The Reluctant Coroner by Paul Austin Ardoin (distant reading txt) 📖

“I’m getting some of Mom’s paintings out of storage. My favorite painting of hers, in fact.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one of the ocean and the cypress tree growing out of the rock, the one right by the butterfly waystation.”

Ferris sighed audibly. “Isn’t that only a mile from your house? Don’t you jog there every morning? Can’t you see the real thing any time you want?”

Fenway gritted her teeth. “Coming from the man who fell in love with her because of a painting? That’s pretty rich, Dad.”

“I suppose,” Ferris said. He didn’t speak for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. “Can’t you just fly?”

“Nope. The paintings are too big to take on the plane.”

Her father paused. Fenway could hear him turning everything over in his head.

“You sure you won’t be back by Monday morning?”

“No, I won’t be back till at least Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe even later.”

“Well, why don’t you take my plane? You’d be back in plenty of time.”

“I’m not taking your plane to Seattle, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“Because it costs you something like twenty-five grand whenever you take off and land.”

“Having you speak at Everett’s announcement is worth twenty-five thousand dollars to me, Fenway.”

She wanted to scream at him. She still had ninety-five thousand dollars in college loans to pay back, which he had never even acknowledged. He barely acknowledged that he hadn’t given Fenway or her mother a cent in alimony or child support. But he threw around a fifty-thousand-dollar weekend trip to Seattle like he could pay for it with the change he found under the sofa cushions.

“Oh, there’s the doorbell, Dad,” Fenway lied. “I’ve gotta go. Talk to you later.” And she hung up before he could protest further.

She looked at Dez, who took another drink of the Hefeweizen.

“Nathaniel Ferris, I take it,” Dez said.

“You should be a detective.”

Dez cackled. “You may just be the only person in this county who won’t give him what he wants.”

“I may just be the only person in the county he doesn’t own,” Fenway said.

“So, you’re going to drive up and get your mom’s painting?”

“Yep. I leave Friday morning. I should get there on Saturday.”

“I’ll be interested to see the painting. You sure talked about it enough. I hope it lives up to the hype.”

“Well, if it doesn’t, take a happy pill and pretend it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. That’s one time I won’t need your disturbingly accurate candor.”

Dez smirked. “So where are you staying up there? Some fancy hotel?”

“I’m staying with a friend.”

“A friend?” Dez looked sideways at Fenway. “That’s suspiciously vague.”

Fenway blushed.

“Oh, girl, you’re hooking up.”

“I wouldn’t call it a hookup,” Fenway said. “He’s an ex-boyfriend.”

“An ex-boyfriend?” Dez narrowed her eyes. “Is this Akeel?”

Fenway’s mouth fell open. “How do you know about Akeel?”

Dez laughed. “Rachel tells me more than she should, I guess.” She lowered her voice. “Is he still hot?”

“I don’t know if I think he’s that hot.”

“Rachel said you talked about his abs and shoulders and eyes for ten minutes. I stopped paying attention, but I got enough to know you think he’s hot.”

Fenway paused. “Okay, fine. I’m going to try to hook up with him.” She lowered her voice, although no one else was in the apartment. “Look, you know and I know that sleeping with McVie a couple months ago was a bad idea, but I, uh, I haven’t really been able to get him out of my head. But I have to work with him, and I don’t want to screw that up just because I’ve got a big schoolgirl crush on him.”

“Plus, he’s trying to make it work with his wife,” Dez said pointedly.

“Right,” Fenway agreed quickly. “So I thought maybe it would help me get over him to spend a night with Akeel.”

“Or three or four nights,” Dez said.

Fenway couldn’t help the grin that spread over her face.

“He’s that good, huh?”

“Oh, Lord, Dez, we were only together for about six weeks two years ago, but damn, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Seattle had a heat wave that summer, and we barely left his apartment. I lived with my mom and she called me a couple times to see if I was okay.” She rubbed the sides of her mouth to get herself to stop grinning, but to no avail. “Hoo boy, I was more than okay.”

Dez rolled her eyes and made a face. “You know I didn’t need that level of detail.”

“Oh, please, Dez,” Fenway said. “I didn’t go into any detail at all.”

“And yet, somehow, I still need to wash out my ears with soap.”

Fenway laughed. Dez, the one person in Estancia who didn’t expect anything from Fenway, never tried to put a claim on her. She was just there for advice and support—like how her mom had been in Seattle, before the cancer.

“But just six weeks?” Dez asked. “Did he ship out or something?”

Fenway stopped laughing. “No. It just, uh, didn’t go anywhere. We had this heat between us, but once we actually hung out together, we didn’t really click.”

“What needs to click?”

“For one thing,” Fenway said, “he didn’t have any books in his apartment.”

“None? Not even The Da Vinci Code or Tom Clancy or something?”

“Nope. He didn’t like reading.”

“Huh. I guess that would be a problem.” Dez glanced at Fenway’s overstuffed bookshelves.

“And when I met his friends,” Fenway started, and then shuddered.

“Oh,” Dez said.

“Yeah. I mean, I know Akeel and I had a physical relationship, but when I met his friends, they looked at me like—I don’t know. Some sort of trophy. One of them said Akeel only liked me because I acted like a white girl.”

“A white girl, huh.” Dez’s mouth became a thin line.

“I know. Some crack about the color of my skin, too.”

“The color of your skin?”

“I wasn’t black enough for them, apparently.”

Dez paused. “Did Akeel know your father’s white?”

“What does that matter?”

Dez shrugged. “It doesn’t really, I guess.”

“I mean, I liked the fact that Akeel was so attracted to me, but he didn’t say anything to his friends. Never defended me, just let me take it. They only said a few things, but it bugged me. We started spending a couple nights apart and then we just sort of stopped seeing each other.”

“But you called him up?”

“Um,” Fenway said, “he lives really close to the storage unit.”

“Did you call any of your other friends?”

Fenway averted her eyes.

“You better hope he’s still hot,” Dez said. “And you better hope he’s not rooming with one of those assholes who said you weren’t black enough. Or you better start thinking of excuses why you need to sleep on the couch.”

“This is a bad idea, isn’t it?” Fenway said, biting her lip.

“You’re driving a thousand miles in your new Accord for a booty call,” Dez said. “I don’t know, I’m terrible with relationship advice. But he’s not married, and he’s hot. At least that’s something.”