In the Bleak Midwinter (37 page)

“Yeah.”

He walked slowly, careful not to slosh the water. “Stick your feet in there,” he said, settling the tub in front of the sofa. She pulled the legs of her sweatpants up a bit and complied.

“It feels warm.” She looked surprised.

“That’s because your feet are so damn cold. I don’t have to do anything like hand-grate imported bittersweet chocolate and hazelnuts for this hot cocoa, do I?”

She made a face. “Just sugar and cocoa. Oh, and a drop of vanilla extract is nice.”

“I have to introduce you to the Kreemie Kakes Diner version of hot chocolate.” He found everything quickly. Like her office, her kitchen was orderly and well-organized. She was a woman who had her priorities, no doubt about it.

“Here you go.” He put two mugs on the coffee table, then crossed to the front window and tested to see if the tops locked.

She craned her neck to see what he was up to. “What are you doing?”

“Locking you in.” He moved to the front door, threw the bolt and latched it at the top. “Who can I call to come and stay with you tonight?”

“Russ!” She sounded scandalized. “I couldn’t impose on anyone like that.”

He turned to her. “Clare, someone put a lot of effort into killing you tonight. Let’s not make it any easier for him to take a second crack at you.”

“But he’s—”

“We don’t know what he is. The guy who attacked you might be a Popsicle right now. Or he might have gotten onto his snowmobile and ridden away. And don’t forget whoever that woman was who called the church to get you out there.”

She worried her lower lip. “All right. You can make sure the doors and windows are all locked,” she said. “But I don’t know anyone well enough to ask over. It would be an imposition.”

“Your mother teach you that? You sound very Southern when you say ‘an imposition.’ ” He crossed the room to stand in front of her sofa. “You’re exhausted and you can barely walk. You think of someone you can ‘impose’ on right quick like or I’ll station one of my officers here.” She glared at him. “Which will mean taking someone away from traffic duty during a major storm.”

Her face melted into a look of concern. She gnawed on her lower lip again. “Doctor Anne,” she said finally. “Anne Vining-Ellis. She lives a couple blocks away.”

“She the same Doctor Anne who works the Glens Falls emergency room?” Clare nodded. “I’ve met her. I’ll give her a call.” There was a cordless phone on the table behind the sofa. He dialed information, punched in the number and headed for the stairs. “I’m going to check the upstairs windows,” he told Clare.

“I can’t believe I’m letting you do this,” she said.

“Hello, Ellis residence.” He jiggled the latches in Clare’s bedroom. Locked.

“Hi, is this Dr. Vining-Ellis?”

“Sure is.”

Another bedroom was empty except for a Nordictrak exercise machine and a floormat. The windows were locked.

“This is Chief Van Alstyne of the Millers Kill Police Department. We’ve met a few times before—”

“Over a few drunk drivers. Of course. How can I help you, Chief?”

He sketched out the situation while testing the latches in the next bedroom. It looked as if it had been a guest room for the former priest, and nothing had been removed. He was pretty sure the gun and dog prints and the dark Depression-era furniture weren’t Clare’s. Doctor Anne was horrified at the story of her priest’s ordeal. “Of course I’ll come over and stay with her,” she said. “It’s absolutely no trouble at all. I’ll bring my kit and give her a going-over, too, just to make sure she doesn’t need to be admitted to the hospital.”

He thanked the doctor and rang off. One of the windows in the bathroom was propped open a sliver. A fine line of snow had accumulated on the sill. He shut and locked it. The toilet was running, and he couldn’t get it to stop by jiggling the handle. Inside the cistern, the plunging apparatus was falling apart. He frowned. Couldn’t her parishioners pay for a plumber, for Chrissakes? Well, he could pick up something at Tim’s Hardware, put it in for her next time he was around this way.

“Doctor Anne’s on her way over,” he announced as he reentered the living room. Clare groaned. “And she said to tell you it was not an imposition.” He stuck his hand in the water her feet were soaking in. Cooling. “So, you wanna tell me about what happened?” He headed into the kitchen for more hot water.

“Master Sergeant Ashley ‘Hardball’ Wright saved my sorry ass,” she called after him.

He poked his head through the swinging doors before emerging with a teakettle of hot water. “Hey! I thought I saved your sorry ass.”

