Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: Bad Cop
The countdown was nearly over. Four more days until the women’s match-play golf tournament.
Par Parker’s game was hot, her mental state positive. She’d been runner-up in the tournament the
last five years. A four handicap was not enough to beat her younger opponents, who made so
many birdies against her that she felt like a beginner again. Teenagers coached by country club
golf pros and college players home for the summer belted drives and smacked iron shots tight to
the pin. They scooped balls out of sand traps and made it look as easy as placing a napkin on a
table.
Par steered her Tahoe in and out of curves on Brown’s Lake Road with the nonthinking
ease of traveling the route home. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of
Aretha singing “Dancing in the Streets” and thought about her best friends at Carmen and
Blake’s twentieth-anniversary party, moments ago, hugging her good-bye and saying, “Good
luck. This is your year.”
The vacant road made her feel like she owned the night.
“Par, I’m gonna be sick.” The voice of Nick, the husband, in the backseat.
“Oh, hon, we’re almost home. Hang on for another mile.” Par sped up to forty-five, still
taking the curves smooth. She heard retching from the backseat, smelled vomit, remembered her
short irons were on the floor. “Nick! Don’t throw up on my grips. Please don’t ruin them for next
week.”
He mumbled, “No . . . I didn’t . . . got the metal.”
Par pressed hard on the button to open all the windows. Her gag reflex gave her little
respect for the last stop sign before home. She glanced left, saw no cars, turned right, and gunned
the engine.
A hundred yards later, a siren screamed.
“Damn,” Par said. Pulling over, she looked at her side mirror just as the cop’s searchlight
flicked on. She fished in her purse for lipstick to freshen the color. She pulled out a stick of Juicy
Fruit gum and quickly chewed the stiffness out of it. Smacking her lips twice, she said to Nick,
“I’ll get us out of this.”
Par stepped out of the car and saw a human hulk lumbering toward her. Blinded by the
wattage coming from the squad car, she looked away and leaned casually on the side of the
Tahoe.
“Get back in the car,” the hulk said as it morphed into a female deputy.
Par knew her lipstick and flirtation skills would not help. She tried a different approach.
“I’m only a block from home. Did I do something wrong?”
“Show me your driver’s license and registration.”
Par got in her car and retrieved what the deputy wanted.
“That your husband?” the deputy asked, with a flick of her head toward the backseat,
toward the lump of Nick Swink.
“Afraid so. You want him?” Par hoped levity might be effective.
“It smells awful here.” She grabbed Par’s arm. “Step away from your vehicle.”
“Anything you say.” Then Par hissed into the backseat’s window, “Nick. Sit up. I’ll be
right back.”
He moaned, “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, you are.”
The deputy tightened her grip on Par’s arm. “Let’s go,” she ordered, and they walked the
thirty yards to her car.
Par breathed in the night air more deeply than ever before. She considered how much she
had drunk at the party. Two cocktails. How she loved the crisp tartness of a lime-rimmed glass
full of tonic laced with gin. It was a drink to cut through the heat and humidity. July was the
month in Michigan when eyes got stung by salt, the grip of a golf club was slick with palm
sweat, and clothes had to be changed at least twice a day.
“Stand here,” the deputy said.
Par stood erect between the squad car’s headlights. She thought she had eaten enough
chicken satay, chips with dip, and chocolate cake to keep her sober. Midparty, a toast to Carmen
and Blake had added a flute of champagne to the mix.
The searchlight switched off.
“Jane Parker-Swink. Class of ’72.”
Par whipped her head to face this comment, which felt like an accusation. Everyone
called her by the nickname Par.
The deputy faced her.
“Dee Dee,” Par said, with a hint of glee. Dee Dee Virgil had sat next to Par in tenth-grade
algebra class and had cheated off Par’s exams. She had buck teeth and bangs that were always
cut too short. The kids called her Doe-Doe Virgin. Her mother was a big-chested, big-hipped
waitress who worked at the Big Boy restaurant north of town. Pearl Virgil had a habit of sleeping
with her customers, and her reputation made Dee Dee a sullen, prudish loner.
