Out Of The Deep I Cry (29 page)

“People were slower to run to the doctor then, I think,” Mr. Madsen said. “Nowadays, we’re at the doctor’s office every time we feel a twinge. Back in those days, you had to be some hurting for your parents to get the doctor out to the house.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Marshall said. “I hadn’t really thought about that. There was no telephone out at the old farm. No electricity. My parents didn’t own a car until 1929.” My father would have had to drive his buggy into town and find Still-man any time they needed any medical treatment.”

Clare lowered her coffee cup. “I just met a Dr. Stillman at the Washington County Hospital. He said he was the third generation of his family to practice medicine here in Millers Kill. He’s an orthopedic surgeon.”

Mr. Madsen snorted. “Well, the old Dr. Stillman was a country doctor. Which meant he did everything from setting bones to delivering babies to performing surgery-”

“-on kitchen tables. With the patients’ butter knives.” Mrs. Marshall arched an almost invisible eyebrow at her old friend. “You think everything was better back then.”

“Maybe the old Dr. Stillman didn’t push the vaccine back then,” Clare said. “Since it was so new.”

Mrs. Marshall tilted her head for a moment. “No, I don’t think that was the case. As I remember him, Dr. Stillman was always after you with a needle.”

“You were immunized?”

Mrs. Marshall smiled a humorless smile. “Against everything.”

“Me, too,” Mr. Madsen said, apparently oblivious of the expression on his hostess’s face. “I think you’re right. I think he was a bug about inoculations. No pun intended.”

“Would your parents have gone to Dr. Stillman for their other children?”

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Marshall said.

“Dr. Rouse was your mother’s physician in her last years, right?”

Mrs. Marshall smiled wryly. “Allan Rouse was my mother’s physician from the moment he proposed serving in the clinic in exchange for the money for his medical degree. Not that he treated her. That didn’t come about until she was in her seventies. But he was hers. As much her creation as the clinic itself.”

“Do you know if she ever spoke to him about what happened to your older brothers and sisters?”

“I don’t know.” Mrs. Marshall sipped her coffee. “She so rarely spoke of anything to do with those times. If it weren’t for my own memories of the farm and my father, I might believe that my life started at age six, in the little house on Ferry Street.” She replaced the cup precisely on its saucer. She left a faint imprint of today’s lipstick on the rim. Scarlet. “I must have been a poor substitute for what she had lost, one child instead of four. And, of course, I was alive, and so could make mistakes and speak rudely and come home with disappointing grades and smoke cigarettes behind the garage. It must have been too painful to compare me to those perfect, dead children.”

“Perfect?” Clare said.

“Haven’t you noticed? Every dead thing is perfect.” She glanced at Mr. Madsen, who was gawking at her over the rim of his cup. “Like Norm’s yesterdays. Unchangeable, and so unable to disillusion you.”

Clare looked into her coffee. “Have you considered that maybe your mother didn’t bring up your brothers and sisters because she didn’t want you to feel as if you had to live their lives for them?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s easy, when you’re the surviving child, to feel as if you have to carry all the expectations your parents had for your dead sibling.” She was speaking from raw personal experience at this point, with knowledge gained from countless conversations when her mother would sigh over her sister Grace’s name or point out when friends’ daughters joined Junior League or got married or had babies. All the things Grace was supposed to have done. “Maybe your mother wanted you to know that she loved you for who you were, complete. That you didn’t have to try to be Peter or Jack or Lucy or Mary. That they were her past, but you were her future.”

“You know, she may have something there.” Norm Madsen reached across the corner of the table and patted Mrs. Marshall’s delicate arm. “That would certainly jibe with the name she gave you.”

Clare raised her eyebrows. “Your name?”

Mrs. Marshall smiled, the first wholehearted smile she had given Clare since they began their conversation. “You don’t know my Christian name, do you?”

“I’ve heard Mr. Madsen and Sterling Sumner call you Lacey.”

“That’s my nickname. My pet name, I suppose you’d call it.” Her smile wisped away into something softer and sadder. “I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who calls me by my real name.”

Clare opened her hands in question.

“Solace. That’s what my mother named me. Her Solace.”

