“I’ve been thinking about it too. I just…I don’t know if I trust myself enough to make a decision like that quite yet. And I don’t know if I could justify asking you to move three thousand miles on a ‘maybe.’”
“A maybe is the only way anyone ever can justify moving three thousand miles. There are no guarantees on the big stuff.”
He smiled, and for a brief second the future seemed a little less scary.
“Excuse me!”
A minivan had pulled over on the side of the road. Leaning out the driver’s side window was Lori Asperski. “I’m sorry, but you need a permit to eat by the ponds.”
Francine thought she was joking. “Right. Thanks, Lori.”
“I’m afraid I’m serious. As a member of the law enforcement community and the neighborhood watch, I can’t ignore a violation like this.”
Francine stood up. “Is it kind of like that rule that you can’t keep farm animals in your yard?”
Lori put the van in park. “You know, when I go somewhere new, I cop to that place’s way of doing things. If I went to Mexico, I’d try to speak Mexican. Understand?”
“We speak English,” Bruno said.
“When my Brownie passed away, I think you two should’ve made it clear you had nothing to do with it.”
“We didn’t have anything to do with it,” Francine said.
“I’m saying, you should have made that extremely clear!” Lori’s voice wavered with anger before she hogtied it back into condescension. “I think I’ve been more than polite these last few weeks, but I have to say I’m looking forward to your departure. The both of you. I’m sure all these little oddities will stop after you leave, and everything will go back to normal.” She glanced up at some gathering rain clouds. “Hmm. Looks like your illegal picnic is about to get rained out anyway. I’d give you a lift back, but I’m late for duty. Don’t forget your garbage.”
She shifted back into drive and puttered off toward the barn.
“Good God, I hate that woman,” Francine muttered.
“Lori works at the police station?”
“As a dispatcher. Next thing you know, she’ll have a star on her chest. Hey, that could be something.”
“What?”
“Chief Durham’s badge. It’s a six-pointed star. What if the triangle on Brownie was a half-finished star?”
“Best triangle theory so far.” Bruno looked up at the darkening sky. “Maybe we should discuss it on the go. We still have to get you wired.”
They packed up the picnic in silence, neither wanting to finish the conversation about what came next.
Chapter 31
In everything I do lately, I feel that I am being tested.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
Ellie’s wardrobe came through as usual, this time with a light cardigan embossed with a wonderfully obscuring polar bear. Francine brushed mac and cheese dust from Charlie’s dinner off the arctic predator’s nose as she left for Roland’s house.
The growing number of undercover meetings she’d had with Roland had given her an added confidence in her work. And since they’d found absolutely zero evidence that indicated Roland was anyone other than who he claimed to be, aside from the lone spike of the glasses polish, she was basically preparing for a relaxing evening with a friend.
Her confidence was doused by the light rain that began to fall when she was halfway to Roland’s. Despite running the rest of the way, she was partially soaked by the time she cleared the line of spruce trees and rushed into the screened porch.
“My goodness!” Roland said. “I have towels and clothing if you wish to change.”
“No, no. I’m fine. It’s actually kind of refreshing.” Francine used a few napkins to dab off the rain and plopped down onto her loveseat, admiring the usual refreshments on the coffee table. Tonight the tea and cookies were accompanied by a large bottle of green liquid. “What do we have here?”
“Absinthe. As our time together nears a close, I thought we could risk hangovers one last time.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had absinthe.”
“It is not entirely legal in this country. I am trusting you not to notify the police.” He winked. “Perhaps your silence can be bought with cookies. I hope chocolate chip will suffice.”
“Chocolate chip will always suffice. You can put that on my headstone.” Francine downed a cookie, still hungry from the interrupted picnic.
Roland poured some absinthe. “You may drink it plain if you wish, but I myself prefer the sweeter approach to life.”
He placed a sugar cube on a slotted spoon above the glass of absinthe, then poured water over the spoon, dissolving the sugar into the alcohol below.
Francine followed his example and they drank together.
“Good, yes?” Roland asked.
“Tastes like those cookies.” Francine coughed. “Asinine? Arsenic?”
Roland chuckled. “Aniskrabeli.”
“But somehow the liquor burn makes it tolerable.” Francine smacked her lips. “I like it.”
Roland clapped his hands. “Wunderbar!”
The intermittent drizzle outside had dropped the temperature and brought a wonderfully fresh breeze. Rain-riled mosquitoes bumped against the porch’s screen walls while Ajax nibbled at some cookie crumbs around Francine’s shoes.
Roland gently shooed the dog away. “He’s quite taken with you.”
“I suspect it may be cookie crumb-related, but I’ll take it.”
“Nonsense, you’re his favorite guest.”
Denied his crumbs, Ajax grunted in frustration and lay down in the corner next to an empty six-pack of beer bottles. The trash struck Francine as strange, since Roland didn’t drink beer.
She took another sip of her absinthe. “Do they drink this stuff back in Switzerland?”
“Often. Or rather, we used to. I am not current on European trends.”
