Chapter 1
For a guy who didn’t believe in God, Russ thought, he spent a lot of time in a church.
He had done his time in the Methodist kids’ choir and youth group, but his regular attendance ended right around the time his dad had died—not from any embittered broken religious beliefs, but because at sixteen, he was too much of a handful for his beleaguered mother to budge of a Sunday morning.
Except for the occasional unavoidable prayer or memorial, his twenty-odd-year career in the army had never included worship, and his first wife had been about as nonobservant as a Catholic could get.
When she had died, he hadn’t even tried to corral some never-met-her-before priest; he let Kilmer’s Funeral Home handle the service.
And then he had married the rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church.
He hadn’t avoided Sunday shifts at the police department, but he hadn’t sought them out, either, and after Ethan was born, well, somebody needed to keep him on Sunday mornings, and it wasn’t going to be the parish priest. And if Russ was taking care of the baby anyway, it seemed ungenerous to sit alone at home when they could be sitting in Clare’s church.
Soon, he’d be old enough to go into the church nursery, but for now, Russ was still polishing a pew, listening to Old Testament and Gospel readings and hearing his wife preach.
He liked the singing.
The Advent hymns, he had discovered, tended to be deep and doleful, with some nice baritone parts.
They were doing one now for the recessional; the choir marched down the aisle two by two, singing, “The king shall come when morning dawns, and daylight gilds the sky.” The older lady next to Russ, seeing him trying to juggle the hymnbook and a wriggling baby, plucked the book from his hand and held it out so he could follow.
She, he noticed, didn’t need to look at it for either the words or the alto harmony.
The crucifer passed by, then the deacon, and then Clare, who winked at him. Then they were on the big finale: “Oh, come that day so longed for, the dawn that e’er shall last.” It wasn’t printed with an exclamation point, but that didn’t stop the congregation from singing like it was.
And then church was over for another week.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. Clare had to stand by the narthex—why Episcopalians had fancy words for things like “entryway” Russ never understood—and greet the people lining up to leave.
Other parishioners headed for the hall, looking for coffee and the offerings of competitive baked goods.
Then there were the baby groupies. He had discovered Ethan worked like a magnet, drawing a mostly older, mostly female crowd who liked to comment on his growth—bigger!
, his hair—so blond!, and his cheeks—so plump!
While he was still chief of police, he could always expect a few remarks directed toward him from parishioners curious as to the best way to make their parking/speeding/failure-to-yield tickets disappear.
But after resigning, he had been reduced to the status of Bearer of the Sacred Infant.
This morning, he allowed Ethan to be carried away by a group of besotted aunties.
Maybe that could be his next job. Rent-a-grandchild.
“Hey.” Clare slipped her arm around his waist. “I’m going to shuck my vestments. Do you want to go to coffee hour, or head home?”
“Coffee hour, definitely.” The parish bought a variety of fair-trade, locally sourced, environmentally friendly beans that should have tasted like smugness, but instead were ridiculously good.
“Okay, see you in there.” Clare headed for the sacristy, which, Russ allowed, was a shorter name than “changing room and silver storage.” She was almost knocked over as several kids came running full tilt through the hallway and pelted up to the choir pews behind the altar.
Betsy Young, the choir director, appeared from behind the organ, settling kids in their places and handing out sheet music. Russ imagined he could smell that coffee waiting for him, and was about to resume his advance on the parish hall when Hadley Knox came through the hallway door.
Knox, the newest officer on the MKPD, was the single mother of a boy and girl, both of whom had been pressed into service in the children’s choir.
Knox herself attended services in an on-again, off-again fashion, but since her grandfather, who served as St. Alban’s janitor, was a regular, the kids rarely missed Sunday school.
Today must have been an exception, since they were both shedding their parkas as they crossed to the chancel—another fancy liturgical word for “everything up there around the altar.”
Knox spotted him. “Chief!”
He shook his head. “Not anymore, Knox.”
She was carrying two mugs. She sidled into the pew and handed him one, setting the other on the polished wood and shucking off her coat.
He took a sniff. Coffee. “May I?”
“Go right ahead. It’s not crazy sweet like you take it, though. I always bring two if I’m sitting through rehearsal. They tend to run long.” She settled next to the mug on the pew. He lowered himself, careful not to slosh the hot drink on the polished wood.
“How are you doing?” Russ was pleased the first question out of his mouth wasn’t How is the department doing? It was a small town; if anything was going wrong, he would have heard. The fact he wasn’t privy to every detail of every day … was something he needed to get over. “How was Thanksgiving?”
Knox blew on her coffee. “Quiet. Granddad’s sick.
I’m hoping it’s not the flu.” She looked toward the ceiling, as if asking for strength.
“He refused to get his flu shot or the pneumonia shot this fall. Said it’s all a con by the pharmaceutical companies.
” She shook her head. “He doesn’t even have to pay for them, for crying out loud.
” Considering her grandfather was in his late seventies, diabetic, and had survived a massive heart attack a few years back, Russ could see why she was so frustrated.
“We could sic Clare on him. ‘No working if you don’t have your immunizations.’”
She laughed. “I may take you up on that.” She took a sip. “How are you doing? With…” Her vague sweeping gesture encompassed his life post-resignation.
