” Fergusson laughed.
“So even you can find people to accept you as you are,” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” Will said. “Remember how you said I should get in touch with some of my old friends from school?” He smiled a little. “I did.”
“Oh.” Fergusson hid her pleased expression behind the rim of her coffee cup. “I don’t suppose any of these friends happen to be girls?”
“Yeah.” His cheeks pinked up, and the combat veteran disappeared, replaced by a teenaged boy. “I’ve been talking with Olivia Bain.”
“Is she still here in town?”
“Naw. She left for SUNY Geneseo this fall. Got a full scholarship.”
“That’s a tough school to get into.” McCrea nodded. “She must be a smart girl.”
“A lot brainier than me. I can talk to her about anything, though. She knows what it’s like to have something really bad happen to you. Her mom died in a car crash this summer.”
“That’s hard,” Sarah said. Still, it made her a good choice for Will’s confidant.
“This summer?” McCrea said. “Here? In Millers Kill?”
“Yeah.”
“What was her name?”
“Um…” Will frowned in thought. “Eleanor? Ellen? Something like that.”
“Ellen Bain.” McCrea’s mouth twisted.
“You know her?” Fergusson asked.
“I cleaned up after her. She went barreling down the resort road with no seat belt on after taking part in Happy Hour. I didn’t have to follow up with the survivors, thank God. I didn’t know she’d left a kid behind.”