Kevin Flynn was checking himself out in the mirror. He tried combing his hair down flat, then dragging his fingers through it until it stood up in spiky chunks. Flat? Chunks?
Behind him, Lyle MacAuley finished his business and zipped up. “For chrissakes, Kevin, it’s the morning briefing, not a beauty contest.” He went to the sink beside Kevin and turned on the water. “ ’Sides, either way you wear it, kid, it’s still red.”
Eric McCrea emerged from one of the stalls, singing, “It’s Howdy Doody time!”
“Like you ever saw Howdy Doody.” MacAuley shook off his hands and yanked a paper towel from the dispenser.
“Just trying to provide a reference you could get, Dep. If I compared our young officer here to one of the Weasley twins, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”
“I knew a couple strippers called themselves the Beaver twins, but no, I never heard of any Weaselies.”
“Harry Potter?” Kevin said. “Everybody’s heard of that.”
MacAuley made a face. “Kids’ books.”
“I like ’em.” McCrea twisted a faucet on. “Last one came out, I read it before my son did.”
“Grown-ups reading kids’ books,” MacAuley said with disgust. “It’s no wonder we’re importin’ men from Mexico to do our work for us. We’re all getting too dumb to know one end of a hammer from the other.” He reached for the men’s room door handle, only to be squashed against the wall when Noble Entwhistle pushed it open. Kevin, doing a last check to make sure none of his breakfast was on his teeth, grinned.
“Chief says, where’n the hell is everybody?” Noble reported.
McCrea twisted the faucet off and dried his hands. “If you step back from the door a ways, Noble, I think Lyle might be able to get out.”
Noble shoved his wall-like frame through the door. “Sorry, Dep.”
Kevin and McCrea snickered as MacAuley and Entwhistle did the doorway dance. Finally the deputy chief squeezed past Noble and disappeared into the hallway, a string of profanities marking his passage.
“What’s taking you guys so long?” Noble asked. “You know what they say. If you shake it more’n three times, you’re playing with it.”
“Nah. We’re just giving Kevin some beauty tips. Much better now the fuzzy thing on your chin is gone, Kevin.”
“Goatee,” Kevin muttered. It would have been a good one, too, if the chief hadn’t squinted at him in the dispatch room last week and barked, “No beards. Shave it off.”
Noble rolled his eyes. “I got a tip for you. Don’t be late. If the chief don’t notice her,”—he wagged his head toward the hall, where the former public restroom had become the women’s room—”he sure ain’t gonna care how pretty you are.”
In the mirror, Kevin could see himself blush. Everyone teased him about his freckles, but they didn’t bug him. The bright, spotty ones of his youth had almost faded away, leaving him with just a scattering across his nose and cheekbones. But God Almighty, he hated his fair skin! It was like a fricking mood ring.
“We’ll be right there,” McCrea said. Noble grunted and lumbered into the hallway. When the door had shut behind him, McCrea said, “I have a tip for you, too, Kev.” His voice was light but serious. “It’s an oldie but a goodie. Don’t shit where you eat.”
Kevin looked down at the sink. “Whaddaya mean?”
McCrea sighed. “Kev, you didn’t give a rip what you looked like until last week, when Hadley Knox started showing up for the briefings. I admit, she’s a total babe. But you do not want to be fishing in these waters. I’d think everything that’s happened between the chief and MacAuley would have taught you that much.”
“That’s different,” Kevin said. “MacAuley”—he dropped his voice involuntarily—”nailed the chief’s wife. I’d never put the moves on a married woman.”
“It’s not about married or not married. It’s about sticking it to someone you’re going to have to see at work every day.”
“I’m not—”
McCrea held up his hands. “I don’t want to get into it with you. Just think about what I’m saying, okay?”
The door thumped open. “Are you two waiting for an engraved invitation?” MacAuley said.
They followed the deputy chief out, Kevin, as always, bringing up the rear. He kept his eyes fixed on MacAuley’s grizzled head until he had taken his usual seat in the squad room, an irregularly shaped space that had been knocked together out of several small offices about twenty years before Kevin was born.
“Nice of you gentlemen to join us.” The chief sat on the scarred wooden worktable, his booted feet braced on two chairs.
“Sorry,” McCrea said. If it had been, say, last November, he would have cracked a joke about them running a salon, or a book club, or something. But that was before the chief’s wife kicked him out. Before she died. Before the department imploded in a smoking mess of old wrongs and betrayal.
None of them joked around within the chief’s earshot now.
Kevin flopped his notebook open, and as the chief launched into the bulletins and BOLOs, he snuck a look at Hadley Knox. Eric McCrea had called her a babe, but that didn’t do her justice. Kevin had never seen anyone like her, with her perfect skin and her huge brown eyes and her round, pouty lips. Even in a tan poly uniform with no makeup on and her dark hair cut like a boy’s, she was better-looking than 99.9 percent of the other women in Millers Kill. McCrea had another thing wrong, too. Kevin knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with a woman like that. If he had swapped more than six words with her since she started patrolling last week, he’da been surprised. He just wanted . . . to admire her. And to think that when she happened to look at him, she wouldn’t think he was a complete geek.
“. . . with Kevin,” the chief was saying.
He jerked to attention.
“You think that’s a good idea?” MacAuley said. “I mean, isn’t that like the blind leading the blind?”
“It’s a routine traffic patrol,” the chief said. “And I want Knox to get as much time behind the wheel as she can. Eric can’t take her, he’s working the Christie break-in.”
“Paul?” MacAuley asked.
The chief gave him a look.
“Ah,” the deputy said. Kevin figured Paul Urquhart had made yet another dirty joke about the new recruit. Or did something inappropriate. Whatever it was, the dep had gotten it.
Everything that’s happened between the chief and MacAuley. It was a waste and a shame, as his dad would have said: two old guys who worked so well together they could have a whole conversation with a word and a look. Now, those were the only conversations they had.
“If Kevin runs into anything heavy while he’s out with Officer Knox, he’ll call it in. Right?”
In like Flynn. “Yessir.” Kevin glanced toward her again, this time smiling reassuringly. Her face, looking back at him, was blank. What did that mean? Was she nervous about riding with him? Pissed off because she wasn’t going with one of the more experienced guys?
“Eric, catch us up on the Christie B and E.” They were up to the current investigations. Kevin returned his attention to his notebook.
McCrea flopped open the case folder and began to recite. “Saturday, April six, at five thirty P.M., Bruce Christie reported returning home to find his trailer in the Meadow-brook Estates trailer park had been broken into. The interior had been trashed, as near as Noble and I could tell”—there was some snickering on this—“but he said nothing was missing. The manager reports seeing a vehicle speeding out of the park entrance at approximately five thirty P.M. No description, other than it was ‘big and expensive.’” He glanced up from his notes. “That might mean any pickup or SUV with more steel than rust. Christie suggested it might be someone his two brothers owe money to and gave us a list of names.” He pulled a short stack of papers from the file and tossed them to Kevin, who took one and passed it on. “The manager suggested it might have been the two brothers.” McCrea looked up. “I tend to discount that. Whatever else you can say about the Christies, they hang tight together.”
“If that’s what you wanna call it,” MacAuley said, under his breath.
“What do you think they were looking for?” the chief asked McCrea.
He shrugged. “Money? Pot? Neil Christie was up for distributing a few years back. Got it knocked down to possession.”
“Sheep?” someone said. There was a snort of laughter, stifled.
“Why did he report it?” The question was out of Kevin’s mouth before he remembered he was trying to appear cool and knowledgeable in front of their new officer. “If the intruders were looking for something illegal, I mean.” God, he sounded lame.
The chief swiveled toward him. “You tell me.”
“Um . . . he’s genuinely clean?”
MacAuley snorted, but the chief gestured for him to go on. Kevin thought furiously. “He was lying about nothing being missing. He’s counting on us to lead him to the guys who took whatever it was.”
The chief tapped his nose. “Something to consider, isn’t it?” He looked at McCrea. “And, of course, it could be someone with a grudge, looking to beat the crap out of Bruce Christie and settling for wrecking his place. Between the three of ’em, the Christie brothers have a record as thick as the Cossayuharie Directory. Assault, possession—” He glanced at MacAuley. “Didn’t one of them do time for resisting?”
“Donald. Got five in Plattsburgh, out in three. Tried to run over the state trooper who was taking him in for D and D.”
“So, be careful.” The chief pointed at McCrea. “Anything strikes you funny, ease off and call for backup.”
“Will do, Chief.”
The chief pushed the chairs away and slid off the table. “That’s all.” He gathered up his folders and stalked out of the squad room. Through the doorway, Kevin could hear Harlene telling him about his calls.
“Christies. They put the dirt in dirt poor.” MacAuley shook his head. He squinted up at McCrea from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “I’ve been to Bruce Christie’s place. How did you tell where the deliberate trashing ended and the usual trashing began?”
