All Mortal Flesh (29 page)

Mark could hear the chief’s teeth click, the hiss of his breath releasing. “No,” he said.

“Good.” Burns turned toward Jensen. “No more questions until I’ve had a chance to confer with my client,” he said.

“Russell.” Mrs. Van Alstyne waded toward them. “The man from the state police came to Kilmer’s—”

“They’re desecrating my sister’s body,” the bleached blonde said. Her voice shook with anger. “This bastard killed my sister and now he’s sending storm troopers over to pry open her coffin and… and…” She choked on tears and spittle.

“Goddammit, I didn’t kill your sister! That woman—”

“
She
says you can’t account for where you were!” the blonde screeched, slashing her finger toward Investigator Jensen. “For almost twenty-four hours! Twenty-four hours! My sister was killed! Where were you, you sanctimonious bastard? Where were you?”

“He was with me.” A woman’s voice, pitched to carry over the crowd. Heads turned. People pushed each other for a better view. The reporter pivoted, his face alight with interest.

“He was with me,” Clare Fergusson said. “He spent the night with me.”

He arrived at the cabin just as the last streaks of orange and red were fading from the sky. He had a bag of groceries in each hand, and he balanced his steps carefully as he crunched up the snow-packed drive to the door. Maple and alder and birch trees cast pale violet shadows on the snow. Behind them, the forest thickened into the darkness of hemlock and eastern pine. He paused, one boot on the deck stairs. Above the cabin’s deep-eaved roof, he could see the first star of the evening glimmering through a thin veil of chimney smoke.

She opened the door, spilling golden light. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing?” She bent down—slipping something on her feet, he guessed—and stepped onto the deck.

“First star,” he said.

“Did you make a wish?” He could hear, more than see, her smile.

“I don’t know what to ask for.”

“Ah.” No smile now. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

He trudged up the steps. “I brought dinner.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I overcompensated and carried a ton of food up here with me.” She opened the door for him. “Trust me, we could be snowed in until spring and we wouldn’t run out.”

He paused in the doorway. Looked down at her. “And isn’t that a tempting thought?”

He could see her cheeks flush before she turned away. She pushed him into the cabin. “C’mon, don’t let all the heat out the door.”

He let her relieve him of the groceries as he took off his boots and parka. “This is nice,” he said. The cabin was one big room, with an assemblage of living room furniture to his left and a dining table to his right. A glowing wood-stove set on a platform of riverstones divided the front of the cabin from the kitchen. Russ followed the line of its broad stone chimney to where it vanished through the roof. “What’s upstairs in the loft?” he asked.

“The bedroom,” Clare said absently, pulling a box of soba noodles and a jar of natural peanut butter from one of the bags. “What were you thinking of?”

What was I thinking of
? Bedrooms. Firelight. Skin. Teeth.

“Pad Thai?” she went on, lifting a clove of garlic.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Pad Thai.” He shook himself like a dog emerging from a river. “Mom’s still on the high-protein, low-carbs diet. I need a pasta fix some bad.” He went around the woodstove, shucking his sweater over his head as he did so. There were a pair of spindle chairs pulled up to a small kitchen table, hard against the back of the chimney. He tossed it over the back of one and rolled his sleeves up.

“How is it going? Staying with your mom?”

He grabbed the tray of chicken breasts and ripped off the cling wrap. “It’s okay, I guess. It helps that she got that house after Janet and I had flown the nest. If I were back in the same room I had in high school, I think I’d feel like even more of a failure than I do now. As it is, it’s more like being a houseguest than like moving back home.”

Her hands stilled over the peppers. “Oh, God, Russ. I’m so sorry.”

He wiped his hands on a dishrag and took hold of her shoulders. “Listen. I know we have to talk. When you asked me up here, I knew it wasn’t a date or an invitation to a seduction. But, dammit, before we get to the part where we tear our guts out, I’d like to enjoy a nice meal with you. How many times have we ever had dinner together?”

“Three,” she said.

“Okay.” He shook her gently. “Can we put all that other stuff aside for an hour or two? Can we just put on the radio and talk about our jobs and the weather and the idiots in Washington like a real couple would do?”

