In the Bleak Midwinter

  She grimaced. “I didn’t want to risk getting stuck, so I left it parked at the base of the drive and walked up.”

  He moved out of the way and let her enter the mudroom. “In that leather jacket and your oh-so-practical boots, too.” She looked down at her soggy, salt-stained suede half-boots. “Talk about unprepared for the weather. You’re worse than a little kid. I’m gonna get you a pair of mittens with a string attached, so at least your hands will stay warm.”

  “I remembered the important stuff,” she said, holding up a six-pack of micro-brewed beer. She dropped it with a thud and bent to remove her boots. “And I could have worn my warm parka. Unfortunately, it actually belongs to the police, and I’m afraid if you see it, you’ll confiscate it.” She handed him her jacket.

  “Stolen property.” He hung it up on one of the many hooks running along the wall.

  “I prefer to think of it as permanently on loan.”

  “Situational ethics.” He opened the door to the kitchen.

  “Oh. A wood cooking-stove!” she said. “I always wanted one of those. They’re supposed to be great for baking bread.”

  “I hate to disillusion you, but the only thing we make on that stove is hot water.” He unhooked a bottle of beer from the cardboard container and opened a paneled pine cabinet to get a couple of glasses.

  “I thought your house was two hundred years old,” Clare said as Russ retrieved a liter bottle of soda from the fridge. “This kitchen looks kind of forties.” The floor was an old linoleum patterned with big flowers, the walls and floor-to-ceiling cupboards warm, glowing pine. The windows over the sink and in front of the table were hung with layer after layer of fruit and flower prints that reminded Clare of the old dish towels in her grandmother Avery’s kitchen. Matching fabric-covered balls hung from the evergreen ropes swagged along the cornice.

  “You have a good eye,” Russ said, pouring their drinks. “The first modern kitchen was built here in the mid-forties. Before that, there was just the summer kitchen, which is on the other side of the mudroom, and a keeping room. I put in the brick wall and hearth for the wood stove, but other than that, we just peeled away the so-called improvements the last owners had made to get to this.” He handed her her beer. “You should have seen it. Vinyl flooring and all the woodwork painted in southwestern colors. Took me three months to get down to the pine.”

  She sat at the round oak table and touched a finger to the tiny Christmas tree serving as a centerpiece. “I like it like this. It’s like a bright, warm quilt keeping out the cold.”

  “Huh.” He sat opposite her. “I’ll pass that on to Linda. She does the decorating. I’m just the hired help.” He drank from a tall glass of soda. She propped her chin in her hand and studied him. He had a fit, outdoors look to him, still slightly tan from last summer, his dark brown hair picked out with gold and copper. She’d have to disagree with Lois, his nose was too big and his lips were too nonexistent to call him handsome. But he looked like a man who had lived comfortably within his skin for the past forty-odd years.

  “So,” she said.

  “So,” he agreed. His eyes were Fourth-of-July blue, high and bright with the snap of a flag in the wind. But behind them she could see something moving, like pages turning in a book no one was allowed to read.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  He took another sip of soda. “Fine. No one got hurt, and Ethan’s in jail. I count it as a victory for the good guys.”

  “Have you called your wife yet? To let her know what happened?”

  He shook his head emphatically. “No.”

  “Don’t want to scare her?”

  “No, it’s my mother who gets scared.” He smiled wryly. “I figured something might be on the news by tonight, so I called my sister Janet and asked her to talk to Mom. I’ll still have to face one of her ‘Why can’t you get into some other line of work’ lectures, but I can duck it for a few days until she’s cooled off.”

  “Uh huh. And you didn’t talk to Linda because . . .”

