Out Of The Deep I Cry (19 page)

Her face fell blank and still. Only her eyes seemed alive, like dark water cast into shade by a cloud. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think so.” She blinked, and the illusion was broken. She looked at him. “Have you ever had a feeling, Chief McNeil? That something bad has happened? That’s how I feel. I don’t think my husband’s coming home for supper. Not tonight. Not any night.”

Clare woke up late. Most days, the alarm hauled her out of bed early so she could get her run in before morning prayer or the 7:00 A.M. Eucharist. Mondays, she left the alarm off, but she usually woke up at the same time anyway through force of habit. She rolled to one side to look at the clock. Nine A.M. Good Lord.

She flipped the covers off and was instantly all over goose bumps. Holy crow, had she left a window open overnight? She grabbed her robe, which had been tossed over the foot of her bed, and belted it tightly. She tiptoed to the upstairs bathroom, trying for the least amount of contact with the cold floorboards. The little window over the toilet was shut tight.

She tiptoed back to her bedroom, spent a few minutes in a vain search for her slippers, and pulled on a pair of thick sweat socks instead, before going hunting for the window that was letting her expensive oil-fired heat escape.

She couldn’t remember opening anything last night when she got in, but she had been asleep on her feet. After her encounter with the dead Ketchem children-
don’t go there
-she had driven Debba Clow back to the house Debba shared with her mother. It had been a nonstop stream of speculation on Debba’s part; what might have happened to Dr. Rouse, what the police suspected, how her ex would react, how this would affect the custody case.

After Clare had finally delivered the anxious woman to her front door, she had turned homeward, only to be blocked out of her own drive by a tow truck, chaining Debba’s car in preparation for hauling it away. Clare had gotten out of her car and demanded to know what was happening, but the answer was a laconic “Impounded. Police.” The tow truck driver, a man as broad and walleyed as a trout, had actually wound yellow sticky tape around the entire car before levering it up onto his flatbed and rumbling away down Elm Street. Despite the hour, or maybe because of it, Clare had seen lights on and curtains fluttering at most of her neighbors’ houses. Yessir, just another dull night at the rectory.

She reached her thermostat in the dining room and discovered why her house was slowly sinking into a deep freeze. The temperature was set for sixty degrees, but it was only registering fifty. She turned the thermostat up, expecting to hear the soft roar of her furnace firing, and instead heard only silence.

“Oh, wonderful,” she said to the wall.

In the kitchen, she turned on the oven to four hundred and cracked open the door. Then she called her oil company and begged them to send a repairman as soon as possible. She was pretty good with engines-she could tinker with cars and do basic repairs to light aircraft-but there was no way she was going to try to fix her own furnace. The oil company’s burner tech was out on call, but he would get to the rectory when he finished with his morning appointments-no later than two o’clock. Three at the most.

“Tell him I’m leaving the door unlocked and a check on the kitchen table,” she said. Okay. She could have tried for a parish in southern Florida and missed out on the experience of her house turning into a giant meat locker, but on the other hand, she wouldn’t have been able to leave the house open and a blank check on the table in Miami. She consoled herself with that thought while wriggling into her clothes with her nightgown tented around her for warmth. She briefly considered lighting a fire in her living room, but the thought of what might happen if she wasn’t around to keep an eye on things dissuaded her.

Instead, she grabbed her parka and her car keys. She was headed for Mrs. Henry Marshall’s house with a whole boatload of questions. On the drive over, she ricocheted between frustration that she had been kept in the dark about Jane Ketchem, sympathy for Mrs. Marshall’s silence about her family’s grievous loss, and a deep bafflement as to Dr. Rouse’s role in all this.

Mrs. Marshall’s doorbell was set flush in an angular chrome-and-Lucite plate: the best the sixties had to offer. Clare caught a faint “Come in!” when she rang the chime and opened the door.

“Mrs. Marshall? It’s me, Clare Fergusson.”

