Gray Matter

bad joke. They’re saying stuff like how you should stop whacking your stick on this skull—and how you should get a wife.”

Greg felt the blood rise in his face. He knew that he had distanced himself from the others, even dropping off the department softball team, and bowing out of picnics, and fishing jaunts. He was even aware that other investigators were refusing to work on cases with him, including his onetime partner, Steve Powers. But the thought that he had become a department joke was mortifying. Suddenly he saw himself as a pathetic fool chasing his own tail.

Get a wife.

“This may be my hang-up, but I have not compromised my duties here.”

“That’s arguable,” Gelford said. “But you’ve been at this for three years, and you’re batting a dead mouse.” He handed back the fax.

Greg nodded, but said nothing.

“I think you might want to take a look,” Steiner had written.

Gelford studied Greg’s face. “Noon, and not a minute over,” Gelford said. “But if this does not pan out—as I expect it won’t—you’ll bury it for good. Otherwise … you know the rest.” Gelford then picked up the phone to say that the conversation was over.

Greg folded the fax and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Similar markings.”

“Thanks,” Greg said and left, his mind humming to get over to the ME’s office.

5

“Are you all right?” Martin asked.

“I’m fine,” Rachel said.

“Well, you don’t look it.”

“Don’t start.”

“Don’t start what? You look like you’re about to go to your own funeral.”

“I said I’m fine.”

They were in the kitchen, and Rachel was making pancakes. She was still in her bathrobe, hunched over the stove, pressing chocolate chips into the frying batter. Dylan loved chocolate-chip pancakes, and she made them for him at least once a week. Martin was dressed and ready to go to work.

The bouquet of roses he had bought last night sat in a vase on the dining room table. They had never made it to the Blue Heron. Rachel said she wasn’t up for it.

“You want pancakes?” she asked, her voice void of inflection. Her face was ashen and the flesh under her eyes was puffy. Her hair was disheveled and stuck back by a couple of hasty bobby pins. She looked as if she hadn’t slept all night.

“I’ll just have some orange juice,” he said and poured a glass. “I’ve got a breakfast meeting with Charlie O’Neill on the road.”

She nodded woodenly. He hated it when she got in these moods. Upstairs Dylan could be heard singing while getting dressed. He liked show tunes, and at the moment he was wailing “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.”

Martin studied Rachel while he drank his juice. She looked miserable, standing there hunched over like an old woman, her feet stuffed into a pair of old slippers, her face looking as if it had been shaped out of bread dough. “So, there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“I said I’m fine,” she snapped.

“Then how come we haven’t made love for over three weeks?”

Her body slumped in annoyance, but she didn’t answer.

“How come you’ve been avoiding me like I’m the goddamn Ebola virus?”

Without looking up from the pan she said, “I haven’t been avoiding you. And stop swearing, he’ll hear you.”

“You have been avoiding me. For weeks I’ve suggested we go out to dinner together, or a movie or something nice and romantic, but you’re too tired. You don’t feel up to it. You’ve got a headache. You go to bed early. Except for bumping into me, I don’t think you’ve physically touched me in weeks. Something’s wrong, and I want to know what the hell it is.”

Rachel continued staring into the pan, then slowly she turned her head toward him. She seemed just about to respond but then laid the spatula down and went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Dylan that breakfast was ready.

When she returned, Martin said, “I don’t know what the problem is, but you’ve been moping around here like you’ve got some goddamn—”

Suddenly she let out a scream, shaking her hand. She had burned the tip of her finger pressing chocolate chips into the batter.

Martin ran to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She was not just whimpering in discomfort. She was outright screaming, as if in outrage that the pan had done this to her. Then, she burst into tears.

Martin walked her to the sink and turned on the cold water and held her hand under it. With one arm around her shoulder, the other hand holding hers under the water, he could feel her shaking as she stood there, deep wracking sobs rising from a place that had nothing to do with burnt fingers.

“Mommy! What happened?” Dylan ran into the kitchen and instantly froze in place at the tableau of Martin holding Rachel’s finger under the streaming water and Rachel crying, tears pouring freely from her eyes and her nose running.

“Mommy just burned her finger,” Martin said. “She’s going to be fine.”

“Mommeee.” Dylan ran over to her and hugged her about the middle and buried his face into her bathrobe, then he began to cry.

“It’s burning!” Rachel shouted through her tears. “Turn it off.”

On the stove smoke billowed up from the frying pan.

“It’s burning,” Dylan screamed. “Fire!”

I’m going to lose my fucking mind, Martin thought, as he shot to the stove, turned off the gas, and pulled the pan off the burner.

Suddenly the smoke alarm went off, filling the house with a hideous electronic wail.

While Dylan yelled, his hands to his ears, and Rachel stood by the sink crying, Martin pulled out a kitchen chair. Yup! Any second now I’m gonna hear a snap like a celery stalk, and then I can join the chorus, screaming and blubbering. Yoweeeee!

He punched off the alarm.

The pancakes looked like smoking hockey pucks. Martin felt the crazy urge to laugh, but pushed it down. Instead he tore a couple of sheets off the paper-towel rack and handed them to Rachel. While she dried her face, Dylan insisted that she hold her finger up so he could kiss the boo-boo.

Just another normal little breakfast scene in the happy Whitman household.

“I think you’re going to make it,” Martin said, looking at her finger, “thanks to ole Dr. Dylan here.” He winked at his son. The tip of Rachel’s index finger was a white crust of burnt skin. Martin tousled his son’s hair. “You made her feel better already, right?”

Rachel nodded and caught her breath. She smiled thinly and gave her son a hug.

Seeing Rachel pull herself together again, Dylan rapidly repaired. “Am I going to be a doctor when I grow up?”

“I don’t see why not,” Martin said. “You’ve got the touch. Now maybe you should go upstairs and put the other shoe and sock on, okay, Doc?”

Dylan looked to Rachel. “Take two ass burns and call me in the morning,” he said, and headed upstairs. It was something Martin said all the time.

Rachel nodded, then headed for the stove to clean the frying pan. Her body had slumped into itself