McCrea snorted. “I wouldn’t have wanted to stay there any longer than absolutely necessary, I’ll tell you.” He jerked a thumb toward Entwhistle. “Noble here was freaked out by the great big googly-eyed Jesus tapestry he had tacked to the wall.”
“It was creepy,” Noble agreed. “Its eyes followed you around. Like in that Stephen King book.”
“Carrie,” Kevin supplied.
“Thank you, Kevin.” McCrea smiled at him. Shit. There he was, doing it again. He had to stop trying to be so damn helpful all the time.
“You know how you know if a Christie girl is still a virgin?” MacAuley grinned. “She can run faster than her brothers.”
McCrea looked at him meaningfully and nudged his head toward Hadley Knox.
“Uh—” The deputy chief was seized with a convenient coughing fit.
Hadley rose from her seat. Looked at MacAuley. Looked at McCrea. “The way I heard it, it’s if she can run faster than the sheep.” She tucked her folder beneath her arm. “You coming, Flynn?”
Clare was three miles out of Millers Kill, at the end of a five-hour drive from Fort Dix, when she realized she was out of booze. She groaned, thinking of returning to her cold house—when she was away for Guard training, she turned the thermostat down to fifty to save on oil—and facing the evening with nothing but some undoubtedly sour milk and a two-day-old Thermos of coffee. No wine. No sherry. No scotch.
No way. She cruised up Route 57, watching the river that gave the town its name running brown and gold beneath the long rays of the setting sun. Driving past St. Alban’s, she continued on toward Main, then crossed over the river, headed for the town line. She’d been doing her shopping in Glens Falls, the better to avoid running into Russ Van Alstyne. But Napoli’s Discount Liquor ought to be safe, seeing as the chief of police was a nondrinking alcoholic.
In the parking lot, she unfolded out of her seat and stretched gratefully—up, down, and side to side. The breeze from the west was still cool with the snow lingering in the mountains, but the warmth thrown off by the asphalt testified to the power of the spring sun. Winter was gone, and good freaking riddance to it. If she never saw another snowflake in her life, it wouldn’t be too soon.
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and checked her messages. One from her parents touching base, one from Deacon Elizabeth de Groot, assuring her that they were all doing splendidly without her, and one from Hugh Parteger. “Vicar! Thanks for stopping by for lunch on your way to that pestilent place south of the Palisades.” She assumed he meant New Jersey. Hugh may have been born in England, but he was a true New Yorker at heart. “Next time”—his voice dropped—”why don’t you just tell your congregation you’re reporting for duty and stay the weekend with me? I promise I can show you maneuvers the U.S. Army has yet to think of.”
“Not happening, Hugh,” she told the phone. She erased the message, laughing.
Checking out her order, Mr. Napoli kept peering at her, frowning a bit as he placed the Macallan’s and the Harveys and the bottles of Shiraz in their narrow paper bags. It wasn’t until she produced her driver’s license and checkbook that he smiled at her. “Reverend Fergusson!” He clutched her license with both hands, his eyes shifting from her picture, to her, and back again. “I didn’t recognize you, with all these soldier clothes on.” He gestured up and down, taking in her desert camo battle dress uniform. “We haven’t seen you in here lately! Now I can tell Mrs. Napoli why.” He took her check, tching. “The army. Is that any place for a sweet girl like you?”
Clare remembered, too late, that she had also been avoiding appearing in public in uniform. Too many explanations. She smiled flirtatiously. “Now, Mr. Napoli. You’ve seen my birth date.” She slid her license off the counter. “I’m hardly a girl anymore.” While he was gallantly defending her right to be juvenalized two months shy of her thirty-seventh birthday, she extricated herself with a promise not to be “a stranger.” Bumping out the door with a bagful of booze, she reminded herself to take her civvies with her next time she reported for Guard service, and change before she got in her car to go home.
Russ Van Alstyne was standing beside his big red pickup in the parking lot.
Staring at her.
She swallowed. Hugged her paper sack closer to her chest. Her first thought was, Was he always that tall? Her second thought was, He’s lost weight. He was in his semi off-duty uniform, tan MKPD blouse tucked into a pair of jeans that had seen better days, an official windbreaker balancing his salt-stained hunting boots.
Then she realized where he was. Her eyes widened. His did, too.
“What are you doing at a liquor store?” she asked.
“What are you doing in uniform?” he said simultaneously.
They both paused. His dismay—at getting caught?—was plain on his face. “Are you drinking again?” she said. Her clashing emotions—concern, not wanting to be concerned—made her voice harsher than she intended.
He blinked. Frowned. “What?”
She waved a hand at Napoli’s plate glass windows, advertising specials on Dewar’s, Bombay gin, and all Australian wines. “What are you doing at the liquor store?” She took a step closer, not wanting to shame him by shouting his problem to any shoppers within earshot. “Please don’t tell me you’ve started drinking again.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them. When he spoke, his voice was tight with control. “I am not drinking again. I’m here to get Napoli’s latest bad check report.”
Her mouth formed a silent O.
“Now, would you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing in BDUs?”
She shifted one shoulder so he could read her New York State Guard patch. His hand came up and touched his collar, where, like her, insignia told the world his rank. “Where’s your chaplain’s cross?”
She mirrored his movement, touching her captain’s bars. “I’m not in the chaplaincy. I’m in the 142nd Aviation Battalion. Combat support.”
“You’re what?” He crossed to her in three sharp strides. “You’re in combat support? Are you insane? There’s a goddamn war on! Who the hell volunteers for front-line duty with a war on?”
She looked up at him. “I don’t know. You, maybe?”
He hissed through his teeth. The secret he might have taken to his grave, if he hadn’t shared it with her. Suddenly, she felt ashamed, as if she had used a cannon to counter a fly-swatter. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I haven’t told. I wouldn’t ever tell.” That, contrary to what everyone else believed, Russ Van Alstyne had not been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. He had enlisted—volunteered.
“Christ, I know that. You think I worry about that?” He shook his head. “At least I had an excuse. I was eighteen and dumb and desperate to get out of town. What possible reason could you have?”
She shifted the paper sack on her hip. “The bishop and I had several lengthy conversations after . . . after . . .” She was searching for a word to pretty up what she had done. She shouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do that. “After I killed Aaron MacEntyre.”
“That was self-defense, not killing. You saved our lives in that barn. His punk-ass friend’s, too.”
“I resigned my cure, but, strangely enough, he didn’t accept it.”
“You what?”
She ignored his interruption. “Ultimately, the bishop didn’t think what I had . . . done . . . was the problem. He thought it was a symptom. Of me not knowing if I was a priest who used to be an army officer, or an army officer who happened to be a priest. He suggested”—she looked up at him, her mouth twisting—” he strongly suggested the National Guard as a solution.” She shrugged. “So I joined up. At the end of January.” She paused. “You hadn’t heard?”
“No, I hadn’t heard. Your name hasn’t come up. . . .” His blue eyes unfocused. She could see the lightbulb come on. “No one talks about you anymore.” She wasn’t sure if he knew he was speaking aloud. “No one ever talks about you to me.”
Another brilliant piece of deduction by the head of the Millers Kill Police Department. Idiot. She dug her fingers into the paper sack to keep from smacking the surprise off his face. A Pontiac pulled in the lot, parking beside her Subaru. Automatically, they each stepped back. Away from each other.
His gaze sharpened again. “Your bishop pushed you into recommissioning. Knowing you might well be deployed.”
“I wasn’t pushed. I had my own—”
His snort blew away her rationalization. “Because you took out Aaron MacEntyre.”
“Because I have a record of—”
“He was going to gut-shoot me. He was ready to do it.”
Clare compressed her lips into a thin line. She didn’t want to stroll down that particular memory lane. Then she realized where he was going. “No,” she said.
“Because of me.”
“No.” She was louder this time. The older gentleman getting out of the Pontiac paused and looked at them nervously. Was the chief of police about to haul some belligerent soldier away?
“We are not having this conversation.” She turned toward her car. Russ caught at her sleeve, and at that moment, her phone began playing “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” in her pants pocket. Proof, if ever she needed it, that there was a merciful God.
“Yes, we are,” he said.
She fished out the phone and opened it. “Hello?” She twisted, more firmly this time, breaking his hold on her.
“Clare? This is Sister Lucia. Lucia Pirone.” The sister’s voice was thready. Clare backed toward her Subaru, keeping her eyes on Russ. He took a step toward her. Then his phone started ringing.
“Lucia? What is it? I’m sorry, I can hardly hear you.” She bumped up against the car and set her sack on the hood. Russ took another step toward her. She pointed at his jacket pocket. Your phone, she mouthed.
“The hell with my phone,” he said.
“There’s been an accident,” Sister Lucia said. “My van—”
“An accident?” Clare jabbed her finger at Russ again, then made a face. “Are you okay?”
He opened his jacket and retrieved his phone. Checked the caller ID. Frowned. He retreated to his own vehicle to answer it.
“No, actually, I don’t think I am.” Clare realized the weakness in the nun’s voice had less to do with signal strength than with injury.
“Lucia. Have you called nine-one-one?”
