The Body of David Hayes Read Free

she seized the moment, sprinting up the back steps and through the kitchen door. Her battle with lymphoma had taken some of the meat off her bones a few years earlier, but she’d filled out since and she knew her husband liked the way she looked in her running clothes. She hurried into the living room where she found Lou down on the carpet in front of a quiet television, grunting softly through a string of sit-ups. The possibility of their joining in the shower heightened her sense of urgency. The kids would be up in a matter of minutes. Lou had been out late on a call, and consequently he was running much later than usual.
    “You got back late last night,” she said. “What happened?”
    “Yeah, after two. It was Danny Foreman. Someone took it to him pretty badly.” “Beat him up? Danny?”
    “Drugged him. Knocked him out cold. Harborview released him and I drove him home. He’ll mend.”
    “We haven’t seen him in ages.” She felt awful about it, especially given Darlene’s death. But Foreman wasn’t the only friend they’d “lost” to the shift of kids and parenting. Their social calendar, never too full to begin with, given the demanding hours of both the bank and the police department, rarely included dinner with friends outside the smallest of circles. Liz’s promotion three years earlier to executive vice president of Information Technology, a division that prior to that promotion she’d known little about, had come only months after her remission from cancer and only a year and a half behind the birth of their second child.
    “Yeah.” Lou sat up and grabbed around his knees. “We talked about that a little. He’s got issues.”
    “We should have had him over to dinner.”
    “Him and about a dozen others.”
    “No, I mean it,” she said. “As close as I was to Darlene? All those months?”
    Lou stood. Liz couldn’t remember him looking this fit. He said, “Which, as it turns out, is why he wouldn’t have accepted anyway.”
    “You’re not serious?”
    “Totally. He resents that you lived and Darlene didn’t.”
    She felt a spike of heat as a wave of indignation and guilt clouded her thought. “He
said
that?”
    “It wouldn’t have been a pleasant dinner.”
    “I should say not.”
    “It isn’t aimed at you personally—”
    “No, not at all,” she said sarcastically, cutting him off.
    “It’s us as a couple, apparently. Understandable, when you think about it.”
    “It’s not understandable, and it’s not excusable. If there’sa problem there, it’s entirely our fault for not working harder when it counted. Did we even see him after the service?”
    “Of course we did. A bunch of times. But it obviously didn’t work for him.”
    Liz wondered what other tragedies lay in their wake. Children caused some serious waves.
    “Listen, I beat myself up over this last night, but I’m all right with it, I think. It’s all yours.”
    “Thanks a lot,” she said.
    She offered to shower first and take over the breakfast duty, and he thanked her for it. She had to organize Sarah’s tote, but that wouldn’t take but a minute. She caught herself laying out how to juggle the next forty-five minutes in order to carry it off smoothly. No one in the family did well when the kids turned the morning into a zoo.
    While Boldt showered she dressed, taking her time to get it right. Miles entered, sleepy-eyed, awakened by the sound of the shower. The same every morning. Liz slipped into autopilot. Dress them. Brush their hair while they brushed their teeth. Beds made. Breakfast going. A pot of English Breakfast for Lou, which seemed to surprise him. She could tell she’d be a few minutes late to work this morning. But what was, was. She had no desire to change it.
    Over a hurried breakfast, they managed fragments of a conversation.
    “Danny’s case,” she said, moving around the kitchen, now tidying up. “Anything interesting?”
    “That wire fraud case. The seventeen