“How far along are you?”
The voice comes a couple of feet from her left and almost makes her jump. Melissa turns toward the woman and smiles. She doesn’t know what the hell it is with women and why they keep asking her this when they see the bump. They think it’s their Goddamn business. Women who have shared the experience of giving birth seem to think that gives them the right to talk to any pregnant stranger they want to.
“Baby’s due next week,” she says, rubbing her stomach.
The woman smiles. She can only be four or five years older than Melissa. She’s wearing a wedding ring and Melissa wonders if she has been pregnant or wants to be, and wonders if the man she wanted to make her pregnant is no longer in this world.
“Boy or a girl?” she asks.
“A surprise,” Melissa says, smiling, because it really would be a surprise. She’s wearing a wedding ring of her own and she begins to twirl it around on her finger. She’s seen married people do that too. “It’s what we both wanted.”
“I saw you come in alone,” the woman says, and her smile disappears. “Your husband, he’s not . . . not why you’re here, is he?”
“No, no, thank God,” Melissa answers.
The woman nods slowly, a sad look on her face, then holds out her hand. “My name is Fiona Hayward,” she says.
“Stella,” Melissa says, simply because it’s the name she decided to use on the way over here. She takes the woman’s hand. It’s warm. “Your husband—is he why you’re here?”
“He was murdered nearly a month ago,” Fiona says, and her voice catches a little and her tears well up a little. “At home. Some madman followed him home and stabbed him.”
“I’m sorry,” Melissa says.
“Everybody is,” Fiona says. “At least they got the guy. And you?”
“My sister,” she says. “She was murdered.”
“I’m sorry,” Fiona says.
“Everybody is,” Melissa says, then smiles at the woman who smiles back and nods. “It was a long time ago,” Melissa adds, remembering her sister, the funeral, the toll it took on her family.
“This is my first time here,” Fiona says. “I don’t know anybody, and I feel somewhat nervous about being here. I had plenty of friends and family offer to come with me, but, well, I wanted to come alone. I can’t explain why that is, really. Truth is I didn’t even think I would come along, but, well,” she says, then gives a small nervous laugh, “here I am.”
“My first time too,” Melissa says, trying to think of a way to free herself from this conversation. She thinks about the gun in her pregnancy suit. She draws comfort from it.
“Do you mind if . . . if I sit with you?”
Yep. She thinks about taking that gun out. “That would be nice,” she says.
People are starting to fill the seats. Some are carrying coffee. Some drag their seats a little closer together. When everybody is seated a man in his mid to late fifties goes around picking up the empty chairs and moving them beyond the circle, others dragging their seats forward to close the gaps. He has a few days’ worth of stubble and a pair of designer glasses and expensive shoes. Attractive, with good taste, gray hair—but only in the temples, the rest of it dark brown. Everybody keeps chatting among themselves until Designer Glasses takes a seat then everybody goes quiet. Melissa can’t take her eyes off him.
“Thank you again for coming along,” he says, his voice is deep and, in other circumstances, probably seductive. Melissa likes him. “I see there are a few new faces in the crowd,” he says, “and I hope the rest of us can offer you some support and companionship, and some hope too. We’re all here out of tragedy. We’re all here because we faced an incredible ugliness. For those who don’t know me, my name is Raphael.” He smiles. “My mother was an art scholar,” he adds, “hence the name,” as if Melissa should care, “and my daughter was a murder victim,” he says, “hence why I’m here.”
He delivers the line with the casualness of somebody who’s said it a hundred times.
“This support group,” he says, “was created from loss. My daughter’s name was Angela, and she was killed last year by Joe Middleton,” he says. “He took away a daughter, he took away a wife, and he took away a mother. A few of you are here because of him, and others are here because of similar men to Joe, or similar women,” he says, and there’s a moment where Melissa thinks everybody in the room is going to turn toward her, but of course that doesn’t happen. “I’m a full-time grief counselor,” he adds. “I’ve been helping people for nearly thirty years, and yet when I lost my daughter I could do nothing to help myself until I realized I needed to be with others like me. So we’re all here to help each other,” he says, smiling as he looks from face to face, spending an extra second on Melissa because there’s more of her to take in. “We’re not here to make the pain go away, because nothing can do that. We’re here to share it, to understand it. We’re here because we need to be.”
Melissa has to suppress a yawn as she looks around the room at the faces. She didn’t have time for a nap and the best she can hope for is that this won’t take long. She’s so tired she could sleep for the next twenty-four hours. Out of all these people, though, somebody will help her. She just has to invest an hour. Or however long it is these meetings go. Talking about your pain doesn’t make it go away. When her sister was killed she had to talk to a shrink every week for a year and it didn’t help an iota. All the shrink kept doing was looking at her legs.
Everybody is staring at Raphael. Lots of warm bodies for her to choose from, and she doesn’t doubt one of them has to be angry enough at Joe to shoot him.
The trick is to figure out who.
Chapter Fifteen
The first thing Schroder has to get past is the ring of media vans that have shown up. They’re blocking the end of the street, along with the local sightseers. With all the murders in Christchurch he’s surprised people still come out to watch the show, especially in this weather. There really is, he supposes, nothing quite like a good homicide. It makes for great reality and it makes for great TV. The reporters are holding up umbrellas and the camera operators are wrapped in wet weather gear and the cameras are protected by plastic linings. What the city needs—no, strike that—what humanity needs right now is a bolt of lightning, something strong and biblical to come down from the heavens and land in the middle of them all. He wonders if that’s something Jonas Jones might think he can arrange.
He can’t get the car past them. There’s no way through, and the only way he could give it a good go would be to hit them at a pace somewhere near the speed limit and scatter them all like bowling pins. He has no siren and therefore has to park on the wrong side of the crowd, with them and a lot of rain between him and the scene.
The exhaustion he was feeling in his last few months of being a cop wasn’t turned in with his gun and badge. Instead it’s been dogging him like a head cold that won’t go away. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the packet of Wake-E tablets that he always keeps within reach these days and swallows one of them, then decides to chase it with another. In five minutes the exhaustion won’t be gone, but it will be bottled inside him with all that other exhaustion he’s built up over the years.
He climbs out of the car into the rain and shoulders his way through the onlookers. The officers guarding the cordon have to take a double take as he approaches them—they know he’s no longer a cop, but they’re thinking perhaps that’s no longer the case. Before he can start explaining himself, Kent comes toward him, an umbrella keeping the rain off her. She has a quick word to the officers and then Schroder lifts the crime-scene tape and ducks under it. The house is in a quiet neighborhood, not the same house the Walker family used to live in. That place was burned down the same night Detective Calhoun went missing. Burned down, no doubt, by Joe. Since then the land was sold. This one is half the size, a single-story place that’s perhaps five years old at the most, the same color scheme from one house to the next, pale browns and grays that look washed out by the rain.