I turned and saw him looking at me with a mixture of concern and obstinacy. We had been over this ground before. But just before Christmas I thought I had finally convinced him that I didn’t want to pursue any more investigations into the shooting. Apparently Mac had other ideas.
“Clyde, let me explain,” he said. He took a step toward me.
I held up my hand. “There’s nothing to explain, Mac.” I dropped the file back on the table. “You’re checking up on me even after I asked you to let it go.”
“No, I wasn’t checking up on you.” He took another step forward and stopped when he met my gaze.
“Then what are you doing with the police report on the shooting?”
Mac sighed and looked away from me.
“I planned to talk to you about it while we were on vacation,” he said.
“Talk to me about what?”
“I think you’re being much too hard on yourself,” he said. “Your lieutenant says you won’t even consider his opinion that you acted well within the bounds of what would be expected—”
I stepped forward and held up my hand.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I completely misread the situation and shot an unarmed man. Nothing will change that fact.” I stopped and took a moment to control both my anger and my sadness.
“Clyde. You have to listen to me,” Mac said. He held his hands out in a pleading gesture. “You did what you were trained to do.”
“I need a few minutes, Mac.” I strode to the door and pulled it open. “I’ll see you at lunch.”
24
I went straight to my room, figuring I could grab a few minutes to calm down and get some perspective. Mac and I had covered this ground before. He felt I was overreacting and that all police officers face this kind of guilt along the line. He also didn’t want me to throw away my career at such an early point.
We frequently found ourselves at an impasse, and my reluctance to name another career seemed to prove Mac’s point that I needed to return to my job in order to be happy. I knew that I was dragging my heels and was grateful that my financial situation allowed me the time and space to figure things out. I needed to decide what to do with my life now that I had stopped running from who I was. But I wasn’t ready to share all of that with Mac yet and so he didn’t understand my reluctance to return to my old job.
I shook my head to clear it as I turned to shut the door behind me.
“Oh! I didn’t expect you,” Vi said from the couch by the window.
I’m embarrassed to say I actually jumped at the sound of her voice. I had been so intent on my own thoughts I didn’t see her sitting there in her multicolored array of shawls.
“Vi,” I said, “I thought you were at the workshop.”
She shook her head. “I needed a break from the knitting.” She said this while clicking her needles along a sage green scarf.
I cocked an eyebrow. “I see.”
She glanced at her hands and snorted. “Not that kind of a break. The gang couldn’t stop chattering about the blood-covered flashlight. Selma has them all thinking they’ll be murdered in their beds. I needed to think.”
“Me, too.” I sat on my bed and stared at the whiteness outside.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’ve been hoping we could go over the case together.”
“I really—”
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said and held one hand up to stop me. “You want me to just sit back and let you and Mac have all the fun.”
“I hardly think of trying to solve a murder as fun. Especially when the murderer is likely having dinner with us every night,” I said stiffly and again wondered how Vi always managed to make me feel like the older, more mature person in the room.
“Okay, you keep telling yourself that,” she said and went back to her knitting.
“What are you talking about?” She was irking me despite my intention to remain calm.
“I mean you’re made for this kind of thing.” She set her project down and turned to face me. “You loved working cases when you were a police officer and you’ve loved solving the murders in Crystal Haven this past year.”
Great. Another person trying to push me toward a calling that wasn’t mine.
“I don’t want to go back to police work, Vi.”
“Who said anything about the police?”
My head snapped up and I narrowed my eyes at her. “You just did. I can see right through you. You want me to join the Crystal Haven police force, and move back home for good.”
Vi came to sit with me on the bed. She put her arm around my shoulders.
“I do want you to move home for good, but I think you’d lose your mind if you joined the Crystal Haven police. You’d have to work with li’l Tom Andrews and take orders from Mac whenever anything interesting happened.”
Tom was a junior officer on the force, but Vi still saw him as the twelve-year-old neighborhood hooligan—her words. And Mac’s job as a homicide detective meant he took the case whenever there was a murder in Ottawa County.
I laughed and turned toward her. “Then what are you talking about?”