Today is the St. Luke's annual picnic. Most of us have them around this time of year. Since you're going to have to wait until later this afternoon for the conclusion of the story, here's my peace offering now: an entire chapter from I Shall Not Want. What is it? Why, St. Alban's annual church picnic, of course.
TRINITY SUNDAY, THE LAST DAY OF PENTECOST
May
26
She shouldn’t have come to the parish picnic. She was behind
on her reading for the criminology course. The house was an ungodly mess and
she had at least four loads of laundry to do. And to top it off, every time she
turned around, there was another cheerful Episcopalian trying to get to know
her. It made her miss the enormous Christian Community church she had taken the
kids to in L.A. That had been big enough to disappear in.
Hadley fished another Coke out of the ice-filled red-and-white
cooler and rolled the dripping can over the back of her neck before popping the
top. The things she did for her kids and granddad. At least the view was
spectacular. The Muster Field stretched out a good quarter mile atop one of the
rolling hills that characterized Cossayuharie. Across the two-lane county
highway at its front and on either side, the land fell away in hillocked
pastures studded with outcroppings of flinty bedrock and bouquets of nettles.
Behind her, the forest that threatened to cover everything in this northern
kingdom pressed against the uneven stone wall that outlined the field.
It was one of the few spots that she had seen in Washington
county where the sky was huge; summer blue, piled with mountain-high cumulus
clouds as bleached-white as the linen shirts worn by the other group that had
come out for the Memorial Day weekend, a company of Revolutionary-era
reenactors. They were marching and kneeling, loading and reloading in front of
their canvas tents, authentically decked out in mid-eighteenth-century breeches
and coats. How they didn’t keel over in those layers of wool was a mystery to
Hadley.
“They look hot, don’t they?” A middle-aged woman dug through
the fast-melting ice to pull out a root beer.
“Mmm hmm.” The minimum to be polite.
“One year, they had two men pass out from sunstroke. They had
to get the ambulance up here, there was a big hullabaloo, and then as soon as
they’d been carted away to the hospital? The rest of them started drilling
again.”
Hullabaloo? What’s next? Twenty-three skiddoo?
“I’m Betsy Young,” the woman said, reaching for Hadley’s hand.
“I’m the music director.”
Hadley shook. They both had palms as cold and damp as fish
from the chest-sized cooler. “Hadley Knox,” she said.
“I know. We’re all so thrilled you came out from California to
take care of your grandfather.”
Whoa. Was that what they were saying? “Actually, he invited me
before he ever had his heart attack and surgery. He was the one helping me out,
not the other way around.”
“Really?” Betsy Young’s bright expression invited Hadley to
Tell Her All About It.
“Really.”
“Ah. Well. I actually wanted to speak to you about your son.”
“Hudson?” Hadley scanned the area around the grumbling granite
stones at the shady rear of the muster field. The children, bored by the
authentic firearms and tactics--Hudson complained they only fired their muskets
once every half hour--had converted the three-century-old memorials into a
combination obstacle course and battle field. Their reenactment had far more
explosions, automatic gunfire and light sabers than that of the reconstituted
Fifth Volunteer Highlanders.
“How old is he?”
“Nine. Why?”
Betsy took a drink of root beer before answering. “I’ve wanted,
for a long time now, to have a children’s choir here at St. Alban’s. When
Father Hames was rector, there just wasn’t any opportunity. He was a wonderful
man, very learned, but he did tend to appeal to an older crowd, God rest his
soul. Since we’ve had Reverend Clare, things have perked up quite a bit.”
Hadley wondered if the music director had heard about the
assault at the church Friday night. Reverend Clare hadn’t mentioned it at the
service this morning; hadn’t shown any sign of it, except, maybe, for a kind of
emotionally bruised look in her eyes. Which Hadley might never have noticed if
she hadn’t heard about the Christie’s arrest from Deputy Chief MacAuley.
“We’ve had quite a few families join in the past three years,
and we finally have enough children in the right age range for me to give it a
go. So what do you think?”
