45

 

 

“Coffee?” I asked her.

There was no hesitation on her end of the phone. “All right.”

“I was thinking The Bean House, up on Northwest Boulevard.”

“I know where it is.”

Of course you do, I thought. Next she’d be telling me that she knows this city like the back of her own hand. Every patrol cop does.

We set a time. I spent the hours in between napping on the couch, and trying not to think too much about the earlier meeting. I was mostly unsuccessful. Matsuda’s comeuppance should have brought some kind of satisfaction with it, but all I really felt was relief. Knowing that the police weren’t looking at me in a criminal sense was a weight off my shoulders.

Katie’s silence throughout the entire meeting was troubling but I tried to put myself in her shoes for a minute. What could she say? Her partner had screwed up on a case. Her case, since she was the lead detective. And the guy bringing it to their attention was…what? An old lover? Some guy she hated now?

For a long time after I left the job, Katie was on my mind almost as much as Amy Dugger. What I lost there. What could have been. And the times since then that we’ve interacted were all either bittersweet, or just plain bitter. In the past couple of years, when I’ve thought of Katie, I mostly wonder what she thinks of me now. After yesterday, I had a pretty good idea.

Used to be, those thoughts haunted me.

Lately, though, I’ve come to realize that I don’t care so much.

 

 

The Bean House was a little too trendy for my taste but I picked it because I knew they had a wide range of coffee. Why that should matter was a mystery to me, since I took mine black. But I didn’t know Anna well enough to know how exotic she liked her java.

In the end, it didn’t matter. She arrived, gave me a nod and a hint of a smile, and took the house drip black.

“Kenyan,” she said, as she took the seat kitty-corner to me.

“The blend?”

She nodded. We both tried it, nodded our joint approval, and then were silent for a few moments.

“So I spent some time at the investigative division yesterday,” I finally said.

“Yeah? Were you under arrest?”

I smiled slightly and shook my head. “I passed some information about a case along to homicide.”

“A Good Samaritan, huh?”

“It was more about self-preservation than anything. I was tired of Cole and his crew eyeballing me.”

She gave me a slightly distracted nod, then leaned forward, beckoning me. I leaned forward until our faces were only a few inches apart. “Are we going to talk about work every time we get together? Because I can get that on shift, you know?”

“No,” I said. “We don’t have to.”

“Good.”

And so we didn’t. We talked about everything and nothing. Some of it was serious, and some of it made both of us smile. Her smile was brief, but radiant, maybe even more so for its brevity.

I forgot about everything else.

There was only her, and for a little while, that included all my demons, all my regrets.

 

 

“Tell me something,” I said at one point. “Your name. The Poe poem. Is there a story behind that?”

She shrugged. “I’m sure there is, though I’m not privy to the whole thing. I do know Annabel Lee was the name my mother insisted on. My father is a pretty stern man, very traditional Chinese. As far as I saw while growing up, she never resisted his authority much, at least not outwardly. But after I became an adult, and I started seeing my parents as people instead of just my parents, I realized how strong she really was. She just chose her battles.”

“And your name was one?”

“It seemed that way. She loved American literature, including Poe. She used to read ‘The Raven’ to my sister and me every year at Halloween until…” She trailed off momentarily.

I reached out and touched her hand. “We don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s fine.” She took a breath and continued. “She loved the poem ‘Annabel Lee.’ I asked her why once, and she said that the only thing greater than love was regret. At the time, I had no idea what she meant.”

“And now?”

“Now, I’m not sure. Maybe I have an idea, but it’s wispy and hard to grasp. All I know, is that it’s a hell of thing to tell a kid named after the damn poem, though, don’t you think?”

I laughed. “I do.”

She smiled for a moment with me, then it faded to something a little more serious. “There’s another piece to it, too, though. In the poem, the guy’s true love is whisked away to a tower by people in her family, and she dies of some kind of illness there. Instead of moving on, he just keeps loving her. He doesn’t give up, even though she’s dead.” She glanced at me. “What do you think of that?”

I considered. Then I said, “I admire his dedication, I suppose. No one likes a quitter.”

She nodded. “Tenacity is good.”

“But,” I said, “sometimes you’ve got to be able to let go of the past.”

She smiled again. “Are you good at that, Stef?”

I smiled back. “No. I’m horrible at it. You?”

“Probably worse.” A shadow seemed to flicker in her eyes, but she shrugged it away. “Anyway, my father was not going to allow his children to have names that were not Chinese. So according to him, my first name is On.” She pronounced it own. “It means peace.”

“But your birth certificate?”

She grinned. “My mother made sure that said Annabel.” She glanced down at her watch.

“Do you have to go?”

She pressed her lips together and nodded. “I’ve got a family thing.”

“Don’t sound so excited.”

She didn’t smile at that, only shrugged. “Sometimes I think ‘daughter’ in Chinese also means ‘duty.’”

“I wish I could say I understood,” I said, “but like I told you, both of my parents took off a long time ago.”

“And your grandmother never made you feel that way?”

“Never,” I said. “The only duty I ever felt regarding her was not to disappoint her. And that was more about me feeling that way than her demanding it.”

“Well, she was definitely not Chinese.”

“Pravda,” I said.

She crinkled her nose. “The old Soviet newspaper? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I’m impressed. But I didn’t mean that. It’s just the Czech word for ‘truth.’ My grandmother used to say it a lot. The truth was important to her.”

Anna stood. “Well, the truth is that if I’m late, my father will view it as disrespect. And that will make the entire visit even worse.”

I stood with her. “All right. See you soon.”

There was a moment of silence, one in which either of us could have initiated something. I didn’t know what – a kiss, a handshake, even a light touch on the shoulder. But the moment passed, and Anna nodded at me once. “Soon,” she repeated, and left.