She nodded. Slowly, she smiled. God, he loved seeing her smile. “So,” she said. “How ’bout them Patriots?”

She dug up candles in the pantry. Their light reflected in the glass-front bookcase behind the dining table. “I’m worried about Kevin,” he was saying. “He has the potential to be a good officer, but he’s still awfully immature. He needs to broaden his experience. I think the farthest away from Millers Kill he’s ever been was the senior class trip to New York.”

She speared a bite of sauce-soaked chicken. “Is there any way you could get him into a more urban police department for six months? Like a temporary detached duty?”

“Yeah. Except then I’d lose him. You can’t keep ’em down on the farm—”

“Once they’ve seen Paree.”

He poured himself another glass of cranberry juice. “As it is, I give Mark Durkee another year or two, tops, before he jumps ship. The talented ones, the ones with brains and energy, they all go off to bigger and better things. The ones who stay are the ones like Noble, who’d be dogmeat in a larger unit, or like me and Lyle, too old to change anymore.”

She snorted. “Yep, that’s you. Doddering off to the Infirmary. Don’t forget to give my office a call. We’ll put you on the visitation list.”

“Watch it, youngster. We’ll see what you say a few years from now, when your knees have given up the ghost.”

“Given it up for the Holy Ghost, more like.” She took a sip of her wine. “I think you may be wrong about Mark Durkee, though. His wife has family here, doesn’t she?”

“Bains. There are dozens of ’em between here and Cossayuharie.”

“And they’ve got a kindergartner, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hard to just up and abandon grandparents and school and all.” Ignoring her manners, she propped an elbow on the table. “It’s Mark you should get a TDD for. He’s got something to come back to.”

“And Kevin?”

She picked up her wineglass again and looked at him over the rim. “He needs to broaden his experience, all right. I suspect that there’s nothing wrong with Kevin Flynn that getting laid wouldn’t cure.”

He nearly choked on his noodles laughing.

They washed the dishes together.

“My parents used to do this when I was a little girl,” Clare said, scrubbing at a sticky spot where the peanut sauce had scorched on. “Mama would wash and Daddy would dry.”

“That’s the natural order of things,” Russ said, putting a final gloss on a plate before replacing it in the cupboard. “Women wash. Men dry.” He picked a glass out of the drainer. He hadn’t done this in years. He and Linda ate a lot of prepared meals, or he would throw something together out of cans if he got home too late or she was working on an order. The dishes would go in the dishwasher, sometimes hours apart. “ ’Tain’t natural the other way round.”

“And why, pray tell, is that?”

“Women have a mystical affinity to water. It’s a tidal thing, you know, the pull of the moon.”

“Uh-huh. And men?”

“Oh, men just like the repetitive motion of rubbing something up and down.”

Fortunately, his glasses protected his eyes when she sprayed water in his face.

They got down to business in the chairs in front of the woodstove. She had blown out the candles and turned off the lights before they sat down. “Sometimes, it’s easier to talk in the dark,” she said.

Of course, it wasn’t dark. They were lit by the leaping red-orange of the fire. But she was right. There was something about the heat of the woodstove, and the shadows dancing off in the corners of the cabin, that unloosened the constraints of the soul. He wondered if there might not be something to the idea of racial memory, if a thousand generations of humans sitting before a fire were making him feel this way: open, balanced, neither dreading nor expecting what was to come. He looked into the face of the woman sitting opposite him.

Or maybe it was Clare.

“What does your marriage counselor say?” she asked.

“What everybody else does. That I need to make up my mind. Except she says ‘I need to discern my inner goals and bring them into congruence with my stated intentions.’ ” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “What does your spiritual advisor say? Deacon Wigglesworth?”

“Aberforth. Willard Aberforth. He hasn’t been advising me so much as listening to me blather on. It helps to unload some of the garbage that’s been accumulating in my heart.”

“Garbage?”

