Catherine killed? What sort of instrument would there have been? There were no marks on her body. I would have noticed if someone had hit her in the head; there would have been blood. Poison perhaps? But how and who? And how would the cops have jumped to that conclusion so quickly? They knew something that I did not. They had a weapon of some sort; or knew that there was a weapon; knew that she did not die of natural causes. But what could it have been?

A dull headache gradually gripped my head like a steel vice and I reached up with my index fingers and massaged my temples and closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind and to forget for a while where I was and why I was there.

The hotel room was like many I had stayed in. Not high class, but not quite dumpy; no cockroaches or bed-bugs but few amenities. The linens smelled clean enough. The quilt was the kind of neutral beige you find in such places with a red royal pattern. The quilt, though, was slightly damp. Not damp from being to quickly removed from the dryer, but rather musty from too much exposure to the moisture in the air. The furniture was the built- in sort of indestructible prefabricated mass produced and maple colored Formica that was crafted for so many such suites before the seventies. The carpeting was new, or at least newer; a brown durable Berber of thick and tightly woven yarn. The heavy gold curtains were drawn, by me, to block out the hastily approaching morning sunlight.

I needed to sleep, but every time I tried I would find myself still thinking twenty minutes later. I could almost feel the windy wake of the earth’s rotation rushing too quickly for my prelation, forcing daylight upon me before I could steal so much as a nap. I flipped and folded and crumpled my pillow for the umpteenth time, trying to delude myself into thinking that it was the un-moldable hotel pillow that was prolonging my exhaustion; denying me the bliss of torpidity. I watched as the clock crept in ten and twenty minute intervals from midnight until four in the morning. I slept like a corpse until seven a.m., and then played the clock game again until ten, waking from my shallow sleep just long enough to see that time had advanced a few minutes or a quarter of an hour. Sarah, other than occasionally feeling for me in the dark with the extension of a limb or the bob of her head, slept like a stone.

At ten-fifteen I finally decided that I wasn’t going to get any more real sleep and I got out of bed. I opened the curtains and found that the hotel room looked less desirable in the light of day than it had at night. There were coffee stains on the sink outside the bathroom. The carpet, while newer, was badly worn at the threshold and the wallpaper was yellowed and curled in places where it was peeling away from the wall.

After I showered and dressed I sat down on the bed next to Sarah where she still slept. It seemed a shame to have to wake her. She was so beautiful in her sleep; so peaceful.

But was she too peaceful? Was she a bit blue?

I panicked and jostled her awake and you would have thought that I’d won the lottery by my expression when her soft blue eyes opened, peaking sheepishly through strands of her sandy-blond hair. She looked up at me confused.

“What’s wrong daddy?”

I didn’t realize it right away but I was crying; dripping rainforest sized droplets onto her face while smiling in relief; she was not dead. One such experience was enough for a lifetime. Sarah reached out to hug me and I pulled her to me.

“Nothing baby. Nothing at all.”

I couldn’t handle any more death;

certainly not Sarah’s. She was my only reason for living now that Catherine was gone. I was a man that needed to be needed. That is why Sarah was such a Godsend. She came to us just as we had given up all hope of ever having a child. As a parent I became unwittingly addicted to being needed. I never even realize my addiction until Catherine died. Sarah was my crack cocaine.

“Were you thinking about Mommy?” “Yeah, honey. That’s it. I was thinking about Mommy.”

“It’s okay Daddy. Grandma said that

I’ll get to see her when I go to heaven.” “That’s right honey.”

“So can we go to heaven today? I want to see mommy.”

I held her to my chest and rocked her. No one she had known had ever died. No pets. Not even a goldfish. To her, heaven was a place not so far away. I guess in reality that was true.

* * *

Sarah bathed and then we dressed back into the clothes we had worn the day before. We had no choice since we had arrived at the hotel late and exhausted. We had no toiletries so I had the hotel’s maitre’ de send up toothpaste, toothbrushes and deodorant.

We could have gone to the store to buy a change of clothes but I figured that we could stop by the house and get what we needed. If the police were there I we could talk them into a couple of t-shirts and a few pairs of jeans from our laundry room. If no one was there I figured that I would simply have to cross the line; slip through a window or the rear sliding door to the family room (the lock had been broken for years and Catherine had even given up on bugging me to fix it). Money was pretty tight, and there was no telling how long we would have to stay at the hotel or more importantly how soon we could reoccupy the crime scene which was our home. I didn’t have any local family to speak of. My parents were dead and I had no siblings, so the only family I had for hundreds of miles was Catherine’s parents. Staying there was obviously not an option. I didn’t want to spend what little cash I had or the limited available balance on my credit cards on clothes knowing that we might be in desperate straights before long.

Outside of our room we made our way down the long poorly lit hallway decorated with outdated and dingy red and gold wallpaper and stained and worn royal red carpeting. The light fixtures were the plastic globed sort with the grooved lines through which you could easily make out the pot-bellied outline of the incandescent light-bulb. Sarah pressed the elevator button with the down arrow and I could hear the elevator bellow and grunt from a distant place below us before finally opening. From inside the elevator we could hear long cumbersome groans, very much like a recording of whales under water I’d heard on the nature channel, as we descended to the lobby. The Lobby was the only modern aspect of the building. The carpet was hunter-green near the elevators and the lobby itself had ivory marbled floors and bright white and gold walls with newer crystal sconces and a large brass chandelier which towered before the twin glass exit doors. The beauty of the lobby was basically a lie, foretelling of lavish updated rooms which might well be in the offing but were obviously not. A clerk with a round boyish face and a curly mop of black hair in a hunter-green uniform stood behind a long Corian topped desk with an absent minded look on his face and he seemed almost startled when Sarah rang the little bell on the counter even though he had watched us as we approached.

I checked out of our room, optimistic that we could return home before nightfall. In television detective shows it seemed that crime scenes were often tied up for days, weeks or months. That couldn’t be the case in real life, I thought. I often worked from home after-all and I was basically out of business without my computer. I needed to work to pay the bills. They couldn’t deny me the provision of income for my family, I thought.

Sarah and I climbed into my car. We put our seatbelts on and, as usual, she held my hand while I drove. Her face looked tired, but she was smiling a little.

“Are we going to see mommy now?” “No honey, we’re going home to get some clothes.”

“When will we get to see mommy?” “Not for a long time.”

Her upper lip rolled into a pout and she started to cry. I squeezed her little hand.