“Yes.” There was a noise, as if the older woman were gasping for breath. “There are two officers here. An ambulance is coming.”
“How can I help?”
“I was—” Her voice faded away.
“Lucia? Lucia? Where are you?”
“Sorry. I’m off Route 137 in Cossayuharie. The van—a tire blew. We went off the road.”
“We?”
“Some of the men are hurt,” the nun said. “They’re afraid. They’re running off into the woods—please, Clare, please—”
“I’ll be right there. I’m getting into my car right now. You sit still and do whatever the EMTs tell you to. I’ll take care of everything else.”
“Thank you—” The call went dead. Clare dropped the phone back into her cargo pocket. Swung open the back door and dropped the bag of booze on the floor. She paused, hand in pocket, fingers curled over her keys. She could just get in and drive away. She didn’t have to say anything to Russ.
Cowardly, Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright, her survival training instructor, sneered.
Rude, Grandmother Fergusson chided.
She turned back to him and was startled to find he had recrossed the parking lot and was a scant few feet away from her again. “I’ve got to run,” she said. “This missioner nun I’ve agreed to help, Sister Lucia, she’s—”
“Been in a single-vehicle accident. It’s a bad one. I’m headed there.”
“Oh.” His phone call. Of course. “I guess I’ll see you there.”
“I guess I’ll take you there.” He turned toward his truck, beckoning her to follow him.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He turned back toward her. “Do you even know where it is?”
“Off the Cossayuharie Road . . .” Her voice sank as she realized Sister Lucia’s description covered a lot of ground.
“I guarantee I can get you there ten–fifteen minutes faster than you would on your own.” He shrugged. “But it’s up to you.” He strode toward the pickup.
She stood, paralyzed, for a second. Don’t be stupid, Hardball Wright said. Just walk away, her grandmother urged.
“Wait!” She dashed across the lot. “I’m coming with you.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, but kept the same steady pace toward the Ford F-250. By the time he crossed to the driver’s side, she had climbed into the cab and was buckled in, staring straight through the windshield as if the Napoli’s Liquor sign were the most interesting thing she had seen all day.
He fired up the truck. Unclipped the light from its mount and, rolling down his window, slapped it on the roof of the cab. “Hold on,” he said.
He pulled onto Route 137, accelerating until he was roaring down the county highway at a good twenty miles above the speed limit. He took his attention off the road for a split second, just long enough to glance at her. It was funny. When he’d thought of her these past months—when he’d let himself think about her—it was always as she was the day Linda died: white-faced, bruised, bloody-mouthed. Her eyes going green with horror as she stared at her hands. Oh, my God, she had cried. What have I done?
This Clare’s pointed nose and high cheekbones were flush with health. She radiated energy, from her crossed arms to her boots, planted square and firm against the floorboard. Whatever was making her eyes glint brown, it wasn’t horror.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to tell me it’s your fault I’m going into harm’s way? That if it hadn’t been for you, I’d be in prayer and meditation right now instead of waiting to hear if I’m called up? Aren’t you going to take responsibility for me screwing up my pastoral duties, and Linda and her sister dying, and every person you work with and every crime ever committed under your watch and”—she waved a hand at the coffee-colored fields unfolding all around them—“and global warming? Didn’t you say we had to have this conversation?”
He did. Except he was going to look like an idiot if he just repeated everything she’d said. Christ, what did he think he was going to achieve by getting her in the truck with him? He should have left her there in the parking lot, her and her spiffy little Subaru and her grocery sack of liquor.
“Don’t you worry you might be drinking too much?” he said, seizing on another topic as a man who’s run out of ammunition might lay hold of a stick.
“Oh, for—”
They sailed over a rise to face a line of brake lights stretching down to the bottom of the valley. “Shit!” he said. “Hang on!” He stood on the brakes. The pickup skidded, slewed sideways in a shower of gravel and old salt, and came to rest three inches from the back end of a Toyota Corolla, whose driver was watching him with terrified eyes through her rearview mirror.
He turned to Clare. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She patted herself on her chest. Took a breath. “Yeah.”
He switched on the siren and inched into the oncoming lane. He could see the obstruction now—some farmer’s disk harrow had decided to break down, half on, half off its trailer, and the two pieces of machinery were blocking most of the road. The farmer, who had been shoving fruitlessly at the rear wheel of the harrow, turned to glare at them when Russ rolled to a stop. He turned off the siren but left the lights. Powered down the window on Clare’s side.
“Don’t you have a hand to help you with that thing?” he said.
“No, I don’t have no goddamn hand to help with the goddamn mess! Can’t get no goddamn help for love or goddamn money. Goddamn sumbitch a-hole—”
“I’ll send somebody from Fire and Rescue.” Russ closed the window over a steady stream of profanity and inched past the unsteady tangle, forcing the nearest car to roll most of the way into the drainage ditch to avoid getting clipped. Clare pointed to its driver, who was using body language to let Russ know what he thought of him.
“Another satisfied customer,” she said.
“Idiot shouldn’t have gotten so close to the accident.” He gave the accelerator a little kick. “You got John Huggins’s number in your phone?” John Huggins headed up the volunteer Fire and Rescue department.
“Just at home.”
He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to her. “He may already be at the scene of the single vehicle. Tell him he needs to get a couple of his guys over here to direct traffic and help Farmer Greenjeans haul his machinery off the road.”
Clare examined his contacts list. “Got it.” She dialed, and held the phone to her ear. Once past the remaining stalled cars, Russ sped up. “Uh—no,” Clare said, beside him. “It’s Clare Fergusson.” She glanced at Russ. “He gave it to me. He asked me to—” She sighed. “He’s fine. He’s sitting right next to me. He handed the phone to me so he could concentrate on his driving.”
There was a pause.
“Yes. Is that a problem?” Her voice was sharp. “No, don’t answer that. Listen, there’s a farmer with a broken down—” She looked over at Russ.
“Disk harrow,” he said.
“Disk harrow, about two, two and a half miles east of Napoli’s on the Cossayuharie Road. Russ—the chief wants you to send over a couple of men to help with the situation.” With her free hand, she poked at one of the bobby pins that was trying, and failing, to keep her whiskey-and-honey hair in a twist at the back of her head. “I know about that. We’re on our way there now.” She rolled her eyes at Russ. “Thanks, uh—Mr. Huggins.” She thumbed off the phone. “I never know what to call him. He always refers to me as Fergusson.”
“I’m sure he’d answer to Chief.”
She crossed her arms over her chest again and made a rude noise. “There’s only one chief in this town, and he’s not it.”
He blinked.
“I mean, you can’t hang a name on yourself and think it makes you a leader,” she said quickly. “You have to make yourself a leader, and then the title just comes naturally. I mean, I can call myself the Grand Duchess Anastasia, but it doesn’t—”
“I know what you mean.”
Her mouth clicked shut. She made a little hissing sound.
“You know, you can’t lead men and women without making yourself responsible for them.”
She turned her head away. Looked out her window. The road rose up to meet them, carrying them up into one of the mountainous fingers that pierced the rolling farmlands of Cossayuharie. The air around them darkened as the trees closed in. When she spoke, her voice was almost inaudible. “I never wanted you to lead me,” she said to the glass. “I just wanted—”
He didn’t get to hear what she wanted. They curved in a long arc down and around a steep cut in the hillside and there was the accident scene, at the point where the forest once more shaded into farmlands, laid out in front of them like a set of toy vehicles that some giant kid had played hard with and then abandoned.
“Oh, my God,” Clare said.
A large white van lay, overturned, among the trees, its crumpled side panel showing where it had rolled. More than once—it must have done a complete 360 and then some to be that far from the road. Only one ambulance, from Corinth—he frowned—but he could see two EMTs, bent over somebody at the side of the van. The Volunteer Fire Department’s pump and hose trucks were angled off to the side, with Huggins’s SUV parked tight behind. He pulled in behind Huggins. Clare had unbuckled and was swinging the door open before he had killed the engine. She dashed toward the ambulance. “Stay out of the way!” he shouted. She waved one hand in acknowledgment.
He found Kevin Flynn arguing with John Huggins, Hadley Knox close by, her arms wrapped around herself. “You okay?” Russ asked. She nodded.
“. . . how much assistance could they need?” Huggins was saying to Flynn. The fire chief’s shoe-leather face and squat four-by-four body made Flynn look even more like a junior varsity basketball player than usual, but the kid wasn’t backing down an inch.
“We won’t know that until your guys get out there and find them!”
“Settle down, Kevin. Give me a report.”
Flynn shot him a frustrated glance. “The driver says she heard a loud noise and then lost control. It looks like the left front tire blew. She went—well, you can see where she went.” He flung his arm out to where tender new grass and delicate maple saplings had been torn raw and crushed. “No witnesses to speak of. The driver said she saw a big boxy vehicle, maybe an Aztek or a Humvee or Jeep Cherokee, but it didn’t stop.” He sounded disgusted. “Didn’t call it in, either. The driver’s complaining of chest and shoulder pains, difficulty breathing, difficulty moving her legs, dizziness. We’ve got one guy unconscious, one guy with a broken arm, and one more banged up pretty bad.”
