Not once had Daniel or anyone in his family ever made her feel like they were better than she was, but that had just proven to her young mind that they were. Especially once people started murdering her family.
“How is Inez?” he asked.
She walked slowly over to the porch steps. When she got there, she could smell Jovan Musk. She used to buy it for him every birthday.
She sat down on the middle step, the paper bag in her lap. “She’s good. She has two beautiful children.” He blinked at her a few times. “Her husband hasn’t come back from Vietnam.”
“I know.” His toothpick stopped moving, and he stared at her a moment. “I kept your senior picture taped to the inside of my helmet for two years, did you know that?”
It was her turn to stare.
“I didn’t know you were in Vietnam,” she managed to say. Retroactive fear for his wellbeing swallowed her whole.
“’66 to ’68,” he said, sounding so casual about it. “Your Grandma said there was no reason for you to be scared until there was something to be scared about.” He looked away for a moment before he spoke again. “I had my dad mail it to me, after I was in-country for about six months. And I taped it in my cover because when you’re over there it’s like no other reality exists.”
He took the toothpick out and looked at it, rolled it over a few times, then put the other end in his mouth. “I was starting to forget that the real world was here, not there. Even if you weren’t in it.”
“I wish you hadn’t been there,” Jennifer said quietly.
“I wish none of us had been there.” He tossed the toothpick into the grass. “Not even them.”
He stood up and stretched. “So, I smell that Mama Tyne is still a heck of a cook.”
Jennifer stood. “Yeah. Are you hungry?”
“No,” he answered, shaking his head.
“There’s plenty,” she said weakly. “Between Inez’s kids and the siblings and cousins and whatnot, there were eleven people in that house, and they still had leftovers.”
He was staring at her again, and he was so close that she was having trouble breathing. She hadn’t been that close to him in over a decade, and she had forgotten exactly how he smelled and sounded and all of his expressions. She had forgotten that he had a tiny white scar by his left ear. He got it falling off her handlebars, when they were messing around. And now he was so close and it was like seeing him again and also seeing him for the first time.
“I have to go,” he said shortly, and started down the steps.
“Wait,” she said, and he stopped on the bottom step, which put them eye to eye.
“I didn’t think you should leave, but you definitely shouldn’t have come back,” he said.
“I know. But, I needed to leave. And I needed to come back.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s the hell of the thing, right?” He turned and started walking away. “I’ll tell David and Audrey and little Danny that you said ‘hello’,” he said without turning around. “Remember them?”
It punched her right in the chest. She remembered vividly. It was just a few months before she’d left. They were just fooling around with his mother’s baby names book.
He was already at his truck before she found her breath, dropped her purse and the bag of leftovers and ran down the steps. He had just closed his door when she got there. He looked at her when she slapped the side of his truck.
“That was so unkind!” she yelled.
“I didn’t say it to hurt you. Yes, I did. I wanted to hurt you. But what you probably won’t believe is that that’s not all there is to it.”
His face was so close to hers that she could feel his breath, warm and humid, on her cheeks.
“Daniel, please don’t leave yet—”
He started his engine, then sat back. He looked at her as he shifted into reverse, and he didn’t look angry. He just looked sad. “Jennifer, everything that we could have said or done, well, we already missed that.”
She watched him drive away, her arms hugging her waist. Then she walked back to the porch, picked up her things, and opened the door. Below and beyond the scraping of the wooden door against the floorboards, she heard another sound.
She stopped, her hand on the door knob. She stood there and stared at the floor without seeing it, and listened. From somewhere behind her, in the woods between the side of the house and the road, she heard a branch snap.
She calmly walked inside, shut the door, and slid the useless bolt that was only there because people were supposed to have some sort of lock on their doors. The lock was so flimsy that it hardly mattered.
She slid her purse from her shoulder and set the bag down on the floor, then made her way across the living room in the dark. Only a few days, and she already remembered how to move through the house in total darkness.
She went through the living room, turned right into the short hall of the addition. As she passed the bathroom, she heard rustling through the open window. She didn’t pause, just kept walking normally, into her room.
She walked to the nightstand, and slowly pulled out the little drawer, the one that tended to stick. The only thing in it was her revolver. There was a window just above the nightstand, and another one on the south wall. The curtains on that window lifted just barely in the slight breeze. She looked back down at the drawer and closed her eyes, shutting out the visual to enhance the audible.
She waited for over a minute, hand hovering over her weapon, eyes closed, the breeze from the window brushing a wisp of hair against her forehead.
She waited and she thought that she hadn’t locked the kitchen door, because she had never locked it in her life, but it didn’t matter. The door was dozens of feet away and creaked terribly. Her hand was less than six inches from the Chiefs Special.
Female police officers worked twice as hard as men to excel, needing to excel at something, at anything, to be accepted. To survive. And she had excelled at marksmanship.
She waited for three minutes or more, without moving. Listening. To nothing else. Then she took her gun with her as she walked to the kitchen in the dark, turned the lock in the kitchen door knob, and then went to bed in her shorts and T-shirt, her gun beside her pillow.
