For a moment she focused all her attention on Grace, whose face was beginning to scrunch up into one of her pre-distress configurations. "Am I doing something wrong?" Lucy asked.
"No, she may be hungry, or she may be cutting a tooth. Those are my current all-purpose explanations for Grace being unhappy. I'm planning to expand the list as necessary as she grows older. But I am hoping those two will suffice at least until her mid-teens."
Lucy laughed gently. "Were life so simple, huh? I wish those were my only two potential problems."
"I do, too, Lucy. I do, too."
Without taking her eyes from the baby, she said, "I told Lauren she could tell you what's been going on. I assume she told you I was there that night? At Royal's house?"
Grace captured and then started sucking on Lucy's pinky. I reached to the bed behind me, grabbed a bottle, and handed it over to Lucy. Grace started eating. "She was hungry," Lucy said.
"Yes, she told me you were at the house."
"The press will probably find out soon."
"They usually seem to discover these things."
"I think it was somebody at the department who leaked the fact that I'd been questioned to the media. That still hurts. Sammy picked me up before dawn so nobody would notice."
"Sam's a sweetheart, Lucy. It could have been somebody at the DA's office who was the leak, couldn't it? It might not have been one of your colleagues."
"I suppose," she said before she grew quiet for a moment, apparently fascinated by the simple act of an infant eating. I guessed Lucy was thirty-two, thirty-three years old. She was unmarried and childless, certainly vulnerable to the gravitational pull of maternal yearnings.
I was about to comment about that when she asked, "Alan? You ever do anything…? God… you ever do anything that you're so ashamed of…?" She stared out the window at the lights of the city and the silhouette of the mountains. "So ashamed of that you'd do almost anything to undo it?"
"I don't know," I replied, in a moment of stark ineloquence. "Maybe." I tried to guess what was coming next, but was drawing a blank.
"You've probably already figured it out, but I'm talking about the reason I was at Roy Peterson's house."
Moments like these-when acquaintances or friends begin to open up to me as though we were patient and doctor sitting in my office-are always awkward for me. My practiced instinct was to warn Lucy that she enjoyed no confidentiality here in my bedroom, but a friend wouldn't do that, a friend would just listen.
"I wondered," I said, recalling that Lucy had told her attorneys that if people knew why she was at Roy's house it would only support the contention that she had a motive to kill him. Now she was telling me that the reason she was there filled her with shame.
She said, "There's an old saying about good intentions. A proverb, or an aphorism. Are they the same thing, proverbs and aphorisms? Do you know it? Something like the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
I said, "The reason you were at Royal's house-that's still what you're talking about?"
Did she nod in reply? I wasn't quite certain. Finally, she said, "This one was-paved with good intentions, I mean. Not a whole lot of good judgment maybe, but a whole lot of good intentions."
She lowered her head and Grace almost disappeared in the cascade of blond hair. "Grace's done with the bottle. Should she have more? How do you know how much to feed her?"
"We give her what she wants. That seems to work."
Lucy closed her eyes slowly and left them shut. She said, "It's different for adults, I guess."
"What do you mean?"
She opened her eyes and looked up at me. The corners of her mouth turned up in a wry grin. She said, "Giving people what they want, it's more complicated with adults than it is with babies."
"I'm no expert with babies but my initial impression after six months' experience as a father is that almost everything is more complicated with adults than it is with babies." Grace spit out the nipple and started to squirm on Lucy's lap. "She probably needs to be burped, Lucy. Though she sometimes makes that same face in preparation for fouling another diaper. You want to burp her? Don't be surprised if she releases pressure at both ends simultaneously."
"Love to." She moved Grace gingerly up toward her shoulder. "Did Sam tell you that I got engaged a couple of weeks ago?"
"No, Lucy, he didn't. Congratulations. Who's the lucky guy?"
"He's not a cop," she replied.
An interesting prologue, I thought.
"His name is Grant. He's with the Forest Service. I met him last fall when I was out hiking, if you can believe it."
"That's wonderful. When is-"
"Who could guess? Everything's up in the air right now. You know, because of… Royal."
I was about to ask Lucy how she'd come to know Royal Peterson when Cozy's huge frame filled the bedroom doorway. He was carrying our foster poodle, Anvil. Anvil looked content in his arms. Against Cozy's huge frame, the sixteen-pound dog also looked like a hamster.
Cozy said, "Hello again, Alan. Did you get some dinner? Wonderful stuff. There's a tart in the refrigerator for later, too. Almonds. No, I didn't bake it. Lucy, want to join us? We're just about ready to get started again."
"Sure." She handed me the baby and said, "Thanks. That was a nice talk. I really appreciate it."
"No problem," I said.
From the other room, Lauren called out, "Sweetie, if you left your pager in the kitchen, it just went off."
I traipsed into the kitchen with Grace in my arms. I didn't recognize the number on my beeper, so I called my office voice mail to see what the emergency page was about. The message was from Naomi Bigg and it was succinct. "Dr. Gregory? There's something more I need to say about what we talked about earlier. Please give me a call."
I asked Grace if she wanted to hazard a guess about Naomi Bigg's pressing problem.
She didn't. Grace had wisdom beyond her months.
I dialed the number off the screen of my pager and heard a smoker's raspy "Hello."
Although I was pretty sure that the voice was Naomi's, I said, "Naomi Bigg, please."
"Dr. Gregory? It's me."
"I'm returning your page." I made certain my tone was as level as a freshly plumbed door.
"You're prompt. Leo always made them wait. He said it was too reinforcing to call right away."
It was becoming clear to me that maybe Leo Bigg was a jerk in more ways than one. Intentionally keeping cancer patients waiting for return phone calls? While I busied myself closing up the cardboard boxes of Chinese food, I let the ball bounce around on Naomi's side of the net.
She took a whack at it after a few seconds. "I was thinking about how we left things today, and what you must be thinking."
"What must I be thinking?"
"That the wouldn't-it-be-cool game I was describing-the one that the boys play-that it might somehow be, I don't know, related to what happened to the district attorney. I assume that I left you with that impression."
Naomi was right on. That was certainly on the list of things that I had been thinking.
She said, "I'm not naive, okay? I can add two and two as well as you can. But, see, none of the wouldn't-it-be-cool games with Ramp and Paul ever-ever-involved someone being assaulted the way that Royal Peterson was assaulted. The news reports all say that he was beaten, you know, hit on the head with something."
I listened as she sucked on a cigarette. She said, "The boys have never joked about doing anything like that-ambushing someone and hitting them on the head, beating them up. You ask me, I think they're too cowardly to do something that confrontational. That's why I don't think they had anything to do with what happened to Peterson."