River’s End

he doesn’t anymore.
    Christ, Frank thought with a stunned laugh. The kid had a memory like an elephant. There’s lots to do up here. Our lodge and campground are really nice, and I could even send you our brochures. You can go fishing or hiking or boating. The lodge has a swimming pool and nightly entertainment. We’re also close to some of the most beautiful beaches in the Northwest. Even as Frank felt his lips twitch at her sales pitch, he scanned the rest. Please come. I have no one else to talk to.
    Yours truly,
    Olivia
    “Jesus.” He folded the letter, slipped it back in its envelope and into his jacket pocket. But he wasn’t able to tuck Olivia out of his mind so easily. He carried both the letter and the memory of the girl with him all day. He decided he’d write her a gentle response, keep it light—sympathetic but noncommittal. He could tell her how Noah was starting college in the fall, and how he’d been named Most Valuable Player in his basketball tournament. Chatty, easy. He’d use his work and his family commitments as an excuse not to go up to see her.
    What good would it do to go to Washington and talk to her? It would only upset everyone involved. He couldn’t possibly take on a responsibility like that. Her grandparents were good people.
    He’d done a background check on them when they’d filed for custody. Just tying up loose ends, he told himself now as he’d told himself then. And maybe in the first couple of years he’d done a few more checks—just to make sure the kid was settling in all right.
    Then he’d closed the book. He meant it to stay closed.
    He was a cop, he reminded himself as he turned down the street toward home. He wasn’t a psychologist, a social worker, and his only connection to Olivia was murder.
    It couldn’t possibly help her to talk to him.
    He pulled into the drive behind a bright blue Honda Civic. It had replaced his wife’s VW four years before. Both bumpers were crowded with stickers. His wife might have given up her beloved Bug, but she hadn’t given up her causes. Noah’s bike had been upgraded to a secondhand Buick the boy pampered like a lover. He’d be loading it up and driving it off to college in a matter of weeks. The thought of that struck Frank as it always did—like an arrow to the heart. The flowers that danced around the door thrived, due to Noah’s attention. God knew where he’d gotten the green thumb, Frank thought as he climbed out of the car. Once the boy was away at school, both he and Celia would kill the blooms within a month.
    He stepped in the front door to the sound of Fleetwood Mac. His heart sank. Celia liked to cook to Redwood Mac, and if she’d decided to cook it meant that Frank would be sneaking into the kitchen in the middle of the night, searching out his well-hidden stashes of junk food.
    The living room was tidy—another bad sign. The fact that there were no newspapers or shoes scattered around meant Celia had gotten off early from her job at the women’s shelter and was feeling domestic.
    He and Noah suffered when Celia shifted into a domestic mode. There would be a home-cooked meal that had much more to do with nutrition than taste, a tidy house where he’d never be able to find anything and very likely freshly folded laundry. Which meant half his socks would be missing.
    Things ran much more smoothly in the Brady household when Celia left the domestic chores to her men.
    When Frank stepped into the kitchen, his worst fears were confirmed. Celia stood happily stirring something at the stove. There was a fresh loaf of some kind of tree-bark bread on the counter beside an enormous yellow squash. But she looked so damn pretty, he thought, with her bright hair pulled back in a smooth ponytail, her narrow, teenage-boy hips bumping to the beat and her long, slim feet bare.
    She carried a look of competent innocence that he’d always thought disguised a boundless determination. There was nothing Celia Brady wanted to accomplish that she didn’t manage to do.
    Just, he thought, as she’d managed him one way or another since she’d been a twenty-year-old coed and he the twenty-three-year-old rookie who’d arrested her during a protest against animal testing.
    The first two weeks of their relationship they’d spent arguing. The second two weeks they’d spent in bed. She’d refused to marry him, so they’d fought about that. But he had his own share of determination. During the year they’d lived