Chapter Eighteen
They had take-out pizza, streamed a movie they both enjoyed, and had sex. The next time Gideon came over, Arden cooked. Then he brought Chinese.
At the end of two weeks, he hauled in another two bookcases. On another rainy night, with the dog curled by the fire, he helped her shelve books and interesting things.
He studied the photo of Arden and her cousin. “Spring break?”
“Good guess.”
The picture Dustin had stolen, Arden thought. Seeing it helped her remember the happiness the picture preserved, and how one person could destroy it.
“Neither one of you’ve changed much.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, loading the bottom two shelves. “Two years after that was taken, she met Boone. That was it for her. Him, too. Now she’s a wife, mother of two with another on the way, and a marketing exec in Oregon.
“Me? I dreamed of being a writer, imagined living in New York while secretly writing a novel between work and classes. And was seriously stuck on a lit major named John Jay Haverstam.”
He looked down at her. “Did you just make that name up?”
“I did not. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a man bun, intended to write the Great American Novel and live in seclusion in Maine—I think it was Maine—while he wrote another Great American Novel.
“He was my first.”
“Your first what?”
“Serious boyfriend and sexual experience.”
Curious, Gideon studied the photo again. His cop’s eyes pegged her at nineteen or twenty.
“How old were you in this picture?”
“I’d just turned twenty.” She looked up at him. “I got a slow start, as most boys weren’t very interested in a bookish, flat-chested girl who hit six feet if she put on kitten heels. Apparently, I’m making up for that now.”
“Happy to help. Did he? Write the Great American Novel?”
“Not yet. He did send me a note of congratulations when my second book came out. Though carefully crafted to mark my success in the arena of popular fiction, which I know he considers one narrow and slippery step above graphic novels—”
“I like graphic novels.”
“Me, too, as you’ll see when we get to that section of the library. But John Jay Haverstam sees them as an insult to literature, the bastard son of publishing.”
She slid another paperback into the bottom shelf.
“So while he congratulated me, I tasted his bitterness in every word, a flavor I found delicious, as when I got back from that spring break, which was about six months into our relationship, he told me that the relationship had run its course for him. I no longer inspired him, and he needed fresh stimulation for his art.”
“So, he was a dick.”
“Absolutely.” She said it with the brightest of smiles.
“A dick who’s teaching high school English—an honorable and essential profession, which I’m sure he hates—in New Jersey.
I’m a published writer who gets to do what I love every day, living in a beautiful spot in Oregon with my faithful dog.
And I’m having regular sex with a guy who looks like you. ”
“Because you developed better taste in men.”
“No question. I’d feel sorry for him, except for the careless and callous way he dumped me, because I’m doing what I always wanted to do, and he’s not.”
“Having sex with me? Oh, you meant writing,” he said when she laughed.
“I did. It’s a tremendous gift to be able to do what you love, what you want and wanted. It makes me want to be good at it, do it right.”
He went quiet so the only sound came from the rain and Zorro’s quiet snoring.
“I’m not working at the hardware anymore. Last day today.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. Are you going to concentrate on your woodworking?”
“No, it’s a hobby. It’s not … Chief Franklin’s retiring.”
“Chief Franklin?”
He shot her a look between annoyance and frustration.
“Chief of police, Arden. You should know who’s in charge of the local cops. He’s retiring. I’m taking the job.”
“Oh. Well, that’s … That’s big news.”
“I met with the town council a few days ago. It’s official now, so I’ll start going in, get a sense of how it works here, the officers under me, the administrative stuff.”
“This is good, right?” She pushed up to stand. “It’s good big news. It’s something you want.”
“All I ever wanted was to be a cop.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Since I’m going back to that in a place with under ten thousand people, you might hear why I stopped being one. I don’t go back into it, no reason to. But taking this job, it might come up.”
“All right. Do you want to sit down?”
“No.”
If he went through it all again, he needed to move, not sit.
“I made detective, and I put in for Major Crimes. That’s what I aimed for, that’s what I got.
It didn’t take me long to figure out my partner was a bad cop.
Taking bribes, doing shakedowns. There were three more of them on the job in on it that I knew of—know of.
I needed evidence, and I got it. When I got it, I turned them in. ”
“What else could you do?”
“Look the other way.”
He wandered the room as he went through it.