Russ came out of the handicapped elevator to thunderous applause. “Elvis is in the building, repeat, Elvis is in the building,” Deputy Chief Lyle MacAuley megaphoned the announcement with his hands.

“Yeah, thanks, I missed you all, too,” Russ said, swinging forward on his crutches. “Now stuff it.”

“I bet Linda forced him to come back to work,” Lyle said. “One week of him stuck at home and she threw his ass out of there. You can tell he’s a bad patient.”

“All men are bad patients.” Harlene Lendrum adjusted her headset over her springy gray curls. “You should see my husband Harold. What a whiner. The last time he got the flu, I told him I was sending him to the Quality Inn out on the Northway. I was perfectly willing to pay so long as it meant someone else fluffing his pillows and fetching him room service.”

“Welcome back, Chief!” Kevin Flynn had gotten a regulation haircut while Russ had been on sick leave. Now the kid looked even more like Opie from
The Andy Griffith Show.
How was he going to do credible traffic stops when he didn’t look old enough to have a learner’s permit? Clearly, a week away was too long.

Russ thumped up the corridor toward the squad room, an overblown, big-city name for the station’s central work area. “How ’bout you guys show me what you’ve gotten done on the Rouse case while I’ve been at home making life difficult for my wife?”

Noble Entwhistle, bless his plodding, methodical soul, followed Russ through the squad-room door and went straight to his desk. “We’ve just gotten the CIS results back on the Clow woman’s car.” He swept up several papers that had been scattered over the desk’s metal surface and held them up for inspection.

“In one week’s time?” Russ said. “It’s a miracle.”

“You must have a special in with the Almighty,” Lyle said, hiking himself up onto his desktop. Russ shot him a look. Lyle grinned.

“What’d they find?” Russ asked, turning his back on MacAuley’s amusement.

“Rouse was in the car.” Noble couldn’t have looked more pleased if they had found the doctor’s body stuffed in the trunk. “They got hairs and a blood sample from the passenger-side headrest.”

“Shee-it.” Russ whistled. “Any prints?”

“A couple of partials along the outside edge of the roof, just above the door. It’s not anything that’ll hold up in court, but it looks like he propped against the car with the door open or maybe reached up while he was inside, sitting down.”

“Now that’s more like it.” Russ tilted toward Noble. “I want Debba Clow in here for questioning like, five minutes ago. Lyle.” He pivoted on one crutch to catch his deputy. “Get the paperwork together and fax it over to the DA’s office. I want a warrant for her house and I want us out there looking before she leaves the station.”

Lyle slid off his desk and took the CIS results from Noble. “This is what I live for,” he said, strolling toward the file cabinet where the application forms were stored. “Pulse-pounding action.”

Forty minutes later, Russ gimped up to Harlene’s operations board for his fifth check-in of the morning. “Anything yet?”

She swiveled her chair around to face him. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping that leg up? Go to your office! Sit down! I will let you know when Noble calls in.”

“My office is a pain in the ass to navigate,” he said. “There’s not enough room around my desk and the damn chairs get in my way. Last time I went in, I knocked over a pile of
Law Enforcement Quarterlies
.”

“Serves you right for not ever picking up in there.” Harlene swiveled back toward her board.

“What the hell’s keeping him so long?”

She swiveled toward him again. “Deborah Clow has little kids, remember? Maybe she has to arrange for someone to sit with them.”

“Oh.” He knew he sounded like he needed someone to sit with him. “I thought her mother-”

Harlene held a hand up, cutting him off. She clipped the microphone back in place in front of her mouth. “Go ahead, fifteen forty-six.”

Russ propped one crutch under his arm and leaned forward to snap on the intercom button. Harlene swatted his hand away and flicked the switch herself. “-with an ETA of twenty minutes,” Noble was saying. “Ms. Clow has agreed to accompany me for questioning. Sus LU’d prior so expect a suit shortly. Fifteen forty-six over.”

Suspect lawyered up before leaving, so expect her attorney shortly. Damn. That was not what he wanted to hear.

“Who do you think she called?” Harlene asked.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Russ said.

