In the Bleak Midwinter Read online

  “You’re not worried he might take off someplace?”

  Russ shook his head. “His whole life’s right here. All his family and friends. I’ll bet the farthest he’s ever traveled has been New York City on the junior class trip. Where’s he gonna go?”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Mr. McWhorter, Karen and Geoff can’t solve your problems for you. But they can help prevent further problems.” Clare took a deep breath and thought of the Wednesday Eucharist she would be celebrating a few hours away at noon. The prospect helped her keep her cool. The Burnses shifted on her small office sofa and glowered at her, obviously frustrated and out of temper with McWhorter’s continual sad narrative about his financial woes and his declarations of affection for his dear, departed Katie. So far, he had been skirting the outright offering of Cody in exchange for cash, but the implication was clear enough. Karen and Geoff had outlined the benefits they could give Cody; the excellent home, the education, the love and attention, even the puppy dog in the backyard. McWhorter countered with how ashamed the boy would be of his poor grandparents, how he would reject his own flesh and blood, living in a shabby apartment and eating beans and rice at the end of the month when the money ran low.

  When Karen asked him if he wanted to bring up Cody in that shabby apartment, he went into a song-and-dance about poor but honest hearts that could have come straight out of Little Nell. Clare, who had held Kristen’s hand until she thought her bones would grind together while the girl stammered out her story of abuse, kept her peace by picturing herself snapping McWhorter’s kneecap with a well-placed kick. It wasn’t very Christian, and she wasn’t proud of herself, but there it was. They had tried the carrot. Now it was time for the stick.

  “What further problems?” McWhorter said.

  Clare rose from her admiral’s chair. “Are you aware of the average cost of rearing a child these days, Mr. McWhorter?” She retrieved several sheets of paper from her desktop. “I asked a parishioner to do some research for me on the Internet, and she found several articles giving parents the costs for the first year.” She handed McWhorter a paper. “Take a look. Diapers. Formula. The medical visits. That’s going to be a sizable chunk for a couple living on disability and a pension.”

  She dropped another paper into his lap. “Here’s the monthly stipend you’ll be getting as foster parents. Falls a little short of the expenses, doesn’t it?”

  Clare handed McWhorter more papers. “Unless your pension stretches quite a bit further, I imagine you or your wife will have to go back to work. Child care and baby-sitters are expensive.” She gave him another paper. “Here’s the average cost of infant care in the tri-county area.” She turned to the Burnses. “Mrs. DeWitt did a great job. She’s very thorough.” The couple were sitting up straight now, staring at her with twin expressions of unconcealed surprise. McWhorter shuffled through the papers, frowning.

  “You’ll be taking on a big responsibility, Mr. McWhorter. A big, expensive, time-consuming responsibility. And we’ll make sure you’re doing your job.” She smiled blindingly. “We all feel connected to Cody here at Saint Alban’s. So we’ll be keeping an eye on him. Not just Geoff and Karen, but a whole lot of us. Dropping by to see how he’s doing. Talking to the neighbors. Checking him out when he’s at the grocery store and the bank and the pediatrician’s office.” She could hear her voice loosen into a light Virginia drawl. “Chief Van Alstyne is interested, too, and I’ll bet he’d be happy to arrange for police drive-bys every day. We’ll all be watching out for little Cody. And at the first hint of neglect or abuse one of us will have DSS on you like fleas on a hound.”

  “Hey!” McWhorter crumpled the paper he was holding. “You saying I’m gonna beat this kid or starve him or something? Where do you get off saying that?”

  “I’m not saying what you will or will not do, Mr. McWhorter. I’m telling you what we all are going to do. I’m telling you, realistically, that you are not going to make one dime off that baby. To the contrary, you can look forward to spending a lot more than you’re used to on the child. Or, you can authorize the Burnses to take custody of your grandson, and accept their more than generous offer to pay any debts Katie left behind.”

  “You’re threatening me, aren’t you? I’m being threatened by a priest and a couple of rich lawyers. For trying to give my grandson a good life and a family he can be proud of.”

