“Yes, but before that I knew my mother loved me.” Dean had frowned, his usually laughing face serious. “I trusted her. Quinn never had anyone he could trust.”
He hadn’t wanted to tell her too much, and Mindy did understand. Quinn was a very private man, and would probably hate to find out Dean had said even as much as he had.
“Get Quinn to tell you someday,” Dean suggested.
He couldn’t have realized the disdain Quinn felt for her, or he wouldn’t say something so ludicrous. But he had felt the tension; she’d sensed he was working extra hard to keep conversation light and flowing when Quinn was over.
She really should make some calls, Mindy thought drearily. Quinn must hate feeling obligated to stay even this long. If she had a friend coming over, he could leave in good conscience.
But it wasn’t as if she’d asked him to stay. He could go home any time he wanted. She wished he would go.
Mindy felt a pang of guilt, because the truth was she’d been grateful last night that he was staying. She’d even been grateful that he had come with Sergeant Dickerson to give her the news. It had been possible to cry on him because she knew that, in his own way, he loved Dean, too.
Perhaps he would just leave, now that he’d realized she was done weeping on his shoulder. If she closed her eyes, and shut out the world, perhaps when she awakened the next time, he’d be gone. And she could cry again, and drift through the empty house, and try to imagine life in it without Dean.
* * *
WHY WAS HE SURPRISED that she left the dirty work to him?
Quinn drove home that afternoon to collect some clean clothes and toiletries, phoned in to clear a couple of days from work, then went back to Dean’s house to do jobs that should have belonged to Dean’s widow.
Sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, he called the funeral home, then flipped open Dean’s address book. Starting with the As, he methodically worked his way through, leaving messages some of the time, speaking to a few people.
Yes, it was a terrible tragedy. Dean’s wife was prostrate. The funeral would probably be Saturday; they would notify everybody once they knew for sure.
Quinn hesitated when he flipped the page to the names that began with G and H. He’d have to call the Howies. Dean had stayed in closer touch with them than he had. They’d been at Dean’s wedding, of course, but otherwise it had been...oh, two or three years since Quinn had called them. They always sounded so grateful, his guilt would rev up another gear.
He almost skipped them now, put off contacting them until later, but wouldn’t let himself. He had plenty of flaws, but cowardice wasn’t one of them.
“Nancy?” he said, when a woman answered the phone.
“Yes?” His foster mother’s voice had acquired a fine tremor. She must be—he had to calculate—in her seventies.
“It’s Quinn. Brendan Quinn.”
“Oh, my! Brendan?” Her voice became muffled. “George, it’s Brendan on the phone!” She came back. “How nice to hear from you. It’s been a while.”
“I know it has. I’m sorry. Time seems to race by.” He despised himself for the weak excuse.
She’d always let him off the hook too easily. “Oh, it’s just nice to hear your voice now.”
“Nancy, I’m afraid the reason for my call isn’t good.” He drew a deep breath. “Dean’s dead.”
The silence was achingly long.
“Dead?”
“He was shot last night. On the job.” As if to quiet her moan of grief, he kept talking, told her about the circumstances, the arrest, that he was at Dean’s house right now.
“Oh, his poor wife!”
Even as he said the right things—Mindy was resting, in shock—Quinn felt anger again. She and Dean hadn’t known each other that long. Dean had had girlfriends who’d lasted longer than he’d known Mindy. In fact, Quinn was going to have to call one of them, who had stayed friends with Dean. But Mindy was the wife, and therefore assumed to be the person who would be most devastated by his death.
Knowing full well he was being petty, Quinn still couldn’t stamp down that spark of something that was a lot closer to jealousy than he liked to admit.
Nancy handed off the phone to George, who asked for the details again. Quinn told him when the funeral was tentatively set for and promised to call again when plans were firm.
“Now, you take care of Mindy,” George ordered.
After hanging up, Quinn stood to pour himself another cup of coffee. The Howies had sounded as if they’d lost a son. Had they really cared that much? Dean, of course, had been easier to love; despite his often expressed faith that his mother would be coming for him any day, he had craved closeness in a way Quinn hadn’t. Quinn had never known whether he was just a paycheck from the state, an obligation they punctiliously fulfilled, or something more. They’d respected his reserve, his pride, and saved the hugs for Dean.
Shaking his head, Quinn took a long swallow of coffee and reached for the address book again.
He was hoarse by the time he reached Smith and Smithers. Dean had had a lot of friends.
Unlike Quinn, who had never had that talent. Didn’t even want it. He didn’t much like crowds and therefore avoided parties. He hated small talk and polite insincerity. Sometimes realized he just didn’t know how to make friends.
Pain rose in a shattering wave, like the agony when a bullet had splintered his shoulder blade. He’d just dialed a number but had to hit End and put the phone down.
Twice now in not much over a year he’d had to face how badly he needed his one close friend. The only person who knew his secrets, his weaknesses, his history. Having to watch Dean marry someone who was so wrong for him had been bad enough.
