In the Bleak Midwinter

  Clare held the glass to her nose and sniffed deeply. “Ahhhh . . .” She took a larger-than-recommended swallow. “God bless you, Lois.”

  “Is that official?”

  “You bet. How’s it going in there?”

  “I heard a few comments about priests overstepping the bounds, but so far no one’s used the phrase ‘meddling woman.’ ”

  “Oh. Great.”

  “Chief Van Alstyne is being quite charming. He hasn’t started waving eight-by-ten glossies of murder victims around, so people are feeling a tad more relaxed.”

  “Encouraged by the sherry?”

  “I brought up the second bottle myself. I thought the chief might like some as well, but he turned me down. No drinking on duty, I suppose.” Clare finished off her glass and sighed again, this time with contentment. The secretary went on. “He’s really quite attractive, don’t you think?”

  “Who?”

  “Chief Van Alstyne. All that tousled hair and those sexy lines at the corners of his eyes. He has that rugged, all-American look, like the kind Ralph Lauren puts in his ads, except his models always have this slightly gay edge to them. The chief is very . . . heterosexual.”

  Clare laughed. “The chief is also very married, Lois. Just how much of the sherry have you had?”

  “Don’t worry,” Lois said, floating back into the hall. Clare followed her. “I’m sure there’s enough left to rustle up another glass for you.”

  In the large, sunlit parish hall, things did seem almost normal. Clare worked her way back to the white-draped refreshment table, greeting the people she knew by name and smiling at those she didn’t know yet. Mae Bristol, as plump and pale as an over-risen bun, was serving up coffee and tea from the church’s silver service. She always wore a printed silk dress with a matching hat—this Sunday it was cabbages in shades of blue. The sherry bottles were between the creamer and the coffee cups. They looked seriously depleted.

  “This is stupid, Miss Bristol. My parents let me drink wine at home!” A slim girl in a fashionably skinny velvet-and-patchwork dress leaned across the white tablecloth. Her hair was perfectly retro-seventies, straight and shining and parted in the middle. She reminded Clare of the girls at her old high school whose outfits always looked like they were straight off the pages of Seventeen magazine and whose hair was always blown dry to frothy perfection. She could still remember feeling angular and underdeveloped and unfeminine next to them, a jock whose clothes never looked right off the basketball court or the track, a girl whose fingernails were always lined with grease because she’d been helping her dad with airplane maintenance. It had been—what?—seventeen or eighteen years since she graduated? Funny how the individuals changed, but the type remained. There would always be girls who had been blessed by the gods of adolescence, and girls like Clare. She reached around the latest version of the homecoming queen and snagged one of the sherry bottles. Age, thank heavens, most definitely hath its privileges. The girl flashed her a well-polished look of teenage disdain.

  “Then your mother can come over here and get a glass for you, Alyson. I’m not giving you any sherry until then, and that’s final.” The girl flipped her dazzling hair in annoyance and flounced away as well as she could in her high-heeled platform boots.

  “The difficult age,” Clare said, filling her glass to the top and handing the bottle back to Miss Bristol.

  The elderly lady fixed Clare with her black-currant eyes. “That girl is spoiled rotten,” she said. “I had her in my fourth-grade class, and she was spoiled then. Alyson will always be at the difficult age, whether she’s seventeen or seventy.”

  “Ah,” Clare said. “Well.”

  “Oh, don’t mind me, Reverend. I never felt I could speak my mind when I was teaching, so now that I’m retired, I’m making up for lost time. Which reminds me. Some of those men who believe they run the church undoubtedly want to let you know their opinions about this police business. You stand your ground. I think you’re doing a splendid job.”

  “Goodness,” Clare said. “Thank you, Miss Bristol.” She turned away, feeling as if she’d been given a sticker for good behavior from an otherwise strict teacher. She took a sip of her sherry, spotting Russ standing by the door to the street. Casual, not obviously blocking it, but making it impossible to get past him without at least making an excuse. He really was tall, several inches above anyone else in the room. It was more noticeable in a group. She wended her way toward him through the crowd, careful not to spill any of her drink on the faded rose-patterned carpet. As she nodded and smiled at her congregants, Vaughn Fowler fell in beside her.