  He frowned. She kept her face open, waiting. He glanced around the kitchen, shifted in his chair, cleared his throat. She sat still, her hand lying palm up on the table. “So this is like PTSD counseling?” He laughed a little. She tilted her head a fraction of an inch. Listening. No threat. “Okay. Linda and I have been married sixteen years now. So she’s been with me through a lot of shit. Armed deployments, police work, bullets flying, the whole nine yards. And, I don’t know if she started out like this or if she cultivated it, but she thinks I’m invulnerable. I’ve learned that I can’t go to her and say, ‘I was frightened out of my wits today,’ because she won’t understand why. What I do, what I’ve done in the past, is like an action-adventure movie or a television show to her. Nothing’s quite real, so why should it bother me?” He flicked a tiny calico ornament on the tabletop tree, then looked at Clare and smiled slightly. “Did I just do an elaborate version of ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’?”

  She smiled. “Uh huh. But you don’t have your shirt unbuttoned halfway down your chest to show off your gold chains, so it’s legitimate.”

  “Oh, God save me from male menopause.” He laughed a little, shaking his head.

  She leaned forward, crossing her arms on the table. “You know, it’s not unusual, being unable to share that kind of thing with your wife or your family. I used to see a lot of that, guys who had spent time in very intense, very dangerous situations, couldn’t talk about it with their wives. Couldn’t admit to being scared to their buddies, of course, except when it’s a joke. It builds up after a while, all that stuff inside and no way to let it out. I think that’s why there’s so much drinking and wild-ass behavior in some units.” She dropped her glance to his glass. “Are you an alcoholic?”

  He choked on a mouthful of soda. “Holy shit! You don’t beat around the bush, do you? ’Scuse my French.”

  She looked at him mildly. “You don’t need to be handled with kid gloves. Answer me.”

  “Christ on a crutch. Yes, I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’ve been dry for five years now. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m just wondering, if you can’t talk about it with your wife, and you can’t pour it into a bottle, who do you talk with? Where do you go?”

  He crossed his arms against his chest and leaned back in his chair, looking up toward the ceiling. “I don’t, I guess,” he said, finally. He looked at her. “But let’s face it, it’s not like I’m a homicide detective in the city. I’m not looking at dead bodies week after week, or having guns pointed at me on a regular basis. I’m just the chief of an eight-man police force in little ol’ Millers Kill. Hell, the entire three town area we’re responsible for doesn’t have more than twelve thousand people, tops.”

  “Twelve thousand people for whom you feel personally responsible.” She pointed one blunt-nailed finger at him. “Tell me, what feels the worst about what happened today? Being scared you might die?”

  “No.” He braced his elbows on the table. “Only an idiot isn’t scared when somebody pulls a gun on him. I’m not ashamed of it. Not inclined to think about it too much afterwards.”

  “The rush you get when you walk away and you haven’t died? Do you like that?”

  “No! I mean, yes, I like walking away, but no, I’m not an adrenaline junkie. I’d be perfectly happy if the most action I ever saw was being dunked at the police booth during the county fair, believe me.”

  “Is it the fact that you should have known that Ethan was on edge and ready to blow? That if you had handled the situation differently, he never would have picked up that shotgun?”

  He dropped back into his chair, his face paling. “Holy shit! Do you believe that?”

  “Do you?” She leaned farther across the table, crowding him against the truth.

  “When you put it that way . . . shit.” He swallowed. “Yeah, I do feel responsible. It was a stupid situation to get into. I kept thinking, what a piss-awful
waste it would be if Ethan didn’t make it, because I hadn’t taken the time to find out the kids in his school already had him tried and convicted and on death row. Instead, I waltzed in there with my patrol car and my service piece and my warrant. Not even a phone call ahead of time so his parents could set him straight about what would happen. That’s just plain careless. Careless and lazy and stupid.” He clenched the edge of the table tightly.

  “I knew about what the kids were saying at the high school. Heard about it on Monday night. I didn’t do anything about it.”

  He scowled at her. “That’s different.”

  She scowled back. “Why? Because it’s not my job to know everything about everybody? Because I’m not personally responsible every time one of the citizens of Millers Kill falls off the straight and narrow? Because I shouldn’t do all I can to . . . to . . . to protect and to serve?”

