One Was a Soldier (28 page)

“Are you okay?” Stillman whispered.

She scrambled to her feet. Stillman got up more slowly. “Like I said. The foolish stuff.” His voice was thin and dry.

“Trip, I need sleeping pills and amphetamines and Tylenol Three.” Like falling into the duck-and-cover, the words came out without conscious control. “I had them when I came back and I’m almost out and I need more.” She looked at him. “I don’t have any good medical reason. I just need them. Will you help me?”

He stared at her. The elevator dinged and the doors opened. They got out. He glanced at the people walking past them; a pair of doctors, a technician in scrubs, a man toting a potted plant. He beckoned her around the corner, into a niche formed by a vending machine and a stainless steel crib frame. “What have you been taking?”

“I don’t know. They’re go pills and no-go pills. The only bags that had labels were the antibiotic and the Tylenol.” He frowned. “I’m cutting back on the sleeping pills. Really. With everything going on, I’ve been falling into bed at the end of the day. It’s just—” She swallowed. “When I wake up. If I have a nightmare. I need one then to get back to sleep.”

“Are you mixing them with alcohol?”

“Sometimes. Yes. Usually.”

He shook his head. “You don’t need more, you need to get off them. Amphetamines and sleeping pills just feed into each other.”

“I can’t!” To her horror, her voice cracked. “Trip, I’ve got nightmares and flashbacks and parishioners to take care of and a wedding to get through. I can’t talk to my spiritual adviser about this, and I’m not going to dump it on my fiancé. I just need to keep on an even keel for a few more weeks.”

Trip looked at the floor. Finally, he sighed. “I won’t give you any painkillers. Forget about it.” He pulled out his PalmPilot. “I’ll give you a two-week prescription for Ambien and Dexedrine. Here’s the deal.” He speared her with a look. “You take the Dexedrine as prescribed—no more than ten migs a day, to start. No booze when you take the Ambien and for twelve hours after. I’m going to call you for a blood test some time during the next two weeks. If I find you’ve been mixing, I’ll cut you off. If I find you have a higher concentration of dextroamphetamine than you ought to, I’ll cut you off. No second chances, no do-overs.”

She nodded.

He tapped something into his PalmPilot. “I’m e-mailing myself the instructions. I’ll give you the scrip Monday, at group. Can you hold out until then?”

She nodded.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.” He rubbed the scar along his forehead.

“Thank you.”

He sighed again. “I’ll see you on Monday.” He looked for a moment as if he were going to say something else. Instead, he turned and walked away. She stayed against the wall, half hidden, for a moment, turning the whole thing over in her head. Telling herself she was going to be okay. Wondering if this was her own before and after.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7

Clare hadn’t taken a sleeping pill the night before, and she hadn’t had a nightmare, but she was still sodden with fatigue when she rolled out of bed at 6:30
A.M.
for the 7:00 Eucharist. She debated taking an upper for twenty seconds before popping one in her mouth. By the time she closed the rectory door behind her, she was feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, congratulating herself for making a smart choice.

She wrapped up the Eucharist in thirty-five minutes and was standing by the great double doors, bidding farewell to the communicants—all seven of them—when Russ wedged his way past Mrs. Mairs into the narthex.

“I didn’t expect to see you today. What are you doing here?” Clare asked.

Mrs. Mairs tittered. “Can’t wait to see the bride-to-be. That’s a good sign.”

Russ smiled patiently at the octogenarian before turning to Clare. “You said we had to go to the Stuyvesant Inn, remember? To okay the napkins or mints or whatever?”

Clare waited until the last of the congregation left the narthex. She kicked away the stand and let the heavy double-braced door glide slowly closed on its hydraulic hinges. “I said
I
have to go. I didn’t mean to drag you into this.” She headed up the aisle. Russ fell into step beside her. “If I hadn’t been sure my mother never would have spoken to me again, I would have just asked Julie McPartlin to do the deed in her office.” She opened the door to the hallway. “It’s still awfully tempting.”

He laughed. “You may be the only southern woman in existence who prefers elopements to white weddings.”

