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Ron nodded to the kitchen and the two men walked through it, and onto the back porch. The covered rectangle, unscreened, overlooked a patch of lawn ringed with planting beds in which nothing had been planted. They were weed free, though, and filled with fragrant mulch, which Ron and the children had spread themselves. It was not that long ago—less than a month—though that pleasant Saturday afternoon might have been a decade ago.
Ron noted the big man’s somber expression, not present when he’d arrived.
They looked over the grass.
Filling the silence, Spencer asked softly, “When did it happen?”
It …
“Or we can move on. Just wanted to ask.”
“No. It’s okay. A few years. How’d you know?”
“Your wife said ‘our children.’ Not ‘two of our children.’ And I met an older boy and a younger girl. But there were pictures on the mantel of Brad and an older girl.”
The man was, after all, a detective.
And looking at the face, big and tough, but tinted with pain,Ron Pulaski knew another fact about Lyle Spencer. They had something in common.
Ron said, “Cancer. Happened fast. Man, you do everything … and sometimes everything isn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Over the years we must’ve had a hundred people over, Jenny and me. Probably looked at that same picture. Nobody made the leap. Maybe they wondered and didn’t want to ask. But I don’t think so. They just didn’t notice. And your situation?”
Looking out over the yard, the man said, “Wasn’t that different. We had a daughter too. Then … It was an orphan disease.”
Ron shook his head.
“Term of art, our doctor said. A rare disease. In the U.S., the definition is less than two hundred thousand people have it.” He gave a dim laugh. “I told Lincoln. And you know him. He said the word ‘orphan’ comes from the Greek. And it doesn’t mean just a child without his parents. It can mean a parent who’s lost a child.
“There’re sometimes drugs to treat orphan diseases, but the companies don’t develop them on scale. Not profitable. A single pill might cost a quarter million dollars.”
“No!”
“That’s what she needed. I was upstate, at a small sheriff’s office. I helped myself to some drug money to pay for it.”
Ron knew that Spencer had had a convoluted route to becoming an NYPD detective. He’d heard about a conviction, but the governor had pardoned him and expunged his record, which allowed him to join up. He’d wondered what had happened.
“It work at all, the drug?”
“For a while. Then it didn’t.”
If there ever was a justifiable crime, it was the one Spencer had committed.
Spencer asked, “Lincoln and Amelia know?”
“No.” There was no discernible reason for not telling them. He just hadn’t. “You? You said Lincoln knows.”
“He deduced it. He wondered why I was about to play high dive off the side of a building, that Locksmith case we worked, little while ago.”
So, the detective had considered killing himself. He must have been a widower, or his wife might have left him after the daughter’s death and his arrest. Ron knew too that after his spinal cord accident, years ago, Lincoln had found a doctor willing to rig a setup so he could end his life.
After his daughter’s death, Ron had never considered anything that extreme. He had the rest of his family to be there for. But that wasn’t to say that he—and Jenny—didn’t die in a way. Part of them would forever remain lifeless.
Spencer said, “One of the hardest things. Bug—our nickname—she knew. Knew everything, and it was like, she just accepted it, got on with life while she had it. ‘What’s for dinner?’ Or, ‘Dad, like really? You forgot the Netflix passcode again?’”
Ron was nodding and, just barely, keeping the tears banked. “Same thing with Claire, yes. I never knew if it was courage or denial. Or something else.” A deep breath. “Never figured that out.”
