Free St. Albans Fire by Archer Mayor Page B

cradling a miniaturized St. Albans, over the frozen slab of the lake itself, and only then coming to a halt against the distant and forbidding wall of New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. It was a view to impress even the dullest onlooker, made all the more stark by being clad entirely in snow and ice. To the horizon’s hard edge, under a blinding sun and a sky as blue as the base of a torch’s flame, the whole world looked as cold as when glaciers had scoured the trough in which the lake’s waters were now frozen.
    It was at once beautiful and repellent—a fanciful glimpse of the Paleolithic past and a future conjured up by science fiction writers too depressed to imagine anything less bleak.
    A perfect setting, Joe thought, for this particular funeral.
    He found Jonathon Michael standing apart from the crowd, dark-suited like Joe and wearing a thick topcoat. He’d found a small knoll to stand on, presumably chosen to give him a vague sense of distance and objectivity, and which, Joe found as he joined him there, also served well as an observation post.
    “You hear the latest?” Joe murmured to Jonathon after exchanging nodded greetings.
    Michael merely raised his eyebrows questioningly.
    “Rick Frantz is in a coma, shot by some nervous deputy last night during a drug deal.”
    “We can’t talk to him?”
    “Not if we want him to talk back.”
    They were silent for a few moments, watching the somber group slowly reorganizing around both casket and minister, a few settling into the folding chairs reserved for the immediate family.
    “It would be a drag if Frantz is our guy,” Jonathan said in a low voice, “and we never got to find out.”
    The same thought had occurred to Joe. “It’s early yet. I wouldn’t worry too much. You know who that is? Looks like a basketball player with a weight problem.”
    Jonathan nodded. “Billy St. Cyr. Neighboring farmer to the south.”
    “No kidding?” Joe remembered the name. “He’s the one Cal said he’s been arguing with for twenty years.”
    They inventoried the assembled faces, exchanging information on the few they knew so far. Joe figured that before this was resolved, they’d probably have a conversation with almost everyone here.
    “How ’bout the blonde?” he asked eventually.
    Michael cast him a look. “You didn’t meet her? That’s Linda, Jeff’s wife.”
    Joe grunted softly. “She was asleep when I met the others. She’s very pretty.”
    Jonathon didn’t respond, leaving Joe to his own reflections. In fact, Linda Cutts Padgett was a beauty. Even tired to near haggardness, she was endowed with the same soft and vulnerable radiance that had made the young Julie Christie such a hit in
Doctor Zhivago.
On her looks alone, Jeff had to count himself a lucky man.
    Joe shifted his focus to the rest of the family, noticing that the grief he’d witnessed the day of the fire had changed into a different, more volatile, complicated kind of tension.
    The minister became its first victim, attempting to arrange the seating. His hopes had clearly been to line them up patriarchally with Cal first, then Marie, followed by Jeff, Linda, and the two kids. But Marie would have none of it. She brusquely pulled Cal down the line, placed him between her and Jeff—casting a loathing glare at the latter—and fired a quick snarling comment at the minister that brought him up short.
    Jeff showed no notice. He was tending to his children, getting them to settle down, while his wife merely stood there, staring blankly at the ground, a thousand miles away. When it came time for them all to sit, Jeff gently lowered her to her chair, as if tending to an ancient Alzheimer’s victim.
    By then, Joe’s eyes were on Calvin. When they’d first met, he’d taken the farmer to be an appeaser by instinct, naturally resolving all conflicts within range. But he wasn’t that way here. Despite the minister looking at him imploringly, there was no deflecting of Marie’s both