She smiled faintly. “You helped. You surely did help.” She sipped her hot cocoa and dabbled her feet while he poured a thin stream of steaming hot water into the tub. “How on earth did you know I was out there?”

He told her about finding the paper trail at St. Alban’s and calling Kristen.

“So she didn’t have anything to do with it. Well, I didn’t think so, not after that guy took a shot at me.” She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “Although before that, when I drove my car over a cliff, I had my doubts. Maybe she was just really bad at directions.”

“You drove your car over a cliff? Christ.”

She frowned.

“Sorry.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a cliff. A big gorge. My car is totaled.” She compressed her lips in an expression he was beginning to recognize. “I loved that car. I don’t get attached to many material things, but I really loved that car.”

“You have any idea who could have been behind this?”

“How about this? This morning, I found out that Katie’s secret lover was Wesley Fowler. His family are members of the congregation. And about as far from the McWhorter’s as you can get, socially, culturally, economically…”

“How the hell did you get that piece of information?”

She told him about her visit to Paul’s office at the Infirmary and the photograph. “It’s still in the pocket of my parka. Your parka,” she amended. “I visited the Fowlers to see if they knew anything about it, which they didn’t, unsurprisingly. Then I went to Albany.”

“Albany?”

“I wanted to see if Katie’s roommates might recognize Wesley’s picture.”

He rolled his eyes. “You know, Clare, the Albany PD already questioned at least two of the roommates.”

“But they didn’t have a picture, and I did. And I had his yearbook.” She twisted on the sofa to face him more fully. “Ow! You were right about the hot prickles. Anyway, at first I thought it was a bust, because none of the girls recognized Wes. But then, just by chance, they spotted a picture of Alyson Shattham. And guess what? She had been to see Katie. It was not a cheerful social visit. They had a fight.”

“When was this?” He swept the newspaper off one overstuffed armchair and perched on the edge.

“Beginning of the school year. September.”

“Huh. Little Alyson Shattam. Who said she hadn’t seen Katie since graduation.”

“Guess who Alyson’s boyfriend was all through last year.”

He smiled slowly. “Wesley Fowler.”

“Ten points.”

“Where is this kid? Still in town?”

“No, he’s a plebe at West Point. His father’s gone down to bring him back, though. They should be here tomorrow.”

He began twisting the sheets of newspaper into kindling. “Want a fire?”

“Please.”

He raked the old ashes to one side and laid splitwood from a big basket over the paper. He crossed two small logs over the kindling and struck one of her silly six-inch-long matches. “Alyson and Wes,” he said, tossing the match on the fire with five inches left unburnt. “A boy and a girl. Go to the same church. Are their families friends?”

“Oh yes,” she said. He sprawled back onto the armchair. “Oh, I feel warmer already. I may become addicted to fires.”

“Yeah, the Shattams were with the Fowlers this morning when I went over. I knew about Alyson and Wes before, though. Dr. Anne’s son gave me the inside scoop on all the high school gossip this past Monday. Sounded like they were the classic king and queen of the prom pair.”

“You sound a tad disenchanted, there.”

“Oh… that’s just an old high school outsider looking in, I suppose. She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’ve met Alyson. She clearly believes that the world owes it to her to treat her like the princess she is. And from what I’ve heard of Wes Fowler, he’s the same type, a golden boy who’s never had anything bad happen to him.”

“So what do you think? Did Alyson know Wes was seeing Katie on the side? Maybe she wouldn’t put out and Katie would? So she let Katie keep Wesley-boy happy?”

“There’s no doubt that Katie did, as you oh-so-tastefully phrased it, ‘put out.’ But honestly, I can’t see Alyson Shattham standing by while her boyfriend gets… serviced. She strikes me more as the kind of girl to keep him on as tight a leash as possible.”

“Yeah, I know that type. Gets her kicks from making some poor slob jump through hoops for the promise of some—” Clare was looking at him with undisguised interest. He felt the tips of his ears redden. “Never mind. I agree, it’s more likely Alyson didn’t know that Katie was sleeping with Wes.”

“But then, at some point, its more than just sleeping with her. He gets her pregnant. Could he have come running to Alyson then?”

“What for?”

“Help. Advice. Forgiveness. Knowing a little bit about the psychology of teenage boys, I’m willing to bet a non-pregnant girlfriend suddenly looked a lot more appealing to him.”