  He laughed quietly. “That’s the LAPD, not Millers Kill.”

  “No, that’s you.” She took a drink of her beer. “The angel at the gate with the flaming sword, that’s you. Guarding your own little paradise from the evil of a fallen world.”

  He closed his hand around air as if he were holding something in front of him. “A flaming sword, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you think I should—what? Stop caring so much?”

  She slid her elbow next to her glass and leaned her cheek on her hand. “No. Not at all. I think it’s a fine thing that you bring such dedication and passion to your work. But I think you should stop beating yourself up when you fall short of some imagined standard of perfection.” She smiled lopsided at him. “Come talk to me next time, instead. I’d be happy to point out the flaws in your image of yourself.”

  “As opposed to pointing out my actual flaws.”

  “I think I need to know you better before I start in on those.”

  He smiled at her. “Seems like you already know me a little too well for comfort.”

  She shook her head, smiling, dropping her gaze to the table. She traced meaningless designs on the tabletop with the water condensation that had dripped from her glass. There was a muffled mechanical roar as the furnace kicked in. The thermostat must have been set high, because the kitchen was plenty warm already. A clock ticked in the next room.

  “Would you—” he began.

  “Now we’ve—” she said at the same time. They both laughed.

  “You first,” he said.

  “I was going to say, now we’ve solved all your problems, how about that burger I was promised?”

  “And I was going to ask you if you’d like dinner. Another example of great minds thinking alike.”

  “More like hungry stomachs rumbling in unison, but, yeah.”

  Russ made what Clare always thought of as he-man burgers, the same three-inch thick monstrosities her brothers would put together at family cookouts. She asked to be made useful, and he put her to work on a salad, although when she started rummaging through the pantry, pulling out cans of artichoke hearts and mandarin oranges, he looked as if he might have regretted not limiting her to setting the table. They talked about cooking as a chore and as a means of expression, and argued about which state had the greatest barbecue, and agreed that vinegar-and-salt potato chips were better with burgers than home fries, and a lot faster, too.

  She would have pegged him as a paper-plate-and-napkin guy when his wife wasn’t around, but he surprised her by laying out beautifully pieced place mats and huge cloth napkins, along with old ironware that could have come from the earliest years of the kitchen. As they ate, he listened very patiently when she got carried away describing all her gadgets from Williams-Sonoma, only laughing once, when she told him about her latest acquisition, a shrimp de-veiner. She asked him plainly if he ever missed wine with a meal, and he raised his eyebrow at her and said he had never been a wine drinker, but he sometimes missed a bottle of whisky after.

  “You mean a glass,” she said.

  “I mean a bottle,” he corrected. Afterwards, he washed and she dried. She made several pointed comments about historical authenticity nuts who wouldn’t have a dishwasher because it didn’t fit with the kitchen’s time period. He smiled serenely and reminded her not to leave any water spots on the glasses. When the kitchen had been restored to its pristine state—she could hardly believe it looked like this all the time, since hers wasn’t as immaculate even when it had been scrubbed for company—she grabbed another bottle of beer and he gave her the grand tour.

  It was a jewel-box of a house, small and beautifully crafted. Russ told her funny stories about all the mistakes he made and had to redo when he first began its restoration. She oohed and aahed over the elaborate draperies and slipcovers and pillows, so he took her upstairs to where he had built an enormous workroom for Linda out of the old under-the-eaves space. He showed her the half-finished bathroom that was his latest project, and complained about his inability to find a tub anywhere near long enough for him.

  She told him about her father, whose mechanical expertise began and ended with aircraft, and who persisted in do-it-yourself projects that had become family legends. Or horror stories. That led to a discussion on the workshop as a sacred place for the American male, and he trotted her all the way down to the cellar, where his impressive collection of power tools looked like high-tech instruments of torture hanging on metal gridwork over the original hewn-rock foundation. Just like her dad’s, Russ’s workshop had a TV and a suspiciously comfortable chair, although it lacked the dozens of model planes that hung from her father’s ceiling.

