The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(12)

“Yes, I guess it did. I was glad she felt strongly enough about our relationship to do something like that. But there was one peculiar thing. Last week, I made some kind of joking reference to the time when the feral cat had bitten her. She seemed genuinely puzzled—she said nothing like that had ever happened to her. I began rattling off the details of the story, but she got upset and said I was wrong and told me to drop it.”

“Did you?”

Tejada frowned. “Sure, I did. I was glad she’d become a cat lover. But I wasn’t wrong, Inspector. The cat attack really happened to her. At first, I assumed she didn’t want to think about it anymore, but it was more than that. It was as if the whole episode had been completely erased from her memory.”





6


Frankie kept one sympathy card on her desk from the death of her father. She’d filed away all of the others weeks ago. It wasn’t even a card from a close friend, because Frankie didn’t have many people that she considered friends. The woman who sent it was a colleague from a nonprofit board. Frankie kept the card because it was a reminder of how wrong people could be.

Inside, the woman had written



My father was the greatest hero in my life. I know what you’re going through.



If only that were true. People assumed that when you lost a parent, you felt nothing but pure grief. They didn’t account for complex relationships. And the relationship between Marvin Stein and his daughters was nothing if not complex.

She kept a photo of her father on her desk. When she picked it up, she could hear his cold voice in her head, passionless and demanding. The photo showed him in his physics lab at UC Berkeley, in his white lab coat. Like her, he was tall and thin. He had wiry gray hair and a neat mustache. He didn’t smile, and his eyes were impatient. Her father never liked to bother with emotional frills like photographs. When Frankie took the picture with her phone, he’d said, “Get on with it, get on with it.”

Her mother had died of cancer when Frankie was five, just a year after her sister, Pam, was born. Since then, their family had been just the three of them. Marvin Stein, physicist, was not meant to be a single father. He dealt with numbers, theories, and formulas, not children. And definitely not girls.

It was hard enough when they were young, but it got worse during high school and college. Their father demanded perfection. Anything but straight As and top test scores was a failure. Because he was a success himself, he pushed his daughters to do more and achieve more. Nothing was ever good enough. Frankie responded by setting crazy expectations for herself that might win his praise. Pam responded by defying him altogether and throwing her failures in his face.

And now he was gone. More than three months later, he still haunted her.

“Are you thinking about Marvin again?” Jason asked.

Her husband stood in the doorway of her office. He was dressed in running clothes, and his hands were on his hips. Sweat glowed on his narrow face.

“Yes, I keep thinking about that last camping trip,” she said, toying with the photograph of her father with her fingertips.

“Dwelling on it won’t change what happened,” Jason told her.

“Oh, I know.”

Jason sat in the comfortable chair in front of her desk. He worked in the headquarters of a large pharmaceutical company a few blocks away on Post Street, but he often went running through the city midway through the afternoon and showed up at her office while she was on a break between appointments. Her own office was located on the top floor of a ten-story building on the east side of Union Square, looking out on the palm trees of the park.

“It’s also not going to change what a son of a bitch Marvin was,” Jason added.

Frankie’s lips bent into a sad smile. “I know that, too.”

“So how do you feel?” He asked it in a clinical way. They were both scientists. Sometimes it was hard to remember they were husband and wife, too. She expected him to take out a yellow pad and start taking notes while they talked.

“I feel off,” she said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really. Something’s not right with me, Jason, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I think it’s called grief.”

He was right, but that didn’t make her feel better. Another husband might have come out of his chair and hugged her, but that wasn’t Jason, and that wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. They weren’t touchy-feely.

She’d met him seven years ago at a conference in Barcelona. He was British. They were both in their early thirties. She’d noticed when she met him that he was handsome, although their interactions were purely professional in the beginning. He had an athletic build and close-cropped black hair. His dark eyes missed nothing, and he had an expressive mouth that could shift from humor to disdain with a twitch of his lips. His face was full of sharp angles, and so was his personality. She liked that. She hated men who tried to woo her.

They’d stayed in touch after the conference because they both specialized in memory. He worked on the neurological side, focused on brain chemistry. She worked on the therapeutic side. Nine months later, he took a research position with a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, and their meetings evolved slowly from professional to personal. A year after that, they married, to the amusement of her sister, Pam, who’d assumed that Frankie would never leave her clinical office long enough to meet a man.