‘OK.’ His breathing had stopped and that was all he could get out.
‘We liked each other, like each other.’ A pause. ‘Maybe a little more than that.’
Hardy tried to keep any hurt or recrimination out of his voice. ‘How much more?’
His wife sighed. ‘I think for a while I was infatuated with him. He seemed to feel the same way about me.’ She read something in his face and let go of his hands. ‘Now you’re going to hate me, aren’t you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s going to make me hate you. I love you.’
She stared at him for another beat. ‘We didn’t…’ She stopped. ‘But he was there, Dismas. He was a friend. He listened. I just want you to understand.’
‘I don’t listen?’
‘Yes. I mean no, you know you don’t. Not about some things. You glaze over – the kids, school life, all those what you call mindless suburban activities. And I don’t even blame you, not really. I know it’s not the most exciting stuff in the world, but it’s my life, and sometimes it’s just horribly lonely and mind-numbing, and then suddenly there was this nice man who didn’t think all of this was tedious to listen to.’
‘So he’d listen, did he, old Ron?’
She nodded, going on. ‘Ron and I, we were just having so many of the same issues with the kids…’
He couldn’t hold it any longer. ‘Wait a minute, Frannie. What about us? I seem to remember we’re doing some of the same things, too – live in the same house, do the kid thing, have friends over, like that. That stuff doesn’t count?’
‘I know, I know, you’re right.’ There was pain in her voice, too, perhaps some faint overtones of the desperation she must have been feeling. ‘But you know how things have changed with us. We’re different. I hope you’re still committed-’
‘Of course I’m still committed. You think I’d be sitting here listening to all this if I wasn’t pretty damn committed?’
‘OK, I know that. But the romance…’ She stopped. They both knew what she was getting at. The romance, and there used to be plenty, had been all but swallowed by the maw of the mundane.
And Hardy knew why. ‘We’re both working now. We work all the time.’
‘Well, whatever the reason, we both know we’re not the way we used to be. There’s whole areas of each other’s lives that we don’t have the time or energy for anymore.’
Hardy brought his hand up to his eyes, all the fatigue of the past hours suddenly weighing in. Everything Frannie was saying was true. Nobody’s lives were the way they used to be. But the accommodation he’d reached was to put it out of his mind. He had his job, making the money. She had hers, the house and the children’s day-to-day activities. They shared the children’s discipline and some organized playtime. They weren’t actually fighting; they were both competent, so there wasn’t much to fight about. This was adulthood and it was often not much fun. So what?
But she evidently had reached another conclusion – she needed something he wasn’t giving her and she’d gone out and found it. ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘Talk to me.’
‘I’m thinking everybody…’ He started over. ‘I mean, married people… I don’t know.’ He rubbed at his burning eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We all get further apart?’
He shook his head. ‘Maybe. But I’ve been trying to support us all here for the last few years. It takes a little bit of my time. Hell, it takes all my time. You think I’m OK with no leisure in my life? You think I don’t miss it, too, the fun? But what’s the option? Live poor, let the kids starve…?’
‘Nobody’s going to starve, Dismas. It’s not that. You know that.’
‘Actually, I’m not sure that I do know that. It feels like if I stop working, somebody might. The world might end.’
‘But you never talked to me about that, did you? That fear?’ He shrugged and she pressed him. ‘Because you don’t talk about those kinds of things, not anymore.’
He shrugged that off. ‘I never did, Frannie. Nobody wants to hear about that, all those nebulous fears.’
‘Yes they do. And nebulous hopes, too, and little insignificant worries that just need to get aired out, and the occasional dream that’s just a dream, like we used to have all the time. What we were going to do when we got older, when the kids have moved out?’
‘Frannie, you’re talking a decade, minimum. We don’t even know if we’ll be alive in a decade. Why talk about it?’
She folded her arms. ‘That’s exactly what I mean. We don’t know something for sure and therefore it’s not on the Top Forty list of acceptable topics.’
‘But Ron does, is that it? You’ve got hopes and fears you can share with Ron, but not with me?’ He was hurt and mad and starting to swing pretty freely, maybe rock her with a roundhouse. ‘So what kind of dreams did you and Ron share and talk about?’
‘I didn’t have any dreams with Ron, Dismas. I only have dreams with you.’
That stopped him. Her eyes were beginning to well up. He reached over, pulling her to him. ‘I don’t want to yell at you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this right now. I’m trying.’ He pulled back so he could look at her. ‘I’ve been trying with our whole lives, too, you know. I do try to be there for you and the kids. I haven’t been distant on purpose.’
‘I know. I shouldn’t have let Ron even be friends, not that way. That’s all it was, really, but I… it seemed innocent, really, starting out. You know, connecting finally to somebody.’
Hardy knew. Just before Vincent had been born, he’d had the same experience – connection, infatuation. Fire that he had ducked away from before it had burned him and Frannie. He knew.
‘I shouldn’t have let him get important,’ she said. ‘I should have seen it and stopped, but we were just talking. It didn’t seem it would hurt anything.’
‘Except it’s put you here.’
That brought them back to where they were, although of course they hadn’t gone anywhere. It was almost midnight and the next morning their own children would be waking up at Grandma’s with neither of their parents around.
Frannie, shivering now, looked down at her orange jumpsuit. This time the tears did well over.
‘I’m so sorry, Dismas. I’m so sorry.’
He pulled her back to him, and moved his hand up and down over her back, feeling pretty damn sorry himself.
Glitsky was at his desk, sipping from a mug of tepid tea, trying to get a take on what Frannie had told him, which wasn’t much that he hadn’t already known. Bree and the oil wars. But so what? He’d been a homicide inspector for a long time and the idea that this was some sort of business-related slaying was, for him, almost too far-fetched to consider.
When he got back to basics and asked himself who stood to benefit from Bree’s death, he came up with Ron. So regardless of how much he’d prefer Sharron Pratt and Scott Randall to be wrong, he was thinking he’d be wise not to forget entirely about him. It might be nice to find an alternative suspect, but if homicide took the road less travelled and found no one on it after the DA had shown them the way, he had a hunch he’d be hearing about it for a decade or two.
He was vaguely aware of two inspectors writing reports out in the open homicide detail. Suddenly there was a shadow in his doorway and he looked up.
‘I was half expecting you not to show.’
‘Which half?’ Hardy asked. He stepped into the office and crab-walked around the desk, which barely fit into the room, to one of the wooden chairs wedged into the tiny space that was left. ‘Frannie told me you two had a nice talk.’
The lieutenant was twirling his mug around and around, wrestling with something. ‘I’m not too happy about what I heard, Diz. I’m thinking it may be Ron after all.’
Hardy was poker-faced, keeping it casual. ‘How could he have done it? I mean like when and where?’