“No, you would have been a bad steward of your church if you had actually turned the money down in favor of the tarp. It just makes you someone whose duty conflicts with your own interest. It happens.”
The tone in his voice made her raise her head, and she found him looking at her as if he were touching her face. Their eyes met, and she remembered an afternoon years ago, flying along the coast of Panama, her helo low over the impossibly blue waters, the smell of the sea everywhere and the rush of the sky and feeling as if the whole world were out there for her taking.
Then he dropped his gaze to the doughnut box and smiled. “I bet you always vote for universal health-care coverage, don’t you?”
She tipped her head back and laughed, and that was how Margy Van Alstyne found them.
“Well! Looks like I’m missing the party.” She bustled in, a short, rotund fire-plug of a woman, dropping her car coat on the other bed. “Hello, Clare.” Clare scrambled off the chair and barely got out a greeting before Margy swept to the head of the bed. “Hello, sweetie.” She leaned up on tiptoe and kissed her son. “How are you feeling? Is it a bad break? Is it in the same spot where your old break happened?” She glanced at Clare. “Russ fell into a foxhole and busted his leg back when he was in Vietnam,” she explained.
It had been both legs, and he broke them jumping to escape a helicopter that had been blown out of the sky. Russ gave Clare a warning look. She nodded.
“Breaking a bone at eighteen is a lot different from breaking it when you’re fifty,” Margy went on. She smoothed his hair back from where it had flopped over his forehead.
“I’m not fifty yet, Mom.”
“Close enough as makes no difference. What did they do? What did the doctor say?”
“He put in two pins. I have to be in the cast six weeks.”
Margy Van Alstyne turned to Clare and they shared a moment of total communion over the ability of men to turn the most dramatic, complex subjects into two sentences. Short sentences. With one-syllable words.
“And how did this happen?” Margy asked her.
“Ah.” Clare recalled the script. “Russ and I were taking a walk. In the woods.”
“Really?” Margy turned again and pinned Russ with a skeptical eye. “When I called the station, Harlene told me you had been tramping around a crime scene, looking for someone who disappeared last night.”
“Busted,” Russ said.
“It was in the woods,” Clare said. “We were walking.”
“You see what can happen?” Margy said to her son. “And this was after the fact, not right there, confronting some criminal. Sweetie, you’ve been at this too long. Sooner or later the odds are going to go against you and you’re going to wind up at the wrong end of some maniac’s gun.” Her voice was tight. In all of Russ’s exasperation over his mother’s protectiveness, Clare had never thought what it was like from Margy’s point of view, to be afraid that one day your son would stop a car or enter an apartment and never walk away.
“Mom, it was just a stupid accident. It could have happened anywhere.” Russ had a tone in his voice, half pleading, half jollying. “It’s Allan Rouse who’s gone missing,” he said. “The doctor who runs the free clinic. He was last seen up by Stewart’s Pond. We found his car, but no sign of him.”
Margy’s expression clearly said she wasn’t fooled by this transparent attempt to change the subject. But she went along with it anyway. “What did he do, jump in?”
“We don’t know,” Russ said. “There was a woman with him right before he disappeared. We’re going to be questioning her further.”
Margy’s eyes rounded out. “Why, that old dog,” she said.
“No, Mom, not like that.” He frowned at her. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to repeat a word. It was this woman who’s been picketing the clinic. Deborah Clow.”
“I know her!” Clare and Russ both blinked. “She came to one of our meetings once,” Margy went on. “Wanted us to get behind her crusade to stop vaccinations. Said they caused autism.” She rolled her eyes. “My first reaction was to send her packing outright. I remember when polio was around, when they closed down public pools and shipped kids off to the country to escape it. But I thought, I’ll look into it. See if there’s anything to what she says.”
“And?” Clare said.
“It’s all hooey. No reputable scientific study has ever shown a relationship between vaccinations and autism. I told her we couldn’t support her. There are too darn many real scary things out there for us to be wasting our time on imaginary monsters.” She crossed her arms over her low-slung bosom and burrowed her hands up under her sweatshirt sleeves. “Everybody wants something or someone to blame when bad things happen. You have to learn how to figure out if there was a fault or not, that’s what I think. Otherwise, it’ll drive you crazy. Nobody can live with thinking that right out there, just out of reach, is the person who hurt you. It’ll drive you crazy.”
Chapter 25
Sunday, March 26, the Third Sunday in Lent
And in the prayers of the people, we continue to pray for the recovery of Lauraine Johnson after her recent surgery; for Roger Andernach, who has been admitted to a nursing home; for David Reid and Beth Reid, on bed rest with twins; for Renee Rouse and for Dr. Allan Rouse, still missing; for Russ Van Alstyne, recovering from a broken leg. Please add your own prayers and petitions.” Nathan Andernach, St. Alban’s deacon, paused. There were some semiaudible mumblings from the congregation. Names. The suggestion of a petition. Someone said firmly, “For all the men and women serving in our country’s armed forces.”
Clare smiled to herself, but her mind was on Allan Rouse. He had been missing for nine days now. There had been an initial flurry of articles in the Post-Star, short because of the lack of information, and getting shorter each succeeding day until they had disappeared. The consensus at Thursday’s Stewardship Committee meeting was that he had, as Dr. Anne baldly stated, “snuffed it.” “It just builds on you over the years,” she had told the rest of the committee members, who had left the capital campaign prospectuses unread on the table in favor of dissecting the town’s most newsworthy event. “Especially solo practitioners. There’s no one to confer with, no one to help you. Every bad decision, every shortcut you’ve taken, every patient you sent away, wondering if you’ve done any good-it can just drag you under sometimes. Some doctors get hooked on their own prescription pads. Some of ’em retire to fish in Florida. And some of ’em…” She had drawn a finger across her throat.
“Lord, let your loving kindness be upon them,” Nathan said.
“Who put their trust in you,” the congregation answered.
“We pray to you also for the forgiveness of our sins,” Nathan said. He bowed his head and stepped away from the lectern.
Clare flew back into the present moment, her hands resting on the smooth white linen of the altar cloth, the sound-rumbling, creaking, sighing-as a hundred people got to their knees. “Have mercy on us, most merciful Father,” they began. The corporate confession of sin went on, smooth and untroubled, not like the halting sentences and tearful interruptions she heard in the privacy of her office, when people wrestled one at a time with failings, with ugliness and nasty truths inside them.
There was an “Amen,” and the church fell silent. Heads bowed or faces covered with a splayed hand or tilted up, eyes closed. Waiting for her to forgive their sins. She reached for the cord of compassion inside her, plucked it, let it resonate until she felt herself a small reflection of the Great Compassion. “May our God who always tempers justice with mercy pour out forgiveness over you,” she said, “washing clean all your sins, strengthening you to do all good things, bringing you day by day and hour by hour into eternal life.” She held back the long, loose sleeve of her alb so that it couldn’t knock over the elements on the altar before her, and sketched a huge cross in the air. “In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer, amen.”