myself that the faceless villain of my dreams had not succeeded, I became aware that my heart was racing. I took some deep breaths and tried to calm down.
I looked at the clock radio. Three in the morning. The dream still seemed close to me, and I felt some small fear of its return should I fall asleep too soon. I decided to get up for a few minutes, hoping that if I left the room, the dream would quit hovering over me, and leave by the time I got back to bed.
Cody made some fussing noises as I turned on the light and sat up, and was thoroughly displeased when I got out of bed. He seemed to waver between following me to see what I was up to and staying in bed. In the end, his curiosity won out and I heard him thump to the floor behind me.
We went into the kitchen, where I cut a few pieces of salami as a treat for Cody and poured a glass of milk for myself. Now that I was awake, I reflected on the fact that this was really my favorite time of day, when the coolness of the air combined with a kind of stillness. Distractions were at a minimum. No one was going to call or drop by, few if any cars would be on the streets. There were enclaves of activity here and there, but most of the city was asleep. “Just you, me, a few night owls and certain members of the criminal element are up and about,” I said softly to Cody, who was washing up after his meal. He looked at me as if I should hear some reply he had made, then went back to work on his front paw.
The paper I had bought earlier at the hospital lay on the kitchen counter, and I began to browse through it. When I reached the front page of our local news section, I saw something that triggered a memory that had been itching at me since the night before.
It was an announcement of a graduation ceremony for Las Piernas College. The memory it triggered was that of the moment just before Elinor Hollingsworth had noticed Pete’s car at the gate. We were up in the tower, and I was looking at Andrew Hollingsworth’s undergraduate diploma. It was from Arizona State University.
In itself, it might not mean anything. Lots of people had graduated from there. As far as I knew, Hollingsworth had always been thought of as a “clean” candidate. Other than O’Connor’s suspicions about some funding irregularities between the DA and the mayor, I had no recollection of any scandals associated with him. And in Las Piernas, anyone married to a Sheffield would be under lots of public scrutiny.
I thought about the microfilm article on the Hollingsworth wedding, which had been so close to the date of Jennifer Owens’s murder. I would have to look at the microfilm for those dates again. He had been a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, so he would have been older than Jennifer by some years. He also would have been away from Arizona for a while. I didn’t know if he was from Arizona originally, or if he had just gone to undergraduate school there.
No use suspecting everybody who had ever been in the state of Arizona, I told myself. All the same, I knew that whoever was involved was powerful, and few men in Las Piernas were more powerful than Andrew Hollingsworth. What if on the eve of his wedding, a young woman had suddenly shown up to tell him she was pregnant with his child? Would he kill her? Mutilate her body? Why not just pay her to keep quiet?
Who would have better access than a district attorney to a rogue’s gallery like the one that had been involved in the dirty work so far? I tried to picture Andrew Hollingsworth in this role. It was not impossible, but I had a long way to go before I was out of the realm of speculation.
I picked Cody up and lugged him back to the bedroom. “You weigh a ton, old boy,” I whispered to him, and got a purr in response. I flopped down on the bed with him, and we got settled in. I turned the light out and lay in the dark, thinking of Frank. I wondered if he was still asleep. I wondered if we would start driving each other crazy if we got any closer to each other. He could irritate me so easily, and I knew I could return the favor. Yet, paradoxically, there was something so comfortable about him, so easy to be with.
I wondered if I felt drawn to him because of the circumstances, if I had reached out to him as some kind of refuge. I was vulnerable, and I knew it. O’Connor’s death alone was enough to make me feel I had lost my footing. Was I getting close to Frank just because of the situation we were in? Could I have any kind of perspective on anything in a week like the last one? Was I just grateful to him for protecting me? Guilty because he had been injured?
I thought of him standing there in his shorts and smiled in the darkness. I didn’t know if Frank and I would be able to be more than good friends, but I did know that something more than dependence and guilt was involved.
“I like the guy,” I said aloud, and Cody looked up at me. I scratched him between the ears. Before long I was fast asleep. Morning came so quickly, I’m not sure I had time to dream.
38
I WOKE UP with the lousy awareness that exactly one week ago, my whole world had blown apart. O’Connor dead a week. I lay in bed, feeling the spike of painful, hopeless longing for his company run through me. I wanted so much to hear his voice, his laugh, his lousy Irish jokes. I wanted him to come back, to be alive again. I knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, but I wanted it anyway.
I made myself get up and get dressed. It didn’t help. Lydia was scheduled to work a half-day at the paper; I asked if I could ride in with her.
“Sure,” she said, studying me. “What’s wrong?”
I shrugged, not wanting to open a Pandora’s box of emotion by talking about how much I missed O’Connor. I was afraid I’d spend the morning blubbering into my breakfast cereal. I tried to make an effort at light conversation; when I failed to carry that off, I settled for being quiet.
Throughout breakfast and the drive to work, Lydia didn’t try to force me to confess my mood or the cause of it. If I had been on better emotional footing, I would have been grateful for it; as it was, I felt bad about not talking to her. I wondered if she regretted taking in such a brooding boarder.
“Lydia,” I said as she pulled into a parking space at the newspaper, “I don’t know how long all of this will go on. Maybe I should try to figure out some long-term arrangements.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t want to put a strain on our friendship. Maybe I should look for a place of my own.”
“Irene,” she said, giving me the exact same look that Sister Joseph used to give me when I had misbehaved in third grade, “relax. We’ve been friends over a long period of time. We survived
“But if I start to bother you—”
“Irene.”
