On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
I was outside their gate in twenty minutes.
White tents on the lawn. Pastel shirts between clipped hedges. Painted eggs going into wicker baskets on the steps. Thirty-odd people holding drinks in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
Everything expensive. Everything clean.
I went up those steps two at a time and before I got to the door Camille Ostrand came out of it with a champagne flute in one hand.
She put her other hand flat on my chest.
Not a shove. She stopped me the way you stop a delivery driver, and she left it there.
And she said it at full volume, so that the entire lawn heard her:
She’s not your daughter today. She’s my son’s wife. Go home.
Nobody on that grass moved. A man in a linen jacket lowered his glass and did not put it down.
Not one of thirty people said anything.
She leaned forward slightly, her hand still on my chest, and said:
Get back in your truck, Cormac. Well?
What I never told that family, in two years of Sunday dinners, is that before I retired I spent twenty-two years as a federal investigator.
Sutton knew I had worked for the government and had decided at some point that it was something to do with permits, because that was funnier at a table. I let him have it. There is nothing you learn in twenty-two years that is more useful than being underestimated by somebody who talks a lot.
I pushed past her.
The living room stopped in pieces. Somebody’s fork touched china once.
