Empty Ever After by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online Page A

into an old fire in which some of my high school classmates had perished. One of the dead was my fiercest teenage crush, Andrea Cotter. That’s when I first met Mr. Roth. During the investigation, Francis Maloney suffered a stroke and I rushed to be with Katy. Now as I drove, I remembered that last time, how I prayed for the cold-hearted prick to die. He knew it too. Even with a partially paralyzed face and mild aphasia, he warned me to be careful what I wished for. He was right. Eventually all death wishes come to pass, and the fallout with them.
    Vandervoort met me in the lobby. I wouldn’t say he looked worried. Concerned was more like it. Oddly, I found his concern reassuring. As cynical a bastard as I could be, I had never been completely cured of hope. We shook hands.
    “What happened, exactly?”

    “I got a call at home from dispatch around seven this morning . . . Hey, you want to grab a cup of coffee? My treat.” He was avoiding the subject.
    “Sure. We’ll talk as we go. You were saying …”
    “They said your wife—ex-wife, sorry, called in hysterical, begging for us to get a car to her house. The dispatcher couldn’t get anything out of her about what was wrong, if there’s been a break-in or what. So they sent a car out, but thought maybe I should know too. Like we were talking about yesterday, people up here still know the Maloneys.”
    “I’m glad they called you.”
    “I got there a little after Robby, that’s the younger deputy who was out at the cemetery with you yesterday. He’s green, but he’s good with people and he’d gotten your wife—ex-wife—”
    “Just call her Katy, Sheriff. It’ll make our lives easier.”
    “Okay. Well, he’d gotten Katy calmed down, but he couldn’t get anything out of her except that she’d gotten a call. She wouldn’t put the phone down no matter what Robby did. How do you take yours?” he asked as we stepped into the hospital cafeteria.
    “Milk, no sugar.”
    “Wait here.”
    He was back in a minute with our coffees. “Let’s sit before we go up to the Psych Ward.”
    “We?”
    “Sorry, Mr. Prager. You’re not family anymore. They won’t let you up there without me.”
    I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t his doing. It was mine. Divorce impacts couples in different ways. It’s an equation of losses and gains. The gains, however large or small, are usually apparent early on. The losses, as I was discovering, reveal themselves slowly, in painful, unexpected ways. We sat at the closest table.
    “When you got there, what happened?”
    “I told Robby to wait outside and your—Katy broke down. She said she knew what she was going to say would sound crazy, but it was true. Her brother Patrick had called. She recognized his voice.”
    “Christ!”
    “Exactly. What was I going to say to that?”
    “What did you say?”
    “I’m no shrink, Mr. Prager. I said maybe she was just stressed out by what had happened yesterday and how it can get rough sometimes with people you love when they’re gone. But that set her off again. ‘I’m not crazy. It was my little brother,’ she started screaming. Then she started talking about little star or something.”

    “Little Star is a pet name she had for Patrick,” I said. I hadn’t heard those two words uttered in two decades.
    “Oh, okay. Well, I told her I believed her, but that I needed her to come with me to the hospital. I gotta tell you, I expected that to flip her out, but she came along pretty calmly.”
    “Thanks for taking care of her, Sheriff Vandervoort.”
    He held his hand out to me. “Pete. Call me Pete.”
    “Moe.”
    We shook hands again and started for the elevator.
    “So what do you make of it, Moe? You know Katy. I don’t, so I’m just asking.”
    “Pete, my wife is the least crazy person I ever met. If she says she got a call, I believe her.”
    “From her dead brother?”
    “I didn’t say that. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to fuck with my family.”
    We