Julia Spencer-Fleming - Out Of The Deep I Cry

“It’s me.” Russ’s voice came out of the shadows. “I came back down to make sure you-are you all right?” He crunched into the moonlight and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, bunching his fingers in the insulated fabric as if to keep her from falling.

She nodded, pressed her free hand against her mouth, breathed against the mitten. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said when she could. “Your flashlight… it startled me, that’s all.”

He looked at her closely, his eyes washed colorless in the moonlight. When had he developed that look, like he was seeing right through her, right into her? She made herself busy with stuffing her map back into her pocket. “I’m fine,” she repeated, although he hadn’t asked. “Let’s go.”

“It’s real slippery through here,” he said. “Take my hand.” He reached toward her. She stared at his glove for a moment, knowing that if Mark Durkee had been there, offering to help her keep her balance, she wouldn’t have hesitated; hating that voice inside her that wondered, Is this okay? Is this safe?

She put her mittened hand in his and squeezed. He pointed the flashlight past a shadowy, cleared area-the cemetery-through the pines. “That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Don’t want you falling and cracking your head open, too.”

“Is that what happened to Dr. Rouse?”

He flashed his light on the gravestones. They were crumbling at the edges, their carving blurred by decades of acid rain. “It looks as if there’s been a lot of thawing and freezing around the stones. They soak up the heat from the sun during the day. The snow melts, then when night falls, everything ices over again.”

She tightened her grip on his hand as she struggled for footing. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“We found smears of blood on the corner of one of the stones consistent with Debba’s story.”

“Can I see?”

He pointed with his light, and she could just make it out, dark blackish spots along the rounded edge of the stone. She would have taken them for moss if she hadn’t known. “So do you believe her version of events now?” She could pick out the name on the marker in the wash of the flashlight beam. JACK KETCHEM. JULY 21, 1920.

“At this point, I don’t know what happened here.” Russ played his beam over the ground. “This was all churned up even before the CIS guys started tromping around.”

Clare let go of his hand and removed her own flashlight from her pocket.

“What?” he said.

“I want to see,” she started, then turned her light directly on the blood-marked gravestone. JACK KETCHEM. JULY 21, 1920-MARCH 14, 1924. OUR ANGEL.

“He was just a baby,” she said. She redirected her light to another stone. LUCY KETCHEM. JANUARY 8, 1918-MARCH 14, 1924. BELOVED DAUGHTER OF J. A. AND J. N. KETCHEM.

Clare stepped closer. “This was what Dr. Rouse wanted her to see? This?” She turned her light on another stone. PETER KETCHEM. JUNE 3, 1916-MARCH 18, 1924. BELOVED SON OF J. A. AND J. N. KETCHEM.

She turned back to Russ. “My God.”

He nodded. “I know. There’s one more of them.” He flashed his light onto a fourth stone. A lump of ice half obscured a bas-relief carving of a lamb near the bottom. Above it, Clare read, MARY KETCHEM. NOVEMBER 5, 1921-MARCH 15, 1924. OUR LITTLE LAMB.

Two and a half years old. She reached back, and Russ took her hand again, holding hard. “Children,” she said. “Just babies.” She looked at the dates again. “They all died within a week of each other.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Jane Ketchem was their mother, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said. “I met her here, when I was still a kid myself. I didn’t know at the time. Later, I heard the story.”

The money for the clinic, for Allan Rouse’s medical training, it all fell into place. This is where it sprang from. This was what Jane Ketchem had been thinking of. And Clare was taking it, using it for roofing. Inside her mittens, the palms of her hands crawled. She turned her face toward Russ. “Let’s go, please.”

He nodded, and tugged her away, his arm helping her find her footing over the icy patches. Long after they had disappeared into the pines behind her, she could feel their stone faces watching her. Peter. Lucy. Jack. Mary. Our Little Lamb .

Tuesday, April 1, 1930

Harry McNeil heard the commotion as soon as he pushed through the doors of the police station. Some woman gabbling upstairs for Sergeant Tibbet to do something, to help her. Not knowing that “doing something” was no longer in the vocabulary of Sam Tibbet, who had been slated to retire this spring but who was staying on because his son had recently lost his mill job and the whole extended family was eating off one police salary. Harry had pulled Sam off foot patrol two years ago when he had discovered the old guy was mostly working the seat instead of the beat. He wasn’t a praying man, but the Millers Kill chief of police devoutly hoped that Tibbet junior would find good employment. Soon.

Stevenson and Inman came in behind him, both officers looking as tired as he felt. “You boys sign in your hours and then head on home. Get some sleep,” Harry said.

Ralph McPhair, spiffed up with fresh-shined shoes and his gloves on, descended the stairs, heading out for morning traffic duty. “You three look like you got dragged through the bush backward. I hope the rumrunners came off the worse.”

Roll Stevenson rubbed his face. “We thought we had one of ’em leaving that old barn behind McAlistair’s place. Chased him almost to the gee-dee county line. Turns out it was Roscoe Yarter’s kid, up all night sparking McAlistair’s girl.”

Pete Inman laughed, a short, sharp gasp of a sound. “We could have plugged the kid, and he woulda thanked us, just so long as we didn’t turn him in to MacAlistair.”

“You going out again tonight, Chief?” McPhair asked.

“Maybe. I’ll get on the phone to Glens Falls, see if they had more luck than we did last night.” Harry tried not to let the complete lack of hope show in his voice. Attempting to plug the constant flow of illegal liquor running from Canada down to New York City was a mug’s game. The bootleggers had as many men and more money than any of the police departments coming up against them, and appeals to citizens’ civic virtue couldn’t compete with hard cash in your pocket for leaving your barn unlocked and looking the other way. Harry knew, like he knew his kids’ names, that within ten miles of where he was standing there were at least two or three delivery vans stashed out of sight in some farmers’ hay barns, their drivers and gunmen snoring safely in the lofts. He knew, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He forced a smile, grinned at his men. “You see any bootleggers passing through town, Ralph, you be sure to stop ’em, you hear?”

McPhair threw them a jaunty salute as he tossed open the doors, and Harry, Stevenson, and Inman trudged up the marble stairs to the accompaniment of the unseen woman’s voice, now demanding to see the police chief. Which was usually how it worked out when anyone with a problem came through the doors and encountered Sergeant Tibbet.

The long reception hall stretched away from Harry, with doors along both sides. The hall was guarded by Sergeant Tibbet, who seemed as oaken and massive as the desk he sat behind. A slim brown-haired woman stood there, taut as fishing line snagged on a snapping turtle. When she caught sight of him, she said, “Chief McNeil?” and in her voice he could hear she was right on the edge of breaking down.

He gestured the two officers to continue on to the patrol room before taking the woman’s hand. “I’m Harry McNeil,” he said. “How can I help you?” He hoped she was here to complain about a neighbor leaving her panties out on the line or kids stuffing her mailbox with fire crackers. He was tired to the bone.