'I can touch the gun?'
'What do you guys do all day, Dad,' she said over Tim. 'Just stay home and figure out ways to defy me?'
'Pretty much,' he said. 'They've been showing Archie and the helicopter over and over on CNB.'
'Slow news day.'
'You ought to see it. You can't tell at first what's coming out the chopper, then they zoom in and you see it's flowers. Then they show petals on the coffin. It really gets you. After that they intervewed the families.'
In his rubber boots Tim waded to the TV and turned it on, but it was a commercial for a local car dealership.
'New car?' he asked.
'No, thanks, Tim. The Impala's running fine.'
It was too hot and humid to be inside, so they sat on the backyard patio. Merci shooed one of the cats off an Adirondack chair and huffed down into it, wondering why an allegedly classic design was so uncomfortable. Clark had made lemonade but Merci asked for a 'hearty scotch and water over ice. In the near dark, Tim played with a hose on the grass, watering down his hat, vest, shorts, everything. He chased one of the cats but it outran him and his spray. He found a gopher hole, put the hose down it and squatted down to watch the bubbles and mud froth out. She loved the way he squatted.
Merci looked out at Tim and the deep green Valencia orange trees beyond. She wasn't much of an orange eater, but she loved the smell of the trees, and not just the orange blossoms that narcotized you late winter and early spring, but the astringent summertime smell leaves and fruit. She was content for a moment, then the feeling was gone.
'Gary Brice left two messages. And Mike called a few minute ago.'
'Mike? What about?'
'Well, not to talk to me.'
'Pretty obvious, Dad.'
'I really don't know. I'm just telling you he called.'
Merci heard a vehicle out on the dirt road that led to their driveway. Probably the grove manager, she thought. Odd that Mike would call, but one of them was bound to break the silence. You don't love someone then arrest that person for a murder he didn't commit, then just ignore each other for the next fifty years.
Clark checked his watch, popped up and headed back toward the house. 'I'm going to go get the evening paper,' he said. 'See if they got pictures of Wildcraft in the chopper.'
The screen slider slapped shut and Merci saw Mike McNally's pickup truck bump onto the driveway concrete. She quickly connected the phone call, the watch check, the need for a newspaper and Mike's arrival into a loose conspiracy theory.
She watched the truck come up the drive and park under the floodlights she'd had installed. Mike got out and waved at her, same as he used to. His blond hair was shiny in the light. She saw from the way his hands went suddenly to his hips and the chesty posture that he was nervous.
Danny came around from the passenger's side carrying a small clear box by a handle. Danny was eight now, an intense and humorless boy who had gone far out of his way to ignore Merci when she and his father were together. She'd admired Danny's loyalty to his mother, a woman who treated Mike pretty much like shit so far as Merci saw. Tim spoke often of Mike and Danny, having easily attached himself to a friendly man and a big brother. Merci had explained their departure in vague terms that had never satisfied him. Tim was precise, forgot little, and it angered him to get soft answers to hard questions. She despised herself for taking them out of his life and told herself that someday he would understand. Mike had taken up with CSI Lynda Coiner after the arrest and she'd wondered what Mike told Danny.
Tim bolted for the backyard gate.
Here goes, she thought, taking a large gulp of her drink and pouring the rest into a potted rose tree, leaving the glass upended against the trunk and the ice cubes in the soil. Merci slid the bolt and Tim pushed open the gate. Danny gave Tim the clear box: a small terrarium containing an alligator lizard he caught. Danny didn't look at Merci. Mike extended his hand like salesman and she shook it, increasingly flummoxed and wishing she had some warning on this, then feeling her anger brew because Mike and good old Dad had not extended that common courtesy.
'Thanks for the warning,' she said.
'We can't stay, Merci. I told Clark we were just going to drop lizard off for Tim.'
'Well, okay, there's no harm done, Mike. It's great to see you. You too, Danny.'
He glanced at her.
'Play with the hose?' Tim asked, pulling Danny by the shirtsleeve. The boy looked to his father for an answer, and Mike looked at Merci.
'Okay,' she said. Tim pretty much threw the lizard box at her and the boys bolted.
'We can't stay,' Mike said again. 'We were just, look, Merci know I should have said something to you before we bombed in. I didn't. But I need to talk to you and I thought… I figured you'd say no and I didn't want to hear that.'
'Okay, okay. Come on in. Let's sit.'
Mike lowered himself into one of the torturous Adirondack chairs and Merci offered lemonade.
'No, thanks, really,' he said. 'I won't be here long.'
She sat in the chair next to his and for just a flash felt like a real couple, watching their children play in the yard. Tim had turned the hose on Danny, who dodged in and out of range. She could smell the dogs on Mike because Mike was the department bloodhound hand and three of the hulking monsters-Dolly, Molly and Polly-lived with him.
'It seems like a thousand years since I sat here,' he said.
'It does. How are you, Mike?'
'Just fine, really. I'm glad to be out of Vice. Burg-Theft is hopping.
'You?'
'Hands full with Wildcraft.' She had the lizard box on her lap and she saw the creature peeking out at her from under a piece of bark.
'The press conference was bad. Sorry.'
'Yup.'
'But that's one of the reasons I'm here. I mean, not directly, but related.'
'What's up?'
'It's time for the Deputy Association to elect its reps for next year. Pretty much whoever gets nominated gets elected. I'm on the nominating committee and I want to nominate you.'
A wrinkle of joy wobbled through her, followed by a hot flatiron of suspicion. She set the terrarium beside her chair.
'Why me, Mike? Half the department hates me.'
'It's kind of hard to explain. I'll try, though.'
She watched Mike's forehead knit, saw in his clear blue eyes his enduring struggle with words. He'd told her once that he liked being around dogs more than people and meant it.
'Merci, some of it's about you and me. See, what happened wasn't all your fault. And not all Evan O'Brien's fault, either. Some of it was mine. So, skip forward until now, and a lot of the deputies, they blame you. And a lot of them took my side, like you just said. But not many of them knew that I fell in love with that girl, and that I deserved to get my ass kicked for it. Not that I deserved exactly how it went down, but… well, they just don't know. Am I making sense?'
'Some.'
'So I hate it like this, half the guys pulling for me when they don't know what happened, and half of them hating you for no good reason. It's all… simplified and stupidified. Like a bunch of children. It's like we're symbols for something. But what you did with Brighton and my dad and yours, God, it must have been hard for you. And it had to be done, Merci. I know it did. I'm glad you did it, even though my dad suffered. He deserved to suffer. Clark deserved to. Brighton deserved to. So what I'm saying is, I was behind you then, even though everybody pulled us apart. And I was too wrapped up in you and the girl and getting arrested to see clear, you know? I just let the crowd carry me along like some kind of wounded hero. It was easy. But I'm sick of it now. It's degrading. I don't want the department torn like this. I want us all at least halfway together. What you did, it cleaned us out, but now
