But an “if” governed each option, and she had shot him, and her regret wouldn’t change an iota of Christopher’s death, which was cast in the stone of the past. The only thing that Andie could change was her attitude, her internal Dr. Capoletti reminded her. And now it struck her with a jolt that instead of feeling sorry, she needed with all her heart to accept what had happened. Really accept it. Live with it. Let it sink down to her core, work into her bone marrow, and flow into the nuclei of her cells. Let it become so deep a part of her that recriminations couldn’t reach there.
She also needed to accept that sometimes in life when she tried her best it still might not be good enough. Sometimes life would pit her against forces greater than her measly self and she’d have to give up the fight and walk on. And sometimes, as Tom had said, her life wouldn’t be fair, but she’d have to cling to the thought that it could still be good. When such a truly terrible thing as killing Christopher had happened, there was nothing left to do but claim her rightful place in the world and ask the sun and sky and sea to give her strength to keep going.
And that was exactly what Andie decided to do.
She spread out her blanket and sat down, cross-legged. The war of tension between her back and shoulders called a truce, and the heartburn that had been her constant companion for months packed up and went home. Accepting seemed like such a simple act, and yet it was huge.
As Andie watched Justice wander the beach, charging geese and sniffing footprints, she thought of her final visit with Dr. Capoletti. He’d reminded her that she’d always carry some sadness about Christopher. His suicide had been like a rock thrown into the still lake of her heart, and the ripples would go on and on forever.
“He forced you to shoot him. He wanted you to. In that way, he is more responsible for his death than you are. You were a pawn. He didn’t leave you much choice.”
“I guess so,” Andie agreed.
“You can’t let what happened define you. You must be more than the cop who killed a kid.”
Andie had agreed to that too.
Now as she sifted pebbles through her fingers, it occurred to her that the tragedy wasn’t hers—it was Christopher’s. The snarl of emotions behind his death belonged to him, not her. Would he have gone through with killing her if she hadn’t shot? Andie would never know. All she could know for sure was that she had a right to live and she’d done the right thing for herself—and as Dr. Capoletti had said, no one could take that knowledge away from her.
Andie lay back, closed her eyes, and listened to the waves as relief flowed into her. She felt as if a storm had sunk her ship, but now she’d washed ashore and was lying in the sun, slowly gathering her wits, grateful to be alive. And tucked into her gratitude was the peace that Tom had told her she could let herself feel.
She had lain there for ten minutes or two hours—she’d lost track of time—when Justice’s paws shuffled over the pebbles and she heard a plop. She snapped open her eyes.
A nasty sand-and-drool-covered stick sat inches from her face, above which Justice’s eyes were begging, Throw! Oh, please! Throw!
Andie got to her feet and hurled the stick as far as she could, and Justice tore after it. As he ran, the wind flattened his fur and his body exuded power and strength. His gait showed no sign that he’d been stabbed and come close to death. He wasn’t stiff. He didn’t limp. He was pure beauty flying toward the waves.
Justice testified to the miracle of healing and restoration. He embodied spring’s rebirth. So could I, Andie thought. Because of the storm of Christopher’s death, she’d come to the sunshine of acceptance and growth into her true, strong self. She’d needed both the storm and the sun, her good friends.
Plop. Moist eyes begging.
Andie threw the stick again. As Justice ran after it, she told him, “Last time. We’ve got to go home. I have something important to do.”
CHAPTER 52
TOM AND ANDREA
On Sunday nights the ferry riders had been acting like thugs again, yelling at one another, making obscene hand gestures, and cutting into the line of cars waiting to board. Ferry traffic was heaviest on Sunday nights, and the drivers needed someone to make them behave. Tom had just agreed with Chief Malone to be that someone starting next week, not that he was looking forward to directing traffic in spring rain.
As he walked out of the San Julian police station, however, he was not thinking about Sunday nights. He was thinking about Andie. When she’d been back at work after his investigation, he’d liked seeing her around there. Without her, the station felt like somebody had dimmed the lights. And bummer of bummers, the Chief had just said he’d kept her on leave long enough and next week he’d advertise for her replacement.
