Linda would have liked this. She would have laughed like that and danced like that and pushed her hair off the nape of her neck like that-such a tender, intimate gesture in a public place, and then he realized he was thinking about Linda and about Clare, holding them both in his mind at the same time, and he waited for the bitter black weight to come over him and it didn't. He felt a lingering sadness, like the clarinet line, but he also felt the excitement of the brass, and he caught a glimpse of a realization, that something of Linda, in some way, survived in Clare, but he couldn't get a handle on the wisp of a thought and his concentration was busted by the growl and crunch of one of his patrol cars, slipping up the street and pulling in next to the park's fire hydrant.
His deputy chief stepped out of the cruiser. "Hey," he said.
"What are you doing here?"
"What am I doing here? What're you still doing here? You were scheduled to go off duty an hour ago. I figured you forgot to call in."
"Huh. Guess I lost track of the time."
Lyle shoved his hands in his pockets as he joined Russ. "Bucking for overtime won't do you any good, y'know. You're on salary. That's why you wouldn't catch me taking your job."
"You wouldn't take my job because you might actually have to show up for work during hunting season."
"Yeah, well, there is that." Lyle looked between the trees to where the dancers were going around to "Begin the Beguine." "How're things goin'?"
"Nobody dragged off to a shallow grave yet. Although the night's still young. What's happening out there?" He gestured with his chin toward the rest of the town and beyond.
"Quietest damn Sunday night I've ever seen. I think the Cossayuharie Killer's keeping everybody home. Or headed down to Saratoga. Paul called in, said he's given out a few tickets on the Schuylerville Road."
"Jim Cameron's not going to like that."
"What, tickets? Sure he will. Paul's scoping out the cars from away. No skin off his voters' noses."
"I meant, people taking their money out of Millers Kill."
"On a Sunday night?" Lyle blew a raspberry. "The only things to spend money on in this town are those idiot arcade games at Alltechtronik and a couple ounces of grass. You have to go to Glens Falls to bet on bingo."
"I dunno about that. I think Geraldine Bain's running a floating canasta game around here. Penny a point."
Lyle laughed. Russ grinned. They stood side by side, watching the dancers, and for a moment it was like it used to be. The music slid smoothly into a new song, the bandleader's voice sweet and melancholy. I can see, no matter how near you'll be, you'll never belong to me-
"Who's the fellow with Reverend Fergusson?"
Russ blinked. "Hugh Parteger. Forty. Unmarried. He's an investment banker from the city. Resident alien. One DUI, got it bargained down to DTE. No other record."
Lyle looked at him sideways. "It was more in the line of a social question."
He felt his cheeks heat up and hoped the light from the streetlamps wasn't enough to give him away. "Guy comes dropping into my town for no good reason every couple of months, why shouldn't I run him? Forewarned is forearmed, or however the saying goes."
"Mmm." Lyle turned back to the dancing. Anne Vining-Ellis and her husband blocked Clare from view, but as the Ellises twirled out of the way, Russ could see her, locked up tight in Hugh's arms, the overdressed bastard sliding one hand all up and down her half-bare back.
"Looks to me like he's got a perfectly good reason for coming to town."
But I can dream, can't I?
"Whyn't you go over there and ask her to dance?"
He rounded on Lyle. "Why don't you mind your own business?" He turned back toward Clare and her date, determined to poke the knife in himself a little deeper. "You're the last person who oughta be handing out advice."
Lyle was still a moment. "You're right," he finally said. "I've managed to ball up every relationship I ever had. Includin' our friendship. But you know what? That means I can recognize when someone's making a dumb-ass mistake." He waited, as if inviting Russ to chime in. Russ kept his mouth shut. "Whatever." Lyle sighed. "I'm gonna take a turn around the park and check in with Kevin. See ya around." He strolled off beneath the trees.
The song ended to a clamor of applause. Russ turned on his heel and strode across Church Street without looking, headed for his truck, parked in the lot across from St. Alban's. He unlocked it and stripped off his gear belt, dropping the whole thing into his lockbox along with his pump-action shotgun and.40-.40. There. Officially off-duty.
He climbed behind the wheel and fired up the truck. Wondered if his mother was still out at Cousin Nane's. Probably not. He wished he had someplace to go where he could be alone.
How about your own house?
He shook his head. He had been back to the house on Peekskill Road several times since Linda's death, but he was never, he realized, going to spend the night there again.
What was he going to do? Sell it? Then what? Buying another house seemed pointless. Keep living with his mother? He had a sudden vision of himself, a decade on, sixty years old, coming back to his eighty-five-year-old mother's house-the women on her side of the family lived a long time, he had no doubt she'd still be alive and kicking-eating the same low-carb dinner, watching the Yankees kick the hell out of the Red Sox, nothing changing, everything exactly the same as it was now. As it had been since Linda died. That's what he had wanted, wasn't it? To stop time? To never let go of her?
God Almighty. What was he doing to himself?
He swiped his hand over his face. Rolled down the window. In the park across the street, the band was playing "In the Mood," and somewhere in the crowd Hugh Parteger had his hands all over Clare Fergusson.
Jesus Christ. What the hell was he doing sitting in this damn truck?
He twisted the key out of the ignition, popped open the door, and thumped to the asphalt. He recrossed the street. The dancing had been going on long enough that people had wandered out to the edges of the park, women fanning themselves, men tugging at their ties and unbuttoning their cuffs. He passed a "Chief Van Alstyne!" and a "Hey, Russ," but kept his course single-mindedly toward the bandstand.
The music stopped, and applause burst like champagne bubbles in the air around him. He looked around, but for the first time that evening he couldn't spot the red dress. His stomach tightened. I could always put him up at the rectory. What if she decided… What if they had-