“I’ll be back,” he promised, and paused long enough to brush a kiss across her temple. And then he left, the lie still hanging in the air between them as the door slammed shut behind him.
*
The night had been short. Too short.
Thomas pedaled his stationary bike as if his life depended on it, faster and faster and faster in his makeshift gym in his garage. Breathing hard and sweating like the proverbial pig, he kept at it as his muscles began to ache in protest. A towel was draped around his neck and he stared at a flat-screen he’d mounted over his workbench. But he wasn’t watching the news as the anchors and reporters went on and on about the coming storm and traffic conditions. It was all just background noise over the steady hum of the bike and the pounding of his heart. Instead, his thoughts were turning as fast as the wheels of the bike. He pushed himself, his legs pumping even harder, the bike’s wheels spinning madly while he was going nowhere. Much like the damned case, he thought.
He’d stayed up past midnight with the old files, making notes trying to tie the murder of Merritt Margrove to the massacre twenty years earlier. He’d always believed that Jonas McIntyre was guilty, that he’d slaughtered his family in a wild rage and deserved to rot in prison. Now, though, Thomas had doubts, at least some doubts.
And the case was getting to him. He usually slept like a log, but when a case was eating at him as this one did, his subconscious always interrupted his sleep and played nasty games with him. Last night, Thomas had spent five fitful hours tossing and turning, his dreams vivid. Images of dead bodies, all brutally slaughtered and dripping in blood, had interrupted any slumber he’d hoped to find. He’d finally given up trying to get any shut-eye, thrown on his sweats and worked out his demons in his home gym, which was really the second bay, the space that Daphne’s car had once occupied.
On his forty-minute ride, he’d learned the Portland Trail Blazers had lost their third game in a row, plans for construction of a new I-5 bridge over the Columbia between Portland to the south and Vancouver, Washington, to the north were once again stalled, and another winter storm with “blizzard-like” conditions was on its way, bringing with it what looked like a white Christmas for most of the state.
As a commercial for a local car dealership came onto the screen, Thomas hit his goal of forty minutes and climbed off the bike. He swiped at his face and dropped to mats he’d placed over the floor, positioned near the furnace.
He’d left it as it was for a while, until he’d learned that she was moving to Austin, Texas, to be with a guy she’d met online. Then he’d decided he couldn’t stand the void of that bay with its oil stains from her vehicle still visible. The emptiness had been a constant reminder of what he’d lost.
Stopping himself at that thought, Thomas finished his routine, fifty curls, a hundred push-ups and then a plank that he held until his entire body trembled. Afterward he wiped the sweat from his face.
He hadn’t lost Daphne, he reminded himself. The simple truth was that he’d practically pushed her out the door. She’d accused him of having a mistress in the form of his job, told him she couldn’t compete with his obsession with his work and was tired of trying. There had been tears in her eyes and his as she’d hit the accelerator and backed her Honda out of the garage on August morning three years ago.
She’d never looked back.
He still remembered the shimmering heat rising from the driveway, the leaves of the saplings she’d planted two years earlier already dried and falling, the lawn brown. He’d stood on the front porch and heard the garage door rolling down and landing with a final clunk just as she’d thrown the garage remote out the open window of her Honda. It landed with the sound of plastic scraping against asphalt, then skated across the street as she’d driven around the corner and out of his life.
Angry with himself, with her and the whole damned world, he’d retrieved the shattered remote.
Then he’d waited.
He’d called.
She hadn’t picked up.
Texts and emails had gone unanswered.
He’d heard from a mutual friend that she’d met a guy online and moved to Austin, Texas. When the holidays came and went, he finally faced the fact that she wasn’t coming back and he’d bought himself the stationary bike, assembled it where it now stood and had used it almost every day since.
He’d added the floor mats and speed bag, even a heavy punching bag that hung in the corner over him, creating a veritable one-man gym that he figured was better than cigarettes, black coffee, rye whiskey, and soulless one-night stands, though, for a time, he’d indulged in all. Hence the fling with Sheila Keegan. He couldn’t help but smile when he thought of her. Smart, sexy, fun, Sheila had helped pull him out of angry self-isolation and get over Daphne. Their affair had run hot and heavy for over six months.