“She looked genuinely surprised to me that morning at your church. Of course, I’ve been fooled before.” He watched Clare twist a strand of hair around her finger and chew her lip. “Okay. Let’s say he did tell her. What do the king and queen of the prom do when he’s gotten another girl knocked up?”

“They make the problem disappear?”

“Let’s say Wesley persuades Katie to give away the baby.”

“That could explain Alyson’s visit to Albany. Maybe she was the go-between, trying to talk Katie into it.”

“But a few days after leaving the baby at your back door, Katie gets back in touch with Wesley. She says she can’t stand it, she wants the baby back.”

“I don’t think Wes Fowler would have been too keen to have it come out that he got a girl from Depot Street pregnant and then abandoned the baby outside St. Alban’s on a freezing winter’s night. The West Point commandant and the ethics commission take a dim view of that sort of thing.”

Russ snorted.

“And there had already been a story in the paper, remember? The day after we found the baby? There wouldn’t have been much chance of him keeping it quiet if Katie tried to reclaim Cody.”

“So one of them—Wesley or Alyson—decides to stop Katie before she can tell anyone she’s the baby’s mom. One of them gets her out by the kill and cracks her head open and leaves her there to die.”

She swished her feet through the water.

“But then another problem rears its ugly head,” he said. “Darrell, who evidently once saw Katie and Wes together.”

“He must have seen the Fowlers’ family picture on our parish bulletin board Wednesday morning when he met with me and the Burnses. That would explain why he broke off the discussion so quickly, if he had a name to put with a face, finally.” She shook her head, silent for a moment.

“If he did, it’s not your fault, Clare.” She glanced up at him. “You’ve got your responsible look on,” he explained. She gave him a half smile. “We know he called somebody. Maybe he was putting the squeeze on Wesley, and the kid high-tailed it back to town and put a bullet through Darrell’s slimy little brain.”

“Or Alyson did.”

He looked at her, nonplused. She spread her hands. “You think she couldn’t? Maybe she’s the shooter while Wes went to the house in Albany to collect any incriminating evidence.”

“The guy who said he was Katie’s father? The roommate described him as older, with a mustache.”

“According to Dr. Anne’s boy, Wes Fowler was in the Millers Kill High School Drama Society. He appeared in several plays and in the yearly musical. A little left-over gray tint in his hair, a fake moustache… it might been enough to fool a couple of freshmen who had had a few too many beers.”

Russ slid out of his chair and squatted on the floor in front of her. “Let’s have a foot.” She lifted one, dripping, out of the water and let him squeeze it. “Need to heat it up a bit,” he said. He held a hand against the copper teakettle, checking to make sure it was still warm before pouring a stream of warm water into the tub.

She made a noise in the back of her throat, flexing her toes. “If he did kill Darrell and clean out Katie’s room, he must have thought at that point he had covered all the bases. There wasn’t anything to link him to Katie except Cody himself, and who would think to ask for Wes Fowler’s DNA to test for paternity of poor Katie McWhorter’s abandoned child?”

“Nobody, until the Reverend Fergusson got her hands on a photo of the two of them together and immediately rushed over to confront his proud parents with evidence that one plus one makes three.” He turned to the fireplace and tossed another log in. “Holy Christ, Clare. You really could have died up on that mountain. You were supposed to have died.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Would he have had time to get from West Point to here and set up that ambush for me?”

He stood slowly, turning around, scanning the dark corners of the room without meaning to. “I don’t see why not. It’s a three-hour drive at most, another hour to get himself parked somewhere safe on a camp road on Tenant Mountain. It’s not as if he needed to come up with an elaborate way to trap you. All he needed was a good way to get you up to that mountain and someone pretending to be Kristen McWhorter.”

“Which brings us back to Alyson.”

“She knew you were helping Kristen, didn’t she?”

Clare nodded.

“And she must have known you’re the sort to charge off to help first, without asking questions until later.”

She cocked her head at him. “You make me sound like the Lone Ranger.”

“Doesn’t make it untrue. The fact that you’re impulsive is not a deeply-hidden character trait.”

“I prefer to think of it as making decisions quickly.”

“I’m sure you do. Prefer to think of it that way.”