Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

Farman looked like he might blow an aneurysm. So much for getting what he needed.

“Frank, sit down,” Dixon ordered. “Let’s get this over with.”

Farman sat and stared at the front of the desk.

“I worked late that night,” he said. “I had paperwork. My wife is mistaken.”

“You were here?” Hicks said. “Okay.”

But as he said it, he cut Mendez a look.

Farman caught it from the corner of his eye. He turned on Hicks. “What?”

Hicks looked uncomfortable. “You were off the clock at four thirty. You’re salaried. You don’t get overtime. Why put it in your logbook that you went to dinner?”

“Habit,” Farman said.

Hicks looked to Dixon. “Can I keep this for a couple of hours?” he asked, lifting the logbook.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Farman muttered, shaking his head. He stood up. “I’m done here. I’m going home.”

Mendez checked his watch. 6:26. He hoped for Sharon Farman’s sake dinner was ready.

“You received a traffic fine in the mail.”

Anne looked at her father as she dropped her book bag and purse inside the front door. “What?”

“It says something about reckless driving and destruction of property. I taught you how to drive better than that.”

“I learned to drive from Mom,” Anne said, taking the citation from him. Frank Farman had written the ticket because she had turned around on his lawn after he parked behind her and blocked her in. Jerk. “You must be thinking about some other daughter you had with some other woman.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what it means. It means you don’t get to reinvent my history.”

“You don’t have to worry about it, anyway,” he said, waving at the ticket. “I give to the sheriff’s charity every year. They know me. They’ll look the other way.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works, Dad.”

Fine: $150!

“Of course that’s how it works. What were you doing behind the wheel? Drinking and driving?”

“No, but I’m thinking about taking that up.”

He didn’t react because he never listened to her. The other person’s role in a conversation with Dick Navarre was to kill time while he was deciding what to say next.

In all their years of marriage he had probably heard about 3 percent of what her mother ever had to say. Her opinion had meant nothing to him, nor had Anne’s. She remembered when she was nine years old her mother telling her to go into the living room and talk to her father before dinner. Even then Anne had seen the futility of that exercise.

“Really, honey,” her mother had said. “Daddy wants to hear about your day at school.”

Anne had looked up at her mother, perfectly coiffed, perfectly made up, all for her husband who treated her like a servant, and said, “Mom, he doesn’t even know what grade I’m in.”

She regretted saying it instantly only because her honesty had hurt her mother. Her father probably couldn’t say what grade she taught now because what she did was of no interest to him, even though he had been a teacher himself. The ultimate narcissist, it only mattered to him that she took care of the things he needed taken care of.

“You’re late,” he said. “Again. What’s your excuse tonight?”

“I’ve been recruited by the FBI to work undercover in this murder investigation.”

He looked annoyed. “The FBI doesn’t hire women.”

“Yes, they do. It’s 1985, Dad. We have the right to vote and everything.”

“Ha. Very funny,” he grumbled, walking away. “The right to vote.”

Anne dropped the citation on the dining room table and headed for the kitchen, calling, “Did you take your meds?”

“Of course I did. I’m not senile. I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

“Good. In that case, I’ll be moving out next week.”

She looked into the plastic case that held his pills for the day. He hadn’t taken half of them. If she asked him why not, he would undoubtedly tell her it was because he once read an article in The New England Journal of Medicine while waiting for his dermatologist to remove a mole, and therefore knew more about the subject of pharmaceuticals than any one of the three medical specialists he saw.

“Maybe you can get a girlfriend,” Anne called out, dumping the pills into her hand. “It’ll be just like the old days.”

“I don’t know why you go on like that,” he groused. “I was a very good husband.”

“Really?” she said, coming back into the dining room. “To whom?”

“You always took your mother’s side.”

“Yes. Damn but that I didn’t inherit that amoral gene of yours. My life would be so much easier.”

“Are you finished?” he asked coolly. “I’m going next door to watch Jeopardy! The Ivers are such a lovely family.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “You hate Judith Iver. Tuesday night you called her a stupid cow.”

“Not to her face.”

“Well, that makes all the difference. Here,” she said, handing him a fistful of pills and a glass of water. “I’m not letting you out the door until you take those.”

“I don’t know why you bother,” he complained. “You’d be happier if I was dead.”

“Yes, but I’m such an obvious suspect.”

“I’m sure your new friends at the FBI would take care of you.”

“It would make a better story if I called in all your markers for donating twenty dollars a year to the sheriff’s annual circus day fund.”

Her father sniffed and struck a pose like a Shakespearean actor on stage. Sir Richard of Bullshit. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

“Oh, please,” Anne said, quickly thumbing through the rest of the mail. “I’m completely thankful to my parent. That just doesn’t happen to be you, that’s all.”

“I’m leaving,” he announced, offended. It would give him something to talk about when he sat down with Judith Iver and her nephew. He could lament his daughter’s low treatment of him and elicit half an hour’s worth of sympathy while flogging them at Jeopardy!

Anne hurried to her room to shower and change clothes. The Thomas Center was holding a candlelight vigil for Karly Vickers and in memory of Lisa Warwick, and she felt a need to be there. She refused to recognize the fact that she expected to see Vince there, just as she refused to think too hard about the fact that he had kissed her. She had allowed him to kiss her.

It was only because she had felt weak and vulnerable, and he had felt so strong and safe by comparison. And she wanted to trust him. The deepest, most private part of who she was had existed in emotional isolation for most of her life. But in that one moment of weakness she had wanted to drop those shields just to feel the comfort of another soul next to hers for a little while.

The sound of his low, rough voice was warm in her head as she stood in front of her bathroom mirror.

It’s all right… This shoulder has been cried on before.

She ached all the way through at the memory of how much she had needed to hear someone say that.

Now she pushed the feeling away as something impractical and a waste of time. She had things to do and needing was not high on the list of priorities.

The Thomas Center was a collection of white stucco buildings that had been a private Catholic girls’ school from the early twenties into the sixties. Modeled on the style of the old Spanish missions, the buildings formed a courtyard between them with a fountain at its center and stunning, simple gardens rambling along the stone walkways.

It was a beautiful place by daylight. By candlelight it was magical. Hundreds of tiny flames seemed to dance on the dark night air. The courtyard was nearly full. Franny had scoped out the scene before Anne got there and had chosen a spot with the optimum potential for eavesdropping.