"What are you doing here, Sara?"
"Checking Eric Gahagan's credit card records," she replied without looking up from the sheets of paper spread out over the layout table. "I could ask the same of you."
"DB in the Charles," Carl replied by way of explanation, and she looked up at him. The day shift supervisor was leaned against the doorjamb, legs crossed at the ankle, head tipped to the side as he watched her.
"Suspicious circs?" Sara asked, and he shook his head.
"Looks accidental. Drowning - some kid with more brains than common sense went out on the ice on a dare."
"Harvard or MIT?" she asked, offering him a tight, humorless smile.
He snorted. "Berkelee."
"Huh." They looked at each other for a moment. "Go home, Carl."
"I'm already late enough to bring down Julia's wrath. A few more minutes won't make a difference." He entered the room, and her hairs stood on end as she silently begged him to leave her alone with the records. "Are you okay, Sara?"
"Sure," she said, and this time the smile was the thin-lipped one she used when she was trying not to throw up during a decomp. "Hot case."
They were both well aware that Eric Gahagan was under suspicion for embezzling no more than five thousand dollars, and they both avoided the issue by mutual unspoken agreement.
"Look, Julia's been nagging me to have you over for dinner again," Carl said, breaking the silence. "Come over tomorrow. It's lasagna night. It'll...give you something to do."
Now, the smile was genuine. "Lasagna?"
"Don't worry, Lizzie's going through a vegetarian phase." He moved as if to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it, and Sara bit back the sigh of relief. "Come by around six and I promise I won't let you leave until your shift starts."
"Carl..."
"Sara..." he mimicked. "Please?"
She blew air out through her lips in a mock-dramatic sigh. "All right. But only if you don't make Rob ask for my help with his physics homework again."
Carl had an easy, open smile that warmed his face considerably from its usual nondescript appearance. "Hey, he wanted to. He just needed encouragement."
Sara rolled her eyes. "I bet. He was terrified. Don't you remember being seventeen, Carl?"
"Nope," he responded without missing a beat. "I've repressed it."
"That ought to tell you something right there." She finally leaned back slightly in the chair, relaxing her shoulders ever so slightly. "I'll be there at six. Now, go home to your family."
He grinned, and touched her shoulder, a feather-light brush that was gone before she even felt it, and moved around the table to exit, stopping at the doorjamb once more and looking back at her over his shoulder. "Sara..." At her impassive look, he seemed to think better of it, and shook his head. "Never mind. Good night."
"Good night, Carl."
She heard more than saw him leave as she turned her attention back to the lists of information in front of her.
12/03/03, Belden's Jeweler's, $1,387...
~*~
Sara speared a piece of eggplant with her fork and dipped it in the sauce before bringing it to her mouth, chewing carefully to process the flavor.
"Well? What do you think?" Lizzie asked eagerly, leaning forward from where she was seated across the table.
It needed a bit more garlic, but Sara smiled and swallowed. "It's very good, Lizzie."
"Sweet," she said with a grin, and attacked her own food. "Dad and Rob think eggplant is disgusting, and Mom is never good for impartial opinions," she explained, mouth full of pasta.
"Lizzie," Julia Linden said reproachfully, and the teenager rolled her eyes and made a very deliberate swallow before addressing herself once again to Sara.
"Why did you decide to become a vegetarian, Sara?"
Sara's hand froze midway in the air for a split second, and then continued back to the plate, where she made her gestures carefully nonchalant as she separated noodle and cheese. "I - ah, it was a crime scene. Sort of. An experiment based on a crime scene - you know what, it's really not good dinner conversation."
Julia looked slightly green, Carl chuckled ruefully, and Lizzie looked fascinated. "Really. Cool."
Yeah, Sara's thoughts ran away from her, more like cold, so cold we had to huddle together for warmth, and -
"Sara, are you okay?" Carl asked, and she realized that the fork had been paused in front of her lips for entirely too long. Gamely, she stuffed the lasagna in her mouth and chewed, nodding in response.
"Lizzie, it's not really polite to interrogate guests at the dinner table," Julia chastised her daughter gently, and received an eye-roll once again.
"We read The Jungle in school," Lizzie chattered by way of explanation, tearing off a piece of garlic bread, chewing and swallowing while looking at her mother before continuing. "And we had to do all this research, and Marcy started it, really, when Dan did his presentation on the meat industry."
"Oh," was all Sara could reply, and wondered if she'd ever been that talkative as a teenager. Not about literature, that much was for certain, and there was only so long you could talk excitedly about organic chemistry before everyone else's eyes glazed over and you were only receiving polite smiles and nods in return.
Carl offered her a rueful smile. "So, Rob, do you have any physics homework tonight?"
Sara glared at him.
