Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

“Hey, buddy.” She scooped him onto her hip. “Can we do it?”

“Yes, we can!” he shouted.

“How’re you doing? Where’s Mr. Squeaky?”

“Mistah Squeaky watchin’ zuh twuck video.” Just as quickly, he tired of being held and wiggled away. He dashed toward the family room. She followed. “Elizabeth?” she said.

Elizabeth de Groot was seated in one corner of an oversized sofa, leafing through a magazine by the light of a ginger jar lamp. She folded it into her lap and looked up eagerly. Cody swarmed up onto the cushion next to her and held Mr. Squeaky out for Clare’s inspection. “See?” he said. Mr. Squeaky was a rubbery plastic squirrel whose original colors and features had been almost completely obliterated after two years as a teething-toy-slash-love object. Cody pointed toward the television, where an eighteen-wheeler hummed down a highway to the accompaniment of an upbeat ditty about driving the big rigs. “Mistah Squeaky wuves twucks,” Cody said, before glancing back at the screen and falling under the spell of the video.

“I see you’ve met Mr. Squeaky before,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, you’ll get to know him, too. He’s a regular attendee at the ten o’clock Eucharist. He tends to make himself known during the homily, but I’ve grown used to it.”

Elizabeth craned her neck, looking past Clare into the dining room. “Is Mrs. Burns with you?”

“No. She has… some more business to attend to. She asked me to watch Cody until she got home. Not that she was worried about your proficiency,” she tacked on, anxious not to offend. “She just didn’t want to impose on you any further.”

“It was no imposition,” Elizabeth said. “He’s a sweet little thing. Besides, as soon as I heard what had happened…” She lowered her voice in sympathy. “Are you okay?”

Since the attentive deacon showed no sign of leaving, Clare took the chair kitty-corner to the sofa. “I’m fine,” she lied.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like,” de Groot said. “Accused, arrested, having to bare your most private moments… it must have been awful.”

You have no idea, Clare thought. Part of her-the part that was still seeing Russ look at her, troubled and speculative-wanted to weep and moan and dump on the nearest warm body. But she didn’t have that luxury. She hadn’t in a long time. Since becoming the rector of St. Alban’s.

“I wasn’t arrested,” she said. A truth. “I am considered a ‘person of interest,’ but that’s because the police have to clear anyone who was remotely involved.” A half-truth. There had been nothing in Investigator Jensen’s avid expression indicating she wanted to absolve Clare of anything.

“Mrs. Burns said you were trying to give an alibi to the police chief and so you told the whole department you two had spent the night together. She was quite overwrought.”

How did she respond to that? Yes, I lied to the police or No, I really did spend the night with Russ Van Alstyne. When did you stop beating your wife, Congressman?

“I told the state police investigator, truthfully, that there was no way Chief Van Alstyne could have murdered his wife because he was with me during the established time of death. As it turns out, he had a pretty good alibi anyway. His wife hasn’t been killed.”

“What?”

“The dead woman was a pet sitter named Audrey Keane. She and her partner were evidently deep into stolen credit cards and identity information. The police think her partner may have killed her while robbing the Van Alstynes’, then fled.” And if Dennis Shambaugh didn’t turn up, she was in the spotlight. A fugitive couldn’t remain at large for very long, could he? Her mind helpfully threw up the name of D. B. Cooper, who parachuted into the Oregon wilderness and was never seen again.

“How on earth could they get the identity of the victim wrong?” Elizabeth sounded scandalized.

“They had similar body types and hair. Close in age, too, I’d guess. They’re not sure if she was killed because she was Audrey Keane, or if she was killed because someone thought she was Linda Van Alstyne. She was”-Clare passed her hand across her face-“mutilated after she was killed.”

Elizabeth glanced nervously at Cody, who, oblivious to the increasingly gruesome conversation, was singsonging, “Big wig, big wig, big wig wide zuh woad,” along with the video.

“That’s horrific,” she said. “And up here, too, in such a pretty little town. What are the odds of that?”

“Surprisingly higher than you would think,” Clare said. “Look, you’ve got a long drive home and the weather’s getting worse. Why don’t you go ahead and call it a day? I’ll watch Cody until his parents get home.”

“This has got to be so stressful to you,” Elizabeth said, showing no signs of budging from the sofa. “Have you thought about taking some time off? Maybe going on a retreat? I know the diocese would be happy to provide a supply priest, all things considering.”

“No. Thank you. I just came back from a sort of retreat. Six days alone in a cabin in the mountains. Now I need work.” Work and love, wasn’t that what Freud called the ultimate cure?

“Not quite alone in the cabin, surely,” de Groot said in a small voice.

“Alone enough,” Clare snapped. She breathed deeply. “Alone enough to realize that right now I need to make my parishioners my priority.”

“I hope I can help you to do that,” Elizabeth said. She sat to attention, very upright and brave. “Although… won’t it be difficult to concentrate on serving them when you have criminal charges hanging over your head?”

“There are no criminal charges!” Great. Now I sound like a shrew.

“Because of this Shambaugh fellow, right. Who’s a suspect.” Elizabeth paused. “But what happens if-just hypothetically, mind you-whatever sort of evidence they pull together doesn’t implicate him? Will they start looking at you more seriously? I mean”-she laughed briefly, a musical ripple that went down the scale and up Clare’s nerves-“it’s silly, because what reason would you have to kill a pet sitter?”

“I wouldn’t have reason to kill anyone!”

“Of course not! I just meant-well, you said the police didn’t know if someone killed that poor woman because he or she thought she was Linda Van Alstyne. And it seems as if-and I may have this wrong, this is just the impression I’ve been getting-you’re fairly close to Mr. Van Alstyne.”

“Elizabeth, what do you want to know? Did I have sex with Russ Van Alstyne and kill his wife? No and no.”

The new deacon’s head snapped back toward Cody, but it looked as if the s- word didn’t interest him any more than the k -word had.

“Goodness,” she said.

“I’m sorry to be blunt,” Clare said, although she could think of several words that would have been a lot blunter. “It’s been a miserable day. It’s been a miserable several days, and I’m in no condition to play ring around the rosies. So let’s just cut to the chase. Did I have a relationship with Chief Van Alstyne? Yes. Was it inappropriately physical? No. Did it cross over the bounds emotionally? Yes. Have I severed our connection?”

No. Never. God, she was an idiot. It was a good thing she believed in redemption through grace. Otherwise, she’d have to say she was simply too dumb to live.

“Yes?” Elizabeth quivered with interest.

“I thought,” she began. She had come unmoored, and the words and events of the past four days swooped and fluttered through her head like a pack of cards tossed into the air. “We agreed not to see each other-of course, with his wife dead-but she’s not, now. They’ll have a second chance to be together. That’s good, isn’t it. No contact.”