Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (11 page)

“You’re not planning any dancing, are you?” I asked, with a nervous laugh. “I didn’t wear my steel-toed work boots.”

“Aw, that hurts,” he said, raising his hand to his chest as if blocking a blow. “I may not be John Travolta, but in the kitchen I channel Rachael Ray. Give me a chance to show you.”

“That’s an interesting prospect,” I said. “Do you dress for the part?”

David laughed, one of those deep laughs that sound vaguely dangerous. “You afraid?” he asked. I wondered if I should be.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But I’m willing to give it a try.”

Like much of Houston, the Heights failed the continuity test. Without zoning, factories, stores, and homes formed a haphazard patchwork. Motorcycle repair shops and muffler manufacturers intermingled with single-family homes on streets shaded by arcs of live oaks or lined with thirty-foot palms. Two-bedroom houses that would be described in a real estate ad as “handyman’s specials” sat next to beautifully restored Victorians, with maid’s quarters over the garage. David lived in a small frame bungalow a few miles from the restaurant, and I pulled into the driveway and parked in front of the garage. It was one of those houses people in the north with basements really can’t understand—no slab, perched on foot-high pilings, leaving just enough room underneath for the neighborhood cats to breed. A porch ran the length of the front, and David had two wood-slat rockers facing the street. Painted a rich tan and trimmed in white, the house had a farmhouse look, which made the view of the sleek downtown skyline surreal.

Once inside, he poured two glasses of a dry cabernet and then banged about in the kitchen, pulling out pots, boiling water, while I circulated through the living room and dining room. Unlike his tousled appearance, the house was well cared for and organized, neatly kept. Books on shelves lined the walls, many of them travel guides, China, Russia, Thailand, and New Zealand. The furniture was dated but comfortable, the brown corduroy couch worn but clean, and the heavily carved oak tables appeared old enough to have been inherited. Black-and-white photos lined the walls, matted and framed, many of a young boy with thick blond hair, freckles, and David’s dimple in his chin.

“Did you take these?” I asked when he walked into the room.

Sipping his wine, he nodded.

“They’re good.”

“Thanks. It’s a hobby. The kid’s my son, Jack. He’s fourteen now and lives with his mother. We divorced about ten years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” he said, with a shrug. “Jan’s a great gal, an elementary school teacher. We thought we’d stay married forever. She just couldn’t deal with the job. Too many hours on the road, too much time for her to sit alone and worry.”

“I was lucky that way with Bill. Since we both worked for the department, we both understood,” I said. “Do you see Jack often?”

“Every chance I get. But they moved from Houston a few months back, just after my transfer here finally came through. Pretty ironic,” he said, with a shrug. “I move in, set up a bedroom for the kid for weekends, and her husband gets an unexpected transfer a month later to Denver. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if it was plotted. But it wasn’t. Just a bad break. Her husband’s in computers, software. Nice guy. Jack loves him.”

“I can’t imagine being separated from Maggie. She’s kept me going this last year,” I said, instantly regretting my words as I saw sadness wash over David’s face.

“Jack and I are okay,” he said, with a half-smile and a resolution to his voice that confided this was something he considered often. “The hours I work, I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time as I’d like to with him even if he lived in Houston. It’s funny. One of the reasons I asked for the transfer from Quantico was that this job came with assurances of more free time.”

“Hasn’t worked out that way?”

“How’d you guess? But enough of that. Now back to dinner,” he said, rubbing his palms together, as if in great anticipation. “The bad news is the only bread in the house is old and hard as a floorboard, but there’s pasta and I added mushrooms and artichoke hearts. Sound good?”

“Extraordinary.”

“Then, let’s eat.”

We filled our plates with steaming linguini David tossed with olive oil, basil, and parmesan cheese, and then sprinkled on the artichokes, mushrooms, pine nuts, and capers. At the dining room table, stacks of unread newspapers pushed to the side, we twirled the long strands of pasta on our forks, washing it down with the heavy, dry wine. The food was comforting and the house felt warm and inviting. David laughed easily, and I decided that when he smiled he could easily have been described as handsome. We talked about our kids, Mom, his ex-wife. We didn’t talk about the case or our jobs. It felt good for once, pretending to be normal people with normal lives. Afterward, I cleared the dishes and David rinsed them and put them into the dishwasher. He added soap and turned it on, filling the kitchen with the sound of rushing water.