  Clare drank some coffee. She balanced the mug casually in her hand, where McWhorter could see the flying rattlesnake and the motto DEATH FROM THE SKY! She looked at him levelly. “I never threaten, Mr. McWhorter.” His eyes flickered from the coffee cup to her face. “You have a chance to save yourself considerable trouble and to do the right thing for your grandson. Why don’t you take it?” The Burnses were still staring at her. Yes, she thought, I am a very different priest from Father Hames. Get used to it.

  McWhorter looked at the papers on his lap. He shuffled them together in a messy pile and rolled them up. “I . . .” He looked over to the Burnses, frowning. “Maybe. I’ll take this home and show it to my wife. Talk it over with her. She had her heart set on having that baby come live with us, you understand.”

  “She can visit with Cody as much as she wants,” Karen said. “I’ll drive her myself if need be.”

  McWhorter rose, and they all rose with him. “Maybe.” He headed into the hallway, Clare and the Burnses close on his heels. “So,” he said, eyeing the carpet and the woodwork and the prints hanging from the walls as if he were casing the joint, “Cody would come to this church if he were your kid?”

  “That’s right,” Karen said. “It’s a wonderful community. Not many children now, but we expect that to change over the next few years.”

  McWhorter stopped in front of the parish family bulletin board, looking at the snapshots of congregants and their families. “Hey, here’s you.” He stabbed a finger at the picture neatly labeled “Geoff Burns and Karen Otis-Burns.”

  “Many of those pictures were taken during the parish picnic last June,” Karen said, her voice unnaturally cheery and light. “Maybe you and Mrs. McWhorter could come along with Geoff and me next summer. We could all show off Cody together.”

  McWhorter continued to study the wall of photographs. Clare felt the back of her neck prickle. Something about the way McWhorter was acting didn’t fit with a man who had been closed into a corner. “Why don’t we all—” she began.

  McWhorter shifted to face them. “I don’t think so.”

  “What?” Karen’s voice was polite, but shaky.

  “I’ve thought about it, and I can’t give him up. He’s the only thing I have left of my Katie. He stays with me and my wife.”

  “What sort of game are you playing, McWhorter?” Geoff Burns crowded the taller man against the wall. “We aren’t going to come back with an offer of money, so you can just forget it!”

  McWhorter sidled past Geoff and retreated to the parish hall. “No. Sorry. I’m keeping him.”

  “Wait!” Karen said “Maybe we can work something out! What if we got you a new car, so you could drive over to see Cody?”

  She tried to follow after McWhorter, snapping to a halt when her husband jerked back on her upper arm. “Stop it, Karen,” he said. “Let him go.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait!” McWhorter reached for the doors. “God damn you!” Karen’s voice thickened. “God damn you!” Clare put her arm around the other woman. She met Geoff’s eyes and tried not to flinch away from the resigned pain she saw there. Together, they held Karen tightly as her body heaved with the effort to expel tears and venom. “I could kill you, you bastard!” she shouted after the vanished man. She laid her head against her husband, weeping with rage. “I could kill him,” she whispered. “I could kill him.”

  A mid-week drive up to Cossayaharie usually relaxed Russ. Although Millers Kill policed the rural township, he seldom patrolled the mountain roads and tiny village himself. So his associations with the area were mostly good ones: visits to his sis
ter’s farm, fishing up at the lake, hiking into the hills, or picnicking in the Muster Field, where militiamen had gathered during the French and Indian War and the Revolution after that. Returning from Cossayaharie you could drive through almost every war the men from this area had taken part in. There were the crumbling granite stones in the Muster Field, and then a big marble obelisk at the front of the old Cossayaharie cemetery, a memorial for two brothers who had drowned in the War of 1812. Before you reached Millers Kill, you passed by its cemetery, guarded by a droopy-mustached Union soldier holding a rifle and forever looking South to where his fallen brothers lay. Then over the bridge, stone cairns carrying brass plaques dedicating it to the sacred memory of those who fell in the Great War, and on into town, where a four-sided plinth listed the names of those who had served in each branch of the armed forces during World War Two. If you finished your journey at the post office, you could run your fingers over the bronze plaque memorializing men who had died on the Korean peninsula while he had been in diapers.

