“Clare, no. Stay put.”
She took the stairs two at a time. “I’m not going to get near him. I’m just going to tail him.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“Well you’re not about to get out of the Camry and run him down on foot if he vanishes between some houses, are you?” She snapped the switches on the brass-plated light fixtures. “I’ll tell you where he is and then you get the car in front of him and cut him off.”
“Clare, this guy could be an addict. That means dangerous, desperate, and unpredictable.”
Roxanne had left a Post-it note over the alarm. “Trigger here, then 60 seconds,” it read. Clare turned on the alarm. “Too late,” she said. “I’ve just armed the building security. I have to get out in one minute or sirens go off.”
“Great! Let the sirens go off. I’d prefer it. It’ll trigger a call to the station and we’ll have a squad car there in ten minutes.”
She shrugged into her coat, buttoned it to the neck, and yanked the door open. The wind almost tore the knob from her hand. “You call the station if you think we need backup.”
She could hear him chomping off obscenities before they could tinge her delicate ears. She clattered down the steps and crunched over a shell-and-gravel path to the garden gate, set in the middle of a tall iron fence.
“Listen to you,” he said. “We do not need backup because we are not trained law enforcement officers.”
The gate groaned open. Clare dashed across the garden, her boot steps squish-squish-slapping against the soggy ground. She tried the door to the carriage house. Locked. The iron fence that divided the historical society from the clinic and alley was bolted into the side of the carriage house. “Crap,” she said.
“What?”
“I can’t get out the back of the garden. Unless…” She ran to the other side of the carriage house, where a brick wall bristling with dead ivy took the place of the fence. In the summertime, it must look like an impenetrable barrier, but now-“Yes,” she said. “Hang on, I have to drop you in my pocket.” She flattened herself against the carriage house and squeezed through the claustrophobic gap, the ivy tugging and snapping the back of her raincoat. She could hear Russ’s voice in her pocket, demanding that she talk to him.
She burst out of the opening and stumbled into the alley. She retrieved the phone from her pocket. “Got out of the garden,” she said. “I’m after him.” The rain splattered over the stone, and she splashed through widening puddles that were already runneling down the center of the alley.
The narrow street emptied out between a Dumpster and a plastic garden shed. She stopped on the sidewalk, looked left, right, and found her target, a dark shape pedaling up Washington Street, bent against the rain that had already plastered her hair against her head and run beneath the collar of her coat. “He’s headed up Washington Street. Toward, um, Elm.”
“I’ll be there in just a few minutes. Clare, hang back. Getting this guy isn’t worth risking your getting hurt.”
“I am hanging back. I’ll be fine.” She crossed the road and strode toward the street person, keeping him in sight but not breaking into a run. She kept hard to the edge of the sidewalk, where she could duck into a front walk or driveway in order to avoid being spotted. On a street empty of everything except darkness and the rain, she was going to stick out like a lighthouse. A car sped down the street from the opposite direction, throwing up sheets of water, and for a moment she thought it might be Russ and said, “Is that you? Can you see me?” but it was a Camaro that went past, picking her out in its headlights, almost drenching her. She jumped out of the way, and when she looked up, the figure had stopped on the corner. Watching her.
“Oh, crap, he’s seen me.”
“Where are you?”
Then the shape bent over the handlebars and was gone, almost before she could register the movement. “He’s taken off!” She loped after the vanished form.
“Where?” Russ’s voice was all patience, cut with strangled worry.
“He went left at the intersection. Don’t know the street name. Away from where the Rouses and the Burnses live.” It was hard to run clutching the phone to her ear. “I’m gonna drop you in my pocket for a sec.” She did so as she rounded the corner. The clinic intruder was at least a block ahead of her, coat flapping past the rear wheel of the bike, hat jouncing. For a moment, she saw the white blur of a face, seeking her out, and then the bulky form was gone again. Where? She lengthened her stride, her boots pounding against the pavement, her breath rasping in her ears. The rain lashed her face, forcing her to screw up her eyes and look sideways. She splashed across one roadway and skidded to a halt at the second.
She grabbed her phone. “I think he’s ducked down Fisher Street.”
“There’s a whole warren of short streets down there. I’m driving toward the riverfront, so I’ll be ahead of you.”
“ ’Kay.” She dropped the phone in her pocket and jogged down Fisher Street, swinging her head from left to right, praying for that one telltale glimpse out of the corner of her eye. And she got it. Just a flicker of movement, a faint gleam on metal, a rosy wink from the rear reflector.
She cut across the street, cleared the sidewalk with one leap, and dodged a pair of waterlogged yew bushes to shortcut through someone’s yard. She almost skidded out of control on the soggy remains of last year’s lawn, but stumbled through to the cross street, the intruder’s long coat skirling ahead of her, leading her on.
She held her phone up like a mike. “He’s going through the cemetery.” She dropped it again and charged ahead, the water splashing up her coat with every stride, so that she was more wet than dry. She ducked through the cemetery’s low brick entrance, dashing rain out of her eyes to keep the fleeing figure in sight. Please don’t let him hide in the mortuary, she thought. The winter dead of Millers Kill had to wait for their burials until April; the long semisubterranean mortuary would be full right now.
But whoever it was showed no signs of stopping. The pinwheel rain hat bobbed in and out of Clare’s view, pedaling headlong toward the cemetery’s side entrance. She pelted over walkways turned to stony brooks and graves where the spongy earth sagged under her bootfalls. She zigged and zagged past fenced-in family plots and curved stone benches. The figure vanished through a screen of trees. Sprinting to catch up, Clare dodged a Civil War-era oak and found herself one footfall away from James and Nancy McKeller, husband and wife. She hurdled their stone with a wild launch into the air and came down hard, stumbled, recovered, and dashed through the side entrance.
A muffled voice was coming from her pocket. It took two tries to grab the phone, her wet fingers slipping over its plastic case. “Where are you?” Russ was asking.
She glanced up at the dripping street sign. “Second Avenue.” A grandiose name for a single block of one-and-a-half-story houses. She jogged down the sidewalk, the phone pressed against her ear. “Where are you?”
“On Lower First Avenue. I figure he’s headed for the old chandleries.”
“The what?”
“I’ll tell you later. Is he still in sight?”
She glanced between the houses as she jogged past. “No. I think he went to the end of the street, but I don’t know which way he turned.”
“He couldn’t have gone to the right.” She reached the end of Second Avenue and saw what Russ meant. The street petered out into a marshy tangle of elephant grass and cattails. “All these streets dump into First Avenue, and that’s-”
She swiveled and ran to the left. One house, two houses, three, and there she was, at the intersection with Upper First Avenue and Lower First Avenue. She heard a shout, muffled and distant from down the street, echoed over the phone.
She pounded down Lower First, a street as much a mausoleum as that in the cemetery. Low, shuttered buildings with spray-painted doors and rusting hulks of unidentifiable origin in their yards. A two-story inn untouched so long that its paint had peeled totally away, leaving it raw, gray, and warping. A series of store-fronts, roofs rotting, porches leaning, windows boarded with plywood turned silver with age. And there, crutching toward the last building in the row, Russ.