Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

So she shouldn’t have felt sick to her stomach when she saw the headlights swinging into her dooryard. She did take a swallow of the rum and Coke then, for real, and breathed slowly and deeply before walking to the door. No sense pretending she hadn’t heard anyone driving up the road. She dropped her hand to the doorknob.

I don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything. I’m innocent. I know nothing.

She opened the door. Not surprisingly, it was Kevin again, and some old cop who was, with his brush-cut hair and weight-lifting body, a preview of what her sister’s husband was going to look like in thirty years. She supposed she should be grateful. At least they didn’t send Mark out for this.

“Lisa?” No smiles this time. “May we come in?”

She stepped back, opening the door. “What’s the matter?” She had thought about this, about how she’d first react. Tossing bagged veggies into the stew pot, she’d considered what she would have thought if the police had come to her door last Saturday, a time that was forever now going to be set off as before. Now was after. And she did as she rehearsed.

“Oh, my God.” A hitch of breath. “Is it Randy? Has he been in an accident?”

The old cop smiled as he walked past her, crinkling up his eyes, as if he were playing Santa Claus. “No accident.” He held out his hand. “I’m Lyle MacAuley, Mrs. Schoof.” She took his hand, staring mostly at Kevin the whole while.

“What is it, then? Is it Mark?”

Kevin shook his head.

“Kevin was here earlier, asking about what you might have seen at Haudenosaunee.”

She nodded. Realized she was standing there with the warm air pouring out of the house. Shut the door.

“There’s been another incident today. A young woman was beaten and left on one of the logging roads on Haudenosaunee. Did your husband mention it to you?”

“No,” she said. How would I react to this news? she wondered. I would be scared of it happening to me. She glanced toward the window nervously.

“Why don’t we sit down?” The old guy phrased it like a suggestion, but he was already crossing the room, taking in everything, the movie, the drink, the stack of bills by the phone, the water stain on the ceiling. “Is your husband home?” he asked, sitting on one end of the couch.

“No.” She glanced back toward the door. “Do I need to worry about being alone out here?”

Kevin crossed his arms over his chest. “Where’s Randy?”

Lyle MacAuley patted the couch next to him. “Calm down, Kevin. Let the lady have a seat.”

She couldn’t not sit after that. She wedged herself in the corner opposite MacAuley.

“You certainly don’t have to worry right now,” MacAuley said, smiling again. “And if you’d like, we’d be glad to drop you off at a friend’s or neighbor’s when we go. If your husband isn’t home yet. Do you expect him soon?”

“By dinnertime,” she said. “He didn’t say he’d be gone longer than that.”

“Where’s he off to?”

“Errands, I guess. I was in the shower when he left.”

“When was that?” Kevin said.

MacAuley shot him a look. “I’d hate to leave you alone out here if you feel uncomfortable,” he said. “Do you have someone you usually stay with?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. If things blow up and one or the other of you has to cool down.”

“You mean Randy and me? We don’t fight like that.”

“No?” His expression invited confidence. “I’ve been there myself. You’re young, married, money’s tight, one or the other of you is always working… you mean to say you never fight?”

“Of course, we have fights. I mean… not so’s one of us has to leave.”

“He’s never gotten a little rough?”

She was genuinely outraged. “No!”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Whatever. I don’t like to interfere between husband and wife.” He smiled. “Has your husband ever mentioned a woman named Becky Castle?”

Her heart jumped so hard she knew he must have seen it in her throat. She shook her head.

“I’m sorry?”

“No,” she said. “Kevin asked us if we knew her. Earlier.”

He leaned forward. “I don’t want to upset you, here, but… have you ever suspected your husband might be seeing someone else?”

“No!” She glared at Kevin. “Kevin, what’s this about?”

This time, he kept his mouth shut. “Becky Castle was the young woman who was assaulted today,” MacAuley said. “The poor thing was beaten so badly she had to undergo surgery to stop her internal bleeding. Somebody punched her and kicked her and hit her until she was so much raw hamburger.”

The words, the images, were so ugly she wanted to slap her hands over her ears and howl until they burned themselves out of her brain.

“We think your husband might be able to help us in our inquiries,” MacAuley went on. “It’s important we talk with him as soon as possible.”

She forced herself to nod. “Of course. I’ll have him call you as soon as he gets home.”

“Is there anyplace he’s more likely to be? At a bar, or a friend’s house? Time is important. You know, we always say the first twenty-four hours of an investigation are the most important. ‘The golden hours,’ we call them. We want to be able to talk to anyone who may know something as quickly as possible.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was at Mike’s earlier. Mike Yablonski.”

MacAuley glanced at Kevin, who nodded once.

MacAuley stood, startling her. “Okay, then. Thanks, Mrs. Schoof.”

She unfolded herself from the couch and joined the two police officers heading for the door. She didn’t understand. She had thought he would keep at her. Ask her more about her husband. “I’ll be sure to have Randy call you as soon as he gets home tonight,” she repeated.

MacAuley smiled at her, eyes crinkling, bushy brows rising. “We’d sure appreciate it.”

“Um… is there anything else I can do to help?”

He smiled even more broadly, looking less like Santa and more like the cat who swallowed the canary. “Why, yes,” he said. “Can we have a look around the house?”

Clare looked into the burgundy surface of her wine. If she sat very, very still, she could see her reflection. Or rather, the reflection of her eye. For now we see through a glass, darkly , she thought.

Hugh thumped his glass against the table. They were sitting in the kitchen. The only other spot to sit face-to-face downstairs was in her living room, where she and Russ had been talking. By mutual, unspoken agreement, Clare and Hugh avoided that room when she returned downstairs dressed in a sweater and jeans.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at a loss for words,” Hugh said.

“There’s nothing to say.” In a way, she was telling the truth. For close to two years now, she had kept her mouth soldered shut, refusing to even think about the unthinkable. She had cracked and admitted it to herself; eventually, she had admitted it to Russ. It terrified her to think that the truth was so close to her surface that she was on the verge of admitting it to a nice man she saw every six or seven weeks. “There’s nothing to say,” she repeated.

“Is he going to divorce the little woman?”

That made her look up from the depths of her glass. “No.”

“Are you planning on chucking the whole priest thing and living a life of wickedness as a kept woman?”

She couldn’t help it; her lips twitched. “No.”

“Bit of a sticky wicket, eh?”

“You sound like someone in the 1939 version of The Four Feathers. ” She took a sip of the Shiraz. They had discovered, on her first trip to New York, that they shared a common devotion to prewar British films.