continued to drink. Vivian Flynn wouldn’t admit that
she had a problem.
“Vivian obviously knows Stone Cold Sam,” Judith
remarked as Joe stirred the embers in the small fireplace.
“Oh, yes,” Joe replied, adding some paper and a
couple of small pieces of wood. “They go way back.”
“They must.” Judith stared into the fire, which was
now sparking into orange-and-yellow life. It rankled
her that Joe and Vivian had such a long—if rocky—
past. The marriage had been a mistake from the start, a
catastrophe set in motion by Joe’s first encounter with
a fatal teenage overdose. The cop bar he’d gone to afterward had offered strong drink and a stronger comeon by the woman perched atop the red piano. In
fighting off the shadows of wasted fifteen-year-old
lives, Joe lost his grasp on reality. When he awoke the
next morning, he was in a Las Vegas bed with a new
bride, the already twice-wed Vivian.
There was no going back, though Joe had tried.
He’d called Judith from the hotel casino to try to explain, to beg forgiveness. But Gertrude had told him
that her daughter never wanted to see him again. The
irony was that Judith never knew about Joe’s call, or
his subsequent attempts to reach her. Brokenhearted
and abandoned, she had married Dan McMonigle on
the rebound. That union was also doomed from the beginning. When Judith learned years later what had happened to Joe, she realized that both of them had
married alcoholics and were paying the price for their
folly. Joe’s folly more than her own, she had often
thought, but no one had compelled her to marry Dan.
It was only retaliation—and the unborn child she was
carrying—that had sent her so recklessly to the altar.
Eventually, she had begun to understand Joe’s ties to
Vivian. In addition to having been married twice before, she had a son by each ex-husband and was down
on her luck. Joe was a sucker for the underdog. Having
taken the vows, he felt obligated to live them, for better or for worse. And like Judith, Joe had endured more
worse and no better.
Those long, mean years had tempered both of them.
It hadn’t been just the chance meeting twenty years
later that caused him to file for divorce. The marriage
to Vivian had been a shambles for more than a decade;
the only good thing that had come of it was a daughter,
Caitlin. Perhaps it was proof of the dismal state of matrimony in the first Flynn household that had kept
Caitlin, now forty, from seeking a husband.
The thoughts flickered through Judith’s brain like
the flames dancing in the grate. She could picture Joe
and Vivian hosting a departmental party, with Stone
Cold Sam Cairo running his hand up the welcoming
