“I love it.”

“Will you love it without your husband?”

“Not as much. But I’m staying anyway.”

“Daddy always said you were stubborn.”

And he always said you were a spoiled little bitch, I thought.

“There’s a car in your driveway.” Tina looked apprehensive.

I recognized Mel’s red Mustang convertible. When Mel was on duty, he drove brown and grey Chevrolets, but he refused to drive anything so mundane on his own time.

“Don’t panic,” I said. “You’ll enjoy this.”

I parked at the curb, and we walked down the driveway to the rear of the house and into the garden, where Mel stood looking out at the lake. I called Mel’s name and he turned and smiled. “Hey,” he said. Mel had a way of combining two expressions in one, his brow furrowing and his eyes narrowing as though he were somewhere between confusion and anger. He wore that expression when he wanted to make you feel good about him, or maybe just good about yourself for being near him. He wore it now.

Behind me, Tina made a pseudo-orgasmic sound in her throat.

“Mel, this is my sister, Tina. Tina, Mel Holiday.”

Mel extended a hand large enough to lift a watermelon. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here to help Josie.”

Tina said that’s what sisters were for, which caused my eyes to roll.

“We just made arrangements for Gabe’s funeral,” I said.

“I’ll be there,” Mel said.

“Well, you’ll be the only one. There’s no ceremony.”

“That’s how you want it?”

“That’s how Gabe would want it. The force won’t send anybody if I ask them not to, right? Not as long as they believe he killed himself.”

“The results came back from forensics,” Mel said. He glanced behind me at Tina, and I sensed the rest of his words were directed at her. “The bullet is from his gun. The guys in Toronto reviewed it, and they’re the best. So there’s no doubt about it. The paraffin test was positive, and there was alcohol in his blood—”

“How much?” I asked.

“Zero point five, something like that.”

“You can legally drive with that much.” I kicked at the garden shed door. “He could have been behind the wheel of his car, and you guys couldn’t have touched him. Don’t tell me he was so drunk he decided to kill himself, Mel. He had maybe a couple of glasses of wine—”

“Josie—”

“No suicide note, Mel. How do you explain that? Gabe would leave me a note when he went for a walk on the beach. Why doesn’t he leave me a note before he shoots himself in the head?”

“It’s not me, Josie.” Mel was looking from Tina to me and back to Tina again. Tina—I know because I checked—was looking at Mel’s eyes. “Look.” He lowered his voice. “Everything you say is true. Nothing about this makes sense. But Walter and everybody else at Central, they look at what we have as evidence, and they believe he did it. There’ll be an inquest, but unless the coroner decides criminal action was involved, Walter’s not going to assign a bunch of cops to look into Gabe’s death. He’ll have no reason to. He’ll say that Gabe wouldn’t be the first cop to fold under pressure, and he’ll be right. Maybe Gabe was working on something that got him so damned depressed—”

“Have they looked into that?” I interrupted. “What he was working on? Gabe never talked to me about the cases he had going, not until everything was settled and the trial started. So has Walter, has he and everybody else, taken a look at Gabe’s cases, the ones he was working on?”

Mel dropped his arms and nodded. “They looked and I looked. They found nothing in his files. If Gabe killed himself, they don’t have a motive for what he did.”

“No, they don’t,” I said. “But maybe we do, right?”

I turned and began walking back to the house, then stopped and looked back at Mel. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“We want the pervert who’s been sneaking into your garden shed,” Mel said. “These guys, they start with this kind of thing,” and he waved at the shed, “then move on to other things. Anybody standing at that window has a perfect view into the kitchen, and upstairs to your bedroom window.”

“Yeah, well, apparently he liked what he saw.” I resumed walking back to the house.

“What will you do?” I heard Tina ask Mel. “How will you catch him?”

Mel said something about spreading crystals on the floor that would cling to the suspect’s shoes, and alerting bicycle patrols on the boardwalk. I didn’t hear the rest. I walked to the rear door, unlocked it, let myself into the kitchen, and had a good cry. A long one. I figured I had the time. Tina would stand out there and listen to Mel recite the entire police procedure manual if he chose, the sunlight on those damn deep blue eyes of his.

9.

Men want to be eagles. Women wish they were swans. I prefer cormorants. It’s my working-class upbringing. Gabe and I talked about this one day while sitting on the pier that extends beyond the mouth of the canal into the lake, the one with the lighthouse at the end. We were watching birds, a pleasant thing to do on warm evenings along the lake. We saw a vee of Canada geese fly over the strand, so lovely in the air and so crappy on the ground. We were always stepping into their droppings, and the damn birds would lunge at you if you approached during their nesting season. Geese, Gabe and I agreed, are best when served with sage dressing.

Gulls flew past, all wings and noise. Flocks of these garbage birds hang around the drive-in restaurant at the far end of the strip and fly up to the canal when they get bored, which they are when they’re not eating. Gulls are the scuzzos of the bird world. Nobody would want to be a gull.

I liked the little terns that scurried in and out of the water’s edge, snaring insects in the sand. Cute, like puppies, but not model material. Gabe liked the herons that lived in the marshlands to the north of the strip. Herons have a lot of class, but they’re ugly. Not just look-the-other-way ugly, but disgustingly ugly. I didn’t need to be a swan, but I refused to be a heron.

That evening, we watched dozens of black birds flying toward the shore from the lake, looking as though they knew exactly where they were going, and why. With graceful necks and tapered wings, they appeared more independent than the geese, who flew in military precision, or the gulls, who would fly into a furnace if they thought food was there.

“What are they?” I asked Gabe. I had seen the birds before but given them no thought.

Gabe said they were cormorants, which sounded exotic. Gabe told me they flew out over the lake in search of food each morning. At the end of the day they returned to nest in trees along the shore of the bay, facing the fires of the blast furnaces and mills. Neither scavengers like gulls nor beggars like geese nor timid souls like terns, the cormorants took charge of their lives. Out of sight of shore, they dove underwater and became submerged predators, swimming after their food like feathered barracudas. When their workday was over, they gathered with their buddies and flew home to snuggle on their perch and watch the sun go down. Blue-collar birds.

On summer mornings, I would step through the rear door of our house on the beach strip and into our garden and watch the cormorants fly east toward the sun, still hanging low over the water. The more I learned about the birds, the more I liked them. Cormorants work hard and mate for life. They’re not as pretty as swans, but not every man I slept with was Hugh Grant, either. They can dive into water cold as ice, they fly twenty miles back and forth to work each day, and they look good in black. To hell with swans. I’d rather be a cormorant.

Cormorants could not live anywhere else nearly as well as they do on the beach strip. Nor could I.