Abide With Me

  Rhonda said calmly, “Oh, Tyler. There’s really been a grave misunderstanding. In my eagerness, I’ve overstated the case. I was only trying to help you see what Katherine might be up against, so that we could get her to start talking again.”

  A dizziness had overtaken him. “I apologize,” he said to Mr. Waterbury. “I certainly apologize for the remark about the gutter.”

  “Oh, sure, sure. Not to worry now.” Mr. Waterbury nodded.

  There was a rap on his door, and, after a startled moment, Mr. Waterbury went to answer it. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Yes, you’re right. Thank you.”

  He came back and sat down. “Whoa,” he said, looking around. “My secretary just heard, and thought it might be relevant because Mr. Caskey was here”—nodding toward Tyler—“that Connie Hatch—”

  Heat washed through Tyler.

  “Connie Hatch what?” said Mary Ingersoll, sitting forward more.

  “Apparently she’s given herself in and confessed to the murder of two women.” They all looked at Tyler. He closed his eyes slowly, opened them slowly.

  “Oh, dear God,” he said quietly. “The poor thing.”

  TELEPHONES RANG THAT NIGHT. They did not ring in Tyler’s house, where he waited to hear from Adrian Hatch. But they rang in many other homes there along the river. Mary Ingersoll was describing Tyler Caskey as a “pervert” to a friend. “He was standing right there, looking up my dress. These ministers, they’re repressed. My gosh—”

  It was a good thing that Alison Chase had a party line for her telephone because that way both Rhonda and Jane Watson could talk to her at once. “He didn’t act surprised,” Rhonda said. “Most people would say, ‘What in the world? My housekeeper is a murderer?’ But he didn’t act that way.”

  “Tell us again,” Jane said, waving her hand to indicate her little girl, Martha, should go away, back upstairs to her room. “Did he have the demeanor of someone who had been, well, you know, intimate with her?”

  “No,” Rhonda said. “No, really, I think that part’s not true. It was just more like he knew.”

  “If he knew,” said Alison Chase, “then he’s been harboring a fugitive.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Jane. “If he didn’t know where she was, he couldn’t be accused of harboring her.”

  (“What’s even more ironic,” Mary Ingersoll was now telling another friend, “is that he accused Mr. Waterbury of having his mind in the gutter!”)

  “How did the rest of the conference go?” Jane wanted to know. “Martha said the child actually had some food in her lunch box the other day.”

  “The conference went poorly,” Rhonda said, and her tone disappointed the other women, for she was using a closed-down “professional” tone of voice that they didn’t care for.

  “Say, Jane,” Alison said, standing in her kitchen closet with the long telephone cord. “What are you doing about cranberries this year?”

  “Canned,” said Jane. “I’m not going near a contaminated cranberry. I’m not having Martha come down with some strange disease twenty years from now.”

  “Martha eats cranberries?” Alison asked. “My kids won’t eat cranberries. Or fish. Or anything green. Anything with color, come to think of it.”

  “The conference went poorly,” Rhonda said, “because, just as I suspected, Tyler can’t bear to hear anything negative about his child. He simply cannot bear it. And poor Mary Ingersoll. She’s a sweet kid, but awful young, she just wants to be important, you know, and help out, but she rubs him the wrong way, that’s for sure.”

  “Martha likes her all right,” said Jane. “She talks about her hair. But I don’t know if she loves her, the way some kids do.”

  “Some kids love Katherine?” asked Alison. “Who?”

  “No, no. My goodness. I’m talking about Mary Ingersoll.”

  “She’s a good teacher,” Rhonda said. “A little inexperienced, that’s all.”

  “Where is Connie now?” Jane asked.

  “I think she’s being held over in the county jail,” Alison said.

  “Isn’t it ironic,” Rhonda said, “that the county jail is attached to the same building as the county farm, where she did these things?”

  “I thought of that,” said Alison. “How funny if she ended up being a prisoner right where she did her crime.”

  “Well, those are county prisoners, and if she’s killed these women, she’ll be in state prison. Over in Skowhegan at the women’s correctional place. I suppose for the rest of her life. How did she kill them—have they said?”