“Hmm? About what?”
“Do you think Hudson would be interested in singing in the
youth choir?”
Hadley pictured her boy decked out in the sort of choir robes
she saw in Christmas specials. She’d love it, but she knew she’d never get him
into anything with a frilly neck. “What would he wear?”
Betsy looked surprised. “Um... a cassock, same as the adult
choristers. With a surplice on special occasions.”
Hadley thought for a moment. She wasn’t keen on getting
involved in any extracurricular activities herself, but she did want Hudson and
Genny to take part, make friends, be comfortable in their new town. “What would
the practice schedule be like? I don’t want anything to interfere with his
homework. We’re still trying to come back from switching schools mid-year.”
“We wouldn’t start until next fall,” Betsy assured her. “Then,
it’d be an hour Wednesday afternoon or evening, depending on what works for
most parents. And he’d have to be here at nine o’clock for the ten o’clock
service.”
That was doable. “Okay,” she said. “He’s in. But don’t hold me
responsible if he turns out to be tone-deaf.”
“There’s no such thing,” Betsy said with confidence.
“Hey, you two.” Hadley and Betsy turned to see Reverend
Fergusson striding toward them, looking more like a well-toned soccer mom than
a priest in her sleeveless blouse and shorts. “Have either of you seen Cody
Burns?”
Betsy shook her head.
“Little guy with curly dark hair?,” Hadley said. “Two, two and
a half?”
“That’s him.” Reverend Clare’s face relaxed.
“I saw him earlier with the kids playing around the
tombstones, but I haven’t noticed him recently.”
The relaxation disappeared. The reverend muttered something
under her breath that Hadley and Betsy pretended they didn’t hear. “C’mon,” she
said, grimly. “We’ve got to find him.”
Across the wide and grassy field, Hadley could see the word
passing, people talking in little clumps and then wandering away from each
other, scanning the horizon or peering at the ground. Picnickers flung open
their coolers and looked inside. At the minutemen encampment, drilling halted,
there was a confusion of wool coats and rectangular backpacks, and then
play-soldiers began crawling through their canvas tents.
“Go check the cars,” someone yelled, and several men ran off
to the front of the field, where the St. Alban’s cars had pulled off the narrow
highway to park in a ragged, overheated row.
Hadley followed Clare into the center of the maelstrom, where
the trees from the forest stretching beyond the old gathering-place cast their
deep green shadows over lichen-blurred stones. She looked at the wall, the
practical leavings from the harvest of rocks that came out of every field here.
In places it had tumbled down to few smooth pieces of granite. Nothing that
would stop an adventurous two-and-a-half-year-old.
“I thought you had
him!”
Hadley knew Geoffrey Burns by sight from church and by
reputation at the station, where the male half of the Law Firm of Burns and
Burns was known as ‘that officious little prick,’ and the other officers all
wondered what the good-looking Mrs. Burns was doing with her short, slight
spouse. Hadley figured it out the first time she saw the man, radiating power,
decked out in a five-hundred-dollar camelhair coat.
“Me? Why didn’t you check with me instead of swanning off to
drink beer?”
She had never seen Karen Burns looking anything less than
rich, well-groomed, and perfect. She guessed, by the look on other spectators’
faces, that they would have said the same. Evidently no one had caught a
glimpse of this mottle-faced woman screaming at her husband before.
“Because I assumed you’re competent to look after our son!”
“And I assumed you had the decency to get your head out of
your ass and notice what’s going on around you!”
More and more congregants and reenactors drifted within
earshot. Several started to look more interested in the Burns’s fight than in
finding the boy.
“Break it up,” Reverend Clare said, hooking Karen Burns’s arm
in hers and neatly turning her away from her red-faced husband. “We need to
organize now.” The rector raised her voice. “Parents, lets get a head count of
the other kids. I want to make sure no one else wandered off with Cody.”
Karen let out a terrible moan. Reverend Clare gave her a
little shake. “We’ll find him, Karen.”
