Take Another Look by Rosalind Noonan Page A

thoughts of marriage and babies.” Although Jane denied it, she knew there was a grain of truth in it. After all, that was what a woman in her twenties wanted: a partner in true love, someone to start a life and a family with. When Marnie had told Jane that Jason had found a job in Seattle, Jane hadn’t been completely sorry to see her friend move to the Northwest. It would be one less source of contention between Frank and her.
    Trying not to be selfish, Jane had suggested that she and Frank go out with some of the cops Frank worked with and their wives. “I’d like your friends to be my friends, too,” she had told him. He had squashed the idea, telling her that he didn’t want her meddling in his career. “You’ve got to learn how to keep different worlds separated,” he had told her. She had met some of his coworkers once when she dropped in at the precinct, but the encounter had been awkward, with Frank glaring at her as if she had committed a crime. “Don’t ever, ever come to my place of work,” he had told her later.
    â€œWe’d been living together for more than a year when I found out I was pregnant.” Jane paused as myriad memories bombarded her. The thrill of motherhood. Hope that the pregnancy might win Frank over. A sea of wavering doubts. Fear that the news might make his fury boil over. “He wanted me to have an abortion,” she told Alvarez. “Actually, he ordered it. He made all the arrangements himself, assuming I’d go along with it. That’s when I left. I knew I had to protect my baby from him. The only solution I could think of was to disappear. So I left town one day, and never went back.”
    When Alvarez looked up from his notes, compassion softened his eyes. He understood.
    He had a few more questions, many pointing to Frank’s hobby of surfing. “Did you ever go with him when he went to the coast?”
    â€œOnly once. I didn’t know how to surf, and Frank didn’t think I could amuse myself at the ocean. But in the beginning, I always wanted to go with him.”
    â€œGoing surfing,” he would say in the morning. She always offered to come along; she wanted to be with him. But he refused. “You’ll just be bored,” he told her.
    â€œDo you think he really went surfing or was that some kind of ruse to step out? You know how guys do that . . . escape to watch a game, go to a strip joint, whatever.”
    â€œI’ve wondered about that, too.” She explained that Frank had a board, and a few times when she saw it out in the garage, she noticed sand sticking to the tacky wax. “The one time when I went to the beach with him, he didn’t actually surf. He took me up to the cliff overlooking a cove, and we watched the surfers out in the lineup. Frank was highly critical of them. It wasn’t a good day. Frank was angry about something. We stopped in at his aunt’s house. A small cottage. His Aunt Ginny was in a hospital bed in the living room, and there was some neighborhood woman who came in to take care of her. He teased his aunt about how she kept hanging on, and she stared at him, but I’m not sure there was any intelligence behind her eyes. He brought her salt water taffy, although she couldn’t have it because of her diabetes. After we left the cottage, he was in a foul mood. He said Ginny should die already and leave the place to him.” Jane frowned. “That was the one and only time I went to the beach with him.”
    When Alvarez asked about the level of violence Frank employed, Jane felt a twinge of embarrassment. Was the detective thinking that she could have just walked away? “It wasn’t overt violence, but the threat was there. I had bruises from being manhandled and shoved around, and sometimes my neck was bruised from the choking.”
    He nodded, gentle encouragement. “The choking seemed to be a pattern in his method of