Tina had more to say, and Schmidt knew she was waiting for him to look at her. When he did, she said, “Have you read Blue Sky Six?”
“Yes.” That was the title of Brenda’s book. He looked back to the road.
“She won a Pulitzer. She has name recognition. She believed that could be enough to interest a publisher. That’s why Brenda untied your boat and killed Lomak. Did she tell you she had to sit on the dock and shove it with her feet? To get the boat into the current going over Kettle Falls?”
He came to a stop in front of the restaurant. A parking attendant came from the entrance. “No,” Schmidt said. “She didn’t tell me that.”
He popped the trunk, got out, and lifted out Tina’s wheelchair. Once she was seated, he wheeled her through snow flurries to the open door. He had made a reservation, and as he pushed Tina and followed the hostess, Schmidt tried to make sense of it. Once seated, neither of them spoke until the waiter came. They both ordered the house salad and crab cakes. Schmidt ordered a bottle of chardonnay. The waiter took the menus and left.
“We promised not to tell anyone,” he said. “To keep you and Marion out of it.”
“Charlie, I know,” Tina said. “No one else was supposed to learn what happened. You wanted to say it was you, but she wouldn’t let you.”
“We promised not to tell anyone,” he said again. “We made a pact.”
“Charlie, she needed to let go of it. She trusts me, that’s all. Because I was there. But Kettle Falls isn’t why she said it was over between you. I really don’t think so.”
Schmidt wished now he had ordered a double vodka.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Tina said. “I think she’s afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of how happy you make her.”
Schmidt looked over his shoulder. The table behind him was empty, and he turned back. “That makes a hell of a lot of sense,” he said. “Is she going to a shrink?”
“I think I’m her shrink,” Tina said.
Schmidt leaned toward her. “More complicated than killing someone?” he said. “Than the two of us covering it up?”
“In personal terms, yes,” Tina said. “More complicated. For you, it has a lot to do with the difference in your ages.”
“I asked more than once,” Schmidt said. “She promised me it’s not important. I believed her. But maybe that’s like promising not to tell anyone what happened. On the phone, before she said it was over, she kept talking about DNA. She said what happened is in us now. Like a genetic defect. The only way is a clean break.”
Tina took a deep breath and let it out. She drank some water and nodded.
“I’ve heard the one about DNA.” She set down her glass. “And the one about clean breaks. I’m going to violate a confidence, too, Charlie. I’m going to risk my friendship with Brenda, because I think you need to know something. You remind Brenda of her father. Not because you’re older, but because you’re honest. Knowable. Funny. I think common parlance these days would be, you’re there for her at all times. And you like jazz, and Brenda thinks you’re graceful. Don’t you see? You’re the one, Charlie. I think that’s the problem. This attractive younger woman who’s been with lots of men and loved her father now loves you. That’s what the age difference means for her. Do you know how her father died?”
“Yes.”
The waiter returned with the chardonnay and began opening the bottle. Schmidt felt spied on. The waiter pulled out the cork and handed it to him. He wanted to throw it, but smelled it and nodded. The wine was poured, and he tasted, nodded again. The waiter poured into their glasses and left.
“Her father died of a heart attack when he was forty-three. On the beach in Cape Cod,” he said. “In South Truro. Brenda was thirteen.”
“Correct, she was thirteen.”
“And she was with him when it happened. That had to be tough, but lots of kids—”
“True, Charlie. Lots of kids are young when they lose parents. But most of them don’t witness it.”
Tina centered her wine glass in front of her dinner plate before looking at him. “And don’t ask me if it means anything, but the same night her father died, Brenda started her first period.”
Charlie drank. Tina did as well. She lowered her glass.
“Don’t ask me how or if it matters,” she said. “But Brenda told me that without meaning to. She said she’d never told it to anyone before. Not her mother, not the therapists she went to after her father died. She said I was the first, it just slipped out. She kept that secret for twenty years. Those two experiences must be joined in her mind. You officially enter puberty on the day you watch your father die. And can’t do a thing to save him. Welcome to adulthood.”
Facing Tina, Schmidt wanted to understand. He thought of his younger daughter at thirteen. How would she have reacted to his death? But psychology was not his thing. He believed if you paid attention to people, you could more or less understand them. Analysis, examining feelings—he had never been good at it. His wife had been very good at it.
“In the car,” he said, “you told me Brenda doesn’t feel guilty about what we did at Kettle Falls.”
“I don’t think she does.”
“She said the same thing to me when it happened. She said she didn’t care what kind of lousy childhood Jerry Lomak had, and she didn’t give a damn that Marion Ross destroyed him in court.”
“Charlie—”
“That’s
