“Are you all right?”
I managed a weak smile. “I’m just tired. And I’m fighting a cold. My head’s all congested.”
He hesitated before saying more. “I heard you and Ricky had a fight.”
“Money problems. We’ll get through it.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
Darrell didn’t push. Not right away. He studied the expression on my face, and I felt like one of his daughters again, under the watchful eye of their father. I didn’t like lying to him, and I was pretty sure he’d heard the rest of the gossip.
“Listen, it’s early,” he told me. “We don’t need to spoil Sandra’s Christmas morning at the crack of dawn. I want to go back to the office and pull the files on Kip and Racer anyway. Why don’t you go home and sleep for a couple of hours? I don’t need you with me. We can meet up later.”
Normally, I would have protested special treatment, but I was glad for an opportunity to get away and clear my head. “Sure. Okay. I’ll take a shower and then head back to the office. I won’t be long. An hour, tops.”
“Take as much time as you need.”
I smiled at him. There were days when he felt like my only lifeline around here. “Thanks.”
I headed across the snow for my car, hoping he’d let it go, but I knew he wouldn’t. He called after me in his soft-spoken voice. “Rebecca? This is your business, not mine. You don’t need to tell me anything if you don’t want to, but I have to ask. Are you thinking of leaving Ricky?”
My voice was as quiet as his. “I don’t know. That’s the honest answer, Darrell. I really don’t.”
“Well, if that’s the choice you make, you know I’ll support you.”
“Thanks,” I said again.
He was silent for a long time, but he had a look that said he wasn’t done. “Do you mind a word of advice?”
“Go ahead.”
“I know the type of man Ricky is. I know that kind of man all too well. I saw them in the military, and I see them around here every day. They’re tigers. You can see it in their eyes. They’re always waiting for their chance.”
“What are you saying, Darrell?”
“I think you know what I’m saying,” he told me. “If you go down that road, Ricky’s not going to take it well. You need to be very careful, Rebecca. Never turn your back on a tiger.”
Chapter Five
At home, we had no power. The generator had run out of fuel, and the house was an icebox. I hoped the hot water tank had enough heat left to let me take a shower.
Ricky and I owned a little two-story house in what locals jokingly called downtown Random, namely the five or six blocks around Main Street where a few hundred people lived. From our front door, I could walk to the sheriff’s department. The house wasn’t much — two small bedrooms upstairs; a kitchen, living room, and dining room downstairs; and an unfinished basement where mice took shelter from the winter cold. The yellow paint on the wooden siding was peeling away, the front porch needed repair, and the roof leaked over our bed when the rain got heavy. Even so, it was ours, and I didn’t want to lose it.
We’d stretched to buy the house three years earlier, with help from my dad. I didn’t know then that Ricky would be fired a year later and our income would be cut in half. But we were a young couple in Black Wolf County, and buying a house was what you did. There were no apartments, so either you lived with your parents or you saved up enough to strike out on your own. Or you left the area entirely and headed for the city. We’d stayed in my dad’s house for two years after we got married, and with him gone all the time, he was fine to have us live there as long as we wanted. But in his house, I was still a kid, and I wanted to be all grown-up. That was how life was supposed to go. You got married, you bought a house, you had kids.
I wanted that whole fairy-tale life more than anything. Believe me when I tell you that, sweetheart. But a fairy tale was not what I got.
When I got home, I kicked off my boots and sat on the living room sofa with my coat on. The Christmas tree in the corner was the only indication of the holiday. The tree was so tall that the top branch bent over at the ceiling, but we’d put it up right after Thanksgiving, so it was already turning brown and dropping needles. The ornaments on the branches were all the same, red and silver glass balls, and one had fallen to the floor and cracked. We couldn’t afford gifts, but my dad and brother had sent a few things, which we’d put under the tree. I’d made big plans to cook a roast and potatoes and bake pies in the days before Christmas, so all we’d have to do is heat everything up, but those plans had gotten away from me.
“You’re late.”
Ricky came into the living room from the kitchen. He gnawed on a pan-fried chicken leg from the refrigerator and sat down in the armchair next to the tree. He wore pajama bottoms, and his chest was bare.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“I figured you’d be in bed when I woke up. You know, I sort of expect my wife to be in my bed in the morning.”
“Well, that was the plan.”
“What happened?”
“Gordon Brink got murdered.”
Ricky arched an eyebrow. “No shit? Who did it?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Somebody kills a lawyer, do they get a prize or something?”
“It’s not a joke, Ricky.”
He wiped the chicken juice from his mouth with his arm. “So are you home for the day now?”
“No. I need to go back.”
“It’s Christmas.”
“Yeah, and this is a murder.”
He sighed with a little hiss through his front teeth. I think that was what frustrated me more than anything else, more than the drinking, more than the money he wasted, more than the times he came home smelling of drugstore perfume. It was the blame he directed my way when he didn’t get what he wanted. Like everything was my fault. Like we were drifting apart because of me. I was the one going to work, taking the night shifts, coming home and cooking meals and doing laundry. I felt like my life was a matchstick house, and I was holding it together with nothing but little dabs of glue. But to Ricky, it was never enough.
I’d met him at a high school football game six years earlier. This was not long after I’d gone to work at the sheriff’s office. At halftime, I was sitting by myself in the bleachers when a man with a cheesy grin under his mustache introduced himself as Ricky Todd. He wasn’t tall, but he had a tough, strong, mine-worker’s body, with big feathered blond hair and a mustache so thick you could mop the floor with it. Men came up to me all the time, so that wasn’t unusual. I was pretty and unattached, which is a rare combination in this town, but I had the reputation of shooting men down like Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel. Ricky didn’t let that stop him. He sat down and started talking to me.
What was it about him?
Why did I agree to go out with him when I’d turned down the others?
It wasn’t his looks, that’s for sure. In high school, he’d been popular and handsome, but then he went fishing with Ajax one summer, and while Ajax was horsing around with the reel, a hook caught Ricky in the face and yanked off a big chunk of his nose. The surgeons did their best to repair it, but it never healed right. Girls lost interest in him after that, in the shallow way that teenagers do. Ricky made jokes like it didn’t bother him, but way down deep, he was bitter as hell.
I didn’t care how he looked. No, what made him different was that he seemed fascinated by who I was. He asked a lot of questions, about my childhood, about growing up on my own, about my mother. It flattered me that he found my story intriguing. I didn’t understand then, or maybe I was too young to realize, that men can be like that about things they want to own. That one way to control someone is to learn everything about them, so you always have ammunition to use when you need it.