Free Father Confessor (J McNee series) by Russel D McLean Page B

looking through old photograph albums. Had them spread out on the living room table. Leaning forward, looking at grainy images from the past.
    I sat beside her. She didn’t look up.
    She pointed to one image. A young-looking Ernie – he’d been a handsome chap back then, with dark, wavy hair and a clean-shaven, angular face that accentuated those sharp eyes his daughter had inherited – with his wife and daughter, sitting on a wall, rolling countryside stretching out behind them. Susan was somewhere around five years old, with an insane bowl haircut and the mischievous look of a child who was going to break all the rules she could get away with.
    She said, “That’s how I think of him. Even when he got old, when we hadn’t seen each other for a while, I’d always be surprised for a moment when he didn’t look how I expected.”
    I reached over and touched her hand.
    She used her free hand to turn the page.
    More images. Family holidays. Smiles. That grainy quality of the cheap, 1970’s camera.
    Memories.
    Everyone had them.
    I kept mine locked away. For reasons of my own.
    Susan said, “You ever think about your parents?”
    I studied the photographs intensely. “How’s your mother doing?”
    She smiled, somewhat sadly, as though at a distant disappointment. “Well as can be expected. Surrounded by sisters and nieces.”
    “You’re not with them?”
    “I stayed a while. Needed to get away.”
    “Do you want me to – ?”
    She said, “Stay,” and turned her hand so she could grip mine. We stayed like that a long time.
    She told me about each photograph. Every memory it evoked. She spoke slowly, as much for herself as for me. Sometimes she’d get this smile playing about her lips, but it would fall away fast as though in deference to the present.
    Only later would I realise that she didn’t cry.
    ###
    The night was drawing in. I had ordered Chinese from the Mandarin Garden on South Tay Street. Gave me an excuse to take a drive and collect.
    I needed to sort my head. Figure where I was. The last two days beginning to blur.
    I left the radio off.
    Drove in silence.
    Like there was something more I could have done.
    But even if I got to the truth, maybe Lindsay had a point when he said what I really needed to do was be there for Susan.
    Our relationship was still tentative; each of us dancing around the other, as though worried about certain truths we’d hidden for years.
    The first time we’d slept together was shortly after Elaine’s death. Something we both regarded as a mistake.
    The counsellor I’d gone to see after the accident might have said that I was looking for some form of comfort, that our reaction had been almost healthy. Or maybe I was putting words into his mouth as an excuse for my behaviour.
    It had been years now, since then. Susan and I had drifted apart, and then come back together; victims of circumstance.
    Circumstance.
    Coincidence.
    It had been events that pulled us together. Terrible events. Grief always seemed to bring us closer.
    After Elaine’s death, we had slept together. More out of need for comfort than anything; an expression of something we couldn’t put into words.
    But that had, in the end, only lasted for a moment before we found ourselves pushed further apart than we had ever been. We stopped talking. Started avoiding each other. As though the idea of what we had was something to hide from, to be ashamed of. Until a suicide that forced us to work together.
    And then the missing girl.
    Mary Furst. Fourteen years old. Taken by her birth mother in a misguided attempt to save her from a psychopath. I’d been looking into the girl’s disappearance as a favour for a friend. Susan had been part of the police investigation. Our paths crossed. Both of us witnessed a tragic end to events, as a young girl did something she would regret forever.
    A moment of rage.
    A bad choice.
    One made in a moment of grief and horror.
    I had been ready to lie on behalf of the girl. Until