She dragged the chair next to his bed. “What sort of run-in?”
“She tried to drown herself in Stewart’s Pond. I was fishing that day, and spotted her. I jumped in and pulled her out.”
She sat in the chair, but found she was irritatingly low, like a prisoner in the docket. She stepped onto the seat and perched on the back of the chair. “That place, that reservoir-it’s a bad place.”
He laughed. “Oh, come off it. It’s just a graveyard. I may not be all up on my Christian theology, but I’m pretty sure being afraid of the dead goes counter to some of the basic tenets.”
“Not like that. I mean…” She broke her doughnut apart, trying to put into words how she had felt at the historical society. The sensation of cold water in the middle of old books and three-ring binders. “There’s a specific gravity to the place. The drowned farm and the dead children. It’s dragging people down.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Well, now we know why I broke my leg.”
“Think about it. Ketchem disappears, his wife tries to kill herself there, and now Dr. Rouse has disappeared.” She cat-cradled her fingers. “And they’re all connected to one another.”
“Three bad things happening over a spread of what-seventy years?-does not a bad place make.” He finished off his cruller and flipped the box open again, considering his choices. “You forget what a small town this is. Between Millers Kill, and Fort Henry, and Cossayuharie, we have maybe ten or eleven thousand people. Three quarters of us are related if you go back far enough. Of course there are going to be connections.” He eased a chocolate-frosted doughnut out without breaking its glossy surface.
She took a different tack. “Why was Jonathon Ketchem’s case never closed?”
“Because there’s no statute of limitation on murder.”
“Was that what they thought had happened? Back in 1930?”
“It was one theory. I guess the chief at the time didn’t want to close out any possibilities.”
“Like you, with Dr. Rouse’s disappearance.”
“Like me,” he agreed. He bit into his doughnut.
She stuffed part of her peanut doughnut into her mouth and thought while she chewed. Have you considered,” she said, after she had swallowed, “that Allan Rouse might have committed suicide? His wife told me he was acting erratically recently-sometimes manic, sometimes depressed. He’s had this protest thing with Debba Clow going on. Then Mrs. Marshall and I came along and told him the clinic was losing the funding from Mrs. Ketchem’s trust.” She felt an acid twinge in her stomach at that one, but went on. “So he takes Debba Clow to the grave site, tries to convince her one last time how important vaccinations are. She doesn’t listen, he falls and cracks open his head, then he gets into his car and drives into a tree-maybe it was all too much for him at the moment.”
Russ swallowed another piece of his doughnut. “So he walked back to the grave site and down to the reservoir,” he said. “And kept walking until he found a spot where the ice gave way underneath him.”
“Huggins, the rescue guy, warned me not to go onto the ice. He said there would be plenty of rotten spots with the shifts in daytime and nighttime temperatures.”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it. If he went into the water, the hole he went through could have been totally invisible from the shore last night. When you fall in through a weak spot, the ice that was there bobs right back up. It doesn’t fit together like a manhole cover or anything, but unless it was real close to the shore, it would have just looked like a rough patch on the surface.” He licked the chocolate icing off his fingers.
“Are you going to send a dive team down there to look for him?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. There are still too many other possibilities. We don’t have any forensics back on Debba Clow’s car yet, for one thing.”
“Do you seriously consider her a suspect?”
“She’s the only one we’ve got at this point.”
“I just can’t see it. Admittedly, she thinks he’s responsible for her son’s autism. And she was all fired up about her ex’s custody suit, and what Dr. Rouse might say against her…” She let herself trail off. The problem with Debba was, the more you thought about it, the more likely she seemed.
“You keep on thinking that people commit murder because of this reason or that reason.” Russ tore a tissue from the bedside box and wiped his hands. “But most homicides occur for one reason only. Someone becomes stupid angry and strikes out as hard as he can, with whatever he has at hand that will hurt the most.” He crumpled the tissue and pitched it toward a plastic basket beneath the window. “The thought doesn’t go into the killing. It comes, if there’s any thought at all, afterward, when it’s time to cover up the mess. And if you’re going to ask me if I think Deborah Clow could get angry and go nuts, the answer is yes. I do.”
“I have a confession to make.” Clare propped her boots on the wooden arms of the chair so she could rest her elbows on her knees. “I’d almost rather he was murdered than killed himself. Because if he committed suicide, St. Alban’s roof is going to be repaired with blood money.”
“Oh, come off it. Okay, the clinic’s lost a few thousand a year.”
“Ten thousand.”
“Nobody offs himself because of a cut in funding. Except-” His eyes focused inwardly. “No, forget it.”
“What?”
“I was thinking, except in cases where someone’s been cooking the books. But the clinic’s not a business, where there’s a profit to fiddle with or shareholders to scam. The board of aldermen go over the clinic’s budget every year as part of the annual meeting.” He looked at her. “At any rate, it’s not St. Alban’s fault. Maybe it’s not your finest hour, and maybe you’d have liked to keep funding for the clinic as well as save your roof. But you make decisions like this all the time.”
“I do not,” she protested.
“Sure you do. Every time you choose to spend the church’s money and time on one thing, you’re choosing not to spend it on another. You’ve got a group of volunteers working with teenage mothers, helping them get through school, find jobs, baby-sitting, right?” She nodded. He went on, “That means that you’re not helping divorced single moms of older kids with education, child care, and getting back into the workplace.”
“That’s not the same.”
“Sure it is. Your parishioners give money to the church, right? Put it in the basket every Sunday.”
“They make pledges and then pay on them. Sort of like public television.”
“Except you don’t give them Masterpiece Theatre video sets in exchange.”
She couldn’t help smiling, even though she knew which way he was going and it still didn’t feel convincing.
“There’s no difference between what they do and what Mrs. Marshall did,” he continued.
“But it feels different.”
“Why?” He crossed his arms over his blanket-covered chest and looked steadily at her.
She opened her mouth to respond only to realize that she hadn’t thought out the answer to that question. She sat up straighter and pulled back her hair, knotting it at the back of her skull. Russ lay there, propped up in the hospital bed, giving her all the time she needed.
“Because,” she finally said, “if it had really been up to me, I would have given the money to the clinic and stuck a tarp over the roof.” She ducked her head. “That doesn’t make me a very good steward of my church, does it?”