Tasting mint, smelling skin and aftershave . . .
As she played, she noticed motion inside the house. Dance saw her son beeline to the refrigerator and cart a cookie and glass of milk back into his room. The raid took all of thirty seconds.
She found herself thinking that she'd been treating Wes's attitude all along as an aberration, a flaw to be fixed.
Parents tend to feel that their children raise valid objections about potential stepparents or even casual dates. You can't think that way.
But now Dance wasn't so sure. Maybe they do raise real concerns at times. Maybe we should listen to them, and as carefully and with as open a mind as if interviewing witnesses in a criminal investigation. Maybe she'd been taking him for granted all along. Sure, Wes was a child, not a partner, but he still should have a vote. Here I am, she thought, a kinesic expert, establishing baselines and looking for deviations as signals that something's not right.
With Winston Kellogg, was I deviating from my own baseline?
Maybe the boy's reaction was a clue that she had.
Something to think about.
Dance was halfway through a Paul Simon song, humming the melody, not sure of the lyrics, when she heard the creak of the gate below the Deck.
The instrument went silent as she glanced over to see Michael O'Neil breach the stairs. He was wearing the gray and maroon sweater she'd bought for him when she'd been skiing in Colorado a year ago.
"Hey," he said. "Intruding?"
"Never."
"Anne's got an opening in an hour. But I thought I'd stop by here first, say hi."
"Glad you did."
He pulled a beer from the fridge and, when she nodded, got another for her too. He sat down next to her. The Becks snapped open crisply. They both sipped long.
She started playing an instrumental transcribed for guitar, an old Celtic tune by Turlough O'Carolan, the blind, itinerant Irish harpist.
O'Neil said nothing, just drank the beer and nodded with the rhythm. His eyes, she noticed, were turned toward the ocean--though he couldn't see it; the view was obscured by lush pines. She remembered that once, after seeing the old Spencer Tracy movie about Hemingway's obsessed fisherman, Wes had called O'Neil the "Old Man of the Sea." He and Dance had laughed hard at that.
When she finished playing, he said, "There's a problem with the Juan situation. Did you hear?"
"Juan Millar? No, what?"
"The autopsy report came in. The Coroner's Division found secondary causes. Labeled them suspicious. We've got a file started at MCSO."
"What happened?"
"It wasn't infection or shock he died of, which is usually what happens in a bad burn. It was from an interaction of morphine and diphenhydramine--that's an antihistamine. The morphine drip was open wider than it should've been and none of the doctors had prescribed an antihistamine. It's dangerous to mix with morphine."
"Intentional?"
"Looks like it. He couldn't do it himself. We're probably looking at murder."
Dance heard her mother's whispered report of Millar's words.
Kill me . . .
She wondered who might've been behind the death. Mercy killings were among the most difficult, and emotional, cases to investigate.
Dance shook her head. "And after all his family's been through. Whatever we can do, let me know."
They sat in silence for a moment, Dance smelling wood-fire smoke--and another dose of O'Neil's aftershave. She enjoyed the combination. She started to play once again. Elizabeth Cotten's finger-picking version of "Freight Train," as infectious a melody as ever existed. It would rattle around in her brain for days.
O'Neil said, "Heard about Winston Kellogg. Never would've called that one."