Burton Kimball stiffened under Ernie Carpenter’s suddenly chilly gaze. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just answer the question.”
“I went drinking.”
“Where?”
“Up the Gulch. The Blue Moon.”
“How long did you stay there?”
“Awhile. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember.”
“And where did you go after that?”
As soon as Burton Kimball realized he was actually under suspicion, he snapped. “That’s none of your damn business, Ernie. Now get the hell out of here. And the next time you open your big mouth around me, you’d better either be apologizing or reading me my damn rights. Understand?”
Without another word, Ernie Carpenter scooped up the dog tags and beat it for the door. Burton sat frozen at his desk until the heavy outside door slammed shut behind the retreating detective.
Only after it closed did Burton get up. He staggered around the desk and pushed the knob that locked his office door from the inside.
Then, like a dazed sleepwalker, he groped his way blindly back to his desk. He dropped heavily into the chair and sat there, staring straight ahead while his fingers clung desperately to the polished edge of his desk. It was almost as if his white knuckled grip was all that was keeping him from being flung far into lifeless, timeless space.
Eventually, the all-enveloping, childlike whimper he had been trying so desperately to suppress managed to work its way to the surface. Forty-five years after the fact, the little boy who had never once cried aloud over his father’s desertion or his mother’s death put his arms on the desk, laid his head on his arms, and sobbed.
Afterward, he just sat there, dry-eyed and with out moving, totally unaware of the passage of time. Finally, an unexpected knock on the door startled him out of his painful reverie.
“Go away, Maxine,” he growled. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
“It’s me,” Linda Kimball replied tentatively.
“Maxine called to see if you’d come home yet. She said she thought something was wrong. I decided to come see for myself. Can I come in?”
“Come ahead.”
“I can’t. The door’s locked.”
Burton got up and stumbled around the desk.
Even though he hadn’t had a drop of liquor since Tuesday at the Blue Moon, he felt as though he’d been drinking. As though he were drunk.
When Linda Kimball saw her husband’s ray aged face, she put her hand to her mouth. “Burton!” she exclaimed. “What is it? What’s wrong?
Burton shook his head and blundered back to his desk. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “Never in a million years.”
“Yes, I will,” Linda insisted. “Tell me.”
Joanna PICKED up Jenny from the Bradys’ house at six and drove straight home. She couldn’t wait to strip out of her good clothes and the cumbersome bulletproof vest that had rubbed the skin under her arms until it was raw.
While Jenny went to her room to do homework, her mother set about cooking dinner. It seemed strange to look forward to an entire evening at home, an evening with no speeches to write or give, no campaign strategy meetings to oversee.
The sudden sense of decompression was almost palpable. For the first time in months, Joanna Brady had only one job to do instead of two.
While searching the refrigerator for leftover vegetables to put in the roast-beef hash, she discovered two forgotten Tupperware containers shoved into the far back corner of the bottom shelf. One contained a few desiccated and no-longer-green peas. The second, filled with some kind of mystery food, sported a brilliant layer of fuchsia-colored mold and exuded a powerful odor that somehow reminded her of the glory hole. And at that moment she didn’t want to think about the glory hole or Harold Patterson or Thornton Kimball.
Firmly shutting the lids on the two containers, Joanna tossed them into the sink, promising to clean both them and the refrigerator right after dinner. It was time to start paying attention to the little things again, to catch up on some of the domestic housekeeping chores that-in the after math of Andy’s death-had been allowed to fall victim to disinterest and neglect.
Jenny came to dinner promptly when called and slipped silently into her usual place in the breakfast nook. “How was school today?” Joanna asked cheerfully, trying to bridge mealtime’s now-customary silence as she filled Jenny’s plate.
“Okay, I guess,” the child answered, ducking her chin and not meeting her mother’s questioning gaze. “How was work?”
What should she answer? Joanna wondered Should she talk about finding Harold Patterson’s body? Should she tell Jenny the old man had possibly been murdered or protect her from that knowledge? Harold had always been one of the kind old men who bought Girl Scout cookies from Jenny’s makeshift stand in front of the post office. He wouldn’t be doing that anymore. Ever. Was Jennifer Brady tough enough to deal with the awful details of one more violent death in her small circle of acquaintances?
“It was okay, too,” Joanna answered finally, choking on the distancing words and pained by the strained formality between them. Would she and her daughter ever be easy with one another again?
