In the Bleak Midwinter (27 page)

“Tired?” Terry McKellan grinned. His coat’s moulton collar, the same color as his moustache, made his fat, friendly face look like Mr. Badger in
Wind in the Willows
.

Clare nodded. “You’d think with sixteen hours of night, I’d be getting more sleep, wouldn’t you?”

He grinned. “Only if you’re not up on police business.”

Clare started. She hadn’t told anyone about chasing down Darrell McWhorter’s murder scene or questioning Kristen. “What? I’m sorry, I don’t… ?”

“I understand there was a cop car in your driveway last night.” He winked. “And your car was at the police chief ’s all night Wednesday. Small town, Reverend Clare.”

She gaped. “Good heavens.” Gossip had simply never occured to her. Especially when the whole thing was so innocent.

McKellan grinned again, wiggling his badger-colored eyebrows for effect. “May be time to trade that MG of yours for something less conspicuious. Come to my bank, I’ll make sure you get a great rate on a loan.”

“Mr. McKellan! Chief Van Alstyne is a married man!”

“So?”

She sighed with exasperation. “He had been in an armed confrontation earlier that day. I was at his place Wednesday for counseling.”
Stretch the truth too far, missy, and it’ll snap back to hit you in the nose
, her grandmother said. She ignored the waspish voice. “It was snowing hard by the time I left, so he drove me home instead of me taking my car, which, as everyone keeps pointing out, is terrible in winter driving conditions.”

McKellan looked disappointed.

“Last night, he stopped by around dinner and I invited him to share a little stew with me while we discussed the Burnses and the baby.” It really had been entirely innocent. She had never done or said anything to Russ that she couldn’t have done or said in front of the entire vestry. So why did she feel like she was lying to Terry McKellan?

He squeezed her sweatered arm. “I’m suitably chastized. Next person I hear talking about it, I’ll set him straight.”

“Thank you.”

“You should still come in and see me about a car loan, though.”

In the parish office, Clare hitched one hip onto the unnaturally neat desk. “Lois, have you heard any gossip about—” she looked at the secretary’s disdainful expression. “Never mind.”

Lois tore off a pink memo slip and handed it to the priest. “Gossip.” She sniffed. “Never listen to it, never repeat it.”

Clare glanced at Lois’s Parker-penmanship writing. “The Department of Human Services? For me? How did—” she looked at the memo again, “—Ms. Dunkling sound?”

“Ms. Dunkling sounded just a tad put out.”

“Just a tad, huh? Guess that means the letter-writing campaign is having some effect.”

Lois lowered her reading glasses and raised her eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”

“No sense putting it off. Better beard the lion in her den. Lioness.” Clare reversed step in the hall and poked her head back through the door. “And can you speak to Mr. Hadley about getting some wood and kindling into my office? I don’t intend to shiver all winter long with a perfectly good fireplace just sitting there.”

She pretended to ignore the warning that floated down the hallway after her. “Winter hasn’t even begun yet, Reverend…”

The radiator was wheezing under its window in a respectable effort to take the chill off. Clare slipped her copy of Mr. Corlew’s report in the “Building Maintenance” file, which already took up an entire desk drawer and threatened to spill over into a cardboard filing box at any moment. She poured a cup of coffee from her thermos, grimaced at the taste, and abandoned it on the bookshelf cabinet. Her desk chair creaked and snapped as she sat down and reached for the phone. Waiting for Ms. Dunkling to come on the line, she flipped through her calendar. Infirmary visits. Music meeting. Stewardship committee. Marriage counseling. “Yes, hello. Angela Dunkling, please. Clare Fergusson.” She frowned and jotted down a note to call Kristen McWhorter about the funerals. “Ms. Dunkling? This is Clare Fergusson of St. Alban’s.”

“Yes, Ms. Fergusson. I called you about these letters I’ve been getting from your membership.” The voice on the other end of the line sounded nasal and inflectionless, like someone who had long ago memorized her speech and could recite it without thought or effort. “DHS is not an organization you can lobby, Ms. Fergusson. We have a legislative mandate to answer only to the best interests of the families we serve. Taking time out to read and answer a bunch of letters only results in less time and resources for our vital mission to protect the children of New York.”

Clare frowned. “Are you saying that getting information about Cody’s prospective adoptive parents isn’t an important part of your job?”

