were between us.
“As much as I could. It’s still blowing pretty hard.” He stowed the snow shovel in the corner of the garage near the workbench. “At least we should be able to get out if we need to.”
The garage was deeply chilled, and even though I’d grabbed my coat, I still caught myself shivering.
As I was trying to think of a way to transition into the topic of the accident twenty years ago, Sean said abruptly, “I thought there was a detective from Denver you were interested in?” His question took me off guard. I’d never told him about Cheyenne, and I was surprised he’d heard about the potential relationship that had never gotten off the ground.
“Cheyenne Warren.”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
Cheyenne had been the one to fire the shots at the man who, as it turned out, was Tessa’s father. Since that terrible night, her relationship with Tessa had remained visibly strained, although both of them claimed things were all right. In the disquieting wake of the shooting, Cheyenne had left law enforcement and gone back to ranching. Neither Tessa nor I had seen her in more than three months.
“I’m with Lien-hua now,” I told my brother.
“I got to know her a little on the trail groomer. She’s nice.”
“Yes, she is.”
Telling him that I was thinking of proposing to Lien-hua seemed like the sort of thing that might serve in some way to draw us closer together, but also a little too personal to share at this point.
He stamped the snow off his boots. “Well,” he said ambiguously, then headed for the refrigerator. “Want a beer?”
“Naw.”
“Can’t drink while you’re on duty?”
“Something like that.”
He went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of Leinenkugel’s for himself, screwed open the top.
Absently, I picked up one of his ice-fishing poles. “Has it been a good year out on the ice?”
“Hasn’t been bad.” He watched me. “Oughta take you out before you leave. I know all the best spots in the area.”
“I’m afraid ice fishing’s never really been my thing.”
“It’s warm in the shanty. We have lawn chairs in there. A heater. Wieners. Some beer. Unless after what happened in the river… I mean, if you need to stay off the ice for a while.”
I gave him a halfhearted smile. “I appreciate that. When things settle down with this case, I’ll have to give it a shot.” I leaned the pole against the wall again.
A small pool of silence.
The more we fumbled around in the quagmire of small talk, the more painfully obvious the shallowness of our relationship was.
I decided to just go for it.
“Sean, remember how things used to be between us?”
He took a long draught of his beer. “How do you mean?”
“When we were kids.”
“When we were kids.”
“Yeah. We’d go fishing with Dad all the time. Never seemed to catch much, but-”
“I remember.”
“Trolled around the lake a lot.”
“Lake Windemere.”
“Yeah. We got to know that shoreline really well.”
“I remember.”
“I think the last time we went fishing together was that autumn before the accident.”
He regarded me for a moment. “The accident.”
“On New Year’s Eve.”
“I know which accident you meant.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No.” He took another drink. “Don’t be.”
“I mean, I’m sorry for the way things were after that. Between us.”
“The way things were?”
“The way they are.”
He lowered his beer, assessed me coolly. “Is that what you came out here to do? Go through that again? That night she died?”
“We’ve never really gone through it, Sean. Never really talked about-”
“Right. Okay.” He moved toward the door. “Hey, what do you say we head inside, see how the women are getting along?”
“Sean, I’m saying I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. About the deer. I know it hurt things between us.”
For a moment I thought he might just walk away, but then he faced me and I searched his dark eyes for understanding, for some kind of reprieve, but it didn’t come and I wondered if maybe our relationship was scarred in a way that would never heal. “I made things worse,” I said.
“No.”
“Yes,” I protested. “I did.”
“It was me.”
I shook my head. “I should have-”
“No.” He cut me off forcefully. “It was me. If we’d left that party earlier, if I’d let you drive, she never would have died. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“You can’t blame yourself.” I saw his hand tighten around the bottle. “It was an accident. You swerved to miss that-”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I do understand. You-”
“There was no deer that night.”
“What?”
He shifted his weight. “There was no deer.”
“The ice? Is that what you’re-”
All at once he turned from me and launched the beer bottle across the garage. It spun wickedly through the air, leaving a spray of suds in its wake until it smacked into the wall, sending an explosion of beer and glass splattering across the concrete.
The random movement above us in the living room stopped, and a moment later I heard purposeful footfalls moving across the room toward the stairs that led to the garage.
“I had too much to drink.” Sean was staring in the general direction of the shattered beer bottle, but he seemed to be looking beyond it to another place. “I had… I shouldn’t have been drinking.”
Footsteps on the stairs.
“You just had two. That’s not-”
“It was more than two. It was a lot more than two.”
Every time he reiterated his guilt, the words struck me harder. In many states there’s no statute of limitations on reckless vehicular homicide. If he really had been drunk that night, he could be The door to the stairs swung open, and Amber appeared. She peered at the foamy trail of beer extending the length of the garage, saw the smashed bottle, then fixed her gaze on Sean. Rather than asking what happened, she just shook her head slowly and then turned toward the stairs again.
“Wait,” he called.
“No. I’m tired of your-”
“Amber, just give me-”
“No!” There was razor wire in her voice and I couldn’t help but think of what she’d told me last night about her and Sean having their ups and downs. I could see this quickly moving into a major down.