Suddenly, Jennifer was already back by the lake, staring at Ned’s father’s 1959 Galaxie. Jennifer heard the roar of an engine, and tires on gravel, but this time she didn’t look up to see the taillights disappearing around the bend.
First, she saw the back of Ned’s head, leaning against the window frame. Blood that made no sense in Jennifer’s world was running down the side of the driver’s door. Then she realized that Inez was yelling over the car radio, which Ned had been blasting. That week’s hottest song, “The Locomotion”, which seemed so inappropriate, already.
“Jonah!” Inez was screaming from somewhere.
Jennifer ran to the driver’s side and yanked open the back door.
He was lying on his side and his eyes were wide open. The most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen. There was blood on the back of his neck, and on the seat beneath him.
In her sleep, Jennifer held her breath. No, it’s not supposed to be Daniel!
“No,” Jennifer said. “No,” she kept saying. She was almost grunting the word. The sound reminded some part of her brain of a mama bear, warning away some danger.
She dropped to her knees, barely feeling the gravel cutting into her skin.
Daniel’s eyes were wide open, and she hoped they were the last thing she would ever see.
Jennifer’s first morning with the Dismal, Florida Police Department started pretty much as she’d expected, though she hadn’t bothered to try to predict the exact details. Her shift started at six. She was up at three because she was too nervous to sleep any longer. She walked into the station with a red plaid Thermos of coffee just after five-thirty.<
br />
She was disappointed to learn that Ray wasn’t in. Sgt. Stewart Michaels, the gray-haired officer who had expressed his polite concern about lady cops, was the supervising officer for night shift. He advised her that the Chief was on his way to Chipley for a meeting with the sheriff of neighboring Washington County. Michaels had been polite enough, if not friendly, and Jennifer was grateful for that.
There was only one locker room, so Jennifer came to work fully dressed. Most of the guys who started trickling in did, too, though a few came in street clothes, grabbed some coffee, and went to the lockers to change.
Jennifer had gone straight from Sgt. Michaels’ desk to her own. She and Messer had the two desks in the east corner. Messer had a big jar of Kraft caramels on his desk, along with a picture of himself and a very pretty young woman with white-blond hair and a warm smile.
By 5:40, Daniel still wasn’t there, and neither was Messer. Jennifer didn’t really feel like having to speak to or walk through the other day shift guys, but she’d had a glass of water and two cups of coffee before leaving the house, and she needed to use the restroom.
She got up, feeling most or all eyes on her, and was relieved to see a woman enter the bullpen. She was a slightly chubby, older lady with a cap of tight, gray curls, and though she wore a brown polyester shift dress, she had a department name tag on her chest and a paper cup in her hand.
They met a few feet from the coffee table.
“Oh, hi,” the woman said. “You must be 232.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Your call number. Yours and Messer’s unit is 19, but he’s 219 and you’re 232. I’m Maureen, one of the dispatchers.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Jennifer said, and the older woman nodded as she started to fill her coffee cup. “Hey, can you tell me where the ladies’ room is?”
“Yeah, sure, it’s—”
“She wants to be a cop, she needs to use the cops’ facilities,” said a male voice behind them.
They both turned to see the redheaded cop, Whitney, standing there with a small paper sack that smelled of cinnamon rolls.
“Shut up, Norman, I play bridge with your mother,” Maureen said. She looked back at Jennifer. “It’s out front, off the lobby, down that hall to the left.”
“Thank you,” Jennifer replied, then sidestepped Whitney to head for the door.
Patterson, the blond cop who was worried about Jennifer’s menstrual cycle, winked at her as he was coming in and she was going out. She ignored him.
When she walked back to her desk, she found a gift waiting for her on her nearly empty desk. She heard a few chuckles behind her as she looked at the disconcertingly-large pink vibrator that was standing at attention next to her Thermos. She took a tissue from the box on Messer’s desk, picked up the vibrator and turned back the way she’d come.
She was distracted from Patterson’s smirk by Daniel’s entrance. As they approached each other, his eyes shot from her to the object in her hands, and his expression went from alarm to curiosity and anger. He didn’t say anything, though, as he passed her. Neither did she.
She stopped at Patterson’s desk and smiled as she stood the vibrator up on his desk. “Your wife will be wanting this back,” she said politely, then turned around with an accompaniment of laughter, some cautious, some heartier. She heard Daniel’s gentle laughter in the mix.
She bumped into Messer, who had apparently just walked in. He had a wide smile on his face. “Sheehan, I said to pack a lunch!”
There was more laughter this time, and this time Jennifer joined in, her deep, husky laugh a genuine one. She’d always wished it had been daintier, more feminine.
“If you’re done playing with your little friends, it’s almost muster,” Messer said as they walked to their desks.
She glanced over at Daniel. He was smiling at his pencil cup.
“Anyway, Michelle’s dad loaned us the down payment on the trailer, and we really want to pay him back, but do you know how expensive it is to give birth?”