Angela Dunkling let out an irritated snort. “Of course it is. Believe me, we have considerable information on the Burnses already. We don’t need to hear from everybody who goes to church with them about what a great couple they are.”

Clare tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. If the letters were so ineffective, why was she getting this call from a DHS caseworker?“Why not simply file the letters in with the other information you have, then? Why are you answering them?”

“Let’s not pussyfoot around this, okay? Your people are sending us letters, and they’re getting their state legislators and senators to send us letters, too. I don’t need some House Rep breathing down my neck over this just because some supporter of his has decided the Burnses would make ideal parents. It’s our job to determine what living arrangements will serve the best interest of the child. We’re still waiting on the police investigation to try to track down the biological parents of the child.”

“Parent. His mother is dead.”

“Father, then. The child can’t be cleared for adoption until we’ve made a final determination of his status vis-?vis his father or living relatives.”

“So meanwhile, Cody spends his first formative year in a foster home instead of with his future parents?”

“Ms. Fergusson, he’s in a perfectly good home with a caring, experienced foster mom. I’ll give you her number and you can check her out yourself if you’re so concerned.” There was a pause, the faint sound of a filofax flipping. “Deborah McDonald. 555-9385. Believe me, we’re not running orphanages out of Charles Dickens.” Ms. Dunkling sighed exasperatedly. “Do you have any idea how many prospective parents are out there looking for the Great White Baby? There are couples who’ve been on lists a lot longer than the Burnses. Why should they get to jump line?”

“Because Cody’s biological parents left a note saying so?”

“Forget it. Call off your hounds, Ms. Fergusson. We don’t need the additional headache and believe me, it’s not going to alter our final disposition in the case. If you want to help the Burnses, tell them to settle down and learn to work with the system instead of trying to manipulate it to serve their own purposes. And tell them to stop making unauthorized visits to Mrs. McDonald. They know the rules.”

“What—they’ve been just stopping by to see Cody? That’s a problem?”

“Yeah, it is a problem. As prospective adoptive parents, they shouldn’t be seeing the child without DHS supervision. Call Mrs. McDonald, she’ll tell you. Wednesday, Geoff Burns showed up without so much as a phone call at eight o’clock at night. Believe me, stunts like that aren’t going to help their application any.”

Clare rested a hand on her open calendar. “This past Wednesday? The eighth?” The night Darrell McWhorter was killed.

“Yeah. Why?”

“No reason. Yes, I’ll talk with them about that.”

“And you’ll stop the letters?”

Clare paused for a fraction of a second. “I’ll pass on your comments to my parishioners. I can only suggest, I can’t order them to do anything.”

The DHS caseworker grunted. “I’ll look forward to being able to get back to work without attempts at coercion, then.”

Clare rang off quickly. She tapped a finger on the square labeled “Wednesday, 8th.” Eight o’clock. Russ said they had told his officers they had been home all night. Perhaps Geoff Burns considered that to be the end of the workday and not the night? Maybe he stopped by Mrs. McDonald’s on his way home and hadn’t thought to mention it. Maybe he had driven straight home and spent the rest of the night watching TV with his wife. Maybe he had a passenger in his car when he visited Cody. Maybe he killed Darrell McWhorter, drove to Albany, rifled Katie’s room and returned to Millers Kill with no one the wiser.

Clare folded her arms against her desk and slid flat until her head was resting on her arms. Dear Lord. She closed her eyes. Please, please don’t let me have been wrong about them.

Clare grimaced at the back of the eighteen-wheeler spraying dirty slush over her windshield. The plows had cleared the roads efficiently after Wednesday’s snowfall, but the same wet combination of grit and salt that gave her enough traction to navigate through the winding hills to Fort Henry had turned her car’s Scarlet Metallic Special Lacquer finish—for which she had paid an extra seven hundred dollars in the days when she was young and flush—into a drab sparrow color identical to every other car she passed. She wondered how Russ and his officers identified vehicles when they all looked as if they’d been spray-painted with industrial waste. He was right, she was going to have to get another car. She could almost hear the salt eating away at the undercarriage as she drove.

