Cavanaugh Strong. Marie Ferrarella
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whistled. “Wow, that’s a lot of years,” he estimated.
“How would you know?” Noelle challenged. “You never met my grandmother.”
“Just a calculated guess,” he answered, backing off. “So what happened? Did he have a heart attack while they were out, or...?”
Noelle pushed the keyboard back on her desk. So much for catching up. She wasn’t going to have any peace until Cavanaugh had the whole story. She had to remember to practice her poker face more often when she was around him.
“They have a standing ‘date’ every other Thursday— Not like that,” she interjected, noting the triumphant look on her partner’s face. “They just go out to eat. Anyway, she picks him up every other Thursday to get him out of that depressing senior retirement home he’s living in.” Since she was stuck telling him this story, she decided to throw in a couple of more details. “Lucy says that ever since Henry moved in there, he’s been behaving like a broken man who was just marking time before he died.”
Duncan inclined his head. He could see that happening. “Well, technically, we’re all just marking time.”
Noelle frowned. That was not what she wanted to hear. “I’d prefer you keeping your cheery comments to yourself, Cavanaugh,” she told him. “Now, do you want me to tell you about this or not?”
He gestured grandly for her to continue with her narrative. “Go ahead.”
Noelle banked down her impatience, deciding that Cavanaugh wasn’t being deliberately annoying, it just seemed to be something that came naturally to him.
“Anyway, when she got there yesterday and knocked on his door, he didn’t answer. After a few minutes, she gave up being polite and just walked in.” She could just see her grandmother sailing full steam ahead into the room—and then stopping dead in her tracks once she realized what had happened. Her heart ached for Lucy. “She found him lying on his bed, dead. He was cold,” she added, “so he’d probably died a few hours before she got there.”
“Had he been ill?” The way Cavanaugh asked the question told her that his interest was clearly piqued. Boredom was really doing a number on the man, she couldn’t help thinking.
“No, actually rather amazingly, Henry was in excellent health, especially when you consider that when he’d moved to the retirement home, it was because he’d had surgery and wasn’t doing all that well on his own. According to Lucy, his recovery progressed rather slowly. Certainly slower than he was happy about. At the time, he’d needed help doing almost everything. It had to be hard for a proud man like him. But Lucy said he did get better eventually.”
“If that’s the case, why did he stay at the home?” Duncan asked. “Why didn’t he just go back to living in his house?”
“Because it was too late,” she answered. “Henry had to sell his house in order to afford living at the retirement home.” Her dismissive laugh was totally devoid of any humor. “Those little cramped rooms don’t come cheap,” she added.
The details surrounding going to live in a retirement home were something he knew nothing about. As far as he could tell, all the older members of his family were still going strong, including Shamus, the family patriarch who had been instrumental in bringing the two factions of the family together.
“How old was he?” Duncan asked.
“Seventy-nine.” She waited, expecting Duncan to make a crack about Henry having one foot in the grave or something equally as tasteless—after all, how could someone as vital looking as Duncan even understand what an older person felt? But her partner merely nodded, as if he were taking down information from a witness to a crime. Noelle was pleasantly surprised. Maybe he wasn’t so shallow after all.
“So he’s a healthy seventy-nine-year-old who just suddenly expires.”
“That about covers it all,” she agreed, nodding. She’d met Henry a couple of times and had liked the older gentleman, but she couldn’t begin to imagine how Lucy had to feel, losing someone who she’d known for so very long. “What makes it worse for Lucy is that she told me that this is the second person she knew who died in the last six months.”
From his perspective, Duncan came to the only logical conclusion that he could. “Is she worried about being next?”
“No!” Noelle cried sharply, then relented, softening her tone as she said, “Well, maybe. What she really is, I think, is lonely. Her circle of friends is growing smaller and I guess it’s making her rethink her life.”
“Missed opportunities?” he guessed.
But Noelle shook her head. “I don’t think so. Lucy never talks about things like opportunities she felt she missed out on. For the most part, she’s always been all about the moment, not the past. That was why seeing her like that this morning really kind of threw me.”
He completely understood her reaction and it was rather reassuring to know that his partner actually was capable of these sorts of feelings. There were times, especially in the beginning, when he’d felt he’d been partnered with a robot or the latest version of someone’s rendering of artificial intelligence.
“She’s your grandmother, right?” he asked. When Noelle nodded in response, he added, “And you said she raised you.”
“She did.”
Personally, Duncan couldn’t imagine what that had to have been like. Growing up, he’d had both parents around, not to mention the rest of the mob scene. He was one of seven brothers and sisters, so he’d never had even a moment when he had felt lonely—no matter how much he’d wanted to on more than a couple of occasions.
Duncan got to the crux of his question. “Why do you call her Lucy?”
“Because it’s her name,” Noelle replied with a straight face. “And because she wouldn’t have answered if I’d called her Grandma or Nana or any of those other traditional labels. She once told me that hearing them applied to her would make her feel old. Since she was my whole world—when she didn’t have to be—I would have agreed to anything she wanted from me.
“Besides,” she went on to say, “it seemed pretty much like a reasonable request to me. Actually, at five, anything an adult asks you to do seems rather reasonable at the time. I never questioned her preference. To be honest, I was so happy to have someone who actually wanted to take care of me I would have called her anything she wanted me to call her.”
Noelle saw the light that entered her partner’s deep green eyes and she quickly headed off what she assumed was his conclusion before he could allow it to grow and flourish.
“My parents didn’t abuse me, if that’s what you’re thinking. They just really didn’t notice me very much at all. I was sheltered, fed, clothed and taken in for the necessary shots that eliminated a bunch of childhood diseases—”
Duncan refrained from saying that the same was usually done for a household pet dog. He had no desire to open up any of his partner’s old wounds on the outside chance that they might have actually healed. Instead, he said, “But Lucy took more than just a passing interest in you.”
Noelle smiled and he noted, not for the first time, that it rather lit up the whole room.
“Exactly,” she said. “So I want to be able to be there for her whenever I can.” She glanced over toward the small office where Jamieson, their supervisor, was sitting, apparently deeply engrossed in the telephone conversation he was having. “Think Jamieson would mind if I took a couple of hours personal time to attend the funeral with Lucy?” she asked.
For the most part, the lieutenant was an easygoing man. He didn’t act as if he had something to prove; neither was he trying to make a reputation on the backs of his detectives.
“I don’t see why he would. It’s not like we’re exactly drowning in work,” Duncan pointed out. And then he