As May suckled away on the bottle, I couldn’t help stealing glances at Wheeler. The care with which she held Harold. The look in her eyes as he sucked on the bottle. There was so much love there. I wondered if she had the same love for every animal she treated. How big was her reserve? And what happened when she couldn’t fix one of them?
It must take its toll.
I thought back to my days as a homicide detective. One of the first rules is: don’t get attached. To the victim, to the victim’s family, or to the investigation itself. You let yourself get attached, and it will slowly chip away at you. You won’t make it three years.
I only made it two.
That’s because I couldn’t draw a line in the sand. I couldn’t see the body of a seventeen-year-old girl and not imagine it was my kid sister lying there.
When you’re a homicide detective, you’re on rotation, and when your number is called, there’s no “Thanks, but this one isn’t for me. I’ll grab the next one.”
After I cracked, after I was let go from the Seattle Police Department, I started taking on cases with the FBI. But with the Feds, it was different, I could pick and choose the cases I investigated. And that’s why I loved the cold cases. It was easier to hold on to your emotions when you were dealing with a crime that happened five, ten, twenty years earlier.
At least, most of the time.
“The yellow tulips,” I said, glancing up. “Are you the one who put them at the memorial?”
Wheeler raised her eyes, but didn’t answer.
“I know your dad was one of the people killed.”
She set Harold down, rinsed the bottle in the sink, then turned back to me. “Yes,” she said flatly.
I set May down and she scampered out of the kitchen to wherever her brother had absconded to. Then I opened the fridge and grabbed two beers. I twisted off the tops, then handed one to Wheeler. She took a sip in silence, then followed me out front. I pondered chancing the two rocking chairs, but they both had a bad case of osteoporosis, and I feared they would collapse under our weight.
I nodded at the chairs and said, “I ordered those from the Old Dilapidated Farmhouse store. They are strictly decorative.”
I could tell she was still thinking about her dad, and she didn’t laugh.
We plopped down on the front steps, a foot apart. A huge beetle, easily an inch long, rumbled past, stopping for a quick moment to glance up at Wheeler.
Even the bugs were impressed.
The big beetle made a U-turn, probably headed back to tell all his buddies about the hot chick on the porch steps, when he banged into my foot. Then he started climbing up it. I shook out my foot, but he held on tight. I leapt from the porch and swatted him off with my hand.
I may have screamed.
Wheeler laughed
I said, “He was attacking me.”
“I could see that.”
Once I composed myself, I said, “I heard the bugs were big in the Midwest, but it’s still a shock.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said with a light shake of her head. “Wait till the middle of July.”
“What happens in July?”
“You ever see Jurassic Park?”
“Sure.”
“You know the scene with the pterodactyls.”
I laughed. “That bad?”
She took a swig and nodded.
I matched her swig, then asked, “So did you ever leave this place?”
“I went to undergrad at the University of Missouri, then vet school out east.”
“Where out east?”
“Cornell.”
“Ah, Delaware.”
“Upstate New York, actually.”
“Right.”
“How ‘bout you?”
“I went to the University of Washington for a few years.”
“Didn’t finish?”
“It wasn’t for me.”
“So what did you do?”
“I went to the police academy.”
She sat forward a couple inches. “You were a cop?”
“I was a beat cop for a few years, then a homicide detective in some capacity or another for almost a decade.”
She cocked her head down at my leg and said, “Is that how you got shot?”
“That happened up in Maine, when I was working a case later on.”
“Maine? How did you end up there?”
“I was a second-year homicide detective in Seattle when my parents died. My kid sister was just finishing high school and got a scholarship to Temple so I moved to Philly with her.”
“Geez, I’m sorry.” She paused, then asked, “What happened to your parents?”
I recounted how my parents were flying back from a Rolling Stones concert in my father’s company jet when the plane crashed into the Sierra Nevadas.
“Where is your sister now?”
“France. She got married last year. Now they’re trying to start a family.”
“Uncle Thomas.”
I hadn’t given this much thought, and the idea made me smile. “Yep.”
“Anyhow, she’s a badass painter.” I bragged about Lacy for a few minutes, then segued into Lacy’s MS diagnosis and how we ultimately ended up in Maine. I touched briefly on the case that led to my being shot, but it wasn’t one of my favorite topics to dwell on and I shifted things in her direction. I asked, “How old were you when your dad was killed?”
She deflated slightly at the mention of her father. “Twenty-eight.”
“And that was four years ago?”
She nodded.
“So you’re thirty-two?”
“Yes, math wizard, I’m thirty-two.”
I grinned then asked, “What about your mom?”
“My parents got divorced when I was twelve. My mom moved to North Dakota and got remarried. I have two stepbrothers up there.”
“You ever go visit?”
“Every couple years. The town they live in is even smaller than here.”
The soft pounding of a hammer caused me to glance up. Randall’s wicker hat bobbed above the tall grass in the distance.
I turned back to Wheeler and said, “When I first got here, I was surprised at the size of Tarrin.”
“Smaller than you thought?”
“Bigger.”
“Really?”
“I mean, you guys have a Sonic.”
“Yeah, that was a big day,” she said smiling. She glanced down between her feet, and I could see the memory loading. Her head lifted,
