“With the girls getting home, we couldn’t do it right away.”
“But you’ll think about it?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
Beatrice ran to the base of a tree and barked up at a pair of crows. Walt called her back to his side.
“You’re probably buried with work, anyway,” she said, giving him a way out of such planning.
“I am. But I always am. I can get away. It’s got to be coordinated with Kevin’s schedule. He’s back at the lodge. Lisa would have to watch the girls.”
“They could come, couldn’t they? We could take turns with them. They’d love the park. We could do a day trip.” They walked another half block. “Too pushy?”
“No. Not at all. It’s me and work. That’s all. I love this job, but it owns me. I have to prepare for the hearings. There’s a ton of paperwork to get done. There will be pleas. I don’t always see eye to eye with our prosecutors. I don’t want to be away and miss something.”
“If the kids hadn’t been on the plane,” she said, “do you think they would have gotten away with it?”
“I suppose the insurance would have paid out. If they hadn’t, then the plan was to go back months later and fly it out and sell it out of the country. A jet can hide for a long time in the Nevada desert.”
“So in a way Kevin and the girl… they’re the ones who stopped it.”
“And the bird strike-the plane going down. But, yeah, they did. It’s true.”
“Young love,” she said. “Chalk up another one.” Bea licked her hand again, causing Walt to reach down and tug her collar. “I didn’t mean to lessen your role in it,” she said.
“I didn’t take it that way.”
“But you’re okay. Right?”
“With wounding a man and killing another? Is that the question being asked?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You have every right to,” he said. “I don’t have an answer. That’s the truth. I don’t know what to say. He’d fired and hit John. Was aiming for a second shot. You don’t think at times like that. You just do what you do and live with the consequences.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“So here we are,” he said. “Do I think about it? Yup. Can I do anything about it? Nope.”
“It’s past,” she said.
They looped around the block and headed back toward the house. What was at first an uncomfortable silence settled away to the sound of Beatrice’s paws on the asphalt and the rustle of their clothing. A neighbor waved and called out to Walt, and Walt called the man by name returning the greeting.
Walt’s hand brushed Fiona’s, and for an instant he considered hooking her fingers with his, and maybe she was having the same thought the way her eyes looked out straight ahead, but nothing came of it.
“Beautiful night,” he said.
“Someday I’ll tell you,” she said, surprising him.
“No need. You’re right about the past. I like what you said.”
“Easier said than done, like everything else.”
“Looks like the Dalai Lama’s coming to town.”
“Are we changing the subject?”
He chuckled.
“What?”
“Nothing. Well… not nothing. Gail and Brandon.”
“What about them?”
“Just before the auction dinner, she ripped him a new one. Made him heel like a bird dog.” He rubbed Beatrice’s head.
“Because?”
“That’s the beauty of it. That’s why I can laugh about it. I have no idea. If I had to guess, it was that he missed some appointment with her. She has this real thing about being stood up. But it could have been him taking the wrong car, or forgetting to fill the ice trays or not cleaning hair out of the shower drain. But what got me was how sweet it was not to be on the receiving end of it, how I wouldn’t have traded with him for anything.”
She reached down for Beatrice as well, and their hands touched. Or was that what she’d meant to happen? he wondered.
About Ridley Pearson
Ridley Pearson is a New York Times bestselling author. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in detective fiction at Oxford. He lives in Hailey, Idaho.
