Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

we ask her to step back, stop trying to control us, she turns into a martyr and makes
us
the bad guys. We all end up feeling manipulated, and for once, we’re going to think about ourselves first.”
    I thought that had the ring of a few fifty-minute hours to it. Also, the way she’d started taking care of the kids, staying home, doing things with them, bespoke a different attitude. But maybe she wasn’t in therapy—maybe the sight of Libby’s swollen wrists and ankles, the horror of knowing she’d nearly lost her, the weeks and weeks of screaming, sweating nightmares, had simply wrought a change. They say people who go through an ordeal often undergo a spiritual experience. Such a thing was hard to imagine where Marty was concerned, but watching her actually behaving like a mother, being civil to Don, seemingly enjoying so humble a thing as a holiday with family and friends, no payoff expected, was a pretty strong argument.
    Another was that she’d been offered the job as director and had turned it down, saying she wanted to spend more time with her kids. Who knew? Anything was possible. We’d been together a lot since August and I’d enjoyed her, thought the true Marty—not the female Sammy Glick—might be coming into its own.
    She wasn’t dating anyone at the moment, and neither was Don, but neither of them talked in terms of getting back together. That was a romance that had never been one to begin with, and it seemed good and over. He’d been invited to dinner because the kids wanted him.
    And Ricky was there because Amber was spending the holiday with her mother. He seemed a little morose, and was having a little wine, but he swore he’d really cut down on his drinking. Libby had told me Amber told her he was in AA, but he seemed not to be in it with both feet. Still, Libby said, Amber was keeping her fingers crossed. Maybe he’d come through for her one day.
    As for Julio and me, we were an item. Rob was the first to tell me. He knew because an unfortunate thing had occurred. The day after the ordeal, when everything was still shaking down, a TV crew caught us leaving the police station, Julio’s arm around my shoulder, mine around Esperanza’s. Rob had seen it in Cambridge. He said we looked like a family.
    We weren’t that, but we’d grown very close in three months. Libby and Esperanza had dreams of me dying, Julio dying, everyone in their family dying. Part of their therapy was for me to spend a lot of time with them. So I came to Monterey a lot. Esperanza was spending the school year with Julio instead of her mother. She’d gone back to Santa Barbara for a while, but the nightmares had come every night, and every day she’d cry until her mother let her call Julio to make sure he was still alive. Finally she admitted she wanted to be in Monterey for a while.
    So Julio moved out of the house with the awful memories and into a much nicer, sunnier one, warm with new furniture, new rugs, new curtains that I’d helped him pick out.
    But we’d by no means moved from two days of fun and games with Warren back to our peaceful and tranquil lives. First of all, there was one more tragedy to be gotten through: Mary Ellen’s body was found at Warren’s home after his arrest. He’d apparently dispatched her before coming to work that fine Monday morning.
    And then there were the nightmares—not just for the kids, but for us all. And in our waking hours there was reliving our story, retelling it. People who go through something terrible have to do that, repeatedly, till they’ve healed themselves. Something in the neighborhood of sixty times, I’m told. That was why we’d made a special effort to spend Thanksgiving together and why Marty was trying not to throw up while we talked slime.
    “Esperanza, you’re hardly eating a bite.”
    Libby said, “Oh, Mom, you sound like Grandma.”
    “Sorry.”
    I suspected Marty could care less whether Esperanza ate. Her problem was that Esperanza was talking. She was desperately trying to stop her.
    “Well, see, I got the idea when I realized I was going to be able to get free. I was thinking about how I could really hurt him and I knew. It just came to me, like a message from God.”
    Keil said, “There’s no such thing as God.”
    “You know how much slime those things can make? My dad showed me once when he was trying to convince me I should like them. It’s, like, ten times their weight. Twenty times. It’s like—out of some horror movie.