The Dearly Departed. Elinor Lipman

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       CHAPTER 5 King’s Nite

      Mrs. Peacock couldn’t help looking pleased that the next of kin to a tragedy had checked into her motel. There was a connection, she explained: Her husband worked for Herlihy Brothers Fuel, and it was the two bosses, Danny and Sean, who’d fixed the fatal furnace. Volunteered. For free. Not that Miss Batten’s mother was one of their accounts. Not at all.

      “That was very kind of them,” said Sunny.

      “It’s good public relations. They’re smart in that way.” She ran Sunny’s credit card through her machine, once, twice, frowning. “Sometimes it’s the phone lines and not the credit limit. I’ll swipe it through again.”

      “There shouldn’t be a problem.”

      “We have a two-night minimum starting June first,” said Mrs. Peacock, whose gray hair had a pale lavender cast and whose coral beads matched her coral clip-on earrings.

      “Fine.”

      “Don’t think people weren’t upset about all of this happening in King George. First, your mother and Miles Finn, then, before we turn around, we almost lose our police chief. Another few inches and a bullet would’ve killed him, which makes me wonder what’s so great about bullet-proof vests if you consider all the parts of the body they don’t cover.”

      “I’m in number ten?” Sunny said after a pause.

      “Last unit. Don’t put anything in the toilet but toilet paper. Our septic tank can’t handle anything else.”

      “Fine,” said Sunny.

      “You can get a decent breakfast—eggs, toast, home fries, bacon, coffee—at The Dot.”

      Finally, Sunny smiled. “Do the Angelos still own it?”

      “Yeah. He’s sick, you know.”

      “Do they still make those maple sausages?”

      “I eat at home. You can’t smoke there anymore. Besides, I don’t like paying a dollar-fifty for a fried egg.”

      “I’d better unpack,” said Sunny.

      At 5,6, and 11 P.M., Joey Loach watched himself on three Boston TV stations looking worse than he realized and needing a shave. No reporter had asked him the question he feared—Why, in a one-horse town with no crime and no criminals, were you wearing a bullet-proof vest?

      “Was I wrong?” he would have said. “Wouldn’t I be dead now if I didn’t arm myself every morning when I left my house?” For three years his vest had been a secret, purchased with his own money, a promise he’d made to his mother and the condition on which she had let him go to the police academy.

      Elsie Loach was both inconsolable about her son’s near disaster, imagining the inches in either direction that would have left him dead or paralyzed, and triumphant that she’d saved his life. She wanted him to resign immediately. No one’s son should be a police officer! They should come from the ranks of orphans and middle-aged men whose mothers have passed on. He practically lived at the station, like a firefighter, like a lighthouse keeper, like a monk. She’d brought the braided rug from his room at home and a reading lamp for his bedside, which necessitated her acquiring and refinishing a solid maple night table from the rummage sale at Saint Xavier’s along with a bureau scarf that wasn’t frilly or stained.

      Strangers assumed that she was thrilled to have Joey in uniform; exhilarated by the sight of him behind the wheel of his cruiser, pressed and clean-shaven, but she wasn’t. She turned off the news when she saw reports of police officers shot, killed, sued, eulogized. And now it had happened. A crazy man had shot Joey at close range as he ambled in his good-natured fashion up to the half-open window of—as best as he could remember—a Ford pickup with Massachusetts plates. They were out there—nuts and murderers; sociopaths who thought it was better to kill someone’s son than get a ticket. Marilee and her husband had safe jobs—day-care teacher at a state building with a metal detector and dairy manager at Foodland.

      Worst of all, the murderer was at large. “He’s gone,” Joey had promised. “Even the stupidest cop killer would get out of town СКАЧАТЬ