Deputy Dee Dee smirked and removed a penlight from her shirt pocket. She pointed the
light into Par’s eyes and told her to track it as she moved it up, down, from side to side.
“Now pick up this dime.” Dee Dee dropped the coin.
Bending to retrieve it, Par skimmed her fingertips along the road’s surface, finding
gravel, leaves, and twigs, touching sticky lumps and rough ridges of who-knows-what, grasping
no tiny dime. “I need some light. I think it rolled under the car.”
“You’re taking too long.”
Par sighed and stood, waited for further instructions. Under Dee Dee’s too-short bangs,
her eyes were shifty Raisinets.
“Your fancy-foiled hair is the only thing changed about you.”
“You must need glasses,” Par chuckled.
“But you’re still wearing it in a sloppy braid.”
“It’s a French braid, and I like it loose. You’ve gone all gray.”
“Blow into this tube.”
“Dee Dee, you’re not going to arrest me, are you?”
“We’ll see.”
Par tongued her gum to the back of her molars. Lips around the plastic tube, she exhaled
and said a little prayer.
Dee Dee checked the reading on her portable device. “Just over the limit. And here,” she
smiled.
Par saw a flash of braces and noticed her buck teeth weren’t so buck anymore.
“I’ve busted a few of our classmates who were popular like you.”
“And it feels good to you, doesn’t it?” Stupid comment, Par knew.
Dee Dee’s expression soured. She spun Par around, slammed her torso onto the hood,
cuffed, and stuffed her into the backseat.
These actions took seconds. Dee Dee’s strength and swiftness knocked the wind out of
Par. The seat was hard plastic; a Plexiglas barricade separated the criminal from the law. The
tightly closed windows created a suffocating vibe. Sweat dripped down the sides of Par’s face.
She glared at the deputy’s back as Dee Dee walked toward the Tahoe, and sensed evil in her
swagger.
Dee Dee and Nick had a conversation. His brawn and height towered over the deputy. He
looked toward the squad car, shading his eyes from the lights. Par’s thoughts skipped around
from hoping Nick did not get arrested to resolving never to be his designated driver again to
planning to beg for a warning. That would be as low as she could stoop.
Dee Dee raised her arms high to his shoulders and turned him around. Nick began
walking west on Kimmel Road. Par’s front teeth bit into her lower lip, and she tasted sweat,
which somehow calmed her. She’s letting him go. Time to beg. Be honest with her. Par gave
herself instructions, like a coach.
“I sent your husband home,” Dee Dee said, after returning to the car.
“I hope he makes it. Dee Dee, I’m sorry. This will never happen again.”
Dee Dee shifted in her seat, tilted her head toward Par.
“Maybe I drank more and ate less at the party because today would have been my father’s
seventieth birthday. I still miss him so much.” She almost added, He was murdered, you
remember, but held back, knowing Dee Dee knew this; everyone in town knew what had
happened to her father. Henry Parker had been the benevolent owner of Parker Chevrolet—
handsome, prematurely gray, stocky and strong like a pickup truck. Par looked out the window.
She saw her father’s face. The one dimple on his left cheek winked at her as she envisioned him
talking about new Camaros he had on order.
Dee Dee twisted in the seat to look at Par. Her back cracked.
Par refocused. “Dee Dee, I did roll through the stop sign, but I was careful to look both
ways. Nick was sick. I had to get him home. Couldn’t you give me a break?”
Dee Dee sighed and looked at her notes. The effort showed consideration. Par felt
hopeful.
“No warning. This is my job.”
“No, this is your power trip.”
“Ha! And I hate that tan of yours,” Dee Dee yelled, and turned on her siren. She whipped
the steering wheel for a U-turn and drove downtown like a maniac.
After what seemed like three hours in the holding cell, Par Parker realized life as she knew it was
as over as yesterday. The cell’s hard surfaces reminded her of her new kitchen with the granite
countertop and Spanish-tile floor. Unforgiving surfaces. Any breakable container that was
dropped could not bounce for a second chance.