“Let’s go sit in the living room,” he said, picking up the wine bottle.

The time passed quickly as we listened to music and talked. David told me about the trip he’d taken through Italy, four weeks by car, alone, including a week in a stone house in Tuscany, with a view of a village where every hour the baptistery bells rang and every morning old women draped in black shawls shuffled over cobbled streets to mass. Before long I looked at my watch and it was well after midnight.

“I need to go,” I said, not really wanting to.

It had been a long time since I’d been so relaxed with a man, and all evening long, I’d had the urge to simply rest my head on his shoulder. But now when he leaned forward, now that I knew that in moments his lips would be on mine, I didn’t know what to do or say, how to react. My body wanted to be touched, and I craved mindlessness, to just not think. I felt David’s hands on my shoulders, and I became aware of his body surrounding me, his heavy warm smell,
and I yearned just to be free of the past long enough to let myself be with him.

Ever so slowly, his lips met mine, with a long, firm, hungry kiss, the kind I remembered from what seemed like a lifetime ago.

Confused, I pulled away.

“Sorry,” he said, with a guarded smile. “I guess you didn’t…”

“No, I did,” I admitted. “I thought, I thought I was ready, but…” Suddenly tongue-tied, I searched his face, wondering what he was thinking.

“Sarah, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m attracted to you. I have been since our first meeting, but I know it’s only been a year. Too soon?”

Again the room fell quiet. I could feel my body reacting to his closeness, the rush of the wine flushing my cheeks, the slight tingle that remained on my lips.

“You know for the longest time, I just waited for Bill to come back,” I said, needing David to understand. “Every time I heard the door open at the house, every time the garage door went up. When the phone rang, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s Bill. He’s home now and Maggie and I will be all right again. Life will be normal, good and whole.’”

Lost in my thoughts, I paused, hoping David would interrupt and keep me from saying more. When he didn’t, I went on. “All the dead bodies I’ve seen, you’d think I, if anyone, would understand death. I’ve touched it. I’ve smelled it. I’ve lived with it. But I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”

My words trailed off, and I no longer trusted my voice.

“I know,” he said, softly wiping away a tear that trailed down my cheek.

My body, reminded of all it had lost, ached for more. I didn’t know if I felt relief or disappointment when David suddenly sat back, expanding the distance between us. Moments passed and neither of
us spoke, unable or unwilling to break the silence, each lost in our own thoughts. Finally, he rose to his feet, grasped my hands, and pulled me up with him. For the briefest instant I wondered if he’d kiss me again. I wanted him to, and I was afraid that he might. Instead, he walked away, leaving me alone, standing beside the couch, waiting, for what, I couldn’t say.

When he returned, he held my blazer and purse.

“Tomorrow, we need to reassess these three murders,” he said, for the first time bringing up work. “We have a lot of questions to answer.”

That night, at home, I stood before the bathroom mirror, just as I had in the motel, staring at my own image. David had said that he’d been attracted to me from our first meeting, that day in the captain’s office. I wondered how he could be. What I saw staring back at me was a plain, tired woman. I ran my fingers through my hair and thought about adding highlights and getting a good cut. Something not so harsh around my face, something to camouflage the wrinkles the last year had etched around my eyes. Maybe some new clothes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone shopping. A vague sense of guilt gnawed at me, but when I thought about Bill, I reminded myself again that he was gone and that he wouldn’t be coming back. I couldn’t bring him back, no matter how hard I tried. Still, I couldn’t quiet the ball of anxiety in my chest.

In my old blue nightgown, I let myself into Maggie’s room. She slept peacefully in her bed. Above her hung a web of hundreds of white lights, Christmas tree lights claimed from the garage and hung in a haphazard pattern that crisscrossed the ceiling. In the dark room, they shone like stars borrowed from the sky. I thought about Mom’s words, that Maggie was acting strangely. Yet the lights didn’t strike me as odd. I found them comforting.

For nearly an hour, I sat on the floor beside my daughter’s bed, watching her sleep, her chest steadily rising and falling. At times, I looked up at her make-believe stars, and I thought about what she’d told me on the telephone earlier that evening, about singularity, the dense vortex of a black hole, where stars are greedily sucked in and crumbled into dust, never to be seen again.

