a favor. Look for any other explanation. Something isn’t right about this. Vince is crazy about your mom. He always has been. Just give him the benefit of the doubt until you can prove otherwise.”
I wasn’t sure what to think when she said Vince had always been crazy about my mom. Like always always, or since my dad died always? But she distracted me with her next statement.
“Maybe he’s working on something,” Kate said.
“He’s retired,” I said automatically. And then I thought about what my mother had said about him going through my dad’s old boxes.
“Cops never retire,” she said. “Not really. They just stop putting on the uniform.”
Retirement had been hard on my dad. He’d loved being a cop more than anything in the world. I’d never realized until his retirement how much he hadn’t been there through my childhood. When he wasn’t on shift, he was working off-duty details or doing surveillance. He lived and breathed police work, to the detriment of everything else.
As a child, I hadn’t realized what it had done to my mother. And as much as Aunt Scarlet liked to think I was a chip off the old block on the Holmes side of the family, I realized I had a lot of my own mother in me too. My dad had been a cop at work and at home, and the mother I knew in my childhood was not the mother I knew now.
She’d been a buttoned-up accountant and so uptight I wasn’t sure how she kept from popping. At least that’s how she’d been around my dad. But Phoebe and I had gotten glimpses of a wild and creative woman beneath the shoulder pads and pantyhose when it was just us and she was able to let her hair down a little. But when my dad was around, or she thought he might be coming home from shift, she made sure the house was spotless and that we were out of his hair so he could rest.
I think my mother only started to discover herself after my father died. Or maybe she’d known all along and just chosen to keep it hidden because she knew he wouldn’t like it. My father was a hard man—a straight arrow and a rule follower. Everyone always said that’s what made him a good cop. As his daughter, I had mixed feelings on the subject. He did have a dry sense of humor I enjoyed, and we didn’t really bond until his retirement, but only when there was a game on.
I don’t remember ever having any heart-to-hearts with my father. My mother took care of the milestones in a teenage girl’s life for both me and my sister. But I was always the luckier of the two of us. Phoebe was five years younger than me, and he wanted even less to do with her. Phoebe had taken his wishes to heart, and she’d escaped from Whiskey Bayou minutes after graduating from high school. She hadn’t come back until his funeral.
I could understand what Kate meant when she said they didn’t stop being cops just because they hung up the uniform. After my dad’s retirement, he was either in his office poring over old case files or sitting in front of the TV watching sports.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Can I talk now?” Scarlet asked, unlocking her mouth key.
“You just did,” I said.
“Huh,” she said. “How about that? Those keys are tricky.”
Kate smiled and sat up. “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see what I can find out,” I said. “That’s all I can do. The priority is finding Vince. He’s been gone two days.”
“She could file a missing persons,” Kate said.
“I think she’d rather die than do that,” I said. “I don’t think Mom would be too keen on letting the whole police department her new husband was gone. I just need to find him and bring him back. Once that’s done they can work it out between themselves. I’m going to check Dad’s office and the shed behind the house to see if I can find any clues to where he’s gone. But not today. I’m going to grab a laptop and then Scarlet and I going home. I’m stick-a-fork-in-me done.”
“That makes me think of chicken-fried steak,” Scarlet said. “Maybe we could have chicken-fried steak with white gravy for dinner. And mashed potatoes.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“That ought to do it,” she said, and walked out of the room.