The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(65)

Jennifer Duffy nodded almost imperceptibly as she looked down at her coffee.

“My dad was a cop, too,” Nikki went on. “He worked patrol his whole career. Old school. Never talked about the job. Never. And we weren’t supposed to ask him. If he had a bad day on the job, how would we know? He wouldn’t tell us, and we couldn’t ask. How were we supposed to know he wasn’t mad at us? Kids think everything is about them.”

“You end up feeling like he’s just a man who sometimes stays overnight,” Jennifer murmured, the memory pressing down on her.

“It’s hard.”

“But you became a cop yourself.”

“Yes. I suppose in part to feel closer to him,” Nikki admitted. She took another sip of her coffee. “Or maybe to make up for what he lacked as a parent. I’m very close to my boys. I don’t ever want them to feel separate from me the way I felt from my old man.

“Even so, it’s not easy being a cop’s kid,” she continued. “It makes you different. It sets you a little apart from the other kids.”

“Yes, it does,” Ted Duffy’s daughter murmured, as she stirred her coffee with a stick of rock sugar.

“I read in the file that you were in your room reading when your dad was shot.”

“He was chopping wood,” she said quietly. “I could hear him chopping wood. He did that when he was upset.”

“Did you hear the shots?”

“I suppose I did, but I didn’t realize it.”

Nikki pictured the scene in her mind: Jennifer Duffy propped up by pillows on the bed as she lost her loneliness in the pages of a book. The distant crack of the axe striking the wood. The distant crack of a rifle shot. A nine-year-old child wouldn’t have known the difference. And even if she had been looking out the window the instant it happened, she never could have seen into the gathering gloom of the woods where the shot had come from.

“Then it was quiet,” Jennifer said. “It was quiet for a long time. I just kept reading. I thought he must have come inside, but he was lying out there, dying.”

The mother in her made Nikki want to put her arms around the young girl in the memory. Jennifer blamed herself in the way children did because they believed their worlds revolved around them. In the active imagination of Jennifer Duffy’s nine-year-old mind, she might have been able to save her father if only she had known he was out there wounded. If only she had realized something was wrong. Instead, her father had bled out lying on the ground beneath her bedroom window.

“He was killed instantly, you know,” Nikki said softly. “There was nothing you could have done.”

She made that slight nod again, but she was still far away in her mind. “That’s what they said,” she whispered.

Now, as she put the pieces of Jennifer Duffy’s answers together, Nikki could see why she had been the one to take her father’s death the hardest. He had never been the father she wanted, and her hope for that to change had died with him. Her father hadn’t seen her off on her first date, hadn’t seen her graduate, would never walk her down the aisle—and somewhere deep down inside there was still a tiny remnant of that nine-year-old girl that believed she was somehow responsible.

“So you grew up to be a librarian,” Nikki said, to move her memory away from the dark corner of her father’s death. “Were books a refuge for you as a kid?”

“You can go anywhere in a book,” she answered, smiling slightly. “Be anyone. And life has to make sense in a book. Real life doesn’t have to make sense. In real life, good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder . . . and worse. I’ll take a good book over that any day.”

She used both hands to lift her cup to her lips. It rattled on the saucer as she set it down.

“My oldest boy is an artist,” Nikki said. “He draws his own comic books. That’s his escape. He says the same thing. In comic books, the bad guy always gets it in the end. There’s a lot of comfort in that.”

Jennifer Duffy stared out the window, her mind years away, in a place where a nine-year-old girl had to hide away from a bad reality. Her father’s death? Her parents’ struggling marriage? Their unhappy family? Her own unjustified guilt . . .

“Can you tell me about the girls who were living with you at that time?” Nikki asked. “Angie and Penny?”

Jennifer Duffy looked at her, confused. “Why? What could you think they would have to do with anything? They were teenagers.”

“I’m fishing,” Nikki confessed. “I spoke with your old neighbor Mr. Nilsen. He said the girls were kind of wild. Maybe one of them had a bad boyfriend or got in trouble with people in the drug culture. Or maybe they had someone in their family background who was unhappy with them being in the foster care system,” Nikki suggested. “Or someone who didn’t want them talking to a police detective.”

“That sounds like a movie,” Duffy said. “They were just teenage girls. I don’t think anybody cared about either of them.”

“Did you like having them around? It had to be kind of like having instant big sisters, huh?”

“I never liked Penny. She was mean when she babysat for us. And she was a liar and a thief. I wasn’t sad to see her go.”

“And Angie? She was the older one?”