Susan splayed her hands. “But I love lasagna,” she said. “Ironic.” She pushed away from her desk and leaned back in her chair. “I need to work, Derek. I’m on deadline.”
His eyes fell to her jeans. “You’ve got blood on your pants,” he said.
She looked down at her shins. The blood had hardened into a smooth rust-colored stain. Susan uncrossed her legs and lowered her socked feet to the floor. “Thanks,” she said.
“I’ve got some OxiClean in my desk,” Derek said.
“That’s good on stains,” the intern said.
Susan turned to the intern. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing a sidebar on spleens?” she said.
“Sorry,” the intern said.
“You get anything out of the PIO?” Susan asked Derek. One of the great things about covering real news was getting to use nifty acronyms for things like “police information officer.”
“Nothing you didn’t get from Sobol. They haven’t identified the body yet. I did a little digging and found out that the house is owned by an old lady. She’s been in a home for over fifteen years. Place has been vacant since she left. There’s an oil tank on the property and radon in the basement. She couldn’t sell it.” He scratched the cleft in his chin. “I might go interview her. Human-interest angle. Funny thing is , she said that she’d already gotten two offers for the house since the news broke. I guess people want their very own Beauty Killer crime scene.”
“Sure,” Susan said. “Open up a little B and B.”
Derek shrugged. “What are you going to do,” he said. He turned and walked away, and sat back down at the desk he’d inherited from Parker a few months ago.
He never looked comfortable in it. It was too big for him.
C H A P T E R 19
They had cleaned up the blood spattered on the floor in the break room. Archie could still smell the bleach. Word on the ward was the counselor had needed stitches; Courtenay hadn’t. She was back in her room, in lockdown. She’d been singing the same song all afternoon. “High Hopes.” You could hear it all the way down the hall.
He’s got high hopes . . . high apple pie, in the sky hopes.
Archie hoped it was intended to be funny.
“My sister’s coming to visit,” Frank said from the couch.
“Yeah, Frank,” Archie said.
Archie had showered and put on clean clothes and brushed his teeth after dinner. They ate at five o’clock, like old people. Now he was drinking coffee out of a mug that had a cartoon of letters spelling MONDAY laid out on a psychiatrist’s couch. In a voice balloon, Monday is saying, “Everybody hates me.”
Archie took a sip out of the mug and glanced up at the clock. Six-thirty. Debbie was always on time. He watched the clock’s hands meet at the bottom of the clock, then looked over at the door to the break room. Debbie stood there, leaning against the doorjamb, smiling at him. Her summer tan, acquired from gardening, had faded. No garden at her secure Vancouver apartment. Still, she was more beautiful than ever. Short dark hair, a black sundress, bare arms crossed, silver bracelets on her wrists. She looked younger, almost happy.
Ben and Sara burst in on either side of her and ran to Archie. As time passed, they looked more and more like her. Her freckles.Her fine, straight hair.Her long limbs. It made Archie glad to see so little of himself in them, as if they might be spared some essential suffering. He hugged them both, inhaling the sweet smell of shampoo in their dark hair, holding them each a second longer than they wanted.
They were changing schools in the fall. But even if Debbie hadn’t moved, she’d never have allowed them to go back to their old elementary school. Not after what had happened there. It was the first place Gretchen had gone after her escape.
“Give your dad and me a minute,” Debbie said. The kids looked back at her, and Archie nodded and kissed them both again on the tops of their heads and watched as they went and sat on the couch in front of the television.
Sara pried her sneakers off and pulled her legs up under her on the couch and sat down next to Frank. It was after dinner and everyone except Frank and Archie was outside smoking. Free period.
Emergency Vets was still on. It must have been a marathon.
“Is this the one where the cat dies?” Sara asked Frank.
“Ferret episode,” Frank said.
“Good,” Sara said.
Debbie waited a moment, until the kids were absorbed in the show, and then walked over to where Archie was sitting. “What’s going on?” she asked him. Her arms were still crossed. He could smell her. The same shampoo as the kids, but other scents mixed in—a musky lotion, and a perfume he didn’t recognize.
They’d fallen in love in college, nearly twenty years ago. He still had a hard time imagining his life without her. But he was careful that she didn’t see it. He didn’t want to make things harder than they already were.
“What?” he said, thinking of the phone in his pocket.
“She’s back,” Debbie said.