Cause of Death by Laura Dembowski (ereader iphone .TXT) 📗

to go on a trip, though.” She lowers her voice. “If one of my kids died, the last thing on my mind would be a vacation. But to each his own,” she says with a wave of her hand, returning to her garden.

I thank her for her time and head back to the squad car, glad I followed my instincts to head over here. I can’t wait to get back to the station to tell Kate and Sarge.

Chapter 8

Margaret

I don’t know how, but I convinced Dave to come to Turks and Caicos with me. I say it that way because I would have gone without him. In fact, I probably would have preferred this be a solo trip, but that would have looked bad. To abandon my barely functional, grieving husband for a tropical vacay. Going on a vacation at all looks bad enough, especially now that the police seem interested in us for whatever insane reason. It’s like kicking a dead horse to investigate a family that is dealing with a suicide.

I had to get out of that house. Every time I go up the stairs I flash back to running up to find Lana hanging there. It makes my heart skip a beat. It takes my breath away. A knife stabs me in the heart each time I walk past her room. We need to move, but Dave’s not ready for that. Dave’s barely ready to eat a meal without a vodka chaser, although to his credit, he was sober most of the day yesterday. And now that he’s in an all-inclusive tropical paradise, he can down all the drinks he wants. I’m trying not to say too much about it.

I kept my mouth shut most of last night. We watched the sunset hand in hand, sitting on the terrace of our suite. I would have liked a mai tai in my hand, but I knew the mere mention of it would make Dave crave something similar; you know, just without any of the fruity additions.

“Lana loved watching the sunset,” he said.

I’m not sure if that’s really true. Sure, Lana sometimes remarked about looking out the window and seeing a beautiful sunset, and that we should come look at it, too. But as far as Lana going out of her way to go outside and sit on the deck to watch the sunset for the better part of an hour, I don’t remember that.

Perhaps Dave has a better memory than me, so I let him have this victory, and convince myself he’s right. But then he got all wistful and couldn’t handle it, so he gave up on watching the sunset and went in to order a drink, or five, from room service. A nice wife would have gone inside with him to talk, or simply to sit in silence, trying to comfort him, but I didn’t. At least I didn’t dump his drinks down the drain; in fact, I even helped him to bed when he was too out of it to make it there on his own.

He’s kind of bringing down my vacation. It’s not that I’m over Lana’s death, but I feel like this is a great way to heal. No one knows me or Dave, or that Lana is dead, save for the people Dave has told, which was pretty much everyone we ran into for the first day or two. But then I told Dave to grow up and keep some of this secret, unless he wanted everyone looking at us like poor, sad parents who just buried their child. He actually listened. Maybe I should have let him go on, though; it was getting us a fair amount of free stuff. Not a bad way to recoup some of the fortune we spent on Lana’s funeral.

A single-gal vacation, flirting with the guys at the bar—not that I would actually do anything, of course—would have been nice. Maybe in a couple months.

I have my own bank account. I saved some money when I was working, and I’ve skimmed just a little of Dave’s paycheck each month. He’s never noticed. He never pays a single bill, so I don’t really feel that guilty about it. He’s too busy to keep track of his own money—how sad is that? The funeral expenses didn’t cut into this account, so when Dave is fired from his job for substance abuse, I’ll have my rainy-day fund to sustain me, and maybe I’ll keep an eye out for Dave, too.

Sitting there, staring at the stars in the sky now that Dave is passed out in the middle of the bed, leaving no space for me, it suddenly hits me how bad it looks that we went on a vacation. No doubt about it. But why should I give a fuck about what other people think? No one has ever truly cared what I think, not even my husband or my daughter.

I wasn’t able to stop crying back in our house, but here, the ocean air has dried my tears.

Dave’s out swimming in the ocean. Swimming is a bit of stretch, perhaps. He’s more wading or splashing. Or trying not to drown. He’d better not drown, because I’m not going in after him. Mostly because I can’t swim. Partly because, well, I don’t want to.

He spent the better part of the past couple of days talking about how the ocean looked so nice and how he’d like to take a dip. He said he’d never been in the ocean. Did I know that? No, I didn’t. I racked my brain to try and recall whether I’ve ever been in the ocean, and I don’t think I have. Maybe I’ll go in tomorrow. I’ll make sure Dave is still alive and well and not deathly ill with some parasite. Once I know it’s safe—as safe as the ocean can be, anyway—I may check it out.

It’s nice that he went in the ocean, did something he wanted to do, something for