The remaining children were rounded up, some protesting, some
demanding hot dogs and hamburgers. Genny wanted another soda, and after making
sure she and Hudson were included in the count, Hadley sent them both off to
the cooler, with orders to stay where they could see her. No one else was
missing. None of the kids could remember seeing the pre-schooler leave.
“I want four volunteers to walk the road, one on each side, in
both directions,” Reverend Clare said to the assembled throng. Several hands
shot up. The rector pointed. “Laurie and Phoebe, you go north. Judy and Terry,
you head south.” She turned to a couple Hadley knew as Sunday school teachers.
“David and Beth, can you take charge of the other kids? Get some food into them
and organize a game so they won’t be underfoot?” They nodded. “Can anyone get a
cell phone signal out here?”
Three quarters of the crowd began digging in their pockets for
their phones, including, Hadley observed, several Revolutionary war soldiers.
Most people glanced at their screens and shook their heads.
“Shit! The sat phone!” Geoffrey Burns smacked himself on the
head and tore across the field toward the Burns’ Land Rover.
Karen, her face twisted, yelled, “Hurry, Geoff, hurry!” She turned
to the rector. “Digital satellite phone. So we can reach clients or the office
no matter where we are.”
Reverend Clare raised her voice. “We’re going to have to walk
the woods. I want everyone to spread out at the rear of the field, in front of
the stone wall. Leave several feet between yourself and the person to your
right or left.” She did not, Hadley noticed, specify “everyone who’s helping
search.” Her assumption paid off when the crowd, St. Alban’s people and
reenactors alike, began to shuffle into a raggedy line.
Geoff Burns reappeared, panting and clutching a brick-shaped
phone that looked like it had been left over from 1987. He thrust it toward
Reverend Clare. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something,
then shut it. “Call 9-1-1,” she said. “We’re going to want the Search and
Rescue team and their dog handler. I think she lives in Saratoga.” She shook
her head, as if dislodging irrelevancies. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll handle
that.” Something caught her eye. “Shoot,” she said, under her breath. “Mr.
Hadley.”
Hadley followed her gaze and sure enough, there was granddad,
stumping off to join the search party, as if hiking through the woods in
eighty-four degree heat wasn’t any different than walking the treadmill at his
therapist’s.
“Mr. Hadley!” Reverend Clare called, at the same time Hadley
yelled, “Granddad!” They jogged over and boxed him in, a woman on either side.
“Granddad, you can’t do this,” Hadley said. “Look at you,
you’re already all red and sweaty.” She clapped a hand to his forehead. “You’re
overheated. You need to sit in the shade and drink something cold.”
“I ain’t one to sit on my fanny while a little kid’s out there
wandering through the woods,” he said, sounding grumpy and short of breath.
Reverend Clare interrupted. “Mr. Hadley, we need someone
responsible to stay here and meet the Search and Rescue volunteers. Could you
be our coordinator? You’ll have to tell them we’re walking a simple straight
line pattern, and that we don’t have any whistles or signaling devices.”
He ran a palm over his bald head. Peered at both of them.
“Well. Okay, Father. If that’s where you need me.”
Hadley shot the rector a look of gratitude. She got granddad
into a chair by the ice chest, hollered at Hudson and Genny to behave
themselves, and then trotted toward the human chain that now stretched to
either end of the Muster Field.
Reverend Clare cupped her hands on either side of her mouth
and paced down the line. “Walk slowly,” she said, projecting her voice so that
it echoed off the gravestones. “Keep another searcher within sight on either
side. That way, you’ll be sure you’re not missing anything. If you find the
boy, pass the news down the line and return to the muster field. The search and
rescue team is on its way, so if you hear three loud whistles, return to the
muster field. Do not, under any circumstances, wander off alone! We don’t want
two people lost in the woods.”
By the time she finished, she was at the other end of the
field from Hadley. A ripple of words flowed through the line, the woman to
Hadley’s right said, “Let’s go,” Hadley passed it on to her left, and they all
stepped over the low stone wall more-or-less in unison.
