The Bright Silver Star

CHAPTER 2

“Dodge is having an affair,” Martine Crockett informed Des in a soft, strained voice as the two of them crouched next to the overstuffed, foul-smelling Dumpster behind McGee’s Diner on Old Shore Road, waiting for the kittens to show.

Des drew her breath in. Martine had never confided anything even remotely intimate to her before. Now this, a bombshell out of nowhere. “Who’s the woman?”

“I don’t know,” Martine answered miserably. “I don’t want to know.”

It was just before dawn, which was happy meal fun time in the world of strays. Esme, Martine’s famous daughter, was crouched in wait on the other side of the Dumpster with Des’s roommate, Bella Tillis. It was Esme who’d spotted the two hungry kittens nosing around the trash bin late last night when she and Tito had pulled into McGee’s for a late meal of fried oysters after a night spent drinking tequila shooters on the beach. Somebody had dumped the kittens there, most likely. Summer people did that. Esme had decided that she had to adopt them, and since Martine was the unofficial queen of Dorset’s rescuers, the four of them were out there now with their dog cages, trying to lure the poor, starved things in with jars of Gerber’s strained turkey. A length of string was tied to each cage door. Once a kitten was inside, they could yank the cage door shut behind it.

The predawn often found Des, Bella, and Martine staked out near a Dumpster somewhere, strings in hand, discussing life, love, and men-three subjects they freely admitted they knew nothing about. They made for an oddly mismatched trio. One tall, cool, late-forties WASP from old Philadelphia money. One round, feisty, seventy-six-year-old Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn. And Des Mitry, ahighly gifted artist who was twenty-nine, black, and Dorset’s resident Connecticut State Police trooper. Throwing a bona-fide Hollywood movie star into the mix just added more flavor. Not that the girl looked like much at this hour. It was obvious to Des from her puffy eyes, disheveled hair, and soiled clothing that Esme Crockett hadn’t been to bed yet.

Unexpectedly, Martine had suggested that her famous daughter and Bella team up together. Obviously, it was so she could drop her bombshell on Des. But why had she?

Des studied her there in the early morning light. Martine was a strikingly pretty blue-eyed blond with good, high cheekbones. The age lines in her tanned face were like the gentle creases in fine leather. She wore her shiny, silver-streaked hair cropped appealingly at her chin, a hair band holding it in place. She wore a pink Izod shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of spotless white Keds. Martine was almost as tall as Des, who was a legit six feet tall in her stocking feet, and she was very active. Played golf several times a week at the country club, swam for an hour a day at the beach club. It showed. Her figure was excellent-shoulders broad, hips narrow, her long legs toned and shapely.

At first, Des had had some trouble warming up to her. Martine was still very much the belle of the debutante’s ball, a privileged white aristocrat who’d never wanted for anything. All she’d had to do was smile and it all came right to her, just like mumsy and daddy had promised. It was all just so easy for someone like Martine Crockett. Des had her problems with such women. She, well, hated them. Couldn’t help it. But now that she was resident trooper of Dorset, which boasted even more millionaires per square mile than Easthampton, she was coming in contact with a whole lot of them. And she really did need to give them the benefit of the doubt. Besides, she genuinely liked Martine, who was unaffected and caring and sweet. She rescued feral strays, volunteered at the Shoreline Soup Kitchen, and the Dorset Day Care Center. Plus she was bright, perceptive, and good to talk to when you were camped out behind a stanky Dumpster waiting for a feral animal to show.

And now her husband was cheating on her, thereby confirming Bella’s old axiom: Most rescuers are ladies with good hearts and bad husbands.

This had certainly been Des’s own story. “How do you know he’s having an affair?” she asked, crouched there in her tank top and gym shorts.

“I can tell. You can always tell, can’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose you can.”

Not that Des had been able to herself. Not when it came to Brandon. They were living in Woodbridge at the time, a leafy suburb of New Haven. He was in the U.S. Attorney’s office. And she, the Deacon’s daughter, was flying high on the Major Crime Squad out of Meriden. After Brandon left her, Des crashed. Bella, the no-bull Yale faculty widow next door, recruited her as a rescuer. And saved her. Woodbridge was now in both of their rearview mirrors. When Des started her new life here in Dorset Bella unloaded her own big barn of a house and came with her. It was working out fine. Between the job, the art academy, and the doughboy, Des wasn’t home much. Plus Bella was a fastidious housekeeper, great cook, funny, independent, and thoughtful. True, theirs was not what other people might consider a typical living arrangement, but quite honestly Des couldn’t think of a single thing about her life these days that was typical.

