A Welcome Grave by Michael Koryta

door and stepped out of the Acura before I reached it. She was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt over a white tank top, looking small and trim, as always. Looking good, as always.
    “Hey,” I said. I’ve got a knack for slick opening lines.
    “Hi.” She was holding a piece of paper in her hand, watching me with a frown. “Sounds like I made the right call passing on the Indiana trip, huh?”
    “You talk to Joe?”
    “No.”
    “So what’ve you heard, then?”
    “This.” She passed the paper to me. It was a printout with ASSOCIATED PRESS across the top. A dateline said “Morgantown, Ind.” There was no headline, but the lead sentence gave a clear idea of the article.
    The only witness to a violent suicide near Morgantown Thursday night was a private investigator from Ohio who has ties to the victim’s recently murdered father
.
    I looked up at her, matched her frown. “Where’d you get this?”
    “It’s on the wire, Lincoln. We’re running the story tomorrow.”
    “What?”
    She nodded. “I knew you’d be upset, but there’s no way I could talk my editor out of running this. Not with Jefferson’s murder being such big news. This reporter from Indiana must be in good with the cops down there, because she got a lot of information. Hell, suicides usually aren’t news, unless the victim was famous or an elected official or something. It’s one of the few areas where we media types have any respect for privacy.”
    I groaned and read through the rest of the article as we stood there in the parking lot. Yes, some reporter from Indiana was in good with the cops, indeed. There weren’t any quotes, just a lot of generic “police said” attribution, but I knew the source had to be Brewer. The story named me and explained that I’d been detained overnight and cited for operating without an Indiana PI license, but that could have come from anyone in the department. The details about my relationship with Karen and my assault on her husband, though, reeked of Brewer’s personal touch.
    “He probably asked her to make sure the AP spread it around.” I crumpled the paper. “He wants me to feel the heat. The asshole actually thinks I’m involved in this.”
    “What asshole?”
    I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, I’ve got to catch you up on all of it, I guess. Let’s go inside.”
    We went up to my apartment, and I told her what had happened while I drank a bottle of water, leaning against the wall while she sat on the couch. She listened with interest, but she was too quiet, offering no questions when usually I would’ve had to shut her up just to finish my story.
    “You mind if I take a shower real quick?” I said when I was done. The sweat from my workout and run was drying, and I wanted to get cleaned up and into fresh clothes.
    “Go ahead.”
    I went. When I came back, she was still on the couch. The television was on with the volume turned off, but she wasn’t watching it, choosing instead to stare at the wall.
    I walked over to the couch, but there was an aura there, a kind of pulsing defense field that told me I probably shouldn’t sit down right beside her. Instead, I sat on the floor and put my back against the couch, tilted my head so I could see her face.
    “You all right?”
    She nodded. “Yeah. I probably owe you an apology, though. I needed to let some things out the other day, but I don’t know if I went about it in the right way.”
    “It’s okay, Amy.”
    She shrugged but didn’t say anything else.
    “You need to say what’s on your mind, when it’s on your mind,” I said. “That’s the only way to live, Ace.”
    “Oh, yeah? Then why don’t I ever know what’s on your mind?”
    “Because I’m a shallow, stupid man. Nothing’s ever there.”
    She laughed. “Good argument.”
    It was quiet for a minute. I wondered if she was hoping I’d take the lead, direct things back to the conversation she’d started in the parking lot the morning I’d left for Indiana.