Tom lamented that Andie would never again be the department’s Christmas elf. He wouldn’t be able to raid her cookies in the roll-call room or see her at Cops Night Out, an event she’d organized every summer for the police and sheriff’s departments. Now that the case was closed, he had little reason to see her. Too bad life wasn’t always the way he wanted it, he told himself—just as Andie materialized out of nowhere, as if she’d picked up his thoughts and come to prove them wrong.
Next to his patrol car, she climbed out of her Honda, leaving behind Justice, who looked highly displeased. His furrowed brow said to Andie and anyone else who might see his forlorn face, I belong in that building. Why the devil do I have to be locked up? Somewhere on this island there are drugs to be sniffed!
“Hey, Brady,” Tom said.
“Hey, Wolski.”
They were off to a flying start. After just hearing of the Chief’s plan to replace her, Tom wasn’t sure what to say, so he settled on an original and scintillating question: “What’s going on?”
“Not much.”
“The Chief just told me the Vanderwaals dropped their suit. That’s fantastic.”
“At least I won’t have to pay them six million dollars.”
“So life can be fair,” Tom said.
“Even if it isn’t, it can be good,” Andie said with a smile. “I have a lot to thank you for. You really helped me. Without your continued investigating . . .”
“I’m glad.”
Andie was holding a business envelope that looked like a white flag of surrender, and Tom itched to know what was in it. At long last her formal resignation letter? A legal form she’d signed for Hausmann? Not to be an overt snoop, he nodded toward it and asked obliquely, “Important business?”
“I don’t know yet.” Andie tapped a corner of the envelope against her thumb as a motorcycle passed by, its muffler loud enough to raise the dead. “Just for the record, I’m doing what you wanted.”
“How so?”
“I’m asking the Chief to take me back.”
Yes! If Tom’s smile had extended another few inches, the corners of his mouth might have touched his ears. “That’s great news.”
“You think it’s great because you told me I should be a cop.”
“Great minds, same channel,” Tom said. “Justice sure will be happy.”
Right now he was as glum as rain. He stared them down with his most crestfallen expression. I want out of this Honda.
“Justice won’t be happy if the Chief says no,” Andie said.
“I’m sure he’ll be glad to have you back.” Why did Brady have to look so damned good in that sweater? It fit in all the right places.
His red-blooded all-American male began to joust with his cautious streak again, and only one was going to stay on his horse.
Go ahead. Ask her out.
Remember, buddy, she broke the date before.
The red-blooded male guffawed. That was six years ago! Are you the Guinness World Record holder for the lamest grudge?
Andie glanced toward the station door. “Only one way to find out what the Chief will say.”
“That’s true.” Tom had wrestled mammoth bruisers to the floor and tackled wing-footed kingpins. It was ridiculous for a strapping m
an like him to hesitate about much of anything. He was about to ask Andie out when she looked back at him and said, “Can I take you to dinner tonight? You know, to thank you for all the work you did to find the motive.” It sounded innocent enough, but a blush had crept into her cheeks.
Tom almost laughed out loud before he caught himself. “I’d like that.”
* * *
After Andie left her letter for the Chief in the mailroom, she stopped to visit Stephanie behind her glass window just inside the front door. She was weaving wands of lavender, which she’d dried in her closet all winter, to sell at a church bazaar.
“I’ve started a new business as a hangover helper,” Stephanie said. “On mornings after, I bring Gatorade and a burrito to college students’ apartments. If they’ve had a party there the night before, I also help clean up.”
“I hate to think of the mess,” Andie said.
“Cleaning up messes pays good money.”
“Are you close to what you need for the Great Barrier Reef?”
“Depends on how luxurious I want the trip to be. Scuba diving isn’t cheap.”
“You’ll get there.” Andie hugged her. “I have to hurry. I have a date. Sort of, anyway.”