  There was nothing marking his war. He didn’t know how he felt about that, and he didn’t want to think about it long enough to make up his mind one way or the other. There had been what his mother described as one almighty patriotic hot flash over Desert Storm, and since then, there had been talk on and off of putting up something for the rest of the veterans. He stayed away from it. He didn’t want to become one of those big-bellied guys down at the American Legion, droning on about their war adventures as if they had forgotten what it was really like. Probably file clerks and car-pool mechanics, anyway. The ones who knew what it was really like hardly ever talked about it, not in the Legion Hall bar and not in front of some committee to erect a monument.

  He passed the obelisk to the brothers who had died in the waters of Lake Erie and took the next right turn. A dense stand of spruce and hemlock crowded in on either side of the road. As it wound its way into the hills, the evergreens petered out and the scenery opened up onto sprawling, uneven grazing fields bordered by bare-branched hardwoods. The road dipped and twisted, past sheltered hayfields, farmhouses, and an occasional trailer. For a mile or so, a stony creek ran alongside the road, black water barely visible under the heavy banks of snow. He drove past sleeping orchards of dwarf apple trees, modern feed silos, and century-old barns. At Jock Montgomery’s place, he saw two of the kids making a snowman in the front yard, and he slowed down, tooted, and waved.

  The Stoner’s farm was a mile past the Montgomerys’. He crunched into the drive, parking next to Mindy’s Chevelle. He was relieved to see Ethan’s old pickup by the road leading up the hill toward the cow barn.

  Mindy Stoner came out on the porch, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Russ,” she said. “What brings you up this way?” She was a tall, raw-boned woman, whose square, strong features had looked almost homely back when she was a schoolgirl. Time had refined her so that now, in her forties, she had the spare beauty of a mountaintop blown clean of snow.

  He held up the folded paper. “I’m afraid I’m here on business, Mindy. Can I come in?”

  She looked back toward the kitchen, then opened the door. “You might as well. No need to freeze out here in the door-yard.” Russ scraped the slush off his boots and followed her through the mudroom into the kitchen, a large room of wooden cupboards, blue-and-white dish towel fabrics, and children’s papers and artwork tacked up everywhere. The woodstove between the mudroom and the pantry was throwing off heat, and the overhead lamp had been lit in preparation for the four o’clock twilight. Their thirteen-year-old—her name escaped him for the moment—was sitting at the round, oilcloth-covered table, doing homework. “Hannah,” Mindy said, “run up to the barn and tell your father Chief Van Alstyne’s here and needs to speak with him.”

  The girl gaped, her too-large eyes widening with a mix of excitement and apprehension. “Is Daddy in trouble?”

  Russ shook his head. “No. But I am going to have to speak with Ethan, too.”

  “He’s out in the barn with Wayne, hooking up for the milking. Hannah, fetch ’em both in.”

  At the mention of her brother’s name, the girl had relaxed. “Oh, Ethan,” she said, heading for the mudroom. “That figures.”

  Her mother sighed. “What’s he gone and done now, Russ?”

  He laid the papers on the kitchen table. “Have you heard about the girl found murdered by the kill last week?”

  “Of course. It was on the news. Unidentified body fished out of the kill, that’s not something you see everyday around here.” Mindy’s eyes widened as she listened to herself. She clapped her hands over her stomach. “God in heaven, don’t tell me you think my boy had something to do with that!”

  “Calm down, Mindy, I’m not here to arrest him for murder. This is a warrant for a blood test. The murdered girl had a baby about a week before she was killed, and I have reason to suspect that Ethan may be the father.”

  Mindy sank into a ladderback chair. “Dear Lord,” she said. “Dear Lord.” She looked up at him. “Who . . . ?”

  “It was Katie McWhorter.”

  Mindy pressed her hands more tightly to her stomach. “Oh. No. Oh, no. That sweet girl.” She shook her head back and forth. “That sweet girl . . .” She covered her eyes with one hand, screening any tears from his view. Russ’s hands twitched, caught between maintaining some sort of professional detachment and reaching out to comfort this woman he had known since his high school days.