  “Any luck with identifying the victim?” he asked.

  “At the church door? No,—no.” She had to forcibly restrain herself from adding “sir” every time she spoke to Colonel Fowler. Mr. Fowler.

  “Let’s hope someone here will be able to help the police, then. Speaking as a vestry member, I don’t like it. The sooner we get this off church property the better. You do realize there could be a question of liability for St. Alban’s?”

  “Liability? For a murder? I don’t see how.”

  “If there was some connection. Do the police have a suspect yet? If it’s a member of our congregation, we may need to consult the diocesan attorney to ensure that the church, as a corporate entity, has no responsibility.”

  “Ah . . . as far as I know, Chief Van Alstyne hasn’t singled out any one person as a suspect. After all, finding out who she was is a very preliminary step.”

  “I’m thinking about the next step. Suppose he arrests someone from St. Alban’s. It’s in the Post-Star. It’s on the news. Then the real murderer turns up. That leaves us wide open to a lawsuit. Contributing to defamation of character or some such. Lawyers. You have to think of the ramifications of everything you do these days.”

  Millers Kill’s chief of police was smiling reassuringly to a young couple wrestling their two little girls into snowsuits. “Mama,” the older child said, “is that Officer Friendly?”

  “I was wondering when you’d get over here. I wanted to wait for you before I started showing the pictures around.” Russ reached behind him and swept the folder off an unused prie-dieu standing beside the door. He looked keenly at Mr. Fowler. Clare introduced the two men.

  “I recall reading about you in the Post-Star around the time you were appointed police chief, Van Alstyne. You were in the Eighty-ninth MP brigade weren’t you? I was chief of staff at Fort Hood during their deployment there in ’eighty-seven.”

  The chief blinked and straightened slightly. “Yes, sir, I was in the Eighty-ninth.” Clare bit back a smile. Evidently she wasn’t the only one to have a hard time treating the colonel as a civilian. “I’m surprised you’d remember something like that,” Russ went on.

  “Military service is something I always look for. It’s what makes a man.” He frowned. “Or woman.” Clare felt her cheeks flush. Fowler pointed to the folder. “You ready to start this, Chief?”

  “Yessir,” Russ said.

  “Then I might as well be the first. Set an example, let everyone know what’s expected of them. Nothing to be afraid of, after all.” Russ looked at Clare. She nodded. He flipped open the folder. Clare had avoided looking at the photographs when she had been saying good-bye to parishioners at the front door, but now she took a long, steady look at the face of the unknown. Four shots, face front, profiles, and full body, covered with an institutional green sheet. She was struck by how much less real the girl looked, laid out on a steel table, lit by fluorescents and flashbulbs. Not at all like the sleeping princess, leaves frozen into her long hair, that she had stood over on the bank of the creek.

  “Sorry,” Fowler said. “Don’t know her.” He frowned. “Where did you say it happened?”

  “I didn’t,” Russ said. “We found her body just upstream from Payson’s Park.”

  The colonel glanced at Russ. “Kids still go there to get away from their parents?” He shook his head. “I used to skinny dip
in the river there. Jump off the old trestle bridge and swim downstream. It was a more innocent time. . . . Sorry I can’t be of any help.”

  “Thank you anyway,” Russ said.

  Fowler nodded, slipping on his overcoat. “Reverend, I’ll be seeing you at the next vestry meeting. Chief Van Alstyne, good to meet you.” When he opened the door, the sunlight and snowlight flooded the parish hall, drawing glances from the rest of the room.

  Clare held up her hands. “May I have your attention, please? For those of you willing to help with the police investigation, Chief Van Alstyne is ready to have you look at the photographs. If you could give him your name before leaving, he’ll be able to keep track of which members of our congregation have seen the pictures. I know it’s an unpleasant task, but it’s important that we all do our part to help the police catch whoever is responsible for this crime. Thank you.”

  There was a surge of bodies toward them. “Good heavens.” Clare murmured. “They don’t seem to be too horrified at the prospect of autopsy shots, do they?”

