by AR Simmons
Cold Tears
A Richard Carter Novel
By AR Simmons
ACORN MOON PRESS
To Michelle with thanks.
Cold Tears
A woman as deep in despair as a person can be. Is it unbearable grief or unbearable guilt?
A child is missing, a baby taken away in the middle of the night. It’s a life-shattering tragedy, but no one seems to care. Is it because the grieving mother is a “lowlife druggie,” as the chief investigator maintains? Or is there another reason the case is given short shrift by the “good people” of James Mill?
Richard Carter, an ex-Marine suffering PTSD who has been spared prosecution for felony homicide only by a governor’s pardon, consents to help the grieving mother, Molly. In doing so, he ignores the pleading of his wife, Jill, who begs him to disengage from the situation which she sees as a threat to his wounded psyche.
Will the truth, if and when he finds it, save or destroy the woman who sees Richard as her “godsend?”
What he is doing may be futile as well as unwise. It may, in fact, plunge him into clinical depression and wreck his marriage. He has given his word to Molly, but Jill is his life.
What will the truth do to them all? And what are “cold tears”?
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, to steal bread.
—Anatole France, “The Red Lily”
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Cold Tears
Epigraph
Night Terror
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilog
Cast of Characters
Places and Features
Preview of Canaan Camp
The Richard Carter Novels
Disclaimer
Copyright
Night Terror
Molly rolled onto her side and cried out as her broken rib wrenched her awake. She groaned, sat up gingerly, fighting against nausea as the room spun around her. Drawing shallow breaths to keep the pain in her side tolerable, she watched the gray rectangle of the window execute a never-concluding fall to the floor. She turned on the lamp, gasping as harsh light slammed raw pain through her eyes to the top of her head.
Bracing against the walls, she stumbled down the hall to the bathroom and went in without flipping the switch. As she did often, especially when drunk or hung over, Molly replayed all the bad times, running through the futile “what ifs.” It was a terrible idea, and she knew it. It had become an irresistible compulsion lately, however, like picking at a scab.
On the way back to her lonely bed, she stopped by the other bedroom and listened for the comforting sound of her daughter’s breathing. Hearing nothing, she held her breath to listen closer. There was only the sound of air whistling from the overhead vent. She reached inside and flipped the switch. The bed was disheveled, but unoccupied. Light flickered from the muted television in the living room. She went into the bedroom and pulled a blanket from the bed. Dragging it down the hall, she tried to remember if Katie had said anything about bedding Mancie down in the living room.
The crib was empty, causing her a confused moment of anxiety.
She tried to calm herself as she went back to the bedroom. Colliding with the doorframe shot renewed pain through her side, but cleared some of the fuzz in her mind. She inhaled carefully and then went around the bed, sure that she would find her daughter curled up on the floor again. Mancie wasn’t there.
Molly lowered herself gingerly to her hands and knees to peer under the bed.
Nothing!
Beginning to panic, she hurried back to the living room, throwing on the hall light in the process. She searched the floor behind the chair and couch. Then she rushed to her own bedroom, thinking that maybe she had brought her daughter to bed like she used to right after Pat moved out.
The bed was empty.
She searched everywhere again. Then she saw the security chain hanging unfastened. She tried the knob. It was unlocked.
“Mancie!” she shouted, rushing outside into the darkness.
She screamed her daughter’s name again. And then she just screamed and screamed.
Chapter 1
August 30
Sun shimmered from the face of the Atlantic as Jill’s flight chased westward, carrying her home. Mirabelle was gone, but she was through with mourning. That’s the way her aunt would have wanted it. Jill would feel sorry for herself no longer. She couldn’t afford to.
I’ll make this work, Aunt Mirabelle, she vowed to the precious woman who had been her only real parent.
Soon I will be with Richard again, and everything will start coming together for us.
She looked out at the clouds and pictured his smile. He hasn’t smiled much lately. But who would, considering what had happened to him—what had happened to both of them.
None of it was his fault. Why can’t he see that?
Like the accomplished scholar she was, Jill had exhaustively researched post-traumatic stress. It had only armed her with the names of her husband’s demons, not with a means to exorcise them. He now refused to talk of Somalia or Mic Boyd. A psychiatrist warned him that he could not just “ignore it away,” but Richard had no use for psychiatry, and steadfastly denied that he suffered from PTSD.
He is too good to have faced all that and come away undamaged.
Everything she tried to do seemed either futile, or had only made things worse.
Maybe nothing I do will ever make a difference.
She twisted away from her gloom. You always said that despair was a sin, Aunt Mirabelle.
She comforted herself with the thought that things had been improving before she’d left for the funeral. Richard seemed enthusiastic, even cheerful, about the possibility of her entering a Ph.D. program at Auburn. He was both supportive of her career, and accepting of the demise of his own dream.
