Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

She shrugged. “I’m not if I didn’t know you were wanted for questioning.” An image of Willard Aberforth sprang up before her, all baggy eyes and inconveniently pointed moral questions. Straight talking is what you need at this point. “I take that back,” she said. “I won’t lie. But it’s not like I’m protecting you. I’m offering to help find out who did this terrible thing.”

“What if I did it?” He sounded distant, as if he were talking about someone else.

“You couldn’t have.”

“What if I did?”

“You’re not capable-”

“Clare, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in twenty-five years of law enforcement, it’s that anyone is capable of anything if pushed hard enough. What if I did it and I’m just racing around trying to cover my ass at this point?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

He rocked forward in the chair suddenly, snapping it on its springs and leaning into her space. “I want to know what you wouldn’t do for me.”

She stared into his eyes, crackle-glazed blue. They hadn’t been this close since… she cut off that thought. For whatever reason, this was a deadly serious question for Russ. Not what would she do for him, but what wouldn’t she do?

“I wouldn’t deny God for you,” she said slowly. “I wouldn’t betray my country for you. I wouldn’t break a parishioner’s trust for you.” Without conscious intent, her hand started to curl over his. She yanked it back into her lap. “I wouldn’t let you get away with it if I found out you were doing something wrong.”

“I am doing something wrong. I’m evading questioning by a New York State Police investigator.”

She made a face. “That’s rule-breaking. I mean wrong. Sinful. Wounding others. Wounding your own soul.”

He creaked back in his chair. His eyes went flat. “Too late for that.”

“No,” she said firmly. “It’s never too late for redemption.”

“I’m never going to be able to make this up to Linda. She’s gone. It doesn’t matter what I do, what I say, how sorry I am. She’s gone.”

“I don’t believe that. Even if I did, even if the death of the body was the end of everything, you’re still alive. And while we live, it’s not too late to ask for forgiveness. To mourn the lost chances and the bad choices and to do better going forward.”

“Who do I ask forgiveness from, Clare? Who? You? Linda? Your God?”

“Try asking yourself.”

“Christ.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. His lashes were wet. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Oh, Russ.” She felt a stinging behind her eyes. “We none of us get what we deserve, thank God. We get what we’re given. Love. Compassion. A second chance. And then a third, and a fourth.”

He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “How the hell can you be so damn certain? How can you sit there and be so goddamn serene?”

She laughed, a sound that came out as a harsh rasp. “Serene? Me? You don’t think I’m carrying around a guilt overcoat for what I did to your marriage? I can barely look at myself in the mirror.”

He sat up straighter. “You? You didn’t do anything. I was the one who was married. I was supposed to, I don’t know, keep my guard up.”

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Do you forgive me, then?”

“For what? Being the sort of person I couldn’t help falling in love with?” His laugh didn’t sound any better than hers. “Yeah. For what it’s worth, I forgive you.”

A kind of power filled her at his words, a moment of rare certainty that the Divine was right there, with her, in her, moving through her. She stood up. “What gives you the right to forgive me for the sins I committed against Linda?” She ducked her head close to his.

Whispered. “Love?”

She laid her hands on his head, not lightly, as if she were giving a blessing, but hard, molding his hair and skull beneath her fingers and palms. “Who here condemns you?” she quoted.

His chest moved with shallow breaths. “No one,” he said, finally.

“Then Love does not condemn you, either.” She was close to him, close enough for her forehead to touch his, close enough to smell the faint pine and wool scent of him. “Go, dear heart, and sin no more.”

He could not have moved if his life depended on it. The pressure of her hands, her breath on his face-it should have been sexual, if it was anything, but it wasn’t. It was a current, there and gone again in an instant, leaving him trembling. Except he wasn’t. His hands, resting against the wooden arms of the chair, were steady. It was a blow. Or a sound. That he hadn’t felt, didn’t hear.

What the hell?

She released him, and he thought his head might float away. Or his heart. He cleared his throat. “I…” he began.

She not-quite-touched a finger to his lips. “Let’s think about what you need to do. And what I can do to help.”

He nodded. Yeah. That would be good.

“Maybe we could split up your leads. I could check out this Oliver guy in Saratoga, and you could follow up on the car they saw in your driveway.” She glanced at her battered Seiko. “High school will be getting out in an hour and a half. Maybe we could catch Quinn Tracey’s friend then.”

He nodded.

She frowned. “Are you all right?”

He cleared his throat again. “Yeah,” he said. And he was surprised to find, as he said it, that he was all right. Not great, not happy-he wasn’t sure if he would ever be happy again-but… all right. “Yeah.” His voice was stronger. He stood up, his back cracking along with the old desk chair. “That’s a good plan.” He bent over the desk and scribbled Oliver Grogan’s address and phone number on a scrap pad. “Here.” He handed the paper to her. “Call me after you’ve checked him out. If anything seems off, if anything at all trips your wire, get out first and call me later.”

She nodded. “Are you going to be okay driving around? What with being a wanted man and all?”

“I switched vehicles when I was at home. I left my truck in the barn and took the station wagon.”

“Won’t they be looking for that, too?”

“If whoever Jensen sent to check my house reports seeing tracks going in and out of the barn, yeah. I’m gambling it was someone inclined to cut me a break.” His mouth twisted. “Gamble being the operative term. Somebody from the department complained to the staties about the investigation.”

“Ah,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“So’m I.” He folded up his notes and stuffed them into his inside pocket. “We’d better get going.”

“Where are you parked?”

“Up the street, tucked in tight in the Balfours’ driveway.” He flashed a grin. “They’re in Florida for the season.”

“That’s very sneaky of you,” she said. “I admire that in a man.”

Coat over her arm, she poked her head out of the door first. She nodded to him. He followed her, not toward the parish hall, where he had come in that morning, but toward the church. She heaved the inner door open, and they entered the dim space of the sanctuary. She led him down one of the side aisles, all the way to the rear of the church. “Wait in the narthex for me. I’ll be right back.”

“The what?”

She pulled open a pair of double doors, revealing a square, towerlike space fronted by the great doors of the church, palisade-high wooden structures faced with enough ironwork to repel the Norman invasion. “The foyer. The vestibule. The narthex,” she said, then disappeared back into the church.

The doors swung silently shut behind him. Four arrow-slit windows let in what light there was, through their narrow, stained glass depictions of a lion, an eagle, a man, and an ox. Cold radiated from the stone walls. He shivered. What the hell had possessed the architect of this place? Even back in the 1850s, they had known there was more effective insulation than a square foot of dressed stone. But they went ahead and erected the cutting edge of eleventh-century technology. He shuddered to think how they heated this anachronism in the decades before the radiators were installed.