“That it for injuries? One driver, three passengers?”
Kevin blew out a puff of air. “I don’t know. Officer Knox and I responded with lights and sirens. Like we’re supposed to.”
Russ nodded.
“So when we come over the hill, we see guys running into the woods; I can’t tell you how many. They just scattered.” He glanced past Russ to where the long shadows of the mountains were darkening the woods and fields. “Some of them may be hurt.”
“As I was telling the kid, if they’re well enough to evade arrest, they’re well enough left alone.” Huggins removed his helmet and scrubbed at his bald spot. “I don’t see any need to send my guys chasing after them.”
“Evade arrest?” Russ’s question was aimed at Flynn, but Huggins answered.
“Illegals. Gotta be. Not a one of the ones left behind speaks a word of English. Probably one of them whaddayacallits. Where they smuggle ’em in.”
“The driver is a nun!” Kevin said.
Russ pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “John, we’re not working for the Border Patrol. We’re working for the town, and the town doesn’t want injured people wandering around the woods in Cossayuharie, even if they don’t speak English. Get your men walking a search pattern. Tell ’em to shout No soy del I-C-E. Estoy aquí ayudarle. Can you repeat that?”
Huggins screwed up his face, as if he were swallowing something nasty. “No soy del I-C-E. Eztoy ackee a-you-darrel.”
“Close enough.”
“Don’t know why they can’t just learn English,” Huggins said, stomping back to the pump truck.
“I didn’t know you speak Spanish, chief.”
“The army likes its warrant officers to have a second language. Got the chance to polish it up in Panama and the Philippines.”
Flynn looked impressed. Of course, it didn’t take much to impress a twenty-four-year-old who had never been out of New York State.
“C’mon, let’s see if we can sort out these people.” He headed toward the battered van, Flynn falling in beside him. After a beat, so did Knox. “You see or hear anything that might make you think they had another reason to flee?”
Flynn shook his head. “Nope.”
“Well. . . .” Knox sounded hesitant.
“What is it?” Russ stopped and faced his newest officer. She was biting the inside of her cheek. “Listen,” he said. “You know how you tell your kids there aren’t any dumb questions? Well, there aren’t any dumb details. Noticing things around you, at an accident, on a crime scene, patrolling, making a stop—someday it could make the difference between life and death. Your life and death.”
She nodded. “Okay. Yeah. Two of the guys left behind were talking about the accident. One of them was saying he heard two pops, you know, two noises like the tires were blowing out, and the other guy said he heard three.” She looked up at Flynn. “But Officer Flynn said it was one tire blown out. When we got here.”
Next to him, Flynn stiffened. “You speak Spanish, too? Why didn’t you tell me? We coulda questioned those men!”
She shrugged. “You told me our job was to secure the scene.”
Russ sighed. “Hadley. We’re a small department. We can’t afford to have anybody sit on his ass and say, ‘That’s not my job.’ Pardon my French.”
“I didn’t—”
He held up one hand. “We work as a team. If you have anything to contribute to the team, whether it’s an observation, or a skill, or a piece of knowledge, I expect you to put it out there. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
He resumed his path toward the overturned van. Just outside his peripheral vision, he could feel Knox glaring daggers at Flynn. He decided to let it be.
He heard a distant whoop carried on the cooling air, and a moment later the Millers Kill ambulance crested the hill. It swung in as close to the van as possible, its EMTs on the ground and headed for the injured before the siren had died away.
No . . . that wasn’t the echo of the ambulance. Far down the valley, where the road ran out of sight between the next mountain gap, he saw a whirl of red-and-whites, following the blazing headlights of a speeding vehicle.
“Christ on a crutch,” he said. Just what he needed, some jacked-up idiot thinking he could give one of their cruisers a run right through an accident site. “Get back!” he bellowed to the Corinth paramedics, who had strapped a man onto a pallet and were now angling for the rear door of the ambulance. He turned back toward where Huggins was huddling with his volunteers. “Everybody away from the road!”
Where was—? He stalked toward the ambulance, his chest tightening, until he spotted Clare kneeling beside someone on another pallet, her BDUs pale in the gathering dark. Well away from the edge of the road. Okay. He saw a flicker of red hair out of the corner of his eye. “Kevin, get on the radio,” Russ said. “I want to know what the hell—” He broke off.
The speeding car was slowing down. Way down. Dust plumed beneath its tires as it veered onto the opposite shoulder and skidded to a stop. The MKPD cruiser rolled into place behind it.
Two men emerged from the car, a souped-up GTO that seemed too small for the size of its driver and passenger. Their dark-blond hair and long-limbed, powerful bodies were similar, although one had a russetty beard swallowing half his face and a couple inches on the other.
“Who’re they?” Knox asked.
“Bruce Christie and his brother Donald,” Russ said.
“What’re they doing out here?” Flynn said.
“Well, that’s a question, isn’t it?” Across the road, Eric McCrea was getting out of the squad car and settling his lid on his head. He was frowning at the Christies, but made no move to stop them. “You two get over to the remaining passengers,” Russ said, without turning. “Take their statements. Knox?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Remember what I said.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Christies struck out toward the van. Russ lengthened his stride, wanting to intercept them, wanting to appear casual. “Can I help you two?” he asked, pitching his voice to carry above the babble of questions and complaints and radio reports filling the air.
The brothers stopped. Looked his way. The last time he had seen this pair, he had had his baton in his hand and was threatening to bust Donald Christie’s kneecaps if he didn’t back down and let his brother drive him home from the Dew Drop Inn.
Bruce, the smaller one—inasmuch as any of the Christie boys could be called smaller—laid a steadying hand on his bearded brother’s chest. “Chief Van Alstyne,” he said.
“Bruce.” Russ tipped his head toward their overheated muscle car. “You two were in one all-fired hurry to get here.”
“Your guy was over to Donald’s place when the call came in. We heard it was a van got rolled.” Bruce glanced over to where the van’s undercarriage lay exposed. “We got a van. Wanted to make sure it wan’t ours.” Like all the Christies, Bruce had a strong up-country Cossayuharie accent.
Russ shook his head. “Not unless you loaned it out to a nun.”
“A nun!” Donald Christie’s eyes went wide over his red-gold beard. “Hell, no. We don’t know no nuns.” Russ caught a whiff of sheep and manure as the big man scraped his boots against the pavement.
“He knows that, Donald.” Bruce, widely acknowledged as the brains of the family, rolled his eyes. “What happened?”
“Tire blew. She lost control.” Russ shrugged. “We’ve got three or four injured but nothing life-threatening.”
Bruce gestured toward the pump and hose trucks with his squared-off chin. “Is it likely to blow? Cast off any fire?”
“Nah.”
“Then why’s the fire department trampin’ around all over the place?”
Russ twisted, to see a line of Huggins’s volunteers disappearing between the trees. He turned back to the Christies. “Why so interested?”
Bruce nodded toward the woods. “This is Christie land. All up and down this part of the mountain and the pasturage below.” He pointed to where, in the distance, house lights could be seen twinkling through the dusk. “That’s Donald’s place, there. If there’s gonna be a fire, we want to know.”
“Fair enough. No, your property’s safe. The nun—the sister—was driving a bunch of—ah, migrant laborers. Some of them ran off when they saw my men. My officers,” he corrected.
“Migrant labor? You mean Mexicans?” Bruce frowned.
“The ones left behind are Spanish-speaking. I don’t know where they’re from.”
“Mexicans. Running loose through our woods.” Donald looked to his brother, who thumped the larger man on the chest before turning to Russ.
“You gonna catch ’em?” Bruce demanded.
“We’re going to try to round them up, sure. See if any of them need help.”
“If they need help”—Donald sounded as if he wanted to spit—“they get a free ride to the hospital and the all-you-can-eat buffet. We get sumpin’ wrong, we gotta go to the clinic and sit for an hour to get some woman who ain’t even a doctor. And we’re Americans! There’s been Christies here since 1720!”
Probably interbreeding the whole time.
“Hush,” Bruce said. “Anything we can do to help? Round ’em up, I mean?”
“You . . . want to help?”
“I wanna get them off our land.” Bruce looked up, to where the first star glimmered in the pink and indigo sky. “When it gets cold tonight, they’re not gonna stay freezin’ in the woods when they can stroll right ’cross the pastures and take shelter in one of Donald’s barns.”
“Stealin’ stuff,” Donald added.
“We should turn out the rest of the boys.” Bruce turned toward his brother. “Where’s your phone?”
“Whoa up, there.” Russ held up one hand. “I’m not sending anybody out as a searcher whose got a hair in his ass about immigrants.”
Donald stepped toward him. “You think you can keep us off our own property?”
Bruce thumped him again. “Hush.” He looked at Russ. “We don’t want anything different than you do, Chief. Get these guys off our land. Take ’em to the hospital or send ’em back to Mexico, dun’t matter to me what you do with ’em once we’ve cleared ’em off. Hah?” He glanced at his brother. “Hah? Play nice?”