“How long has this been going on, Martine?”

“A few weeks,” she replied, wringing her hands. She had strong hands with long, graceful fingers. She painted her nails pink. “I’m sorry to be burdening you with this. I just, I feel you’re someone who I can talk to. I don’t have anyone else.”

Des pushed her heavy horn-rimmed glasses back up her nose, frowning. Martine Crockett had a million friends, women who she’d known a lot longer than she’d known Des. Why not confide in one of them? One possibility jumped right out.

Because it was one of them.

“You won’t tell anyone about it, will you?” she asked Des urgently. Now she seemed sorry she’d brought it up.

“Of course not. But what will you do?”

Martine raised her chin, and said, “Oh, I’ve moved on.”

“I see,” said Des, although she flat out didn’t. Moved on meant what-that she’d gotten past it emotionally, taken a lover of her own, loaded up a van with her most precious possessions? God, these Dorset people could be so cryptic sometimes. No one just said what they meant.

Esme moseyed over toward them now, looking sleepy and bored. She was a blond like Martine with flawless porcelain skin and the same good, high cheekbones. Her hair was a wild, frizzy mane of curls that cascaded halfway down her back. To Des, Esme still looked very much like a child. Her heartshaped face bore soft, slightly malleable remnants of baby fat. Her big blue eyes held wide-eyed innocence. And her hands were a girl’s hands, chubby and unblemished by time or work. Esme Crockett was famous for her mouth. It was a pouty, highly erotic mouth with a short, upturned top lip that made her look as if she were in a constant state of sexual rapture. She was also famous for her figure. She was a good deal shorter than Martine, perhaps five feet six, but so ripe and voluptuous that she looked positively illicit in the outfit she had on-a deep Vnecked halter top cropped at the belly to show off her gold navel ring, super-low denim cutoffs slashed way high up on her thighs and cheap rubber flipflops. “Where are they, Mommy?” she demanded petulantly. “How long do we have to wait for them?”

“Hours, sometimes,” Martine answered.

“Sometimes they don’t even show at all,” Des said.

Esme flopped down carelessly next to Des on the pavement, reeking of tequila and sweaty girl. She was highly unkempt, in contrast to her spotless, stay-pressed mother. Her hair was unclean, armpits unshaven, ankles soiled. Des noticed that she also had splotchy bruises around her upper arms, as if someone had grabbed her and squeezed her hard. Also a number of scratches on her neck and shoulders.

“Girl, what happened?” Des asked her, as Bella joined them. “Did you get in a fight?”

Esme immediately reddened. “It’s not what you think.”

“Me, I’m thinking Tito beats the crap out of you,” said Bella, who did not know how to mince words.

“No, never. We just get physical sometimes when we’re, you know. ..”

“Getting physical?” asked Des.

She nodded, glanced awkwardly at her mother, who bristled noticeably.

“I never did understand that,” Bella said flatly. “If Morris ever put a welt on me when we were in the throes of connubial passion he would have found his bags on the front porch in the morning, packed and ready to go.”

“He’d never hurt me,” Esme insisted, a defensive edge creeping into her voice. In the flesh, she didn’t seem nearly as bright or mature as the characters she played on screen. “I bruise easy, that’s all. Honest.”

“I believe you,” said Des, who believed no such thing. Not with Tito Molina’s reputation for violent eruptions.

“I wish they’d get here.” Esme sighed, scratching irritably at a mosquito bite on her thigh. “This waiting thing sucks.”

“Patience is everything in life,” Bella said. “Allow me give you an example. When I was your age I desperately wanted to look like Elizabeth Taylor. Which, God knows, I did not. But guess what?” Bella raised her bunched fist of a face to the sky, preening. “Now I do, see?”

Esme gaped at her blankly. “Not really.”

“Time, tattela,” Bella explained. “It’s the great equalizer.”

“Do you still date men, Bella?”

“When the occasion arises. Lord knows, the men don’t. But you have to be very, very careful when you get to be my age.”

“Careful how?”

