Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

business, you understand.”
    “Of course.” A shiver passed through Ruth. She would die before betraying John Winters’ confidence. “I won’t tell a soul. Cross my heart.”

Chapter Nine
    “You’re back on the beat, Smith. Effective immediately.”
    “I only thought….”
    “You thought too damned much. That woman appeared to be on the verge of telling us that she suspected her husband of murder and you decided to let her know that it didn’t really matter.”
    Smith clenched the steering wheel. Tears gathered behind her eyes, and she blinked as rapidly as windshield wipers in a hurricane, trying to keep them from spilling over. Traffic was heavy as they drove through town. It was a summer’s Friday afternoon; weekenders were pulling into town, and locals leaving work early. Her father stood in front of Mid-Kootenay Adventure Vacations, chatting to passers-by. “Mrs. Tyler didn’t say a word about her husband. She thought we were after the video store owner.” She’d been only trying to help. To be a good cop, and a good citizen.
    “So you thought. Tell me, what would you have done if she’d admitted that her husband was the killer? Offered her a cup of tea, a shoulder to cry on?”
    “With all due respect, sir, that’s most unfair. Mrs. Tyler did not finger her husband. In fact she didn’t even realize where your rather obvious questions were heading.” Smith plunged on, realizing that she was heading for a cliff, but, like a lemming, unable to stop. She pulled into the police station parking lot, not quite understanding how she’d managed to get here. She shoved the gearshift into park. “I’d suggest, Sergeant, that if Mrs. Tyler had a single ounce of guile she’d have been onto you in a moment and be stringing us a line that would stretch all the way to Kootenay Lake.” Molly Smith watched her career take wings and fly off into the clear sky. “She was so infatuated with you, she’d have admitted that Santa Claus visited last night, if that’s what she thought you wanted to hear.”
    Winters turned in his seat. “How many years of expertise do you put behind that opinion, Constable?”
    She took a deep breath. Oh, well, if she was fired from the police, she could always find work in her parents’ store. “Twenty-six years. Unless you think that we spring fully formed as if from the brow of Zeus the day we leave police college. In that case I have less than one.”
    Winters looked out the window. Smith pulled the keys out of the ignition. She didn’t know whether to get out of the car or sit here and wait until he spoke to her. Always easier to do nothing. So she sat.
    “The Chief Constable seems to think you’ve the potential to make a competent officer,” he said after a pause so long she wouldn’t have been surprised if it’d started to snow. “I’m aware that you know these people, some of them very well. That’s a complication I rarely came across in my years in Vancouver. But you’re a police officer first. You’ll arrest your grandmother if you have to. Think you can do that, Constable Smith?”
    “I’ve thought about that. When I first decided to apply for the force, and almost every day since.” With an activist mother like Lucky, Smith knew that the possibility of her arresting her own mother wasn’t idle speculation. “But I want to be a police officer, Sergeant Winters, and a good one. And I want to live in the Kootenays, at least for now. So yes, I will arrest my grandmother, should she be caught digging up a neighbor’s perennial she’s had her eye on, or hitting a young man with her cane if he’s shown her what she thinks of as disrespect.” Smith looked at her hands, twisting the car keys over and over.
    “Remember your place, Molly, in the course of this investigation. I’m looking to you for local commentary, not intervention. You are not replacing Detective Lopez. Do you understand?”
    She understood all right. It was he who didn’t. This was not the big city, where everyone kept rigidly to their assigned roles. In a town the size of Trafalgar, you had to give and take a bit. “I understand.”
    “I’m hoping that the preliminary report from the forensics team’ll be ready, and we can hear what the officers who visited the shops backing onto the alley found out. Let’s go.”
    As she climbed out of the car, she lifted her eyes to the mountaintops. Sunlight sparked on the snows at the top of Koola Glacier. Winters might be an