Par looked at her left hand, sans wedding ring. She hadn’t taken the ring off in twenty
years. In its place was a strip of golf ball–white flesh. A jailer wearing brown-and-tan fatigues,
his last name, BOLTON, embroidered in black thread above his left shirt pocket, had packed her
personal belongings—earrings, ring, necklace, watch, wristlet, keys—in a ziplock bag like
leftover scraps. She looked up at the softball-size dome camera in one high corner of the cell and
steeled herself against crying. She didn’t want to cry in public because she didn’t like what
crying did to her squinty eyes. They’d puff up and appear closed, except for a shred of azure.
Being watched, she felt self-conscious about her nervous habit of twisting buttons off clothes.
Because of Nicholas Dalehurst Swink—the heavy drinker, mama’s boy, reluctant
carpenter—Par was locked in an eight-by-eight cell, staring at the outline of cinder blocks and
wishing the lights would turn off. At the party, Nick had acted his usual self. Not a mean or
merry drunk, he had leaned against a wall and watched people, listened to anyone nearest him,
talked if spoken to, and wanted to be the last to leave. She knew why he drank so much, was
partly to blame.
A jailer slid aside the panel of the small barred window to peek into Par’s cell. His tongue
licked one end of his black mustache. Their eyes connected for two seconds, then he closed her
off from the outside world. She felt like a caged animal and she felt unclean. The underarms of
her yellow silk blouse were damp with sweat and emitted the stink of stress. She went to the
metal sink next to the metal toilet to wash her face. Shaking her hands dry, she sat on the bench
and thought about what Pete Masterson had told her about making arrests. Pete had been a
deputy, a personal trainer, her lover in her first and only extramarital affair. He’d told her it
didn’t happen like the movies, where the cop placed his hand on the perp’s head and gently
guided the person into the backseat. Pete had claimed, “I don’t like to touch people. I especially
don’t like to touch their hair. When I arrest someone and know they’re going to jail, they seem
dirty to me.”
She scowled thinking about Nick lying on top of five-hundred-count lavender cotton
sheets under their king-size bed’s canopy, his head flattening a goose-down pillow, his snores
mixing with fresh air coming in through a wall of raised windows. His mouth would be open like
a chorus boy’s, body stretched out like a snow angel still dressed in khaki shorts and an untucked
plaid shirt.
Trying to gain some comfort, Par lay down on the concrete bench on her right side, the
hardness pressing into hip bone and ribs. Turning gently onto her back, Par stared at the ceiling
and twisted a fused-glass half-ball button on her blouse. She stood up. She paced. She flicked a
glare at the camera and muttered, “I don’t belong in jail. Dee Dee had it in for me.” Par scored an
X with her fingernail into a fat mosquito bite she’d been scratching on her thigh. “I’m a lawabiding
citizen.” Futile words evaporated into the fusty air.
Sitting down, she lifted up her knees, wrapped arms around shins, stared at the floor, and
thought of her mother; her sons, Todd and Joey; her golf buddies and fans; and Dr. Ed Murphy, a
best friend of the family. She thought of the hundreds of third graders she had taught over the
years, knew they’d be shocked and confused if they found out she’d been arrested and spent time
in a cell that had once held, and would hold again, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, child abusers,
drug addicts. She shivered. But how could they find out? She’d not tell a soul. Except for her
three best friends, of course.
Her stomach ached with dread at the possibility that information about this arrest would
be printed in the Jackson Citizen Patriot, a newspaper that had been kind to her over the years,
displaying articles with pictures of her golf wins, and sympathetic comments about her losses in
local and state tournaments. People wouldn’t understand. They’d think she had a drinking
problem and was a danger on the roads, a danger to the community. But they wouldn’t print it.
Or, would they? If they did, would they use her full name, Jane Harriet Parker-Swink, as if she
were a common criminal? She hated her middle name and didn’t use her husband’s surname,
except for on legal documents. She thought Swink sounded like a poorly hit golf shot.
Would they put her mug shot in the paper? She realized how entrenched in her cheery
facade she had become, realized the depth of her falseness when the camera flashed to take her
picture and she smiled, smiled as automatically as she smacked a mosquito sucking her blood.