“One of Morris’s dearest friends, Velvel, started wooing me last year. Very cultivated man. A renowned mathematician, seventy-four years old. Before I’d so much as let him give me a peck on the cheek I had to, you know, check him out,” Bella said waggling her eyebrows at Esme.

“Wait, check him out how?”

“I made a date to go dancing with him, okay? Waited for a nice slow dance, got out him out there on the floor…”

“And?…”

“I gave him a good hard whack on the leg. That’s when I heard it.”

“Heard what, Bella?” Now Martine was curious, too.

“The slosh,” Bella replied. “You hear a slosh it means the man’s wearing a catheter bag. You don’t want nuttin’ to do with him.”

Esme smiled at her, a smile that lit up her entire face. “Bella, you are the coolest.”

“That’s me, all right, the queen of cool.” Bella stood there staring down the front of Esme’s halter top at her considerable cleavage. “So did you have your boobs done or what?” she asked her bluntly.

“No way. These are all mine. Want to feel them?”

“Not necessary.”

“That whole deal was just Crissie doing what she does,” Esme explained.

“Which is what exactly?” Martine demanded.

“She plants the denial before there’s ever a story.”

“So as to create the story?” asked Des.

Esme nodded. “That way she keeps the tabloids fed and off of our backs.”

“That woman is so crass,” Martine said. “Honestly, I can’t tell if she’s part of the solution or part of the problem.”

“None of it’s real, Mommy. It’s just some tabloid trash about tits.”

“Those are your tits they’re talking about. And I don’t care for it. Or Chrissie.”

“Yeah, I kind of sensed that,” Esme shot back. They had a definite mother-daughter thing going on. “But don’t blame me. Tito’s agent hired her. He had to. That’s how the business is-if we don’t give them something then they just make up stuff about how our marriage is in ruins or whatever. It’s not like we’re real people to them. We’re just characters in some twisted interactive soap opera. They shout things at Tito, you know. To bait him.”

“What things?” asked Des.

“They tell him I’m a slut. That I’m having sex with Ben Affleck or Derek Jeter or Justin Timberlake, anyone. They’re hoping he’ll lose it so they can sell a picture of him attacking them. They try to climb over the wall of our Malibu house. They follow us when we leave. It’s horrible. If the public knew what really went on, they’d freak. But since it’s the press they somehow think it’s all noble and decent.”

“Those people aren’t the press.” Bella sniffed.

“No, they totally are,” Esme insisted.

Des couldn’t disagree. She’d seen the tabloids in action when she’d worked murder investigations. “Do you two keep a bodyguard around?”

“Tito won’t live that way. He wants to keep it real, or at least try. He figures, how can you hold on to your street edge when you live like royalty?”

“You can’t,” Des concurred.

“Besides, Chrissie’s staying in the guesthouse while we’re here, so she keeps them at bay. And the road we’re on is private. The beach association has a gate, and they can’t get past that. Or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

“If they do, let me know,” Des said.

“I would, Des, except Tito’s deathly afraid of the police. He has so many childhood scars.” Esme let out a soft laugh. “But, hey, who doesn’t, right?”

Martine stiffened at this last comment, Des noticed.

“Everyone thinks they know us, but they don’t. Especially Tito. Nobody knows Tito.”

“So tell us something we don’t know about him,” Bella said.

“Seriously?” Esme tossed her head, running her hands through her mane of golden hair. “He’s the most deprived boy I’ve ever met, okay? Growing up, he went without so many things that the rest of us take for granted. Like pets-he’s never, ever had one. I mean, God, he’d never even had a Christmas tree until he met me. You should have seen the joy in his eyes when we decorated our very own tree last Christmas.” Recalling it, tears began to spill out of her own eyesright down her flawless cheeks. “All the things I took for granted growing up. A nice home, friends, parents who I believed I could trust

…”

Des felt that there was something deliberately pointy about the words Esme used to describe her parents. Crouched there beside her on the pavement, Martine definitely seemed ill at ease.

“Tito never knew any of those things. That’s why he’s so out there as an actor. It’s like he’s experiencing everything for the first time.”

Des thought she heard some small movements now in the forsythia bushes out behind the Dumpster. “We better get on that other trap,” she whispered, tiptoeing around to the other cage and grabbing on to the string attached to its door.

Esme joined her. “Here, let me,” she whispered, holding her hand out to Des.