She went into the sacristy. “Me and every other clergywoman. Do you know how many weddings I’ve officiated at? And I haven’t been ordained five years yet.” She stripped her alb over her head and snapped it to get the wrinkles out. “Another five years and I’ll run screaming when I hear the opening strains of Pachelbel’s
Canon
.” She slid the alb onto a wooden hanger and replaced it in the closet. “Which reminds me. If you have any musical preferences, speak now or forever hold your peace, because Betsy Young has announced she and the choir will be providing the wedding music as a gift to us.” She removed the stole from around her neck, kissed it, and draped it over a padded dowel with the others.

“Hmn. I was thinking you could walk up the aisle to ‘She Drives Me Crazy.’”

She gave him a look.

“Then we could come back down to “Goody Two Shoes.’” He swiveled his hips in a surprisingly agile figure eight. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?”

“I drink.”

“Who says the song is about you?”

She shoved him. “I’ll tell Betsy we’d like ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ and ‘Come Down, O Love Divine.’”

He laughed. “Chicken.”

She grabbed her keys and her coat from the hook inside the sacristy closet and ushered him out. “Seriously. You don’t have to do this. I know you’re flat out with Tally McNabb’s murder investigation.”

He let her lead him back to the narthex. “First, we’re nowhere near to calling it a homicide. Second, if my department can’t get along without me for an hour, I’m not doing my job right. Third”—he stepped into the early morning sunshine and stood to one side as she locked the great doors—“I put my work ahead of everything else when I was married to Linda. It didn’t turn out so well.” She turned to look at him, and he braced his hands against the wooden door, trapping her between his arms. “I want to do it differently with you. You deserve the best I can bring to the table.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. “Thank you.”

“C’mon. I parked over in Tick Solway’s lot across the street.” It hadn’t been Tick’s lot since he died two years back and his son inherited, but that was the way things worked in Millers Kill. Clare was sure half the town still referred to the rectory as Father Hames’s house, and that paragon of virtue had been gathered into Abraham’s bosom six years ago.

It was five minutes before traffic thinned enough to allow Russ to pull his truck onto Church Street. “What’s with all the cars?” Clare looked at her battered Seiko. “The morning rush to Glens Falls ought to be over by now.”

“Leaf peepers. For the next two weeks or so we’ll see almost as many tourists as we get during ski season.” He braked as an Explorer with New Jersey plates cut in front of him to turn onto Main.

“I’ve never quite understood how driving an SUV three hundred miles expresses your love of nature.”

“Don’t say that in front of any local business owners.”

A thought struck her. “Aren’t you going to be short on manpower? With an investigation and a boatload of tourists in town?”

“Yep.” He cut the wheel, and they made the sharp turn onto Route 57. “I can already hear Lyle. ‘Ask not for whom the overtime tolls, it tolls for thee.’ What we really need is another sworn officer.”

“What about trainees from the police academy?”

“That was fine to plug the gap while Eric and Kevin were away, but in the long run, I need someone full-time. Someone who can cover me or Lyle or Eric when things get tight.”

He swung onto the bridge. Up and down the river, the trees reflected in the calm water, red and gold, yellow and bronze, green and copper. It was made more beautiful by its brevity; the glory of a few days, a week, and then it was gone.

Russ sighed with pleasure. “Poor bastards.”

“Who?”

“Those folks you were talking about who have to drive three hundred miles for this. Looks like someone set the river on fire, doesn’t it?”

The river. The fire.
The pale Nile green water and the buildings beyond, stone blocks and mud bricks baking in the endless sun. The car exploding, and the barn burning and the fire racing across the dry field. The column of oily smoke, and the chunks of masonry smashing into the hard-baked dirt. The blood. The screams.

“Clare?”

She shuddered back into the here-and-now.

“Are you all right?” Russ’s voice was concerned.

“Yeah. I’m—”
not fine. Just tell him. I’m. Not. Fine.
“Okay. Just a little tired.”

She was a coward. She was straight-up chickenshit. He thought she deserved the best he had to offer. She knew better. She had something ugly living in her, no different in its way than the colon cancer that had eaten up her sister from the inside out.

She just wanted it to be over and done with so she didn’t have to think about it ever again. The moment the idea touched down in her head, her skin goosefleshed. Was that what Tally McNabb had come to?

“Do you want to go home? We can reschedule. Or, hell, just have your mother decide everything.”

“My mother?” She breathed in. She was a big girl. She could handle a few bad memories. “You mean, my mother who wants you to wear a kilt?”

“What?”

