Free Gaits of Heaven by Susan Conant

Eumie.”
    “She was careless about her meds, but the worst that ever happened was that she was sleepy the next day. Lethargic. I don’t care what Ted says! She was not self-destructive. Someone did this to her! She was not depressed. She was interested in things. Especially in people! Anyone who’s depressed enough to commit suicide loses interest in everything, and my mother had to know everything about everyone. She wasn’t just snoopy, which she was. She also had this passionate curiosity about people.” Caprice fumbled in her pocket. I handed her a tissue, and she blew her nose. “People told her things. They confided in her. Her patients did, of course, and Ted told her everything about his patients, too. And she found things out, including things people didn’t want her to know. And people resented her. Wyeth did. And Johanna. That’s Ted’s ex-wife, Wyeth’s mother. Johanna blames Eumie for wrecking her marriage, and Wyeth takes his mother’s side even though he doesn’t exactly get along with her. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
    I said what I guessed Rita would say: “Wyeth seems very angry.”
    “Wyeth is a little bastard,” Caprice said. “He’s a spoiled brat. And that’s not my mother’s fault. It’s Ted’s. And Johanna’s. I don’t know which of them is worse. Oh, God! What am I going to do? Where am I going to go? I can’t stay here. Not with Ted and Wyeth. My therapist is here. She’s in Cambridge. I have to see her, especially now—I can’t go to New York with my father. I have nowhere to go!” She burst into deep sobbing.
    I put an arm around her. “Home with me,” I said. “If you want a place to stay for a while, you’re welcome at my house. Leah’s with us for the summer. We’d be glad to have you.”
    Caprice was crying too hard to speak, but she nodded and gave me a big hug and then kept clinging to me. As I held her, I tried to think of ways to protect her. No matter what the need of the police for any information she could provide, I simply had to get her away from this lunatic household and especially from Wyeth, who, for all I knew, would repeat his insults to her and crow over her mother’s death.
    Somewhat to my astonishment, when I glanced toward the house, the row of glass doors to the family room revealed the hulking figure of my neighbor and buddy, Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy, who was the key element in my emerging plan to protect Caprice and thus seemed almost to have been conjured up by my imagination.
    “Caprice,” I said, “there’s a cop in the family room who’s looking out here. He’s a friend of mine. My next-door neighbor. His name is Kevin Dennehy. I’m going to have a word with him, and we’ll see if we can get you out of here. I’ll be right up there on the deck or in the family room. Okay?” Hesitantly, I added, “Would you like Dolfo to come over and sit with you?”
    The ridiculous-looking dog was curled up under a recently pruned forsythia bush. At the sound of his name, he roused himself and came loping toward us.
    “Dolfo is an idiot,” Caprice said.
    In his defense, I said, “His intentions are good. And dogs feel grief, too. He could probably use your company.”
    Rolling her eyes, Caprice stretched out a hand to the dog, who took the gesture as permission to approach her. With a wry grimace, she tapped him on top of his head but didn’t speak to him. With the sense that I wasn’t leaving Caprice entirely alone, I hurried to the steps that led to the deck, ascended them, and beckoned to Kevin to join me.
    His mother, who is the actual owner of the house next to mine, takes an ethnographic view of the human countenance: she always describes Kevin as having the map of Ireland on his face, by which she means that he has red hair, blue eyes, and freckles. Ireland is, however, a rather small country, whereas everything about Kevin is big: his head, each facial feature, his arms and hands, his torso, his tree-trunk legs, his