  “Drowning them, I think,” Jane answered.

  “Drowning?” Alison and Rhonda spoke together. Alison said, “How could you drown a poor old sick lady and not have anyone notice?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane. “But I heard something about exhuming the bodies to check for water in their lungs. Charlie Austin’s cousin, you know, works up there in the police department. So Doris heard some of this.”

  “Gruesome,” Rhonda said. “Absolutely gruesome. And so angry! An angry thing to do.”

  When they hung up, Jane called Alison back. “Do you need a doctorate in psychology to know that killing someone is an angry thing to do?” The two women laughed until tears came to their eyes.

  TYLER WAS NOT able to suppress his feelings of rising anxiety, and after they had eaten, he left the dishes in the sink and said, “Kitty-Kat, let’s go for a drive.”

  Wordlessly, the child went to get her coat, and he tucked her in beside him in the front seat. The dark sky had cleared, the stars were visible above the dark fields, and the moon, like half a white button, shone in the sky. He drove all the way out to Connie’s place, not sure what he would do. There was no light on in the trailer, but there were lights on in the downstairs of Evelyn’s big house. He imagined Evelyn and Adrian speaking earnestly about Connie, and it nagged him—he should be there. “I’ll only be a minute,” he said, parking by the barn. But when he walked up the front steps, he saw Adrian and Evelyn were watching television, both staring straight ahead. Evelyn seemed to laugh at something on the television. Tyler waited a long moment, then turned and walked back to the car.

  He drove to Hollywell, to the bus station where Lauren had called him that day, not knowing where she was. He drove down Main Street, past the pharmacy, down a side street by the house where Susan Bradford lived; a light was on in the living room, and he was moved to think of her in there alone, but the feeling seemed far away.

  He drove home along the back roads, sorry to think of getting back to the farmhouse, for being in motion made the ache and anxiety in him only just bearable; he began to think of his sermon once again. You have no idea, he thought, envisioning his congregation, how offensive it is to come into God’s house and soil it with your petty, unkind thoughts.

  It seemed Katherine had fallen asleep. Her head was leaning against the back of the seat, her face turned toward the window. The sudden, quiet sound of her voice surprised him. She said, “Daddy, why is the moon following us?”

  IT WAS INDEED ironic that the county prisoners were kept in the same building that housed the county farm where Connie had worked, and where Tyler had visited the bewildered Dorothy Aldercott. The jail was not set up for women prisoners because there were so few, and Connie was being kept in a segregated wing, her meals brought to her so that she would not eat with the men.

  “Turns out just because you confess something doesn’t mean the state right away believes you did it.” Adrian spoke toward the windshield, not turning his head to Tyler, even when Tyler turned to him.

  “You mean they need corroborating evidence,” Tyler said.

  Adrian didn’t answer.

  The road leading to the county farm was long, winding its way off the main road to a section of land that was treeless and barren. The road climbed up a hill that had on both sides only large sweeps of unbroken snow, gray-blue against the cloudy sky. The building itself was of a dirty yellowish brick, with additio
ns that stuck out here and there, graceless and tired-looking, and so seemingly lacking in anything human that the barbed wire rolled along the top of two walls, coming into sight as Adrian downshifted, appeared momentarily and bizarrely to offer an image of liveliness in that half a second before the meaning sank in. I was in prison and you visited me.

  Because Connie had said Tyler was a minister—her minister—he was allowed to see her alone. Adrian stayed in the small lobby by the reception area, and Tyler, having been greeted politely by the sheriff, was then handed over to a uniformed, expressionless man, who led Tyler through a series of three locked gates, each one locked behind him before the next was unlocked, so that two times he stood, essentially, in a cage while the man unhurriedly found the keys on a key ring the size of a saucer. Tyler held his hat with both hands, sweat forming so completely over him that he felt it even on his wrists as he waited to pass through the yellow painted bars. And then he was in a small, windowless room that had a plain table and three chairs. He waited. A large clock on the wall had its hands showing a time of ten-twenty, and it took Tyler a while to realize the clock was broken; it was not moving forward.