Stephanie raised a hand to her forehead like a Victorian lady swooning on her settee. “Pardon me while I faint. Tell me! Who?”
“Wolski,” Andie said, “and if you don’t close your mouth a fly might buzz in.”
“I knew he had the hots for you.”
“It’s not the hots. . . .” Well, maybe it’s the mutual hots. “I gotta go.”
Andie rushed to the parking lot. She had to get Justice home and feed him supper. With luck, she’d have time to change out of her jeans and sweater and get her hair to behave.
When she climbed into her car, Justice was still in major woebegone mode, his forehead grievously rumpled. Andie patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry I left you, Sweet Boy. I didn’t think you’d mind if I went in for a minute.”
When he fixed his eyes on her, white crescents appeared below his pupils, his darkest, most lugubrious look. You went into the station without me. I wanted to see my friends.
“If the Chief lets me come back to the force, you’ll get daily doses of our colleagues,” Andie promised.
As she drove home, Justice got back to his old self. His damp nose streaked the windshield while he looked for bad guys and squirrels he could round up.
When Andie turned onto Valley Road, Justice whimpered with anticipation of hauling Rosemary around in his mouth and eating his dinner. Andie turned into the driveway before she realized that she’d passed the Vanderwaals’ without thinking of Christopher. For the first time since his death, she’d driven by without a flinch, because she’d been thinking of Tom and her first date since Christopher had attacked her.
For months she’d been measuring her life in terms of “before Christopher” and “after Christopher” just as some people gauged events before or after they moved away from home, or started their first job, or met the person they would marry. Before and after Christopher had even applied to where Andie had parked, for heaven’s sake. Ridiculous.
She drove down her driveway but did not head toward the side of her house. She went straight to her “before Christopher” parking spot in front of it. As she pulled her key from the ignition, she resolved that it was time to look for a better life-organizing principle than Christopher Vanderwaal.
She opened the passenger door, and Justice ran to the bushes to hunt for Rosemary. Andie walked over to the side of her yard that she’d avoided for months and Tom had threatened to mow. Evening was coming, and the forest was peaceful. A soft pink streaked the clouds. Last night’s rain had washed the trees, and she breathed in the clean, fresh smell of cedar and fir.
Andie walked over the grass Christopher had run across. She ran her hand along the bushes where he’d hidden. She stood on the dirt once pooled with his blood and gazed at her house.
Though she’d lived here for years, she felt as if she’d never truly seen any of it before. It was no crime scene. It was her home. She was exactly where she belonged—in her rightful place—and it was more beautiful than she’d ever understood.
Maybe there were no befores and afters or beginnings and ends, she thought. Life just kept moving, and you muddled along the best you could. Once in a while, the worst got thrown at you like a tornado that sucked you up and spit you out and you had to find your way back home. But as long as you kept muddling along, you reached it, and, like Andie, maybe you saw it with new gratitude, as if for the first time.
EPILOGUE
Being a faithful and hardworking dog, Justice rejoiced at being reinstated as a San Julian P.D. K–9. He guarded Andie with extra vigor and, when asked, sniffed his heart out. In May, after the Beast was tried and put away, Justice nabbed the Brute, who’d moved in on the Beast’s turf. In June, on a tip from a Bremerton nark, Justice charged into an upscale house, where one would have expected to find upstanding people, and he led Andie, Tom, and a tactical response team to an entire drug lab—with eighty bricks of heroin and twenty-eight thousand dollars in cash.
In August Justice had another chance to shine at the annual San Julian Cops’ Night Out, which Andie had been organizing for months at Waterfront Park. The whole town—including Dr. Mark Vargas, the Laser Lady, the once-mooned Marigold Adams, and the fastidious Kimberly Thatcher—turned out. As the enticing smells of free hot dogs, popcorn, and cotton candy drifted through the air, dozens of children crawled through a demo ambulance and police car. At booths manned by police, parents picked up brochures on fire safety, emergency preparedness, and crime prevention.
