John Lescroart - The 13th Juror

"What happened?"

"What else?" The hands again, including the universe. "She winds up here. Dr. Witt's the pro with female plumbing and he's a volunteer. He calls for an ambulance right away. But before it even gets here she's dead."

"The parents blamed Witt?"

Sam nodded. "You got to. They're not going to blame themselves, right? So they need somebody and Melissa's already dead – kind of unfair to take it out on her, wouldn't you say? – so they pick Witt. They decide he's somehow responsible for the abortion that killed their daughter."

The logic of that couldn't stand much scrutiny, but Hardy supposed it rang true for the bereaved Romans. Hardy was leaning forward now. "How'd they pick on him? When did all this happen?"

Sam nodded, pleased with himself. "I looked that up today. It was right before Thanksgiving of last year."

"Which was a month before Witt was killed."

"Right."

"What did they do? Threaten to sue him? What?"

Sam's palms were up again, laying out the whole truth. "I don't know everything. I know Roman came down twice – we had to get security on the scene the second time. Then, right after that, Dr. Witt said he might just quit volunteering, it was too much. Somebody broke his car windows and he was sure it was Roman."

"Did he report that?"

"I don't know."

This was something Hardy could legitimately bring up to Terrell, or even Glitsky. Here was a crime that happened to a murder victim within a month of his death.

If Larry had reported it.

"The other stuff," Sam was saying, "if Roman was suing him or the clinic, I don't know. I haven't heard about that, but I'll tell you something…"

Hardy waited.

"How about this? If you're planning to kill somebody, you don't also sue him, do you? Maybe that's why I never heard of anything. Otherwise, why wouldn't he just sue the clinic?"

Interesting question.

His house was empty when he got home and he felt the emptiness trying to settle on him, heavy and cold as the city's familiar fog.

He had lived the better part of ten years alone in this house before he had gotten together with Frannie, and the associations weren't all good – he missed almost nothing from that lost decade. The house, back then, had been smaller (without the nursery), darker (without the skylights), colder. Just plain colder somehow.

He would get hoem from bartending or a ball game and go to his office in the back, which was now Rebecca's pastel bedroom. He'd take a bottled Guinness from the refrigerator and sit at his desk in the light from his green banker's lamp and read, or shoot darts, or clean his (now unused) pipes, or whittle something. He'd light a coal fire in the grate.

Everything he did he had done all by himself, even when he was with other people. He hadn't thought he was lonely. He wasn't lonely, he was just alone. And, he now knew, there was a difference.

Frannie hadn't mentioned going out and he'd talked to her after he'd seen Jennifer in the morning. It was possible she'd gone to the market, although they'd just spent a domestic weekend, including a trip to the grocery store on Saturday.

He didn't know where they were and, against any kind of sense, it worried him. On the drive home he'd been thinking about Jennifer and Larry and the Romans and the medical background sheet Lightner had – intentionally? – left for him to pick up.

All those thoughts were now gone. He looked down and out the window in Vincent's room, wondering if, even with the July evening chill, they might be in the backyard. They weren't. He fed the tropical fish in his bedroom, looked at his watch, started to call the Shamrock and decided not, checked the time again. He didn't know. There was no note.

He wasn't going to sit around waiting, letting the old emptiness fill him up. It was something he'd put behind him, and its sudden reappearance spooked him. Were the kids all right? Had Frannie run out quickly to the emergency room, not even having time to jot something on a pad? He walked from the kitchen to the front door down the hallway and back through the inside rooms, telling himself he wasn't looking for drops of blood on the floor.

In his bedroom he shucked his suit and put on shorts, a sweatshirt, tennis shoes. He had a four-mile circle he ran from his house, out to the beach, across Golden Gate Park, along Lincoln back to the Shamrock at 9^th Avenue, then home. It took him about forty-five minutes.

He looked at his watch. He'd be home by seven. He wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table under a salt shaker. At least Frannie would know where he'd gone.

In the kitchen, Frannie greeted him with a kiss. She was stirring her white clam spaghetti sauce and humming. Rebecca was pouring water from a watering can, getting almost half of it into the different-sized pans she'd arranged on the floor. Vincent was in his baby seat next to her. The windows were steamed with the boiling water. The sun was still up. In his house there was nothing empty or spooky or sinister.

Hardy went in to shower, berating himself for his paranoia, wondering how he got to be so old.

On Wednesday at a little after noon there was the sound of something being thrown, clattering against bars onto the floor in the jail behind where Jennifer sat on the bench in the visitor's area. Startled, Frannie nearly left her chair. Sitting back down, she forced a smile. "I hate that kind of noise. I always jump a mile."

"It doesn't really bother me anymore. I guess I'm used to it." Jennifer looked down at her hands. "Larry used to throw things sometimes, so by the time I heard the noise it meant most of it was over."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, the tension, waiting for him to blow up. It was almost a relief when it came."

Frannie put her hand on the Plexiglas. Jennifer put hers up against it. It had developed between them, some kind of signal, a touch by proxy. This was their third meeting. The hands remained in place. Frannie stared at the hands, at her wedding ring. Her face paled.

"Are you all right?" Jennifer asked.

"I'm fine. Sometimes just…"

"What?"

"I'm sorry. Moment of weakness. It's nothing." Then smiled again, weakly. "I don't know what it is."

"You look sad."

Frannie nodded. "That's what it feels like. Like all at once things have sort of stopped" – she searched for the right word – "resonating, I'd say."

"Maybe it's just the postpartums. They can go on six months, you know, sometimes longer. After Matt," she paused, surprised by the name, from out of nowhere. A deep breath, pushing on, " after Matt, first there was euphoria, then this black hole that didn't want to go away."

Frannie shrugged. "Maybe. I don't know. I don't feel like it's that." She brought her hand back down to her lap. "I wanted to tell you – you know, my first husband was killed too?"

Frannie then told Jennifer about it, about twenty-five-year-old Eddie Cochran – Frannie's husband and Hardy's friend. Hardy had helped expose the murderer, and five months later they – Hardy and Frannie – had gotten involved, married.

Frannie told her about some bad moments since they'd gotten together. Guilt perhaps. Timing questions. But this, Frannie's sadness, seemed to strike a deeper chord somehow.

"Everything's been so kind of rushed, you know?"

Jennifer listened, rapt, her eyes glistening. Another woman had problems, had sadnesses. It was some comfort to know she wasn't so alone.

"It's just first there was Eddie, then Dismas and me. Then all of a sudden I'm married again and Rebecca is being born. Next, before I've really given any thought to those changes, I'm pregnant again and having Vincent. And now… now I've stopped for a minute and I look back and it's like I've been running like a crazy person, as though I'm maybe running from something. Does this make any sense?"