The Running Girls(8)
It couldn’t go on. She snapped the laptop shut, deciding she would end this impasse today, one way or another.
Two hours later, and David still hadn’t returned. As Laurie changed, she noticed another vein, this time on the back of a calf muscle. She pushed at it, recoiling at its springy texture, and quickly covered it up with a pair of jeans.
She called David’s cell phone but it went straight to voicemail. Where the hell was he? Laurie paced the apartment, unwittingly putting extra pressure on the leg where she’d spotted the enlarged vein. Should she go after him? Like so many things in their marriage, they hadn’t talked about the return of his father two months ago. When she’d told him Frank Randall was back, David had shrugged as if the information was nothing out of the ordinary. As far as she knew, he’d yet to pay his father a visit.
However much he would protest to the contrary, Frank’s return weighed heavy on David, and Frank returning to David’s old family home must have rekindled so many old memories.
The apartment felt like a prison. Laurie pulled on her coat and left, determined to find David and sort things out. She tried their local bar first, the bar they’d visited on their first date, eighteen months after the sentencing hearing that sent Frank to prison. The bartender told her David had left twenty minutes before, which meant she’d either missed him on the way there or he’d headed to another bar to continue his drinking. Her guess was the latter. His drinking wasn’t yet at the problem stage, but it had been trending steadily in that direction for some time now.
The wind had picked up further and Laurie pulled her jacket closer as she moved up the block. She already feared the look David would give her if she tracked him down. She pictured the surprise and disappointment and it was almost enough to make her turn back. When had things gotten so bad that the thought of seeing her husband made her cower so?
Instinctively, she placed her hand on her stomach. Where once it had curved, for a time full of life, it was now a flat plate of lifeless muscle. The thought made Laurie blink back tears, her anger at David intensifying.
She walked toward the Strand where she’d run into David all those years ago and he’d surprised her by asking her for a date. She could recall that night with perfect clarity. The smell of sea salt in the air, the day’s residual heat softening the sidewalk and lending a sense of hope to their encounter. He’d been different then. Not only from the man he’d now become, but from the man she’d encountered during the Randall investigation.
David had initially refused to believe it when his father had decided to change his plea to guilty. Laurie had taken him to see Randall in the county jail where he’d been held prior to the sentencing. Although she hadn’t witnessed the meeting, she’d been told by the prison guard the pair had argued vociferously and after that day, David had refused to speak about Randall any further. To this day, she didn’t know what had been said between them. If Randall had confessed to him, David had never told. She hadn’t blamed him for that. David had lost one parent and was about to lose a second. Who would want that? Who would want to admit that their father was capable of such a horrific crime?
As part of her liaison role as a junior detective, she’d stayed in contact with David for three months after the verdict. During that time, she’d seen acceptance gradually wash over him. He’d grown up so much in that short time, faced up to things that would have destroyed most people. He’d struggled and although he’d refused her repeated suggestion of counseling, she’d felt after the last appointment with her that he’d been close to putting things behind him.
And on that night in the old quarter, he’d been full of hope and promise. He’d just been offered a new six-month rolling contract and his life was again full of possibility. Laurie had worried that seeing her would only remind him of his father’s conviction, but if anything the shared experience somehow brought them closer.
Being here now threatened to tarnish that memory. She was so angry with him, not just for today but for the whole of the last year. She stuck her head through the door of every bar in the Strand, part of her pleased every time he wasn’t there, and was about to head home when she saw him at the counter of a coffee shop. A surprising relief washed over her, as if he’d been missing for months, her heart rattling in her chest at the sight of him even though she’d seen him a couple of hours ago.
That relief soon dissipated as Laurie watched him carry over two drinks to a table where a woman Laurie had never met before sat waiting.
Chapter Four
The sound of the gulf. It was the first thing that reoriented him every morning; that took away the dread that he was still in a prison cell. His ears clung to that distant noise as he lay half-conscious, bypassing the screeching of the grackles and the ever-growing howl of the wind. It launched Frank Randall’s morning routine—forcing his eyes open, maneuvering his weary bones out of bed, dropping him to perform the twelve meager push-ups the dwindling muscles on his upper body would allow him.
On this morning, like every morning since he’d been back, he opened the front door of the house and let bright sunshine flood the interior, the rich, earthy aroma of the grassland carrying in the morning air. As he did every morning, Randall thought about Annie and how she would have loved this peaceful moment, while still being eager to get out to explore their surroundings, to get her daily fix of the shoreline.