As it turned out, Debba Clow’s mouthpiece arrived before she did; not such a surprise, considering his office was a five-minute walk away on Main Street. Russ could hear him before he saw him, badgering Ed at the reception desk. “I want to see my client
before
she’s processed, and I want a copy of any and all warrants extending to her arrest and any searches of her property.”

Russ thumped down the hall toward reception. “Your client’s not under arrest, Mr. Burns. She’s coming in of her own accord to help us locate a missing person.”

Geoffrey Burns looked Russ up and down. Mostly up. He was a little guy, maybe five and a half feet, and Russ figured “little” described him in more ways than one. It would go a long way toward explaining his bantam-cock attitude toward the world. Compensatory something, it was called.

“I’d heard you broke a leg. Reverend Fergusson included you in the prayers yesterday.”

“She did? Huh.” He’d lay good money Geoff Burns hadn’t been praying for his quick recovery.

“Where’s Ms. Clow?”

Evidently they had met the minimum daily requirement of chitchat. “She’s not here yet. Officer Entwhistle is driving her in.”

“What’s the basis of your warrant?”

“I told you, we’re not arresting her. She was the last person to see Dr. Allan Rouse alive.” Or dead, he thought.

“She told me you impounded her car last week and had it searched. What did you find?”

Russ smiled pleasantly. “Let’s wait until we’re all together before we discuss that, shall we?”

“Are you planning on a search of her home?”

He had to give it to Burns, he knew how to stick you like a butterfly on a pin with his questions. “If necessary.” He was saved from further disclosures by the sound of footsteps echoing up the marble stairs in front of them. Noble Entwhistle and Debba Clow appeared, the latter with an angry pink flush high on her cheeks and her kinky hair flying every which way. It was not shaping up to be a promising questioning.

“Deb, thanks for showing up,” Russ said. “Let’s all go back to the interview room.” Aka the interrogation room, but that didn’t sound so friendly. He gestured down the hallway with his head. The department’s small briefing room was where they usually interviewed friendly witnesses or victims. It had windows, tissue boxes, a plug-in coffeemaker. The interrogation room had audio-and videotaping feeds. He knew which one he wanted when talking with Debba Clow. “Noble,” he said as they reached the interrogation room, “will you see if Ms. Clow or her attorney needs anything? Coffee, water…”

“Let’s get down to business,” Burns said. “First order is, I need a minute in which to confer privately with my client.” He cast a glance at the interrogation room’s reinforced door. “Not there.”

Russ smiled, a bit less pleasantly. “We don’t eavesdrop on attorney-client discussions, Mr. Burns.” Burns simply stared at him. Russ breathed in on a slow three-count and turned his head toward Noble. “Officer Entwhistle, will you please escort Mr. Burns and Ms. Clow to my office? You can wait outside to make sure they don’t get lost on their way back.” He bared his teeth at Burns, who bared his in return.

“Thank you. That will do nicely.”

Russ crutched up to the squad room as Burns and Debba Clow disappeared into his office. “Lyle?” he said.

Lyle rounded the corner from the other end of the room. “Sorry. I was in the can.”

“You got anything on that warrant?”

“Amy Nguyen from the DA’s office is in with Judge Ryswick right now. As soon as she’s got it signed, she’ll hand it off to Kevin and me and we’ll split for Clow’s house.”

“Remember, Clow lives with her mother and she has two little kids. One of ’em autistic. So use your good manners and play nice.”

“I always play nice. I’m like the real-life version of that Jerry Orbach guy on
Law & Order
.” Lyle stroked his bushy gray eyebrows.

“Except that Jerry Orbach is a lot better looking than you.” Russ stumped back down the hall to the interrogation room. Balancing on one crutch, he unlatched the door and pushed it open. He wanted to be sitting when Debba Clow and Burns came in. He figured the sight of him balancing precariously as he lowered himself into a chair wouldn’t do much good for his image as the Guy in Charge.

He had just stowed his crutches under his chair when Noble escorted Debba and Burns in. Russ watched her as she took in the room’s windowless, institutional green walls and the steel case furniture bolted to the floor. Her eyes widened and she turned to Burns. That’s right, honey, this is the real deal, Russ thought. Scary, isn’t it?