He hated going through it.
“You couldn’t look the other way,” she spoke quietly. “Maybe some could, but you couldn’t.”
“Some of the people they shook down, planted evidence against, were bad guys. These were three men and one woman with careers and families, who went through doors and risked their lives and took plenty of those bad guys off the street. I could’ve looked the other way. I didn’t. I didn’t because I couldn’t.”
It hurts him, she thought. It still hurts him. God knew she understood how old wounds could throb and ache.
“You crossed the blue line.”
“That’s right. There were plenty who supported that, and some who didn’t. Four wrong cops were off the force, faced charges. Cases they’d worked on had to be reopened, and the department had to deal with the fallout, public fallout. I made that choice, and I’m not sorry for it.”
He shrugged. “I took some blowback, and I’d expected it. The looks, the talk, flat tires, a dead rat on my doorstep, that sort of thing.”
“That’s wrong, Gideon. Just wrong.”
“Right, wrong, it happened. I handled it for the best part of a year. Then I took a transfer, handled that. It followed me anyway. I got another partner, good guy, solid cop. We worked well together. We were investigating a drug ring, gang members.”
It still stuck in his throat, still ground glass in his gut.
“To wind it up, we got pinned down in a firefight, and I called for backup, shots fired. The car that responded took its fucking time. They knew it was me, and took their time. Time enough my partner took a hit.”
“Oh God, Gideon.”
“He’s bleeding, half conscious. I call in the officer down, I’m pissed, scared shitless he’ll bleed out.
Backup got there fast, easy since they were sitting in their car around the goddamn corner.
Another car got there right ahead of them.
They’d hit the sirens when they got the call for backup, but they’d been farther away than the other.
We resolved the situation, got Pete to the hospital. He made it, and he’s back on the job.”
“What happened to the ones who failed to respond?”
“I don’t know. I stopped caring. One of them came up to me at the hospital, when we didn’t know if Pete would make it. He said: ‘It should’ve been you. It should’ve been you, and if he dies, it’s on you.’”
She still spoke quietly when she said, “Motherfucker.”
That surprised a half laugh out of him.
“It took three of them to pull me off him. I turned in my badge the next day. I was done. I didn’t know what I’d do, just that I was done. A couple weeks later, my grandmother died. Pop was lost. I was lost. So, we worked through it together.”
Done, Gideon thought. He’d gotten through it one more time. Hopefully the last time.
“I don’t look back there, Arden. It’s over, and I’m okay with that. I never expected to pick up a badge again, but, well, Pop fired me.”
Even as her eyes stung with tears, she laughed. “Of course he did. He’s such a good man. So are you.”
“Doing what I had to do doesn’t make me a good man.”
“I disagree. I’ve been with, as you aptly put it, a dick. I’ve been with a—I guess I’ll say a fun lover with a lazy streak, and with a very nice man who wasn’t any more right for me than me for him. I know a good man when I’m looking at him.
“I’m sorry for what happened, and the way it happened. But it brought you here, and it seems like here’s where you’re supposed to be. Chief Riley.”
“Ha. That’ll take some getting used to.”
“You could try a Jesse Stone and insist everyone call you by your first name.”
“I’ve noted your collection of Robert B. Parker novels. But I think I might get off being called chief.”
“In that case, I’ll try to remember to call you that once in a while in bed.”
He came to her, drew her in. It had been easier to tell her than he’d imagined. Just as it was easier to keep coming back to her, to see himself continue to come back to her.
“We could go up, try that out now.”
She tipped her face up to his. “Good idea, Chief,” she said, and kissed him.
Later, she lay warm beside him, listening to the rain. She wondered if she should tell him what had happened to her. He’d understand, the man she knew him to be would understand. The cop she imagined him to be would have heard and seen worse.
Part of her, most of her, simply wanted to forget it had ever happened, to keep riding on this slow and easy road of being with him, learning about him, enjoying him.
Why bring Dustin Dubecki into something both comfortable and exciting? And already a little scary because she was falling in love.
Maybe she’d already landed.
Couldn’t she just hold on to what was now for as long as it lasted?
He’d be out in a handful of months, out in the world she inhabited. But not here. And surely after five years she’d no longer be his obsession, the target of his delusions. To say it all out loud would bring everything flooding back again.