Chapter 4
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Doreen was tired and hungry by the time she got home, and so were the animals.
She fed them first, then pulled some soup from the fridge that she had made the day before.
As she sat down to a very late lunch or an early dinner, Mack walked in her front door.
She was surprised to see him and to see how tired he looked.
She sighed. “This job will be the death of you.” His lips quirked as he dropped a pizza on the table. She lit up at the sight of it.
He eyed the soup and asked, “Any more of that?”
“Tough couple of days,” he admitted. “Sorry I haven’t been around much.”
“Hey, you don’t have to apologize to me,” she pointed out. “Besides, I get it.”
He nodded. “I’m not sure how many other women in the world would get it in quite the same way as you do,” he clarified, “but I am grateful that you do.”
She gave him a sad smile. “That sounds very melancholy, as if your day was worse than I thought.”
“It’s been a tough day, no doubt,” he admitted. “We can’t necessarily do anything about it right now.”
“That sounds even worse,” she muttered, frowning at him.
He smiled. “It’s all good—still trying to get to the bottom of it.”
“I understand you found a body.”
He nodded. “We did, a young man who was probably running with the wrong crowd,” he shared quietly. “Something that’s pretty hard to get out of again.”
“Understood,” she murmured. “It’s sad though, for the family.”
“It is, and, in this case, he’s not close to his remaining family. So it took us quite a while to figure out who he was, but at least we’ve ID’d him now.”
She nodded and didn’t say anything for a moment. “Gosh, that poor family,” she muttered. “That’s got to be the worst news ever.”
“Thankfully I didn’t have to make the notification, but, yeah, it’s awful,” he agreed. “Nothing easy about hearing that a young man, full of life, … has passed away,” he muttered. “I can’t imagine if it were your own kid.”
He quickly polished off the soup and reached for the pizza. After he’d eaten three pieces, he sat back and sighed. “Ah, it feels like I might survive now.”
“Yeah, you’ve got to remind your stomach that your throat hasn’t been cut every once in a while.”
He stared at her curiously, then burst out laughing. “The things you say can still make me laugh.”
“I’ll take it,” she replied, with a smile. “Absolutely I’ll take it. Yet it does sound like you need some time off.” Then she winced. “I would suggest a holiday, but we know how that will go.”
“Right, but at least we got the job done in Vancouver—or as much as we could while we were there.”
“That’s what I was thinking too,” she muttered. “I’m sure there’s more to be done, but I’m hoping we can just … hire someone to finish it off.”
“That would be good,” he agreed, with a dry laugh. “What about Nick? Any word?”
Nick was Mack’s brother and her lawyer. He was the one handling the transfer of Mathew’s estate from her side and keeping an eye on things on her behalf. “I haven’t heard from him,” she shared, “but I wondered if you had.”
“Not yet, but he was catching up on some other work for his clients, then will dive into the details of Mathew’s estate again. I don’t think that was planned for today or tomorrow. Maybe not for a couple days yet.” Mack stretched his arms over his head. “I should probably check in with him.”
“I had a visit with Jerry today.” When he looked at her in surprise, she shrugged. “I just thought Thaddeus … needed something more normal for a change,” she explained. “We started with a long walk at the cemetery, and then we stopped in for a visit.”
“Good. I’m sure Thaddeus loved that.”
“He really did.” Doreen chuckled. “Jerry and I got to talking about those genealogy tests. I’m thinking about doing one.”
He raised one eyebrow, then nodded. “Sure, if you want to. I don’t mean any disrespect or anything, but it’s not always the results you want.”
“I know,” she noted quietly, “and I think that’s what’s holding me back.”
“But you don’t have any doubt about where your family is or your lineage, right?”
“No,” she replied cautiously, “but neither do I want to discover that anything I thought to be true is not.”
“Good point,” he noted. “And that could potentially be upsetting to Nan.”
“That’s the thing. I don’t really want to be the one to upset her.”
