Returning to the seawall, Laurie ran through a stiff crosswind that ruffled her clothing and stung her skin. It was painful to run in, but she refused to turn back. It was a challenge she welcomed, her lungs bursting, her muscles screaming in pain as she pushed through the invisible barrier.
She kidded herself she didn’t know where she was heading and let the lie play out even as she reached the turn onto Rebecca Whitehead’s street. It was beyond foolish, but she ran down the road and stopped two houses away. She didn’t know what she hoped to achieve. Any sign of David being here would devastate her, but the masochistic side of her hoped to see him. She wanted the pain of not knowing to subside, and if that meant catching him in the act, then so be it.
For one ludicrous moment, she even considered climbing the stairs to the porch and ringing the bell. She wondered if Rebecca would know who she was, and if her eyes would betray her. Laughing to herself, she turned and retraced her route back to the seawall and charged again into the wind.
Returning inland, Laurie passed the spot on Sealy Avenue where the GPS signal on Grace’s Fitbit had cut out. She imagined a passing truck stopping and bundling Grace inside. For those practiced enough, it was a simple enough maneuver, and in the darkness, with little traffic, it was possible that it could have gone unnoticed.
By the time she returned to the Harrington house, she was forced to stop. Her running had been erratic tonight, her speed dictated by the power of the wind and the urgency of her thoughts, rather than her reliable steady pace. The lights inside the house were off and she hoped Glen and Sandra were able to have some sort of rest. Tomorrow was going to be difficult for all of them, their grief tempered by the ongoing murder investigation, which Glen was about to become directly involved in.
Laurie walked away from the house, waiting for her breath to return. She’d put to the back of her mind Filmore’s concern over Glen Harrington’s future, but now it returned and left a bitter taste in her mouth. Glen hadn’t technically done anything illegal, and Laurie’s years in law enforcement had taught her not to take a moralistic high ground, but the fact that he was having relations with young women the same age as his daughter was definitely a red flag she had to investigate. It might not be a motive for him to kill his daughter, but what if his attraction to the young women was related to an unnatural obsession with his daughter? Laurie had seen it before, and she needed to find out more about Glen Harrington. As far as she was concerned, his reputation could be damned. It would be easy to focus all their attention on Frank Randall, but at that moment she thought Glen Harrington was a worthy secondary suspect.
That notwithstanding, she had sympathy for the family as a whole. At the very least, Glen’s dalliances would inadvertently reflect on Sandra, and would cheapen Grace’s death. Laurie wished there was something she could do to stop that happening, but press management wasn’t her job.
She returned toward the gulf, upping her pace until she was running again, thoughts of Grace’s death bringing back memories of Milly. As her legs found a steady rhythm, she wondered for the millionth time what Milly would be like now. She’d probably be taking her first steps, and uttering her first words. It would never get any easier to accept that she’d never even taken a breath, that her little body had ceased to live in her womb. With all the monstrosities in the world, it still seemed brutally unfair that her little girl could be taken away without even enjoying the simple act of filling her lungs.
By the time Laurie reached her apartment, she didn’t know if the salt on her face was from sweat or tears. Try as she might, she’d been unable to fight the urge of her mind to take her back to that time. She recalled the varying advice she’d been given after the stillbirth, the hardest of all being that she could try again, as if Milly had been some kind of failed experiment. It was hard enough that she had been stillborn, but for her girl to be treated as if she hadn’t really existed was the cruelest thing of all. She and David had named their little girl and buried her, and now they both grieved for her like all parents grieved for their children. That she had died before her birth didn’t mean a thing, and Laurie would honor her for the rest of her life.
“Right,” she said to herself, as her pulse rate plummeted. She tried to refocus as she climbed the stairs, and only heard the sound from within her apartment once she’d opened the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
Laurie would have reached for her gun had she been carrying, and it took her a few seconds to realize that would have been a mistake. David had returned early and was in the living room with his earphones on. He jumped up on seeing her, his hand to his chest as he said, “God! You scared the crap out of me.”
All the tension of the last few days hit Laurie at once, heightened by her recent thoughts of Milly. Seeing David sent a wave of conflicting emotions through her. She wanted to embrace him, to seek comfort in his arms, at the same time wanting to hurt him for the way he’d been making her feel. “I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow,” she said, hearing the coldness in her words, wanting to take them back but not knowing how.
“Last-minute change of mind. Bad weather brewing. You haven’t seen it on the news?”
The weather forecast had been background news for the last few days, but she hadn’t paid it much attention. Already this hurricane season, islanders had twice received warnings about storms hitting the island, only for both storms to veer away to sea. Storm and hurricane notices were a way of life in Galveston. The Great Storm of 1900 was the deadliest natural disaster in US history, and Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Ike were still recent memories, the latter in particular causing incredible damage to Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula. Laurie had stayed put during Ike, and could still recall the dread of being on the island during the storm, and the harrowing days that followed without power or facilities.
“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” she said.
“Who knows? They say it might be changing course. They ain’t going to be taking any chances, so you’re stuck with me earlier than you thought.”
He was trying to be cute, but a few minutes ago Laurie had run past Rebecca Whitehead’s house and was in no mood to play happy couples with him, even if the lure of his arms felt momentarily welcome. “I need to shower,” she said, leaving him looking confused as she went to the bathroom.
Running the shower, she sat on the toilet and allowed herself to cry again. Instead of easing her tension, the run had somehow compounded everything. The release of her tears gave her some perspective, though, and she realized that in all the commotion of finding Grace’s body and interviewing Frank, she hadn’t really given any thought to how today’s events would affect David. His estranged father was now a suspect in another murder, and images of Grace Harrington would naturally bring with it devastating memories of his mother. It didn’t matter how angry she was with him, he needed to know and she needed to be the one to tell him.
She showered first, feeling sluggish as she noted signs of weight gain around her middle and on her arms. Her training was haphazard at the moment, and with the current investigation she wasn’t eating the right things. She ran her hand over the slight curve of her belly and found it difficult to believe it had once protruded so hugely from her body, full of life.