“You really don’t look back, do you? I’m jealous.”
Roland took a bite of cookie. “When I found a new beginning here, there was no need to return, in person or in thought. The whole continent had been scourged by war. When what is done is done, reflection has value, but only to a point.”
“Hey, you’re getting started early tonight. And nice try, but love and war are vastly different things, despite the ‘all’s fair’ bullshit.”
“Life’s truest wisdoms are often the most common, applicable to maladies of every scale.”
“Roland, as much as I hated my divorce, it didn’t kill millions of people.”
“You have felt tremendous pain. Why should another’s suffering disqualify your own?”
Francine drew in a sudden breath as a quick pain, much more present than the kind they were discussing, spiked into her back.
The transmitter. It must have gotten wet and shorted out. Another mild shock made her jump.
“Are you all right?” Roland asked.
“Oh, sure. Can I use your restroom?”
“Too much too fast,” he chided jokingly.
She nodded and walked quickly through the double doors.
“Down the hallway, last door on the left,” he called after her.
“Left?” She feigned looking for the bathroom. “Ah, got it.”
Another small bite of electricity found her lower back as she shut the door. She ripped the transmitter off and pulled the microphone out from under the cardigan.
“Bruno, if you can still hear me, I’m fine,” she whispered into the mic. “The transmitter’s screwed up from the rain. I’m going to dump it, but everything’s okay.”
She shoved open the bathroom’s tiny window and peeked outside. The uncovered window well below was a soup of leaves and rainwater. Francine dangled the mic and transmitter out the window and dropped them, watching with relief as they sank into the leafy sludge below.
She ran the faucet on high for appearances and strolled back to the porch.
“Now then, where were we?” She dropped onto her s
eat, feeling oddly more relaxed without the wire, even though she no longer had her mop-haired guardian angel listening in.
Roland held up refilled glasses.
“I need to pace myself,” Francine said.
“Nonsense. You’ll ruin my plan.”
“What’s…your plan?”
“To remove inhibition so as to better access the truth.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
He meant inhibition about discussing her divorce. Didn’t he?
“I’m loathe to admit it,” Roland said, “but as I said before, our time together grows short. What would you say to some accelerated therapy techniques?”
“What would these techniques entail?”
“I ask you a question, and you give me your first reaction. Not your first thought, you understand, just your reaction. Understood?”
Well, this couldn’t possibly be super fucking dangerous. But before she could think of a reasonable excuse, the test had begun.
“When did the trouble begin in your relationship?”
“Well, I mean, it was probably all there from the beginning. I thought we were compatible at first, but less so later on.”
“That was a thoughtful response. React, Francine. Did you love your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Did he love you?”
“I…Yes.”
“Did he love you?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“When did he stop?”
“How could I know that?”
“When did he stop?”
“When I had a breakdown.”
Roland leaned back in his seat. “Would you like to talk about that?”
“I might have to think a little to do it. Is that allowed?”
He nodded.
Francine took a drink. She wouldn’t have told Laura Jean about the breakdown. Even Ellie knew only bits and pieces. She definitely wasn’t ready to tell Bruno yet, and for once, he wouldn’t overhear it by accident. This was one of her last opportunities to get Roland’s sharp perspective on her problems.
“I get confused every once in a while. Like, I was really into Nancy Drew as a kid. She’s the teenager that solves mysteries, you know? Eventually she became my imaginary friend, and probably hung around a little longer than she should have. I didn’t actually think I was Nancy Drew, but I’d sometimes introduce myself as ‘Nancy’ for fun at parties, or her words would bleed into mine. That kind of stuff. Never anything too exciting, just a mild episode here and there. When I was married to Ben, if I got really stressed out, I’d briefly have trouble understanding what was real and what wasn’t.”
The rarely voiced words sounded heavy and clumsy coming out of her mouth, but Roland remained patiently silent.
“I was gonna get help, but Ben didn’t want me to. He said it would look bad for both of us. That sounds horrendous hearing it now, but at the time he made it seem reasonable. He was good at that. I was embarrassed, so I tried to keep everything together on my own. When I found out Ben was cheating, I tried everything I could think of to fix the situation. I kicked him out, took him back, begged him to stop. Nothing worked. And when he wouldn’t change, something inside me that I’d been holding together came loose. I became someone else for a night, someone with a different name and a different life. Someone without a husband who couldn’t stop lying and cheating. I went out to a bar, found a guy, and slept with him. I was someone else while I did it, but I did it.”
“You were not responsible,” Roland objected. “It was an episode—”
“No. I’m telling you all this to explain how I felt, not to use it as an excuse. Someone else was at the wheel that night, but I kinda let them drive, you know? I was unfaithful to the marriage just like Ben was.”
“And he knew something had occurred?”
“Yes.”
“Because you told him.”
“I couldn’t lie like he could.”
Roland shook his head. “It was a single offense versus an instigating action performed countless times.”
“I don’t think Ben liked the single offense, but when I told him how it had happened, the distance I’d felt from myself, he didn’t want to deal with that. He liked me better when I was an easy read.”
