With Child

“Um,” she mumbled.

“I can cook or order something. Pizza?”

She shuddered.

“How about Chinese?”

Her response was slow, as if neural synapses weren’t firing at normal speed. “Okay,” she finally agreed.

She did manage to pour herself some juice while he called. When she carried it to the table and sat down, she said, “You’re still here.”

“I didn’t want to leave you alone. Since you never got around to calling your mother or a friend.” Quinn shrugged.

“I don’t want anybody right now.”

He tried to hide his exasperation. “Then you’re stuck with me.”

She was quiet for several minutes. Then, like a puzzled child, she asked, “Why don’t you like me?”

Because you’re silly, not too bright and self-centered. Because sooner or later, you were going to get tired of Dean and break his heart.

Quinn didn’t say a word of what he thought. Instead, he snorted. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”

Okay, maybe the not-too-bright part wasn’t true. She looked at him with knowing, sad eyes.

He found himself amending. “It’s not that I don’t like you.”

She kept waiting. Or maybe she had lost interest in any answer and was just staring into space he happened to occupy.

“I didn’t think you and Dean were a good match.”

Anger flared in her voice. “And you were the expert…why?”

“I knew Dean a hell of a lot better than you did!”

“And me not at all.”

His jaws knotted. “That might be because you were too busy giggling and flirting with Dean to hold a rational conversation.”

“I didn’t know I was required to present my credentials to you.”

They glared at each other.

Then, as quickly as their petty argument began, it ended. Her face crumpled. Her voice drifted. “Oh, what difference does it make?”

After a moment of struggle, she regained control, sipped juice and went back to glancing vaguely around the kitchen. Eventually, her gaze reached the address book and phone at his elbow.

“Have you already called some of Dean’s friends?”

“I called everybody.”

“Everybody?” Her gaze lifted to his face. “Shouldn’t I have done that?”

“You didn’t seem up to it.”

She was starting to look mad again. “You mean, I wasn’t willing to do it today, before Dean’s body is even cold.”

“Did you want his friends to find out he was dead from the six o’clock news?”

“No.” Emotions waged war on her face. “Will it be…”

“On the news? Damn straight. He was a cop.”

“Not anymore.”

“As far as we’re concerned, he was one of us. Reporters will see it the same.”

“You could have said…”

Sharper than he had meant to be, Quinn said, “Murder makes the news. I didn’t know I had to tell you that.”

Resentment smoldered in her eyes and made her lips pouty. She even looked childish.

“I read The Times. I don’t watch much TV. And following local murders is not my hobby.”

Which part of The Seattle Times did she read? he wondered uncharitably. The comics?

“Dean’s murder will be in the morning papers, too. I thought the news would better come from one of us.”

“So you just took over.”

A headache began to bore into his skull. “I took over when you decided to spend the day napping.”

She rose to her feet, looking anguished, furious and completely grown-up. “When I spent the day grieving! Instead of worrying about whether somebody Dean played golf with once in a while found out in the first twenty-four hours that he was dead!”

The doorbell rang.

Quinn shook his head and went to answer it. He half expected that by the time he got back to the kitchen, she’d have retreated to the bedroom. Instead, she stood at one of the French doors looking out, her back to Quinn.

Quinn wondered, though, how much she could see through her own reflection in the glass. Maybe nothing; maybe she was studying her own haunted face.

“Dinner,” he said, lifting the sacks.

“I did love him, you know.”

Pain squeezed his chest, roughened his voice. “I know.”

He hadn’t been sure, not when Dean was alive. Now, he was beginning to believe she did.