The Night Detectives

33

As we drove back and I reported on my lunch meeting, Lindsey texted me that she and Sharon were going shopping-she needed to load up on moisturizers now that she was back in the desert-and she would be home by six. I wanted to go back to Sunnyslope but Peralta vetoed that. So I let him drop me off at home.

With the house to myself, I lay down on the bed and actually started reading the biography of George Frost Kennan that had languished on the table for months. But it did not transport me away from this age of “business casual,” tattoos on pretty women, and dunces saying, “No worries!” The perspective it gave me on geopolitics then and now was quickly forgotten. It was not the author’s fault.

Too many anxieties hammered on my brain. Edward Kevin Dowd, killing machine, was foremost among them. In these insidious little moments, I noticed Lindsey’s suitcases remained in the guest room, only partly unpacked. Was that because of the investigation she had been thrust into, or was her stay here only temporary?

I couldn’t stop myself from inconspicuously rifling her bags. I fancied myself a good burglar. I persuaded myself that I was guarding my heart by trying to figure if she was going again. But my breathing was also the fast pant of the voyeur. What did I think I would find? Photos and videos of my wife being impaled by another man? Billets-doux?

I found it inside one zippered compartment: an envelope, addressed to me. It had a stamp, too, but had never been mailed. In fact, it had never been sealed and inside were pages of Crane stationery. Now every electron of good judgment in my body was telling me: Stop, put this away, go no further!

Of course I ignored them. Out came the personalized stationery I had bought for her two Christmases ago. I carefully unfolded it. Hers was not a generation that had been forced to learn and stick with cursive handwriting. “Keyboard proficiency” on a computer mattered more. Instead, Lindsey’s block printing was instantly recognizable.

The letter addressed to me was dated May first.

Dear History Shamus,

This is not a “Dear John” letter but it’s going to hurt. But please read all the way through. I’m trying to express things I don’t know how to say when we’re together. You’re so good with words and thinking on your feet. I freeze up. So I’m going to try this way.

I said terrible things to you. I don’t blame you for what happened to Emma. You know this, right?

As Robin probably told you, I had a baby when I was seventeen. It was probably a cry for help, as they say, from the one who always had to be grown up, always had to be the good girl. Linda called me a slut and put the baby up for adoption and I only got to hold him once. I didn’t tell you this when we started dating because I still felt ashamed. And as the years went by, I always wanted to find the way to tell you, but couldn’t. Like I said, I don’t have your gift of words.

After that, I thought I didn’t want to try again. I wouldn’t make a good mother. There’s madness in my bloodline. But when we conceived Emma, I realized I had been lying to myself. I wanted a child so much, a child with you. A child we could raise with the love and sanity I never had growing up, and the mother and father you never had. And everything inside both of us, good and bad, could go into the future. And maybe that child would remember us kindly and carry that memory with her, too, and pass it on to her children.

When the miscarriage happened, I went crazy. They say people have a “fight or flight” instinct. Mine was flight. So when the governor offered me the job at Homeland Security, I grabbed it and flew. There’s no excuse for leaving you. My hope was that Robin would be there as a friend for you and more. I knew she couldn’t help herself and neither could you. Did I make you polyamorous, my professor? I didn’t realize she would fall in love with you. I didn’t know if you would fall in love with her, too. But I figured I deserved it if it happened.

The first time I cheated on you, Emma had been dead exactly one month. I was sitting in a coffee shop near DuPont Circle and saw a man watching me. I smiled at him. He wasn’t especially good looking. But he invited me to walk with him and I did. We went two blocks and he pushed me back against a streetlight and kissed me really hard. Then he asked me a question: he wanted to know if I was a slut. The question insulted and stunned me and I didn’t answer. “I didn’t think so,” he said, and pushed me away. He walked off into the evening crowd. I felt so many things. Angry. Guilty. Hurt. Aroused. I liked that kiss. I had missed a man’s touch, a man inside me. I wanted to kill this numbness in me. And I thought: yes, I was a slut.