The absinthe was packing the wrinkles in Francine’s overclocked brain with warm licorice lint, fresh out of the dryer. She was putty.
“I want you to listen to me closely,” Roland said. “You were mistaken in your choice of partner, and you believe that choice took a part of you away without permission. That isn’t true. As you were then, so you are today. Whole, and deserving of love.”
“Thank you, Roland.”
Francine’s mind made itself up all on its own. The man before her was not Oskar Lischka. In the relief that ensued from this knowledge, she relaxed, and they drank, adding more sugar to their drinks to match the sweeter conversation.
Francine brought up less dramatic memories of San Francisco, like the Embarcadero movie house that showed bad King Kong sequels. She always loved to watch monsters fight monsters.
More sugar. More water. More absinthe.
Roland talked about Ajax being too kind for his own good. The husky who wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone a squirrel, which there were definitely less and less of around the neighborhood these days.
Sugar, water, absinthe.
Francine said August was a tacky month to get married, let alone remarried. Roland agreed.
Sugarwaterabsinthe.
Roland said Hawthorn Woods was a special place, even if it occasionally suffered misfortunes like Magdalena Durham. Francine agreed wholeheartedly.
Soon—or had it been a while?—the bottle was empty, and Ajax was nudging impatiently at the back door.
Roland clapped his hands. “Our canine compatriot is either weary of our ramblings, or desperately needs to relieve himself.”
The three of them went out into the backyard. Ajax sniffed around the grass, then cocked his head at a high, whining sound: Eric Banderwalt’s dirt bike, screaming through some other part of the neighborhood.
“Menace,” Roland grumbled.
“That’s what I used to think,” Francine said.
“It is not so?”
“I dunno for sure, but his father is not a nice man.”
“I couldn’t wait to get away from my father. Perhaps this boy has a fantasy of escaping on his bike, though I wish that fantasy were just a bit quieter. Ajax is drawn to engine noises. I worry about him running into the street.”
The husky inadvertently startled a pair of brown rabbits feeding on the grass near a slab of stone leaned against a tree trunk.
Looking closer, Francine saw it was an unused tombstone. With some drunken difficulty, she read the poem etched across its face. “‘Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.’ That’s beautiful.”
“I found it in a book of poetry and thought it fitting for my grave marker. It narrowly won out over ‘Chocolate chip will always suffice.’”
“Oh, shut up.” Francine smirked. “Kinda morbid to have your own tombstone waiting in the backyard, isn’t it?”
“At my age, it is a mere practicality. I have no next of kin, and rest a touch easier knowing the words I’ll lie forever below are as sublime as these. Death for me now is less about the when, and more the how and where. There’s a small graveyard deeper in the neighborhood where I have a plot reserved. I think Hawthorn Woods will make a fine point of departure.”
“You deserve a fine point of departure,” Francine said, seeing Roland as a child of abuse who’d forged a better life halfway across the globe, and aspired only to have kind words on his grave.
The single headlight of Eric’s dirt bike knifed down the street. Ajax darted through the spruce trees, running toward the engine noise.
“Ajax!” Roland called, but the dog was already in the street.
>
Just as husky and bike were about to meet, Eric steered expertly around the dog and skidded to a halt on the side of the road, where he killed the earsplitting engine.
With surprising speed, Roland was in Eric’s face, poking him so hard in the chest he knocked him off the bike. “What’s in your head, boy, driving so fast? You nearly hit my dog!”
“I didn’t know he was gonna run into the street,” Eric said, getting to his feet.
“You shouldn’t be driving so fast!”
Eric’s eyes went to Francine. Did he expect her to say something? To stick up for him?
“Eric, that’s too fast for around here,” she said. “You could’ve hurt someone.”
He looked at her a moment longer, then picked up his bike and spit on the road. “Maybe try leashing your dog next time. He’s no good as roadkill.” He drove his foot down on the kickstart and cranked one handle, kicking up a spray of gravel as he took off.
They watched him speed away through a thin cloud of exhaust.
“And just like that, he’s my number one all over again.” Francine slurred.
“Number one?” Roland asked.
“For Brownie. I’m going to find out who killed her, no matter what. Eric and his little green knife seem to fit quite nicely.”
Roland’s gaze remained on the bike’s diminishing tail light as he patted Ajax’s head. “A sound bet, indeed.”
Chapter 32
At times I have enjoyed being hurt by someone I loved.
[ ] TRUE [ x ] FALSE
Francine stumbled home to find Bruno sitting on the back of Pete’s Volvo.
“Hey!” he greeted her in a hushed voice. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, much more loudly, still riding the wave of absinthe. “I mean, I’m a little disappointed you didn’t kick Roland’s door down when the mic went out, but that’s okay.”
“I thought about it. I tried to come over to keep an eye on things but I got stopped by Chief Durham. By the time I got to Gerber’s, you guys were outside and I didn’t want to be seen. So I came here to wait.”
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