The Pocket Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d nearly shouted into Ann’s voice mail, as sirens clotted the air and screamed toward the ER. “I’m on my way.”
    At the time he hadn’t realized why she didn’t answer either her cell or the house phone in the kitchen, but after she’d left, when he walked inside and saw the cake from the French bakery, the scripted “Happy Anniversary” in purple buttercream, when it was, in essence, hours too late, he knew. He also knew that her anger had been building for a long time. He’s never really understood the milkiness of women; he doesn’t want to. He thinks itmight be worse, the way they take a sharp, hard thing and stretch it into smoke and wisps of summer nights—ghosts that curl around the bedpost and lie in wait outside the kitchen door. Men, Jack thinks, deal with things head-on, and then they dust themselves off and blunder through their lives.
    He gets up from his desk and stretches. All night he tossed and turned, and now he’s dying for a cigarette even though he hasn’t smoked in years. He walks into the break room and tries not to look at the half-empty box of doughnuts on the table in the middle of the room. “Hey, Rob,” he says, and his partner nods, gesturing toward his mouth and then the open doughnut box.
    â€œHow’s the case coming along?” he says. “The woman on Ashby Lane?”
    Jack pours himself a cup of coffee from the machine, muddy and tasteless. “Night shift left a report on my desk. Said somebody might’ve been at the crime scene last night after we left.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œNo idea. The patrolman said there was a light inside the house, but the place was locked up tight as a drum. No forced entry. Said it was possible it was headlights coming through a window from the street behind.”
    â€œHuh. Murderer returning to the scene of the crime?”
    â€œCould be. Anything on the missing girl?”
    â€œThey found her car not far from where she worked, stripped, with some blood on the front seat. I got two calls from Lenora at the prosecutor’s office,” Rob tells him. “Lenora the Luscious.” He rolls his eyes. “She wants an update on both cases.”
    â€œAlready? Crap!” The first assistant prosecutor has been even more of a pain than usual lately, her spike heels inches from whatever case they’re on. Jack gulps down the coffee and nearly gags. His stomach is a huge knot, between Ann leaving and his eatingonly crusts of burned things he found in the oven in the middle of the night—the charred remains of potatoes and roasted brussels sprouts.
    Probably the missing teenage girl is with her boyfriend in the city, which is usually how these things turn out, but he’s hardly an authority when it comes to kids. His one remaining son is living with a girl named Maryanne in a place even felons avoid if they have a choice. Rosie’s Rooms, not far from Jack’s office. Jack hasn’t met the girlfriend and quite possibly he never will. He hears just scraps of things from Margie, who is totally unreliable as a witness—or anything else, for that matter. If he interviewed his ex-wife on a case, he’d toss out most of what she said. Still, Margie’s all he’s got now, the only connection to their son. And if it’s true what she told him when she dropped the ball with her AA program a few months back, he might soon have a grandchild. Sometimes he believes this, but usually he doesn’t, since it wouldn’t be the first time Margie’s lied about a pregnancy. She told him she was pregnant a few weeks after she threw Jack out. She wasn’t. It was just one of the cards she played.
    He holds his pencil between the first and second fingers of his right hand, exactly the way he held a cigarette for twenty-seven years. Margie told him in a more lucid call, in which she was much vaguer about Maryanne’s pregnancy, that