I know this makes no sense to you. We had not had sex in a long time and after the miscarriage, even though you were so gentle and patient, I couldn’t be with you. I can’t tell you why. I couldn’t explain anything, couldn’t feel anything but the intensity of my grief. I didn’t want five stages or closure or your love. I wanted my baby. And I knew that I could never have another one. That was it. Somehow that anonymous kiss on the street took me away from the pain.

Of course, I never confessed this to you. You wanted me to come back to Phoenix. I couldn’t. The thought of it made me ill. So I stayed in Washington and I was a slut. Not with my husband or people I even really knew. Most of the ones I fucked and sucked were men. One was a woman. None of them knew I was mourning my baby. To them, I was a woman who was desirable and impetuous. They loved it that I was marvelously good in bed. The bizarre thing was, I could not come the way I did with you. I won’t say it didn’t feel good, but my body wouldn’t give me a real orgasm. That was all right. Being a slut suspended the ache, the longing for Emma. These lovers didn’t know much about me, certainly not the job I did. That only added to the sexual tension and the intensity when we fucked. I was a mystery woman.

Then I met a man at work and settled down. Crazy, huh? Settled down into monogamous infidelity. I figured you were fucking Robin and I kept translating my hurt and guilt over Emma into anger at you. So I became the mistress of a man who was the boss of my boss. He was married, of course, with a pretty wife and children in northern Virginia. He understood that I really needed to fuck and suck. Our encounters were incredibly intense. It took me awhile to realize he knew I needed this passion and riskiness like a drug, to help me forget. Did I write “me”? It wasn’t me. None of them knew me. They knew the “not-me” that I became.

It didn’t last. Robin’s death happened. I sat in the cemetery with you. Remember how the rain started? “Not-me” became me for a while and I was so ashamed and I knew you would never understand or forgive me. How could I ask that? Things were different when I got back to Washington, too. I realized he was tunneling into me, getting past my defenses. But I didn’t feel comforted. I felt manipulated. I felt like I was drowning.

Two weeks ago, I broke up with him. I left his apartment in the District and walked back to my place at three a.m. It was raining and I felt as if a very bad cold had suddenly passed. I don’t intend to see him again, even though there will probably be consequences. I’m tired of the slut racket.

Dave, I am writing this letter to give you one big honesty dump, and I can only imagine how much it hurts, how mad you are. I want to come home and be with you, try to find us again. I miss us. I know that’s a tough request after all that has happened. I don’t expect you to agree to it once you read this letter. You will be pissed and jealous. I wouldn’t blame you (don’t think I didn’t feel that way thinking of you with Robin). But I wish you would let me come home and let us find the way to forgive each other and forgive ourselves. You are the love of my life and always will be. When we first got together, you said that I saved your life. But you saved mine, too. I wish we could find a way to save each other one more time. I’ve written this letter ten times. I don’t know if I’ll have the guts to send it.

Lindsey

I carefully returned the letter to its envelope and that to the zippered pocket of the rolling suitcase. I rezipped it to exactly the position it had been before my fool’s adventure. My hands were shaking, my mind seared. Burglary is a crime and I would pay the penalty alone. She would never know that I had read it.

As if on cue, Lindsey called. She and Sharon were at the Nordstrom at Scottsdale Fashion Square and was I doing okay? I gamely said yes. No, I hadn’t heard anything about the situation in Sunnyslope. Did I mind if the two of them had dinner? Of course not. I told her to have fun, hoping my voice didn’t betray my knowledge of the fun she had in Washington. After she hung up, I walked to the study, my mind in a soup of queasiness and arousal, barely feeling the old hardwood floor under my feet.

At loose ends, I turned on the television for the first time in probably more than a year. A handsome man holding a microphone was standing in the parking lot where Peralta had talked to the G-man this morning. The reporter had positioned himself so the “S” made out of whitewashed rocks on the slope of a hill above Sunnyslope showed over his right shoulder. I turned up the volume.

“…still no details about the police situation here in Sunnyslope,” the reporter said. “Officers have sealed off several blocks around a house on Dunlap, as these aerial images show…”

The screen flipped to an overhead shot of the house, with a long roof and several cars parked in its driveway. The nearest police or FBI vehicles appeared to be at least two hundred yards away. I shut it off. This was turning into the goatfuck that I had feared. I had to get out of the house.