"If I give you a couple of plates, would you set the table outside?" He rummaged around in the cabinets and came up with a couple of blue-tin plates with white speckles, forks, knives, and some paper napkins.
I went outside and put everything on the table. When I went back in, I gathered the salads, drinks, the b.u.t.ter, and some condiments. He put the lobsters in a big bowl and got some nutcrackers out of one of the drawers. Once outside, he surveyed the table. "What else do we need?"
"I think we"re fine," I said, and sat down at the picnic table.
He sat down across from me. We were perpendicular to the ocean and both had a sideways view.
"Seriously, though," he said, and picked up a lobster, "do you want something to tie around your neck?" He waved the cooked lobster in front of my face.
I shook my head. "I"ll take my chances." I took the lobster and put it on my plate. Actually, I had no idea what to do, so I fooled around with my drink until he put his lobster on his plate. As soon as he made his first crack with the nutcracker, I followed suit. He pulled a big piece out of one of the red tails, dunked it in the b.u.t.ter, and dropped it into his mouth.
He attacked the sh.e.l.l some more and pulled out another giant piece of white lobster meat. He held it over to me. "Here."
I held my plate up and he dropped it in the middle of the potato salad. At this point in our suspect/cop/we"re-just-friends part of our relationship, I didn"t think opening my mouth and being fed was appropriate. I cut the chunk of lobster into smaller pieces and ate it. When I was done with that, he handed me more, seeing the trouble I was having with my own crustacean. While I ate, he asked me where I was from.
"My parents were from Montreal, but I was raised in Tarrytown."
"Do they still live there?" he asked.
I shook my head. "My father died when I was a senior in high school, and my mother died two months before I got married. She made me promise to go through with the wedding." I laughed, even though the thought of her last days was still a source of pain. "I guess it was her dying wish that I not spend the rest of my days alone." I looked away quickly so that he wouldn"t see the pain, or tears, in my eyes.
"No pressure, though," he said, trying to lighten the mood.
"I think she had an inkling about Ray"s shortcomings, but she would never say anything. She was old school-better to be married to a b.u.m than not married at all."
"My mother wanted me to be a priest," he blurted out between mouthfuls of potato salad.
I held my hands up like a scale. "Homicide detective, priest. They"re similar. You"re still hearing confessions."
"The celibacy thing would have been a huge stumbling block for me." He handed me some more lobster without looking up.
For you and the faithful female flock, I thought. "Father What-a-Waste." It was out of my mouth before I realized that I had spoken.
He looked at me questioningly. "What?"
"Father What-a-Waste. I read that in a book somewhere. Handsome priests who turn on female parishioners are called Father What-a-Waste."
He let out a big laugh. I had to stop saying the first thing that came into my head. Now he knew that I thought he was attractive. I felt like I needed a complete refresher course in male/female interactions. I didn"t think you were supposed to reveal the attractiveness factor until much later in a relationship, but my timing was off on everything now. I was relieved when I heard the insistent beeping of my cell phone go off in my bag, inside the house. Crawford looked down at his waistband and checked his beeper, but I knew it was mine. I jumped up, went in through the screen door, and grabbed it out of my briefcase, which was resting against the leg of the ship"s-wheel coffee table. I answered it just before it went to voice mail and heard Ray"s voice.
"Well, I"m out of jail," he said, obviously mad at me for not checking on him sooner.
I wanted to scream, "We"re divorced, you a.s.shole!" but I didn"t. I wasn"t sure how to react so I didn"t say anything. I wouldn"t have been that upset had he spent the night in lockup, or whatever the cops call it when you"re thrown in a cell with a dozen unwashed men and given bologna sandwiches to eat.
"Are you there?" he asked.
"Uh, yes," I said. I still wasn"t sure what this had to do with me. I had called Mitch Klein, which was my only partic.i.p.ation in Ray"s situation and all I was going to do to help him, philanderer and possible murderer.
"I thought you would want to know that I"m out," he said.
"That"s great, Ray. Did you connect with Klein?"
"Yes. He got me released. The police don"t have anything to go on except the fact that I once had your keys in my possession and that I . . ."-he hesitated for a brief second-". . . knew Kathy. From intro bio." Liar. He waited a moment and then changed the subject. "Where are you, by the way?"
"What?" I asked.
"Where are you? I called school and Dottie said that you called in sick. And you"re not home, because I tried you there." His tone was proprietary and not concerned at all, and I didn"t like it.