“Not bad. I took a couple weekends and went up to the lake, to work on our place before the snow flies. My winter project is going to be clearing out the rectory’s carriage house. One hundred and fifty years of priestly junk.” He shook his head.
“Great. That sounds great! Anything fun?”
He paused. “We went to the tractor parade in Greenwich.”
“Oh, I was going to bring the kids, but we just didn’t get our act together in time. How was it?”
“Uh. It was … bright. Lots of lights.” No need to mention the “white Christmas” float.
“Are you,” she sounded hesitant, “job hunting yet?”
“Nope. Thought it would be good to cool off for a bit. Take my bearings and figure out what I really want to do between now and retirement. I started working as an MP when I was what, twenty? Twenty-one? I’ve been a cop ever since.”
“Do you miss it?”
He smiled, showing his eyeteeth. “No more than I’d miss my foot if it were lopped off.”
She took another drink of coffee. “Ah.”
The children in the choir began singing, then stopping, then going back to the beginning.
“How about you? How are things at work?” What the hell, she brought it up first.
She seesawed her hand. “MacAuley’s doing fine as interim chief. You know how he is—very organized and methodical. He was always good at scheduling and stuff like that.”
That Russ’s deputy chief had been less good at personnel and conflict resolution went unsaid.
“Eric’s back working full time, but we’re still shorthanded, and the board of aldermen isn’t showing any sign of opening up their pockets for another officer.”
Russ hummed agreement. “We were understaffed even before Kevin left. I should have replaced him immediately, instead of letting the board get used to a skinnier budget for us. For the department.” Kevin Flynn, the youngest member of the MKPD, had taken a job at the Syracuse Police Department not quite a year ago.
Russ could see now, as he hadn’t then, that he’d been unconsciously hoping the kid would return to Millers Kill. “You heard anything from him?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve left a couple messages on his cell and on Facebook, but…”
“Have you tried calling Syracuse again?” Three weeks ago, he had done just that, to be told Kevin had taken a leave of absence for family business. Except Knox had called the Flynns, and they had no idea where their son was.
“No, I don’t want to be stalker-y.” She made a sound of frustration.
“Look, working undercover was hard on him. He’s probably also taking his bearings and figuring out what he wants to do next.”
“You think so?” Knox sounded dubious.
“Imagine you were trying to infiltrate hate groups for months on end, on alert all the time, having to watch every word out of your mouth for fear it would expose you. That sort of thing gets inside your head, Knox. It’s hard to shake.”
She sighed. “And in the end, it didn’t come to anything. He told me when the joint task force he was on got canceled. He was so mad.” She smiled a little. “Not something you expect from Flynn.”
“No.” Russ took a swig of his coffee. “It’s not. So yeah, I think it’s entirely likely he’s trying to decide if he wants to continue being a cop, if he wants to go someplace else, if he just wants to stay at home and raise his kid.”
Knox looked at him sideways. “I don’t need to point out Flynn doesn’t have any kids, right?”
“You know what I mean.” He took another drink of coffee to avoid sighing like a sad sack. “It’s a tough field. People leave for something else all the time.”
“Kevin once told me all he ever wanted to do was be a cop. He said he got hired as soon as he turned twenty-one.”
Russ laughed. “Oh, God, yes. I remember that. He was all arms and legs and red hair, hadn’t even finished growing into himself.
It was like having an Irish setter puppy running around in the shop.
The radar gun was exciting. Traffic duty was exciting.
We had a homicide that year and he helped at the scene.
I had to tell him to stop grinning and commenting how cool it all was. ”
The kids had paused the song, and Betsy was going over their two parts, soprano and treble.
“I can believe it. He’d calmed down a little by the time I came onto the force, but still. Do you see that guy wallowing in some sort of existential crisis about his future?”
Russ breathed in. “No.”
“And the Flynn family is really tight. Like, until Kevin left, they all had Sunday dinner together every week. I mean, I could go from Christmas to Christmas without ever talking to my mom,” Knox’s tone was dry, “but I can’t see Flynn doing that.”
“I … yeah. You’ve got a point.”
“So maybe you could call Syracuse again?”
Russ wondered exactly how coincidental that second cup of coffee had been. “Knox. Hadley. I’m not chief of police anymore. I’m not in law enforcement anymore. I’m a stay-at-home dad.”
“You could act as a private investigator,” she wheedled.
He laughed. “PIs in New York state have to have a business entity, pass an exam, and apply for a license.” He held up a hand as she opened her mouth to argue. “Plus, I have zero desire to be a PI.”
Knox sagged back against the shining wood of the pew. “Okay. Sorry.”
“What I will do is talk to Lyle. He’s acting chief of the agency formerly employing Kevin, and will get a lot further with the HR department in Syracuse than you or I would.”
Knox digested that, then smiled. “Thank you. I know it’s not my job, but I’ve been … worried. A lot.”
“You two worked as partners. That creates a bond. Look at Lyle and his old partner Vince Patten. Lyle left the Albany shop, what, twenty? Twenty-five years ago? And they’re still tight.”
“Mmm.” She buried her face in her coffee.
One of the ladies who had absconded with his son appeared in the doorway, holding Ethan in a way that suggested a full diaper. “Oops.” Russ slid out of the pew. “Duty calls.”
“Chief? Thanks. Really.”
“My pleasure. I guess I’m destined to be keeping an eye out for adventurous boys.”