  She slapped her hand on the oilcloth suddenly, startling Russ into stepping back. “As far as I knew, Ethan broke up with Katie last year. If he was sneaking around without us knowing, and got her pregnant, we’ll have the truth out. And he’ll take responsibility for it.” She rose slowly from her chair, glaring at Russ. “But you listen to me, Russ Van Alstyne. My boy didn’t have anything to do with killing anybody, least of all Katie McWhorter.”

  “What’s going on?” Wayne Stoner stood in the mudroom door, prying off his boots with the jack. “Russ?” Wayne had the round reddened cheeks and the ice-pale blue eyes that marked so many people of Dutch descent in the county. He reached out and shook Russ’s hand firmly before he crossed to his wife’s side. “What’s that boy gotten into now?”

  “Russ wants to take Ethan for a blood test,” Mindy said. “Seems Katie McWhorter had a baby a few weeks back and Ethan might be responsible.”

  “Aw, Christ,” Wayne said, pulling off his hat and slapping it onto the table. “What a damn fool thing to do. Jesus, you can practically buy condoms at the feed store nowadays!”

  Hannah had slipped in and was watching round-eyed from beside the woodstove. “Did Ethan get some girl pregnant?” she asked. “Whoa. No wonder he’s been acting so weird.”

  “There’s more,” Mindy said to her husband, ignoring her daughter. “Katie is the girl they found dead down by the kill. The one that was in the news?”

  Wayne shook his head as if he were checking it for loose wiring. He shook it again. He squinted at Russ. “You think Ethan had something to do with that?”

  Russ spread his hands. “Wayne, I don’t know. First step is to get this blood test and see if he could be the baby’s father. Then we’ll take if from there.”

  “I’m calling our lawyer,” Wayne said. “I don’t want Ethan leaving this property until I’ve talked to him.” He pivoted to the phone table between the two windows looking out onto the dooryard. Russ heard the slap of the phone book opening.

  “Wait a minute,” Mindy said, “wasn’t she killed on Friday? Isn’t that what it said on the news? You saw Ethan on Friday. Remember? We had to come pick him up from that video game place. He couldn’t possibly have . . . he didn’t kill Katie.”

  “The girl died sometime after sundown, Mindy. I didn’t see Ethan until well after ten o’clock.” He looked out the windows. The sky was darkening, blue to lavender, masses of pink clouds floating on the icy air. He turned to Hannah, who had lost the gloating look of a younger sister seeing her big brother about to get it from th
e grown-ups. It was sinking in that Ethan might be in a whole lot more trouble than she had ever imagined. “Hannah, did you tell Ethan I was here when you got your father?”

  She nodded. “He said he’d be right down.”

  Russ looked up to the barn. It wasn’t dark enough yet to need lights on, but it would be in half an hour or so. He wanted to get this over with. “I guess I’d better walk up there myself.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Mindy said, pulling on her jacket. Outside, they crossed the path separating the barn drive from the house driveway and tramped up the well-plowed gravel road. To the northwest, the clouds were dark blue and heavy, rising from behind the mountains in a solid mass. Snow later tonight or tomorrow.

  “You can’t tell for sure from a blood test if Ethan’s the father,” Mindy said.

  “No. It’s more in the way of eliminating or confirming him as a possibility. If he has the right blood type, they’ll send his sample down to a lab in Albany that can compare his DNA to the baby’s.”

  Mindy opened the cattle gate to the barnyard. “If he has the right blood type, what are you going to do?”

  “Ask him some questions. He can have a lawyer present. Depending on what he tells me, we’ll go from there.” He stepped carefully, avoiding half-frozen cow patties.

  “Ethan!” Mindy called. The road ended at the gaping two-story-high entrance to the old barn. Even in the antiseptic winter air, the smell of manure and hay and machine oil was strong. “Ethan!”

  “Maybe you ought to stay out here,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. This is my son we’re talking about.” Inside, the barn was warm with animal heat. The cows on the left-hand stalls had all been hooked up to their milkers, while the ones on the right waited their turn with bovine patience. The machinery was silent, however, and Ethan was nowhere in sight. The low ceiling was punctuated by four trap doors that Russ could see, leading up to the huge hayloft. The back of his neck felt hot and prickly. Something in the situation read wrong, very wrong.