“Where should we put her?” Shaun asked.
“Lay her down in the backseat.” Russ looked in the rear for a blanket or a coat to lay under her, but there was nothing except more gardening equipment.
They stretched the woman out on the sticky plastic seat. She looked clammy and paler than before. Russ had a sudden image of himself and Shaun driving into town in an overheated granny car with a corpse in the back. He shuddered.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, sure. You want to drive?”
Shaun held up his hands. “No way, man. If we get stopped, I don’t want the cops getting too close to me.” He sniffed his shirt. “Can you smell it on me?”
Russ rolled his eyes. “You know it’s good stuff if it’s making you ’noid.” He slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted it back to fit his long frame. “Hop in.”
The ride into Millers Kill passed in silence. Russ was concentrating on driving as fast as he could. Shaun was tense, hissing between his teeth whenever Russ took a corner too tightly, gripping his seat if another car went past them. And in the back was-nothing. Russ couldn’t even hear the old lady breathe. As they passed from the forest down into the rolling farmland, the back of his neck began to creep. He couldn’t shake the idea that if he turned around, he would see her lying there, wet, unbreathing, looking at him with her black eyes. He was grateful when they came to the town and he had to focus on navigating through the stop-and-go traffic.
He pulled into emergency parking at the Washington County Hospital and killed the engine. Shaun looked at him. “Well?” he said. “Let’s get her in there.”
Russ forced himself to twist in his seat and check behind him. And, of course, he saw nothing except an unconscious old lady. His shoulders twitched at the sudden release of tension. “Yeah,” he said to Shaun.
If he had been less weirded out and more on top of things, he would have gone into the emergency room, fetched out a couple of nurses, and had them wheel the old lady into the place themselves. He thought of it, later, but at the time, sliding her out of the Rambler seemed like the most logical thing to do. He took her feet and Shaun took her shoulders. He was so intent on avoiding a collision while walking backward that he didn’t see the commotion their entrance caused. Shaun did, though, and nearly dropped the woman on her head.
“For Chrissake, Shaun, don’t just-”
“What are you boys doing?” The nurse bearing down on them had a bosom like the prow of a battleship, and the face to match. In one swift move, she caught the old woman’s wrist lightly in one hand while digging her other fingers bone-deep into Russ’s shoulder.
“Ow!” he said. “We’re not doing anything!”
“Is this your grandmother?”
“I don’t know who it is! We just found her. At Stewart’s Pond. She walked into the water. She tried to drown herself.”
She sized him up with a single flick of her eyelashes, and even though she barely came up to his chest, she somehow managed to speak over his head. “Skelly, McClaren, get that gurney over here.” She glared at Shaun, who was looking longingly at the exit doors. “Don’t even think about moving, young man.”
Two nurses scarcely older than Shaun and Russ rolled a pallet over. One of them glanced sympathetically at Russ. The battleship let go of his shoulder in order to ease the old woman onto the gurney.
“Into the examination room,” she said to the other nurses, who obeyed her with such speed that Russ figured she must terrorize everybody she came into contact with. She hooked her hands around his and Shaun’s arms and followed the gurney, towing them past the admissions desk and through the swinging double doors into the examination room. She bulldozed through a square of limp blue curtains shielding the old woman from public view. “Get Dr. Hansvoort,” she said firmly. One of the young nurses disappeared. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she told the remaining nurse. “Get her vitals. Ah, Dr. Hansvoort. Thank you for coming so promptly.”
The young resident who had parted the curtains looked as if he wouldn’t have dared take his time. “Nurse Vigue?”
She rattled Russ’s and Shaun’s arms. “All right, you two. Tell Dr. Hansvoort here what happened.” She narrowed her eyes. “Truthfully.”
Russ and Shaun fell all over themselves trying to get their story out. While they described the woman’s strange actions, Russ’s dive to rescue her, and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Dr. Hansvoort clicked on a penlight and looked into his patient’s eyes, nose, and throat.
When they had finished their recital-Shaun’s last comment had been “… and so we’d like to go now, please”-the doctor frowned.