Rob, a gangly, painfully shy boy of seventeen, nearly choked on his beans. "I - uh - no - I mean, it's bio, genetics and evolution, and I already finished most of it, really - "
"You'd be better off with your dad for that," Sara said lightly, trying to calm the poor kid down before he had a stroke at the table. "He's the biologist."
"We'll take a look at it after dinner, Robbie," Carl promised him with a smile. Out of their father's line of sight, Sara watched Lizzie mouth "Robbie" at her brother and he blushed a deep crimson and stared determinedly at his plate.
The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed, and Sara looked down at her watch out of instinct. 6:45.
"Sara," Carl said with a raised eyebrow. "I know for a fact that there's nothing more pressing than the trace on the Holland case waiting for you, and that will take you all of ten minutes."
"I wasn't - " she began to deny quickly, and fixed a wobbly smile on her face. "Habit, I guess." How could she explain to the man who was the closest thing to a best friend she had in Boston that his perfect family was tearing her apart inside? To show him that she was trying to enjoy the evening, she speared a piece of cucumber and dabbed it in the vinaigrette, bringing it to her mouth with gusto.
There was a brief moment of silence, and then Lizzie was off and running again. "Mom, do you think we could go out tomorrow night and start to look for a dress for the Winter Ball? Marcy got hers at Filene's, and she doesn't even have a date yet, and Mark's already asked me, so I have even more of a reason to need a dress..."
No, Sara decided, she had never been that talkative. She took a sip of milk to forestall the slow burn in her stomach and wished that it were wine so that it could do something to block the memories, too.
~*~
"What is forensic entomology," Sara muttered at the television screen, and this time she had a wine glass gripped between her fingers. She poured half of the liquid down her throat in the time it took for one of the Jeopardy contestants to buzz in with the answer.
"Forensic entomology is the answer!" Alex said cheerfully, and the contestant grinned widely when he won eight hundred dollars. Kind of a gimme question for eight hundred, Sara thought bitterly.
Carl's head jerked up from the kitchen table when he heard Alex's voice, and he looked across the length of the double room at Sara. She returned his gaze with a steady look that was designed to convince him that she was fine.
"Ewwww," Lizzie squealed from where she was curled into the corner of the couch. "They do that? Have you ever done that?"
That necessitated another gulp of wine. If this was the topic of conversation much longer, she wouldn't be going to work sober tonight. "Not really. There are people who specialize in it."
"Have you ever worked with one?"
Nope, definitely not going to work sober.
"Lizzie!" Carl called from the table. "Don't you have homework?"
"Just some Spanish," she called back.
"Next commercial break, I want you at the table and doing it," her father responded firmly, and Alex chose that moment to announce that Jeopardy would be right back. Sara closed her eyes in relief.
Lizzie sighed dramatically and pushed up from the couch to go and get her backpack.
"Rob, I think you're okay for now. Call me if you need anything," Carl told his son, gripping his shoulder firmly before coming over to take Lizzie's vacant seat on the couch. "I'm sorry."
"What for?" Sara twirled the stem of the nearly empty wine glass between her fingers, focusing on the straw colored liquid as it clung to the inside of the glass. It had an almost hypnotic quality to its movements, and before she knew it, her vision was blurred and the white wine had become champagne, raised in a toast -
"Lizzie, she..." Carl paused and regrouped to try again.
"It's okay, Carl," she told him, setting the wine down on the coffee table, suddenly unwilling to look at it. "I'm fine." The commercial switched to cute puppies sliding across kitchen floors to the tune of an annoying pet food jingle. "I'm fine," she repeated, whispering almost to herself.
"Whew," Julia said cheerfully, re-entering the family room from the small side room that served as an office. "I'm so sorry, but I had to take that call. A mother panicked about her son's B+." She shook her head with a chuckle. "You try reassuring a mother that a B+ on a French test in eighth grade is not going to ruin his chances of going to Harvard."
Sara laughed, a genuine sound of amusement, and Carl relaxed as his wife plopped down on the couch beside him, tucking her feet up under her and leaning slightly into her husband. Julia, Sara was convinced, was a genuine modern-day saint with the ability to make everyone around her instantly at ease.
"Ah, I see I missed the end of the forensics category," Julia observed as Jeopardy came back on. "Maybe the final question will be about France and I can trump the two CSIs," she said with a mischievous grin.
As it turned out, the final question was about African politics, something none of them were at all familiar with - and apparently none of the contestants, either. They were all docked points, and in the end, the contestant who had answered the entomology question was the winner - by eight hundred dollars. Forensic entomology had saved him. Alex and he agreed that yes, it really was ironic that the last question he'd answered, and about such an obscure subject, would win him the game...
Carl changed the channel.