More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,47

he could get into bed all right. He hated it, but he would have hated being found in a heap someplace even worse.” She looked at my reflection straight in the eye. “I never could talk him out of anything he’d decided. I guess he decided he was going outside anyway, stubborn old man.”

“I guess.” It seemed to me that Petra needed to believe that she’d done everything she could to look after Garrison. Divorce or no, she cared about him.

Maybe Petra felt she’d showed me too much of herself. As the machine slowed and turned itself off, she announced, “Well, now that I’ve satisfied the letter of the law, maybe I’ll violate the spirit of it by having an early Bloody Mary as a reward.”

She stepped off the belt with care, but marched briskly out of the room without a glance back at me.

I rested my head on my knees, letting the tension that had built up during our talk dissipate. Hard enough, to offer someone condolences, worse to watch her struggle between the desire to talk about it and the urge to maintain composure before a total stranger.

Not a total stranger, I reminded myself. And she certainly didn’t mind chewing over my discomfort over Duncan.

Shoot, Emma, you can’t even let the woman have that much distraction? It didn’t cost you anything. A lot of folks of that generation don’t like to talk about personal things, emotional things, even as they’re trying to deal with them. Imagine what you’d feel if you’d done everything you thought you could to look after someone, and they still…

But…Garrison had told her he was going to bed, had actually gone to bed, but then got back up? Sometime close to nine-thirty? It made no sense to me, for all Petra was willing to chalk it up to his stubbornness.

I turned around, and seeing the dopey, puzzled face that stared back at me from the mirror, scowled. Then I composed myself and put on my best game face, the neutral one that Nolan, my trainer, was trying to get me to wear, even when I got hit or hurt during sparring. It took some effort, because surprise is a strong reflex, but I was getting better at it.

Following the lead my face was setting me, I began to shadow box, throwing lefts and rights, then working in a couple of combinations of threes and fours. Slipping imaginary punches, bobbing, weaving, I was starting to lose my self-consciousness and began to throw in some kicks as well. Then I really let myself go for a minute, paying attention to my footwork, trying to keep loose, and trying to form planned combinations and then execute them, all at once.

Duncan was there, in the doorway.

I saw him as I laid out a sidekick. I’ve learned, the hard way, to always look at your target when you are attacking, and although my balance was pretty good, the sight of him watching me—how long had he been there?—threw me for a loop. I fumbled a little, but thought, hell with him, and managed to follow through with a fairly convincing back kick. I decided I wasn’t up to ignoring him while I did more, and cooled down again with simpler combinations. I caught sight of my face and was impressed by the serious lack of humor. Now that was a game face.

“That’s new. Lotta stuff new, about you. Looks good on you.”

I wasn’t getting dragged into this, but I also bit my tongue before I asked him whether he wasn’t keeping an eye on me full-time now. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Why didn’t he just go away? If I could have wiped him away, along with all the memories of our relationship, I would have.

“Scott just left, if you were looking for him.” I didn’t stop my boxing, and used all my focus to ignore him.

“I am looking for Scott. I meant it, though. It suits you.”

I kept working. “I’m pretty much the same as ever.” But that was mostly a lie: I was changing. I was just contradicting him for the sake of it.

He nodded and left. I kept throwing punches, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore; I wanted to go up to my room and hide under the covers, but I didn’t.

The cocktail party had already started and, as usual, was a mob scene. The drinks were ridiculously overpriced, filled with weak liquor, and there were only four harassed bartenders to cater