  “How come I’ve never seen any pinups in one of these workrooms?” she asked. “I’d think that would be the perfect place for a little cheesecake.”

  “Introducing the feminine would disrupt the whole Iron Male, sweat lodge, men’s-only aspect of the space, though,” he said. “For instance, what kind of calendar does your dad have in his workshop?”

  “Uh . . . World War Two nose art.”

  “Nose art?”

  “Paintings on the noses of planes. Please don’t ask me to explain.”

  Russ opened one of the cabinet doors. Inside was a glossy calendar showing a man in blaze orange creeping up on a twelve-point stag, who seemed to be waiting patiently to meet his fate. “See? All male, all the time.”

  Clare laughed. “Okay, I get it. Do you have to blow smoke around the room when I leave, to purify it?”

  “No, but if you reveal any of our secrets, the Society of Masks comes to your house in the middle of the night and plays ‘Louie, Louie’ until you repent.”

  “Society of Masks?”

  “Iroquois ceremonial group. Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about the Iroquois?” She went back upstairs to a lecture on Iroquois history. She snagged another beer while hearing about their political structure and made herself comfortable on the Chippendale sofa in the living room while learning about their culture, past and present. When she confessed to her abysmal ignorance on anything that had happened in the Adirondack region before, say, last March, Russ rummaged about making disapproving noises until he came up with five books she had to read, to get a grounding in her new home.

  “History! That’s what it’s all about,” he said.

  “I guess so,” she said, craning her neck to look at all the history titles jammed into the bookcase.

  “I see a lot of police work as a kind of history,” he said, flopping into a high-backed Martha Washington chair.

  “Really?” she said, her attention drawn away from the books he had handed her. “How so?”

  He propped his sock-clad feet on a footstool. “First, you have to recreate the history of the crime. Who did it, when, where, all that. Then, it’s usually the history of the individuals involved that helps you to understand why. This guy was molested as a kid, so he, in turn, molests other kids once he’s grown.”

  Clare made a face. “Like Darrell McWhorter, you mean? I don’t get it. I can see where knowing his history would hel
p if he were in counseling. But what effect does it have on your ability to put him behind bars?”

  “If you know a person’s history, you can use it to help predict what that person might do. A person’s history can be the key to understanding his motivation for committing a crime. For instance, in Katie’s murder.” Russ leaned forward, feet hitting the floor, elbows on his knees. “We know Ethan may be Cody’s father. But why would he kill Katie? Is there something in his past or in their history together that would make him likely to do it? What about McWhorter? Apparently, he’d be willing to kill Katie to cover up his molestation of her. But it looks damn sure that the baby isn’t his. What’s in his history that makes him a suspect?”

  “A need to control his daughters?” she suggested. “Katie demonstrated her control of her own body by having another man’s child, so he killed her in a rage?”

  “Maybe. But compare that to the Burnses’ history. A couple tries for years to get a baby, stressing their marriage and their financial resources in the meanwhile, and then a kid falls in their laps. But, the mother shows up and says it was all a mistake, she wants Cody back now. I think that’s damn good motive for murder.”

  “Except for one thing.” Clare scooted to the edge of the loveseat and skewered the air with her finger. “If Katie had wanted Cody back, she could have just gone to DSS. She’s the birth mother, she doesn’t need to deal with the Burnses to get him back.”

  “Okay, she doesn’t want him back. She wants money to stay away.”

  “Now you’re ignoring history. Does that sound like the Katie McWhorter we’ve been hearing about? And anyway, the Burnses wouldn’t pay to get Cody. This morning they—”

  The phone rang, cutting her off. “I gotta get this.” Russ vaulted out of his chair. “I’m expecting word on the blood test results and how Ethan’s interrogation went.” He glanced at his watch. “Geez, it’s almost ten o’clock! Where did the evening go?”

  She rose and followed him into the kitchen. “I’ll take that as a compliment on my ability to be a distraction.”