That was when Des noticed the thin white lines on the inside of her wrist. Both wrists, in fact. On-screen, the makeup artists were able to cover them over. But up close and in person Des saw them instantly for what they were. Esme Crockett had tried to slit her wrists at some point in her past. Des found herself wondering what could possibly have driven someone so lovely, gifted, and privileged to want to end her life?

“Shhh, hear them…?” she whispered, clutching the string anxiously.

Des did hear the tiny mewings. And now she could see the two of them coming out of the brush together. They were mixed gray, no more than four or five weeks old.

“Aren’t they the sweetest?”

Des didn’t like the unsteady way they were moving.

“Hi, babies,” Esme cooed as they edged hungrily toward the baited cage, moving closer and closer. “Come get your breakfast… Come on, babies…”

Until they were inside the cage and Esme had yanked the door shut behind them.

“In the house!” Des called out, latching it shut.

Bella and Martine immediately joined them.

“I can’t wait for Tito to see them!” Esme cried excitedly, clapping her hands together with girlish delight. “We’re going to name them Spike and Mike.”

Martine stood there looking down at them in grim silence. So did Bella.

“What, don’t they look like a Spike and a Mike?” Esme asked.

What they looked like, all three rescuers knew only too well, was a pair of very, very sick little kitties. Their eyes were rheumy, their noses caked with pus, coats scabby and oozing with sores. Feline influenza, most likely. It was very common in the summer. If left untreated, it often led to pneumonia.

“They look awfully sick to me, honey,” Martine said gently. “I think we’d better take them to the vet.”

“What do you think, Des?” Esme asked.

“I don’t meant to be your dream killer, but I think you should prepare yourself for the worst.”

Esme let out a gasp of horror. “You mean he might put them to sleep?”

“They’re very sick, tattela.”

“It was real nice of you to alert us,” Des added. “You’ve done them a solid, because they’re so miserable.”

“Mommy, noooo!” Esme threw herself into Martine’s arms, weeping.

“We’ll get you another pair,” Martine promised, hugging her tightly.

“I don’t want another pair! I want Spike and Mike! They’re ours! We found them!” Now Esme released her mother, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be such a baby. This is just so sad. And it’s not their fault.”

“Me, I’d like to take a baseball bat to whoever dumped them here,” Bella growled.

“We do everything we can, honey,” Martine said. “We get them neutered. We find homes for as many as we can. But the truth is that there are just too many kittens and not enough people to love them.”

“Now, if you’d like to adopt a couple of good, healthy ones,” Des offered brightly, “we can certainly help you out.”

Esme tilted her head at Des curiously. “You mean you have some at your place?”

“We, uh, happen to have a few.” Twenty-eight at last count. “Come on over, girl. Check’em out.”

“No, no,” Esme said abruptly. “I mean, thanks, but I don’t think so.”

Martine Crockett took her daughter by the hand now and led her back to Martine’s 1967 silver Volkswagon Beetle convertible. They got in and drove off. Des and Bella loaded the cage with the sick kittens into the back of Bella’s Jeep Wrangler with its personalized CATS22 license plate.

“What do you think?” Des asked her.

“I think Dr. Bill will put them down as soon as he lays eyes on them.”

“No, I mean about her.”

“Who, the great Esme Crockett?” Bella let out a hoot of derision. “I think she has the worst BO I ever smelled in my entire life.”

Why did Martine tell her about Dodge’s affair?

Des couldn’t imagine. Being human, she also couldn’t help wondering who the other woman was. She didn’t say anything about it to Bella on the way home-she’d promised Martine she’d keep quiet, and she did. But it was certainly on her mind as they dropped off Spike and Mike with Dr. Bill, knowing full well they’d never see those two helpless kittens again. It was still on her mind when they pulled into her driveway in gloomy silence. She and Bella always felt lousy when a rescue mission turned out sour.

Bella marched straight inside to scrub the kitchen floor and listen to one of her Danny Kaye records, which was what she did when she was blue. Des hung out in the garage for a while with the Pointer Sisters, Mary J. Blige, Bootsy Collins, Master P, Jay-Z and the others that they had rescued. She cooed at each of them, stroking the oneswho’d let her. Some, like Method Man, just hissed. No problem. He’d come around. Des was patient. She made sure they all had food and water, then went upstairs.

