Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (6 page)

“Come on, then,” I said, helping her up and offering my arm. “I'll walk you to your door.”

Her hand on my arm was almost bird-boned, and she leaned against me as we walked. The gale had yet to blow itself out, and I was happy to be there to steady her as we made our way down the long, narrow corridor to their cabin on the Bahia Deck.

“I'm glad to see you're wearing your bracelets,” she said when we stopped in front of her door and while I waited for her to extract the room key card from her pocket.

“They saved my life,” I told her. “In this kind of rough sea, if I weren't wearing them, I'd probably be flat on my back in bed.”

I held the door open for her and walked her as far as the freshly made-up bed. “You're sure you don't need anything?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I'm fine. I'll just take a little nap. And if I do need something, the attendant is right outside.”

“All right, then,” I said, backing toward the door. “Sleep well.”

“Jonas?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell Lars what I said?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I don't think so. If he's as smart as I think he is, he'll figure it out on his own. That's what I'm hoping, anyway.”

“Okay,” I said. “Mum's the word.”

I went out and closed the door. As I walked back up the corridor carpeted with a distinctive strewn-seashell design, I was struck by a fit of despair. Lars and Beverly were both pushing ninety, for God's sake, and the two of them still couldn't make heads or tails of the battle of the sexes. If with a combined total of over seventy years of experience with marriage they couldn't make it work, then there sure as hell wasn't much hope for the rest of us.

A
FTER DEPOSITING BEVERLY
in her cabin, I returned to mine. Lars was still asleep, only now he was sprawled crosswise on my rumpled bed. Because of that, I didn't hang around. Instead, I went down and tried walking around on the Promenade Deck. When that proved to be far too wet and blustery, I went up to the Lido Deck's buffet and drowned my sorrows in a couple of cups of coffee.

It turns out I did have some sorrows to drown. I've never been one for great feats of introspection, but now, retired from Seattle PD, I found that self-examination had caught up with me anyway. I'd be fine as long as I was preoccupied with whatever was going on around me, but as soon as I was left to my own devices, waking or sleeping, a single image invaded my being.

In my mind's eye I would once again see Sue Danielson, wounded and bleeding, lying propped against the living-room wall in the shattered ruins of her apartment. She would be clutching her weapon and waving me down the hallway toward where her ex-husband was hiding. And then, moments later, I would once again be standing in the bare-bones waiting room at Harborview Hospital. The doctor, still in surgical scrubs, would come through the swinging door. He would catch my eye over the heads of Sue's two bewildered young sons and give me the sign—that slight but telling shake of his head—that said it was over. Sue Danielson hadn't made it.

No matter how many times I relive those wrenching scenes, they don't get any better. I've been to the departmental shrink. Dr. Katherine Majors tells me that I'm suffering from post-traumatic stress. She claims that's why I keep having flashbacks. Not the kind of flashbacks that makes broken-down vets think they're back in ‘Nam and under attack by the Vietcong, but close enough. Close enough to keep me from sleeping much at night. Close enough to make me wonder if I'm losing my grip. Close enough to make me postpone accepting the attorney general's offer to go to work on her Special Homicide Investigation Team based down in Olympia.

It's not as if this kind of stuff hasn't happened to me before. I was there years ago when Ron Peters was hurt and later on when Big Al Lindstrom got shot, but those incidents didn't affect me quite the same way. Ron may be confined to a wheelchair now, but he's reclaimed his life. He has his daughters, Heather and Tracy, and a new wife. And now Ron Peters is the proud father of a recently arrived son who also happens to be my namesake.

As a result of his injuries, Big Al Lindstrom was forced to take early retirement, but as far as I can tell, he and his wife, Molly, are both enjoying the hell out of it. The AG's office made Big Al the same offer they gave me, and he didn't even think twice about saying thanks, but no thanks. Molly probably would have killed him if he had tried to go back to work.

With Sue Danielson, though, it's different. She's dead. Her sons are orphans, and no amount of psychobabble from Dr. Majors is going to change that. No amount of talking it over and “getting it out of my system” will alter the fact that Sue won't be there to see her boys graduate from high school or college. She'll never be the mother of the groom at a wedding or have the chance to cradle a newborn grandchild in her arms. I continue to blame myself for all those things—to feel that, justifiably or not, there must have been something else I could have done that would have fixed the situation and made things turn out differently.

And, Lars and Beverly's honeymoon aside, that was the other reason I was on the
Starfire Breeze
—because I hadn't yet figured out what to do with myself or how to forget.

“Is this seat taken?”

I looked up to find the beaming face of Naomi Pepper, my seatmate from dinner the night before, smiling down at me. She was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate piled high with fresh fruit and melon in the other.

“No,” I said. “Help yourself.”

“You're the only familiar face I saw,” she continued. “I hope you don't mind.”

“No, really. It's fine.”

Naomi settled down across from me. “Everyone else seems to be sleeping in.” She grinned. “I'm the only early bird.”

“Does that make me the worm?” I asked.

Her smile disappeared. “Are you always this surly?” she returned.

Her question took me aback. I had been making a joke that didn't strike me as particularly surly. “What do you mean?”

“How about, ‘My wives are dead. Both of them'?” Naomi continued mockingly. “For somebody who's supposed to be a fortune hunter, you don't have much of a knack for it. That's not what I'd call getting off on the right foot. In fact, you made it sound as though you personally were responsible for knocking them both off, which isn't a very high recommendation when you're shopping around for wife number three.”

