Roadside Crosses

lawyer. He was well known.”
    “Yes, he was.” Dance noted the shift of subject.
    “Sued the state, I think. Consumer advocate.”
    “Mom, what’ve you heard from Sheedy?”
    Edie Dance blinked. “Not tonight, Katie. We won’t talk about it tonight.”
    “Sure.” Dance felt like a chastised child. “Whatever you want.”
    “Will Michael be here?”
    “He’s going to try. Anne’s in San Francisco,so he’s juggling kids. And working on another big case.”
    “Oh. Well, hope he can make it. And how is Anne?” Edie asked coolly. She believed that O’Neil’s wife’s mothering skills left a lot to be desired. And any failures there were a class-A misdemeanor to Edie Dance, bordering on felony.
    “Fine, I imagine. Haven’t seen her for a while.”
    Dance wondered again if in fact Michael would show up.
    “You talked to Betsey?” she asked her mother.
    “Yes, she’s coming up this weekend.”
    “She can stay with me.”
    “If it’s not inconvenient,” Edie offered.
    “Why would it be inconvenient?”
    Her mother replied, “You might be busy. With this case of yours. That’s your priority. Now, Katie, you go visit with your friend. Maggie and I’ll get things started. Mags, come on and help me in the kitchen.”
    “Yea, Grandma!”
    “And Stu brought a DVD he thinks Wes would like. Sports bloopers. You boys go put that on.”
    Her husband took the cue and wandered to the flat-screen TV, calling Wes over.
    Dance stood helplessly for a moment, hands at her sides, watching her mother retreat as she chatted happily with her granddaughter. Then Dance stepped outside.
    She found Boling at an unsteady table on the deck, near the back door, under an amber light. He was looking around. “This is pretty nice.”
    “I call it the Deck,” she laughed. “Capital D. ”
    It was here that Kathryn Dance spent much ofher time—by herself and with the children, dogs and those connected to her through blood or through friendship.
    The gray, pressure-treated structure, twenty by thirty feet, and eight feet above the backyard, extended along the back of the house. It was filled with unsteady lawn chairs, loungers and tables. Illumination came from tiny Christmas lights, wall lamps, some amber globes. A sink, tables and a large refrigerator sat on the uneven planks. Anemic plants in chipped pots, bird feeders and weathered metal and ceramic hangings from the garden departments of chain stores made up the eclectic decorations.
    Dance would often come home to find colleagues from the CBI or MCSO or Highway Patrol sitting on the Deck, enjoying beverages from the battered fridge. It didn’t matter if she was home or not, provided the rules were observed: Never disrupt the kids’ studying or the family’s sleep, keep the crudeness down and stay out of the house itself, unless invited.
    Dance loved the Deck, which was a site for breakfasts, dinner parties and more formal occasions. She’d been married here.
    And she’d hosted the memorial service for her husband on the gray, warped timbers.
    Dance now sat on the wicker love seat beside Boling, who was hunched forward over the large laptop. He looked around and said, “I’ve got a deck too. But if we were talking constellations, yours’d be Deck Major. Mine’d be Deck Minor.”
    She laughed.
    Boling nodded at the computer. “There was very little I found about the local area or Travis’s friends.Much less than you’d normally see in a teen’s computer. The real world doesn’t figure much in Travis’s life. He spends most of his time in the synth, on websites and blogs and bulletin boards and, of course, playing his Morpegs.”
    Dance was disappointed. All the effort to hack into the computer and it wasn’t going to be as helpful as she’d hoped.
    “And as for his time in the synth world, most of that is in DimensionQuest. ” He nodded at the screen. “I did some research. It’s the biggest online role-playing game in the world. There are about twelve million subscribers to that one.”
    “Bigger than the population of New York City.”
    Boling described it as a combination of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Second Life —the social interaction site where you create imaginary lives for yourself. “As near as I can tell he was on DQ between four and ten hours a day.”
    “A day ?”
    “Oh, that’s typical for a Morpeg player.” He chuckled. “Some are even worse. There’s a DimensionQuest twelve-step program in the real world to help