Donald rumbled deep in his chest but nodded.
“Okay,” Bruce went on. “We can call up some of our cousins and they can help look. Or if you don’t want ’em to help that way, they can camp out on the other side of this forest. That’s Donald’s place, off’n Seven Mile Road. Head off anybody who comes outa the woods.”
Russ took off his glasses and polished them on his blouse front. Seven Mile Road was a hell of a long way away by car. This stretch of the mountain’s spine was bigger than he had thought—a lot bigger. “Okay,” he said, replacing his glasses. “You can assist. You and your cousins.” He knuckled his hands on top of his rig, making himself larger and emphasizing his sidearm. “But I’ll warn you. Once. If there’re any problems, if it looks at any point like one of you messed with one of the missing men, I’m rounding you all up. And we’ll let the DA sort out who did what to whom. Shouldn’t take her more’n a couple weeks.”
Donald rumbled again, more threateningly this time, but Bruce nodded. “Deal.” He held out his hand to his brother. “Gimme your phone.” The larger Christie reached into his side jacket pocket, a movement uncomfortably reminiscent of someone going for a shoulder-holstered firearm. “How many of these guys you got missing?” Bruce asked.
“That’s a good question. Let’s go see what my officers have come up with.” He took a step back, swinging wide so the Christies would walk beside, rather than behind him. To his left, he heard the solid ca-chunk of a door’s closing, and the rear lights of the Corinth ambulance flared red and white. It crawled off the crushed patch of ground it had been parked on, paused at the shoulder, and then, blue lights springing to life, surged onto the road. Leaving behind a solitary figure in desert camo, who turned, spotted him, and jogged over. “Russ,” she called.
“In a minute,” he said. They all converged on the Millers Kill ambulance at the same time. Karl and Annie, the paramedics, were positioning an inflatable cast on the arm of a young Latino, whose closed-off expression may have been due to pain, or to an extreme reluctance to engage with Knox, squatting on the ground next to his pallet.
“Por lo menos dígame si cualesquiera de sus amigos estuvieron lastimados,” she was saying. The injured man ignored her. She stood up, turning to Russ.
“Hel-lo, baby,” Donald said. He sucked and smacked his lips. Kevin Flynn, standing spread-legged behind Knox, flamed up. He opened his mouth.
“If I were your baby, asshole, I’d probably be stupid enough to find that flattering. But I’m not, and I don’t. Get lost.” Hadley looked at Russ. “The only thing I can get out of him is that his name is Amado and he claims to be legal. He’s got some sort of guest-worker permit thing. He’s happy to flash that around, but anything else, forget it.”
Kevin was staring at her, his expression a mixture of admiration and shock. Russ kept his mouth in a straight line. “Thank you, Officer Knox.” He got down on one knee—squatting had gone out of his body’s vocabulary four, five years ago—and looked at the kid. He was young, barely out of his teens, and his scraggly beard and patchy mustache made him look like a boy made up for a high school play.
“Amado.” He tapped his badge. “Yo no soy del ICE. No cuido sobre su estado.”
Clare’s voice. Surprised. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
He gave her a look. Turned back to the injured man, who was wincing as Annie finished Velcroing the splints in place. “Amado, charla a mí.”
“Yo soy Amado Esfuentes. Soy legal.”
“No cuido. Deseo encontrar a sus amigos y ayudarles. ¿Cuántos de ellos están fuera de allí? ¿Cualquier persona estuvo lastimada?”
“What’s he saying?” Flynn asked.
“Same thing I was,” Knox said. “How many are there, is anyone hurt.”
“Russ.” Clare’s voice was insistent. “I know how many men there were.”
Of course she did. He was surprised to find a part of himself amused. Smack-dab in the middle of police business. Just like old times. He braced his hand against his thigh and stood up.
“Sister Lucia said there were eight men in the van. They were headed for Michael McGeoch’s dairy farm.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “Mike McGeoch’s farm? On Lick Springs Road?”
She shook her head, loosening more strands of hair. “She didn’t say where.” Donald Christie was looking at her, curious about her BDUs, maybe, but he didn’t show any signs of trying out his charm offensive. Of course, she didn’t have everything out there on a platter, like Knox. A jackass like Christie wouldn’t know how to appreciate a woman like Clare.
He turned to the injured man. Karl and Annie were helping him to his feet. In the light from the ambulance’s interior, the kid’s face was gray beneath his caramel skin and thin beard. Annie frowned. “You’ll have to ask the rest of your questions at the hospital, Chief. We need to get this guy and the other one back.”
“Okay. Thanks, Annie.” Russ pointed toward the Christies. “You two. Get to the pump truck and get briefed by John Huggins about the search before you call in any of your family.” Thankfully, they shambled off without protest. “And remember what I said!” he called after them. “Knox. Kevin.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yeah, Chief?”
“You two keep the van secure until the tow truck gets here. Kevin, show Knox how to write up the accident report.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw desert camo sidling past him. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“To help with the search.” Clare’s expression said, What did you think I was going to do?
Help with the search. Of course she was. It was too much to hope she might stay out of it for once. “I’m taking off now,” he growled.
“Oh, I’ll get a ride.”
He sighed. Motioned to his junior officers. “I want you two to see that Reverend Fergusson gets back to her car. And then that she goes home.”
“You want us to stay for the search, Chief?” Kevin sounded as if there was nothing he’d rather do more. Hadley Knox, on the other hand, looked appalled.
“Yeah. I do. Knox, you’re the only other Spanish speaker here. Make yourself available as necessary.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you headed for the hospital, Chief?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to the McGeoch place and let them know all their farmhands have run off.”
Clare’s face, outlined in the gathering dark by the flash of red-and-whites, changed. She got it.
“You know him, Chief?” Flynn continued.
“Oh, yeah.” He sighed. “He’s my brother-in-law.”
Amado heard him before he saw him. One of his own, no flashlight, no badly accented shouts of, “We are not I-C-E! We want to help you!” Just the thudding of footfalls and the whipping, crackling sounds of someone running through the forest. Idiot. There was a little moonlight shafting through the bare branches and pines, but not enough to make it safe to race all out as if you were sprinting down a street. He had spent enough time hiding in the dark. The trick was to go slowly. To let yourself see where you were headed and then to move like smoke, silently, safely.
Thank God it wasn’t his little brother thrashing through the trees. In the confusion after the accident—men swearing and groaning, Sister Lucia insisting she was all right despite her bloody head and shallow breath—he had seen Octavio’s arm. Known at once the boy would have to go to the hospital. Where, without papers or a green card, he faced deportation. Amado had stuffed his own GW-1 permit and identity card into his brother’s pocket. “You will be Amado,” he had said. “I will be Octavio.” Octavio looked at him blankly, eyes glazing over with shock. “Just keep saying it over and over,” Amado had urged. “You are Amado Esfuentes. You are Amado Esfuentes.”
“I am Amado Esfuentes,” Octavio parroted.
Amado had stayed as long as he dared, until the lights of the police car came over the hill. Then he, along with the rest of the able-bodied, fled into the woods. His ID would ensure his brother’s safety. They resembled each another, and the pitiful excuse for a beard Octavio was growing blurred the differences between their faces. Anglos had a hard time looking past the color of a man’s skin, anyway.
A loud thud, followed by a grunt, brought him back to the present: Esteban. He was the only one stupid enough to blunder through the dark like that. Amado debated, for a moment, staying put in his half-hollowed log. Then he heard a faint whimpering noise. Mother of God. Why his family had ever let the boy out of the house, let alone sent him north, was beyond Amado’s understanding. Resigned, he heaved himself out of the shadows and headed—slowly, silently—toward the snuffling sounds.
The poor kid was sprawled out on the forest floor, trying to stuff his weeping back into his mouth. It took some of the younger ones that way. Amado had seen it before. Tell a boy he’s a man and carry him two thousand miles away, into a cold and alien place. He misses his mother, he misses his girl, he misses his home. He swaggers around like a fighting cock, to hide his fears, and cries in the dark when he thinks no one can hear him.
Amado had been that boy—once. He paused behind a cluster of pines and coughed, to give Esteban the chance to set himself to rights while he still thought himself unseen. “Is someone there?” Amado said.
The figure, anonymous in jeans and a quilted jacket, shoved up abruptly and scrambled backward, face pale and terrified. Shit! An anglo. He faded farther back into the shadows, ready to disappear, when the boy, still moving backward, slammed himself into a tree, making Amado wince. He wasn’t Esteban, but he certainly moved with the same grace and coordination. His baseball cap flew off, revealing a tumble of long blond hair.
Not a boy, then. Not a boy at all. The girl held her hands up in front of her and whispered something in impossibly fast English. Pleading, he could tell by the tone of her voice, but for what? Help? Amado stepped into the shaft of moonlight so she could see him, his hands out and open, his arms relaxed. “I won’t hurt you,” he said, but of course, she couldn’t understand him. She balled her hands up into fists—badly—and said something, a thread of defiance over her fear. He recognized one word: police.
