Old World Murder - Kathleen Ernst [67]
“That must have been hard.” Libby shook her head.
“Not at all. I loved Switzerland. Ballenberg is a wonderful historic site. And Brienz is lovely. I could walk to the market …” Chloe let her words trail away. Some of her best memories were simple ones: wandering up Oberdorfstrasse, a street lined with old chalets and window boxes of vibrant flowers. Sitting on a bench near a church while the sound of a rehearsing choir floated through an open window. Sipping white wine while Markus puttered in the kitchen, chattering about honeybees and Grison gray cattle …
Dammit. She had to stop this. Markus had ended their relationship almost nine months earlier. Sure, she’d been hurt. Shocked. Stunned, even. But still functional. She’d done what she needed to do: packed her suitcases, come home, found a new job.
It was only months later that she’d realized, belatedly, that a sucking gray depression had crept up from behind. It had come so stealthily that she hadn’t realized she was losing herself until it was too late to stop the descent. And she hated being that depressed person. She hated not being able to scrub Markus from her mind. It felt as if some record album in her brain had one deep scratch, and the needle kept jumping back to a chorus she’d already heard ad nauseum.
Libby regarded her. “Is there any reason you can’t stay here tonight?”
“I guess not, but—”
“Good. I think you should.”
By the time the neighbor dropped Justin and Dierdre off, Chloe was already cocooned in Libby’s guest bedroom. The small room was painted a cheerful purple. Photographs of the children lined the walls. Shelves overflowed with dog-eared paperbacks and storage tubs labeled “Sewing stuff” and “School papers—J” and “Photographs, 1981.” The room wasn’t haunted by memories of girlhood dreams, as Chloe’s bedroom in her parents’ house was. It wasn’t a sterile taunt of her failures, as the bedroom in her farmhouse was. It felt calm.
And she felt calm, too. Calmer, anyway. Chloe curled into bed, hearing the comforting murmur of Libby and her children as their evening unfolded. Very soon, for the first time in many months, Chloe fell deeply and soundly asleep.
____
Roelke sat at his kitchen table while Shirley Horn sang “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” and the coffeepot burbled. It should have been a peaceful Sunday morning. It wasn’t.
“Well, hell,” he muttered. He shoved to his feet, instinctively ducking to avoid braining himself on the low sloping eaves, and restlessly prowled his apartment.
There wasn’t much to prowl. When he’d moved to Palmyra, all he’d wanted was a cheap place near Libby and the kids. This tiny flat had been available; he took it. He’d done the basics to make it feel like his own: pictures of the kids on the bookcase, a brontosaurus rex painting Justin had given him for Christmas on the wall, the last quilt his mother had made on his bed. He’d never thought of the flat as more than a temporary place to sleep. Besides, Libby’s place—a true home, with canned tomatoes in the basement and perennials in the gardens and inked lines on the kitchen door marking the kids’ heights at every birthday—was just a few blocks away.
Except that Libby’s house suddenly didn’t feel so welcoming. He wished that Libby could admit that once in a great while, she didn’t know everything about everyone.
He glared at a snapshot of his cousin. Maybe he should just move back to Milwaukee. Let Libby fix her own damn faucet. Get back in line for sergeant’s stripes.
See the kids once a month. Go to sleep wondering if their father was going to show up unannounced one night and break their mom’s arm.
The stereo switched off. Roelke replaced Shirley Horn with “Brilliant Corners” by the late, lamented Thelonious Monk. After setting the needle, Roelke slid back into his chair. He wanted to think about something else. Index cards were spread on the table before him, and he stared at his notes:
• May—OWW visitor asks about ale bowl with cow heads
• Sometime prior to June—page about ale bowl torn from OWW record book