of past.”
“Probably not.”
“Then what?” He paused. “You lost someone close to you, didn’t you?”
She gazed at the moon, sparkling on the swimming pool. “That’s a rather obvious guess, detective.”
“But true.”
Her sigh stirred the air between them.
“Yes. True,” she answered. “It’s a long, sad story that I’m sure would bore you senseless within minutes.”
“I have a pretty high bore quotient. I’ve been known to sit perfectly motionless on stakeouts for hours.”
She glanced at him, then away again. “A simple background check would tell you this in five seconds but I suppose I’ll go ahead and spare you the trouble. I lost my husband seven years ago. I’m a widow, detective.”
Chapter Seven
For several moments, he could only stare at her, speechless.
She was a widow. He would never have guessed that, not in a million years, though he wasn’t quite sure why he found the knowledge so astonishing—perhaps because she normally had such a sunny attitude for someone who must have lost her husband at a young age.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you to talk about something you obviously didn’t want to discuss, especially after you’ve done nothing but help Josh and me.”
“It’s okay, Ross. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t wanted you to know. I don’t talk about it often, only because it was a really dark and difficult time in my past and I don’t like to dwell on it. I prefer instead to enjoy the present and look ahead to the future. That’s all.”
“What happened?” he asked after a long moment.
He sensed it was something traumatic. That might help explain her empathy and understanding of what Josh was dealing with. He braced himself for it but was completely unprepared for her quiet answer.
“He shot himself.”
Ross stared, trying to make out her delicate features in the dim moonlight. “Was it a hunting accident?”
The noise she made couldn’t be mistaken for a laugh. “No. It was no accident. Chris was…troubled. We were married for five years. The first two were wonderful. He was funny and smart and brilliantly creative. The kind of person who always seems to have a crowd around him.
“After those first two years, we bought a home in Austin,” she went on. “I was working at a high school there and Chris was a photographer with an ad agency. Everything seemed so perfect. We were starting to talk about starting a family and then…everything started to change. He started to change.”
“Drugs? Alcohol?”
“No. Nothing like that. He became moody and withdrawn at times and obsessively jealous, and then he would have periods where he would stay up for days at a time, would shoot roll after roll of film, of nothing really. The pattern on the sofa cushions, a single blade of grass. He once spent six hours straight trying to capture a doorknob in the perfect light. Eventually he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, with a little manic depression thrown in for added fun.”
Ross frowned. He knew enough about mental illness to know it couldn’t have been an easy road for either of them.
“You stayed with him?”
“He was my husband,” she said simply. “I loved him.”
“You must have been young.”
“We married when I was twenty-four. I didn’t feel young at the time but in retrospect, I was a baby. I suppose I must have been young enough, anyway, that I was certain I could fix anything.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“Not this. It was bigger than either of us. That’s still so hard for me to admit, even seven years later. For three years, he tried every possible combination of meds but nothing could keep the demons away for long. Finally Chris’s condition started a downward spiral and no matter what we tried, we couldn’t seem to slow the momentum. On his twentyeighth birthday, he gave up the fight. He returned home early from work, set his camera on a tripod with an automatic timer, took out a Ruger he had bought illegally on the street a week earlier and shot himself in our bedroom.”
Where Julie would be certain to find him, he realized grimly. Ross had seen enough self-inflicted gunshot wounds when he had been a cop to know exactly what kind of scene she must have walked into.
He knew her husband had been mentally ill and couldn’t have been thinking clearly, but suddenly Ross was furious at the man for leaving behind such horror and anguish for his pretty, devoted young wife to remember the rest of her life. He hoped she could remember past that traumatic final scene and the three rough years preceding it to the few good ones they had together. “I’m so sorry, Julie.”
He wanted to take it away, to make everything all better for her, but here was another person in his life whose pain he couldn’t fix.
The unmistakable sincerity in Ross’s voice warmed the small, frozen place inside Julie that would always grieve for the bright, creative light extinguished far too soon.
She lifted her gaze to his. “It was a terrible time in my life. I can’t lie about that. The grief was so huge and so awful, I wasn’t sure I could survive it. But I endured by hanging on to the things I still had that mattered—my faith, my family, my friends. I also reminded myself every single day, both before his death and in those terrible dark days after, that Chris wasn’t responsible for the choices he made. I know he loved me and wouldn’t have chosen that course, if he could have seen any other choice in his tormented mind.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time and she couldn’t help wondering what he was thinking.
“Is that why you work with troubled kids?” he finally asked, his voice low. “To make sure none of them feels like that’s the only way out for them?”
She sighed. “I suppose that’s part of it. I started out working on a suicide hotline in the evenings and realized I was making an impact. It helped me move outside myself at a time I desperately needed that and I discovered I was good at listening. So I left teaching and went back to school to earn a graduate degree.”
“Do you miss teaching?” he asked.
“Sometimes. But when I was teaching six different classes, with thirty kids each, I didn’t have the chance for the one-on-one interaction I have now. I can always go back to teaching if I want. I still might someday, if that seems the right direction for me. I haven’t ruled anything out yet.”
“Do you ever wonder if anything you do really makes a difference?”
How in the world had he become so cynical? she wondered. Was it his years as a police officer? Or something before then? It saddened her, whatever the cause.
“I have to give back somehow. I’ve always thought of it as trying to shine as much light as I can, even if it only