Des had bought and renovated a snug little cottage tucked into a hillside high above Uncas Lake. Mostly, she’d bought it for the sunlight. The living room, which she’d turned into her studio, had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the shimmering lake. Her kitchen and dining area were very airy and open, with French doors leading out onto the back deck, which had a teak dining table and chairs, and a dynamite view. The deck practically doubled her living space during warm months. There were three bedrooms, all of them small. The spare room was where Des worked out with twenty-pound dumbbells five mornings a week. Her weight room door was closed currently and there was a steady chorus of meows going on in there. Their five in-house cats were unable to resist the allure of a wet kitchen floor-whenever Bella was in scrub mode she herded them in there.

Des kept a portrait that she’d drawn of Mitch hanging over her bed. She’d drawn it when she was still trying to figure out how she felt about him. He looked very lost and sad in the portrait. He didn’t look nearly so sad now. It was the only sample of her art that was visible anywhere in the house. She did not display her haunting portraits of murder victims that were her life’s work and her way of coping with the horrors of her job. These she kept tucked away in a portfolio.

She did not like to look at them after she’d finished them.

Right now, Des snatched a graphite stick and Strathmore eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch sketch pad from her easel and started across the house with them as Mr. Danny Kaye was busy singing “Madam, I Love Your Crepes Suzette.” Or make that shrieking. Des did not understand that man’s appeal. Apparently, you had to be Jewish, old, and from Brooklyn in order to dig him. Also, possibly, deaf.

“I put your breakfast out on the deck,” Bella called to her from the kitchen floor, where she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing away like an old-time washerwoman.

“You didn’t have to make me breakfast, Bella.”

“I did so,” Bella shot back, scrubbing, scrubbing. There was a sponge mop, but she wouldn’t go near it. “Otherwise you’ll tromp all over my wet floor with your big feet.”

“They are not big. They’re long.” Twelve and a half double A, to be exact. “Besides, Mitch likes them-especially my toes.”

Bella made a face. “Genug shen!” Which was Yiddish for No mas. “I don’t want to hear these things about you two.”

“Don’t blame me, girl. You’re the one said I should snag me a Jewish gentleman.”

“And did I steer you wrong?”

“Nope. Just don’t tell him that-I don’t want his ego swelling.” Des tilted her head at Bella curiously. “Real, if I stick around long enough will I ever dig Danny Kaye?”

Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “No one appreciates true talent anymore.”

“Oh, is that what you call it?” she said sweetly.

“If you want to put on your Jill Scott, go ahead. It’s your house.”

“It’s our house. And I’m just woofing on you.” Des started out of the kitchen, then stopped. “We can’t save them all, Bella.”

“I know that,” Bella said tightly.

Des went out onto the deck, closing the French doors behind her, and sat down at the table in front of her Grape Nuts, skim milk, and blueberries from Mitch’s garden. It was a drowsy, humid morning. A young couple was paddling a canoe out on the lake, their giddy laughter carrying off the water as if they were right there next to Des. Otherwise, it was quiet enough that she could hear the cicadas whirring.

As she ate, she flipped through her drawing pad, looking at her latest work. Her figure drawing professor at the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, a brilliant and maddening guru named Peter Weiss, had urged Des to take a complete break from her crime scene portraits this summer and draw nothing but trees, an exercise that he claimed would prove highly beneficial to her. He wouldn’t explain why this was so, merely said, “You’ll find out what I mean.” Leaving Des tosolve the mystery on her own. She’d tried to do what he said. Spent the past six weeks working on trees and trees only.

And, so far, the results had been a total disaster.

Page after page of her drawing pad was filled with one crude arboreal rendering after another. Her lush, midsummer oaks and maples looked like stick figures topped with meatballs. Her evergreens resembled television aerials. It all looked like something an eight-year-old kid would do. She’d tried graphite stick, vine charcoal, conte crayon, pen, pencil. The results were all the same: dreck.

Bella had been the soul of tact when Des showed them to her. “I like everything you do,” she said.

Mitch, who was always brutally honest, had said, “Jellystone National Park-they look exactly like the background drawings from the old Yogi the Bear cartoons. Remember Yogi and Boo Boo?”

To which Des replied, “Back slowly out of the room while you are still able to.”