“I’m back here, in the kitchen,” Mrs. Marshall called out. She emerged in a doorway at the end of the hall, wiping her hands on an apron tied over her wool pants. Her lipstick was a marigold orange, almost the same shade as her turtleneck sweater, and from the distance down the hallway, her face softened in the shadows, Clare could almost see the slim and fashionable matron who had come to this house in the 1960s. “I’m making a meal to take to Renee Rouse, poor thing. Ham-and-cheese strata. It’s wonderful, because you half bake it ahead of time, and then when you want to eat it you pop it in the oven and out it comes, hot and ready.”

Clare hung up her parka in the hall closet while Mrs. Marshall extolled the virtues of her dish. “How did you hear about Mrs. Rouse?” she said, advancing toward the kitchen.

“She was calling everyone she knew yesterday. Frantic, poor thing. I telephoned her this morning, and she told me the police found Allan’s car, but not Allan.” She ushered Clare into her kitchen. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Clare looked around. Unlike the rooms she had seen before, the kitchen had been thoroughly remodeled, and recently. Everything was creamy walnut, glossy dark granite, and brushed steel. As up-to-the-minute as the rest of the house had once been. Clare wondered how old she would be before the flush-to-the-cabinets Sub-Zero would be considered as hopelessly unfashionable as an avocado Kenmore.

“If it’s all right with you, dear, I’m going to put you to work.” Mrs. Marshall withdrew an apron from a drawer and handed it to Clare. “Will you chop up the ham and the broccoli for me? The knife’s on the cutting board.”

Clare obediently fastened the apron around her waist and went to the thick butcher’s board next to the sink. She found a head of broccoli waiting to be rinsed and turned on the water, considering how to get into the topic that was foremost in her mind. “So Mrs. Rouse told you about how they found Dr. Rouse’s car,” she said, turning the broccoli beneath the spray. “Did she mention where it was?”

Mrs. Marshall pulled a metal mixing bowl from a cupboard and put it on the counter across the sink from Clare. “Off the road, up into the mountains, she said.” She shook her head, her silver-white hair catching the light. “Bad news. Not what a wife wants to hear.”

“It was by a place called Stewart’s Pond Reservoir.”

Mrs. Marshall crossed the room toward the refrigerator.

“Do you remember that woman who was so upset the day we went to see him? Debba Clow? He asked her to meet him out there. He showed her a little cemetery at the edge of the reservoir.”

Mrs. Marshall faced the open refrigerator, her back to Clare. “Stewart’s Pond,” she said. “We used to call it the lake.” She bent down, pulled a box of eggs from a lower shelf. “So that was where he went missing. I didn’t know.” She straightened, returned to the side of the sink with her egg carton in hand.

“I was there last night. Debba had come to the rectory to talk with me after… after she had met with Dr. Rouse. Chief Van Alstyne wanted her back up there to see if she could help them figure out where Dr. Rouse had gone.”

Mrs. Marshall looked out the window over the sink. “Why on earth would he take anyone there?” she said. Clare didn’t think the old woman was talking to her.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Clare steadied the broccoli on the cutting board and watched her hands as she cut off the thick stalk. “I saw the headstones. Sons and daughters of J. N. and J. A. Ketchem.”

There was silence for a moment. “My brothers and sisters.” Mrs. Marshall blinked, then looked at the egg carton. She picked up an egg and cracked it over the edge of the bowl.

“Would it disturb you to tell me about it?”

Mrs. Marshall turned to her, her expression almost surprised, as if she had lost track of the fact that her priest was in the kitchen with her, sleeves pushed up, chopping broccoli. “Disturb me? No.” Then she smiled a little, the smile of a woman who has lived long enough to appreciate human nature. “Besides, if another man’s gone missing it won’t take too long for all the old stories to resurrect themselves. That’s the trouble with living in your own hometown. Long memories.”

Clare dropped her eyes to the cutting board and began slicing off the florets, halving the larger ones and peeling away the woodiest part of the stems. “What happened?”

“Diphtheria.” Mrs. Marshall bent down and pulled a waxed cardboard milk carton from beneath the sink. “Compost garbage in there.” She tossed in her eggshell and reached for another egg. “They called it the black diphtheria back then. It took all four of them within a matter of a week or so.”

“But not you.”

“I wasn’t born until five months after.”