“Attempted suicide,” he said to Nurse Vigue. “Or perhaps senile dementia. You had better put a call in to the police.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she said, nodding her approval at the doctor’s performance. She captured Shaun and Russ again and sailed them back through the swinging doors into the waiting room. “You boys sit here. The police will have questions about this incident.”
And if they don’t, Russ thought, she’ll make sure to tell them they ought to.
“But,” Shaun began.
“Sit.” She arched a thinly plucked brow at them and seemed to soften a little. “We have quite a few back issues of
Boy’s Life
magazine. I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading them.”
“For God’s sake, sit down and read,” Russ muttered to Shaun, taking a chair himself and opening the first magazine at hand.
Two issues of
Popular Mechanics
later, the emergency-room doors opened and Russ looked up to see the weather-beaten face of Chief Liddle. He was neither large nor intimidating-in fact, he looked more like a farmer than a cop-but both boys sank in their seats when he glanced their way.
The chief spoke briefly with Nurse Vigue and then vanished into the examination room. “Now you’re screwed,” Shaun whispered. “He’s had his eye on you ever since he caught us torching tires at the dump.”
Russ shook his head. “I’m not scared of him,” he said, and it was true. He had seen the chief a few too many times, back before his dad passed away, gently steering the incoherent and maudlin Walter Van Alstyne up the front walk and into the parlor. The chief always said the same thing: “He’s had a few too many, Margy. I guess he needs to sleep it off.” Then he’d look real close into Russ’s mom’s face and ask, “You be all right here with him while he’s like this?”
And she would get all brisk and efficient and tell him they would make out fine, and then they’d help Dad to his bed and she’d press a cup of coffee-usually refused-on the chief.
It wasn’t until after his dad was dead that Russ realized what the chief had really been asking his mom, and when he did, it enraged him, that anyone could think his gentle, soft-spoken father would ever harm his mother. But later, he thought about how the chief had always acted as if Walter Van Alstyne’s drunkenness was a onetime thing, and how careful he was of his mom’s pride. And he realized the question wasn’t that far-fetched after all. Because in his own way, his dad had hurt his mom a lot.
When the chief had caught him drinking Jack Daniel’s and leading a group of seniors in lighting tires on fire and rolling them downhill from the dump, he had hauled Russ behind his cruiser for a talking-to. To the rest of the guys, it must have looked as if Russ had missed getting arrested by the skin of his teeth. But in truth, Liddle hadn’t threatened him with the lockup. Instead, he had looked at Russ as though he had been stealing from a church, and said, “Russell, don’t you think your mother’s been through enough without you grieving her with this kind of foolishness? How are you going to look her in the eye if I have to bring you home…” he didn’t say
just like your father.
He didn’t have to.
Russ didn’t have the words to tell this to Shaun, so he just grunted and snapped open a year-old
Life
magazine. It showed pictures of a massive antiwar demonstration. He shut it again, leaned back against the vinyl seat, and closed his eyes. This was supposed to have been a fun day fishing, one last day when he didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. Now it was all turned to crap.
“You boys want to tell me what happened?”
Russ opened his eyes. Chief Liddle stood in front of them, his thumbs hooked into his gun belt. Russ and Shaun clambered to their feet, and Russ let Shaun rattle on about the fishing and the old woman and the rescue and the resuscitation. He wound it up by explaining how they had driven the old woman’s car to the hospital, then said, “Can I please go and call my mom to come get us? Because I just now realized we need a ride back to the lake to pick up my car.”
The chief looked at both of them closely. He sniffed. “You two smell like the Dew Drop Inn on a Saturday night.”
Shaun’s eyes got wide and white.
“It’s me, sir,” Russ said. “I had a couple beers. But it’s not as bad as it smells-I knocked ’em over when I took my jeans off to go after the old lady. That’s why I stink so bad.”
The chief shook his head. “Russell-,” he began.
“Russ is leaving for the army next week,” Shaun blurted. “You know what they say, Chief. ‘If you’re old enough to fight for your country…’”
“You aren’t going, are you?” Chief Liddle asked Shaun.
“Ah, no.”
