And when Mike McNally had confessed to falling in love with nineteen-year-old prostitute who turned up dead after one of their secret little dinners at her place, Merci had wondered the same of him
She nodded. Suspicion. Wonder. Surprise. Certainly, Eccles was entitled to them. "Okay. What do you think-Archie and Gwen, bottorn line?"
Eccles tapped his beer glass on the table. He looked at her with cold hurt in his eyes.
"I don't know, Detective-that's what I'm trying to say. Based on what I've heard of the evidence, and what I know of Archie,
I just damn don't know what to think."
His face colored and his gaze caromed off of hers.
"Well, if CNB and Gary Brice come snooping around, you don't need to say that to them," she said. "You can give him the benefit of the doubt."
"Don't worry. I'm just suspicious, Sergeant. I don't understand people who hold out. Especially on people who are trying to be the friends. But I'm not dumb enough to talk about it on TV. Listen- how do you think this sits with me? To say what I just said about him? My friend's got a bullet in his head. I feel like Judas. But I had to say it because it's what I've seen and it's what I believe. And because Gwen's dead. Maybe Fraud is getting to me. All you hear are lies and scams."
She considered this, laying some money on the table. "What you said was hard to admit. I respect it."
"I hope I'm wrong. Like you were."
She looked at him sharply but what was the point? "I do, too."
A long silence then, observed by the ghosts of Rayborn's memory. Eccles brought out his wallet. "By the way, McNally's a racquetball friend of mine. He talks about you. Not a lot, but more than a little."
"Don't."
It was Merci's turn to color now, and she felt it happen.
Eccles shrugged. "He admires you."
"That's not possible."
He looked at her with a level, open expression. "Maybe you know less than you think you do. I know you're a good detective. Everybody knows that. But you ought to open up a little and see what's around you. What's possible. What can happen. People are surprising. Give him a call sometime."
Merci looked at him, allowing some pleasantness into her face. "You don't sound like a Fraud guy now. Sure you're cut out for that detail?"
Eccles shrugged and smiled. "That was the old me talking. I was a Boy Scout-literally. That boy's not quite extinct, yet."
"Hang on to him."
"I'm trying."
She got home that night after eight. Clark and Tim were at the dinner table, facing each other, Tim in his booster seat and Clark leaning forward on his elbows.
Clark looked at her with concern. Tim didn't look her way at all. It was a typical Monday, Tim displeased by his mother's absence after two days of togetherness.
She hugged him and he ignored her, turning his head away when she went to kiss him.
"Thanks a lot, you ungrateful little monster," she said.
"He just missed you."
"Funny way to show it."
Tim turned to look at her now. "Hi, Mom!"
She attacked him with kisses and hugs and Tim endured it, giggling as she tickled him under his chin. Merci plopped into the chair at the head of the table, Tim to her left and Clark to her right.
"Whew," she said. "That was a day."
Clark stood and put his hand on her shoulder as he pivoted around her and into the kitchen. "Monkfish tonight," he said. "The poor man lobster."
"We're poor," she said. "Perfect."
"I saw the CNB story this afternoon. Tim watched it, too."
"Great, Dad." She shot a glance at her father, but Clark dodged by looking into his skillet. He let Tim see and do things that she would not, and that was simply the way it was. She'd spent a year scolding her father for his permissiveness, then given up. So far as the TV was concerned, anything went.
"Awchie is not okay?"
"No, Archie is not okay. He's missing."
"He is missing?"
"Yes. For now he's missing."
"Is not missing?"
"You're exhausting, Tim," said Merci. "Cute, but exhausting."
"Gary Brice called here twice," said Clark.
"That asshole." Too late.
"Not an asshole?"
"I quit."
After dinner she bathed her son. She put short pajamas on him for the heat but he insisted on wearing his cowboy boots. He sat on her lap in the bedroom rocker while she read to him. The first three stories kept him intensely focused, but then his boot heels started sliding down her leg and his body grew heavier as he tired.
The last story was
Da Grouchy Moocher Boogie Man, which Merci found too dark and coincidental for her taste. But Tim liked it, studying the colorful illustrations as the old man dies and the young girl holds his craggy head.
Tim yawned and clumped across the floor to bed. Merci pulled off his boots and put them on the floor where he could see them. She pulled a sheet and one light blanket over him and turned off the light. She went back to the rocker then, for the last few words she'd have with Tim that day. This was a favorite time for her, talking to her son with the room darkened but the light from the hallway coming in. She wished it could last for hours.
"Grouchy Moocher Boogie Man is dead?"
"Yes, he dies in the story."
"He is all gone?"
"All gone. But he's just a character in a story."
"He is not real?"
"Exactly."
"Daddy is all gone?"
Her heart sank again because she'd heard this line of questioning before. There seemed to be no satisfying it for Tim, and she had come to realize that this is how the dead remain active on Earth.
"Yes, Daddy is all gone."
"Is dead also?"
"Yes."
"Is not a character in a story?"
"Correct. He was real. Your daddy was real."
"Name is Tim?"
Was Tim or is Tim? She sighed quietly and felt a warm wetness in her eyes.
"Yes. His name is Tim."
"And he is all gone?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
A few minutes later she said good night, I love you, and pulled the sheet up to his neck. Tim was silent but not asleep.
A few minutes after nine the phone rang. It was Captain Greg Matson of Willits PD, returning her call.
"Awfully sorry it's so late," he said. "It took me a while to get the file, then we had a shooting in a bar downtown. We get a shooting about every other year, but today was the day."
"Get the guy?"
"He was still in the bar when we got there. Jealous boyfriend. The woman's okay though, took a twenty-two slug through her arm.
"It had always puzzled Rayborn that jealous boyfriends often shot their women first and their rivals second, or not at all. "Shooter had a record?"
"Couple of D and Ds. Decent guy, really. Wife died on Lake Mendocino a few years ago. Boating accident. He never got it together after that."
"Those are tough."
"Yeah, but Julia Santos was even tougher."
"Tell me."
Captain Matson said he'd been with the Willits PD Homicide Unit back then, which led him into missing persons when foul play was suspected. Foul play was definitely suspected in the disappearance of Julia Santos, age ten. She'd left for school one morning at seven-fifty and was never seen or heard from again. Neighbors had seen an unfamiliar pickup truck but nobody got plates or even agreed on make and model.
"The parents were clean," said Matson. "Single mom, Anna. Good lady. The father lived over in Fort Bragg but it wasn't him. He went to work that morning at seven-thirty, punched in, twenty people on the dock said he was there until ten o'clock, which was when I got there to question him.
"We interviewed every neighbor in Julia's apartment complex. We interviewed every property owner between that apartment and the school. We polygraphed a few. We got some bloodhounds out of San Rosa and they followed a scent trail from Julia's front door to a place on Highway 101, about where it goes over the river. I always figure he got her there on the bridge, where she had less room to run."