Clare was thinking about the pills. She hadn’t had any yet, but she wasn’t sure if that was because just knowing they were there was enough to keep the craving away, or if she needed plausible deniability if someone noticed they were missing. She had an excuse already—I was in a hurry, didn’t read the labels, I grabbed both bottles. I put this in my pocket and in the rush of events forgot to return it. It sounded believable. But no one had asked. The police had seized Audrey Langevoort’s Seconal, which had Clare’s, Audrey’s, and Kent’s fingerprints on it. During her interview, Audrey had told them she’d had the same prescription for decades, since before the 1972 murder of Natalie Epstein. But no one had asked about the pain pills, missing or not.
Right now, they were in an acetaminophen bottle in the glove compartment of her car, parked across the road from what had once been the entrance to the lake house. She had shoved them there, ready to slip them back into Audrey Langevoort’s bathroom—she hadn’t—or to drop them into the medicine disposal bin at the police station—she hadn’t—or bury them in the depths of the trash before taking it to the curb. She hadn’t done that, either. She and Russ and the baby had arrived at the lake house last night. Maybe—maybe—she would pitch the bottle into the water or open it and pour the pills off the edge of the boat house. But she didn’t think so.
She shook her head to focus, and pushed her hair off her forehead with her wrist. Her job this morning was to scrape and repaint the used cabinet doors they had picked up cheap at a salvage store. They had lost most of the kitchen and bedroom and everything upstairs when fire had damaged the house the previous winter; it was not going to be the relaxing getaway they had envisioned for a long time to come. So far this summer, Russ had torn away the ruined roof and second floor, and installed a temporary roof over the still-intact great room—which was also serving as their bedroom, nursery, and, thanks to a propane camp stove, kitchen. Russ was roughing in the cabinets in the actual kitchen, and while normally the sight of her husband doing his carpentry thing lifted her heart, this morning it was more like seeing someone build a house of cards with a shaky hand. He wasn’t focused; he kept making mistakes, muttering under his breath, then making another. As Clare watched, he set his level on the boxlike frame. Even from the great room, she could see the bubble slide to the left.
“Goddammit!” Russ snatched the level and threw it into his open toolbox. He glared at the wood and then swung his hammer into the side of the offending one-by-three. He hit it again, and again, until the wood cracked and sagged. Ethan began to wail.
“Russ!” He dropped the hammer to the floor. Clare plucked Ethan out of his playpen and approached her husband, hand outstretched. It wasn’t going to be a great weekend if he was teetering on the edge of exploding the whole time.
He took it. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why … usually working with my hands settles me.”
“C’mon. Let’s all sit on the porch for a bit.” The screened porch facing Lake Inverary had survived the fire intact. She took one of the two Adirondack chairs and set Ethan on her lap. His crying had died down into a tiny, bearlike snuffling. Russ collapsed into the chair next to her.
They sat in silence for a while. A breeze ruffled the dark water, so that the sunlight broke and turned and flashed in their eyes. A canoe emerged from behind the small island in the middle of the lake, the paddlers’ oars rising and dipping in unison.
“There’s a poem about Inverary, isn’t there?” Russ rubbed his hand on his T-shirt. “Something about building a cabin and beehives.’”
“Innisfree.” Clare kissed Ethan’s head. “‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.’”
“Mmm.”
They sat awhile longer. Finally, Clare said, “Tell me what it is you’re most afraid of.”
He sighed. “Being selfish. I don’t want to resign. I love my job.”
“That’s not selfish.”
“Yeah, but I don’t need it. Not like my officers need their jobs. I mean”—he waved a hand around—“we don’t even have a mortgage.” It was true. They had bought their lakeside getaway with the proceeds from selling the house Russ had owned with his first wife, and the rectory belonged to the church.
“Your officers could find other positions, you know. If the vote went the wrong way. Look at Kevin Flynn.”
“Some of them could, sure. Any department would be glad to get Hadley, and Eric McCrea’s really wasting his talents in our small shop.”
“But…”
“But Eric’s hanging on to his wife and kid by a thread. He’s still in therapy and taking anger management classes. And Hadley’s got kids in school and her grandfather to think about.”
That was true. Clare suspected the reason Mr. Hadley was still alive was his granddaughter monitoring his diet.
“So let’s say they can find work within commuting distance. Even Paul Urquhart, God help the poor sergeant who winds up with him. But Noble Entwhistle? Or Lyle, who’s sixty? Or the part-time officers? They’re just shit out of luck, excuse my French. Lyle has to take early retirement and Noble gets a job as a mall cop. Maybe. Tim and Duane—I don’t know what’ll fit around their part-time EMT stints. Jacking deer and collecting recyclable bottles.”
“So if you resign, and everyone else gets to keep their jobs, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Russ spread his hands. “I never work again.”
“I find that very hard to believe.”
“Okay, I never work around here again. I get another chief’s position or do private security consulting and we have to move away from our friends and family and then you’re out of a job.”
She held up her hand. “You don’t get to worry about my possible theoretical future unemployment.”
“You asked.”
Ethan chose that moment to blow a big, wet raspberry. Russ laughed. “Thanks for the support, kid.” He reached for the baby and Clare handed him over. Russ lifted Ethan high and pressed his lips against their son’s fat tummy and blew. Ethan squealed in delight. Russ bounced him gently in the air. “Maybe I could just be a stay-at-home dad.”
“You’ll get no complaint from me.” She watched them for a minute. “So, you’d have to leave a job you love, and we might have to move in order for you to find comparable work.”
Russ lowered Ethan to his chest. The baby began patting his father’s chin. “Yeah.”
“Which possibility weighs more heavily? That, or what might happen to the rest of the department?”
“What happens to my people. No question.”
Clare let him sit with that.
“It’s just…” He bent his head over Ethan.
“It’s just?”
“If I resign, John Opperman wins.”
She kept quiet.
“Did I ever tell you what he said to me? When he got arrested?”
She shook her head.
“He said, ‘You have no idea the power money can bring to bear.’” Russ laughed, a painful sound. “He was right. I didn’t. But I’m finding out now. So he wins. And yes, he’s still in prison and I’m walking around free. But he wins, and he knows it, and I know it.” He swallowed. “That leaves a taste in my mouth I don’t know I’ll ever be rid of.”
She reached out and took his free hand. Held it tight. After a minute, he released her and stood. “Let’s go take a ride down to the end of the lake.”
“Now? Why?”
“Because we can get a cell phone signal down at Cooper’s Corners. I want to call Jim Cameron and let him know I’ve decided. He’ll have my resignation letter on his desk Tuesday morning.”