A Fountain Filled With Blood

Margy got to her feet and wrapped her arms around him. He squeezed her hard and dropped a kiss on her springy white curls. “Don’t worry, Mom. There aren’t going to be any bad guys.”

She tipped her head back to look him straight in the eye. “That’s not the only sort of trouble out there.”

The Old Lake George road was familiar to him, part of the regular patrol route. When he had been in school—back around the Civil War, it felt like—the road had been mostly undeveloped, except for a few scraggly cabins inhabited by cranky loners. It had been, as its name suggested, a shortcut over the mountains toward Lake George, not a place anyone with a lick of sense would build on, back when the surrounding area was all devoted to dairy farming. Things started to change in the eighties, when a “pristine mountainside between a quaint Adirondack village”—he had seen the language in an ad his mother had sent him—and the old resort area of Lake George suddenly became a hot commodity. Overnight, neo-Adirondack lodges that would have given Teddy Roosevelt nightmares had sprung up along the road, interspersed with fake Swiss chalets and Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater rip-offs. One of the latter, whose architect had insisted on flat roofs to “blend in with nature,” had come to a spectacular end when a twenty-four-hour storm dumped three feet of snow on the area and the whole house collapsed in on itself.

He recognized Peggy Landry’s house when he pulled into the long drive. She couldn’t have owned it long—it had been purchased and expensively renovated by a dot-com millionaire from New York City just a few years ago. He remembered the guy because he was constantly calling in intruder alerts during his summer stays, until Mark Durkee went up and pointed out that the open-air kitchen he had installed at the end of the pool house was attracting a steady stream of black bears.

The drive was still full of cars, but it was easy enough to pick out Clare’s god-awful Shelby Cobra. He pulled his truck into the nearest empty spot and got out. He glanced up at the facade of the house, three stories of vaguely rustic clapboarding rising up to a modern-cladded roof. He tried to picture Clare dropping out one of the windows, three sheets to the wind, and the image made him wince. An adrenaline addict, she had once described herself as. How she ever made it through a seminary and into the priesthood was a mystery to him.

He crunched over to her car. There was no sign of life until he bent down and peered into the shadowy interior. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He knocked on the driver’s door and opened it.

“I’m here,” she said loudly, bolting upright.

“Take it easy. You’re not asleep on duty.” The light from the house reached the interior of the car dimly, but even in the shadows, he could see she hadn’t exaggerated. She looked like she’d been dragged through the bushes backward.

“No, of course not, I was just—” She blinked several times. “Russ! What are you doing here? No, wait, I remember. Are you going to arrest Malcolm?”

He squinted past her into the tiny sports car. “I don’t think I can fit inside this tin can. Why don’t we get into my truck? We can talk there. Grab your purse and keys.”

She nodded, and a moment later they were crossing the gravel drive to his pickup, Clare muttering quiet “Ouch” noises as she, barefooted, picked her way across the stones.

As soon as they were both inside, he fired up the ignition and shifted into gear.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“Taking you home,” he said, craning over his shoulder to see as he backed up. “Fasten your seat belt.”

“You’re supposed to be searching Malcolm’s room! Didn’t you hear anything I said on the phone?”

“Yep.” He threw his pickup into first and headed down the drive to the road.

“You can’t just drive away! There are illegal drugs in that house. And persons with knowledge of a murder!”