Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Frankie’s lips bent into a sad smile. “I know that, too.”

“So how do you feel?” He asked it in a clinical way. They were both scientists. Sometimes it was hard to remember they were husband and wife, too. She expected him to take out a yellow pad and start taking notes while they talked.

“I feel off,” she said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really. Something’s not right with me, Jason, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I think it’s called grief.”

He was right, but that didn’t make her feel better. Another husband might have come out of his chair and hugged her, but that wasn’t Jason, and that wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. They weren’t touchy-feely.

She’d met him seven years ago at a conference in Barcelona. He was British. They were both in their early thirties. She’d noticed when she met him that he was handsome, although their interactions were purely professional in the beginning. He had an athletic build and close-cropped black hair. His dark eyes missed nothing, and he had an expressive mouth that could shift from humor to disdain with a twitch of his lips. His face was full of sharp angles, and so was his personality. She liked that. She hated men who tried to woo her.

They’d stayed in touch after the conference because they both specialized in memory. He worked on the neurological side, focused on brain chemistry. She worked on the therapeutic side. Nine months later, he took a research position with a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, and their meetings evolved slowly from professional to personal. A year after that, they married, to the amusement of her sister, Pam, who’d assumed that Frankie would never leave her clinical office long enough to meet a man.

She’d found a husband who was a carbon copy of herself. Smart. Demanding. Unemotional. Or maybe — she occasionally whispered to herself — she’d done what so many other women did and married her father.

“After he died, you told me you felt some closure with him,” Jason reminded her.

“I know. I still do.”

“Do you remember why?”

Frankie did. The camping trip snapped like a photograph into her mind. It was something that she, Pam, and their father had done annually since they were children. On New Year’s Eve, they would travel to a state park around Northern California and spend two nights there. They’d stayed as close as Angel Island in the bay and traveled as far afield as Redwood National Park north of Eureka. It was a family tradition, but their father had a way of turning the outings into intellectual exercises. He selected a discussion theme. He assigned reading and quizzed them like a professor. The topics had ranged over the years from politics to science to economics. Minimum-wage policy. Extraplanetary life. Addiction. Alaskan glaciers.

This year’s topic had been a strange departure. It was risk . Which turned out to be a tragically ironic subject in the wake of what happened to him.

“He was different with me that last evening,” Frankie said. “Maybe it’s because it was just the two of us this year. He relaxed. We talked about Mom. Before we went to sleep, he told me he was proud of me. I’d been waiting my whole life to hear something like that from him.”

“So you got what you wanted,” Jason said.

Frankie stared out her office window. She could see the crowds in Union Square ten stories below her. “Yes, he could have told me he loved me, and it wouldn’t have meant as much as him being proud of me.”

He heard her hesitation. “So what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just — I don’t know.”

“It hasn’t even been four months, Frankie. That’s not long when you lose a parent. Don’t rush yourself.”

“You’re right.” Frankie shook her head and added, “Pam missed out.”

“If she’d been there, it wouldn’t have been the same,” Jason reminded her. “Marvin treated her differently.”

“I know.”

“Maybe you got the closure you needed because it was just the two of you,” he pointed out.

“I’ve thought about that, but it makes me feel guilty.”

“You had no way of knowing what was going to happen.”

“No.”

On New Year’s Day, her father had awakened early, at sunrise, which was typical. He made coffee and took a hike along the bluff trails of Point Reyes. He told Frankie to stay behind, which was a surprise. Normally, he made her and Pam get up and join him on his early walks. It didn’t matter how late they’d been up the night before. He hiked north of Arch Rock where the cliffs dropped sharply to the rocks and beach. It had rained overnight. The earth of the headlands was soft and yielding.

Hours later, when he still hadn’t returned, Frankie alerted the rangers. They found Marvin Stein’s body at the base of the cliff.

Jason checked his watch. “I have to get back to work. Are you and Pam going to Zingari tonight?”

“Probably. Do you want us to wait for you for dinner?”

“No, I might be late.”

“Okay.”

Her husband got up, and his sharp eyes examined her face. “Are you still feeling off?”

“Yes, I don’t know exactly what it is.” She stared out the window again, and without looking at Jason, she said, “Do you think that he—?”

Jason waited, but Frankie didn’t go on. He answered her question without her asking it, because she couldn’t form the words.

“No, I don’t think that Marvin killed himself,” Jason said. “He’s not the kind of man who would take his own life. It was an accident. The cliffs are dangerous. He fell.”

Frost heard Lucy Hagen’s footsteps inside as she hurried to answer the door at the apartment she shared with Brynn Lansing.

“Oh, hi, Frost,” she said, her face flushing happily when she saw him. Then she corrected herself: “Sorry — Inspector.”

He returned the greeting with his own friendly, crooked smile. “Frost is fine.”

“Come on in.”

He crossed the threshold past Lucy and eyed the apartment. There wasn’t much to see. It was a studio in an old building on Haight near Octavia. A bay window overlooked the street. Three steps led up to the bathroom, where he could see a toilet and claw-foot tub. The kitchen could have been slipped into the back of his Suburban. He noticed two twin beds, one made, one unmade. Fashion posters were thumbtacked to the walls. The apartment was overstuffed with furniture and clothes.

“It’s not exactly Seacliff, is it?” Lucy said. “Although it feels that way when I pay the rent.”

“It’s an expensive city.”

“Yeah, no kidding. I don’t know where people get the money. We get some of the super-rich types shopping in the jewelry department at Macy’s sometimes. That must be the life, huh?”

“They can have it,” Frost said. “I’ve seen what money does to people. It’s not pretty.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind giving it a try. Cops do okay, though, huh?”

“The union takes care of us.”

“That must be nice. Nobody’s signing up to take care of me. Not that you guys don’t earn it. You do.” Lucy shook her head. “Sorry, I’m babbling like an idiot. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Don’t worry about it. How long have you lived here?”

“Two years. I need a new roommate now, or I’ll have to move. I called my parents to tell them what happened, and they think I should get out of the city. They don’t think it’s safe here. I don’t know, maybe they’re right, but I’d miss the funk if I left San Fran. Know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“How about you? Have you been here long?”

“All my life.”

“Where do you live?”