  A feeling of calm filled him, but he knew it was not to be trusted, that it signified only that something inside him had shut down, like the clock. Moving just his eyes, he looked about the room. It probably had not been painted since it was first constructed. Two bare lightbulbs shone from fixtures high above him. He thought, with a kind of lassitude, that had he been Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he might have killed himself.

  Across from him was a small commotion, the metal door opening, a guard standing back, and there was Connie, wearing a tan shift, her hair down, her eyes reddened and sunken back in the sockets. He would not have recognized her. But her face lit up, and she reached her arms toward him. “Tyler!” she said.

  TEN

  Jeannie had learned to say, “Daddy is a mimster. A mimster,” she shrieked, clapping her hands, while Margaret Caskey stood behind her, and the old dog, Minnie, wagged her tail before lying down with her head on the rung of the rocking chair.

  “Look how she talks, Tyler,” said Mrs. Caskey. “All week I pointed to a picture of you and said, ‘Daddy is a minister,’ and now she’s learned it.”

  Little Jeannie buried her head in a couch cushion, giggling, then threw the cushion into the air. “Daddy, daddy,” and then a fit of delighted laughter. Katherine watched, a hand in her mouth.

  “Get your hand out of your mouth,” said her grandmother. “My word, if you had any idea how many germs lived on a hand. On anything. Do you know what germs are, Katherine?”

  “Daddy is a mimster,” said Jeannie, who was beginning to look exhausted now; she was fair-skinned, and around her eyes, blue shadows showed quickly when she got tired. For the first time she had not napped in the car ride up, Mrs. Caskey told Tyler. She was at that stage now of going from two naps to one. Tyler did not remember Katherine going from two naps to one.

  “Excuse me,” he said, for the telephone in his study was ringing.

  Ora Kendall was on the phone. “Tyler—what’s going on?”

  “How nice to hear from you,” Tyler said. “It’s been a while. How are you, Ora?”

  “Oh, stop it. People are saying things, Tyler. You must know that.”

  On the horizon it looked as though an egg yolk had broken and was seeping along the edge of the earth. “I don’t keep up with the local gossip.” He felt suddenly breathless and stiff, inside the body of a very old man. He straightened his shoulders. The mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue.

  “Mostly about Connie. I don’t believe it myself, but it’s said that you went to visit her in prison yesterday.”

  “And what if I did, Ora? I went with her husband. A minister visits people in trouble.”

  “What did she say? God, did she do it?”

  “Ora, you know I don’t repeat conversations.”

  “Right. Well, people are saying you must have been helping to hide her. Oh, they’re saying all sorts of things. And in my opinion—do you want my opinion?”

  “I do, actually. Yes.”

  “In my opinion you’d better start going out and talking to your congregants. Let them see you, for heaven’s sake. Tell them your concerns, that you understand their concerns.”

  The sky was a deepening blue with that streaking yellow below it. The trees on the hills were brown and bare and still. “I see,” Tyler said, sitting down slowly.

  “Jane Watson was even going to—oh, never mind. But get off your high horse and come back down to the little folk, Tyler.”

  “I see,” Tyler said again. His underarms prickled. “Anyone who wants to see their minister, Ora, see who he is, and hear what he has to say, can come to church tomorrow.”

  He sat in his chair and watched while the yellow faded from the sky. Just when he thought the sun had gone down fully, there was a reflection back up into the sky of a glorious pinkish-purple against the striated clouds. He tried to remember how he had once liked Ora a great deal, but the memory seemed far away. What filled his head was Connie, like a thick, dark moss—the image of her when the guard took her away, how she had turned to look at him when she was at the door, her reddened eyes like a frightened child’s; he had raised his hand in a gesture that was meant to convey he would be back, for he had not said so to her directly when they spoke. On his way out, he had passed the men prisoners on their way into the dining hall, the same dining hall used by the residents in the county farm on the other side of the building, and the men had frightened him; their eyes were shiny as they looked him over, the guards telling them to move along, move along. He had asked the sheriff if Connie was safe, and the fellow had said, Yup, nothing was going to happen on his watch. They had brought in that woman guard from the state place in Skowhegan. Tyler did not think he had ever known a prison guard before. Bonhoeffer had made friends with his guards, some of them.

