"I can'd talk right now, I'll call you back," I snapped, and hung up. I
despised the women who staffed Comfort Hill: unsmiling, uncomforting.
Underpaid, gruelingly underpaid, which was probably why they never
smiled or comforted. I knew my anger toward them was misdirected – it
absolutely infuriated me that my father lingered on while my mom was in
the ground.
It was Go's turn to send the check. I was pretty sure it was Go's turn
for July. And I'm sure she was positive it was mine. We'd done this
before. Go said we must be mutually subliminally forgetting to mail
those checks, that what we really wanted to forget was our dad.
I was telling Riordan about the strange man I'd seen in our neighbor's
vacated house when the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang. It sounded so
normal, like I was expecting a pizza.
The two detectives entered with end-of-shift weariness. The man was
rangy and thin, with a face that tapered severely into a dribble of a
chin. The woman was surprisingly ugly – brazenly, beyond the scope of
everyday ugly: tiny round eyes set tight as buttons, a long twist of a
nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, long lank hair the color of a dust
bunny. I have an affinity for ugly women. I was raised by a trio of
women who were hard on the eyes – my grandmother, my mom, her sister –
and they were all smart and kind and funny and sturdy, good, good women.
Amy was the first pretty girl I ever dated, really dated.
The ugly woman spoke first, an echo of Miss Officer Velásquez. "Mr
Dunne? I'm Detective Rhonda Boney. This is my partner, Detective Jim
Gilpin. We understand there are some concerns about your wife."
My stomach growled loud enough for us all to hear it, but we pretended we didn'd.
"We take a look around, sir?" Gilpin said. He had fleshy bags under his
eyes and scraggly white whiskers in his mustache. His shirt wasn'd
wrinkled, but he wore it like it was; he looked like he should stink of
cigarettes and sour coffee, even though he didn'd. He smelled like Dial
soap.
I led them a few short steps to the living room, pointed once again at
the wreckage, where the two younger cops were kneeling carefully, as if
waiting to be discovered doing something useful. Boney steered me toward
a chair in the dining room, away from but in view of the signs of
struggle.
Rhonda Boney walked me through the same basics I'd told Velásquez and
Riordan, her attentive sparrow eyes on me. Gilpin squatted down on a
knee, assessing the living room.
"Have you phoned friends or family, people your wife might be with?" Rhonda Boney asked.
"I … No. Not yet. I guess I was waiting for you all."
"Ah." She smiled. "Let me guess: baby of the family."
"What?"
"You"re the baby."
"I have a twin sister." I sensed some internal judgment being made.
"Why?" Amy's favorite vase was lying on the floor, intact, bumped up
against the wall. It was a wedding present, a Japanese masterwork that
Amy put away each week when our housecleaner came because she was sure
it would get smashed.
"Just a guess of mine, why you'd wait for us: You"re used to someone
else always taking the lead," Boney said. "That's what my little brother
is like. It's a birth-order thing." She scribbled something on a
notepad.
"Okay." I gave an angry shrug. "Do you need my sun sign too, or can we get started?"
Boney smiled at me kindly, waiting.
"I waited to do something because, I mean, she's obviously not with a
friend," I said, pointing at the disarray in the living room.
"You"ve lived here, what, Mr Dunne, two years?" she asked.
"Two years September."
"Moved from where?"
"New York."
"City?"
"Yes."
