Read Suffer the Children for Free Online

said with a nod. He sipped his coffee. “When is this skating party again, Joanie?”
    “We should leave in forty-five minutes,” Joan told him. “Once we get there, I’m off to see my movie. We might do a little shopping at the mall after. I’ll be back home before five.”
    Doug said nothing further but didn’t look too happy to be babysitting at a kids’ party today. It had taken every ounce of persuasion she possessed to get him to agree to it. By the end of the week, he was exhausted and wanted nothing better than to putter around the house doing projects or maybe take the dog into the woods for some hunting. But she was tired too. Sometimes he seemed to forget she had a full-time job just as he did, twenty-four hours a day, every damn day.
    I shouldn’t have to beg , she thought as she put his omelette in front of him and smothered it in salsa. Doug stared at it for a moment with bleary eyes and dug in.
    “So who’s this Josh?” he said.
    “One of my kids. Ramona’s boy. I might be losing him.”
    “She’s got money, though, right?”
    “It’s not that. He got sick yesterday. Ramona thinks he ate something here.”
    “She’s crazy,” Doug said. “Kids get sick all the time.”
    Joan smiled. Her irritation faded. The man had his faults, but she could always count on him for certain things, one being that he always took her side.
    She glanced at the clock and hurried her preparations.
    There was always so much to do and not enough time to do everything.
David
    Hour of Herod Event
    David hated Nadine’s silences. The angrier she got, the quieter she became.
    Right now, she was downright furious.
    He drove slowly, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Somebody passed him, horn blaring, and he cringed. He’d only started driving again within the past two months and was being extra careful. The rehabilitation had been hard on him—David no longer used a cane but still walked with a limp.
    Nadine had been driving the Mercedes last New Year’s Eve. Normally, it would have been David, but he’d had one too many. They’d picked up Paul at the babysitter’s and carried him sleeping to the warm car, wrapped in David’s coat. On the way home, a pickup truck slammed into them on an icy bridge. Paul died in the impact.
    Nadine blamed herself.
    If only, if only.
    The big question was: Why?
    Nadine was still searching for meaning. David, meanwhile, had embraced the horrible, simple truth of the accident. Often, there was no reason why bad things happened to good people, just a cause. Shit happened, and sometimes, it happened to you.
    Now, as they drove in silence, he decided to try again to get her to talk.
    “We haven’t seen them in six months,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”
    David’s friend Ben Glass was the county medical examiner. His primary function was to cut into corpses and determine the cause of death, analyze blood and DNA in a lab, and testify in court. Ben had chosen this path in medical school because he didn’t like treating living people. Dead people were easy, he believed. They didn’t scream; they didn’t die under your care and haunt your conscience for the rest of your days.
    David and Nadine had been friends with Ben and his wife, Gloria, for years. Ben always had an interesting story to tell about helping the police solve a crime using forensic pathology, just like on TV. Dead men tell tales , he liked to say. The dead are real blabbermouths, if you know how to listen.
    Since the accident, though, they’d hidden from everybody they knew. And in Ben’s case, they didn’t need another reminder of death. The night of the accident, death had stopped being an abstraction, the end of a long, satisfying journey. It was evil incarnate that had stolen their child.
    Nevertheless, after a chance meeting at the grocery store, David had lobbied Nadine hard for this lunch, part of his resolution to try to move forward. She went along with it, but he could tell it was only to please