Clare slid the cut broccoli to one side of the butcher’s block board. She thought about her own mother and dad, heartsick after her sister Grace’s death, their lives narrowed to a long, dark tunnel of mourning. “I can’t imagine how parents could live with a grief that huge.”

“My mother never talked about them. Ever. Everything I know, I found out from my grandparents.” Mrs. Marshall cracked another egg, tossed the shell. “But the loss was with her always. Every day.” She looked directly at Clare. “She loved me ferociously, I never doubted that, but at the same time, I know I was a constant reminder of my brothers and sisters. The pain of it just hollowed her out eventually.” She shook her head. “After I was grown and married and gone, there were a few accidents that weren’t accidents. She always got stopped in time, but it became obvious to me that she was trying to do herself harm. That’s when Henry put in for a transfer so we could move back here. To look after Mother.”

Clare reached out and rested her hand on Mrs. Marshall’s thin arm. It felt like bird bones wound in wool. “I’m so sorry. Is that how she died?”

“No, surprisingly; she lived to be seventy-four years old. She was finally taken by pneumonia. Allan Rouse was her doctor, at the end.” She smiled again, that small, sad smile. “He was her protégé.”

And now he had gone missing, after a last visit to the graves of Jane Ketchem’s long-lost children. “Can you think of any reason why he would have taken Debba Clow to see your brothers’ and sisters’ grave site?”

“She’s the woman who’s been protesting against vaccinations, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suspect he was hoping what happened to my family would be an object lesson to her. According to my grandma, the children died because my parents wouldn’t have them vaccinated.”

“You’re kidding me.” Clare touched her mouth. “Excuse me, that sounded flippant, and I didn’t mean to be. I guess I meant, it’s hard to imagine.”

“Well, the diphtheria vaccination was quite new then, and not widely used. My grandma never blamed my parents. She said lots of folks in those days worried that the vaccinations themselves were the cause of a growing list of ills, everything from mental retardation to social diseases.” She cracked another egg and tossed the shell. “And, too, folks living a clean, healthy life out on a farm didn’t think they were likely to have to face the diphtheria. It was supposed to be a disease of the slums, passed around by poor unwashed immigrants.” Mrs. Marshall gave Clare a dry look. “You’ll recognize that line of reasoning. It seems human nature doesn’t change, just the name of the disease.”

“Do you think your parents blamed themselves?”

“I’m sure of it. They made what they must have thought was a good decision, in the best interests of their children, and they lost everything.” Mrs. Marshall rested her hands on either side of the metal mixing bowl, cupping it abstractedly as she looked out the window again. “I believe that’s the real reason I never had children.”

Clare must have made some involuntary gesture, because Mrs. Marshall turned to her.

“Oh, yes, it was a choice. People assumed Henry and I simply weren’t fortunate, but we knew before we got married that neither of us intended to have children. In fact, I turned down two men who asked me first, because I knew they wanted their own families one day. But thinking about it”-she paused, worrying her lip so that a tiny smudge of marigold appeared on one of her front teeth-“I see that it wasn’t the fear of what losing a child would do to me. I mean, that was always there, but… I think it was a fear of the responsibility. My parents took on that responsibility, and in the end, it destroyed them.”

“What happened to your father?”

“Well, you see, that’s why people are going to start repeating the old stories. Now that Allan Rouse has suddenly gone missing. My father walked out of our house the night of April first, 1930, after having a fight with my mother. He climbed into his car, drove away”-Mrs. Marshall sighed and turned to Clare-“and was never seen again.”

By the time he headed out to Lake George to talk with Jonathon Ketchem’s brother, Harry McNeil was beginning to think that Mrs. Ketchem was right about not seeing her husband again.

He had started with Ketchem’s buddies, four names on the top of the list. His first call was pretty much a bust. He had scarcely descended from the Ford when Hutch Shaw’s wife, washing the windows at the front of their narrow row house, yelled, “He’s not here!” What followed was mostly a waterfall of complaints about how the economy had forced her husband into working for a road crew building up past Warrensburg, and now every day he had to travel all the way to Warrensburg, for heaven’s sake, and what kind of life was that for a man with children?