That trip to the shop had also made him hyperaware of his marriage, the chinks in the armor, the little rips in the fabric. Laura looked like Emma, but she wasn’t Emma as Emma had once been. Laura was careful and a little sensitive, where Emma had been self-confident. Laura wanted to be with him twenty-four seven, where Emma had always made it clear she liked him just fine, but maybe she had better things to do. Their relationship, such as it had been, in junior high and, briefly, in high school, hadn’t really gotten off the ground. All the guys had wanted Emma, and maybe he’d gotten a little closer than most, but it hadn’t been a real relationship. He could admit that now.
Her aloofness was one of the reasons they’d all gone to scare her at her babysitting job the night of the Stillwell party.
“I’m taking over for my sister,” Emma had said breezily when Tim Merchel, whose parents had bought him a cell phone, had called her on her home phone.
“Ah, c’mon, Emma. Stillwell’s having a party.”
“Have fun,” she’d told them, hanging up.
She’d relented later, actually stopping by the party briefly before going on to her babysitting job. Race had asked her what took her so long to show up, but she’d refused to say before taking off. Her departure left Race in a bad mood and then . . . plans were made.
They all knew she babysat for the Ryerson twins.
Cooper shook the memories away as he drove back to the station. Whenever Marissa called and he was around, he tended to take off work for a few minutes to pick her up from school and drop her off. Laura expected her to walk home, though she lived over a mile from the school, but with iffy weather and a heavy backpack, Cooper kinda thought Marissa needed a little extra help sometimes. Which pissed Laura off.
“She’s my daughter,” she told him crisply time and again, usually on a phone call after she’d worked up a head of steam.
“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl with a backpack three times as heavy as it ought to be.”
“She’s not your problem anymore.”
“I’m saving her from future back surgery.”
Which was when she invariably hung up on him. Laura was angry that he’d never been committed to the marriage in the same way she had. He’d tried, but she was a “ruleser.” Everything had to be just so, and well, he didn’t fit into the mold. He’d found himself heading home from work later and later, and finally recognized he didn’t want to go home at all. Laura was a nice, friendly person in front of others, but she was quick to drop that facade in the privacy of her own home and became tyrannical when things didn’t go her way.
They’d gone to a psychologist, at Laura’s insistence, who’d said they both needed to try harder, which hadn’t been what Laura wanted to hear. She wanted complete vindication. So, no more trips to see Gwen Winkelman, which was fine with Cooper; Gwen was another River Glen alum and the less gossip about his failing marriage around town, the better, and though he trusted she wouldn’t blab about all their problems, just seeing a psychologist was enough to start a few tongues wagging.
And then they’d divorced and everyone had gasped, how had that happened? Cooper and Laura? They had the perfect marriage! How can that be?
During the split, Laura was good about not giving too much away and so was he. Irreconcilable differences. That was it. Nothing more to say. And then Cooper’s father had a stroke and his attention was diverted, completely taken up with his father through his illness and until his death a few months later. By that time, Cooper had moved out of the house he and Laura had purchased together and into the home he’d grown up in. His mother had died years earlier from breast cancer. He had no other siblings and now no wife or children. Work was all that mattered and he attacked it as if his life depended on it, which in a way, it did.
Eventually, the gossip had died down. Laura moved on and was currently dating David Musgrave, who seemed a decent-enough guy. He’d heard talk that the two of them might even move in together. They were shopping for a house in Staffordshire Estates, River Glen’s chichiest area, a development that adjoined the Stillwell property, a parcel sold to home builders by Race and Deon Stillwell’s parents before their deaths in a small plane accident.
Now Cooper pulled into the back lot of the station. Several black Ford Escapes with the River Glen Police Department’s gold ribbon sat idle. Cooper parked his own SUV, a black Ford Explorer that looked a lot like it belonged in the River Glen PD fleet, and took the short flight of steps in two bounds.
Inside, he walked down a short hall that held the break room, restrooms and a storage closet to an open area that held six desks in three groups of two, front to front. His was one of the two closest to the window and faced Howie’s. Only three of the others were ever used. Today, they were all empty. Howie and Elena Verbena were on a case, a domestic fight between a man and his wife, both of whom were currently in the hospital from the injuries they’d inflicted upon each other. Cooper had been unavailable at the call out, and the department sent whoever was closest to the incident.
The River Glen PD chief, a man who’d been appointed by the mayor, knew less than nothing about law enforcement from experience but was smart enough to stay out of
