Deal Breaker

Jessie's gaze touched down on the chair to her immediate right. Kathy's chair. It was still here. Her mother had not touched it. Her father, well, he was dead. But Kathy - who knew? Kathy could, in theory, walk through the back door right this very minute, banging it against the wall as she always did, smile brightly, and join them for dinner. The dead were dead. When you lived with a medical examiner, you understood just how useless the dead were. Dead and buried. The soul, well, that was another matter. Jessie's mom was a devout Catholic, attending mass every morning, and during crises like these her religious tenacity paid off - like someone who spent time in a gym finally finding a use for their new muscles. She could believe without question in a divine and joyous afterlife. Such a comfort. Jessica

28

wished she could do the same, but over the years her religious fervor had become a strict couch potato.

Except, of course, Kathy might not be dead. Over the chair - Mom's lantern kept lit to guide her youngest back home.

Jessica awoke most mornings bolting upright in her bed, thinking about - no, inventing new possibilities for - her younger sister. Was Kathy lying dead in a pit somewhere? Buried under brush in the woods? A skeleton gnawed on by animals and inhabited by maggots? Was Kathy's corpse stuck in some cement foundation? Was it weighed down in the bottom of some river like the little undersea man in the living-room aquarium? Had she died painlessly? Had she been tortured? Had her body been chopped into small bits, burned, broken down with acid…

Or was she still alive?

That eternal spring.

Had Kathy possibly been kidnapped? Was she living in white slavery under the thumb of some Middle East sheikh? Or was she living chained to a radiator on a farm in Wisconsin like something on Geraldo? Could she have banged her head, forgotten who she was, and was now living as a street person with amnesia? Or had she simply run away to a different world?

The possibilities were endless. Even those lacking creativity can come up with a million different horrors when their loved one suddenly vanishes or more painfully, a million different hopes.

Jessica's thoughts were chased away by the tired chugging of a car engine.

A familiar Chevy Caprice blanketed with tiny dents pulled up. It looked like a retrieval car at a driving range. She stood and hurried out the front door.

Paul Duncan was a stocky man, compact, with salt-and-pepper hair now turning defiantly toward salt. He walked purposefully, the way cops do. He greeted her on the front stoop with a big smile and kiss on the cheek. 'Hey, beautiful! How are you!'

She hugged him. 'I'm okay, Uncle Paul,' she said.

'You look great.'

'Thanks.'

Paul shaded his eyes from the sun. 'Come on, let's go inside. It's hot as hell out here.'

'In a minute,' she said, putting a hand on his forearm. 'I want to talk to you first.'

'What about?'

'My father's case.'

I'm not handling that, honey. I don't do homicides anymore, you know that. Besides, it would be a conflict of interest - me being Adam's friend and all.'

But you have to know what's going on.'

Paul Duncan nodded slowly. 'I do.'

'Mom said the police think he was killed in a robbery attempt.'

29

That's right.'

'You don't believe that, do you?'

'Your father was robbed,' he said. 'His wallet was gone. His watch. Even his rings. The guy stripped him clean.'

'To make it look like a robbery.'

Paul smiled then, gently - the way, she remembered, he had at her confirmation and Sweet Sixteen party and high school graduation. 'What are you getting at, Jess?'

'You don't find this whole thing odd?' she asked. 'You don't see a connection between this and Kathy?'

He stumbled a step back, as if her words had given him a gentle push.

'What connection? Your sister vanished from her college campus. Your father was murdered by a robber a year and a half later. Where do you see a connection?'

'Do you really believe that they have nothing to do with each other?' she asked. 'Do you honestly believe that lightning struck twice in the same place?'

He put his hands in his pockets. 'If you mean do I think your family has been the victim of two separate awful tragedies, the answer is yes. It happens all the time, Jess. Life is rarely fair. God doesn't go around divvying out the bad in equal doses. Some families go through life with nary a scratch. Some get too much. Like yours.'

'So it's fate,' she said. 'That's your answer. Fate.'

He threw his hands up. 'Fate, lightning striking twice - these are your phrases. You're the writer here, not me. I just call it a tragedy. I just call it a tragic, somewhat bizarre coincidence. I've seen a lot stranger. So had yor dad.'

The front door opened. Mom stood in the doorway. 'What's going on? 'It's nothing, Carol. We were just talking.'

Carol looked at her daughter. 'Jessica?'

Her eyes stayed on Paul's, probing. 'Just talking, Mom.'