Stephen White - Blinded

That was prime tabloid bait. The frosting on the cake. When that news hit the wires, we were talking nonstop cable TV chatter and lots of reporters making their first trips ever to southern Georgia so they could do their pompous stand-ups on some obscure bridge over the Ochlockonee River. There’d probably be good footage of gorgeous old bloodhounds on long leashes snuffling along the riverbank and maybe even some shots of gruff rescue guys in wet suits searching eddies. And of course, there’d be plenty of on-camera interviews with fat cops like me saying they’re doing the best they can, ferreting out every lead, examining every possibility.

So I checked the street in front of the house as carefully as I knew how. I didn’t want to get ambushed by some reporter.

Not yet.

Gibbs Storey was home. To my surprise, she answered her door. To my greater surprise, she invited me inside as soon as I told her I was a friend of her psychologist. That’s what got me inside her door: Alan. Whatever. I was grateful to be off the porch; I’d felt like I had a spotlight on me when I was standing outside like some Jehovah’s Witness or some almost-homeless guy walking across lawns going house to house spreading doorspam.

The entryway of the Storeys’ home was all rose-hued marble tile. Nothing was out of place in the part of the house that I could see from where I was standing. No dust, no dirt. No kids’ shoes. No crappy tennis balls the dog dragged in. If my crazy grandmother had had a ton of money and a totally different sense of what was tasteful-actually the dear old woman didn’t have any sense at all of what was tasteful-this is what her house would have looked like.

“You’re Dr. Gregory’s detective friend? The one he wanted to talk to about… my situation?”

That part couldn’t have gone better if I had written her lines myself. I’d never said I was a cop-technically since I was on leave, I wasn’t a functioning cop-but she’d generously gone ahead and granted me detective status. Alan had once told me that status was a simple thing, psychologically speaking. One person assigned it, and as soon as someone else agreed, the status became real. That’s all it took. Well, Gibbs had assigned me detective status. And me?

I didn’t contradict her. Thus, my status was real.

“Yeah. I’m Dr. Gregory’s friend. The one he talked to” was all I said.

“How did you find me? He said he wouldn’t tell you my name.”

“He didn’t. He kept his word; he’s big on that. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on-you must know that. Things that I’m in a position to hear about without any assistance from him. The search warrant here the other day? The cops visiting from the West Coast? It wasn’t hard to put numbers on the players’ backs, if you know what I mean. I sort of put two and two together on my own.”

She stared at me as though I were some kind of bizarre math whiz, and she feared I was about to do some jujitsu calculus on her.

I smiled back at her like a teddy bear. A big teddy bear with man-boobs.

I was wearing a coat, a nylon parka that had once had enough goose down in it to keep me warm in a blizzard. She wouldn’t know about the man-boobs. Hell, maybe she would. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t planning on taking the coat off in front of her.

Why? I just wasn’t going to do it.

Gibbs Storey was gorgeous, okay? I mean make-me-nervous, shift-my-weight, avert-my-eyes kind of gorgeous. The girls-guys-like-me-don’t-even-get-to-talk-to kind of gorgeous.

Not pretty.

Gibbs was movie-star stuff.

If she hadn’t been so pretty, or maybe if I had just been constitutionally more adept at being around someone so pretty, I might not have blurted out what I blurted out next. But she was, and I wasn’t.

I said, “And of course, I heard about your husband. That’s kind of why I’m here. Well, that is why I’m here.”

Her face decomposed into tears. For a moment I thought she was going to run into my arms. Fantasy? Maybe. But she didn’t turn to me; she turned and sprinted down the hall.

I decided that her rapid departure constituted an invitation, so I followed her.

It took about five minutes before things calmed down again.

We’d ended up in a long room that faced the greenbelt below the hogbacks on the western edge of town. Right where the Storeys’ carefully manicured backyard stopped, the scrub of the greenbelt began. The previous owners of this place must have had a scary, scary night in July 2002 when the Wonderland Lake fire erupted and looked as though it were planning on turning this particular section of Boulder into raw material for Kingsford.

A quick calculation told me that the room we were in was almost exactly the size of my house. This family room/breakfast nook/kitchen combo was as spotless as the entryway, but it wasn’t done in marble. This doesn’t-it-look-like-a-ski-lodge? haven was all dark wood floors and wood-beam ceilings and plaid sofas and furniture converted from farm implements and a chandelier made out of a heck of a lot of deer antlers. A moss rock fireplace divided the view of the sharp hogback to the west almost exactly in half. If the fireplace had ever had an actual fire in it, somebody with a serious aversion to ash-I’m talking phobia-had taken on the responsibility of cleaning up after the blaze.

It crossed my mind that maybe that’s why Gibbs Storey was seeing Alan. She was a neat freak, a pathological neat freak of some kind. He was trying to get her to loosen up, not dust for a day.

But who was I to say what was deviant, right?

While I was encouraging Gibbs Storey to stop crying-I do a surprising amount of that in my job day to day, and I’m pretty good at it-I was thinking that if somebody came and chopped off the rest of this house and just left this room standing, Sherry and I still couldn’t afford to live here.

Why did we fight so hard to stay in Boulder? Why? We worked our asses off, together we made a decent amount of money, or what should have been a decent amount of money, and what did we get for it? A barely insulated frame box with a crappy furnace, a twenty-year-old roof, and wall-to-wall carpeting that smelled like a colony of prairie dogs used it for a few years before donating it to the Goodwill. If you’re a cop, or a teacher, or a lady selling flowers in a little shop just off the Downtown Mall, that’s what working your ass off gets you, if you want the privilege of living a dozen blocks away from Gibbs and Sterling Storey in beautiful, beautiful Boulder.

It gets you shit.

Maybe Sherry was right. Maybe it was time for a change. Back to Minnesota? I didn’t know.

Gibbs was curled up in the corner of a big sofa. I was across from her on a chair made out of twigs and branches. Her sniffles seemed to be slowing. Finally, she whimpered, “I’m a private person. Soon everybody is going to know everything, right?”

Well, that gave me pause. I’m thinking I have a grieving widow on my hands, and that I’m going to be ladling out the comfort and tugging the tissues if I want to get anything out of her, but instead I’m wondering whether she’s upset just because her family secrets aren’t likely to remain secrets for too long.

That was a whole different state of affairs.

“ ‘Everything’ being what exactly, ma’am?” I said. It was as innocuous as I could make the question sound. I hoped it was innocuous enough, because if Gibbs heard any semblance of the echo of what she’d just said to me-assuming she was one tenth as smart as she was pretty-I figured that my forward progress was going to be severely hampered.

She swallowed, opened her eyes a tad wider, and inhaled slowly. Yep, she’d caught wind of the echo.

“What is it that you want, Detective?”