Out Of The Deep I Cry (20 page)

The two useful pieces of information Harry winkled out of Mrs. Shaw before escaping were that neither she nor her husband had spoken with Jonathon Ketchem since Friday before last, and that all the men Mrs. Ketchem had listed were members of the Grange and the VFW.

“So you two were in the Great War together?” he asked Arent De Grave, a blocky blond whose good-sized farm seemed unthreatened by the hard times that had sent poor Hutch Shaw up to Warrensburg.

“Ayup,” Arent said, pitching a forkful of rotted manure onto his spreader. They were standing in the cobbled yard between De Grave’s two barns, and except for the pile of crumbling manure that had been composting over the winter, everything was clean enough to eat off of, in that particularly Dutch way Harry always admired but could never achieve.

Arent continued, “That is, we were both in it. I was in Dordogne. Jon sat the whole thing out in Fort Knox, running their motor pool.”

“So you knew him before the war?”

De Grave tossed another forkful into the already heavily loaded spreader and then swept his hand past his tidy white house, past the firepond, to a notch between two hills where a many-gabled roof could be seen. “That’s the Ketchem place. My family’s been farming next door since my dad moved us from North Cossayuharie in aught-six.”

“They there? Mr. and Mrs. Ketchem?”

De Grave shook his head. “They’ve got hired hands running the place over winter. Mr. Ketchem’s been having a bad time of it with his lungs, so they went out west for the winter. I imagine they’ll be coming back right soon, but they ain’t home yet.”

“Is anyone living in the house?”

“Nope. The hands that ain’t married have their own place, back along the crick.” He paused for a moment. “You’re thinking Jon might have gone to his parents’ house. I would have seen a light there if anyone had been inside the last two nights. Besides, I can’t imagine Jon running back to his mom and pop. That’s the last thing he’d do.”

“So you know him pretty well.”

“As well as anyone, I reckon.”

Harry kicked a clump of hay-studded manure out of his way. “Tell me true now. Is he likely to be off on a bender?”

Arent De Grave rested his pitchfork against the cobbled stones and looked at Harry. “Now where would he be getting booze around here, Chief?”

Harry sighed. “I’m not asking where anybody’s getting anything. But your friend walked out on his wife in a temper and hasn’t been seen since. Most men, that means they’re either drinking or whoring.”

De Grave raised his barely there blond eyebrows.

“Or they’re bivouacking with a friend. So how ’bout it? Which category would you place Jonathon Ketchem in?”

“He’s not here.” De Grave dug his pitchfork into the manure pile and tossed another twenty pounds into the spreader. “Who-all’s on that list you got?”

Harry pulled the creased paper from his back pocket. “You, Hutch Shaw, Leslie Bain, and Garry MacEacheron.”

“We’re all of us married men. With kids. I can’t imagine any of those men’s wives not picking up the phone and letting Jane know that Jonathon was there.” He smiled, almost shyly. “I know for sure my missus would.”

“Could he be holed up in a speakeasy someplace? Maybe gone to Glens Falls, taken a room there?”

De Grave clanged the pitchfork tines against the cobbles to loosen the muck and kicked what remained off with the edge of his boot. “Help me get the team hitched up,” he said, walking into the barn. Harry followed him. For a moment, his vision shut down in the difference between the bright, chill sunshine outside and the warm animal gloom inside. Two enormous geldings, half-Percheron by the looks of them, stood patiently, and Harry was relieved to see that they were already in tack. It had been a long time since he had harnessed up his own dad’s team, and he didn’t want to look a citified fool fumbling around in front of De Grave. “This is Ned”-De Grave indicated the horse at the left-hand block-“and that one is Nick.”

Harry took Nick by the bit strap, scratched his neck, and stroked the outside of his nostrils with a light finger. From between black leather blinders, Nick looked down on him with clever brown eyes that seemed to say,
This is all nice and good; but I’m supposed to be to work.

Harry led Nick out of the barn, blinking again as they emerged into the light. “Nick is the far horse,” De Grave called over his shoulder, and Harry led his charge to the right side of the rig. The gelding was so well behaved that the slightest pressure of Harry’s hand on his bit rein caused him to back neatly into his place beside the spreader’s wagon tongue. Harry and De Grave lifted the crossbar, and Harry held it steady while the farmer clipped Ned’s straps to the bar’s left ring and adjusted their tension. Then Harry did the same for Nick while De Grave returned to the tack room to retrieve the heel chains, which would attach the horses’ tack to the spreader itself.