“I’m not the police,” he said. Slowly, keeping his arms spread wide, he sat on the rusty mat of pine needles beneath them. Making himself smaller. “No police.”
“No police,” she said in English.
He nodded. “No police.” He smiled at her. “I milk cows for a living.” He mimed the old-fashioned way of milking teats. “I pitch manure.” He flung a few invisible loads with an imaginary pitchfork. “And I roll hay”—no way to indicate that—”and I wipe the shit off my boots at the end of the day.” He wiped the soles of his boots on the forest floor. Quiet talk, the kind of nonsense he murmured to the stock while he worked. All the words that, together, meant I’m no threat to you.
She stepped away from the huge pine that had been holding up her backbone. She bent a little, getting a closer look at him. In the moonlight, he could see she wasn’t a girl, either, but a woman, around his own age. He also got a clue as to why she was hiding from the police in, presumably, her own country. She reeked of marijuana.
She said something. He caught the word Mexican.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m Mexican. Oaxacan.” Not that she’d know where that was. He pressed one hand to his woolen jacket. “Amado Esfuentes, at your service.” He bowed as best he could while sitting tailor-style on a cold patch of ground.
“Amado Esfuentes,” she repeated.
He nodded. Wondered if he ought to have introduced himself as Octavio. He ought to get into the habit. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she was about to turn him in to the authorities, was it?
She smiled, a bit, and edged an inch closer, like a new calf examining him around its mother’s hindquarters. She mimicked his motion, flattening her quilted jacket, revealing she was most definitely a woman. “Isabel,” she said. “Isabel Christie.”
English vowels always sounded so flat. “Isobel Christie,” he said.
She smiled, more broadly. “Yeah, Isobel.”
Slowly, one hand still raised where she could see it, he reached into his coat pocket. She shrank back. “It’s okay,” he said, in the same voice he used to soothe a skittish cow or a frightened horse. “It’s okay.” He pulled out a king-sized Pay-Day bar and held it out toward her. “Are you hungry?” He waggled the candy. “Go ahead. You can take it. I have more.”
She stretched her hand out and grasped the chocolate with the very tips of her fingers, and it was gone, out of his hand and into hers faster than the eye could follow. He nodded again and dug out another candy bar for himself.
She tore open the wrapper and downed the confection as if it was the only meal she had had all day. He had guessed, when he smelled the pot on her, that she’d be hungry. She eyed the candy bar in his hand. He pulled out another PayDay—his last—and handed it to her. This time, she took it, rather than snatching it, and sat down facing him. She consumed the second one almost as quickly as the first, watching him all the while as he ate his more slowly, crunching the peanuts between his teeth.
“Well,” he said in Spanish. “Now I’ve introduced myself and talked about my work and my home, and shared a meal. The last time I did that, it was a setup with my friend Geraldo’s sister-in-law. Now I suppose I’ll have to walk you home and introduce myself to your parents.”
She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She said something to him in a tone of voice so pleasant he wished he knew what it meant. Then she smiled, full on.
“Maybe this is the secret to maintaining good feelings between a man and a woman,” he said. “Not understanding a word of what the other is saying.”
In the distance, he heard a high, thin voice. “Izzy!” it called. “Izzy!”
The smile vanished from her face. Her eyes went wide and white-edged. He didn’t need to know English to translate her frightened whisper. Oh, God.
They both scrambled to their feet, as the voice continued on, wheedling, cozening. It reminded him of the way his grandfather would croon lovingly to the chickens right before catching one and putting the hatchet to it. The woman was looking wildly around her, long blond hair swinging through the moonlight. Too bright. Amado snatched her hat off the ground and handed it to her. She twirled her hair into a rope and stuffed it beneath the cap.
“Isobel,” he said, softly. She looked at him, on the verge of panic. He held his finger to his lips and pointed, through the trees, toward his earlier hiding place. He held out his hand to her. Come with me.
She took his hand. Yes.
He turned and traced his way through the trees, taking his time, seeing where he wanted to go and then moving. She shoved against his arm, pushing, trying to hurry him, a whimper trapped in her throat. He squeezed her hand and patted her arm, once, twice, turning the pat into a gesture that took in the woods stretching out in front of them. Slowly. Silently.
He stepped over a fallen pine and around a dense thicket of sharp-thorned scrub that had sprung up in its place. Hard on the other side of the thorn, a massive maple had split from age or lightning or ice, leaving one half upright and budding, the other angled against the trunk. The dead branches were weighted down with a decade or more of maple leaves, pine needles, tiny twisting weeds, so that the forest floor itself seemed to rise up in a swell. He pointed toward it.
She turned her hands up in puzzlement. What?
He angled his body, making himself as flat as he could, and slithered past the spiny brush. Small branches shook and flexed as the thorns caught his woolen coat, but then he was through, ducking down, squatting in the opening of the leaf-mold-and-tangle tent.
She nodded. Followed his path, stepping where he had stepped, her arms outstretched to give herself a flatter profile. The thorns zizzed over the nylon of her jacket.
“Izzy? Izzy!” The voice was louder, nearer, meaner. He—it was a he, Amado was sure of it—had stopped pretending he wanted to feed the chickens. Now they could hear the hatchet in his hand. The woman froze for a moment, her face puckered in fear, but before Amado had the chance to whisper courage to her, she opened her eyes and took another step. One, two, and then she was through, reaching for him. He took her hands and held them, tight, before pointing into the hide.
She crouched, twisted about, and scooted in on her backside, deeper and deeper, snapping off tiny twigs that sounded, with the voice raging in the air around them, like rifle shots. Amado crawled in after her, as far as he could go, and they sat, face-to-face and knee to knee, in a dark so profound all he could make out was the pale blur of her face. The smell, mold and rot and marijuana, made his head swim.
“Izzy! Goddammit! Get out here, you bitch!”
Her hands fluttered against his, and he caught them, squeezing hard. She had calluses, as he did. A woman used to hard work, as he was. Even in his tight grip, her hands shook. He tugged her, gently, firmly, until she leaned forward, and he could wrap one arm around her shoulders and press her head into the crook beneath his neck. She shuddered and breathed deeply. Stopped shaking. He held her, this stranger, against the voice, raging and snapping and threatening things he could not begin to know.
The Washington County Emergency Department charge nurse did a double-take that would have been funny, if Clare hadn’t been so tired.
“Reverend Clare? Is that you?” Alta came around the intake counter, her eyes never leaving Clare’s uniform, whose coffee-stain design now also sported several streaks of crushed-grass green and leaf-rot brown after almost two hours spent crawling through the woods, searching in vain for the missing men. “Good lord, you haven’t left the ministry, have you? Weren’t you just on call last week?”
Clare held the rotating—and unpaid—post of hospital chaplain, along with the Reverend Inman of High Street Baptist and Dr. McFeely of First Presbyterian. She sighed. “Hi, Alta. Yes, I was here last week, and no, I haven’t left the ministry. I’m a weekend warrior.”
Alta looked dubious. “It’s Tuesday night.”
“I’m a weekend warrior who is way, way behind on her flight hours. I’ve been heading to Fort Dix or Latham on my days off to get in more air time.”
“Flight hours? You’re not a chaplain?”
“Nope. They’ve got me in the pilot’s seat again.”
“Well. God bless you.” Alta, for the first time in their almost-three-year acquaintanceship, hugged her. “Stepping forward when your country calls.” She held Clare out at arm’s length. “I’m proud to know you.”
Clare made a miserable attempt at a smile. “Yeah, thanks. Look, I’m here to see Sister Lucia Pirone. She was brought in—”
Alta stepped back behind the counter. “Broken hip and internal hemorrhage of indeterminate origin, ayeh. She’s been transferred to Glens Falls for an MRI.” Evidently, the special tribute was over.
“How about the injured men she was driving?”
Alta bent over her computer. “The unconscious-with-contusion’s been admitted for observation overnight.” She looked up at Clare. “Routine. Checking for symptoms of concussion.” She straightened up. “The abrasions-and-contusions got patched up and was R.O.R. ’bout half an hour ago. I have no idea where he is now.”
“You just let him go?”
Alta looked over her shoulder and beckoned to Clare. Bemused, Clare moved in closer. “An agent from Albany showed up.”
“An agent?”
“ICE.” Alta rolled her eyes. “Formerly known as INS. Some twenty-five-year-old with an MBA probably told them to rebrand themselves.” She dropped her voice. “So, anyway, I gave the guy ten bucks and the homeless shelter pamphlet. Don’t know if it’ll do him any good, since he didn’t speak English, but—”
“The hospital reported these guys?”
Alta drew herself up to her full five feet two inches. “Of course not! Someone at the accident site called it in, apparently.”
One of the MKPD? No. None of Russ’s officers would make a call like that without his say-so. Now John Huggins—that was a whole ’nother kettle of fish. “What about the third man?” she asked Alta.
