“Then your mother can come over here and get a glass for you, Alyson. I’m not giving you any sherry until then, and that’s final.” The girl flipped her dazzling hair in annoyance and flounced away as well as she could in her high-heeled platform boots.
“The difficult age,” Clare said, filling her glass to the top and handing the bottle back to Miss Bristol.
The elderly lady fixed Clare with her black-currant eyes. “That girl is spoiled rotten,” she said. “I had her in my fourth-grade class, and she was spoiled then. Alyson will always be at the difficult age, whether she’s seventeen or seventy.”
“Ah,” Clare said. “Well.”
“Oh, don’t mind me, Reverend. I never felt I could speak my mind when I was teaching, so now that I’m retired, I’m making up for lost time. Which reminds me. Some of those men who believe they run the church undoubtedly want to let you know their opinions about this police business. You stand your ground. I think you’re doing a splendid job.”
“Goodness,” Clare said. “Thank you, Miss Bristol.” She turned away, feeling as if she’d been given a sticker for good behavior from an otherwise strict teacher. She took a sip of her sherry, spotting Russ standing by the door to the street. Casual, not obviously blocking it, but making it impossible to get past him without at least making an excuse. He really was tall, several inches above anyone else in the room. It was more noticeable in a group. She wended her way toward him through the crowd, careful not to spill any of her drink on the faded rose-patterned carpet. As she nodded and smiled at her congregants, Vaughn Fowler fell in beside her.
“Any luck with identifying the victim?” he asked.
“At the church door? No,—no.” She had to forcibly restrain herself from adding “sir” every time she spoke to Colonel Fowler. Mr. Fowler.
“Let’s hope someone here will be able to help the police, then. Speaking as a vestry member, I don’t like it. The sooner we get this off church property the better. You do realize there could be a question of liability for St. Alban’s?”
“Liability? For a murder? I don’t see how.”
“If there was some connection. Do the police have a suspect yet? If it’s a member of our congregation, we may need to consult the diocesan attorney to ensure that the church, as a corporate entity, has no responsibility.”
“Ah . . . as far as I know, Chief Van Alstyne hasn’t singled out any one person as a suspect. After all, finding out who she was is a very preliminary step.”
“I’m thinking about the next step. Suppose he arrests someone from St. Alban’s. It’s in the Post-Star. It’s on the news. Then the real murderer turns up. That leaves us wide open to a lawsuit. Contributing to defamation of character or some such. Lawyers. You have to think of the ramifications of everything you do these days.”
Millers Kill’s chief of police was smiling reassuringly to a young couple wrestling their two little girls into snowsuits. “Mama,” the older child said, “is that Officer Friendly?”
“I was wondering when you’d get over here. I wanted to wait for you before I started showing the pictures around.” Russ reached behind him and swept the folder off an unused prie-dieu standing beside the door. He looked keenly at Mr. Fowler. Clare introduced the two men.
“I recall reading about you in the Post-Star around the time you were appointed police chief, Van Alstyne. You were in the Eighty-ninth MP brigade weren’t you? I was chief of staff at Fort Hood during their deployment there in ’eighty-seven.”
The chief blinked and straightened slightly. “Yes, sir, I was in the Eighty-ninth.” Clare bit back a smile. Evidently she wasn’t the only one to have a hard time treating the colonel as a civilian. “I’m surprised you’d remember something like that,” Russ went on.
“Military service is something I always look for. It’s what makes a man.” He frowned. “Or woman.” Clare felt her cheeks flush. Fowler pointed to the folder. “You ready to start this, Chief?”
“Yessir,” Russ said.
“Then I might as well be the first. Set an example, let everyone know what’s expected of them. Nothing to be afraid of, after all.” Russ looked at Clare. She nodded. He flipped open the folder. Clare had avoided looking at the photographs when she had been saying good-bye to parishioners at the front door, but now she took a long, steady look at the face of the unknown. Four shots, face front, profiles, and full body, covered with an institutional green sheet. She was struck by how much less real the girl looked, laid out on a steel table, lit by fluorescents and flashbulbs. Not at all like the sleeping princess, leaves frozen into her long hair, that she had stood over on the bank of the creek.
“Sorry,” Fowler said. “Don’t know her.” He frowned. “Where did you say it happened?”
“I didn’t,” Russ said. “We found her body just upstream from Payson’s Park.”
The colonel glanced at Russ. “Kids still go there to get away from their parents?” He shook his head. “I used to skinny dip in the river there. Jump off the old trestle bridge and swim downstream. It was a more innocent time. . . . Sorry I can’t be of any help.”
“Thank you anyway,” Russ said.
Fowler nodded, slipping on his overcoat. “Reverend, I’ll be seeing you at the next vestry meeting. Chief Van Alstyne, good to meet you.” When he opened the door, the sunlight and snowlight flooded the parish hall, drawing glances from the rest of the room.
Clare held up her hands. “May I have your attention, please? For those of you willing to help with the police investigation, Chief Van Alstyne is ready to have you look at the photographs. If you could give him your name before leaving, he’ll be able to keep track of which members of our congregation have seen the pictures. I know it’s an unpleasant task, but it’s important that we all do our part to help the police catch whoever is responsible for this crime. Thank you.”
There was a surge of bodies toward them. “Good heavens.” Clare murmured. “They don’t seem to be too horrified at the prospect of autopsy shots, do they?”
“Reality TV,” Russ whispered. “If you’ve seen all those specials on serial killers, this is pretty tame.” He raised his voice. “If you could form a line there, we can get you all out of here quickly.”
It was a repeat of the earlier scene in the vestibule of the church, with more people. The same exclamations, expressions of sympathy, philosophical mutterings. No one recognized her. There was a moment of excitement when Mae Bristol’s turn came up. She held two of the photos in her hands, looking slowly from one to the other. “I feel as if I should know her,” she said. “I just can’t place her. But I’m sure I’ve seen her before.” She shook her head and smiled apologetically at Russ and Clare. “Too many years of too many young people, I suppose.”
The tedium of the whole process reminded Clare of how she had felt waiting on the trail for the evidence to be photographed. Police work was a lot like combat, she decided, hours and days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.