by M. P. Cooley
“Mom, stop.” Lucy giggled as I hugged her close.
I spoke into the top of Lucy’s head. “I missed you so much. And I’m sorry I missed ice-skating.”
“Grandpa told me.” Lucy wriggled around, turning left and then right, her blue eyes—Kevin’s blue eyes—still wet with tears. “Plus, he said you were sorry you missed the quiz I gave him last night. I saved it for you to take tonight.”
I made a big show of rolling my eyes. “Lucky me. Lucky, lucky me. May I change into my play clothes first?”
“You may,” she said, like she was granting an audience with the queen. I gently pushed her off my knees and trudged up the stairs. I bent over the railing and yelled to my father in the kitchen that I would be down to help in a minute.
“Take your time,” he called. “The Internet says I need to let the lasagna rest, whatever the hell that means.”
I popped into the shower and scrubbed myself down, then pulled on some sweatpants and a fleece, which was as close to pajamas as I could get without actually wearing them to the dinner table. While I wanted nothing more than to slide under the covers now, I needed to see Lucy and to let her see me, to do normal things. As I finished throwing my laundry in the bin and storing my pearls, Lucy came into the bedroom, in the middle of a conversation with me for which I hadn’t even been present. Trying to make it up to her, I listened closely as she explained what she had learned in school—the parts of a flower and what they did—and had me explain dry cleaning in great detail, and why some things like socks didn’t need it, while other things like suits did.
“Maybe someday we can take one of my dresses to the dry cleaner?” Lucy asked hopefully.
I struggled to keep from laughing. “Maybe, if you’re very lucky.”
The doorbell rang. I listened from the top of the stairs, Lucy gripping my hand, as my father opened the door and—damn it—Hale said hello. I let Lucy hold me at the top of the stairs, hiding from Hale so that I might not have to go out into the cold and investigate something: death, or chemicals, or drugs.
“. . . just a second, let me get her,” I heard my father say to Hale, and then his voice, louder. “June!”
“Thank you, sir,” I heard Hale say as I walked down the stairs. Lucy let go of my hand, shy with a new person in our house, and stayed one step behind me the whole way down.
“You eaten?” Dad asked.
“Well, sir, I’m not very good company right this minute. I need sleep almost as much as June.” As he spoke he looked from my father to the stairs, and he beamed. I felt like a prom queen until I realized the smile was directed at Lucy.
“Well, hello there!” Hale’s voice as sweet as his smile.
I arrived at the bottom of the stairs with Lucy twisted around me. I dragged her to the front and introduced her to Hale.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Lucy,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Bascom.” Lucy stuck out her hand. “Not Miss. Just Lucy.”
“Okay, Lucy. Call me Hale.”
“Coming?” Dad called from the doorway, waving a spatula like a billy club. Lucy broke the handshake and ran into the kitchen.
“I’d hate to impose on your family time,” Hale said. “I wanted—”
“Why don’t you stay?” I surprised both of us with my goodwill, which was a mix of happiness that he wasn’t there to drag me back into the cold and a tiny bit of our restarted friendship exerting itself.
“Suuure.” Like he didn’t really believe me. He filled me in while he unbuttoned his coat. “I stopped by the station to brief y’all in person, but you were gone. Craig denied almost everything that Marty said.”
“But the pictures—”
“Remember, we knew about everything Craig did in the pictures, everything illegal, that is. For now, I told him to mind his p’s and q’s, and as a bonus, though he doesn’t know this, he’s under surveillance. I stopped by the glove factory, and hey, I forgot to tell you a fun fact—Phil Brouillette has title to the building. Things there are locked up tight.” He gave a mock shudder. “That glove factory is creepy. Do you know we found a room filled with wooden hands?”
He gave me a brief rundown on the schedule for tomorrow. Dave and I would be part of the team working the drug bust. They had a sizable number of people in town, but were keeping a low profile.
“And you’ll know at least some of the folks there tomorrow. Ernesto Aguilar is on the team.”
