“I don’t want to put you out—”
“Oh hush, you. You need a good feeding now and then. How’s Linda?”
“Somewhere in Florida, I think. We haven’t spoken in a while.”
She gives him a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry to hear it. I thought you two might put things back together.”
“I’d hoped to, but taking the sergeant’s job shut it all down. Junior’s on the street now, too, doing the family proud. I think two cops in the family is more than she can handle. It’s all good. Paperwork’s final next week. We’ve kept it civil.”
“It’s still a shame. But Junior, he’s a good boy. Handsome in that uniform. Mine are rebels. I don’t know if they’ll ever grow up.”
Andrea and Gorman have twin boys, and Parks knows she isn’t kidding, they are both wild. Fun, and fearless, and smart. They are juniors at Sewanee now. Gorman was so proud the day they were accepted, bragging to everyone he’d come in contact with.
Andrea pushes a glass of tea toward him and gestures for him to sit at the island. She stays standing.
He takes a deep drink of the tea. “I assume you’re wondering why I’m here.”
“I figure it’s something about a case Gorman was working on.” She says her dead husband’s name with barely a wince, and Parks is proud of her.
“You’re right. It’s the Armstrong case.”
“Oh, the missing baby? Gosh, that was years ago.”
“Right.” More tea, a cookie nibble.
“Spit it out, Bob.”
“Gorman had his own case files, yes?”
“Every homicide detective does, you know that. You need the Armstrong files? After all these years, too. Imagine that.”
“It might be nothing. Zack Armstrong made a call yesterday. Apparently he called Gorman regularly, hoping for updates.”
“He’s not the only one. But yes, he called, on schedule, twice a year. I guess no one told him about...well, Gorman’s been gone long enough, I can say it. That he died.”
“Armstrong wasn’t aware of the accident. He was caught off guard, for sure. It’s probably nothing, but I took a look at the case files, just to familiarize myself. I hadn’t seen them, figured what the heck. There was a recent notation that piqued my interest. A handwritten Post-it note. Gorman’s writing. I was hoping his personal files might explain what it meant.”
“What did the note say?”
“‘Colorado.’ It was underlined three times.”
She stills, and her eyes become hooded. A hand snakes to her throat.
“Did he mention that he might be looking into anything while you were out there?”
She shakes her head, still pale. “But he wouldn’t have told me. It was a family vacation. Winter break. We’d never skied the Rockies, he thought the boys would love it. He said he wanted to experience it while his knees were still good, and while he was still fully insured with Metro, in case he broke a leg.” She stares into the backyard. A squirrel is swinging wildly from a red ball feeder. “It was almost like he knew something was going to happen.”
“You know how we are, Andi. Superstitious to a fault.”
“I do.” She meets his eyes again. Hers are misted, and she gives a weak smile. “He didn’t mention anything to me that I know of, but let’s go look at the files. I know where they are.”
She leads him up the stairs to Gorman’s office, all dark wood and heavy desk. It is immaculately polished and dusted, the bookshelves gently lit, as if their master will be home to peruse them at a moment’s notice. It makes Parks’s heart hurt.
“I haven’t messed with anything. Haven’t seen the need. I rarely came in here when he was alive. It’s not like I need the space, not with the boys away at school. If one of them decides to come back home for more than a week, I’ll think about it. These kids now, they have to live at home because they can’t afford to buy a house and live on their own. Oh, look at me, I’m babbling. You go on in. The Armstrong files will be with the rest, in the closet. I’m just going to...” She starts to back out of the room.
“I’ll be quick.”
“No, no, take your time, hon. I’ll make some more tea.”
“Your class? I don’t want to keep you if you need to go.”
She stops, cocks her head to the side, purses her lips. “I think I’ll skip yoga today. I was thinking about playing hooky anyway, going to Parnassus and browsing instead. I haven’t read anything good lately. You take your time,” she says again, and he lets her leave.
She is a tough nut, Andrea Austin.
The files are where she said, in the closet. A corrugated box, and inside, thick stacks of paper. He sets the box on the desk and digs in.
There is a skiing magazine. Photocopies of various Colorado ski areas, timetables, competition schedules. Parks is confused but keeps thumbing through.
He sees nothing that stands out. Had Gorman lost his marbles and tucked his winter break ski research into the wrong file?
Another page flip and he sees a story printed out from Ski Magazine stapled to the magazine’s January cover. On the cover, a young woman holds a pair of skis and grins, a gold medal dangling from her right hand. Her goggles obscure her face, but it is easy to tell she is young. In red marker, the twenty-point font headline name is circled.
Mindy Wright, Skiing’s Next Superstar.
“Mindy Wright?” Andi’s voice startles him. She’s come up the stairs again, silent and soft, and is standing behind him.
“Do you know who she is, Andi?”
“You haven’t heard of her? She’s one of the best young skiers out there right now. Gorman was following her career like a hawk. She was expected to get onto the Olympic team this year.”
“Was? What happened to her?”
“Blew out her leg at a World Cup event last month. God, Gorman would be so disappointed if he knew. He thought she was the next Lindsey Vonn, only better. More focused, more athletic. Less likely to get injured because of how she trains. Boy, was he wrong.”
“I had no idea Gorman was such a ski fanatic.”
Dimples flash in Andrea’s cheeks. “Oh, he loved it, though he rarely had the chance to ski himself. The boys decided they wanted to learn how to snowboard a few years back, so we took them to Snowshoe in West Virginia for winter break. They liked it well enough, but Gorman, he was hooked. Like a fish to water. I’d only ever water-skied myself, and I thought it was fun, but it was so cold, and I kept falling down because I couldn’t get the hang of leaning forward instead of back.
“Gorman, he had no form, looked like a pile of sticks doing cartwheels, but the rush of flying down that hill satisfied the adrenaline junkie in him. We could barely get him off the slopes that first day. And ever since, any chance he got... He was obsessed. You know how some men watch golf on the weekends? He watched skiing. Even got an upgrade on the satellite plan so he could watch the European races. He was all FIS, all the time.”
“FIS?”
“International Ski Federation. They sponsor all the World Cup events.”
“Ah. And Gorman was a fan of Mindy Wright?”
“Devoted. I asked him once what the attraction was—outside of her being adorable in all the right places, of course. He said she was a huge talent, but I sometimes wondered if it was more.”
“More?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t like him to get so attached to a stranger, you know?”
“Did he ever meet her?”
She nods. “The weekend he...we went to Beaver Creek to see her ski. She won the race. He got her autograph. Shook her hand. I have a picture here somewhere, probably on the camera. I... I haven’t looked at the photos.”
“Let me do it. You don’t need to.”
“No,” she says, voice full of steel. “It’s high time I did. Come with me.”