Hannah’s whisper was vicious. “Dad said he knew all about you. The affair. It was him, right? Frank!” Her eyes were filling with tears. “You cheated on him. He found out. That’s why he started drinking! You ruined his life!”
So this was behind her comment during their fight earlier.
You dumped him there and went on to something else...
Tears in her own eyes now, Parker tried to grip her daughter’s forearms, but the girl pulled roughly away.
“No, no, no, honey! When you heard that, he was drunk, wasn’t he? Rambling, sometimes incoherent?”
“So? It doesn’t make it a lie.”
“Not a lie, no. But he believed things that just weren’t true. He’d forget the day of the week. He called me Judy — his old girlfriend. He called you Abby.”
Parker never knew where that name came from.
“Remember that party? Fourth of July at Hank and Patty’s. Your father got into a fight with Mr. Simms because he was sure he was saying things behind his back. He got paranoid and mean. Jesus, Han. Think about it: When would I have time for an affair? Sixty-hour weeks. Home the rest of the time.”
“Why would he make it up?”
“Because he got paranoid and delusional and angry. He wasn’t in his right mind. I never—”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“She’s not lying, Hannah.” Frank was standing in the doorway. His round, kind face was cast down at her. The girl looked up, clearly shaken that someone else had heard the exchange.
“Can I come in?”
When she didn’t answer he entered anyway, but only a few feet.
“I’m sorry. I heard what you were saying. I just wanted to tell you about your mom and me.”
What a calm voice, what kind eyes...
Hannah was frowning toward him but she gave a shallow nod. Wiped tears.
“Your mother and I used to date. Years and years ago. Before she met your father. Only for a few months. Then it was over with.”
Parker said earnestly, “Han, cheating? No, that wasn’t us. I had my faults. Your father had his. But that? No, never.”
What was the point? In fast memory, flaring spontaneously, she was picturing the last time Jon and she had made love, which wasn’t that long before he was arrested for assault.
It had been so nice. It always was. Consuming. And it was yet one more thing she regretted saying goodbye to when she’d pressed charges.
This memory killed her.
What she’d told her daughter was one hundred percent true. Oh, there were flaws in the Merritt-Parker marriage, but infidelity was not one of them.
“All the things he said when he was drunk? Nonsense and mean. And half of it didn’t make sense in the first place. He lit candles on a waffle for your birthday — six months early. And got mad at you when the tablecloth caught fire. He said why didn’t you thank him for the dog he bought you? What dog? There never was a dog. He accused me of banging up the new car — when it was him. His reality was different.”
Hannah was wiping tears on her sleeve. Her mother plucked a tissue from a box printed with gaudy orange daisies.
Don’t go away, she begged silently. Stay with me.
Hannah took the slip of Kleenex and wiped.
For the tenth, the twentieth, time in the past two days, she found herself touching her cheek, the skin just above the crack, long healed, the ridge prominent as a mountain, despite the doctor’s reassurance that that could not be.
Parker took her daughter’s hands. “They’ll find him, they’ll get him some help in prison.” And added spontaneously, “The help I should have gotten him last year.”
This was what the girl needed to hear. She nodded.
Emotions roiled within Parker. Oh, her daughter believed her about the infidelity. She was pretty sure on that. But this, of course, was not the end of the story. For the time being, though, the angst and anger were sidelined.
It was time for strategic withdrawal.
“I’m starving.” She looked at her daughter. “Mr. Vill—”
“No, make it Frank.”
“Frank’s going to make some lunch for us.”
“Okay.”
“You go on,” Parker said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
The girl blew her nose and pitched out the tissue. She pulled her jacket off, tossed it on the bed and followed Frank into the hallway. Parker stepped into the bathroom and leaned, hands on the vanity, head down, wiping her own tears.
From the moment they’d met in the research department of Midwest Particle Technology she’d been comfortable with him. He was kind and funny. And he was as smart as she was, smarter in some disciplines.
They had both understood at exactly the same moment that there wasn’t enough chemistry to make them a couple — the sort of chemistry that sparks a true connection.
Chemistry...
That flare, that gut twist she’d never experienced with Frank but was front and center the first time she’d met boyish Jon Merritt at a Halloween party. She’d been wearing a Chicago Bears T-shirt with a large price tag on it, he’d been wearing a dark blue police uniform. They made eye contact and he walked up. “Okay,” he said, eyeing the outfit. “I give.”
“I’m a state of the union,” she replied.
Without missing a beat, he’d said, “New Jersey. Wow.”
“And you’re what? A cop from some TV show?”
“No, I’m a cop from a cop shop. Ferrington PD. I was too lazy to come up with a costume.”
“So,” she said, smiling coyly, “that means the handcuffs’re real.”
They’d talked the entire night. Well, most of the night. The two had ended up in his small bachelor apartment, where the chemistry continued into the early hours of the morning...
Now, in an instant, consumed with rage, breathing impossibly fast, Parker drew back her fist and aimed for the center of the mirror, two feet in front of her, not caring what shattered, what sliced.
She heard “Mom?”
The girl was calling from the hallway.
A deep breath. Two.
“What, honey?”
“I’m cold. Where’s my gray sweatshirt?”
Parker’s shoulders slumped. “I think it’s in my gym bag. Let’s take a look.”
55
They sat in the white Transit, Moll behind the wheel, tapping it with his long thick fingers.
They were in a 7-Eleven parking lot, having finished a late lunch — from cellophane containers. The long-awaited barbecue was still on hold.
They’d driven twenty miles west on Route 92 from the Sunny Acres motel, to put distance between themselves and any law, pausing only to pitch the motel’s security hard drive into a creek. They’d then flipped a mental coin and decided to keep north, though avoiding the cameras at the intersection of Routes 55 and 92. They’d join the former well into Marshall County.
Merritt had a lead and they were now waiting to see if it panned out.
Hurry up and wait...
As he sprayed his neck, Moll glanced at the passenger seat, where Desmond continued to work on the willow branch.
It was an interesting thing, this hobby of his. You pounded the branch until the bark was loose enough to work off. Then you cut a notch — called, for some reason, a fipple — in a three-inch plug of the wood and slid it back on the hollow tube of bark, the end result being a musical flute.
Desmond now set his SOG knife down and lifted the green instrument to his lips. He played, producing a soothing, resonant tone. He stopped and continued to refine the instrument with the blade. Then he played some more.
These flutes lasted only a week at most. Once the willow dried out it was useless. It turned back into a branch. This at first seemed like a waste of time to Moll, but then he realized: What in life lasted very long?