“Ernie?” And suddenly I was excited for tomorrow. I’d worked with Ernie on the desert meth operation. I would gladly spend six weeks in a tin shack with him. Ernie was team.
Hale stopped speaking.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“I believe so. Yes?”
“Thank God. I thought you’d showed up with another catastrophe. C’mon,” and I led him into the kitchen. “Dinnertime.”
As we sat down, Lucy was telling the story of the boy in her class who could roll his eyeballs back.
“That’s not going to be funny when his face freezes that way,” my father said.
Lucy considered. “It might be.”
The dinner was relaxed, and I found myself laughing for the first time in days. Hale ended up taking my test for me.
“Addition of three numbers,” he whispered loudly. “This is tough stuff.”
“No talking,” Lucy said.
I ate two pieces of lasagna. Dinner was beyond good, bordering on excellent. I expressed this with more surprise than Dad appreciated.
“What? I can read.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And I used canned sauce.”
Even the iceberg lettuce in the salad was delicious after eating nothing but vending machine coffee and subs for two days. And doing the dishes was a pleasure, safe and warm at home.
My hands wet, I joined everyone in the living room, where Lucy was playing poker with Hale on the coffee table. She was kneeling forward against the edge, trying to peek at his cards. Hale was loose, his jacket off, resting with his back against the couch, one leg drawn up to rest his hand with the cards, the second leg spread wide. Hale gave Lucy a few easy ones until he began to lose, whereupon he played in earnest. Lucy wiped the decks with him handily.
They played three hands, during which my father would point to a newspaper article on the case and hand it over without comment, practicing the same discretion with Lucy that he used to practice with me when I was a child. I found myself in a bit of a domestic reverie, enjoying the back-and-forth between Hale and Lucy and missing Kevin, but only a little, an ache rather than a raw tear. I almost lost track of time.
“Okay, Luce, fifteen minutes until you have to wash up and get ready for bed.”
“Nooo,” Lucy whined, which is what I expected. Lucy said no each consecutive time I told her, until the last time, when her no was followed by “Can Hale read me a story?”
I smarted. That was mine. Hale chose that moment to pick himself up.
“I need to get home, sweet pea,” he said. “But let’s see if I can get my coat and my hat on faster than you can get ready for bed.” He checked his watch. “Ready? Go.”
Lucy hesitated, realizing that this was an adult “going to bed” trick, but her competitiveness took over, and she raced for the stairs. Hale said his good-byes to my father, who was pretending to be awake in his chair, and ambled to the front door. He took his time, stopping to look at pictures of me in my high school graduation gown, my sister adjusting my tassel; my father and Kevin snapping a wishbone at Christmas the year before Kevin died; a picture of my sister with her kids and husband behind her, all in red sweaters, each with a hand on her shoulder, which must be the fashion in Ohio. He stalled, giving Lucy a chance to win. I was pulling his coat out of the closet when we heard all of the water pipes quiet at once and the stomp of feet from the bathroom. Lucy stood at the top of the stairs, wearing her favorite purple nightgown—she couldn’t sleep without it—over a pair of yellow footy pajamas.
“I won!” she said.
> Hale nodded. “That you did. I’m pretty poky.”
“You’re not so slow. I’m fast. Want to listen to the story?”
Hale smiled up at her, and the smile was still on his face when he looked at me. God, he was still handsome.
“Charlotte’s Web?” I asked him.
“I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
“You aren’t imposing.”
“C’mon,” Lucy said.
Lucy climbed into bed, arranging her pillows so that her head was directly below her dream catcher. Lucy had been plagued by nightmares—night terrors, really—when Kevin was at the end of his illness. She would wake, terrified that her father had been kidnapped or swept out to sea. We tried soothing music, back rubs, warm baths, and night-lights, but nothing worked. My father must have mentioned it to my mother, because the next thing I knew this gift arrived in the mail.
“To guide you through your night’s journey,” my mother’s note to Lucy said. Lucy had no idea what that meant.