But Quinn hadn’t felt this swirling void of loneliness since he’d answered the door to find policemen on the doorstep, there to tell him his mother was dead. Maybe it had been there inside him the whole time, but he’d closed it off. Built a floor, firmly nailed down, to seal off a dank, dark basement that seemed to be occupied with rats that scurried out of sight when he looked but watched with blood-red eyes and the glint of sharp teeth when he half turned away.
He let out a rough, humorless laugh. What an idiotic image! Okay, he didn’t let himself dwell on his occasional loneliness, sometimes wished he had Dean’s gift for closeness with other people. But rats! Poor me, he mocked himself.
What he was feeling was the grief of losing family. For most people, there must be a moment when they realized that the last person who’d known them when they were young was gone. When parents died, or a sister or brother. For Quinn, Dean was that person. Like anyone else, he’d deal with the loss.
Mindy reappeared at five o’clock. She looked awful, he thought critically, seeing her hover in the kitchen door, her vague gaze touching on microwave, refrigerator, table, as if she’d never seen any of them before.
She was pretty, he’d give Dean that. She always had had an air of fragility, accentuated now. Maybe five feet four or five inches tall, Mindy was incredibly fine-boned. She kept her golden blond hair chopped short in a sort of unkempt Meg Ryan style that somehow suited the long oval of her face and her huge gray-green eyes.
The first time Quinn saw her, she’d worn tight jeans and a cropped T. Dean had leaned close to say something that made her giggle. Not laugh, like a grown woman, but giggle.
According to Dean, she was twenty-five. Twenty-six now; Quinn had had no choice but to attend the party Dean had thrown for her birthday, during which she’d clapped her hands with delight, danced with such abandon she’d kept whacking people, and almost cried when she’d failed to blow out all the candles.
“Oh!” she’d cried. “I won’t get my wish!”
Dean had blown out the last two, then wrapped a comforting arm around her slender shoulders. “Sometim
es you need help to get a wish.”
Her absurdly long lashes had fluttered quickly, as if she had to blink away tears, and then she’d flung herself against him and kissed him passionately. The crowd whistled and applauded.
Except for the passionate part, Quinn had felt as if he were at a birthday party for a friend’s sixteen-year-old daughter. He’d wondered what she and Dean had to talk about. She was an artist, Dean had always said proudly, but the only product of her artistry Quinn had ever seen was the hand-painted Welcome sign that hung over their front door. It was pretty. Michelangelo, she wasn’t.
He hadn’t thought much of it when Dean had first started dating her. She’d seemed young and flighty. Some people enjoyed having yappy miniature poodles, too. Not his choice, though.
But marriage? He was still shaking his head.
At the moment, half her hair was spiky, the other half flattened from the pillow. Her face was puffy, her eyes bloodshot, her slender figure hidden inside a thick terry-cloth robe that was bright turquoise decorated with red and gold stars. Barefoot, she shuffled toward the refrigerator as if she were an old lady.
“Hungry?” he asked.
Her gaze swung toward him as if she hadn’t noticed he was there. It registered his presence without interest.
“Um,” she mumbled.
“I can cook or order something. Pizza?”
She shuddered.
“How about Chinese?”
Her response was slow, as if neural synapses weren’t firing at normal speed. “Okay,” she finally agreed.
She did manage to pour herself some juice while he called. When she carried it to the table and sat down, she said, “You’re still here.”
“I didn’t want to leave you alone. Since you never got around to calling your mother or a friend.” Quinn shrugged.
“I don’t want anybody right now.”
He tried to hide his exasperation. “Then you’re stuck with me.”
She was quiet for several minutes. Then, like a puzzled child, she asked, “Why don’t you like me?”
Because you’re silly, not too bright and self-centered. Because sooner or later, you were going to get tired of Dean and break his heart.
Quinn didn’t say a word of what he thought. Instead, he snorted. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”
Okay, maybe the not-too-bright part wasn’t true. She looked at him with knowing, sad eyes.
He found himself amending. “It’s not that I don’t like you.”
She kept waiting. Or maybe she had lost interest in any answer and was just staring into space he happened to occupy.
“I didn’t think you and Dean were a good match.”
Anger flared in her voice. “And you were the expert...why?”
“I knew Dean a lot better than you did!”
“And me not at all.”
His jaws knotted. “That might be because you were too busy giggling and flirting with Dean to hold a rational conversation.”
“I didn’t know I was required to present my credentials to you.”
They glared at each other.
Then, as quickly as their petty argument began, it ended. Her face crumpled. Her voice drifted. “Oh, what difference does it make?”
After a moment of struggle, she regained control, sipped juice and went back to glancing vaguely around the kitchen. Eventually, her gaze reached the address book and phone at his elbow.
“Have you already called some of Dean’s friends?”
“I called everybody.”
“Everybody?” Her gaze lifted to his face. “Shouldn’t I have done that?”
“You didn’t seem up to it.”
She was starting to look mad again. “You mean, I wasn’t willing to do it today, before Dean’s body is even cold.”
“Did you want his friends to find out he was dead from the six o’clock news?”
“No.” Emotions waged war on her face. “Will it be...”
“On the news? Yes. He was a cop.”
