Westville Police Chief Oren Carmichael had been a surprise. Oren, an uber hunk with broad shoulders in a fitted uniform, would never be for Hester and vice versa. But she fell and he fell and now, here they were. Hester couldn’t help but wonder what Ira would have made of this. She liked to think that he would be happy for her, the same way she would have been happy for Ira if he’d ended up with Cheryl, Oren’s still-sumptuous ex-wife who even now posted pics of herself in bikinis—though on the other hand, maybe Hester would have haunted Ira like Fruma-Sarah in the dream sequence in Fiddler on the Roof.
She’d want Ira to be happy with someone new. Wouldn’t Ira want the same for her? She hoped so. Ira could get so jealous, and Hester had been a bit of a flirt back in the day. Still, Hester was deliriously happy with Oren. They were ready to make more of a commitment, but at their ages, what did that mean? Kids? Hahaha. Marriage? Who needed it? Moving in together? Not really. She liked her own space. She didn’t want a man around all the time, even a wonderful one like Oren. Did that mean on some level she loved him any less? Hard to say. Hester loved Oren as much as possible, but she didn’t want to love him like she was eighteen years old, or even forty.
But there was one truth that constantly stung: The relationship with Oren was physical—more physical, though it would never be fair to compare, than with Ira. She felt guilty about that. Her and Ira’s sex life had waned. That was normal, of course. You’re building a life, two careers, you’re pregnant, you’re raising little kids, you’re exhausted, you have no privacy. It was a story too often repeated. But it’d still upset Ira. “I miss the passion,” he had said, and though she’d dismissed it as normal “man wants more sex” manipulation, she wondered about that.
One night, not long before David died in the car crash, Ira had been sitting in the dark with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He rarely drank and when he did, it went right to his head. She had come in the room and just stood behind him. She didn’t think he even knew she was there.
“If I died and you start dating again,” he’d said, “would you want your sex life with a new man to be what we have?”
She hadn’t answered. But she hadn’t forgotten either.
Maybe Ira wouldn’t be happy about what was going on in his old bed. Or maybe he would understand. When you’re young, you expect too much from a relationship; one day, you look back and understand that.
The phone trilled again.
Oren asked, “Verdict?”
Earlier, she and Oren had been discussing the Richard Levine murder case over dinner.
“Either you believe in the system,” Oren, as a law enforcement officer, had commented, “or you don’t.”
“I believe in our system,” she said.
“We both know what your client did wasn’t self-defense.”
“We don’t know anything of the sort.”
“If he gets off, does that mean our system doesn’t work?”
“It may mean the opposite,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“It may mean our system has the flexibility to work.”
Oren considered that. “Levine had his reasons. Is that what you’re saying?”
“In a sense.”
“Every murderer thinks they have a reason to kill.”
“True,” Hester said.
“And you think it’s okay to kill someone for that?”
“Only when it comes to Nazis,” she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “When it comes to Nazis, I have no problem with it at all.”
Hester sat up in bed now and looked at her phone. “Not the verdict,” Hester said. She hit the answer button and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“You alone?” Wilde asked.
She didn’t like the quake in his tone. “No.”
“Can you be?”
She mouthed to Oren that she was going into another room. Oren nodded that he understood. When she was in the living room with the bedroom door shut behind her, she said, “Okay, what’s wrong?”
“I have a hypothetical for you.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“Doubtful.”
“Go on.”
“Let’s say hypothetically I found a dead body.”
“I knew I wasn’t going to like this. Where?”
“In a private home where I was not supposed to be.”
Wilde explained about his search for his cousin and how it ended up on the doorstep of the McAndrews residence.