“To catch your bad dreams,” I explained. I figured Lucy liked the feathers, beads, and purple latticework, but my mother’s hippie weirdness worked. Since then, Lucy had developed a nightly ritual—touching the feather and positioning herself carefully underneath—that she still followed even now, three years later. The willow frame had started to crack, and I might be forced to ask my mother to buy a replacement. I was not looking forward to that day.
I read through the creation of the “Some Pig” web, turning the book so that both Hale and Lucy could see the pictures. Lucy was fast asleep in midchapter, and the two of us crept out by the glow of the night-light.
“She’s beautiful,” Hale said as he wrapped the scarf around his neck. “She’s a long drink of water, just like her momma. And with the black hair and those big blue eyes, she’s the image of Kevin. That must be nice.” He winced. “I mean, I assume—I imagine that it’d be a good thing, but it might also pain you.”
“No, it’s good. I like to remember my time with him.”
Hale unclenched his jaw. He seemed as nervous as I was about restarting our friendship. I realized that he was intentionally not breaking eye contact, giving me all the signals that we learned at Quantico to show he wasn’t lying. “I owe you an apology. You and Kevin. I was young and stupid, and hurt that you two left me on the outside.”
“As I recall, you were the one who opted out of our friendship,” I said, but with no bite in it. I dropped my voice. “And other things.”
“It sure didn’t feel that way. At training, the two of you were always in each other’s orbits, crazy in love.”
“We weren’t even dating,” I protested.
“Kevin thought you hung the moon. Any fool could see it.”
I laughed. “As I recall, you were the one I had a fling with, not Kevin.”
Hale blushed. “Well, perhaps I was wrong. You were both so confident being agents, I figured you were sure about everything. Kevin was going to raise hell, break things wide open. You were going to set things right, and restore order. You were the stars.”
“You did well for yourself.”
“You think? Most folks figured it for a little hobby, something I’d put aside when I started in the family business.”
“Being rich is the family business?”
“The way my people do it. When I visited home for Christmas the year we were at Quantico, Momma strewed blondes around the house. She thought the right woman could correct my ways. My father cornered me after his fourth highball and said, ‘If you wanted to carry a gun, you could have joined the hunt club like a gentleman.’”
“I didn’t know,” I said, thinking of how I had imagined Hale spending that winter break. It involved blondes and highballs, but in my mind, he was enjoying it.
“Your family seemed to be all for a career in law enforcement,” he said. I glanced around the corner at my father, sleeping away. Hale stood close to me, his voice husky. “And you . . . you were made for this life. When Kevin got sick and you left the service . . . I didn’t believe it.” He paused, and seemed to be thinking over his next question. “Do you regret leaving?”
I breathed in the scent clinging to his clothes, gun oil and the dust from the glove factory, and underneath it, Hale.
“I don’t regret anything.” I realized this was true. “What I gave up, where I landed, what I did, how I lived . . . it let me have the best things in a way I couldn’t have otherwise.”
“You ever think about rejoining us, now that things have settled down?”
“This is calm?”
He shrugged. “Calm in your personal life.”
“I don’t think that’s a road that’s open to me.”
He tilted his head, considering me. “Let’s have this conversation again next week.”
We both reached for the door at the same time. He pulled his hand away and let me open it for him. He was over the threshold before he stepped back and hauled me into a hug. I hugged him back.
“I’ll be seeing you, June Lyons.” He kissed my cheek, his mouth brushing my hair before pulling away. He walked down the path, out of the range of light from the porch. I shut the door and turned out lamps, finally stopping in front of my father, who never would admit that he wasn’t watching. He would always be a cop. So would I. Tomorrow I would work to finish off this case, keeping the world, big and small, a little safer. I convinced my father to go to bed—he was awake, he swore—and went to find sleep of my own.