I looked through the picture window and saw Crawford spread out on the chaise, facing the ocean with his shoes off and his fingers laced across his stomach. The outdoor table was covered with the lunch debris. A mixture of guilt and awkwardness flooded over me. I couldn"t tell Ray where I was exactly, but I wasn"t sure why I had to lie entirely. "I"m at the beach. I needed a break."
"You don"t have a car. How did you get there?"
I cleared my throat. "I"ll call you later, Ray." I flipped the phone closed and put it back in my bag. Before I was outside, it began ringing again, but I ignored it.
In the two to three minutes it took for me to have my conversation with Ray, Crawford had fallen into a deep sleep on the chaise lounge, one foot touching the deck, and the other bent at the knee. His mouth was open, and his shirt had ridden up to expose the s.p.a.ce between his ribs and his waistband. The top b.u.t.ton on his jeans was open, I guess in an attempt to make room for more food. I averted my eyes quickly, feeling as if I had just walked in on him in the shower. At my age and under the constant tutelage of Max, I should have been able to deal with looking at the flat stomach of a very attractive man, but I felt like a Peeping Tom. I slipped off my shoes and headed out into the sand and toward the water, putting as much distance between myself and the snoring detective as I possibly could.
Thirteen.
There were only two ways to go on the beach without either getting wet or hitting road-north or south. I chose south and started walking, enjoying the feel of the wet sand between my toes and the occasional splash of chilly ocean water on my legs. I looked at my watch and saw that it was almost three o"clock. I was in no rush to leave, but knew that I had to get home by ten or eleven in order to get ready for work the next day and get enough sleep in order to face my cla.s.ses with a modic.u.m of composure. I pushed the thought of the two-hour car ride out of my head and the probable traffic that we would face and enjoyed meandering down a deserted beach, destination unknown.
In the distance, I saw a hazy amus.e.m.e.nt park sticking out into the water, almost a mirage. I remembered from my teenage years that it was the boardwalk and amus.e.m.e.nt park at Seaside Heights, the after-prom destination of most high schoolers of my generation. I figured it was about five miles from where I was, going south. I wondered how long it would take me to walk that far in sand, barefoot.
I walked for about an hour and didn"t feel any closer to Seaside, but I was so relaxed that I hadn"t even thought about the last few weeks. In the distance, I saw a dune buggy approaching, its giant wheels carving huge tread marks in the damp sand. To my amazement, the driver pulled up next to me and stopped.
A young man wearing a tan police uniform with a badge on the sleeve that said LAVALLETTE POLICE DEPARTMENT looked right at me. "Afternoon, ma"am."
The ma"am thing. I hated that. "Hi."
"Are you"-he consulted a clipboard hanging from the dashboard-"Alison Bergeron?"
Great. Interrogated in two states. I nodded. Facing west, I had to shade my eyes from the sun, which was now low in the sky.
He picked up a cell phone, dialed a number, and handed it to me. It was Crawford. His voice crackled on the other end. "What is with you and walking? I woke up, and you were gone."
"I figured you were doing surveillance, and I didn"t want to disturb you."
"Funny."
"You didn"t have to call the police." I looked at the young cop, who was pretending not to listen but was hanging on every word. The side of the dune buggy said LPD. "You didn"t have to call the LPD." How many cops could Lavallette have? Three? And now one was dispatched to look for a wandering English professor. Must have been an exciting day in the station house. "You"ve either greatly overreacted, or you"re too lazy to go out and find me."
"Just get in the car and ask him to drop you off at the back of the house. I"ll be outside," he said, and hung up.
"It"s a dune buggy," I yelled into the phone, but he had hung up. "Would you mind driving me back down? It"s north of here. I"m not exactly sure where the house is, but my friend will be outside." I hoisted myself into the dune buggy, and he gunned the engine.
A few minutes later, and after a nice conversation with Ted, the cop (who really wanted to teach surfing in Hawaii I learned), I was deposited at the back of the beach house. Crawford was standing on the deck with his arms folded over his chest and gave me a stern look. "You could have left me a note."
"I left my shoes. That"s the beach equivalent of a note."
Officer Dune Buggy Ted stayed a moment longer than he should have, waiting to see if fisticuffs would erupt, I guess. When he was sure that all was well, he drove off. I waved at him, and called "Thanks for the ride, Ted!"
"You didn"t have to call the LPD," I said, giggling. "I was actually going to see how long it would take me to walk to Seaside."
