Carla Neggers - The Widow

She flung more pages on the fire.

By nightfall, I’m worried. So are Doyle Alden, a local police officer, and Owen Garrison, Chris’s rich neighbor. I can see it in their faces.

Chris should be back by now.

“Abigail? You’re not breathing.”

She made herself exhale and smiled at Bob, who, initially, hadn’t even wanted her in the department, much less working at his side in homicide. Too much baggage, he’d told everyone, including her. It wasn’t just her husband. It was quitting law school, it was her background. She’d had to earn his trust. “I’m okay. I should have done this sooner. It feels good.”

“Why are you doing it now?”

“What?”

Bob wasn’t one to miss anything.

Abigail tore more pages, tossed them whole onto the fire, nearly smothering it.

I ignore warnings to stay inside-to rest-and instead put on my hiking boots and go off on my own into the unfamiliar landscape. Unlike Doyle and Owen and my husband, I don’t know every rock, every tree root, every snaking path through the woods or along the shore.

I’m not from Mt. Desert Island.

Bob watched her squirt more charcoal lighter fluid on her fire, the orange flames glowing in his face.

“The journals are emotional clutter-a drag on me.” Her words sounded okay to her, anyway. Plausible. “I’m heading up to Maine in the morning.”

“I see.”

“I need to do some work on the house.”

“Taking vacation time?”

“Some. Things are quiet right now. I have plenty of time coming to me.”

Bob poked at the fire with his tongs. He wasn’t by nature a patient man, but he had explained to Abigail, equally impatient, how his experience had taught him the value of strategic silence. She knew if she tried to fill the void, he’d have her.

The combination of the lighter fluid, the flames, the heat and the emotion had her eyes stinging. But she didn’t cry.

She’d never cried in front of Bob or Scoop, any of her fellow police officers.

I see Owen Garrison down on the rocks, near the waterline, below the skeletal remains of the original Garrison house, burned in the great Mt. Desert fire of 1947.

I can taste the ocean on the air and smell the acidic odor of the damp, peat-laden earth.

My mind doesn’t want to take in what I’m seeing.

The body of a man.

Owen tries to stop me from running. “Don’t, Abigail…”

She picked up the spiral notebook on the bottom of her pile. The last one to burn, and the first one she’d filled, the handwriting oversized and thick, a pen difficult for her to hold in those initial, terrible weeks of rage, shock and grief.

With a sharp breath, she ripped out too many pages at once and distorted the metal spiral, ended up tearing sheets on an angle. She threw what she had onto the fire and pulled off the bits that had stayed behind, then grabbed another fistful and yanked those pages free.

Bob O’Reilly continued to watch her.

“I’m taking the ashes with me to Maine. As many as I can fit in the coffee can. I’m going to dump them in Frenchman Bay. It’s part of the ritual.”

“Should be pretty up there,” he said.

I keep running. I don’t slip on the rocks or hesitate, even as Owen grabs me by the waist. “Chris was shot, Abigail. He’s dead. I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do now.”

Owen won’t let me go to my husband. He won’t let me contaminate the crime scene when there’s no hope.

All we can do now, he says, is find the killer.

Bob hooked the tongs back onto the side of the grill. “Forget it, Detective Browning. You’re not fooling me. You’re not even coming close. Cleansing rituals. Emotional clutter.” He snorted. “Bullshit.”

Abigail tilted her head back and gave him a lofty look. She could feel her tank top sticking to her back. Her hair, short and dark, had twisted itself into corkscrews. Bob didn’t wilt under her scrutiny, and finally she sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His cornflower Irish eyes leveled on her. “You haven’t given up, Abigail. You won’t toss in the towel on finding your husband’s killer, ever.”

“If you were in my position, would you give up?”

“We’re not talking about me.” He leaned in toward her. “Something’s happened. Something’s changed. What?”

Abigail turned away from him. “Bob…”

He grunted, silencing her. “If you can’t tell me what’s really going on, you can’t tell me. Just don’t give me cleansing rituals.”

“Okay, but the part about fixing up the house-”

“That’s a little better, as cover stories go.”

“It’s not a cover story-”

“Abigail.”

She decided not to push her luck, and Bob didn’t press her further, scowling once more before heading back up to his third-floor apartment. Abigail watched her fire die out, here and there bits of unburned paper amid the ashes. She peeled the lid off her coffee can and noticed that she’d started to cry, almost as if she were someone else.

Using a long-handled spatula, she scooped ashes into the Folgers can.

Not all the ashes fit.

She stirred those left in the grill. All she needed to do was start a fire with two of Boston ’s most respected detectives on the premises. She’d been a detective for just two years. By Bob O’Reilly and Scoop Wisdom’s standards-by her own standards-she was still a novice.

They believed in her, and she proved herself one day at a time, but she’d decided, even before she’d formed her own plan of action, not to tell them about last night’s call.

An anonymous tip.

It wasn’t the first in seven years, and it wasn’t the craziest-but she didn’t need two trusted colleagues, two unwavering friends, to talk her out of following up on it.

Her spatula struck a half-burned page pasted to the bottom of the grill, the words jumping out of the ashes at her in thick, black marker, as if somehow she needed reminding.

I am a widow.

The tip had come to her the night before in theatrical fashion.

It was the second Saturday in July, the day Abigail and Chris had chosen for their wedding seven years ago. She had spent the day alone. She always did, despite her friends and family who would call and invite her to barbecues and dinners, a movie, a Red Sox game.

Once, her mother, a corporate attorney with a high-powered husband, a woman who’d learned how to relax, had offered to book Abigail a spa day. “Get a massage. Get your toes done. You’ll feel better.”

Only her mother, Abigail had thought. But Kathryn March had made her widowed daughter smile with that gesture-mission accomplished.

Her father was a different story. He never tried to make his only daughter smile on her anniversary. He knew he couldn’t. Abigail had told him he couldn’t.

“Was Chris killed because of you?”

“Abigail…don’t…”

“Was he?”

“I was the father of the bride on your wedding day. That’s all.”

“Did you put him up to something on his honeymoon? You’ve seen the file on his murder. What’s in it? What aren’t you telling me?”

The truth was, there was nothing in Chris’s file. Otherwise his murder wouldn’t have remained unsolved. Investigators wouldn’t release certain details to a family member-in their place, Abigail wouldn’t, either. But the Maine State Police and the FBI weren’t hiding anything from her. Although he was a director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a hard-driving, self-made man, a former Boston cop himself, John March had no advantage when it came to his son-in-law’s murder.

He couldn’t produce a killer any more than she could. The evidence just wasn’t there. He couldn’t even console his daughter.