In the Bleak Midwinter

“We can’t pay the man off, not directly. But we can reimburse him for expenses, offer to pay for, say, improvements to his house in order to make it a better place for Cody to visit, things of that nature. And I thought, what if Geoff and I make a large donation to the church, dedicated to helping lower-income residents of Millers Kill? And what if one of the recipients of this aid is McWhorter?”

“What? You’re asking me to make the church your money launderer?” Clare stood up, pushing the chair away. “In a scheme that boils down to you paying for another human being. No. I won’t do it. It’s immoral, even if it is legal.” Karen looked up at her, stricken. Clare sat back down. “Karen,” she said, more gently, “you can’t buy motherhood. I know how much you want that baby. But this . . . this wouldn’t work. What’s badly begun has a way of turning out badly. Imagine Cody as an older child, finding out that his grandfather had essentially sold him to his parents. Imagine how he would feel about himself.”

Karen folded her arms tightly around herself. “Do you think he’d be better off being raised by the man who’s willing to sell him?”

Clare shook her head, laid her hands palm up on the desk. “No. I’ll do everything I can to help you. Let’s go ahead and set up a meeting with McWhorter, see what we can accomplish.”

“With what? Earnest entreaties and prayer? Somehow, I don’t think he’ll respond very well to that.”

“Nope. We offer him what assistance you can legally and ethically,” Clare emphasized the word, “provide. That’s the carrot. Then, we show him the stick.”

When Russ turned his cruiser onto Main Street at the end of a long day, his lights picked out Clare’s MG half in and half out of the police station’s driveway. Grinning, he pulled up behind the little car and gave it a hit of his flashers. The door opened, and the Reverend Clare Fergusson got out, reluctantly turned around, and spread-eagled against the side of her car. Russ was laughing so hard it took him two tries to find his seatbelt latch.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, once he had managed to get out of his cruiser.

“I was dropping by to speak to you between home visits, and my . . . dang . . . car got stuck.”

He looked down at the scant two inches of snow and ice the plow had thrown up on the lip of the driveway. “In that? Heck, my niece’s trike could drive through that.” The old snow had been churned to dirty slush by her spinning tires. “You gotta get yourself a real car for this climate. Not an itty-bitty wind-up toy like that one.”

“This car,” she told him, “is a marvel of precision engineering. Zero to sixty in ten point seven seconds. It handles like a dream, and it can drive a mountain road at sixty miles an hour without a shimmy across the yellow line.”

“Yeah? Well if I ever catch it doing that, it can also get impounded. C’mon, I’ll help you push it out.” He braced himself against the back fender. Clare leaned into the edge of the door, one hand on the wheel. “Okay, push,” Russ said. They heaved together. The MG slid over the low snowbank and rolled forward a foot.

“Thanks.” Clare looked at the tire marks in the snow, thrown into high relief by the streetlights. “That is an embarrassingly small amount of snow to get stuck in, isn’t it?”

“You need something heavy, with front-wheel-drive,” Russ said, opening the door to his cruiser. “Four-wheel-drive is better. Until you get that, load up the trunk with bags of kitty litter. It’ll give some weight to your rear and if you get stuck, you can always sprinkle some around for traction.”

“Great. I can see it now. I’ll get my car free just in time to run over some old lady’s cat who’s come to investigate.”

He grinned. “Why don’t you park that thing. Let me get the cruiser in, and I’ll stand you a cup of coffee.”

“Any of Harlene’s strudel left?”

“I might be able to rustle something up.” She nodded approvingly, slid into her car, and pulled it forward. A strudel person, he thought, shifting the cruiser into first. Should have guessed that.

In the briefing room, two of the sheep-and-geese mugs at hand and nothing left of the last slice of strudel except crumbs, he told her about delivering the warrant to Darrell McWhorter. “You should have seen him. So cool. The nicest guy about it you could imagine. He drove himself over to the hospital, with me following, thank God, because I sure didn’t want to have to make conversation with him in my car. Got his blood drawn and went home.”

“That doesn’t sound like a man who’s afraid the test will show something incriminating.”

“AB negative. Same as Katie’s.”

“And Cody’s father has to be Rh positive, doesn’t he?”