I
like your room, Maggie,” I said first thing in the morning, as I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Beautiful. Just like being out in the woods and looking up at the stars.”

“It’s because…” Maggie started to say something, and then stopped. In between chomps of Frosted Flakes, she said instead, “Mrs. Hansen wants you to come to school for a parent-teacher conference.”

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

I’d expected her to be surprised to see me, but Maggie acted as if I’d never been gone, not even acknowledging our conversation from the night before.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mom inspect a homemade coffee cake, its crust cracked into a cinnamon-and-sugar road map. She’d gotten up early and baked it before sunrise, and I realized she must be even more upset about Maggie than I’d realized. She cut through it, excising a slice that measured a sixth of the cake. I knew it had to be for me, but I didn’t protest. I’d learned long ago that with Mom it’s always less painful to eat cake and skip lunch. Somewhere, far back in our English/Irish family tree, undoubtedly lurks a Jewish
or Italian woman whose food genes waited in hiding until they morphed into Mom. How else can anyone explain a woman who considers an unfinished plate of cake or a refused cookie a personal rebuff?

“I failed my math test,” Maggie continued, reclaiming my full attention. She sounded no more concerned than if she’d just announced she’d been tardy to class.

“Your math test?” I stammered, truly stunned. “How could
you
fail a math test? You’re a whiz at math and science. It’s impossible.”

“She hasn’t been studying,” Mom said as she plopped the cake plate in front of me accompanied by one of those looks that says,
Didn’t I warn you about this?
As wonderful as Mom is, as much as I love her, she’s never been above a good old-fashioned I-told-you-so.

“Did you do your assignments?” I asked.

“She hasn’t brought books home all week,” Mom answered for her.

“Gram, I did so. Maybe I just didn’t understand it,” Maggie answered, her lower lip jutting out, the same way it had when she was a toddler and Bill or I scolded her for not picking up her toys. “Just because I failed one test doesn’t mean that I’m not studying. Lots of kids fail sometimes.”

“Not you, Magpie,” I said, genuinely puzzled. “You’ve never failed anything.”

“Gee, Mom. It’s no big deal,” she said. “I don’t know why Mrs. Hansen even wants to talk to you.”

“Because she’s concerned about you, just like Gram and I. She knows, we all know you can do better,” I said, trying to sort through my thoughts. Of course it was my fault; it was always my fault. I wasn’t paying enough attention. I was gone too much. I should be a more suitable mother, the room mother who coordinated the school bake sale and led a Girl Scout troop, taking twelve eleven-year-olds on campouts.

“Well, maybe I can’t do better,” Maggie said. Clanking her spoon
into the empty cereal bowl, she pushed back from the counter and plopped flat-footed onto the rough Mexican tile floor. “Maybe I’m not as smart as everyone thinks.”

I paused, considering what to say next, when the telephone rang. Mom answered it.

“Maggie, we’ve had a rough year,” I ventured, deciding to confront it head-on, a pain inching its way up the back of my neck into my skull. “Maybe the two of us need to talk more, spend more time together. Maybe you’re not studying because you’re upset about Daddy or mad at me?”

“Oh, Mom,” she moaned. “Why do parents always think it’s something big, just because a kid fails one stupid math test?”

Suddenly the television set on the counter clicked on and Mom flipped to channel two, the local NBC affiliate’s morning news.

“Some man named Garrity says there’s something on the news you need to see,” she explained, pouring herself a second cup of coffee.

“This discussion isn’t over,” I called to Maggie, who flounced from the kitchen, her backpack hanging like a disfiguring hump from her shoulders. “Get your jacket, and I’ll drive you to school.”

“I told Strings I’d ride the bus with him,” she shouted back.

“We’ll pick him up on the way,” I said. “Five minutes, you and me, in the car.”

I poured myself a mug of black coffee to wash down the two thousand calories of coffee cake, just as Priscilla Lucas, head down, dressed in a pale purple suit fit for a society luncheon, appeared on the television screen, walking into the Galveston County jail for booking, Scroggins and Nelson trailing behind her. My suspicions had been right; one or both had tipped off the press. They wanted the show, the spectacle of arresting one of Houston’s most prominent and wealthiest citizens.