CHAPTER 25
FROM MY PERCH ATOP the mill’s roof, I had a view of the whole neighborhood. Despite the rain, through my binoculars I could see the details not only of the buildings, but of the neighbors’ lives: a couple tearing into a pizza, a family watching a reality TV show that seemed to involve people racing up a beach with buckets on their heads, an elderly woman drinking daintily from a teacup, which she refilled from a bottle of scotch. I could watch the actions of everyone within sight of my binoculars.
Except for the FBI’s. The surveillance that blanketed the neighborhood was evident to me because I knew where to look: the FBI listening equipment housed in a van right underneath me on the Old Mill Parkway, and an assault team parked a straight shot down Silliman Street, at the end of the alley that ran behind the Jelicksons’, shiny with rain. Farther still was the Mohawk River, where Danielle was thrown, if not to her death, then to her impaling.
But that’s not where my attention was focused. The dealer—the killer—had told Craig to drop the drugs in a tiny park that ran between the east side of the neighborhood and the cliffs that dropped into the Hudson River. A quarter-mile long and twenty feet wide, the undeveloped land had been too unstable for heavy industry during Hopewell Falls’s boom times. Craig was instructed to slide the drugs to the center of a ring of benches a few feet from the parking area, a Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union tribute to the women killed in the looms or mangled by machines. The seats were high and curved, taller than I was, and from my post the four solid ellipses formed an Irish knot, open yet impregnable. I had spent many days there the summer after Kevin died. I would lose track of time, letting the sounds of the river wash over me, drowning out the roar of the voice in my head reminding me that there would never be a time without grief. Never placid, in winter the current of air could sometimes make you feel like it would pick you up and drop you off the cliff into the water below. Inside the circle you were protected from some, though not all, of the winds.
My eyes flitted to the Jelicksons’ on Cataract Street. The Merrimen had lit two oil drum fires, and the block was bright. The flames had been festive, almost pretty, when they were confined to the Jelicksons’ front yard, but now they’d dragged the second barrel into the street. When they lit it, the tinder and the gasoline sent flames shooting up two stories like a Roman candle. Then the fire dropped to a low, hellish glow and seemed to be contained, but they were blatantly breaking the law and deserved to be arrested. I felt as if Hale was shrugging at me through the radio when
I suggested we call in the locals: “As far as they know, the investigation is closed. Let’s not give ourselves away.”
It’s not like the day had started out all that great. Reporters showed at 8:00 A.M. for Jerry’s announcement of the indictment against Marty, which was—surprise, surprise—just in time for the national morning talk shows to pick up. The chief and Dave stood grimly behind Jerry while he explained how justice was being served against the killer of such a fine young woman. He didn’t mention Ray.
“The people of Hopewell Falls and the Capital District”—Jerry trying to invoke gravitas, but instead sounding nasally—“everyone in the Empire State can sleep better knowing that this murderer, this craven killer, will face justice.”
The TV folks stuck around to do their establishing shots on the jailhouse steps. They seemed to think everyone wanted the attention Jerry was chasing, and took my “no comment” as the start of a discussion. At ten, Dave and I reached our breaking point, and gave the chief the heads-up that we were on our way over to the Kelly Suites to “liaise.” That’s where the federal agents were holed up, planning their stakeout. As Dave and I escaped out the prisoner transport entrance we saw Denise Byrne bundling her son into a minivan. With Jerry not willing to indict Jason without more evidence, we had had to cut him loose.
The Kelly Suites was a hotel of opportunity. Travelers would check in when they couldn’t drive another mile up the Northway. With its faded olive and harvest gold color scheme that couldn’t muster any optimism, and the half-fallen poster announcing FREE COFFEE EN SUITE, the place appeared to be slumping into bankruptcy. The only thing that didn’t fit was the lit no in front of the neon VACANCY sign.
The back of the hotel told the true story. As Dave and I walked up the steps to the second floor, we watched a half-dozen buzz-cut guys in DEA windbreakers and white-jumpsuited techs rushing around loading up hoses, tents, ventilators—meth labs could produce enormous amounts of corrosive gases and chemicals—as well as mobile kits.