“The broken arm? He’s getting casted. He’ll be ready for release as soon as Dr. Stillman clears him.”
“So soon?”
Alta gave her a glance that said, And your medical knowledge is . . . ?
“It’s just that when Chief Van Alstyne broke his leg last year, he went into surgery and had to stay overnight.”
“The chief”—was it her imagination, or did Alta put a peculiar spin to those words?—“had an open fracture requiring pins. The illegal has a plain-as-vanilla greenstick fracture. Slap some fiberglass on it and he’s done.”
Clare found herself looking over her shoulder just as the charge nurse had. “What’s going to happen to him? When he’s discharged?”
Alta threw up her hands. “Lord knows. The lady from the ICE already looked at his papers.” She shook her head. “All the way up from Albany for three farmworkers. I wish the government had moved that fast when my ex-husband was skipping out on child support. Their sponsors are on the way over to talk with her.”
“Their sponsors?”
“The folks who hired ’em. They’re responsible for their work permits. Leastways, that’s how it was explained to me.”
Sponsors. Would that be the business that arranged the paperwork and the transportation? Or would that be—
The Emergency Department’s old-fashioned swinging doors thumped open, admitting Russ Van Alstyne. He didn’t look happy, and his frown grew even deeper when he caught sight of Clare.
He strode up the institutional green hallway toward the waiting room. An anxious-looking man with more hair in his mustache than on his head entered in his wake, along with a rangy blond woman who looked enough like a female version of Russ to be his—
—sister. Oh.
“What are you doing here?” Russ demanded. “I thought I told Knox and Kevin to take you home after the search.”
She squelched the first reply that came to mind: You’re not the boss of me! “Don’t blame them,” she said instead. “They tried.”
The doors to the examination and treatment area clunked open. A white-coated doctor stepped inside, headed for Alta’s desk. He paused when he saw Russ, and opened his mouth, but the chief of police went past him without a second glance and stopped in front of Clare. “Oh, I don’t blame them, believe me.”
Clare did a lot of counseling as a priest, and she was good at it. She recognized the weapons of grief: anger, lashing out, keeping the world at bay. She knew the postures of guilt: bending over, ducking away, doing almost anything to avoid confronting the festering wound to the heart. She recognized. She knew. And it didn’t do her a damn bit of good, confronted by Russ Van Alstyne acting as if she had somehow done him wrong.
“If you have a problem with me, spit it out,” she snapped. “Otherwise, get out of my face.”
“A problem with you? A problem with you? How about the fact that you’re once more elbowing your way into police business that has nothing to do with you—”
“I am here to visit Sister Lucia! It has nothing to do with you.”
“—despite the fact that the last time you decided to get involved—”
“—it ended in a bloody mess, you—”
“Saving your life, you—”
“—idiot woman!”
“—overbearing jerk!”
They both stopped at the same moment, breathing heavily. If this were a movie, they would have grabbed each other, but Clare had never felt less like throwing her arms around Russ Van Alstyne. Unless it was to knock him to the floor.
Someone coughed.
Oh, my God. She saw realization replacing rage on his face. They had played the whole scene out in front of an audience.
“Chief Van Alstyne?”
Russ closed his eyes for a moment, then turned. The doctor who had come in earlier was looking at them with one hand resting on Alta’s desk phone. Ready to call security, no doubt.
“Dr. Stillman.” Clare could hear him forcing his voice into its normal channels. “Hi.”
“Uh . . . hi. How’s the leg?”
Russ looked down at his ancient jeans, as if it hadn’t occurred to him before now that there was something holding him up. “Fine. Just . . . fine.”
“Great. Uh—” The orthopedist’s gaze strayed to Clare. He stared. “Reverend Fergusson? Is that you?”
She smiled weakly. “Nice to see you again, Dr. Stillman.” He let go of the phone and crossed to her, peering at her patches in the same way she had seen him peering at Russ’s X-ray last year. “National Guard? Great! Me, too. What unit?”
“Uhm . . . the 142nd Aviation Battalion.”
“Are you their new chaplain?”
Russ rolled his eyes.
“No,” she said. “I’m their new Black Hawk pilot.”
“Excuse me.” A new voice, from behind her, startled Clare. She and Dr. Stillman both turned. A very tall and very erect older woman had emerged from the hallway leading to the elevator banks. She had silver hair cut towel-dry short and the professorial air of someone who has been telling people what to do without much back talk for the past forty-some years. “I’m Paula Hodgden, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” She folded her hands over a clipboard. Her measuring gaze took in the whole waiting-room tableau. “Is one of you the sponsoring employer of the nonresident aliens?”
“Oh!” The mustachioed man tore his eyes away from the Russ-and-Clare show. “That would be me. I mean, me and my wife.” He nudged the woman by his side, who was still contemplating the two of them with a look of deep amusement.
“ICE?” Russ said. “Not to be rude, but what are you doing here?”
“And you are . . . ?”
“Russell Van Alstyne, Millers Kill chief of police.”
She flipped her clipboard open and made a notation. “Ah. It must have been your department that handled the accident.”
“An accident in our jurisdiction. Why are you here, Ms.—uh—”
“Hodgden,” Clare said under her breath.
“I received a report that a vanload of possible undocumented aliens had been in an accident.”
Russ frowned. “Who reported it?”
Ms. Hodgden looked at him evenly. “I don’t think you expect me to divulge that, do you? I will say it was not, as it should have been, your department.”
Russ crossed his arms, a move that emphasized his departmental hardware and patches. “We don’t go around checking people’s papers here in Millers Kill. It’s not a damn police state.”
Clare had to hide her smile.
“But you and I are in the first line of defense against possible terrorists, aren’t we?” Ms. Hodgden gestured toward Clare and Dr. Stillman. “Surely, we do our job so they might not need to do theirs.”
Russ glanced at Clare, and she knew, without a doubt, what he was thinking: This lady has read too many official government pamphlets.
Their mind-reading moment was broken when his sister shouldered him out of the way. “Hi, I’m Janet McGeoch.” She shook Ms. Hodgden’s hand. “Is there a problem with our workers?”
“How do you do, Mrs. McGeoch. Let me ask you, did you use a service to facilitate the H-two A permits?”
Janet glanced at her husband. “Yeah. Is that a problem?”
“It was Creative Labor Solutions,” Mike McGeoch said. “They came well recommended. We went to this seminar about getting workers, over to Amsterdam? Couple folks there had used them before. We’ve kept all the paperwork and copies of everything we signed off on.” He patted his plaid wool jacket, as if the documentation might be hiding inside somewhere.
Ms. Hodgden made another notation on her clipboard. “Creative Labor Solutions. I’m not familiar with them. I’d like to see any correspondence you have from them.”
“Why?” Janet said pointedly.
The ICE agent sighed. “Mr. and Mrs. McGeoch, I suspect you’ve been stung by a not-uncommon employee scam. Obtaining an H-two A permit costs an employment service time and money, and, as it’s designed to do, retards the movement of labor from the resident country to the United States. You follow?”
Janet frowned. Glanced at her husband. “Yeah, I follow.”
“Some so-called employment agencies try to make a deeper profit by charging clients the cost of fully legal H-two A employees and then supplying undocumented nonresident aliens instead.”
“You mean, like a dealer selling a dime bag for a full ten bucks, but giving his customers baking soda?” Russ said.
Ms. Hodgden raised her eyebrows. “That’s not how I would have put it, but yes.”
“And we got the baking soda?” Janet looked from her brother to the ICE agent. “What’s that mean, exactly?”
“Two of the three men who were admitted here had forged H-two A permits. Not, I should add, very good forgeries, either.”
“Oh, shit,” Mike McGeoch said.
Janet reached behind her and squeezed her husband’s hand. “And the third?”
Ms. Hodgden consulted the clipboard. “Amado Esfuentes. His employment authorization documentation is correct.”
“Well, there! There’s nothing to say the rest of the men don’t have the right papers, too.”
“Mrs. McGeoch.” The agent’s voice had the professional sympathy of someone used to telling the same bad news, over and over again. It reminded Clare of her insurance adjuster. “Properly documented migrant workers don’t usually flee after being injured in a car wreck. Yes, it’s possible the two who were unable to run away were the only two undocumented aliens, but it’s not likely.”
“What about this Amado guy?” Mike sounded hopeful. “Why would he have papers and the others not?”
“In all likelihood, Esfuentes has worked in the U.S. before. That makes it easier for him to obtain an EAD on his own, rather than through an agency. It’s not uncommon for an experienced guest laborer to serve as a sort of leader or guide for work gangs from his village. I’d be willing to bet everyone in that van tonight came from the same hometown.”
“An experienced worker? The one with the broken arm?” Russ shook his head. “I spoke with him. He was barely out of his teens.”
Dr. Stillman, who had been listening at the edges of the discussion, broke in. “I agree with Chief Van Alstyne. He’s twenty-one, tops.”
Ms. Hodgden made a well, what can you expect? gesture. “These people go to work when they’re thirteen or fourteen. You can’t rely on age as a guide.”
