Singer 02 - Long Time No See Read Online Free PDF Page A

sleep was broken with the ominous crack of a limb about to crash, I lay in bed knowing in my heart that she hadn’t been grabbed by some monstrous Halloween deviate and was being held against her will, but that she was lying in some shallow, icy, suburban grave. I’d think about her children: One day they’d had a mother who adored them. The next day she was no more. Were these poor kids told Mommy will be back, or Gosh, honey, we don’t know where Mommy is but we hope she’ll call? Were they told anything?
    But because it seemed there would be no conclusion to the Courtney case, it was easier to push it from my mind. I threw myself into work and lived for the times I’d see Kate and Joey or my friends. When I was by myself, mostly I thought about Bob. True, he and I hadn’t had a fairy-tale marriage. Still, even when all that’s left is polite conversation and low-wattage marital sex, you have to remember (I’d told myself during those years we were together) that once upon a time it must have been a love story. I guess I always half expected the plot would get moving again: Some incident will touch off a great conflict in our relationship. Then, lo and behold, not only will the air between us finally clear, but there’d be romance in it! The two of us will walk hand in hand into a sunset, happily ever after—or until one of us went gently into the night in our eighth or ninth decade. Imagine my surprise when he died before my eyes in the ER of North Shore Hospital.
    So not only no husband. No prospect of another one. Not one more blind date, that was for sure, not after the two geriatric wonder boys Nancy had dubbed Old and Older. After Christmas break, I began to go out occasionally with Geoff, a postmodernist from the English department at St. Elizabeth’s. I rarely understood what he was talking about, his clothes smelled as if he patronized a discount dry cleaner, and unfortunately he had a healthy sex drive. No one else was knocking at my door.
    I had long before disciplined myself not to think about Nelson Sharpe. And to dwell on the Courtney Logan case would be to invoke him: What would he make of all this? Would he be putting pressure on the husband? Would he be investigating other leads?
    I didn’t want to jeopardize again the life I’d fashioned for myself because, whatever it was, it worked. I had kids, friends, library and Blockbuster cards. I had a job that evoked remarks like, Gee, or Ooh, how intellectually stimulating. The truth was, my work occasionally had my mind. Never my heart.
    So winter warmed into spring and early one evening in the middle of May I came home from St. Elizabeth’s and raced straight to the garden to cut lilacs. When I came back inside, in the way of so many people who live alone, I reflexively turned on the radio for company. My face was buried in my armful of lavender, purple, and white blooms and I was getting dopey on those first ecstatic sniffs. So it took a few seconds before I actually tuned into the sandpaper voice of Mack Dooley, the Logans’ pool man. He was telling WCBS radio: “Like, this morning, about eleven, I’m taking off the Logans’ pool cover with this kid who works for me—you know, pump it out, acid-wash it, get it ready and—” The reporter did attempt a question but Dooley kept going. “So listen. The cover’s fine, tied down real tight like I left it in the middle of September when I closed them up. The kid and I are kind of rolling it back and I see something. I say, Holy— You know how big raccoons can get? Except for the life of me I can’t figure out how even a raccoon could work its way under that cover. Well, that second I see, you know, it’s ... It’s a body! Jeez. Believe it or not I’m still shaking.”

Chapter Two
    T HE NEWS ABOUT the body in Greg Logan’s swimming pool consumed local TV and radio, a tristate info-blob engulfing any news about Al Gore’s plummeting poll numbers or the raging wildfires in Los Alamos.