"A long time." He had cleared the table of the lunch dishes and lit a citronella candle. I pulled up the same chair that I had been in before and sat down. He sat down next to me. "We shouldn"t leave for a while because the traffic on the Garden State will be horrendous. If you really have to get back, though, we can get started." He looked at me, it seemed, hoping that I would agree to stay. "Or, you could start walking, which you seem to like to do."
I didn"t want to leave, truth be told. I told him that I didn"t need to rush home.
"Great," he said, and jumped up from the chair. He returned a few minutes later with a bottle of chilled chardonnay and two winegla.s.ses. The bottle had already been uncorked, and he put the gla.s.ses on the table and poured the wine. "If you want dinner, we still have some food from lunch. Or, we can go out."
"I promised Ted we"d go out later."
He looked at me.
"I"m fine," I said, and took a sip of the wine. It was delicious. I wondered if he had chosen it or if it was the family beach house stash. We sat quietly for a long time, watching the waves crash onto the beach, one after another. We finished the wine during that time and started on a second, even better one. "Do you collect wine?" I asked.
He looked surprised. "Me? No. I have a good friend who owns a restaurant in the city, and he buys my wine. My father and brother drink wine out of a box, so I bring a case down here every once in a while so they don"t get cirrhosis of the liver."
"Good friend to have," I said.
"I should take you to his restaurant sometime," he said.
I took a sip of my wine. "Do you think we should do that?" I asked.
He looked back at me, obviously confused.
"We really shouldn"t do this." I looked away from him. "We don"t know what we are, really."
He shrugged. "We"re friends. Like you and Ted."
"Really? Because you"re still a cop, and I"m still the ex-wife of a murder suspect and the owner of the murder vehicle, or whatever you would call that. And we"re alone at your beach house. Do you really think we should do this?"
He slumped in his chair. "No," he admitted. "But the case will end soon and our lives will go on and someone else will get murdered," he said, his voice trailing off. "Then, it will be all right." He looked away, almost like a kid caught in the middle of an act of disobedience. "You"re right, though."
Being right in this case didn"t make me feel any better. "So, n.o.body will know where I was today or who I was with. Except for Ted, of course."
"Ted. It"s always Ted with you, isn"t it?"
"You know, you and Ted may be working together if anyone finds out we spent the day here eating lobster and drinking wine. So, try to get along."
"The dune buggy is so much cooler than the Crown Vic," he mused, smiling. But I could tell that I had hit a nerve. We weren"t supposed to be anywhere near each other. I returned to my thought that he might be the worst cop I had ever encountered, and the only ones that I had ever encountered were on television. They were usually very handsome, had great clothes, and broke all of the rules in the name of justice. Two out of three was pretty good.
He held his hand out to me. "Come here." He reached over and took the wine out of my hand, putting it on the edge of the table. I took his hand, thinking we were going to shake on our new friendship and his new career as a beach cop. Instead, I was shocked when he pulled me onto his lap. I thought about the fact that at my height and weight, I could render him a paraplegic if I stayed there for any length of time. Our faces were as close as they could be without touching. "As long as we"ll never see each other again in a social capacity," he said, putting his ma.s.sive hands on either side of my face to pull me closer, "I"m going to kiss you just once." And he did. And I didn"t vomit, as I often did when he was around, but I did almost faint.
Fourteen.
Crawford dropped me off around eight that night, having endured a car ride with me in which I never moved and remained completely silent. What he didn"t know was that I was mentally berating myself for not moving and being completely silent. What was wrong with me? After so many years with Ray and having not a shred of self-esteem or self-respect left, I didn"t know how to act around an attractive and obviously, interested, man anymore.
Sadly, I had lost my mojo. If indeed I had ever had any.
And, to add insult to injury, I had p.i.s.sed Max off. After he kissed me, I heard my cell phone start chirping inside the house. When I saw that the number on the screen belonged to Max, any pleasure that I had gotten from having kissed a very attractive man was erased by the sound of her shrill voice screaming about the fact that I was late for dinner. I apologized profusely, hanging up somewhere between "you"ll pay for this!" and "c.r.a.ppy house chardonnay."
I went to bed filled with a mixture of s.e.xual desire and self-loathing, just like a good Catholic should, and woke up some time around seven in the morning. Despite the fact that I had had one of the most enjoyable days that I could remember in a long time, I had a bit of a headache. Maybe it was a kissing hangover. I hadn"t been kissed like that in a long time; it must have had some kind of profound effect on my equilibrium. I stumbled into the bathroom and found a bottle of Excedrin headache medicine in the cabinet over the toilet. I shook two out of the bottle and put them in my mouth. Unable to find a cup, I put my mouth under the sink and tried to wash them down with the running water. I ended up with a bitter mush of aspirin and water in my mouth that made me gag.
