Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [79]
They walked down the steep, cracked steps and into a steam-filled foyer, moisture condensing on the glass door of the restaurant. A middle-aged Asian woman conducted them to a table in the corner by the window and handed them large menus covered in red plastic. The woman was impersonal and businesslike as they settled into their seats.
As she handed them the menus, Kathy said, “Thank you. Do you have Saigon beer?”
The woman’s face broadened into a smile. She looked at Lee.
“Two?”
“Sure, why not?”
As the woman left, he turned to Kathy. “You made her happy.”
“I think it’s because I asked for Vietnamese beer instead of Chinese.”
“And you even knew the brand name.”
“Well, they do have Vietnamese restaurants in Philadelphia, you know.”
Lee laughed, surprised at how easily the sound left his body. He hadn’t laughed much lately. “Let’s not get an intercity rivalry going this soon.”
“Okay. Just figured I’d establish my territory early.” She bent her head to look at the menu, and the same lock of dark hair fell onto her forehead. Lee’s stomach lurched again. He looked down at the menu, but he wasn’t very hungry tonight.
It was a quiet Sunday night, and there were only a few other customers in the place, all of them Asian. Nelson always told him that was a good sign in Chinatown, and meant the food was decent, or at least authentic.
Kathy looked up from the menu. In the lamplight, her eyes were the color of the Hudson River on a cloudy day. “What do you think of chicken with lemongrass and chili?”
“Sounds good to me.” The truth was, it could have been sawdust, and he would have said the same thing.
“Okay, let’s get that. And how about this mushroom appetizer? Does that sound good?”
“Sure.”
In the end they settled on another entrée, something involving noodles.
“So,” she said, putting her elbows on the table and leaning toward him, “how do you like what you do?”
“It can be very frustrating, but it feels like what I should be doing—right now, at least.” He thought about telling her about the Internal Affairs investigation, but didn’t want to spoil the evening.
“I know what you mean,” Kathy said. “That’s the main thing—not that work is easy, but that it feels right for you, somehow.”
“You know, a lot of people think what I do is ‘soft science.’ They don’t respect it much.”
She gazed into her teacup as if seeking her answer in the dark liquid within.
“And what do you think?”
Lee smiled. “You sound like Dr. Williams.”
“Oh. Is she…?”
“My shrink—yes.”
Again she lowered her eyes, as if it wasn’t proper to say the words.
“That’s one of the things I like about bones,” she said. “There’s nothing ‘soft’ about them. They’re so clean, so smooth—the last thing to surrender to the decay process. You know that properly preserved, they can last indefinitely? They’re kind of heroic.”
“I never thought about it that way.”
“A lot of times bodies are found when only the bones are left, as the last physical reminder that this once was a human being. If it weren’t for bones, even more crimes would go unsolved.”
Somewhere, deep in the woods perhaps, Laura’s bones were waiting for him—for someone—to discover them.
The woman came back with two beers and poured them into tall thin glasses, all the while smiling at Kathy.
“You’ve made a friend,” Lee said after the woman had gone.
She looked around the restaurant. “It’s different here now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “There was this feeling, in the weeks afterward, that’s hard to describe exactly, but it was a kind of camaraderie—a feeling that we were all in this together.”
“I know what you mean. It was sort of like that in Philly, too.”
“And we all thought that there might be more attacks coming too—we didn’t know what to expect. Where were you when it happened?” he asked.
“I’m ashamed to say. I was in the Caribbean.”
“Why be ashamed?”
“I was snorkeling in St. Thomas when we heard the news. I guess I wanted to be back here—to help in some way, you know. And instead there I was, forced to stay an extra week at Crystal Beach. Poor