The Widow - Carla Neggers [1]
“Outdoor burning’s illegal,” Bob said.
“I’m getting ready to throw some hot dogs on the grill.”
“You don’t eat hot dogs.”
“Salmon, then.”
At six-two, the veteran detective had nine inches on Abigail in height, and, although he was pushing fifty, he could run ten miles and still move the next day. He’d taught her how to use free weights properly, and he’d taught her crime scene investigation. She’d taught him what it was like to lose someone to violence.
She’d taught him that seven years was the blink of an eye.
A page, filled with bloodred ink, went up in flames.
As I regain consciousness, I feel the ice pack on the lump on the back of my head and almost vomit from the raging pain of my concussion.
“Don’t move,” my husband tells me quietly. “An ambulance is on the way.”
I try to tell him that I’m fine, but I become very still as I notice the anger in his face. The knowledge. The awful sense of betrayal.
He knows who did this to me.
Bob pointed at the five-pound Folgers coffee can that she had set on the plastic chair, behind the stack of spiral notebooks. “What’s that for?”
“The ashes.”
“Come again?”
“I’m performing a cleansing ritual.”
“A firebug I arrested ten years ago said the same thing.”
“This is different,” Abigail said, watching the pages blacken and burn. Once Bob left, she’d finish tearing up the last two notebooks, burn their pages, rid herself of their raw emotion.
Detective Bob O’Reilly of the BPD wouldn’t understand cleansing rituals. He had pale skin and freckles and red hair that was graying gracefully; only his cornflower eyes suggested the work he’d done for almost thirty years ever got to him. His second wife had walked out on him two years ago, telling him he was an emotional basket case and recommending therapy. Instead, Bob got drunk with cop friends, packed up his stuff, and, swearing off marriage forever, moved out, eventually buying the triple-decker with Scoop and Abigail.
“Is that your handwriting? The purple ink?” he asked.
Abigail glanced at a scrap that had just caught fire. “I used different colored inks depending on my mood.”
“How’s a purple-ink mood different from, say, a blue-ink mood?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“What are these, journals or something?” He seemed to have to struggle to keep the disbelief out of his tone.
“I started keeping a journal after Chris died. My therapist suggested it.”
“Oh.”
“She said to write stream-of-consciousness, without thinking, but to try to use all five senses and the present tense. She wanted me to write about our time together…what happened when he died.”
Bob scratched the back of his thick neck. “It helped?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I haven’t thrown myself off Cadillac Mountain.”
She grabbed the partially torn notebook and opened it up to the middle, tearing a hunk of pages, trying not to look at the words.
Chris leaves me with the ambulance crew, who will take me to the emergency room at the hospital in Bar Harbor. He doesn’t say where he’s going. He doesn’t promise to be back soon. He doesn’t promise anything.
I have no premonition of anything bad about to happen.
I just don’t want him to leave me.
Bob unhooked a pair of tongs from the side of the grill and stirred the blackened pages, rekindling the dying fire. “You never thought about killing yourself, Abigail,” he said, not looking at her. “Only thing you thought about was finding out who killed your husband.”
She flung more pages on the fire.
By nightfall, I’m worried. So are Doyle Alden, a local police officer, and Owen Garrison, Chris’s rich neighbor. I can see it in their faces.
Chris should be back by now.
“Abigail? You’re not breathing.”
She made herself exhale and smiled at Bob, who, initially, hadn’t even wanted her in the department, much less working at his side in homicide. Too much baggage, he’d told everyone, including her.