Knowing full well that he was right. For some reason she kept drawing her way around the trees as opposed to getting inside of them. She wasn’t grasping them. She’d tried to learn her way out of her personal abyss. Pored over book upon book by arborists and nature photographers. Studied the Connecticut shoreline’s grand masters such as Childe Hassam, George Bruestle, and Henry Ward Ranger, landscape painters whose works she admired tremendously. But it was no use. Not any of it. She could not translate what her eyes saw into lines and contours and shapes. Her trees were two-dimensional, lifeless, and crude, her drawing hand stubbornly blind.

She slammed her sketch pad shut, boiling with confusion and frustration. Because there was no instruction manual for this, no road map that could direct her to her inner soul. There was only her. The wisdom was within her.

The enemy was within her.

All she could do about it now was punish herself physically. She stormed back down to her weight room. Out went the cats, in came the crazed artist. First, she stretched for twenty good minutes on her mat, freeing her mind, feeling the blood flow through her as she worked thekinks out of her lithe, loose-limbed body. Then she did one hundred pushups and two hundred sit-ups. Then she hit the irons-two full circuits on her pressing bench with the twenty-pounders, two sets of twenty-four reps each time around. Pushing herself. Working it, working it, working it. Pump, breathe… Pump, breathe… Muscles straining, veins bulging, the sweat pouring off of her. Pump, breathe… Pump, breathe… Pump, breathe…

Why did Martine tell her about Dodge?

Des could not imagine. These blue-blooded locals genuinely perplexed her. They did not believe that the shortest way between two points was a straight line. They did not believe in lines-only negative space. And she did not know what to do about this. Mitch raved about Dodge Crockett day and night. Should she break it to him his new walking buddy was a snake? Or should she keep it to herself?

She made it through her last set of reps on adrenaline and fumes, and collapsed on the bench in a heap, gasping. She gulped down a bottle of water, then showered off.

Des spent very little time in front of the bathroom mirror these days. She wore no war paint. She needed none. She had almondshaped pale green eyes, smooth glowing skin and a wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand yards. She kept her hair so short and nubby that it was practically dry by the time she’d put on her summer-weight uniform and polished black brogans. She strapped on her crime-girl belt, complete with top-of-the-line SIG-Sauer semiautomatic handgun, and called out good-bye to Bella. Then she jumped into her cruiser and headed out.

Des lived in was what was considered a mixed neighborhood by Dorset standards, which meant it enjoyed a highly diverse white population. There were tidy starter houses owned by young professional couples. There were rambling bungalows bursting with multiple generations of blue-collar swamp Yankees. There were moldering summer cottages rented by old-timers from New Britain who played bocce out on their lawns. Right now her mail carrier, Frank, was out walking his golden retriever, and a pair of young mothers were on their way to the lake with a brood of kids, complete with pails, shovels, and water wings. They all waved to Des as she drove past. She raised a hand in response.

Summer was her busy season. Dorset’s seaside renters nearly doubled the town’s year-round population of less than seven thousand, plus the inns, motels, and campgrounds were filled to capacity. More people meant more traffic and more trouble. So did the warm weather. During the cold months, people did their drinking and their fighting behind closed doors. Now it all spilled out onto the front lawn. Dogs barked, tempers flared, neighbors started throwing punches at one another. It could get a little ugly.

And then, dear God, there were the tourists.

First, she headed for the historic district. The lawn in front of the old library on Dorset Street was being set up with chairs for a noon summer concert by Dorset’s town band, which was quite accomplished if you happened to be into oompah music. Des rated their sound one solid notch below Danny Kaye on her own personal hit parade. The concert was part of a full day of quaint small-town activities. Crafts stalls were being erected next door on the lawn in front of Center School, where local artisans would be offering their handcrafted candles and soaps, their driftwood sculptures and wind chimes made of seashells and bits of broken glass. Des pulled in at town hall to see if there was anything of interest in her mail slot-there wasn’t-and to work on Mary Ann, First Selectman Paffin’s new secretary, a lonely widow who desperately needed to adopt two healthy, neutered kittens and just didn’t know it yet. Then she resumed her patrol of the historic district, with its lovely two hundred-year-old homes, steepled white churches and graceful old oaks and sycamores. Trees again. Trees, trees, and more trees…

I should just give up and move to the damned desert.

