“Right,” he said.
“I should see if there’s anything I can do for them.”
“Stop trying to help people for five minutes. What were you doing here, anyway?”
“Remember Dr. Stillman, who set your leg? The one who was the third-generation doctor?” He nodded. “He loaned me some of his grandfather’s personal journals. There’s all this stuff about the diphtheria outbreak in 1924, including an entry about the Ketchem children dying. I wanted Debba to read it. To get another perspective on vaccinations.” She stuffed her hands into her skirt pockets. “Same thing that Allan Rouse was trying to do, I guess. I thought maybe words would have a bigger effect than the old tombstones.” She looked at him looking at her. “What?”
“Nothin’,” he said, his mouth crooked. A movement across the road caught his eye. “Let’s get Kevin over here to take your statement. Kevin!”
She followed Russ back to his pickup, and she leaned against the bed giving her statement to Officer Flynn while his chief half sat, half stood against the passenger seat, resting his leg.
When she retrieved Dr. Stillman’s journal from Debba, she gave her a quick, fierce hug and said, “We’ll talk about this later, right?” Debba nodded, her lashes still wet with tears, Skylar still rocking and rocking in her arms. Clare dropped her voice, mock-confidential. “And I promise I won’t tell anyone about your torrid affair with Dr. Rouse.”
Debba gasped, blinked, and then started to laugh. She laughed and laughed until Lyle MacAuley and her mother both stared. She laughed until Skylar, serious faced, reached up and touched her cheek. “Funny Mama,” he said. “Funny.”
“What was that all about?” Russ asked her as she placed Dr. Stillman’s diary in the front seat of her car.
“Laughing in the face of adversity,” she said. She chucked the car door shut. “So, am I going to take you up to Stewart’s Pond, or not?” Ignoring the voice of her grandmother, who was saying, Nice girls don’t extend invitations, they accept them. Ignoring the voice of MSgt. Ashley “Hardball” Wright, who was reminding her, A smart soldier does not deliberately put himself in harm’s way. A giddy fearlessness was fizzing through her veins, and at that moment she was perfectly willing to do something that would probably turn out to be a big mistake.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Yes, which is why we need to get moving right now.”
He glanced over at Kevin, who was dragging a ladder out of the barn. She couldn’t figure out what he and Deputy Chief MacAuley were doing until she saw the jackknife and evidence bag in Lyle’s hand. Apparently Mrs. Rouse’s shot had gone into the barn’s clapboard front. “Kevin,” Russ shouted. The young officer stopped. “Reverend Fergusson is going to take me up to Stewart’s Pond so I can catch up with the M.E. You drive her car up there and meet me as soon as you guys are done.”
Kevin nodded. Lyle MacAuley gave them a long look before turning back to the ladder.
“Hope you don’t mind driving my truck,” Russ said, “because there’s no way I’m going to try to wedge myself into that little skateboard of yours.”
They jounced out of the Clows’ drive, Clare climbing the gears as they drove up out of the valley until they were flying along a good fifteen miles an hour above the speed limit.
“Hello,” Russ said. “Don’t make me give you a ticket in my own truck.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You don’t have the little ticket book.”
“Damn.” He flipped open his glove compartment. “I knew there was something I forgot.”
She laughed.
“Ah,” he said. “I see my mistake now.”
“What?”
“I thought I was getting into the truck with the Reverend Clare Fergusson. But no, it’s actually Captain Fergusson, the terror of Fort Rucker.”
She grinned at him. “It feels like that, yeah. Like I could get this machine airborne if I just hit…”
“Escape velocity?”
“Yeah.”
He leaned back into his seat in a kind of studied nonchalance. “It’s amazing how weightless you can feel once a gun’s not pointed to your head anymore.”
She laughed.
“You are, without a doubt, the damndest priest I’ve ever met.”
“I worry about that.” She slowed as they approached an intersection. “I’m not so sure I’m really cut out for parish life. Doing good is one thing. Being good is a lot harder.”
“What would you be doing if you weren’t rector of St. Alban’s?” There was a tone to his voice she couldn’t name, but she couldn’t spare a glance at him as she swung onto Route 9.
“I don’t know. I could re-up as a chaplain, but I think I’m too old for the army now. No, not too old. Too…” she thought about it. “I’ve lost a lot of my ability to fit in and follow orders.”
He laughed. “I find it hard to imagine you ever had much of that ability.”
“There ya go.” She shifted up. “I’d probably go for some sort of missionary work. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, that sort of thing. Doing something to ease somebody else’s life-that’s always seemed like the point, to me.”
“What about flying? You know, quitting the priesthood entirely. There have to be a lot of opportunities for someone with your experience.”
She laughed. “You can’t quit the priesthood. I mean, yeah, you can not work as a priest. You can get kicked out of your bishop’s diocese. But ordination is forever. Like baptism. You can’t take it back.” She glanced across the cab at him. “How about you?”
“How about me, what?”
“What would you be doing if you weren’t nailing down that chair at the police station?”
He took his glasses off and fished a tissue out of his pocket. “When I retired from the army, I had a couple job offers to manage private security firms.”
“I find it hard to imagine you running a rent-a-cop shop.”
“Me, too.” He cleaned his glasses, balled up the tissue. She glanced over again and found he was looking at her. “This is what I would be doing. This job. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
She turned onto Old Route 100. “This way’ll get us there, won’t it?”
“It sure will.”
They drove on in silence for a few minutes. “I think that’s the real difference between us,” she finally said. “You know you’re in the right place. Doing the right thing. With the right person.” He looked away from her. “I don’t have that certainty. I thought my call would make me certain. But it hasn’t.”
“I’ve got fourteen years on you,” he said, still looking out the window. “I’ve had a lot more time to figure things out.” He pointed. “Don’t miss the county road up there.”
She slowed down and kept the speed moderate as she drove up to the reservoir. The road twisted and rolled, up and down.
“There.” He pointed to a wide, cleared track through the trees. It was a good half mile before the site of the accident. “That’s a boat put-in. That’s where the diving team’s working from.”
She muscled the pickup down the trail, crunching over the last of the icy, hard-packed snow, the tires squelching and sucking through the water-saturated ground. The trees opened up to a clearing the size of a small parking lot, crowded with an ambulance, a state police dive truck, a trooper’s squad car, and two unmarkeds. She could see three men, one in uniform and one braced with a walking cane, gathered around some sort of aluminum dock. She parked as close to them as she could, eyeing the heavy gray clouds that were collecting across the sky. The walk would be hard enough on Russ’s leg without making him hike through rain. “Sit right there,” she said, killing the engine. “Let me help you down.”
“I can do it myself.”