In the Bleak Midwinter (23 page)

“Clare?” For a selfish second, he thought please, please, not another distressed woman. I can’t handle any more today. “Are you okay?” The back of her head jerked up and down. He saw the bank of yellow lights ahead and coasted to a slow stop well before the oddly angled intersection of Route 39 and Tanco Road. He had once waited here while the Millers Kill fire department used the jaws of life to remove three mangled bodies from a station wagon that had tried to beat the light in bad weather. The driver had been a guy his age. “Clare,” he said, turning toward her, “if you’re okay, will you please look at me?”

The back of her head jerked back and forth. “Clare?” He thought back to how he felt earlier this evening, the weight and tension dropping off of him as he sat across from her at the kitchen table, talking. “Clare, who do you talk to? You asked me that, remember? Who do you talk to, Clare?”

Her voice was thick and tight. “I’ll be all right. It’s just been a long—” she couldn’t continue. The lights turned green. He didn’t move. “It’s just—” she tried again. “She makes me think of my sister,” she finally got out.

“Your sister,” he said. “The blond girl in those pictures on your table? What about your sister?”

She turned to him, her eyes bright, her face drawn and pinched. “She died. Five years ago this Thanksgiving.” She scrubbed her face with her open hands.

In the mirror, he could see distant lights headed up Route 39. He shifted the truck into gear and carefully drove on through the icy intersection. “Tell me,” he said, wondering as he said it why he was asking. He respected people’s privacy more than most, and this was clearly a private pain. “What was her name?”

“Grace. She was…” She coughed. “She was like a beautiful decoration on a Christmas tree. Funny and loving and frivolous. She was the sweet little sister and I was the tomboy know-it-all big sister. She was the beautiful one and I was the smart one.” One side of her mouth crooked up. “She was always trying to get me more interested in clothes and makeup and dating and all that girl stuff that came so naturally to her.” She plucked at the leather sleeve of her coat. “She gave me this jacket when I made first lieutenant, because she thought it looked like something a dashing aviatrix would wear.”

“She sounds like a very special person,” he said quietly.

“She was to us,” Clare said. “She never did anything that would make you stand up and take notice. She worked for our parents’ aviation company, secretarial work and bookkeeping. Enough to make minimum payments on her credit cards, she used to say. Mostly, she wanted to get married and have lots of kids. She would have, too. She had guys left, right, and center.” Clare smiled, a small, inward smile. “She volunteered at the local hospital because she wanted to meet a doctor.”

Russ didn’t want to hear more. He hated the dread creeping along the edges of his nerves, knowing how the story ended. He wanted the details left off, so he wouldn’t have to feel the ache under his sternum that had already begun. Aching for Clare, who had dried her eyes and was speaking in a low, thick voice.

“She was four years younger than me. Twenty-five when she—when it happened. She had had this pain on and off in her abdomen, thought it was indigestion or gas. It finally got bad enough for her to have it checked out.” She closed her eyes. “It was colo-rectal cancer, well advanced. She didn’t suspect. No one suspected. No one in our family had ever had cancer. She went in for a checkup in the morning and by that evening she was under a death sentence. In one day.”

He made the left-hand turn onto Main Street, the truck’s rear fish-tailing gently before he got it straightened out. The shop lights were almost invisible in the snowy haze.

“I was stationed at Fort Bragg at the time, about four hours from home, so I didn’t ask for compassionate leave. Grace moved back into our parents’ house and I visited them every weekend. For awhile, I really thought she was going to get better. They treated it very, very aggressively, and I thought, she’s twenty-five, she’s under the best medical care possible, she has people all over the country praying for her, writing her letters, of course she can’t die. Of course she can’t die.” She folded her hands and pressed them to her mouth as if she were pushing a prayer back into her throat. “Four months. After four months, ‘she can’t die’ became the problem, not the expectation. Do you know anything about colo-rectal cancer?”

He shook his head.

