Monday, March 20

Clare woke up late. Most days, the alarm hauled her out of bed early so she could get her run in before morning prayer or the 7:00 A.M. Eucharist. Mondays, she left the alarm off, but she usually woke up at the same time anyway through force of habit. She rolled to one side to look at the clock. Nine A.M. Good Lord.

She flipped the covers off and was instantly all over goose bumps. Holy crow, had she left a window open overnight? She grabbed her robe, which had been tossed over the foot of her bed, and belted it tightly. She tiptoed to the upstairs bathroom, trying for the least amount of contact with the cold floorboards. The little window over the toilet was shut tight.

She tiptoed back to her bedroom, spent a few minutes in a vain search for her slippers, and pulled on a pair of thick sweat socks instead, before going hunting for the window that was letting her expensive oil-fired heat escape.

She couldn’t remember opening anything last night when she got in, but she had been asleep on her feet. After her encounter with the dead Ketchem children-don’t go there-she had driven Debba Clow back to the house Debba shared with her mother. It had been a nonstop stream of speculation on Debba’s part; what might have happened to Dr. Rouse, what the police suspected, how her ex would react, how this would affect the custody case.

After Clare had finally delivered the anxious woman to her front door, she had turned homeward, only to be blocked out of her own drive by a tow truck, chaining Debba’s car in preparation for hauling it away. Clare had gotten out of her car and demanded to know what was happening, but the answer was a laconic “Impounded. Police.” The tow truck driver, a man as broad and walleyed as a trout, had actually wound yellow sticky tape around the entire car before levering it up onto his flatbed and rumbling away down Elm Street. Despite the hour, or maybe because of it, Clare had seen lights on and curtains fluttering at most of her neighbors’ houses. Yessir, just another dull night at the rectory.

She reached her thermostat in the dining room and discovered why her house was slowly sinking into a deep freeze. The temperature was set for sixty degrees, but it was only registering fifty. She turned the thermostat up, expecting to hear the soft roar of her furnace firing, and instead heard only silence.

“Oh, wonderful,” she said to the wall.

In the kitchen, she turned on the oven to four hundred and cracked open the door. Then she called her oil company and begged them to send a repairman as soon as possible. She was pretty good with engines-she could tinker with cars and do basic repairs to light aircraft-but there was no way she was going to try to fix her own furnace. The oil company’s burner tech was out on call, but he would get to the rectory when he finished with his morning appointments-no later than two o’clock. Three at the most.

“Tell him I’m leaving the door unlocked and a check on the kitchen table,” she said. Okay. She could have tried for a parish in southern Florida and missed out on the experience of her house turning into a giant meat locker, but on the other hand, she wouldn’t have been able to leave the house open and a blank check on the table in Miami. She consoled herself with that thought while wriggling into her clothes with her nightgown tented around her for warmth. She briefly considered lighting a fire in her living room, but the thought of what might happen if she wasn’t around to keep an eye on things dissuaded her.

Instead, she grabbed her parka and her car keys. She was headed for Mrs. Henry Marshall’s house with a whole boatload of questions. On the drive over, she ricocheted between frustration that she had been kept in the dark about Jane Ketchem, sympathy for Mrs. Marshall’s silence about her family’s grievous loss, and a deep bafflement as to Dr. Rouse’s role in all this.

Mrs. Marshall’s doorbell was set flush in an angular chrome-and-Lucite plate: the best the sixties had to offer. Clare caught a faint “Come in!” when she rang the chime and opened the door.

“Mrs. Marshall? It’s me, Clare Fergusson.”

“I’m back here, in the kitchen,” Mrs. Marshall called out. She emerged in a doorway at the end of the hall, wiping her hands on an apron tied over her wool pants. Her lipstick was a marigold orange, almost the same shade as her turtleneck sweater, and from the distance down the hallway, her face softened in the shadows, Clare could almost see the slim and fashionable matron who had come to this house in the 1960s. “I’m making a meal to take to Renee Rouse, poor thing. Ham-and-cheese strata. It’s wonderful, because you half bake it ahead of time, and then when you want to eat it you pop it in the oven and out it comes, hot and ready.”

Clare hung up her parka in the hall closet while Mrs. Marshall extolled the virtues of her dish. “How did you hear about Mrs. Rouse?” she said, advancing toward the kitchen.

“She was calling everyone she knew yesterday. Frantic, poor thing. I telephoned her this morning, and she told me the police found Allan’s car, but not Allan.” She ushered Clare into her kitchen. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Clare looked around. Unlike the rooms she had seen before, the kitchen had been thoroughly remodeled, and recently. Everything was creamy walnut, glossy dark granite, and brushed steel. As up-to-the-minute as the rest of the house had once been. Clare wondered how old she would be before the flush-to-the-cabinets Sub-Zero would be considered as hopelessly unfashionable as an avocado Kenmore.

“If it’s all right with you, dear, I’m going to put you to work.” Mrs. Marshall withdrew an apron from a drawer and handed it to Clare. “Will you chop up the ham and the broccoli for me? The knife’s on the cutting board.”

Clare obediently fastened the apron around her waist and went to the thick butcher’s board next to the sink. She found a head of broccoli waiting to be rinsed and turned on the water, considering how to get into the topic that was foremost in her mind. “So Mrs. Rouse told you about how they found Dr. Rouse’s car,” she said, turning the broccoli beneath the spray. “Did she mention where it was?”

Mrs. Marshall pulled a metal mixing bowl from a cupboard and put it on the counter across the sink from Clare. “Off the road, up into the mountains, she said.” She shook her head, her silver-white hair catching the light. “Bad news. Not what a wife wants to hear.”

“It was by a place called Stewart’s Pond Reservoir.”

Mrs. Marshall crossed the room toward the refrigerator.

“Do you remember that woman who was so upset the day we went to see him? Debba Clow? He asked her to meet him out there. He showed her a little cemetery at the edge of the reservoir.”

Mrs. Marshall faced the open refrigerator, her back to Clare. “Stewart’s Pond,” she said. “We used to call it the lake.” She bent down, pulled a box of eggs from a lower shelf. “So that was where he went missing. I didn’t know.” She straightened, returned to the side of the sink with her egg carton in hand.

“I was there last night. Debba had come to the rectory to talk with me after… after she had met with Dr. Rouse. Chief Van Alstyne wanted her back up there to see if she could help them figure out where Dr. Rouse had gone.”

Mrs. Marshall looked out the window over the sink. “Why on earth would he take anyone there?” she said. Clare didn’t think the old woman was talking to her.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Clare steadied the broccoli on the cutting board and watched her hands as she cut off the thick stalk. “I saw the headstones. Sons and daughters of J. N. and J. A. Ketchem.”