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She poured a cup of coffee, slid it across to the sergeant. He took off his mask to drink it, and she realized this was the first time she’d seen his face. He looked exactly as she’d imagined he would. Roman nose, square chin, clean shaven, handsome. A regular Captain America.Not your type at all, she thought, a pang of inappropriate-for-the-setting lust welling up as she thought of her husband’s ruggedness, his crooked nose, his broad chest, dark liquid eyes, freckles. She poured a cup of coffee for herself and took a sip. Felt its warmth buzz straight from her empty stomach to her head.
“Your father-in-law,” the sergeant said, “brought up some concerns with us.”
“Oh yeah?” She sat down at the opposite end of the table, legs weakening with surety this was going to be about the foul play implied in the horrible article.
“Yes. You said you weren’t on speaking terms. Why not?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“He did, but I’d like to hear it from you.”
She took another sip of coffee. Paused to mentally diagram her husband’s little family, break it down to its essentials.
“I took care of my mother-in-law when she was ill last year. My husband was too frightened to see her that way, and that man? He couldn’t be bothered. Acted like her cancer was mainly an inconvenience she was forcing on him. Not that she helped on that front. Apologizing for being sick. Always blaming herself for everything. She died just about four months after we moved here to help out. I was the one who found her. I sat my father-in-law down and broke the news to him. He hit me in the face. Right here.” She tapped her cheek. “He hit me hard enough he knocked me down. So no, we’re not on speaking terms. And I’ve got no interest in ever seeing him again.”
The sergeant’s blue eyes stared at her, firm and direct.
“You press charges?”
“No. Just stepped out of his life with my husband and children.” She took a long sip of her coffee. “Is that the story he told you?”
“No.”
“Did he say he hit me?”
“No.”
“What did he say?”
“That he thought you were trying to create a wedge between him and his son by not speaking to him. Said you were after money.”
She scoffed and shook her head. “He made it crystal clear from the time my husband and I were in college that he wouldn’t be helping usout financially in any way. He didn’t approve of my husband pursuing photography. So we had zero expectations there. And we don’t need anything from him anyway.”
“So financially, you’re…comfortable?”
“Yeah,” she said, not knowing if this was true, not sure she could do all this alone, trying to convince herself. “For the first years we were married, I made triple what my husband did, easy, while he was trying to break into the art thing. He did okay, and then after a while he did well. His photos have been our main income for the last five years or so. Now he’s gone—I’m going to have to figure it out. But I’ve got clients. Savings.” She kept her voice even as she thought of the forged signatures on her husband’s photos, adding, “And there’s still lots of my husband’s art to sell.”
“No life insurance?”
She shrugged. “I’ve got some that covers me, but he didn’t have any coverage. It was too expensive because of all the flying he did in that awful little plane. They wanted to carve everything out of the policy to the point it didn’t seem worth paying for.”
“I see.”
“Turns out, I guess, we should’ve paid for it anyway, since the plane had nothing to do with it.” She paused. “I worried all the time that plane would kill him. Seems ridiculous now.”
The sergeant’s eyes bored into her, searching, until at last he said, “Your father-in-law thinksyoukilled him. Pushed his son down the stairs.”
Even prepared for this as she thought she was, her hands shook.
“Christ,” she said, surprised at the sting of hearing this out loud, proof that her father-in-law could think this of her. She wiped her sweating palms on her shirt. “Did you see that article? About my husband? He said something that implied that’s what he thought. He really does hate me. Thinks I’m…disfigured.”
She slid her eyes to the sergeant to see how he responded to this. But he’d gone back to his factory settings, expression impenetrable.
“He said you were having problems. Marital problems.”
She shook her head. “Our only problem was him. Unlike with you, he couldn’t pretend he never hit me when it came to my husband. Because of the bruising and all. But he tried to convince my husband it had been my fault. That I’d been mean or rude when my mother-in-law passed, which was a lie. And my husband, well. Fathers and sons, you know? They’re complicated. My husband…he wanted to find a way for us all to get along, I think. And that just wasn’t on the table for me.” She chewed on her lip. “Anyway, my father-in-law wouldn’t know about any problems. He and my husband weren’t talking.”
The sergeant cleared his throat. “They were, actually. Talking. Even spoke the day before your husband died.”