De Grave came about the front of the team and handed Harry a three-foot chain, thick and heavy enough to break a skull open with one blow. “So how ’bout it?” Harry asked as he smoothed a hand over Nick’s broad flank. “Is Jonathon the type of man to have poured himself into a bottle? Does he have a girl somewhere who might have taken him in?”

He bent down to clip on the chain, and through the stolid stacks of the horses’ hind legs, he could catch glimpses of De Grave: muck boots and faded pants and hands that looked older than his thirty-some years, meticulously attaching chain to ring, checking the latch, checking the straps.

“Jonathon liked his whiskey as much as the next man in his younger days,” he said, his words slow and thoughtful. “He never was a temperance man, that I heard. But I haven’t seen him near liquor for… well…” He stood, resting one hand on Ned’s muscular croup. “Well, not since his children passed.”

Harry stood up, the heel chain still dangling from his hands. “What?” He could just see De Grave’s head over the horses’ rumps. “What do you mean, after his children passed? I thought he and his wife had the one daughter.”

De Grave nodded. “She was born after. They had four youngsters before. All of ’em died of the black diphtheria in ’24.”

“Good God.”

“Sometimes His will is hard. Hard to bear.” De Grave’s hand traced the leather lines of the straps crisscrossing Ned’s hip and rump. “Jonathon was different after that.”

“Different how?”

De Grave tilted his head up and squinted at the pale blue sky of early spring. “He had always been real certain about where he was going, what he wanted. He was going to make a big success of his farm, buy more land, do better than his father. After the children passed, he just sort of… spun free.”

“You mean he started acting up? Getting wild?”

“No, no, just the opposite. He didn’t have any more spark for fun in him, I think. He was more like…” Harry waited while the farmer chose his words with care. “Like a working barge that’s been set adrift on the river. You see it traveling downstream, it may look like it’s doing what it’s always done, but there’s no purpose there. No hand on the tiller.”

“Sooner or later, an unmanned boat will wreck.”

De Grave looked at Harry. “I know.”

“But not on a bottle.”

De Grave shook his head. “I don’t think on other women, either, although I can’t say for sure, one way or tother. It’s hard to imagine a man with a pretty, sweet wife like Janie looking elsewhere.”

Harry didn’t find it hard to imagine at all. He could picture it, long nights lying next to the woman, and every time you looked at her seeing your lost children in her eyes, her mouth, the color of her hair. Never touching each other without the chains of grief weighing your limbs down, making your flesh cold. He glanced at the heel chain, heavy in his hands. Easy to imagine wanting to hide yourself in someone else’s hot, blank, forgettable body.

He squatted down and attached the chain to Nick’s trace strap, tugging on it to make sure the latch was secure. He fastened the other end to the big steel ring bolted to the corner of the spreader. When everything was neat, he stood again, looked across the horses’ backs at De Grave. “What’s your guess, then?” he said. “You know the man. What would you think he’d done, disappearing from his home and not coming back?”

De Grave weighed the question with the same deliberate concentration he gave to everything. “My guess would be,” he said after a minute, “that he’d finally drifted downstream out of sight.”

When Mrs. Ketchem had described her husband investing in his brother’s gas station, Harry had envisioned one of those ramshackle affairs that were popping up in the wake of the new road construction up north, converted livery stables or smiths with a pump out front and bales of hay still stacked in the rear. He was surprised, then, when he spotted a brilliantly enameled brand-spanking-new sign emblazoned KETCHEM’S GAS AND MOTOR SERVICE. The low, wide building on the intersection of Route 9 and Tenant Mountain Road was whitewashed within an inch of its life, stuccoed into rounded edges and smooth curved arches through which three service bays beckoned to distressed motorists. There were no fewer than three pumps outside, protected from the elements by a bright red roof supported by more stuccoed pillars. It looked as if it had been lifted up bodily from Hollywood, California, and transplanted to Lake George.

Harry pulled alongside the far edge of the building, out of the way of the pumps. As he got out of his Ford, a tall, gangly youngster in coveralls popped out of the first service bay. “Help you, sir?” he said, his voice cracking halfway through the greeting. He coughed and blushed.