She glanced down at the directions Deborah McDonald had given her. “I’d be happy for you to come call, Reverend,” the foster mother had told her in their brief phone call. “All the ways I’ve had babies come into my care, and never by being dropped at a church doorstep. It’s a miracle you were there, that’s what I believe. A miracle.” Clare gripped her steering wheel more tightly and thumbed a spray of blue antifreeze across the windshield.

The McDonald’s vinyl-sided garrison looked as if it had been plucked from some densely populated suburb and capriciously planted on a windy hillside surrounded by pasturage. Two life-sized plastic snowmen flanking the front steps and a plyboard Santa-with-reindeer did nothing to ease the loneliness of the house, whose only neighbor was a dairy farm a half mile down the twisting road.

The woman who opened the door to Clare’s knock was like her home, a disconcerting blend of bare-bones plainness and cozy domesticity. Angular, unhandsome, with tightly permed hair and coffee colored eyes, wearing double-knit polyester pants and a sweatshirt decorated with puffy bears. Deborah McDonald smiled widely and took both Clare’s hands in her own.

“You must be the minister. I’m so glad to meet you. Come in, come in!” Her kitchen was country cute and immaculate. “I was saying to Keith, that’s my husband, that of all the babies I took in, there never was one left on the church steps. Thank goodness you were there. Take off your coat! Can I offer you some coffee? Hot cocoa? You have to tell me what to call you. Our minister goes by the name of Mr. Simms—we’re Church of Christ—but I know you folks may do differently. We have lady ministers, too, you know. Not here, of course, but other places. I seem to recall reading in the
Evangel
there was one in New Jersey.”

Clare accepted the proffered coffee. The geese marching around the rim reminded her of the mugs in Russ’ office. “Call me Clare. Please. I appreciate you seeing me, Mrs. McDonald.”

“Deborah, call me Deborah. All these years and ‘Mrs. McDonald’ still sounds like my mother-in-law, though she’s eighty and living up at the Infirmary now.” She tilted her head toward a bulletin board covered with photographs of infants, children, teens, and young adults. “After all the kids I’ve had, ‘Mom’ seems more natural than my own name.”

Clare examined the faces on the wall. “Looks like quite a crew. They must have kept you busy.”

Deborah laughed. “Still do. I make it my business to knit something for each one of my kids for Christmas. Hats, scarves, mittens, the like. I start in January. I’m down to just three more to go. Four, including Cody. I’m doing up a little hat for him.”

Clare, whose only craft accomplishment was refinishing furniture, almost missed the baby’s name while contemplating the scope of the foster mother’s gift-making project. Cody. Right. “Is the baby asleep?”

“Lord, yes, you’d be able to hear him if he wasn’t. He’s a noisy boy, that one, always wanting to talk with us.” Deborah gestured Clare through the archway leading from the kitchen into the living room. “He gets the cutest expression, too, like he’s thinking, ‘Who said that?’ whenever he makes a noise.” She led Clare through a carpeted hallway into a white-walled nursery with two cribs. The windows and cribs were swathed with petticoat fabric, and dancing bears lined the walls like gingerbread men.

Cody sprawled in the middle of one of the cribs, his round tummy pushing out his fuzzy blue sleeper. “Gosh. He’s gotten bigger. I can’t believe it’s only been ten days since I saw him last.” Clare found it hard to connect this fat and contented infant with the bundle she had unwrapped that night in the parish kitchen.

“He’s close to ten pounds. The doctor’s very pleased.”

Ten pounds must be good. “Shouldn’t he be sleeping on his stomach?”

“Oh, no. Only on the back, we know that these days. Cuts down on the instances of crib death.” Deborah smiled at Cody, the chocolate-sundae smile people get around babies. “We don’t want anything happening to this little guy.”

Clare reached inside the crib. “May I?”

“Touch him? Go ahead, until he’s hungry again nothing’s going to wake him up.”

Clare settled her whole hand over Cody’s head and blessed him with an inarticulate surge of tenderness and amazement that the most helpless of creatures were caught and held by God. As she signed the cross on his forehead, Deborah nudged her arm and pointed to a needlepoint hanging near the window.
HE KEEPS HIS EYE ON THE SPARROW
it read. “Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, he does.”

In the living room, Clare admired more pictures of graduations and proms and weddings before getting to the point. “I understand the Burnses have been visiting Cody. Did Ms. Dunkling from DHS tell you about the note that was left with Cody?”