The Iceman by Anthony Bruno

women with good taste and good looks and good educations. It was all thanks to Barbara. She’d taken care of all the child rearing.
    “Where’s your mother?” he asked the girls.
    Merrick was assembling a lasagna, layering wide strips of curly-edged pasta, tomato sauce, slices of mozzarella cheese, and gobs of ricotta in a baking pan. “Mom’s upstairs lying down. She’s got a headache.”
    “Oh.” He looked to Christen, but she was busy slicing a cucumber.
    “Where’s that boyfriend of yours, Christen? What’s his name? Matt.”
    Christen shrugged but wouldn’t look at him. “I dunno. He’s home, I guess.”
    He looked at Merrick, grinned, and winked. “Oh, yeah? Once he smells that lasagna, he’ll be over here like a shot.”
    Christen sighed. She didn’t like her father’s cracks about Matt. He made it obvious that he didn’t like her boyfriend. Ever since that night he caught them making out on her bed and screamed at them for over an hour straight.
    Merrick pursed her lips and tried not to laugh at her father’s needling, for her sister’s sake.
    Richard reached around Christen, picked out a slice of bell pepper from the wooden salad bowl on the counter, and popped it into his mouth. “I’m gonna go check on your mother.”
    He went back through the living room, climbed a short flight of carpeted steps, and went to the master bedroom. The door was closed. He turned the knob without a sound and peeked in. Barbara was on her back in bed, one arm draped over her face. She was wearing designer jeans and a peach-colored knit top. The satin pillow under her head was the one he’d brought back from Los Angeles.
    “Rich?” she moaned, and lifted her arm.
    “You all right, babe?”
    She nodded behind her arm. “It’s just a headache.” She raised one knee and curled her toes. At forty-six Barbara still had the kind of figure a fashion model could envy.
    Kuklinski stepped into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt her forehead. Her eyes looked more tired than usual.
    “It’s just a headache, Rich.”
    “You take any aspirin?”
    “I just took some. I’ll be fine by dinner. I just need a little quiet. That’s all.”
    Kuklinski nodded to himself. She had said she was fine that time he went to Switzerland. He wasn’t there thirty-six hours when he got a call from Merrick: “Mom’s in the hospital. They don’t know what’s wrong.” He got right back on a plane and rushed home to be with her.
    He stood up from the bed. “You rest as long as you want. Okay? You can eat later.” He started to go but then stopped and looked at the walls, narrowing his eyes and staring hard at them.
    “This room needs another paint job,” he said, more to himself than to his wife. “I can see the letters coming through.”
    Barbara looked up at him and sighed. “Don’t start with that again, Rich. I keep telling you, it’s your imagination.”
    “It’s not my imagination. I can still see it.”
    “The painter used a special primer and three coats of paint to cover it. Believe me, you can’t see it. It’s your imagination.”
    He shook his head. He could still see it. The words he’d written on the walls in a moody rage one night when Barbara wouldn’t listen to him, when that stupid telemarketing job was taking over her life, when she refused to quit after he told her she had to. Four-foot letters in black marker stretching across one wall and continuing onto the next, stopping abruptly at the wardrobe. LOVE HATE DEATH DEATH DEA—
    Barbara closed her eyes and draped her arm over her face again. “Let me rest for a little while longer, Rich. I’ll be down for dinner.”
    He didn’t answer. He left the bedroom and went down the hall to the bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet, he scanned the shelves. The green plastic Excedrin bottle was on the top shelf. He shook out two aspirin, popped them into his mouth, and chewed. He didn’t have a headache, but he often took aspirin to prevent