The woman diver drew up to the stretcher, Bob Mongue close behind her. “We almost didn’t spot it,” she said. She had short, dark curls plastered against her scalp, and a cool, appraising look not unlike Dr. Dvorak’s. Clare figured you’d have to be pretty unflappable to go diving through muck or dark water looking for dead people. “It was the car we noticed first.”
The medical examiner went around to the other side of the stretcher, peering closely at the skull and neck bones. “Very well preserved,” he said to himself.
“What car?” Russ said. He looked toward Bob Mongue. “You remember any missing person and car?”
The dark-haired diver shook her head. “This wasn’t a car either of you guys would ever have heard about. From what I could see was left of it-the leather top and tires, some of the body-this was like a Model T or something. Old. Like, your-grandfather-drove-it-when-he-was-a-kid old.” She peeled off a rubbery orange glove and ruffled her hair. “We can go in for it if you want. There aren’t any single pieces left big enough to call for the winch. There’s a leather roof, some wire-spoke wheels, stuff like that.” She looked at Russ and Bob Mongue, who were staring at her. “Hey, we figured we were there for the body. Nobody said anything about a car.”
Clare couldn’t stand biting off her question one second longer. “Did he commit suicide, do you think? Drove into the water and drowned?”
The diver shook her head. “It was in the middle of the reservoir. His car never would have gotten that far.”
Russ looked at Clare. She felt like she could read his mind. And he could read hers. “But he could have driven it in,” he said, not looking away from her. “If he had come here a few days after the dam was finished and the river began piling up behind it. He could have driven right into the rising water-”
“At night,” Clare said. “Into the condemned property, where nobody in his right mind would have gone.”
“And parked the car. Waiting for the water to take him.”
“I hate to toss a spanner into such a neat and tidy conclusion, but this man didn’t drive himself anywhere,” Emil Dvorak said. “Or if he did, he wasn’t alone.” He gently cradled the skull through the fine netting, lifting and rotating it so they could all see the back, where a network of fine cracks radiated out in a circle, like a fractured porthole. “See how depressed this is? This man may have been left in the water, but he didn’t drown. He was killed by a massive blow to the head.”
Chapter 33
Monday, April 3
Clare and Norm Madsen accompanied Mrs. Marshall to the morgue. She hadn’t wanted to go, despite a phone call from Dr. Dvorak late Friday afternoon, asking her if she could come in after the weekend and answer a few questions about her father.
“It couldn’t be him,” she said, turning around from the passenger seat of her car to address Clare. “What would his body have been doing there, anyway?”
“Remember the stories you used to spin when you were a kid?” Norm was a careful driver, hands at the two and ten positions, eyes on the road even while he was talking. “About your dad being ambushed by bootleggers?” He let the implication hang in the air.
In the backseat, Clare tried to think of a new way to answer the same question she had heard at least a dozen times since Russ had broken the news to Mrs. Marshall that the unidentified remains from the reservoir might be those of Jonathon Ketchem. There were only so many ways one could dance around the answer: Someone killed him and dumped his body there.
It had been a pretty miserable weekend all around. Friday’s clouds had brought a steady spring rain that lasted, on and off, until Sunday night. Clare had spent a gray and solitary Saturday afternoon in the old nursery at the historical society, searching unsuccessfully for more records of the Sacandaga land sales and peering out through the curtains of rain toward the clinic, dark and closed. At St. Alban’s, a leak worked its way through the roofer’s tarp, rendering several pews in the north aisle uninhabitable for Sunday Eucharist. And much to her senior warden’s dismay, she was in the newspaper. Again.
“Clare,” Robert Corlew said, bearing down on her in the parish hall. “Did you see Saturday’s Post-Star?”
She looked up from the table, where she was debating between the frosted brownies and the carrot cake. Coffee hour at St. Alban’s was always a celebration of butter and sugar. Occasionally, someone with higher ideals would bring in grapes, or pineapple chunks on toothpicks, or apple slices. They usually went untouched.
“I sure did,” she said, picking up a brownie.
“You’re in it. In a news story. About a crazy woman holding people at gun-point.” He leaned in more closely. “I thought we agreed after last year that you weren’t going to appear in print unless it was something nice and uplifting.”
“An Easter message of hope, I believe you said.”
Sterling Sumner had drifted over. “You know, the story went out over the wires. A friend in Albany called to ask me if my priest was the one mentioned in the ‘State and Local’ item.”
She knew. There had been a message on her answering machine from the diocesan office. Someone on the bishop’s staff wanted to Talk With Her. “It must have been a slow news day,” she said.
“Clare! This isn’t the kind of thing designed to attract new members-”
“New pledge-paying members,” Sterling added.
“To St. Alban’s! ‘Local priest, artist held in armed standoff.’ ” He looked to Sterling for support. “Am I right? Would this make you want to try out St. Alban’s?”
“I’m sorry!” Several heads turned in their direction, and she toned her voice down. “It’s not like I set out that morning with the goal of having a gun stuck in my face.”
“We’ve suggested before that you take a look at the people you’re getting involved with,” Sterling said. “You know what they say. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”
“I get involved with people who need me.” She almost threw up her hands until she remembered the brownie.
“Notoriety isn’t a desirable quality in a priest,” Corlew said. “If we had wanted Daniel Berrigan, we’d have hired him.”
“I’m not courting notoriety,” she said. Corlew raised one eyebrow so high it nearly disappeared into the thicket of his hair. Or toupee.
“You must admit you’ve gotten involved in some pretty flamboyant incidents.” Sterling tossed his boys-school scarf for emphasis.
She bit the inside of her cheek. Counted to ten. Quickly, but she made it. She could argue with these guys from now until Good Friday and she still wouldn’t make them see things her way. It was time for a little dose of southern. She put one hand on Sterling’s arm, and her other on Corlew’s shoulder. “Gentlemen, you are absolutely right.” They both looked at her suspiciously. “My grandmother always said a lady’s name should appear in the paper only three times, and I can’t say I disagree with her. I never spoke to any reporter about the unfortunate incident with Mrs. Rouse, and I promise you here and now I never will. In fact, I could live happy never speaking to another reporter again, except on church business.”
“Like, about the white elephant sale,” Corlew said.
“Or Easter messages of hope,” she said.
The sight of the square brick facade of the county morgue yanked her back to the present. Mr. Madsen parked and they all got out. Mrs. Marshall looked up at the granite flight of stairs. “I won’t have to… look at the body, will I?”
“I doubt it,” Clare said, not adding, There isn’t much you would recognize.
Inside, Mr. Madsen gave Mrs. Marshall’s name to the attendant, who rang the medical examiner and then buzzed them through the door that separated the waiting room from the coroner’s office and the mortuary. Dr. Dvorak met them in the hall. Clare introduced Mr. Madsen, who described himself as “a family friend,” and Mrs. Marshall, who looked at the medical examiner’s hand a beat too long before shaking it, perhaps envisioning where it had been.