Spiral

only the one shot.
    Setting down the clothes and toilet kit on Nancy’s kitchen table, I very carefully pried the thumbtack out of the photo and the wall as Renfield began crying again behind me.

    The cemetery is on a harbor hillside only a few blocks from the Lynches’ three-decker. There’s a gate that’s kept open, even at night, so folks can visit when they get off work. I walked down the macadam path to her row, stopping at the gravestone with Elizabeth mary devlin cuddy carved into the marble.
    John, what’s the matter?
    She could always tell. Always.
    John?
    ”It’s Nancy, Beth.”
    Trouble between you?
    I shook my head before lifting it away from her and toward the inky blackness of the water—Jesus, the ocean water—at the foot of the—
    Oh, John. No...no ...
    Just a nod this time.
    She paused. Then, How?
    I told her. At first, in short, choppy phrases that an English teacher probably wouldn’t count as sentences. Once the words started coming, though, I began to get more detailed, even glib.
    Beth waited me out before saying, This is the first time you’ve talked it through, right?
    ”Right.”
    Do you feel any... better?
    I took a deep breath. ”No more than I did after losing you.”
    Another pause. John, I think you have to accept that Nancy’s death is going to be different for you.
    ”Different.”
    Though I hadn’t said it as a question, Beth answered me anyway. You knew for a long time that I was sick, that I was going to-
    ”Goddamnit, Beth, it’s just not fair!”
    The thought jumped out before I was conscious I’d spoken it aloud.
    A third pause. If you’re waiting for life to be fair, John, I think you’re in for a very long siege.
    I looked down toward the water again, then immediately back at her stone. ”It’s not just that Nancy was taken so young, or so... abruptly. It’s that because they didn’t find her body, she doesn’t have even a grave.”
    And you don’t have any special place for visiting her.
    Beth was right. ”Nowhere she wasn’t...”
    Alive?
    I tried to take a deep breath again. Couldn’t.
    John?
    ”You’re right. I don’t have Nancy anymore, and I don’t have a place I can be with her that doesn’t remind me of...” I shook my head.
    This may not help, but there’s a reason why you weren’t on that plane.
    ”Sure there is. I didn’t check my messages in time to—”
    Not what I mean, John. There’s some reason why you were spared.
    I thought back to one of the first visits I’d made to the graveyard after Beth had died. ‘You know that.”
    I do.
    ”Mind letting me in on it?”
    A short pause this time that passed for a small smile. If only I could.
    Suddenly, I started to feel the cold. ”Do me a favor?”
    What?
    ”Keep an eye out for Nancy. I think you’d like her.”

    I was back in the condo—finally opening almost two weeks of home mail—when the phone rang. I thought about letting the tape machine handle it, then realized nobody had called me, morning or afternoon, at the office. Odd for a Monday.
    ”John Cuddy.”
    ”Buenos noches desde Florida, John.”
    ”Justo?”
    ”The one and the same.”
    Justo Vega was a friend from my military police days in Saigon. He’d been practicing law in Miami most of the time since, helping me some months before with a case down in the Florida Keys that had blown sky—
    ”John?”
    ”Sorry, Justo. Something wrong with the Keys thing?”
    ”No. No, unfortunately I disturb you on a holiday for another matter.”
    ”Holiday?”
    A hesitation on the other end of the line. ”The third Monday in January. Martin Luther King.”
    No wonder there’d been no calls at the office. ”Sorry—” I decided I had to stop saying that. ”I’ve been kind of stuck on another matter.”
    A longer hesitation. ”John, there is also something else, no?”
    When you soldier with someone during bad times, there’s a certain connection that’s beyond even good friendship. ”Yes, but I’ve gotten a little tired of talking about it”
    ”Of course.” The longest hesitation yet. ”I am not sure I should be burdening you with what I will say now. Yet, if you were calling me, I would want to know of it because of an old debt we both share.”
    ”Being?”
    ”The Skipper, John.”
    Shit. Back in Vietnam, ”the Skipper” was the nickname the lieutenants like Justo and me used affectionately for Colonel Nicolas Helides, our commanding officer. Though we were Army, not Navy, we called him that