“Hello?” she said warily, anxious that it might be more bad news. The phone was cold and heavy in her hand.
“Ms. Ross. It’s Lydia Strong. We wanted to let you know that we’re going to be taking on your case.”
“I’m so glad,” she said, and she was. Relief washed over her like a wave.
“There’s paperwork you’ll need to fill out. Would you like us to messenger it to you, or would you prefer to come by?”
“You saw my daughter today,” she said, not answering the question. “Do you think she’s guilty?”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone before the girl answered. “No. I don’t.”
Eleanor was glad to hear it, though she wasn’t sure she believed Lydia Strong. “I’ll come by the office tomorrow around noon, if that’s all right.”
“That’s fine. We can talk some more then. I have some more questions for you.”
“Very well,” answered Eleanor. “Good-bye.” She hung up the phone and sighed. They could ask all the questions they wanted. But there were only so many answers she could give.
Lydia folded Jeffrey’s cell phone and handed it back to him. He took it from her and held her hand in the warm pink waiting room. Everything was pink and roses, smelling of potpourri. Even the bulbs behind the sconce lighting were pink, the reception desk a rose-colored Corian. A very pregnant woman sat across from Lydia reading a copy of
Lydia smiled back at her. “You’re beautiful,” she said, and meant it. The man smiled at them and returned to his magazine. After a few more moments, a nurse came out and escorted the young couple in to see the doctor. Lydia noticed a soapstone sculpture that sat beneath a lamp on the end table next to the couch where the woman had been sitting. It was the impression of a woman, her head a stone atop her belly, which was a circular nest with another tiny stone nestled in the curve.
“Oh, God,” said Lydia, squeezing Jeffrey’s hand.
“I’m right here,” he said with an indulgent smile.
“You damn well better be,” she said. “You’re stuck now… shotgun wedding and all.”
He laughed and released her hand, put his arm around her and pulled her close. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried,” he whispered in her ear.
chapter seven
Ford McKirdy pulled his green Taurus into the narrow driveway beneath his Bay Ridge row house. He didn’t bother pulling the car into the garage, but he attached the Club to his steering wheel, took the bag of Chinese takeout from the passenger seat, and locked the doors. Nobody wanted his piece-of-shit car, anyway, which was part of the reason why he drove it.
He felt heavy and tired as he pulled himself up the red brick steps to his front door. His neighbors in most of the other houses had hung their Christmas lights and decorations, making the block a tacky visual cacophony of multicolored bulbs, plastic Santas, reindeer, snowmen, and nativity scenes. Ford’s house looked grim and neglected by comparison. He held the screen door open with his back, looping the bag around his wrist as he fit the key into the knob. The air was cold outside, a biting winter chill moving in for the first time in a season that had been unusually mild. The house was dark inside, empty.
A lifetime ago, his children, Katie and Jim-or James, as he liked to be called now-and their golden retriever, Max, would have raced each other to the door in a messy, happy tumble to greet him. He could hear the echo of Max’s deep barking, the kids’ yelling. His wife would be standing in the archway between the living room and the dining room, the look on her face telling him if he was in trouble or not for however he’d fucked up that day. The smell of whatever she was cooking reaching him as he embraced her. But tonight the house was quiet. Max was long gone, put down nearly five years ago now. Katie, a kindergarten teacher, lived with her husband and two kids in Houston. Jimmy was a Wall Street broker living in Battery Park City “working like a slave and partying like it’s 1999,” as he liked to say; Ford saw even less of him than he did Katie, though he was only a few subway stops away.
His wife, Rose, hard to believe she was gone more than a year now. All the difficult times they’d faced together, all the hell he’d put her through, all the fights and late nights she spent worrying about him, all the canceled dates and missed anniversaries because he’d “made a big collar.” After thirty years together, she’d finally had enough.
“I have good years left, Ford,” she told him one night, when he’d come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, her coat on and an overnight bag by her feet. “I don’t want to live them like this. Our children are grown and happy. I did my job, taking care of my family.”
She’d put some money away, wanted to travel.
Turns out no one ever told him that all the things that make you a great cop make you a shitty father and husband. He missed her every night when he came home to the quiet, cold Brooklyn house where he’d lived for twenty-five years, twenty-four of them with her. But when he thought of her, he realized he didn’t know certain things about her that a man should know about his wife, like her favorite color, the perfume she wore, what made her laugh. He’d paid attention to every detail of every case he’d ever investigated, had a catalog of professional memories, remembered things about cases twenty years ago like it was yesterday. But when it came to Rose, he was ashamed to admit, he didn’t even know her dress size.
Ford flipped on the light in the hallway and hung his coat in the closet. He looked at himself in the mirror that hung behind the door, the mirror where Rose had always combed her curly black hair and applied lipstick to her full, soft mouth before leaving the house. He looked old, with blue smudges of fatigue under his eyes, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw. His salt-and-pepper hair was in serious need of a trim. He was fat and pale. Shit, he didn’t even get on the scale anymore. He didn’t
He turned out the light and walked over the red shag carpet of the living room and onto the speckled Formica of the dining room and into the kitchen.
When Rose left, he realized he didn’t know how to run the dishwasher. That he couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed a stitch of clothing or been inside a grocery store. He was virtually helpless. Thank god for Chinese takeout and Laundromats. If it weren’t for the Asians, he’d be dirty and hungry all the time.
The aroma of sesame chicken wafted from the bag as he dropped it on the counter by the sink. He washed his hands and pulled a plate from the cupboard. It was funny, not in a ha-ha way but in a pathetic and miserable way, that he’d spent his whole life trying to be different from his father and his life was turning out just exactly the same way-alone, a heart attack looming in the not-too-distant future. He turned on the television that sat on the stand by the table to the eleven o’clock news, brought the bag and the plate over to the table, and sat down.
Ford’s father, a first-generation Irish American, had been a mean bastard of a drunk who’d never held down a job for more than a month. Living off welfare and the meager salary Ford’s mother earned as a clerk at Macy’s, his father had systematically terrorized and tried to ruin the lives of his wife and each of his children. He’d beaten Ford and his older brother Tommy, nearly killed his mother before she got the strength to leave him and move them all away. His father died alone in a room at the YMCA, a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, with no one to mourn him.
In his life, Ford had worked to be exactly the opposite of the man his father was. He’d learned the value of discipline and hard work from his mother and promised himself that no children of his would want for things the way he and his brother had. He’d worked long hours of overtime to make sure his family had everything they needed and more. He’d never had more than a beer or two in a sitting. Even with all of that effort, always sure he was doing the right thing just because it was the opposite of the way his father had done it, now he was alone.