She smiled humorlessly. “You think I’m so all-forbearing and even-tempered about this. You have no idea. How many times I’ve caught myself thinking,
Well, maybe his wife will drop dead of a heart attack
or
Maybe her plane will go down on the next buying trip
.”

He winced.

“I know. It’s awful stuff, and I hate myself for it. The times I literally sit on my hands to keep from calling you and inviting you over to my house and into my bed. The nasty, gut-churning jealousy when I think of the two of you doing the ordinary, stupid things couples get to do. Eating together every night. Watching a video.” Her voice dropped. “Sleeping together. God, when you two went off for the Christmas holidays, I was a wreck. A total wreck. That’s when I knew I had to take this time. I knew I needed to be alone to think and pray.”

“Oh, darlin’.” He sighed. “That was supposed to be a rekindling-the-marriage trip.”

“How did it go?”

“I think it would have worked better if I could have stopped thinking about you for more than five minutes at a time.”

She smiled a little.

“Ever since I told her about us, Linda’s been trying her damndest to reach out to me. First it was shopping bags full of sexy lingerie and silk sheets and massage oils.”

Clare winced.

“Then it was the trip to Montreal, then the marriage counselor. Even kicking me out of the house. I don’t think she’s as interested in exploring the non-marital side of herself, which is what the therapist recommended, as she is in making me see what I’ll be missing.”

Clare was silent for a moment. “And will you be missing her?”

“Yes.” He knew she was half-hoping for a different answer, but he couldn’t be anything less than honest with her. “We’ve got twenty-five years together. Half my life. That’s too much to just walk away from. I stood up in front of my family and friends and promised to stay with her until death. She’s kept her promises. Why should she suffer because I couldn’t?”

“And you love her.”

“And I love her. It’s different than the way I love you, but yes.”

Clare looked away from the fire. She was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “I think what you have with her is love. What you have with me is novelty. I’m new and different, and we’ve been catching bits and pieces of each other over the past two years.” He had never known her to sound so bitter. “I expect that if we ever spent any real time together, the infatuation would wear off pretty damn quick.”

“Clare.” He pushed out of his chair and knelt on the rag rug before her, pinning her in place. “Don’t say that.” Pain and frustration roughened his voice. “Say what’s true. You know things about me that no one else ever will, not in twenty-five years, not in fifty. You know
me
. Goddammit, if I was just looking for a quick thrill, don’t you think I would have ended it by now? Do you think I like making my wife cry? Do you think I like lying awake at night, caught between destroying her and destroying myself? ’Cause that’s what it feels like when I think about never being with you again. Like I might as well walk up into the mountains and lie down and let the snow take me.”

She was shaking beneath his hands, and he realized she was crying. He pulled her against him, tumbling her out of her chair, and they rocked together in front of the hissing fire. “Christ, Clare,” he said. “Christ. Tell me what to do. I can’t leave her and I can’t leave you. For God’s sake, tell me what to do.”

She was standing by one of the windows, looking out. It was snowing, softly, fat flakes that looked like the paper-and-scissors ones his nieces taped to their windows all winter long. He had gone out to the shed and brought in more wood, triggering the sensor light over the deck, and the snow pinwheeled through the brightness and vanished into the dark.

“We have to end it,” she said.

“No.” He was sitting on the polished wooden floor, his back to the wall. It seemed appropriate.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m not willing to buy my happiness with your marriage. And neither are you.”

“I love you,” he said. His voice sounded bewildered in his own ears. “Am I just supposed to stop loving you?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Then I wouldn’t feel as if someone put a stake through my sternum. No. We just… go on.”

“That sounds like that idiotic Céline Dion song.”

“Yeah.” She stared at the falling snow. “You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from
Titanic
describes your relationship.”

She had taken his seat on the floor, back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her. He was sitting on the second-from-bottom tread of the stairs leading to the loft. “No lunches at the Kreemy Kakes Diner anymore,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I won’t drive by the rectory to check things out anymore.”

“No.”

“But it’s a small town. We’ll wind up seeing each other. We won’t be able to help it!” He suddenly felt wildly, irrationally angry with her. It was his town, dammit. He was here first. She should go. He was happy before she came.