The art academy was located in the historic district, in the old Gill House. So were the better galleries and antique dealers, the cemetery, firehouse, John’s barbershop with its old Wildroot sign and barber pole.

It was only when she got to Big Brook Road and made a left thatshe returned to the twenty-first century. Here was Dorset’s shopping center, which had an A amp; P, pharmacy, bank, hardware store, and so on. Across the two-lane road from it were the storefront businesses like the insurance and travel agencies, realtors and doctors. It was all exceedingly underwhelming. There was no ostentatious display of signage allowed in Dorset. No Golden Arches, no big box stores, no multiplexes. Most businesses were locally owned.

As a rule, the business district was quite laid back, too. Not much traffic, plenty of parking. It was possible to get around even during the summer. But not this summer. Not with Tito and Esme in town. News vans were crowded into parking spaces wherever they could find them. Des could spot crews from at least a dozen Connecticut and New York television stations, not to mention CNN, Fox News, Entertainment Tonight, and Inside Edition. News choppers hovered overhead. And the sidewalks were positively bursting with sunburned tourists cruising back and forth in the bright sun, back and forth, hoping to catch just one glimpse of them.

Madness. It was just plain madness.

As she nosed her way around, making her presence felt, Des came upon a genuine traffic jam at Clancy’s ice cream parlor. Cars were at a total standstill. Drivers were even honking their horns, which was unheard-of in Dorset. She flicked on her lights and veered over the yellow line so she could get around to it. When she reached Clancy’s she discovered a whale-sized white Cadillac Escalade double-parked out front with its doors locked. Its owner had simply left it there and walked away, blocking the entire lane of traffic. No one else in town could get by.

Des hopped out, straightening her big Smokey hat, and took a closer look. The big SUV had New Jersey plates. No special handicapped tag, no media or law enforcement markings. Just a selfish, thoughtless owner. Shaking her head, she got busy filling out a ticket. She was just finishing it when a middle-age guy with an expensive comb-over came sauntering toward her licking a double-scoop chocolate ice cream cone that he really, truly did not need. His gutwas already straining hard against his tank top. It didn’t help that he was wearing shorts. His skinny, pale legs just made his stomach look even bigger. Summer clothing was very unforgiving.

But not as unforgiving as the resident trooper of Dorset, Connecticut.

“Hey, I just went inside for a second,” he protested when he caught sight of her. “One second.”

“Sir, that was a very expensive second.”

“Now you just hold on,” he ordered her, as more drivers honked their horns. “You’re not giving me a ticket over this.”

“Oh, I most certainly am. You’ve created an unsafe situation, and you’ve inconvenienced a lot of people. Next time, park in the lot.”

“The lot was full.”

“Next time, wait,” she said, as pedestrians began to gather around them, gawking.

“But everyone does it.”

“Not in my town they don’t.”

“I don’t fucking believe this!”

“Please watch your language, sir.”

“You’ve got a real attitude, haven’t you, doll?”

“Sir, I am not a doll. I am Master Sergeant Desiree Mitry of the Connecticut State Police, and you are illegally parked.” She tore off the ticket and held it out to him.

He refused to take it. Just stood there in surly defiance, his ice cream melting under the hot sun and running down his wrist. Too often, Des had discovered, people on vacation were people at their worst. In their view, the world pushed them around seven days a week, fifty weeks out of the year. When they got their two weeks off, they felt entitled to shove back.

“Take the citation, sir,” Des ordered him in a calm, steady voice. “Take it and relocate your vehicle at once. If you don’t, I will place you under arrest.”

“What is it, Tommy?” His slender frosted-blond wife was approaching them now, two appallingly fat little kids in tow, both eating ice cream cones. “What’s wrong?”

“Aw, nothing,” he growled, snatching the ticket from Des disgustedly. “You give some entry-level person a little taste of power and right away they bust your balls.”

Des knew all about this. “Entry-level person” was a code phrase for N-e-g-r-o. But she had learned long ago not to mix it up with jerks. It wasn’t as if they got any smarter if she did. She simply flashed her mega-wattage smile, and said, “You folks have yourselves a real nice vacation.” And stood there, hands on her hips, while they piled back in their SUV and took off.

Once the traffic flow returned to normal she got back in her own ride and continued on down Big Brook Road, making her rounds, her mind still working it, working it, working it…

Why did Martine tell her about Dodge?