  “Reality TV,” Russ whispered. “If you’ve seen all those specials on serial killers, this is pretty tame.” He raised his voice. “If you could form a line there, we can get you all out of here quickly.”

  It was a repeat of the earlier scene in the vestibule of the church, with more people. The same exclamations, expressions of sympathy, philosophical mutterings. No one recognized her. There was a moment of excitement when Mae Bristol’s turn came up. She held two of the photos in her hands, looking slowly from one to the other. “I feel as if I should know her,” she said. “I just can’t place her. But I’m sure I’ve seen her before.” She shook her head and smiled apologetically at Russ and Clare. “Too many years of too many young people, I suppose.”

  The tedium of the whole process reminded Clare of how she had felt waiting on the trail for the evidence to be photographed. Police work was a lot like combat, she decided, hours and days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

  “Oh! My! God!” The squeal brought her mind back to the scene at hand. Alyson what’s-her-name stood in front of Russ, flanked by two well-dressed adults who were presumably the parents who had spoiled her. “I know her! That’s Katie McWhorter! I know her!”

  CHAPTER 8

  Clare had offered her office to the Shatthams, figuring it would be a comfortable spot for their daughter to talk with the police chief, but they were insistent that Clare be there for Alyson’s statement, so the five of them wound up clustered at one end of the massive oak table in the vestry meeting room. Clare wasn’t sure what role the Shatthams wanted her to play. Counsel? Witness? Maybe they hoped she would put the fear of God into Alyson, who, after her first emotional outburst, had reassumed her pose of pseudo-sophistication and contempt. Clare was out to sea when it came to adolescents, which she’d freely admit if anyone bothered to ask. The only teens she had known in recent years had been in the army, and she didn’t think telling Alyson to keep her weapon grounded and her hands inside the bird would be useful in this situation.

  The girl sat in a chair facing away from one of the windows, her hair a blond nimbus, her face shadowed. Her parents had dithered for a few moments before taking up seats on either side of her. Russ sized up his choices and sat down directly opposite Alyson, leaving the chair at the head of the table for Clare. She took it, wishing she had brought her glass of sherry along, wondering how Russ could let the seconds roll on by without demanding Alyson tell them everything she knew.

  He flipped open the folder again, arranged the photos against the creamy manila, and slid it across the table to Alyson. The teen’s eyes flickered to the pictures and then returned to the chief. Russ reached inside his shirt pocket, removed a pair of sunglasses, and swapped his glasses for the shades. They were mirrored. Clare rested a finger against her lips to keep from making a crack about Cool Hand Luke.

  “Katie McWhorter,” he said. “What can you tell me about her, Alyson?”

  “She was just a girl who went to school with me, that’s all. She graduated last year.”

  “Did she stay in town after she graduated? Or did she move away?”

  The girl shifted slightly in her seat. “She went off to college. Somewhere. I’m not sure. It’s not like we were friends or anything.”

  “No?”

  “No. She was like, living somewhere around Depot Street? My parents sure don’t want me going there. And she didn’t exactly hang out at Smoky Joe’s drinking cappuccino.”

  “Who did she hang with, Alyson? Before she went to college.”

  “Nobody much. She was a brainiac, really smart, so she knew a lot of the geeks. I know she had a job at the Infirmary.” She paused, frowning. “She had a boyfriend.”

  Clare wanted to yell, “Yes! Now we’re getting somewhere!” Russ didn’t twitch. “A boyfriend?” he asked, with no particular emphasis.

  “Yeah. Ethan Stoner. They were like, a weird combination, what with her being a brain and him being a head.” The unintentional pun made Alyson smile at her own wit. “I think they knew each other from way back, like in grade school or something. He was held back a year someplace, otherwise he would have graduated last year with Katie. They were a pretty hot and heavy item.”

  “Had you seen her since she went away to school?”

  “Had I seen her? What do you mean?” Clare wished there was more light on Alyson’s face. She couldn’t tell if her voice was strained because it was finally sinking in that an acquaintance, someone her own age, was dead, or if she knew more than she was letting on. Or if she was just hostile to Russ’s authority.

