Read Online The Divide by Nicholas Evans - Free Book Online Page B

ex-wife had been staring out of the window.
    Charlie had been staring at her. It was kind of hard not to. He wondered how old she might be. These East Coast city women took care of themselves. Mid-forties, maybe. She was tall and elegant and had clearly once been a great-looking woman. In happier circumstances, if she put on a few pounds and let that cropped blond hair grow a little, she still could be. The dark blue dress suited her and Charlie would have put money on those little diamond studs in her ears being the real thing. All in all, Sarah Cooper was what his daddy used to call “a class act.” Mind, that sharp tongue of hers sure seemed to have her ex-husband on eggshells. Charlie knew from his own dealings with Sheryl how the poor guy must feel. But he’d seen bereaved mothers behave like this before. Anger was probably just her way of hanging by her fingernails to sanity.
    But now and then, behind that cool façade, he’d gotten a glimpse of how fragile and wounded she was. And it moved him to see a creature so graceful in so much pain. The look in her eyes when she learned about her daughter being pregnant was close to heartbreaking and it was still there now as she gazed out at the rain. Since Charlie broke the news, she’d barely spoken a word.
    Ben Cooper bore his grief more visibly. He seemed like a decent enough guy. They must have once made a fine couple, the kind you saw in those society magazines, sitting on a yacht or by a swimming pool, happy and perfect and probably on the brink of divorce. Charlie wondered what had gone wrong between the two of them, whether it was all about their daughter or whether they had traveled some other special route to sadness of their own devising. There was a story there, he had no doubt, along with the same old story shared by himself and countless others, of guilt and grudge and shattered hope.
    He followed the woman’s gaze. The rain had gotten heavier and there was a wind now too. The trees outside were starting to come into leaf and through the frantic branches he could see squalls thrashing the roofs of three U.S. Mail vans parked below in the street. A young woman in a clear plastic poncho was pushing a boy in a wheelchair along the sidewalk, trying to keep him dry with a red umbrella. Charlie looked again at Mrs. Cooper and found she was looking at him. He smiled and with his eyes tried to apologize for Hammler, who was still droning on behind his immaculately organized desk. There was a little chrome pot of perfectly sharpened pencils and a matching tray for his staples and paper clips. The little creep even had a coaster for his coffee cup. Charlie remembered someone once saying that you should never trust a man with a tidy desk. Hammler’s was borderline obsessive.
    Mrs. Cooper didn’t smile back. Instead she turned and glared at her ex-husband. Whether it was because of the polite attention the poor guy was giving Hammler or for some other transgression, Charlie couldn’t tell.
    “So, that’s where things stand as far as the investigation goes,” the agent was saying. “Now, if you don’t mind, I need to ask you both some questions.”
    “Okay,” Mr. Cooper said. “If it’ll help. Go ahead.”
    Hammler had his questions all neatly listed on a legal pad, squarely placed with a new pencil in front of him. The first was about when the Coopers had last seen or heard from their daughter. Charlie had already asked and he pointed this out to Hammler but to no avail. Mr. Cooper answered patiently, if a little wearily, but Charlie could see his ex-wife starting to seethe. Finally, when the agent began asking about Abbie’s character and personality and whether they would describe her as being prone to bouts of depression, she exploded.
    “Listen. You people have asked us all of this God knows how many times. We came to hear what you had to tell us, not to go over all this old stuff again. If you want to know these things, look at the files. It’s all