Read The Black Ice (hb-2) for Free Online Page B

back was to him and she put two mugs on the counter and poured coffee from a glass pot. He leaned against the doorway next to the refrigerator. He was unsure what to say, whether to press on with business or not.
    “You have a nice home.”
    “No. It’s a nice house, not a home. We’re selling it. I guess I should say I’m selling it now.”
    She still hadn’t turned around.
    “You know you can’t blame yourself for whatever he did.”
    It was a meager offering and he knew it.
    “Easier said than done.”
    “Yeah.”
    There was a long moment of silence then before Bosch decided to get on with it.
    “There was a note.”
    She stopped what she was doing but still did not turn.
    “‘I found out who I was.’ That’s all he said.”
    She didn’t say anything. One of the mugs was still empty.
    “Does it mean anything to you?”
    She finally turned to him. In the bright kitchen light he could see the salty tracks that tears had left on her face. It made him feel inadequate, that he was nothing and could do nothing to help heal her.
    “I don’t know. My husband… he was caught on the past.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He was just-he was always going back. He liked the past better than the present or the hope of the future. He liked to go back to the time he was growing up. He liked… He couldn’t let things go.”
    He watched tears slide into the grooves below her eyes. She turned back to the counter and finished pouring the coffee.
    “What happened to him?” he asked.
    “What happens to anybody?” For a while after that she didn’t speak, then said, “I don’t know. He wanted to go back. He had a need for something back there.”
    Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future. She dried her eyes with tissue and then turned and gave him a mug. He sipped it before speaking.
    “Once he told me he lived in a castle,” she said. “That’s what he called it, at least.”
    “In Calexico?” he asked.
    “Yes, but it was for a short while. I don’t know what happened. He never told me a lot about that part of his life. It was his father. At some point, he wasn’t wanted anymore by his father. He and his mother had to leave Calexico-the castle, or whatever it was-and she took him back across the border with her. He liked to say he was from Calexico but he really grew up in Mexicali. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there.”
    “Just to drive through. Never stopped.”
    “That’s the general idea. Don’t stop. But he grew up there.”
    She stopped and he waited her out. She was looking down at her coffee, an attractive woman who looked weary of this. She had not yet seen that this was a beginning for her as well as an end.
    “It was something he never got over. The abandonment. He often went back there to Calexico. I didn’t go but I know he did. Alone. I think he was watching his father. Maybe seeing what could have been. I don’t know. He kept pictures from when he was growing up. Sometimes at night when he thought I was asleep, he’d take them out and look at them.”
    “Is he still alive, the father?”
    She handed him a mug of coffee.
    “I don’t know. He rarely spoke of his father and when he did he said his father was dead. But I don’t know if that was metaphorically dead or that he actually was dead. He was dead as far as Cal went. That was what mattered. It was a very private thing with Cal. He still felt the rejection, all these years later. I could not get him to talk about it. Or, when he would, he would just lie, say the old man meant nothing and that he didn’t care. But he did. I could tell. After a while, after years, I have to say that I stopped trying to talk with him about it. And he would never bring it up. He’d just go down there-sometimes for a weekend, sometimes a day. He’d never talk about it when he came back.”
    “Do you have the photos?”
    “No, he took them when he left. He’d never leave