“Fell apart?”
“I started-I couldn’t-I had to come home from the office. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. Linda thought I was dying or something. I had what I guess you could kind of describe as a sort of nervous breakdown. So that’s when I retired.”
Her hand was still on his shoulder. “You’re lucky to have Linda.”
“Don’t I know it. I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for her.” It was an old thought, and a well-worn one, like a stone he carried in his pocket, reaching in to rub it every now and then.
They drove in silence for a few minutes, which was okay, because silence with Clare never felt like you had to quickly start filling it up with words. Bonnie Raitt was singing about cool, clear water, and wanting to go under, and he could get that, for sure. He eased to a stop before the Veterans Bridge and turned right, away from the river.
“This isn’t the way to Mrs. Marshall’s house,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’ve bent you to the awesome force of my will again, haven’t I?”
He laughed. “If I don’t take you, you’ll just drive up there yourself in that idiot car of yours and get stuck in the snow. At least this way, I know I can get you in and out safely.” He could see her out of the corner of his eye, smiling to herself in a satisfied way.
They wound up into the mountains, quiet again, so that they were really listening to the music, and when Bonnie sang “I sho do… want you,” he wanted to mash the button and eject the CD so it wouldn’t be there, hanging in the air between them. But he didn’t.
Both sides of the road along the trail to the little cemetery were churned to slush, the ground-in tire tracks and foot-flattened snow looking as if an army had been encamped there. “Wow,” Clare said, after they had parked and gotten out of the truck.
He paused, listening for any sounds of the mountain rescue team or the search dogs nearby, but the only thing he heard was the thin, cold air moving through the pines. He started to tell Clare to bundle up, but she was already wrapping her scarf around her neck and pulling her mittens out of her pocket. “This way,” he said, gesturing toward the trees.
The legion of footsteps that had compacted the snow along the trail didn’t make the walking any easier. The hard, dense surface had slicked up under the midday sun, and he found he had to keep his arms outstretched to counter the unpredictable terrain beneath his boots. “Careful,” he warned Clare.
“Uh-huh,” she said, her eyes and attention focused on the path. They crept down the trail like toddlers learning to walk, lacking only the all-enveloping snow-suits to complete the picture.
A crack echoed through the air. “Oh my God,” she said. “Was that a gunshot?”
“Ice breaking up.” He pointed ahead, to where portions of the reservoir gleamed through the trees, gray ice slicked over with pale green water. “It makes all kinds of noises. Loud bangs, groaning, creaking. Very dangerous this time of year.”
“I hope Dr. Rouse knew that,” she said, and then, “There they are.” The headstones looked smaller, softer, sadder today than they had last night; more like the memorials connected to real human beings, less like objects at a crime scene. Clare picked her way through the few snow-covered lumps representing the older graves and sank to her knees in front of the Ketchem children’s stones, sitting back on her heels, Japanese style.
She was silent while he stepped closer, getting a better look at the smear of blood that might or might not have been the last trace of Allan Rouse. He envisioned Debba Clow and the doctor, arguing in the darkness with the dead all around them. When he had questioned her here late last night, she had been upset but had kept herself reined in, uncomfortable but cooperative. Earlier, though, out here with the older man haranguing her, worried about her own kids and exasperated with him driveling on about the Ketchems… what had she been like then? He couldn’t imagine her planning a murder, but he could see her fed up, blaming Rouse for her troubles-in his experience people like Debba always blamed someone else for their troubles-maybe yelling at him to just shut up and then a good hard shove to get him out of her face…
When Clare crossed herself, he realized she had been praying. “This makes me think of Debba Clow,” she said.
“Me, too.”
She looked up at him. “I mean about the children. About the weight of responsibility parents take on. Mrs. Marshall told me her parents chose not to inoculate their children with the diphtheria vaccine. They did what they thought was best, and this was what they got.” She spread her hands, encompassing the stones. “Her mother spent the rest of her life grieving, and her father skipped town.” She dropped her hands to her thighs. “Debba’s the same. She tried to do everything right, and she’s got an autistic son and an ex-husband trying to take away her kids.”
“I’d be a lot more sympathetic to her plight if I hadn’t seen her trying to brain the doctor with a stool.” He held out a hand to help her to her feet.
“Do you really think she dragged him away somewhere, unconscious?”
“That’s a thought. Maybe he’s in her basement, chained to the wall until he agrees to sign a statement declaring she’s the best mom ever and he’s a quack for vaccinating kids.”
She ignored his flippant remark. “If she hit him here, or he fell, and then she left him to die, where’s his body?”
They both looked through the pines toward the reservoir. “I wish I had a few weights I could chuck out there, see if there are any thin spots that break right through,” he said. His fingers shaped a large imaginary rock.
“Like those stones they slide for curling,” she said.
“Yeah.” He faced her. “Okay, you’re Debba and I’m Rouse. I slip and fall, hitting my head on this gravestone. I’m bleeding.” He knelt at an angle to Peter Ketchem’s stone. “What do you do?”
“I try to help you up,” she said. She reached down and wrapped her hands around his upper arm.
“But I’m heavier than you, and disoriented.” He stood up. “Plus I’m a cranky old bastard and I don’t want your help.”
“So I’m reaching for you, trying to grab you to take a look at your head.” She thrust her arms out toward him.
“And I step backward.” He did.
“Be careful,” she said.
“What do you do next?”
“I’m still trying to get ahold of you.” She put her mittened hand against her mouth, frowning in thought. “I’m scared and probably getting ticked off. So maybe I’m yelling at you to stay put.” She advanced a step toward him.
“I’m backing away,” he said, “because you’re looking crazy, backing away and-” He was moving as he did so, not looking back because, of course, Rouse hadn’t been looking back, he had been wiping blood out of his eyes, and when Clare shouted, “Look out!” he started to turn to see where he was going but it was too late, his heel stepped down into nothingness and he tilted crazily, his whole boot sliding into the frozen maw of a woodchuck hole, and he was going over, arms careening, Clare yelling something, and then there was a split second where it felt as if a mallet smashed against his leg, pain, agonizing pain above his ankle, and then he hit the frozen snow with a thud that snapped his skull and threw his glasses off.
Chapter 20
Oh, fuck!” he said.
Clare smashed down onto her knees beside him, gabbling something, reaching for him, and he was bellowing about his glasses, don’t step on his glasses, as if the goddamn glasses mattered with his goddamn leg in a goddamn hole, except that they had cost three hundred bucks and weren’t covered by his insurance.
“Ssh! Ssh!” Clare was saying. “I’ve got them, Russ, they’re right here. Right here.” And she slipped his glasses on, her hands stroking his face, rubbing his chest. He shut his eyes for a second while chills swept through him, surging like snowmelt waters, shaking his whole body. The pain in his leg was so bad he wanted to weep and howl. He opened his eyes. Clare filled his whole range of vision, hanging over him, her hazel eyes wide and bright with fear. Her voice was steady, though. “I want you to move your head slowly if you can.”