Unperturbed by the crowds, Justice demonstrated his sniffing skills.With the focus of a conscientious homing pigeon, he zeroed in on stashes that Andie hid in the backpacks and pockets of colleagues planted in the audience. After their applause, he assumed his maharaja position and allowed petting hands as a pope might allow signet-ring kisses. Though modest, Justice basked in his glory.
Popular as he was, he could only lay claim to being the evening’s second-greatest attraction. The first was the pie-eating contest, which began as the sun set and floodlights came on all over the park. Andie was the emcee, and the judges were Meghan (minus Rosemary) and Stephanie, who was packed and ready to leave in the morning for the Great Barrier Reef. Contestants were the bravest members of the San Julian Police Department and the Nisqually County Sheriff’s Department.
Andie called them all up to the stage. Reluctant but good-natured, Tom dragged himself there first, and next came Chief Malone, Doug Baker, Ron Hausmann, Alan Pederson, Ross Jackson—and Justice, whose eyes glittered at the prospect of food. Facing the audience and lined up across the stage, all of them but him sank to their knees before one of Andie’s blackberry pies, waiting on an apple crate.
Justice was in a different category. Andie had prepared him a small pie of browned hamburger, topped with mashed potatoes. Meghan stood with her hand up in front of him to keep him from lunging at it before the contest began.
As Murphy handcuffed the contestants behind their backs, Andie announced that first prize went to whoever finished the most pie, and second, to whoever’s face got the purplest. She rang a bell and bedlam broke out onstage. There were chomps, gulps, chokes, coughs, and porcine grunts. Noses rooted through pies. Purple goop and clumps of crust fell all over the stage.
The Chief slobbered berries down his shirt’s front as he raised his head to chew, and Alan Pederson got so worked up that his signature crescent moons of armpit perspiration appeared on his shirt. Once again Ross Jackson could have used intravenous feeding. He dipped his forehead and chin into the pie and rolled his cheeks from side to side so purple completely covered his face and managed to reach his bald head. Blackberries found their way into his ear and up his nostril.
As Lisa screamed from the audience, “Go, Dad!” Tom ratcheted up his eating speed and gulped full blast. He attacked the crust an
d swallowed blackberries whole. As he gluttonized at rocket speed, berry juice got slung around and stained the sergeant’s stripes that Andie had recently sewn onto his sleeve. Next to him, Justice, who’d polished off his hamburger pie in twelve seconds, was licking his chops.
Finally, Andie rang the bell again and Stephanie and Meghan examined sticky faces and pies’ remains. Tom, dubbed the “Eager Eater,” won first prize, a gift certificate for the Dip-pity Creamery. Ross Jackson, the “Purple Piglet,” came in second for two Sweet Time Bakery pies of his choice. As the crowd cheered, Murphy removed everybody’s handcuffs and Ross Jackson strutted around the stage, his hands clasped above his head like he’d just knocked his opponent out cold in a boxing match.
Andie claimed her man. With a moist towel she tenderly wiped Tom’s face. She flicked bits of blackberry off his cheeks and planted a congratulatory smackaroo on his sweet purple lips. No longer needing a wall around herself, she gladly showed anybody who cared to look what her feelings were, and no one could doubt that she loved Tom. She now thought of events as “before Tom” and “after Tom.” He, not Christopher, was the organizing principle of her life.
Too regal to sink to jealousy that Tom, not he, was Andie’s organizing principle, Justice approved of any smackaroo that took place in his presence. After the long, winding road the three of them had traveled since last November, they’d finally reached their destination, all of them together. They were a family in the making with long hours and crazy, ever-changing, dangerous shifts. And Lisa would live with them on weekends.
Justice pressed himself against Tom’s and Andie’s legs. Just as he liked to prance around proclaiming that Bandit was his personal teddy, he now proclaimed to the contest audience that Andie and Tom were his personal people. And if anybody like the Beast showed up and caused them any grief, Justice had some teeth he’d be delighted for them to meet.
A Healing Justice Page 24