“David, good lord. This is a disturbed person, if the murder itself wasn’t enough to tell you that.”
I asked her not to tell anyone about the dolls, which was information held back from the press. Then I realized I might be sounding like her husband.
“So tell me how David is doing. Just working?”
“I’m fine, Sharon. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Everything is kind of chaotic right now.”
“New love interest?”
“I don’t know.” Why was I hedging? Was I afraid she would tell Lindsey? Why would I be afraid of that? She never would even run into Lindsey. What did it matter if Lindsey found out?
“So is this the life you’re going to live?” she asked, in another tone of voice, higher, more detached. “David among his old paper records and his old cases, living his life between his ears.”
“Between my ears?”
“You have your nice house in Willo, and your little twenty-something sex machine—or you’ll find another one. You’ll cruise through your forties having affairs and witty friendships, reading books and working for the sheriff as a media celebrity.”
“I’m not…” I protested, but the words didn’t follow.
“You don’t want to venture anything,” she said. “Not after Patty. And you think you’ve found a little island of emotional safety where you won’t have to.”
“What is this about?”
“What do you want?”
I stammered the stammer of the invaded.
“No, dammit,” she said. “Don’t give some politically correct answer. What do you, David Mapstone, want? David Mapstone who has no family, no offspring, and is all alone in the world?”
We stared at each other. She went on, “You’re at the age where if you don’t know that answer, you’re going to ruin the lives of a lot of women.” The last word echoed through the old sheriff’s office and dissipated in the ceiling.
Then, she said, “Sorry, David. I’m all wound up. Mike always found me too intense, so he worked all the time so he wouldn’t have to deal with me.”
“God, I don’t know, Sharon,” I said finally. “I want to keep you both in my life. You know very well I can’t fix whatever’s wrong between you…”
“Like the fact that he hasn’t touched me in five years.”
“I don’t need to know this,” I said reflexively.
“What are you afraid of?”
I thought about that, wrestled down the words flying through my mind, then, “I’m afraid I’ll lose you both.”
She looked at me a long time in silence, an expression on her face I had never seen before.
“I hope that doesn’t happen,” she said quietly and rose to leave. “Please make sure he takes his medicine,” she went on. “He has diabetes, you know.”
I didn’t know.
“He controls it orally,” she said. “Don’t let him cook too much. He cooks bad things for himself.”
I followed her as she walked to the office door, her heels snapping precisely against the old hardwood floor.
“May I ask you something?” She wheeled to face me. “Why is it, all these years, you never made a pass at me?”
“Well, you were married.”
“That never stops men,” she said. “I thought you guys wanted to sleep with every woman you saw.”