“Then I suggest you hush up and stay away from booze where I can smell you. Go on, go call your mother.” Shaun didn’t have to be told twice. He took off for the pay phone at the other end of the hall. Liddle looked straight at Russ, and the fact that the chief now had to look up to meet his eyes gave Russ a weird, disoriented feeling, like the time after his dad’s service when Mr. Kilmer, the funeral director, had asked for ‘Mr. Van Alstyne’s signature’ and he had realized that that was him, that he was ‘Mr. Van Alstyne’ now.
“Is it true?” the chief said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You volunteer, or did your number come up?”
Russ paused. “My number came up.”
“And you’re leaving next week?”
“Wednesday.”
The chief bit the inside of his cheek. “How’s your mom taking it?”
“About as well as you’d expect.”
“I’ll make sure to drop in on her now and again. To keep an eye on things.”
To do Russ’s job for him. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”
The chief looked as if he were going to say something else, but he merely extended his hand. “Good luck to you, then.” They shook. “I don’t need you to make a statement. You can go.”
“Sir?”
The chief cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Who is that old lady? And why was she going into the reservoir like that?”
The deep lines around the chief’s eyes crinkled faintly. “Curious, are you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Liddle glanced toward the emergency-room doors. “That’s Mrs. Ketchem.”
“Ketchem? Like the clinic? And the dairy?”
“That’s the one.”
“But she must be rich!”
The chief smiled at him. “If she is, you can’t prove it by me. Rich or poor, all folks have troubles, Russell.”
“Was that why she was trying to, you know, kill herself?”
The chief stopped smiling. “I’m going to call that an accident. She’s an old woman, working out in the sun, getting up and down… it’s natural she became disoriented. Her daughter and son-in-law moved back to the area recently. I’ll have a talk with them. Maybe we can persuade Mrs. Ketchem that it’s time to give up her house and move in with them.”
“But she wasn’t disoriented. She was walking into that water like you’d walk into the men’s room. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
Chief Liddle gave him a look that somehow made him draw closer. “Attempted suicide is a crime, Russell. It might require a competency hearing and an involuntary committal at the Infirmary. Now, as long as she has family to take charge of her, I don’t think she needs to go through that, do you?”
“But what if she’s… I don’t know, sick in the head or something?”
Liddle shook his head. “She’s not going off her rocker. She’s just old and tired. Even her sorrows are older than most of the folks around her these days. Sometimes, the weight of all that living just presses down on a person and sort of squashes them flat.”
Russ thought that if that’s what old age brought, he’d rather go out young in a blaze of glory. His feeling must have shown on his face, because the chief smiled at him again. “Not that it’s anything you have to worry about.” He shook his hand again. “Go on with your friend there. It looks like he’s done with his phone call. And keep your head down when you’re over there. We want you to come home safe.”
And that ended his day’s adventure. At least until that night, when he woke up his mother, yelling, from the first nightmare he could remember since he was ten. And in later years, even after he had walked, awake, through nightmares of men blown to a pulp and helicopters falling out of the sky, he still sometimes remembered the sensation of sinking into the cool, dark water. The pale, withered face. The black, black eyes. And he would shiver.
Chapter 2
NOW
Ash Wednesday, March 8, a Day of Penance
The rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, town of Millers Kill, diocese of Albany, spread her arms in an old gesture of welcome. Her chasuble, dark purple embroidered with gold, opened like penitential wings. “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent,” she said, “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.” Her voice echoed off the stone walls of the church and was swallowed up in corners left dark by the antiquated lighting system and the heavy, gray day outside. “And, to make a right beginning of repentance and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.”
She turned toward the low altar and knelt. There was a thick woolen rustling as the twenty or so persons who had risked a late arrival at the office to attend the 7:00 A.M. Imposition of Ashes knelt behind her. A vast and somber silence settled around them as they all considered the sobering idea of their mortal nature. At least, Clare hoped they were all considering it. Undoubtedly, some were worried about the imminent storm, promising ice and freezing rain, while others were already thinking about what awaited them at work or contemplating the pain in their knees. There was a lot of kneeling in Lent. It was hard on the knees.