This Fallen Prey (Rockton #3)(78)

“No harm in asking, Iz,” he whines.

“Yes, actually there is. If a woman here wants your company, she will approach you. That is the new rule, as you have been told. If you’re looking for company, you’ll find it in the search parties. That’s where tonight’s staff is, and that’s where you should be.”

“Can I get a drink?”

“Yes, absolutely. I’ll get you your drink, and you’ll sit on your ass and enjoy yourself while everyone else searches for the man who murdered Val. I’ll make sure all my girls know that’s what you were doing tonight. They’ll be terribly impressed.”

Artie leaves. Quickly. I sit with Petra and Diana, and Isabel brings over tumblers and Irish whiskey.

“I don’t think Val was Irish,” I say.

“Do you have any idea what her heritage was?”

I shake my head.

“Then in the interests of a proper wake, tonight she was Irish. And we are playing poker.”

“Never been to an actual wake, have you,” Petra says.

“I’m improvising. Otherwise, we’ll sit here and try to come up with things to say about the dearly departed, and it will get very awkward, very fast.” Isabel pours the whiskey. “Have any of you ever attended one of those funerals? Where it’s very clear that no one actually has anything interesting to say about the deceased?”

“Or anything nice,” Diana says as she takes her drink.

“The lack of anything nice would be far worse than the lack of anything interesting. That’s what I want for my funeral. I don’t give a damn if anyone tells a single story that reflects well on me. Just tell stories.”

“Val liked tea,” I say.

Diana snickers and then sobers with, “Sorry.”

“The point being,” Isabel says, “that we have not a single interesting thing to say about Val.”

“We didn’t know her,” I say.

“Not for lack of trying.”

“Shortly after she arrived, she got lost in the forest and was attacked.”

Isabel nods. “I know.”

“She came to you?”

“Val ask for help? Never. But I have counseled enough survivors to know she did not wander out of that forest unscathed. I tried to broach the subject once, to offer support, and she shut me down. Nothing happened, and I should go practice my ‘mediocre skills’ on real victims.” She raises her glass to me. “Kudos on being the one to break through.”

“I didn’t. When I confronted her, she said that to have ‘allowed’ herself to be attacked would have been a sign of weakness. Strong women don’t do that.”

“Ouch,” Petra says.

“An unfortunate—and unfortunately common—belief,” Isabel says. “Also monumentally wrong and stupid, but that goes without saying.”

We take a drink.

“Val however was not a stupid woman,” Isabel says. “She’d been a mathematician.”

“I didn’t know that,” I say. “I’d seen her doing math puzzles. Not the kind you get in a paperback book, but real puzzles. Theoretical ones.”

“Even if she didn’t open up to you about the attack, Casey, you were the one to break through. To get her out of that house and into the community.”

“Yep.” I take a slug of my whiskey. “And look where it got her.”

Three mouths open in simultaneous denials. I beat them to it with, “This morning, Phil said Val made a mistake trying to join life in Rockton. That her place was separate and apart from us. He may have had a point.”

“Phil is an idiot. Gorgeous, but an idiot. And I don’t just say that because he looked at me like I was a bag lady blocking the steps to his brownstone.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I say.

“Oh, yes it was, but since he wasn’t checking you out either, I won’t take it personally.”

“You both might be the wrong gender,” Petra says.

“He didn’t give Will more than a passing glance.”

“The sneer wasn’t a physical assessment,” I say. “It was disdain. For everyone and everything here. But I still wonder if he was right about Val. We couldn’t afford to lose our leader, and involving herself in our affairs endangered her.”

“Well, if that’s your reasoning, you’d better tell Eric he has to stay in the station from now on. He’s the one we can’t afford to lose. Val was . . .” Isabel swirls her drink and shakes her head. “This isn’t the proper way to conduct a wake, is it?”

“Does anyone have anything nice to say?” Diana says.

“She liked tea,” Petra quips. Then she adds, “The truth is that none of us knew her well enough to eulogize her. But a year ago, no one would have been holding a wake for her either. She was coming out of her shell. She was starting to care. We were starting to care back.”

Isabel raises her glass. “Then let’s drink to that. A woman we didn’t always understand. A woman we didn’t always like. But a woman we were looking forward to getting to know better. A missed and mourned opportunity.”

We clink glasses.

“Now, poker?” Petra says. “For credits, I hope, because I will clean you all out.”