The Accidental Detective

service, Lynette Moore sought a private moment with Sally Holt and those who watched from a distance marveled at the bereaved woman’s composure and poise, the way she comforted her ex-husband’s killer. No one was close enough to hear what they said.
    “I’m sorry,” Lynette said. “It didn’t occur to me that after—well, I guess we can’t see each other anymore.”
    “No,” Sally lied. “It didn’t occur to me, either. You’ve sacrificed so much for me. For Molly and Sam, really. I’m in your debt forever. It will always be our secret.”
    And she patted Lynette gently on the arm, the last time the two would ever touch.
    Peter’s estate went to the children—but in trust to Sally, of course. She determined that it would be in the children’s best interest to pay off the balloon mortgage in cash and his brother, the executor, agreed. Peter would have wanted the children to have the safety and sanctity of home, given the emotional trauma they had endured.
    No longer needy, armored with a widow’s prerogatives, Sally found herself invited to parties again, where solicitous friends attempted to fix her up with the rare single men in their circles. Now that she didn’t care about men, they flocked around her and Sally did what she had always done. She listened and she laughed, she laughed and she listened, but she never really heard anything—unless the subject was money. Then she paid close attention, even writing down the advice she was given. The stock market was so turgid, everyone complained. The smart money was in real estate.
    Sally nodded.

HONOR BAR
    H e took all his girlfriends to Ireland, as it turned out. “All” being defined as the four he had dated since Moira, the inevitably named Moira, with the dark hair and the blue eyes put in with a dirty finger. (This is how he insisted on describing her. She would never have used such a hackneyed phrase in general and certainly not for Moira, whose photographic likeness, of which Barry happened to have many, showed a dark-haired, pale-eyed girl with hunched shoulders and a sour expression.)
    When he spoke of Moira, his voice took on a lilting quality, which he clearly thought was Irish, but which sounded to her like the kind of singsong voice used on television shows for very young children. She had dark HAIR and pale BLUE eyes put in with a DIRTY FINGER. Really, it was like listening to one of the Teletubbies wax nostalgic, if one could imagine Po (or Laa-Laa or Winky-Dink, or whatever the faggoty purple one was named) hunched over a pint of Guinness in a suitably picturesque Galway bar. Without making contact, Barry explained how he had conceived this trip to exorcise the ghost of Moira, only to find that it had brought her back in full force (again) and he was oh so sorry, but it was just not to be between them and he could not continue this charade for another day.
    So, yes, the above—the triteness of his speech, its grating quality, his resemblance to a Guinness-besotted Teletubby—was what she told herself afterward, the forming scab over the hurt and humiliation of being dumped two weeks into a three-week tour of the Emerald Isle. (Guess who called it that.) After her first, instinctive outburst—“You asshole!”—she settled down and listened generously, without recriminations. It had not been love between them. He was rich and she was pretty, and she had assumed it would play out as most of her relationships did. Twelve to twenty months, two or three trips, several significant pieces of jewelry. He was pulling the plug prematurely, that was all, and Ireland barely counted as a vacation in her opinion. It had rained almost every day and the shopping was shit.
    Still, she nodded and interjected at the proper moments, signaling the pretty waitress for another, then another, but always for him. She nursed her half pint well into the evening. At closing time, she slipped the waitress twenty euros, straight from his wallet, and the young woman obligingly helped to carry Barry through the streets to the Great Southern. His eyes gleamed a bit as she and the waitress heaved him on the bed, not that he was anywhere near in shape for the award he was imagining. (And how did his mind work, she wondered in passing, how did a man who had just dumped a woman two weeks into a three-week trip persuade himself that the dumpee would then decide to honor him with a going-away threesome? True, she had been a bit wild when they first met. That