“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered tersely. “Why?”
“I really couldn’t help but overhear…” I let my voice trail off, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken.
“Sorry about that,” he replied. “Forget about it. It’s nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing, Ben.”
“I said forget it,” he snarled.
We made the rest of the trip to police headquarters in complete silence.
“Where are you?” My wife’s voice issued from the speaker on my cell phone.
It was rapidly approaching six P.M., and I was still downtown though fortunately, not sitting on the concrete stairs in the parking garage. I had finally lost count of how many times I had given my accounting of the events and to how many cops I had given it. They eventually concluded that with the exception of a few adjectives and conjunctions, the story was always the same. No more or less information than the previous recitation.
I don’t guess I could blame them for trying. I was as aware as anyone else of what can be seen but not consciously remembered.
“What, no hello?” I asked.
“I said hello when I answered the phone,” she replied. “Now, where are you?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me” came her guarded response.
“Downtown with Ben.”
“Tell me you’re at a bar, Rowan,” she half asked, half instructed, but the tone of her voice told me that she knew that wasn’t true.
“Sure,” I answered. “It’s called Police Headquarters.”
“Oh Gods, Rowan,” she moaned, then asked, “The seizure?”
“No… Yes… Maybe… I don’t know yet” was my response, confusing as it was to us both. “Have you heard about Brittany Larson?”
“How could I not? It’s been all over…” she started then stopped herself mid-sentence. “Oh, Rowan, no… What? What happened?”
“Kidnapped as far as anyone can tell right now,” I answered. “Although I don’t think whoever did it has any qualms about hurting her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well… I kind of had the bad fortune of being a witness to the abduction, and it was a bit violent.”
“You what? How?”
I gave her a rundown of the day’s events since we had last spoken; all of which had finally culminated in me using my backside to warm a molded plastic chair next to Ben’s desk for the past few hours.
The promised lunch had eventually happened sometime around three in the afternoon. Unfortunately, it had taken the form of a stale jelly doughnut and a cup of what the officers of the homicide division referred to as coffee. My personal jury was still deliberating on that point.
I told her about that too.
“So anyway,” I continued. “Ben is going to be tied up down here for a bit longer, but they’ve given me the okay to leave.”
“Give me twenty minutes,” she replied to the unasked question.
“I’ll be waiting outside.”
CHAPTER 7:
“Bar food?” I said to my wife. “I’ve been stuck down here all day with nothing but a stale doughnut and bad coffee, and you want me to eat BAR food?”
“It’s not ‘bar food’,” she replied as she dropped the Jeep into third gear and veered onto the Kingshighway exit from westbound Interstate 64. “It’s PUB food.”
The top was down, and the warm wind was whipping through the open cab of the vehicle. There was still better than an hour of sunlight left in the day, so it was still hot and humid. Fortunately, the temperature had dropped off by a few degrees, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been earlier in the day; if you liked steam baths, that is. Although, I had to admit the artificial breeze generated by the motion of the Jeep went a long way toward making it tolerable.
“There’s a difference?” I asked with a chuckle.
“Aye, and you’ll be finding out soon enough, then,” she answered, dredging up her inherent Celtic brogue with no effort whatsoever. Truth was, it was probably more of an effort for her to hide it.
Felicity was second-generation Irish-American, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her- or especially at times, to hear her. In fact, one would think she had just stepped off an airplane direct from the Emerald Isle.
Her looks were straight out of Celtic myth. She was petite, standing shoeless only slightly more than five feet tall. Her complexion was milky white and smooth like porcelain with the only exception being a light spate of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Bright, green eyes peered out of her doll-like face, and the whole package was framed by spiraling locks of fiery auburn hair that hung down past her waist. If a toy company were to produce a doll to represent Ireland, my wife would make the perfect model for it.
If the looks weren’t enough, she was also possessed of the stereotypical temper that, whether politically correct or not, was so often associated with both the ethnicity and hair color. Fortunately, it wasn’t one that was easily ignited although I had managed to spark it on a few occasions.
Growing up, she had spent almost as much time in Ireland as the United States, even attending college there; hence, she was never completely devoid of a light, Irish lilt in her voice. However, get her around her family, get a few alcoholic drinks in her, or wait until she got overly tired, and her guard would drop. The lilt would morph into a thick brogue, replete with slang and colloquialisms the average American was hard pressed to understand. We’d been married better than twelve years, and she still came up with some that perplexed me.
When she really got riled up, she would even mix languages on you. While certainly not fluent in Gaelic, she had more than a passing familiarity with it. That particular vocabulary, however, consisted of innumerable curses and derisive phrases born of the ancient language, and if provoked, she was more than happy to use them.
On the flip side, she even knew a few of the endearments, and I’d had the good fortune to hear them whispered in my ear from time to time.
“I love it when you talk with an accent,” I said, shooting her a grin.
“Aye, what accent?” she asked, still laying it on thick and laughing as she spoke. “You’re the one with the accent, then.”
“Right,” I answered. “Midwest plain and dull. So what’s the name of this place again?”
“Seamus O’Donnell’s.”
“Sounds Irish,” I joked.
“Well, duh,” she returned.
“So it doesn’t sound familiar. Have we been there before?”
“No.”
“Hmmm. I thought we’d been to every Irish pub in Saint Louis by now.”
“They’ve only been open a few months.”
We had made the loop and merged into the afternoon traffic. She sped up to the next intersection, just catching the light before it switched and turned the vehicle to the right from Kingshighway onto Oakland.
“So how do you know this so called ‘pub food’ is any good if we haven’t been there?” I asked, shooting a glance over at her.
Her hair was pulled back, but loose strands were whipping about her face as she looked over and smiled at me. “I said we haven’t been there before. I never said that I hadn’t been there.”
“Oh,” I exclaimed playfully. “So you went there without me, did you?”
“Hey, a girl’s got to have lunch, doesn’t she?” she laughed.
“Yes, I suppose she does,” I replied. “So do they have colcannon and Dublin coddle?”
“Among other things, yes they do.”
“And Guinness, of course?”
She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow, giving me an unmistakable stare.
“Okay,” I held up my hands in surrender. “I know, I know. Stupid question.”
“Well, it IS an Irish pub, Rowan,” she laughed.
She downshifted as the traffic signal ahead of us winked yellow, and we rolled to a stop at the white line just as it switched over to a glaring red.
Considering the events of the day, I was surprised to find myself in such a good mood. Truth is, even if today had never happened, I still would have been surprised. I hadn’t felt this good about life since the first time I’d been cold-cocked by an unwanted ethereal vision of a horrific murder; and that had been almost four years ago.