“I’m not here for service, son, but thank you. I’m looking for David Ketchem. Might he be around?”

The kid tucked his chin in an attempt to keep his Adam’s apple in place. “My dad’s in the office,” he said, pointing to a red door sandwiched between the service bays and a gleaming expanse of plate-glass window.

The door didn’t tinkle when Harry opened it. Instead, it set off a musical
bing!
that sounded like an hour tone on the radio. He began to suspect that, had life turned out a little differently, Jonathon Ketchem’s brother would have gone into show business instead of being a pump jockey.

“Can I help you?” The man behind the counter was about Harry’s age, mid-thirties, with thinning blond hair and a face that fell easily into smiling. Harry didn’t need the DAVE badge sewn over his right breast pocket to identify him as the skinny kid’s father.

“David Ketchem?” Harry smiled himself, a salve against the sting of his next words. “I’m Chief Harry McNeil, Millers Kill police.”

Ketchem’s smile faltered, and he darted a glance toward the door separating the office from the service bays. Then he reached his hand over the counter. “How d’ye do. I hope there isn’t any trouble.” His voice, which had been as smooth and accentless as a soap salesman’s before, took on a strong up-country Cossayuharie accent, so that “isn’t” came out “in’t.”

“I’m here because of your brother, Mr. Ketchem. Seems Jonathon Ketchem had a fight with his wife this past Saturday night. He stormed off in his car and hasn’t been home since. Mrs. Ketchem is mighty upset about it, and I told her I’d make some inquiries. I’m hoping you can help me locate him.”

“Yeah. Janie called me yesterday. Said he’d taken himself away and she didn’t know where he was.” Ketchem’s body relaxed, and the storm cloud that had been brewing in his eyes dissipated into amused surprise. “I can see why Janie’d go on about it to you. He’s never done that before, that I know of.”

“He hasn’t come here? To cool off or to keep his head down for a few days? Give her a scare?”

“Nope. He’s welcome to stay anytime, but I haven’t seen him for a couple, three weeks at least.”

“You sure? Maybe he drove through here on his way up north, and your boy saw him?” Harry figured if this guy was protecting his brother, it would be a good idea to give him a graceful way out. He leaned forward on the counter, confidential, man-to-man. “Obviously, we don’t get involved in a quarrel between a man and his wife, but now that we’re out looking for him”-skipping over the fact that Harry wasn’t wasting any of his men’s time on this-“I’d hate to keep on spending the department’s money looking for him if someone knows where he’s gone.”

David Ketchem shook his head. “Honest, I don’t know. And Lewis, my boy, he’d ’a told me. Janie’s a good girl, and she’s been a good wife to him. I wouldn’t help to scare her.”

“You ever know your brother to drink?”

“We used to sneak a bottle here and there when we were younger, but no, not for some while. Our dad is an elder of the Presbyterian church in Cossayuharie, so you can imagine how our folks feel about liquor. I just figured Jon followed their example.”

“What about women? Any chance he might have a girlfriend on the sly who’d take him in?”

Ketchem laughed. “Jon? Not a chance. Farm and family, that’s all that interests him.”

Harry polished an imaginary spot on the gleaming white counter. “That’s not the impression I’ve gotten from speaking to a few people. His wife says he’s been moody and out of sorts since they lost their farm to the Conklingville Dam project. Hasn’t figured out what to do with himself. A friend of his agrees.” He glanced up at Ketchem. “What’s your take?”

David Ketchem rested his forearms on the counter, bringing himself down to Harry’s eye level. He frowned, and gazed out the plate-glass window at the stubby pasturage across Tenant Mountain Road. “I guess that’s true. Having to sell the farm, that was hard on Jon. Only thing he ever wanted to do, really. Be a farmer, just like Dad.” He looked at Harry. “I told him he ought to get into a business. Farming.” He shook his head. “You bust your hump three hundred sixty-five days a year doing the same work your great-great-grandfather did. And never get any further along in life than he did.” He glanced around his movie-star-bungalow garage. “You have to look to the future, that’s what I told him. He got a bundle from selling his land to those development folks. It’s worth more underwater than it was growing corn and feeding cows. That’s a sign, don’t you think? The mountains are changing, and a smart man changes along with them.” The satisfaction in his eyes as he surveyed his red-and-white kingdom left no doubt as to which path David Ketchem had chosen.