Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

“I met him before. That day you asked me to find out-” She shook her head. “Yesterday. It was yesterday. It feels like a year ago. Anyway, I’m just realizing that when he was talking with me and his mother, it was all ‘like’ and seem’ about him. As if everything he did, every human interaction, was a performance.” She shuddered.

“You don’t need to talk about this,” he said quietly.

“Sooner or later I do.”

“No,” he said. His voice was firm. “You don’t.” He glanced away from the road for a second. “I didn’t go into any details about what happened with Flynn and Noble Entwhistle. I said MacEntyre was threatening our lives, and that he’d been killed. As the responding officer, I’m going to write up the official report. I can make it so that I did it.”

She sat, silent for a moment. Thinking about changing history with a few keystrokes. “Thank you,” she finally said. She smiled a little. “I love you for making the offer. But I can’t accept.”

He snorted. “Kind of thought you’d say that.”

Ahead of them, Flynn’s cruiser’s brake lights flared red. Russ stepped on the brakes, muttering something under his breath that Clare figured she didn’t want to hear. The Subaru fishtailed. “Hang on,” he said, steering them into the skid. He got control of the car, and they slowly inched forward, following Flynn, who had turned on his red-and-whites. Emerging out of the darkness, they could see flares, and the whirling lights of squad cars and tow trucks and emergency vehicles, and then the intersection. A truck had T-boned a small car, crumpling it around the Peterbilt grille like a wet napkin draped over a fist.

Clare crossed herself, then folded her hands against her mouth. Dear Lord God, she prayed, show Your mercy to all whose lives will be changed tonight.

“Wait,” Russ said. He slowed even more. “Wait.” He pulled off the road. She thought. It was hard to tell.

She was about to ask if he was needed when he opened the door. In the overhead light, his face was a death mask. He slipped out, slamming the door behind him.

Alarmed, she tugged her hat and gloves on and followed him. In the blur of the storm, the rescuers and responders were anonymous, bulky figures in parkas and rip-stop pants, their faces hidden behind skin-saving balaclavas. She lost Russ immediately. She headed toward the accident, where brilliant halogen lights cut through the snow’s unending assault.

“Hey!” A masked figure caught at her sleeve. “No one allowed in there, sorry.”

She pushed her hat back and her parka collar down.

“Oh! Reverend Fergusson!” The man let go of her sleeve and peeled his balaclava away. It was Duane, an EMT and one of Russ’s part-time officers. “I’m afraid they don’t have any need of you now, Reverend.” He raised his voice to be heard above the wind. “Better say your prayers for the rest of us, that we don’t get frostbite sortin’ this mess out. It’s ugly.”

“What happened?”

“Rental car skidded through the red light right into the path of the eighteen-wheeler. The driver says he tried to stop, but… He’s pretty shook up.”

“He’s okay?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s the other two that bought it.”

A sick and terrible weight ballooned in the pit of her stomach. “I have to get in there,” she said.

Duane shrugged. “Stay out of the way,” he advised. Clare skirted an ambulance-sitting there, both EMTs waiting patiently in the cab, no rush to the hospital for them-and sloshed through a well-churned morass of snow toward the accident.

Four members of the Millers Kill volunteer fire department were attacking the remnants of the car with torches. Cutting away the tortured metal to take out what was left inside. Two fire trucks flanked the scene.

“Russ!” she yelled. She skirted the edges of the light. “Russ!”

A firefighter crossed in front of her, toting a rolled hose. “Excuse me,” she shouted. “Have you seen Chief Van Alstyne?” The man-woman?-paused, then pointed to the other end of the intersection.

Clare hurried, slipping and sliding, dodging cops and firefighters, rushing, the panic and dread growing, frantic to find Russ and not wanting to see him at all.

She spotted him standing apart from anyone else. He was facing the remains of the car head-on. The closer she got, the more slowly she walked, until she was too close not to see his face.

Then she knew.

“They…” he said, in a voice that had aged a century. “They…” He pointed to the intersection. “You can see. From the tracks.” She looked. Whatever he saw in the patterns in the snow was unintelligible to her. “And… from the angle. They were coming back.”

She didn’t want to see him like this. She didn’t want to ever see such pain in anyone’s eyes ever again. If it had been within her power, she would have switched places with the woman in the passenger seat. Just to erase what she saw when she looked at him.

“They were coming back. The hotel. Was that way. They were coming back.” He stared at Clare. “And I-” His voice cracked, and he crumpled beneath an enormous cry that tore out of his chest. “Oh, God! What I said to her!”

Clare stepped forward, opening her arms, offering whatever she had.

He turned away.

He stood there, in the snow and the light and the darkness, drowning with the first bitter waters of grief, and she waited, and she waited, until she realized he wasn’t going to turn to her. Ever. She stepped back. She stepped back. She stepped back and back, out of the light, past the fire trucks and the EMTs and the squad cars, until she had vanished into the storm.

And she was lost again.

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

It is a cliché that there are no secrets in a small town. It is also true. Despite the fact Kilmer’s Funeral Home had no visiting hours for the late Mrs. Russell Van Alstyne and her funeral had been unlisted in the Post-Star, the Center Street Methodist Church in Fort Henry was packed. The pews at the front of the church were so crowded, Mayor Cameron had to squeeze in next to Wayne and Mindy Stoner in the third-from-the-last row.

Mindy, who had been in Russ’s class at MKHS, sighed when she caught sight of him. “Poor man. He looks awful.”

“You speaking today?” Wayne asked Cameron.

The mayor shook his head. “I’m keeping a low profile. The aldermen and I met yesterday and told him he’s getting six weeks off whether he likes it or not. Poor bastard just sat there and nodded. I don’t want to give him the chance to change his mind.”

“Can’t say I’d like to sit home and think about it if my wife got turned to jelly in a car wreck.”

“Wayne!” Mindy elbowed her husband.

“Why d’you think it’s a closed coffin, hon?” He turned back to Jim Cameron. “Where’s the other one? The sister?”

“Florida. She had a couple of grown kids who brought her remains back.” Cameron shook his head. “What a mess. This is going to screw up our state highway fatality rating for the rest of the year.”

Wayne relayed the news about Russ Van Alstyne’s leave of absence to Scotty McAlistair at the Agway feed store the next day, and Scotty, in turn, told his daughter Christy at dinner time. When Christy arrived at the Free Clinic for an appointment she thought her father knew nothing about, she was disappointed to find out the nurse pratictioner had already heard that the chief of police was off duty for the next month and a half.

“Yeah, Lyle MacAuley’s acting chief,” Laura Rayfield said, helping Christy sit up. She snapped off her gloves and popped open a cupboard door.