If only the law enforcement career had been left to him, she thought with a sigh.
The Michigan pardon had resolved his legal problems, but had not expunged the fact that he had initiated a fight resulting in felony homicide. No matter that the “victim” had been a serial murderer, neither the FBI nor any other law enforcement entity could see him as anything but politically untouchable.
She sighed and looked out upon the clouds now veiling the sea below and sealing her inside the narrow world of the cabin. With the absence of turbulence, the steady low drone of the engines provided the only clue that they were moving. She closed her eyes.
Tonight, she said to herself as she imagined lying entwined with him, wrapped in his arms. Tonight, love.
•••
James Mill, Missouri, (Southeast of Springfield), 2:30 PM
The door opened to a fetor of mildew and something sour in the dead, silent air. Dropping her suitcase in alarm, she cried out. “Richard!”
No answer.
No! Please, God! Not that!
She rushed inside, leaving the door ajar. In the kitchen, an open gallon of milk turned to curds and whey sat at the edge of a sink filled with beer cans. Other cans littered the table and counters. One lay upon the floor beside the overflowing trash can. There were no dirty dishes, but a solitary glass of spoiled milk sat on the counter beside a black and shrunken banana hosting a small cloud of gnats.
Holding her breath, she rushed down the hall to the bedroom. The bed was disheveled but empty. In the bathroom, towels hung neatly as she had l
eft them, but the stool was unflushed.
The basement, she thought numbly.
Trembling, she went to the stairway and opened the door. A high-pitched series of blips and beeps sounded, and pale light flickered in the dark. She flipped on the light switch.
“Richard?” she called out fearfully again.
A chair scraped on the concrete floor.
Thank you, God, she breathed, closing her eyes in relief.
Richard appeared at the foot of the stairs. “You’re home,” he said, smiling up at her.
“Are you okay?” she managed without gasping.
He didn’t look okay.
“Yeah. I’ll be up in a minute. I just—hold on. Let me turn off the computer,” he called out, darting back into the darkness. “I’ll be right up.”
Jill’s heart was still racing, and her knees felt like jelly.
“Why did you take it there?” she called down. There were other, more important questions.
“The light,” he said, taking two stairs at a time as he hurried toward her. “I can see the screen better away from the light. I’ll bring it back up for you after while.”
His appearance appalled her. Although always thin, Richard had wasted alarmingly in her absence. His eyes were dull and sunken, his face pale above unkempt whiskers. He appeared not to have shaved in over a week. The clothes were the same he wore when she’d left for the funeral, and a sour smell suggested that he had gone without bathing.
“What have you been eating?” she asked.
“Stuff,” he said vaguely. “Mostly from the fridge.”
“But you bought beer?”
He shrugged. “I only bought a couple of cases. I didn’t get drunk—honest. I made it last for two weeks. What is that? Less than two cans a day?”
“What exactly did you eat?”
“I … don’t know. I wasn’t hungry. But I could eat something now,” he said eagerly.
Jill imagined him holed up in the basement, subsisting on the occasional can of beer, and playing video games, neglecting even minimal housekeeping and personal care. Obviously, he had neither worked nor tried to find a job.
“Richard, I love you, but …” she began sternly. “I have to go to the college to check my mail and talk to Doctor Campbell. When I get back, we’ll go get something to eat and … and we must talk.”
“Sounds great.”
“Could you clean up this place and shower … and either trim your beard or shave it off?”
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said lamely.
“I know, dear.”
Jill left the house feeling as if she would choke on the knot in her throat. She drove only around the corner before pulling to the curb. She put the car in park and covered her face with her hands and cried.
•••
4:45 PM
Absent the beard, Richard looked even more emaciated. Sharp cheekbones accentuated his sunken eyes. He continued to apologize.
“I just couldn’t find the energy to do anything, Jill,” he said. “I tried … I just … couldn’t keep anything going. I’m so sorry. You had to go through all that, and then you get back here and find … all this.”
She tried to imagine what had made him do what he had. It was nothing like him. He didn’t even like video games.
“What happened, Richard? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I just … you were gone and … and nothing seemed to matter anymore.”
“But I was coming back, Richard. You knew I was coming back.”
He was no more able to comprehend it than she.
“Things will be different now—better,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Would things ever be right again? She didn’t know. One thing was certain. He needed her. She vowed never to leave him again.
“Say, I’m hungry. I really am,” he said. “You want to get something to eat. How about that Chinese place you like? Want some cashew chicken? That would be good, wouldn’t it?” His sentences stumbled over each other, betraying the pretence of his enthusiasm.
Jill had no appetite, but she wanted him to eat. “That would be nice,” she said.
Richard held the door open for her as they went out, his courtesy reminding her of a first date. He started the car, but made no move to leave.