“These people?” Clare propped her hands on her hips. She opened her mouth. Russ laid a hand on her shoulder. She shut up.
“What does this mean for us?” Janet asked. “Bottom line.”
“It means the two undocumented nonresidents will be returned to their country of origin.” Ms. Hodgden looked back down at her clipboard and frowned. “I’m having some difficulty locating one of them,” she admitted. “No one here seems to know where they’ve placed him. Sloppy work for a hospital.”
Clare studied her boots.
“What about the money we’ve paid to Creative Labor?” Janet asked. “What about us having enough hands to manage our herd?”
“Whether you can recover the fees paid to the agency is between you and that agency.” Ms. Hodgden gave the McGeochs another professionally sympathetic look. “My suggestion would be to contact another, more reliable service and have them get started fulfilling your labor needs.”
“Another six weeks!” Mike McGeoch jammed his hands in his pockets and stared at his boots.
“In the meantime, your other employees’ papers will be examined as soon as they—ah, turn up.” She gave Russ a look indicating this was his responsibility. “Mr. Esfuentes can remain in this country legally, so long as he is employed.”
“Employed by us,” Janet said.
“Yes.”
“As in, paid, and everything?”
Paula Hodgden pierced her with a gimlet eye. “Mrs. McGeoch, one of the reasons we have work permits is to prevent employers from exploiting employees from another country.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant”—Janet splayed her hands wide—“he’s got a broken arm! On a dairy farm, that makes him about as useful as . . . as . . .”
“Teats on a bull?” Russ offered.
Janet slugged his arm. “How long is he going to be laid up?” she asked Dr. Stillman.
“Four weeks in the heavy cast and another four in a lighter version. After that, another few weeks in a removable brace, just to ensure he doesn’t reinjure it. No weight-bearing exercise for the first month and very mild exertion for the second.”
“Mild exertion? What’s that mean?”
The orthopedist shrugged. “He could pick up a couple of books. His clothing. For most of my patients, it means you can start to perform normal household functions for yourself.”
“We don’t need someone for normal household functions,” Janet said. “We need someone who can unspool thirty pounds of hose and pitch manure and drive a stick-shift truck!”
Stillman shook his head. “You’re talking early July before this young man will be cleared for that sort of work.”
Janet McGeoch’s eyes met her husband’s, and Clare could see them speaking to each other without a word, in the way of long-married couples. Mike nodded.
Janet turned back to Paula Hodgden. “I’m sorry, but we just can’t afford to keep him on the payroll for two months or more.”
“I understand. I’ll arrange for him to return with the other two.”
“Wait!” The word was out of Clare’s mouth before she had a chance to stop it. “What if he gets a job?”
Paula Hodgden looked at her and then at the rest of them, clustered among the JFK-era chairs of the ED waiting room. Clare could see her assigning everyone a status—employers, investigating officer, treating physician, and . . . woman in a grungy undress uniform.
“I’m sorry,” the agent said. “You are . . . ?”
“The Reverend Clare Fergusson, rector of St. Alban’s Church.”
Ms. Hodgden’s eyebrows went up. She looked at Russ.
“Yeah,” he said. “She really is.”
Dr. Stillman grinned. “I can vouch for her authenticity, too.” He glanced toward the admissions desk. “But that’s all I can do. I see Alta’s waving me down. Excuse me, folks. Reverend.”
Clare raised her hand in something that might have been either a wave or a blessing. Then she zeroed in on Ms. Hodgden again. “What if this Amado had a job for the next two months? A legal, paying job? Could he stay then? And work for the McGeochs after his arm healed?”
Russ pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “What are you thinking of?”
“We need an interim sexton at the church. Mr. Hadley had open-heart surgery in March, and he hasn’t been able to perform his duties since then. He’s going to come back this summer, we think, but in the meantime we’ve been plugging the hole with volunteers. This guy could take the job.” She smiled, pleased with herself. “It’s perfect.”
“Wait just one minute—” Russ began.
“What do you think, Ms. Hodgden? Would that be legal?”
“Well . . . if you’re willing to fill out the paperwork.”
Clare turned to the McGeochs. “Would you consider taking him on when he’s recovered?”
Janet and Mike gave each other another speaking look. “Okay,” Janet said.
“Clare. For chrissakes, you’re going off half-cocked again.” Russ shoved his thumbs under his belt and tightened his hands over his rig. “He could be anybody. He could be wanted in three countries, for all you know.”
Paula Hodgden shook her head. “Mmm, no. In order to obtain an H-two A permit, the applicant must have no criminal record in either the originating or the host country.”
Russ glared at the ICE agent, then returned his attention to Clare. “He’s not going to be able to do custodial work with a bum arm. And what if he boosts the silver and takes off?”
“Most of Mr. Hadley’s work is stuff like vacuuming and polishing the woodwork. You can do that with one arm as well as two. As for the silver, I keep it locked away except when it’s in use.” She let her usual light Virginia accent deepen into molasses. “I am a Southerner, after all. We know how to preserve our silver from depredation.”
“Where’s he going to stay? Hmm? Are you going to pay for a room for him?”
She bit her lip. As much as it galled her to admit it, she hadn’t considered that issue.
“You see?” Russ went on. “You can’t—”
“There are two extra bedrooms in the rectory,” she said, thinking out loud.
“No.” The word was like a lodge pole driven into the ground. Immovable. She looked up at his grim face.
“No,” she agreed. “That’s not the best idea, is it.”
“Why can’t he stay in our bunkhouse?” Mike’s voice startled her. She had tuned the rest of them out. She looked at the dairy farmer. “Well, it’s not a—you know—western-style bunkhouse.” He smiled shyly. “It’s the original house on the property. Way back from the road, down by the stream. Hadn’t been lived in by anything but squirrels and chickens for the last hundred years, and let me tell you, it was a job making it habitable again.”
“Honey.” Janet laid her hand on her husband’s arm. She smiled apologetically to Clare. “We have the house all cleaned and repaired for the new hands. He would be welcome to stay there, but I’m afraid he’d have no way of getting to work.”
“No, no, that’s what makes it perfect.” Mike beamed at Clare. “The lady who bought the Petersons’ house, the house across the road? She works at your church. Her name’s Elizabeth de Groot.”
Clare felt her jaw unhinge. She stared up at Russ. “My deacon lives across the street from your sister?”
He shrugged. “I told you it’s a small town.”
The agent held up her clipboard. “This is all very interesting, but perhaps, while they hash out the housing arrangements, I might have a word, Chief Van Alstyne?” She retreated toward the admissions desk.
Russ looked at his sister, then at Clare, then back to his sister. “Don’t agree to anything,” he said to Janet. “You have no idea what you’ll be getting into.” He stalked off like a mood-reversed Cheshire Cat, leaving his frown hanging in the air between them.
“I can get Elizabeth to carry Amado back and forth if you’ll let him live in the bunkhouse,” Clare said, hurrying to close the deal before Janet decided to take her brother’s advice.
“What do think, honey?” Janet asked her husband.
Mike shrugged. “Not like it’s going to be too full now, is it?”
“Okay, then.” Janet held out her hand to Clare.
“Great.” They shook. Janet laid her other hand atop Clare’s, trapping her in a warm grasp. “Honey?” She kept her gaze on Clare. “Could you go get me something from the cafeteria? I’m starving.”
“Uh . . . okay.” Mike bumped off down the hall. Leaving Clare alone with Janet McGeoch, née Van Alstyne. Clare swallowed.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.” Janet’s eyes were the same blue as Russ’s.
Oh, God. Better take the bull by the horns. “I bet you have,” Clare said. “Some of it’s probably even true.”
Janet nodded. Released Clare’s hand. “I have to apologize to you.”
Now that was surprising. “To me? Why?”
“When my mom told me about you and Russ, I sort of mentally cast you in the role of bimbo home wrecker. You know, the much-younger seductress who wears Victoria’s Secret thongs and nails the middle-aged idiot by massaging his ego. Among other body parts.”
Clare thought she might spontaneously combust from the heat in her face.
“But it’s pretty obvious you’re not like that.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “No. No thongs.”
Janet smiled slyly. “And I don’t see you spending a lot of time massaging my brother’s ego.”
Clare laughed. And then Janet surprised her again by catching her in a hug. “My mother likes you,” she said in Clare’s ear, “and I think I like you, too.” She moved a little way apart, creating a space between them. “And if you can rescue my brother from this pit he’s dropped himself into, I swear, I’ll love you forever.”
It was close to midnight, and he was halfway back to his mother’s house, when Russ realized he hadn’t thought of Linda in hours. Since . . . since when? This morning? This afternoon? Panic, like a meaty hand, gripped his throat. Since before stopping at the liquor store. He hadn’t thought of her once since then. He had forgotten to remember. He steered the pickup to the shoulder of the road and got his four-ways on before the tears blinded him and he buckled over, hacking, the steering wheel cutting a groove in his forehead. He wept for his wife, and for forgetting, and for all the things he had loved and damaged.