“She was in agony. She was half-dead from the chemo and the half of her that was alive was suffering every day, all day. The fact that she was young and strong became a… a curse, because her body hung on, and hung on…” She rested her chin on her tightly clasped hands. “There was an intern she had dated, a friend of hers. Harry Jussawala. He would visit her, sometimes stay with her during treatments in the hospital.” She breathed deeply. “He came for Thanksgiving dinner. My folks always have friends as well as family for Thanksgiving. Their house is always open. I wasn’t there, I was on duty so one of the married guys could be at home with his family. Anyway, while the rest of them were in the kitchen or outside, Harry went into Grace’s room and gave her fifty crushed Valium pills suspended in a solution of cranberry juice and vodka.” She looked at Russ. “Does that sound stiff? That’s how I always think of it, you know, because that’s how I first heard about it from the investigators.” Her mouth quirked. “It was a Cape Codder, get it? Her favorite drink. She died within a half hour. She was dead when my mom went in to check on her.”

He didn’t know what to say. His heart hurt for her. “Oh, Clare. I’m so sorry.”

“Harry was never arrested. They talked about murder, then about manslaughter, but in the end, no one could prove anything except that he had brought the crushed Valium to her room. His medical license was revoked. I still don’t know, to this day, if it was really her idea to kill herself or if he acted out of his own sense of compassion. She didn’t leave a note or anything.” Her face crumpled at last. “I never got to say good-bye to her.” She furiously blinked back tears. “And you know what’s awful? To this day, I don’t know whether to curse him or bless him. She was suffering, I know that, and it was going to end in her death. But she was alive! To be put down like a hurting dog…” she shook her head sharply, her lips closing tightly over her grief. She rubbed her face again, hard, and sniffled wetly. “I’m sorry. I never talk about this, I don’t know what got into me.”

He turned onto Church Street, swerving to one side to let a snow plow get by in the other lane. “It’s late and you’re tired,” he said. “Fatigue is like a truth drug, you know. Makes you do and say things you ordinarily wouldn’t consider.” He stopped at a red light and looked at her. “I think with all this stuff about Kristen and her sister, you needed to talk about Grace, and you needed a friend. I like to think I qualify there.”

She wiped a finger under her nose, smiling a little at him. “You do. You surely do. Thanks.”

He drove forward, past the park, past St. Alban’s, onto Elm Street. Over her protests about not trying to make it into her driveway, he shifted into second and churned a path up to her kitchen door. He was damned if he’d make her walk any farther than she had to in those skimpy boots she had on.

The truck idled quietly. “The guys on the graveyard shift always swing by my place around dawn,” he said. “Give me your key. I’ll radio them tonight before I turn in, ask if one of them will drive your car back into town if the roads are plowed by then.” She nodded, rubbing her eyes once more before fishing a key chain out of her pocket. She looked like a little kid at the end of an overlong day, all flushed cheeks and exhausted, tear-bright eyes. She pulled a key off the ring and handed it to him. “You need me to come in?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I started out this evening hoping I could help you get it all off your chest,” she said, smiling. “Didn’t expect to be on the receiving end.”

He draped his arm over the back of the seat. “Will I embarrass you if I tell you I admire you? The way you listen to people, the way you want to help?”

She smiled more emphatically. “Yes, you will. But thanks. For everything. You’re right, you know. I do need a friend.” She looked at him seriously. “Thanks. For letting me be just Clare. Instead of the Reverend Fergusson. It’s been a long time since I—it’s a rare thing to have someone you can just be yourself with, you know. Your whole self.”

He was going to make a crack about hanging out with heathens more, but he couldn’t, not with her looking at him that way. He shifted his gaze to the dashboard, unable to meet her eyes. “Good night, Clare.”

“Good night, Russ.” She opened the door and slipped from the cab.

“Clare—” he said. She paused, her hand on the door, the snow swirling around her and into the passenger seat. Her hair stirred in the wind, already hung with feathery snowflakes.

“Nothing,” he said. “Talk to you tomorrow.” He waited until he had seen her inside the kitchen before he shifted the truck into gear. She waved at him from the window. He pulled out of her snow-drifted driveway and drove away from the rectory at a much faster speed than was safe.