  “Did you see her back in Millers Kill at any time?”

  “No. But like I said, we weren’t friends. So if she came back to visit Ethan, I wouldn’t have known about it.”

  “Or her parents.”

  “Huh?”

  “She might have come back to visit her parents.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Alyson looked at her own parents at this. “Can I go now? I really don’t know anything else.”

  “Can you think of any reason, anything at all, why someone might have wanted Katie dead?”

  “God, no. I think it must be one of those random violence things, don’t you? Some stranger coming into town and raping and murdering the first girl he can lure into his car?” She shuddered visibly and dramatically.

  Her mother whimpered. “Chief Van Alstyne, do we need to be worried about the safety of our daughter?”

  “My God, what if it’s one of those serial killers, like the one over in Rochester a few years back?” Mr. Shattham put his arm around his daughter’s thin shoulders.

  “Dad-dy . . .” she said, her voice rising in a whine.

  “I can’t rule out a stranger killing in this case,” Russ said, “but I doubt that’s what we have here. And Katie was never raped.” He folded his fingers together and leaned his chin on his hands. “She had recently had a baby, though.”

  Alyson’s mouth dropped open. Dust motes rose through the air on thermals caused by the sunlight puddling on the floor and the table. “What?” she finally choked out. “She was pregnant?” It was the first genuine emotion Clare had seen from the girl since she laid eyes on the photos of Katie’s body.

  “She had been pregnant. The doctor who autopsied her says she gave birth within the last two weeks.”

  “Pregnant. Holy shit.”

  “Alyson!”

  “Oh, Mummy, don’t have a cow.” Alyson’s shaded face stilled, only a small frown marring the blankness of hard thought. “It must have been Ethan,” she said finally. “He knocked her up and then killed her. It must have been Ethan.”

  “Why do you say that?” Russ leaned back in his chair.

  “Like, who else would it be? He was seriously in love with her. Aren’t most women murdered by their husbands or boyfriends? I remember discussing that in my health class.”

  Clare thought back to health class at Hopewell High School. The only thing dangerous
she had discussed was venereal disease, which over 50 percent of the male population was afflicted with, according to her teacher.

  “Maybe he wanted her to, like, have an abortion and she wouldn’t. Or maybe he wanted her to marry him and she wouldn’t. Whatever.”

  “Whatever,” Clare said under her breath.

  “Wow. Ethan and Katie. And I know both of them. That’s like, creepy.”

  “Alyson,” Russ asked, “do you remember Katie’s parents’ address? Was it on Depot Street?”

  “No. I don’t know her parents’ names. Oh, whoa, she has a big sister, though. She was a senior when I was a freshman. Kristen. She works at Fleet Bank as a teller.”

  “The branch here in town?”

  “Yeah. I know because that’s our bank.”

  “Okay, Alyson.” Russ gathered up the photos and closed the folder. “Thank you for your cooperation. You’ve been a big help.”

  “I can go? I’m done?”

  “That’s right. I don’t need a formal statement from you, there’s no need to go to the station.” He pulled off his shades and stared into her eyes. “Remember that we’re just gathering information at this point. I appreciate your, ah, insight into Katie’s relationship with Ethan Stoner, but none of us can draw any conclusions from that.” The girl gaped, a blank expression on her beautiful face. Russ sighed. “Don’t go telling everyone you meet that Katie’s dead and Ethan murdered her. Got it?” He turned to Alyson’s parents. “Mr. and Mrs. Shattham, thank you.”

  “You will let us know if you come to suspect this was the work of some . . . some . . .”

  “Wandering serial killer? I certainly will, Mr. Shattham.”

  Russ and the Shatthams looked at Clare. She rose from her seat, gesturing toward the door. “Let me walk you out,” she said to the Shatthams. They got up, taking coats off the other chairs, and preceded her into the hall. Somehow, she assumed Russ would remain behind, sitting in the sunlight, thinking. Probably the same way he was assuming she’d come back as soon as she had seen the Shatthams off, to talk things over with him.