“No, now that you mention it.” Jen took a sip from her Thermos. “So, is that where your wife is from, too? Defuniak Springs?”
“No, she’s from here,” he answered. “I’m originally from Pensacola. We moved to the Springs when I was fourteen, when Pop got out of the Navy.”
“So, it’s still going to be expensive? Even with PD insurance?”
“Like buying another car,” Messer said. “So, she’s been working nights over at Zayre’s until a couple weeks ago. They were really pressuring her to go home. Said it didn’t look good for her to be at a cash register at seven months.”
“They’re probably worried her water will break during the Fourth of July sale,” Jennifer said, smiling.
“That’s what she said!” Messer slapped at his steering wheel.
There had been no discussion about who would drive, though Jennifer headed for the passenger side before he went to the driver’s. Her last partner hadn’t let her drive at all. She figured Messer might, but he didn’t need too much change on his first day with her.
“You know, I just realized why I was kind of glad the chief assigned me to be your partner. I mean, besides the fact that you probably won’t fart me into a coma like Murray did, pardon the biology.”
He had already explained that his former partner, Kenneth Murray, had retired two months earlier.
“Okay, so why?”
“Well, it’s because you’re a woman, but not because you’re pretty, although you’re a knock-out, if you don’t mind me saying that.”
“Okay,” she said.
“What I mean is, you’re a very attractive person, but you’re not my type, even though you and Michelle are both blonds. Oh, crap, that sounded terrible!” he said, as Jennifer laughed.
“Thanks so much, partner.”
“No, no. Look, I’m sorry. What I mean is, there’s nobody in the world that can touch Michelle. I can see that another woman is really pretty the way I see that a new boat or the beach is pretty. But I haven’t seen a beautiful woman since my third date with my wife.”
“That’s really nice,” Jennifer said with a pang of envy. She was not that woman to anyone.
“She’ll like you,” he said. He looked over at her. “I’d appreciate it if you’d come over to eat when she invites you. It’ll make her feel better.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, look. She’s already asked me how old you are, what you look like, that kind of thing,” he shrugged. “You know, like a woman asks about another woman who’s spending time with her husband. We do the same thing, us guys. We’re just clumsier about it.”
“Anthony—is it okay if I just call you Anthony?” He shrugged. “If me being your partner is going to make her feel funny, I’m happy to talk to her.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I was honest with her. I said you were a little younger than us, and that you were blond, and yes you were pretty. I don’t lie to my wife, unless she asks me if I know where her Count Chocula went, okay?”
Jennifer laughed. “She knows you ate it, Anthony.”
“She thinks maybe I did, but her hormones are all messed up, so she thinks maybe she finished it off.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “I’ve been married four years, okay? Anyway, she’s not a jealous woman. Her self-confidence is just a little shaky because of the pregnancy. Once she meets you, she’ll like you, and she’ll feel fine.”
“I’d really like to meet her,” Jennifer said. “I have a really close girlfriend here, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been home. I don’t really know many people anymore.”
“Cool.” He drove in silence for a moment, then he glanced over at her a couple times.
“What?” she asked him.
“I can shut up. But…so, you and Daniel, then?”
There was
that dull ache in her chest, which wasn’t as dull as it had been a month ago, or even last week. “That was a long time ago. High school.”
“So?”
“So, what?”
“I really like Daniel, he’s a stand-up guy,” Messer said.
“He is,” Jennifer said to the window.
“Now that he’s single again, maybe you guys can rekindle or something.”
They were at the stoplight, and Jennifer was so grateful to already be staring at a fire hydrant. She even felt pale, so if Messer could have seen her face, she would have had humiliation to add to shock.
“He’s divorced?” she asked as casually as she could manage.
“Oh, Anthony your mouth,” he said quietly. “Hey, Sheehan. Jennifer, look, I’m really sorry.”
She looked over at him quickly, and gave him a smile that she hoped looked better than it felt. “Why? It’s okay. Really.”
But it wasn’t. It was ridiculous for her to feel anything other than a bit of regret for what might have been, like a normal adult would. They had been eighteen. Seniors in high school. Yes, they had made plans to marry. She had had a ring.
“I can’t just not explain, but please don’t tell Daniel where you heard it.”
Messer looked so upset when she turned to look at him that she started feeling sorry for him instead of herself. “I won’t,” she said.
“He was engaged to Angie somebody; I forget her last name,” Messer said. “She’s Pastor Huddleston’s assistant. You know, his dad. They broke it off a year or so ago.”
Jennifer nodded for no particular reason. “Okay,” she said simply, hoping she sounded like she was talking about the weather. In actuality, she just couldn’t help feeling like her cat died.
But it was eleven years ago. He wasn’t a senior in high school; he was a grown man, and grown men had lives that included grown women.
Late that first afternoon, Jennifer and Messer responded to a fender bender call on her old street. She’d been relieved that it was a few blocks shy of their old house, but her relief was short-lived. They had just sent the tow truck off and cleared the last of the looky-loos when she turned around and looked into the eyes of her father.
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