“Not anymore.”
“As far as we’re concerned, he was one of us. Reporters will see it the same.”
“You could have said...”
Sharper than he had meant to be, Quinn said, “Murder makes the news. I didn’t know I had to tell you that.”
Resentment smoldered in her eyes and made her lips pouty. She even looked childish.
“I read The Times. I don’t watch much TV. And following local murders is not my hobby.”
Which part of The Seattle Times did she read? he wondered uncharitably. The comics?
“Dean’s murder will be in the morning papers, too. I thought the news would better come from one of us.”
“So you just took over.”
A headache began to bore into his skull. “I took over when you decided to spend the day napping.”
She rose to her feet, looking anguished, furious and completely grown-up. “When I spent the day grieving! Instead of worrying about whether somebody Dean played golf with once in a while found out in the first twenty-four hours that he was dead!”
The doorbell rang.
Quinn shook his head and went to answer it. He half expected that by the time he got back to the kitchen, she’d have retreated to the bedroom. Instead, she stood at one of the French doors looking out, her back to Quinn.
Quinn wondered, though, how much she could see through her own reflection in the glass. Maybe nothing; maybe she was studying her own haunted face.
“Dinner,” he said, lifting the sacks.
“I did love him, you know.”
Pain squeezed his chest, roughened his voice. “I know.”
He hadn’t been sure, not when Dean was alive. Now, he was beginning to believe she did.
“Just so you believe that much.” Sounding incredibly weary, she turned from the view of the garden and came to the table.
He got plates and silverware and dished up. She waited docilely, her head bent as if she found the weave of the place mat fascinating. He wondered if even the slight effort of spooning moo goo gai pan and kung pao beef onto her plate would have stopped her from eating. But once he put food in front of her, she picked up her fork and took a bite.
Like this morning, neither of them ate much. But they tried. When she pushed her half-empty plate away, he did the same.
“Why,” he said, trying to understand, “won’t you call your mother?”
She gave a seemingly indifferent shrug. “We’re not that close.”
“Doesn’t she live around here?”
“Issaquah.”
Fifteen, twenty minutes away.
Mindy stood. “Excuse me. I have to...” She fled.
Staring after her, Quinn wondered what he’d said wrong. Or did she just hate Issaquah, the mecca of upscale shopping with the chic shops that made up Gilman Village? Mama, he concluded, must have money to live in Issaquah. Somehow that didn’t surprise him. He added spoiled to Mindy’s list of sins.
He turned on KOMO news and watched as the camera panned “the storage business where in the early hours of this morning a former Seattle Police detective was struck down, allegedly by two young men trying to steal this travel trailer.” The camera focused on the white pickup truck with Fenton Security emblazoned on the door, then zoomed in on the Fleetwood. When Quinn was gravely told that “a source informs us that the young men may have been manufacturing methamphetamine in this trailer,” he used the remote to turn the TV off.
Quinn’s stomach roiled. Too vividly he saw Dean’s body sprawled on the pavement, the blood in his mouth, the glazed eyes. Why had Dean decided to confront the two punks? Why hadn’t he waited for the cops?
Quinn’s fist hit the table so hard the dishes jumped and a sh
ockwave of pain ran up his arm.
He heard a small sound and looked up through the blur of tears to see Mindy staring at him from the doorway. He knew what he must look like, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an agony of anger and grief.
After a moment, she turned and left him to mourn alone.
Quinn let out a harsh sound. The two people who Dean had loved most couldn’t stand each other. Pretty sad.
CHAPTER THREE
ON A SUNNY MAY DAY, hundreds watched Dean Fenton be laid to rest at the cemetery. Endless tears rolled down Mindy’s face. Struggling with grief that balled in his throat like a jawbreaker that was trying to choke him, Quinn remained rigidly conscious of his dignity. Mindy, apparently, didn’t care.
She looked inappropriate for her role as grieving widow to begin with. With a suspicion she’d have nothing to wear, Quinn had suggested a couple of times over the week that she go shopping or order something online. She’d ignored him, of course, and now wore—well, he guessed it was a business suit for a twenty-something, which meant the skirt hugged her butt and left a long expanse of leg bare while the jacket was form-fitting over what seemed to be a camisole, the lace showing at the V. It wasn’t even black, but rather white. Call him old-fashioned, but in his opinion a widow shouldn’t go to her husband’s graveside wearing clothes that advertised her body.
Naturally, she hadn’t thought ahead enough to bring tissues, and had turned to him with wide-eyed desperation earlier at the church when tears and snot had begun to run down her face. Wasn’t that a mother’s job? he’d wondered, but he could already see that she was right: she and her mother weren’t close.
Mom had shown up today, he had to give her that, but had seemed annoyed at the necessity of missing a luncheon for some club she belonged to. From the minute she’d arrived, Mindy looked sulky and even younger than usual.
The Howies were here, too, of course, Nancy looking much as she had at the wedding except for the sadness on her sweet, soft face, and for the tremor that affected not just her voice but her hands. Every time Quinn looked at her, she held them clasped together, as if one could control the other. Parkinson’s?
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