With Anne Corley, the term “knocking her off” was far closer to the painful truth than I wanted to come, although the exonerating words of the official determination had labeled her death “justifiable homicide.” Rather than say so, however, I went on the offensive.

“Fortune hunter!” I exclaimed indignantly “Whatever gave you the idea that I'm a fortune hunter?”

“Isn't that what dance hosts do?” she asked. “They prowl through cruise-ship passenger lists looking for wealthy widows or divorcées. Which I'm not, by the way,” she added, slicing into a piece of watermelon and forking some of it into her mouth. “Far from it.”

I may have sounded surly before, but now I was truly offended. “Look, once and for all, I am not a dance host—never have been. I don't know where you women get that idea.”

“Oh,” she said. “You're such a good dancer. That's why, when we girls talked it over later, we all assumed you were one.”

“Thank you,” I muttered, feeling somewhat mollified by the compliment. “About the dancing, I mean. My mother's the one who insisted I take lessons,” I added.

Naomi smiled brightly. “You certainly got her money's worth.”

We sat in silence for a while during which Naomi worked her way through several pieces of melon. As she did so, I noticed for the first time that Naomi Pepper was wearing a wedding band.

“Will you be joining us for dinner tonight?” she asked a few minutes later. “Or did we scare you off? I've heard tell that as a group we can be a pretty intimidating foursome.”

“I'm tough,” I said. “I think I can handle it.”

She smiled back at me, and it seemed that the earlier unpleasantness had been entirely forgotten. “For years, Harrison Featherman was the only male in the bunch who could put up with all of us as a group, but then even he bailed. Now we're back to the way we started some thirty-five years ago when we were all college roommates over at Wazoo. Now it's just the four of us.”

In the state of Washington, natives speaking shorthand refer to the University of Washington in Seattle as the U Dub and to its cross-state rival in Pullman, Washington State University, as Wazoo. As a former Husky, I couldn't help falling into the old collegiate rivalry. Unlike a few other things I could name, it doesn't seem to diminish with time.

“So you were all Cougars together way back when?” I asked.

“Not
that
long ago,” Naomi returned with a slight lift of her eyebrow. “But, yes, we all went to school over in Pullman. And, yes, we're all Cougars to the core.”

“I take it you're roommates here, too?” I asked. “On the cruise, I mean.”

She smiled again. “Three of us are. Margaret has her own cabin, but no one's complaining. After all, since she's the one paying the freight, beggars can't be choosers.”

I knew how much I had paid for my junior suite. “That had to be a fair piece of change.”

Naomi nodded. “Margaret's always been generous about throwing Harrison's money around, but inviting us on a cruise did seem a little excessive, even for her. I wondered about it right up until Chloe showed up at dinner last night. Her temper tantrum pretty well let the cat out of the bag. Margaret is here and she brought all of us along in hopes of zinging Harrison one more time—for old times' sake, I guess. But that doesn't mean the rest of us can't go ahead and have fun, does it?”

“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

Naomi flagged down a waiter. I waited while he poured more coffee for both of us. “So where do you and your husband live?” I asked.

“My husband's dead,” she said flatly. The shoe was on the other foot now, and the abruptness of her answer surprised me.

“Sorry,” I stammered. “It's just that the ring . . .”

She glanced down at her left hand for a moment as if considering whether or not she should say anything more. “Gary and I were separated when he died,” she said. “We had started divorce proceedings, but then he got sick—liver cancer. He came back home expecting me to take care of him, and since there wasn't anybody else to do it, I did. He died four months ago—on Mother's Day, as a matter of fact. I've been meaning to take the ring off ever since, but somehow I just haven't gotten around to it.”

Naomi hadn't said that much, but all of what she did say hit home. I, too, had lost a former wife to cancer. It's one thing to be married to someone when they die. It hurts like hell, but at least there's a template of acceptable behavior for the survivor to go by. There are expectations about what to do. People know that you'll attend the funeral. People send flowers and condolences, and they know what to say. When you're no longer married or—as in Naomi's case—not quite divorced, all bets are off. The rules go out the window, and the person who's left is stuck figuring out his or her own answers to all those tough questions.

“My former wife and I had been divorced for years before Karen died of breast cancer,” I said quietly. “People seemed to think I shouldn't have been affected.
I
thought I shouldn't have been affected, but I was. It hurt like hell. It
still
hurts like hell.”

That sudden admission on my part surprised me, and it seemed to surprise Naomi, too. Her eyes filled with tears which she quickly wiped away. “Thank you for saying that,” she said. “It helps to hear it from someone who's been there.”

She was still grappling with regaining her composure when Margaret Featherman found us. “So someone is up and around after all,” she said, sidling up to our table and, uninvited, taking one of the empty chairs. “I hope I'm not interrupting anything.”

Margaret's eyes darted back and forth from Naomi's face to mine. Since we both must have looked suitably guilty, she gave us a conspiratorial smile. “Of course. I can see that I
am
interrupting. Maybe I'd better shove off and give you two a little privacy. I was just looking around to see if anyone wanted to join me in the exercise room. I tried calling your cabin, but all I got was voice mail.”

“Stay where you are, Margaret,” Naomi told her impatiently. “You're not interrupting anything.”

“What about Marc Alley?” Margaret asked. “Has anyone seen him this morning?”

Naomi shook her head. So did I, and it seemed to me the lie was justified. The last thing Marc Alley needed right then was to have his neurologist's ex-wife show up in the middle of his interview and introduce herself to the nice lady writing an article about Harrison Featherman's almost miraculous surgical exploits for the readers of some popular medical journal. No, that wouldn't do at all.