Chapter Fifty-Nine

Mary Alice walked somberly through the hospital parking lot and got into her car. She dropped her forehead onto the steering wheel and closed her eyes. Her throat ached with the need to cry, but there were no tears left in her. In the six days since Charlie’s party, it seemed as if she’d done nothing but weep.

First over Bridge, now for Nancy and Ben.

Despondent, Mary Alice started her car and pointed it toward home. It was late afternoon, almost quitting time on the road crew. Officer Deane would be at her place soon and he would not be expecting her back today, so she wanted to be in plain sight when he arrived—one gun aimed at her neck was plenty for a lifetime.

She had been staying at Nancy’s place again to help her cope since Ben was admitted to the hospital two days earlier after blacking out several times. They were doing more tests to see if surgery on the tumor would even be possible, given its sensitive position in his brain. But today, Nancy had sent her home.

Mary Alice sighed deeply, thinking about Ben. They were bringing in a specialist from another hospital, but while the doctors were arguing, Ben’s health was deteriorating fast. The prognosis was bleak.

Mary Alice had tried to comfort Nancy, helping her through the days, minute by minute, as her friend had done for her three years ago. But getting Nancy to eat or sleep was next to impossible.

Not that Mary Alice had much use for those activities herself.

She missed Bridge with a physical longing that was all-consuming. Even in her darkest moments with Nancy, she still couldn’t forget him. Like Ben’s tumor, she feared her sorrow was untreatable, and she was destined to slowly waste away until there was nothing left of her but a shadow.

Like Ben.

Ben, the accountant.

Ben, who had the safe, comfortable, benign life of a man whose most dangerous activity was making a bad stock trade, or walking across Baldwin Avenue to get a sandwich at the deli for lunch.

Gazing up at the purple mountains towering over her small hometown, Mary Alice finally accepted the certain knowledge that had crept into her heart as softly and quietly as the clouds that drifted over the distant peaks.

A cop couldn’t be taken from this world any faster or more surely than Nancy’s Ben was being taken from her at this very moment.

Nice, gentle, safe Ben.