“Sorry for all this,” he said again. “This was all you needed. You come home and find me … wallowing in self-pity like that. I’ve been so damned selfish.”
At last, he sounded more like himself. “It is okay, Richard. We are together again. Everything will be fine now.”
She was not at all sure that everything would be fine.
“I’ve got to find a job working with my hands, Jill,” he said suddenly as they pulled out. “I can’t talk people into buying things they probably don’t need.”
“Everyone needs insurance,” she said. “Why can’t you try to stay with this job?”
“The commission part bothers me—my income depending on how many policies I sell. It just seems that sooner or later I’ll be pushing people to buy more than they can afford.”
With the few policies he had sold so far, Jill thought that there was little danger of that. She wanted him to keep the job, keep any job for that matter. They needed it for his sake as well as for the income.
“A lot of honest people sell insurance,” she said.
“It’s not for me,” he said stubbornly. “I want a job where the only thing I have to do is show up every day and work my butt off.”
It wouldn’t matter to her if Richard never made as much money as she would eventually make as a professor. She was no snob when it came to honest work. She worried, however, that it might matter to him.
“So have you applied for such a job?”
“I talked to a guy,” he said vaguely as he pulled into the lot at Taipei Garden.
Their budget prohibited ordering from the menu, so they went through the buffet line.
“I’m sorry about your aunt,” he said, covering her hand with his when they got back to the table. “I wish we could have afforded for me to go with you.”
“We did the sensible thing. Aunt Mirabelle would have understood.”
“Was it a nice service?”
The priest had said nice, appropriate things, but he was new to the parish and hadn’t known her aunt. “No, it wasn’t.”
“You sound angry,” he said.
“I am only disappointed. No one ever appreciated her.”
“From what you tell me, it was their loss. I wish I could have met her.”
This was Richard, her man, the one she had expected to find when she returned home. “Thank you,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“Mirabelle would tell me quit feeling sorry for myself, wouldn’t she?” he said softly.
She studied him intently. “Is that what happened, Richard?”
He shrugged, still as much at a loss as she. “I let you down, Jill. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“We agreed not to unless there was an emergency. I didn’t want to bother you with something so … so trivial. I mean, it’s silly, isn’t it? A grown man, and I can’t even spend a few days alone without … just falling apart like that.”
“We were warned about this. Maybe you should—”
“I’m not seeing a shrink,” he said stubbornly, cutting her off. “You know how I feel about those guys. They have to be a little nuts themselves or they’d never go into the business.”
“They are doctors.”
“Witchdoctors, maybe. No one is screwing with my head—and I’m not taking a bunch of mood-altering drugs either. No chemical crutches for me, thank you. I’ve got enough problems without that.”
Normally reasonable, Richard was adamant about psychiatry. He could clearly benefit from counseling. She gave it another go. “After what happened while I was gone, don’t you think that perhaps …?”
She stopped when she saw him clench his jaw in ang
er.
“Look, Jill. Think of it like … like I fell off the wagon or something while you were gone. Okay? I just kind of fell down this hole and couldn’t get out. But I didn’t do anything destructive like get drunk, or try to kill myself, or something like that. Now you’re back, and I’m fine. Stop worrying about me.”
“I’m not worried,” she lied.
“Sure you are. You came home and found this crazy guy holed up in the basement like a junior high kid playing hooky. It probably scared the hell out of you.”
He thought he was exaggerating her concern, but he wasn’t.
“Well, I love that guy, and I need him,” she said, squeezing his hand again.
“I’ll pull it together now,” he assured her. “You’ll see.”
The doctors had warned her that his emotional recovery would be a long (perhaps lifelong) process. Today was brutal confirmation. Jill saw clearly now that she would have to provide strength and stability for them for the foreseeable future. She vowed again never to leave him alone.
•••
On the way home, he slowed abruptly, looking intently to his right. “There’s the guy I told you about.”
“What guy?”
He pulled quickly into a service station behind a flatbed truck loaded with roofing shingles. “Hold on. He’s getting ready to leave,” he said, getting out and trotting toward the station.
Two rawboned, shirtless men in their early twenties came out. One of them noticed Jill and smiled appreciatively. As they went to the truck, the other looked back at her, said something, and dug an elbow into his buddy’s ribs. Both laughed. She ignored them and turned her attention toward the station where Richard stood talking with a man clad in jeans and a soiled T-shirt. The man opened the driver’s side door of the truck and turned back to nod. Richard nodded back.
“Looks like I have a job starting tomorrow,” he said as he got into the car.
“Those men are carpenters?”
“Roofers. Hard work and we start early. I’ll be getting the minimum wage to start with, but it’ll be steady work through the fall. Eric has more jobs than he can handle. Two of his guys quit on him.”