He smiled and tilted his head. “In that case, maybe hold off until …”
“Until she’s gone?”
He shrugged. “Sorry.”
“No worries, I was thinking that myself.”
He smiled. “You are a very nice person.”
She rolled her eyes at that. “I don’t know about that,” she muttered. “I do, however, think a lot of my grandmother, and I wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt her.”
“What is it that could hurt her though?” he asked curiously.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. I just don’t trust my mother.”
“Ah, but your mother did have you, right?”
“Not that I could personally confirm that,” she quipped, with a laugh. “Yet I was told that she was, indeed, my mother.”
“Right,” he replied, grinning from ear to ear. “You probably don’t remember being born, so you don’t actually have details.”
She rolled her eyes at the joke. “No, sorry, I don’t. And, even when I was old enough to remember, I didn’t have a whole lot to do with my mother anyway.”
“And your father?”
“Even less to do with him. I don’t think Nan would be very impressed if I were to contact him either.”
“At some point in time though,” he began, “as much as we don’t want Nan upset, we do need to take into account that your birth father is not getting any younger himself.
We can’t use Nan to judge life expectancy by, since she and her cronies are not the norm.
If you had any thoughts of ever wanting to learn more about who your father is, you need to remember that he’s getting up there in age too. ”
She winced and nodded. “Maybe down the road.”
He nodded. “Did you get through any of Solomon’s files?”
“No, but Nan did suggest that I start a file of closed cases.”
“Oh, I like that idea,” he declared. “If nothing else, it’s … an accomplishment file maybe, a success file. You know, like a visual affirmation of the cases that you’ve closed for him.”
She beamed and nodded. “I like that idea, especially the way you described it.”
“And you’ve got room, so you really could do something like that.
I think it might boost your spirits sometimes.
Not needed every day, but for those days when you’re definitely feeling down and could use a reminder that you haven’t wasted your life and that you have helped a lot of people. Even if you don’t consider it helping.”
“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” she asked, her lips curling. “You do things for other people, but is it really helping?”
“It absolutely is helping,” he confirmed. When his phone buzzed, he looked at it with a sigh. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
She frowned and added, “You know …”
“Know what?” he asked, as he stood and pushed the chair up against the table.
“If you ever need a hand …”
A boyish grin crossed his face as he nodded. “If I ever need a hand, I know where you are,” he pointed out. “Thanks for the offer.”
“I know it seems foolish, … offering to help, when you guys are perfectly capable of handling everything that comes your way.”
“Apparently not,” he stated in the same cheerful voice, “because we’ve needed you a lot of times.”
“Does that cause you trouble?” she asked hesitantly.
“Trouble? … Nope.”
“They don’t bug you at work?”
“The only time they bug me at work is if they think I should have brought you in on a case, and I didn’t.”
Her eyes widened, and she added, “Well, this could be a good opportunity to bring me in on a case.”
“Nope,” he replied. “We have to keep these boundaries pretty strict. We are really hoping to nail this soon,” he noted, squinting out the window. “I don’t think it’s connected to an old case, so, sorry, but it’s not one for you.”
Glumly she nodded and trailed behind him as he walked to the front door.
He leaned over, gave her a kiss, and shared, “I won’t be back tonight, so make sure you lock up and look after yourself, okay?”
“I will,” she replied. “Was he really found in the underbrush?”
He frowned at her and then slowly nodded. “Yes, that would be a good word for it. He wasn’t buried.”
“And it was a recent murder?”
“Wasn’t buried, was a recent murder, and pretty sure it’s associated with drugs,” he shared.
She nodded and frowned.
“What? Why the frown?” he asked, yet smirked.
“Just toss me a bone, Mack, will you? Something I can gnaw away on.”
He burst out laughing. “You already have a bone. Just the fact that I even have a case gets you gnawing away.”
Delighted with himself over the joke, he waved and headed to his truck.