The horror in Russ’s voice made her laugh, thank God. “That was her suggestion after I told her it was unlikely you’d agree to your police dress uniform. She thought all the men could wear kilts.”

“That’s the nuttiest—”

“They did it at my brother Doug’s wedding.”

He was silent as he slowed the truck and made the turn onto the Sacandaga Road. Finally, he said, “It might be worthwhile just to see how Lyle reacts.”

She laughed, and the moment was behind her, left beside the river as they rolled up and up through the stone-and-wire-rimmed pastures until they crested a rise and there was the Stuyvesant Inn, looking like a painted Florodora Girl in a wide green skirt sitting in the middle of dairy country.

It seemed Stephen and Ron were reaping the leaf-peeper bounty as well; their small three-car parking area was filled, and the sign pointing vehicles to the back was in its wooden frame. Russ ignored it in favor of pulling his truck half on, half off the grass beneath a blazing red maple near the road. “Fast getaway,” he said, when she looked pointedly at the parking sign. “In case of a police emergency.”

“Uh-huh.” They walked up the curving drive and mounted the steps to the wide front porch. In honor of the season, the chintz pillows on the curlicued wicker furniture had been replaced with needlepoint. Lacy throws and plaid lap robes draped over scrollwork settees and fan-back armchairs.

Russ pressed the brass buzzer. “I always feel like I’m going to break some god-awful piece of bric-a-brac worth a fortune when I’m here.”

“Maybe we can bypass the house and walk straight around to the tent for the reception,” she said, and then the door opened and Stephen Obrowski was there. “Welcome! Welcome!” He pumped both their hands at once, so it appeared, for a moment, as if they were about to begin a folk dance. “Congratulations,” he said to Russ. “You’re a lucky man.”

“Thanks. I agree.”

Stephen tugged them inside. Gray-haired, red-cheeked, Obrowski always reminded her of some jolly British print of a century ago:
The Genial Innkeeper
or
The Happy Host.
Instead of a buxom wife in an apron, however, he had the tall and Teutonic-looking Ron Handler, emerging from the kitchen at the end of the hall wiping his hands on a dish towel.

“Great to see you, Clare.” Ron kissed her cheeks. “And Chief Van Alstyne. You’re looking as butch as ever.”

“Ron,” Stephen warned.

“I kid, I kid. Look, why don’t you show them where everything will be set up, and then we can go over the menu and the notes Mrs. Fergusson faxed.” Ron tilted his head toward Clare. “I don’t like to leave the kitchen while we still have guests eating breakfast.”

“Notes Mrs. Fergusson faxed?” Russ said, at the same moment Clare said, “If this is a bad time…”

“Of course not.” Obrowski steered them toward the archway on the left while his partner vanished back down the hall. “Now, we thought we’d put the pianist here in the double parlor”—he pointed to a grand piano—“and leave the rest of the furniture pretty much as it is, to encourage folks to sit and talk.”

“There’s a pianist?” Russ looked at Clare. “I thought it was a DJ.”

“The DJ will be outside, in the dancing tent,” Stephen said.

Clare was starting to get a bad feeling. “When you say ‘dancing tent,’ does that imply there’s going to be a
non
dancing tent?”

“That’s right. The dining tent will have roll-down walls and heaters, to keep everyone comfortable through dinner and the toasts and all that.” Obrowski looped them through the second parlor, emerging back in the wide entrance hall. “We’re going to have the coat check back here, with a rolling rack tucked beneath the stairs, and then right here in the hallway, we’ll have one of the bars.” He looked at Clare hesitantly. “I know it’s a little unorthodox, but I thought it would keep traffic flowing and prevent the guests from bunching up around the drinks.”

“
One
of the bars?” Russ shook his head. “Christ on a bicycle. It’s like the sacking of Richmond in reverse.”

Clare caught the look on the innkeeper’s face. “It’s fine, Stephen. Russ’s idea of a wedding is fifteen minutes in front of Judge Ryswick.” And boy, wasn’t that getting more appealing by the minute?

“Ah. Of course. I understand. Trust me, it sounds like a lot of fussy details right now, but the night of your wedding, when you’re here with your beautiful bride on your arm, you’ll be glad we took pains to get everything just so.” Stephen hurried ahead and cracked open the doors on the other side of the hall. He peeked inside.