4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 by Frederick Ramsay Page B

bought me something as just a present. I’m touched.”
    “Down here, we would say ‘teched’ as in—she’s a little teched in the head.”
    “Can the rustic comedy. I mean it. I am. Thank you.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Ike saw what might have been tears in her eyes. She’d turned her head away too quickly to be sure.
    “You’re welcome,” he said, and waited. “Are you crying?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. Ever since your mother died, I get these mopey moments. I start thinking about her, and us, and the gates just open. What’s wrong with me, Ike?”
    Ike’s mother had been only a short interlude in Ruth’s life. Close to death when they met, the force of her personality, and her fierce love for her son, had moved Ruth far more than she’d expected. She took the death hard—perhaps harder than Ike. He pushed a box of paper napkins toward her, the nearest thing he had to tissues. She took one, gave him a weak smile, and blew her nose. Ike started at the noise. She honked like a man.
    “It’s the pressure, I guess,” he said. He didn’t know what he meant by that but it seemed to be the thing to say. It wasn’t.
    “Pressure,” she snapped. “I live with that twenty-four seven. Not pressure.” She helped herself to another napkin and wiped her eyes.
    “Sorry,” he said. “It occurred to me that the merger, or coed, or whatever, business has put an extra strain on your system which is, as everyone knows, already at capacity. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
    “You know about those things? You aren’t going to do a recitation on PMS next, are you?”
    Ike raised his hands in surrender. He knew he was right but he also knew enough not to press it. “I went to the cemetery this afternoon.”
    “To visit your mom?”
    “To visit them all. Eloise, for a moment.”
    “She’s not still…?”
    “No, I just like to stop by, you know. Eloise and I weren’t married that long before she was killed and ever since you…well, memories fade. No, I went to put some flowers on my mother’s grave. It will be another ten months before we can place a headstone. I just figured I needed to get connected to what happened in Toronto, and since she started all that, in a way, I figured I’d…I don’t know, check in or something.”
    In January, Ruth and Ike spent part of a week in Toronto. She to give a speech, he to take a break, a short vacation, after the upheaval in his department that left his main deputy dead, and a vacancy yet to be filled. They’d used the time to talk—about themselves and their future, or, more precisely, their apparent lack of one.
    “You told me, however it went, you’d be okay,” she said, eyes averted. “That put it all on me.”
    “Not all on you. It’s just that I don’t want to be the one to put a crimp in your career, Ruth.”
    “What about your career?”
    “I don’t have a career, I have a job. I like it, but I can walk away anytime.”
    “Walk away…you’re sure of that?”
    “Yes…No…I don’t know. But I would if I needed to.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I would not let being sheriff of Picketsville keep us apart, not for any length of time, anyway.”
    “Wow. So, if I accepted an offer in Berkeley, or Chicago, or…somewhere, you’d be okay with that?”
    Would he? For the first time in his adult life, Ike felt he was making a positive contribution to something. True, Picketsville was not the “Big Apple,” and rural law enforcement hardly rated as glamorous, but he liked the people, the town, and he did not want to leave. He routinely trashed any feelers he received, for jobs elsewhere, and ignored his father’s chronic nagging that he should run for Attorney General.
    “Yes,” he said, and having said it, hoped he meant it.
    She stared into his eyes. Then, voice barely audible, “You’d follow me?”
    “Yes,” he repeated and then, before he could stop, added, “I love