  Tyler tapped his fingers to his mouth. For a long time he sat, until the hills in the distance could barely be seen, the birdbath just a gray shape through the window.

  WHEN THE CHILDREN were in bed, Margaret Caskey sat down with her knitting, her arm jerking in quick motions. “Sit,” she directed Tyler, and he sat down in the rocking chair. “As you can imagine,” she said, an eyebrow raised, her eyes cast down at the knitting, “I was sick to hear about Connie Hatch saying she’d gone and killed two women. You had a lunatic in this very house, Tyler. What a shock that gave me.”

  Tyler waited a moment. “I’ve been to see her,” he finally said.

  Margaret Caskey stopped knitting. “You went to see her? Where?”

  “In jail. Yesterday with Adrian. We drove over together.”

  “Why, in the name of the good Lord, would you feel compelled to go see that woman?”

  “Mother, for heaven’s sake. It’s my job. She’s in trouble.”

  His mother resumed knitting. “I’ll say she’s in trouble. I hope to heaven they lock her up and throw away the key.”

  He watched her, trying to remember the mother of his youth, and he could not. It seemed the woman seated on the couch was made of molecules pressed so tightly together that her face, her long fingers, her small ankles, could all have been made of some metal beneath the skin, and yet she was perishable, he thought. Everyone was.

  “I hope you realize,” she said, glancing over at him, jerking the yarn, “that merely having her in your home may have harmed your reputation.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “The church hired her for me.”

  “Yes, and as I recall, there were some women in the Ladies’ Aid not so keen on it from the very get-go. She stopped going to church years ago, and now it makes you wonder why. Even Lauren didn’t like her, but you insisted on keeping her. And I don’t think, even as a minister doing God’s work, it behooves you to stay in contact with her much longer.”

  He had not wanted to mention
it, but a certain anxiety—and something else—caused him to drill forward with the words. “Well, Mother, there seems to be a silly rumor. The kind of thing that happens in a small town, when people are bored with their own lives and needing some excitement.”

  Margaret Caskey stopped knitting and looked at him.

  “That I was somehow mixed up with Connie. That I even, apparently, gave her a ring.”

  “Tyler. What in the world.”

  Tyler raised his eyebrows in weariness. “People think up things to say. It’s not fair to Connie, though. Or to her husband.”

  “Connie! Who gives a hoot about Connie? What about you? Who’s spreading this rumor, and what have you done to stop it?”

  “Mother, relax. Keep your voice down. If a pastor responded to every rumor floating around his parish, he’d have no time for anything else.”

  Mrs. Caskey put her knitting aside, took a hankie from her sweater sleeve, and tapped her mouth. “And what if Susan Bradford should hear this dreadful thing?”

  “What if she should? There’s nothing I can do. If she believes this, then she doesn’t know me very well.”

  “She doesn’t know you very well—that’s the point! She’s been getting to know you bit by bit. Oh, my heavens. This makes me ill. Ill.”

  “Then I never should have mentioned it to you.”

  “Don’t do that, Tyler Caskey. Don’t pretend that you need to keep secrets from me just because you don’t like the way I react to them.”

  He stood up and started to walk out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” his mother said.

  “I have work to do. Tomorrow is a very important sermon.”

  “Well, I’ve invited Susan for Sunday dinner afterward.”

  Tyler turned. “You did? Without telling me?”

  His mother picked up her knitting. “I’m telling you now, aren’t I? Do you think it’s been easy for me watching you this past year? You have a chance to make things better, and you don’t seem to even know it.”

  He pictured himself picking up the rocking chair, breaking it against the wall, snapping whatever he could of its back rungs, and the image so surprised him that he came and sat back down in it, resting his hands on its arms carefully.