Clare paused in front of the parish bulletin board, a packing box of Christmas banners propped against one hip. Still woolly-headed from the late night and high emotion, she had tackled the messy, mindless task of digging the church’s Christmas decorations out of the undercroft this morning. The Sunday-best of her parishioners’ photographs contrasted with her rumpled, sweaty, dusty state and reminded her that she would have to wash and change in order to be presentable. The picture of Karen and Geoffrey Burns caught her eye. They looked so happy and relaxed in the photo, with the kind of sleek contentment that more than enough money brings.

For all of Geoff ’s raging and Karen’s desperation, Clare still couldn’t believe that their desire for a child could lead them into murder. She had seen them with that baby in the hospital, seen the instant love and tenderness that was ordinarily lost in the brassy blare of their personalities. Within their small universe of two, they were gentle, caring people. It struck her that perhaps they needed a child most of all so they could show that vulnerable side to another human being.

“Reverend Clare?” Lois’s voice broke her concentration. She hoisted the box higher and walked into the secretary’s office.

“A few messages for you,” Lois said. “Karen Burns called, and Mr. Felton’s daughter, to reschedule your visit. He’s going in for some tests and he won’t be back to the Infirmary until tomorrow.”

“Anything serious?”

“She didn’t sound too concerned. The last one was Kristen McWhorter. Is she related to the—”

“Her sister. What did she say?”

“She’s going to see her mother, and wondered if you’d come along.” Lois pushed the pink message memos across her desk. “Her number’s there.”

“Thanks.” Clare dropped the box against the wall and took the paper slips. “Say, Lois, you don’t know anyone who could get the mold spots out of these felt banners, do you?”

The church secretary sniffed a few times. “That’s what that smell is.” She tilted her head so that her perfectly-cut bob swung sideways. “You’ve come to the right person. Not that I ever have to deal with mold, you understand, but I do know the best dry cleaner in the three-county area.”

“Somehow, I knew you would.”

In her office, Clare flung herself into her chair with a creak and a snap. She picked up two of the pink papers and held them up, one in each hand, as if weighing Karen Burns against Kristen McWhorter. She looked out the window at the diamond-pieced sky, longing for a four-hour nap. Steam off the smell of moldy old boxes, burrow under her grandmother’s guilt, turn her Thelonious Monk CD on low and forget about the world for awhile.

Too bad the inward voice that gently and relentlessly urged her on could find her, even under a Baltimore guilt. And make itself heard even over jazz from the ’68 Monmartre session. Heck, God was probably playing at that session. She picked up the phone and dialed.

“Kristen? It’s Clare Fergusson. You left a message for me?”

“Yeah. I was hoping… I have to go see my mom today to start sorting things out. I was wondering… would you come with me?”

“Are you sure you don’t want some privacy with your mother? I mean, if you want to do more than go over the funeral plans with her. You two have some very intense issues to discuss.”

Kristen groaned over the phone. “Yeah. The thing is, I think if you were there I’d, you know, be more likely to get to the tough stuff. I know it’s asking a lot…”

“No, I’d be more than happy to come if I can be helpful, Kristen. It’s not asking a lot. I’m glad you thought to call me.”

There was a pause. “About last night? I’m sorry I got all weird on you. I was just… it was all too much, you know?”

“I know. Believe me, I understand.” Clare pulled her oversized agenda toward her. “I’ve got a counseling session at three, but I’m free until then. Give me the directions to your mother’s apartment, and I’ll meet you there.” She scribbled the address on a piece of scrap paper and wrote
KRISTEN: NOON
in the agenda. “Okay. See you in about half an hour.”

Someone had hung a pair of plastic wreaths on the front doors of 162 South Street. The peeling apartment facades must have been working-man’s flats a hundred years ago. Utilitarian and cheap back then, and not improved by the last thirty years of unemployment and neglect. Still, Clare could see evidence of the coming Christmas as she fishtailed slowly down the street. Crayon-colored reindeer taped in windows, strings of fairy lights wrapped around the posts of one battered and sagging porch.

She parked as close to the curb as she could. No sign of Kristen’s black Civic. She kept her engine running to ward off the cold and turned up the Top Forty station on her radio. Everything was calm in the afternoon’s watery sunlight, but she couldn’t be far from where Russ had answered a domestic disturbance call last Friday when she had gone on patrol with him.