After a shower, I went into the bedroom and sifted through the clothes in my closet. There was a yellow T-shirt and a pair of black pants in the mess that didn"t look too wrinkled, so I shook them out and put them on after unearthing a bra and underpants in my underwear drawer. Today would be "casual day." My sandals were next to my bed, right where I had left them, and I slipped those on, too. After brushing my wet hair and putting on a bit of makeup, I felt like I could go to school and not look like the wreck of the Hesperus, as my mother used to say.
I found my briefcase in the hallway, right by the front door. I checked for my wallet and my phone, grabbed a couple of Devil Dogs and a bottle of coffee from the refrigerator, and left for school.
It was Friday. Two weeks since I had found out about Kathy"s murder, since I had met Crawford. What was it they always said on cop shows? The longer a case goes, the colder the trail gets? Well, if they didn"t step it up and soon, this case would be as dead as that dead young girl. I still had a hard time imagining Ray as a cold-blooded killer, but then again, I had had a hard time imagining him as anything less than my devoted husband. I guess I wasn"t as perceptive as I thought.
I thought about Crawford. It just figured that I met a nice man who seemed to think I was nice, too, and it was in the middle of a murder investigation. I felt incredibly guilty, thinking about what Gianna and Peter and their family had to live with for the rest of their lives. They wanted the case to be over so they could find out who killed their daughter, and I wanted the case to be over so I could go on a date. Maybe I"d track down Kevin when I got to school and figure out how not to feel so guilty about that.
Crawford could always join the LPD. And drive the dune buggy. But maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Maybe I was putting the cart before the dune buggy.
I mulled all of this over as I stood on the platform of the train station. I looked northward up the tracks as everyone else did in the morning, willing the train to come so that we could begin our day of rushing and running through the tasks that would put us on another platform, looking for the same train to take home. I saw it, like a mirage down the tracks, moving through the morning mist and hazy sunshine, making its way toward all of the type-A commuters I was sandwiched between.
I sat in my usual seat, with the same pregnant businesswoman next to whom I sat every day. She acknowledged me with a nod. We never spoke, but she had started looking for me in the last two weeks, and I for her. I didn"t know if it was against train etiquette to speak to her-it seemed there were some very ingrained rules regarding commuting, one of them mandating silence as far as I could tell-so we never spoke. I took out my Devil Dogs and began eating. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye and caught her looking at me. By the way she was looking at me and the way I was stealing glances at her, it seemed that we both wanted what the other had-me, her swollen stomach and she, my Devil Dogs.
When the train arrived at the station, I began my laborious journey up the hill. To say that I literally dragged myself up the hill and down the avenue would not be an exaggeration. I continued my trek until I reached the front entrance of school. I thanked G.o.d silently as I saw Joe, in his golf cart, shooting the breeze with Franklin over a box of Dunkin" Donuts and two giant coffees.
I stumbled up to the guard booth. "Can I get a ride?" I managed to get out, nearly to the point of hyperventilation. "And a donut?"
Franklin held out the box of donuts and I took a chocolate glazed. Joe put his donut down on the guard booth shelf and motioned to the golf cart. "At your service," he said. I made a vow never to make another crack about Joe and his giant belly, either out loud or in my head.
He drove me to the back entrance of the building and after thanking him profusely and eating my donut, I went down the stairs, through the back door, and around to the door of the floor of offices. Dottie was in her usual spot, talking on the phone in that sotto voce way that you do when you"re at work and you"re talking with someone who really doesn"t have anything to do with your profession. Although calling what Dottie did a "profession" was stretching it. She mumbled something to the person on the phone and hung up.
"Feeling better?" she asked.
"Yes. Thanks for helping out with cla.s.s a.s.signments." I turned around and went to the mailboxes behind her. There were various notices, papers, and messages, all of which I scrunched up into a stack and put in the outside pocket of my briefcase.
She swung around in her chair, blocking my exit. "The cute detective called," she said, and winked at me. Dottie is sixty, looks seventy, and can be coquettish with the best of them.
"Cute detective?" I asked in that ridiculously casual way you do when you know exactly to whom someone is referring but don"t want to let on.
"You know. Crawford," she said. "The Irish-looking one. Not the one that always looks like he"s in a bad mood. Although he"s kind of handsome, too, in a more rugged . . ."
I looked at her, waiting for the message. "And?"
She looked back at me, her eyes, heavy with mascara, blinking at me. "And what?"