Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

“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.”