It was no-tech compared to the last search in the woods she
had undertaken, but despite the lack of topo maps, flashlights, walkie-talkies
and whistles, it was fundamentally the same--walking in line, a flare of
excitement when you saw a human-shaped bump on a log, disappointment, and the
dawning realization that one piece of forest looks pretty damn much like
another. People yelled “Cody!” instead of “No soy del ICE,” and they had the
benefit of sunshine turning the air beneath the trees green, but otherwise, it
was that night in April all over. Hadley hoped they would be more successful
this time.
The line drew thin as men and women responding to the forest’s
size spread apart to cover the maximum amount of acreage. It wavered and
drifted out of plumb as differing terrain--open, brushy, thickly
forested--forced some to slow and let others pick up speed. Hadley stopped, and
halted the woman to her right, when she noticed the man to her left had
disappeared. She was about to bring the line to a standstill when he reappeared
from behind a cluster of young pines, zipping his fly and looking abashed.
The walked past slim birch and alder, past immense maples and
oaks. They parted the heavy black-green spill of hemlock boughs to look
underneath, and they peered and poked at fallen and half-rotted eastern pines.
The pine needles and humus beneath their feet, the tock-tock-tock of
woodpeckers and the whine of mosquitoes, the shaded and broken light--they
walked forward and forward and forward, but it never changed. Hadley began to
lose her sense of time and distance. She found herself checking again and again
to make sure her search partners were well in sight. She had never gotten the
whole “lost in the woods” thing--she always figured, just walk out the way you
walked in. Now, though, if someone had challenged her to find her way back to
the muster field on her own, she didn’t know if she could have done it. How far
north and east did this piece of the Adirondacks go? Two miles? Two hundred?
Another ripple of words, excited, flowed down the line from
the right. The calls of “Cody! Where are you?” fell silent as searchers passed
the message like a relay torch. Hadley was already feeling a sense of
relief--God, she’d be half out of her mind if she was the kid’s mom--when the
woman to her right turned toward her and said, “They need Officer Knox at the
other end of the line.”
Hadley stopped in her tracks. Officer Knox?
The woman made a shooing gesture. “Pass it on.”
“Uh.” Hadley felt as much of a fraud as she ever did when she
said it. “I’m Officer Knox.”
The woman could tell she was a fake, because her eyes bugged
out and she said, “You’re a police
officer?”
Hadley didn’t bother responding. She called to the guy on her
left to move into her place, and took off for the other end of the line. What
the hell could they need her for? Her mind pulled a blank. The other searchers,
reenactors and St. Alban’s parishioners alike, stared at her as she hiked past
them. Hadley Knox, imitation police officer. No one would have questioned Kevin
Flynn if he had been here. Maybe she should start pumping iron. Except the last
time she’d tried that, getting into shape between Hudson and Genny, she’d
started to look way too much like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. That wasn’t going to
buy her any cred, either.
The line strung out almost to the breaking point. Past the
last remaining searcher, she could see four or five people clustered together.
Reverend Clare was among them, head up, looking towards Hadley, but the others
were all focused on the ground. Her stomach churned. Oh, my God, please don’t let anything have happened to the baby.
The fear sizzled up her spine as she recognized Anne Vining-Ellis, an
emergency-room doctor, among the grim-faced group. Hadley forced her sneakered
feet into a jog. She didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t stand the waiting to
find out any longer.
“What is it?” She asked before she could see. “What is it?”
They all looked up. Stared at her. Moved aside. Expecting to
see a toddler sprawled on the ground, Hadley at first couldn’t make sense of
the jumble of dirt and dead leaves and ivory and... and...
The ivory was bone.
“We’ve found a body,” Reverend Fergusson said.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
del.icio.us
Digg this blog
StumbleUpon
So there you go. Hope you enjoyed the story and the excerpt. And, you know, the videos 'n stuff.
