Extracurricular Activities Read Online Free PDF Page B

from my discovery that I passed.
    â€œWe have decaf, too,” he said, anticipating the fact that my shaking hands might preclude my having some caffeine.
    I accepted the decaf; I didn’t want to disappoint him. He seemed hell-bent on making a cup of coffee. After he handed it to me, complete with the little guard that surrounds a very hot paper cup, he led me into a brightly lit room with a long mahogany table and close to a dozen comfortable chairs around it. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get questioned or make a presentation on the fourth-quarter sales goals of Wal-Mart. I took a seat at the end of the table and waited to make my statement.
    I thought about Ray while I sipped my French roast and tried to sort out my feelings. I was still stunned by seeing him in the kitchen but I didn’t feel like crying. And I cry when I see the hurt look on that caveman’s face on the insurance company commercial when he realizes everyone is making fun of him. But my hands danced to a rhythm all their own, and I sat on them to keep them subdued. I kept seeing Ray’s face, in death, and while I felt profoundly sad, I wasn’t at the point of true grief yet. I wasn’t sure if I ever would be. How are you supposed to feel when something this horrible happens to someone about whom you have such conflicted feelings?
    The uniformed cop interrupted my reverie and poked his head into the room. “Do you have a boyfriend who’s a cop?”
    I chewed on that question for a moment. That would be harder to answer than “who would want to kill your ex-husband?” “Uh, he’s not my boyfriend, really, because we’re kind of broken up right now, but…” I stopped when I saw the cop looking at me with a mixture of confusion and boredom. “I guess so,” I said, as definitively as possible.
    â€œHe’s on his way over,” he said and pulled his head out of the room again, leaving me alone.
    So I guess Crawford had gotten my message and, in true Crawford style, wanted to lend a hand. Why was I attracted to fabulous, but unavailable, men? And why, with my ex-husband dead in my kitchen, was I obsessed with understanding why this was so?
    I picked my coffee up with my shaking hands, and took a careful sip. The hot liquid stuck in my throat as I thought about Ray, the way he looked, his missing digits. The contents of my stomach started wending their way up my digestive tract and I took a deep breath, holding it until my nausea subsided. I have a hair-trigger nervous system and have been known to unleash its power at the most inopportune times. I focused on a picture of the mayor of Dobbs Ferry which hung over the door and waited for a feeling of calm to overtake me again.
    Fortunately, I was able to hold it together until another detective, this one a woman named Catherine Madden, entered the room to talk to me about my gruesome discovery. I put her age at around fifty or so and she reminded me of someone who had spent many years in the convent before finding that her true passion was police work—short, unstylish hair, sensible shoes, navy blue suit with white shirt. A gold cross dangled from a short chain around her crepey neck. She offered nothing in the way of pleasantries, just a curt “Start at the beginning. What happened?” She jotted down what I thought were the most salient points of my accounting, putting her pen down when I was finished.
    â€œSo, who do you think did this?” she asked, pursing her lips together in a very unattractive frown. Didn’t she know that if you made unattractive faces, your face could freeze that way? Geez.
    â€œI don’t have the slightest idea,” I said. And that was true. If I just thought about cuckolded spouses or pissed-off parents, the list of suspects was long: Peter Miceli, Mob boss and father of Ray’s last girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old college student who was now dead; my neighbor Jackson,