Excerpt of No Safe Place by Judy Fitzwater

I should never have married Stephen Michael Larocca. I knew it when he and I were standing in front of the minister, I knew it when I kicked him out of my life and I damned well knew it when his body turned up again — after I'd buried the son of a bitch.

"Did you read this?" Cara asked, waving the piece of paper I'd given her in my face.

"Every word." I took a swig of the scotch I'd poured myself. It stung my throat and I choked. I'd forgotten how nasty it tasted. Scotch was Stephen's drink, not mine.

"It's a request asking if we want Dad reburied at sea. You call me and insist that I leave work, skip lunch and get my butt over here —"

"I didn't use the word butt."

" — without a single word of explanation, scaring me half to death. I thought something horrible had happened. This is some stupid bureaucratic mistake. Pick up the phone, call the coast guard and tell them whoever that fisherman snagged in his net isn't Dad."

She came to the kitchen table, took the glass out of my hand and smelled it. "What's wrong with you? You're drinking Dad's scotch."

"Only theoretically. Drinking requires swallowing. I thought..."

Actually that was the whole point: I didn't want to think. For just a little while, I wanted to slip into oblivion and pretend the last six hours hadn't happened. I wanted the phone call from the coroner not to have come. I wanted Stephen not to be dead. I wanted Cara happy like she'd been two weeks ago. Twenty-three was too young to lose her father.

I looked at her again. She was beautiful — thick, dark hair; brown, almost black eyes; olive skin; a saucy, pouty mouth with a hint of mischief — just like her father. But under the skin, she was my daughter, and that meant I was in for trouble.

"This is a mistake," she insisted.

I almost laughed. I retrieved the glass from the sink where she'd put it, and got the scotch out of the cabinet to try it again. I'd heard the first few sips were the worst, that it got better.

This time she took the bottle away and poured its contents down the drain.

"Mom, we buried Dad two weeks ago." The words caught in her throat. "We stood together and watched his casket lowered into the ground. We threw dirt on top of it. This is someone else's body. Do you want me to call the coast guard? Is that why you asked me to come over?"

I sat back down, numb, unable to comfort her or focus my thoughts.

Cara opened the blinds behind the small table. I winced at the afternoon sunshine. I wasn't in the mood for light. "Christ, Mom. Snap out of it. How much did you drink?" She pulled the coffee can out of the refrigerator and, not bothering to measure, dumped some grounds into the basket of the coffee maker. She never was much good at math. Or cooking. Or dealing with the fact that her father was dead. Her eyes were ringed with red.

She stuck the carafe under the spigot and then poured the water into the reservoir. She needn't have bothered. I wasn't drunk. I just wanted to be. I couldn't get the foul stuff down.

"It's his body," I said evenly, watching carefully for her reaction.

"Now I know you've lost it. It couldn't possibly —"

"I saw it."

That stopped her cold. I wanted to reach out to her, but I felt frozen.

"You mean you identified the corpse they pulled out of the water?" She slid into the chair across from me, the slightest tremble to her hands. She dropped them in her lap where I couldn't see them. Weakness was something we Laroccas hid well.

"An hour and a half ago."

I didn't go into the details of what two weeks in open water does to a corpse. I wish I hadn't seen it. The image was etched in my brain. The body was Stephen's, what was left of it. The tattoo of the U.S. Navy SEAL insignia wasn't the only giveaway. He'd had his initials added just below. And just below those, mine, two days after I'd agreed to marry him.

"There's more," I added.

I saw her look at the scotch bottle, empty, on the counter. She was about to be sorry she'd poured it out.

"The body had been cut open and sewn back up again."

"Dad was skiing alone when he died. Of course the authorities would order an autopsy."

"Not in Denver. Not before we buried him. When we got him back, his body was whole."

Now my pain was hers. As her horror grew, some of my numbness waned. I moved to put my arms around her, but she shook me off. She had her father's strength, or the illusion of it. I watched her features soften and, for the briefest moment, I glimpsed her panic.

I never spoke ill of Stephen, not in front of her at least. But she knew how I felt. And I think, for the first time in her life, she might have had just an inkling that I had cause when I said there were things concerning him she knew nothing about, things I couldn't live with, things I'd spent a lifetime protecting her from.

She licked her lips, and gave me a long stare. "Are you saying someone stole Dad's body after we buried him?"

And then dumped it like trash in the bay. "When?" she asked. "Why?"

"I have no idea." At least, none I was willing to share with her.

As to when, my best guess was that the body had been removed from the coffin at the funeral home, between the service and the interment. It would have been so much easier than digging him up.

The why was a much more difficult question. I hadn't spoken with Stephen in months, not since that last visit, before I got the call from the funeral home in Denver saying he was...

I still couldn't get my mind around the word. "What are we going to do?" Cara asked. "Have him reburied."

To her credit, she didn't roll her eyes. She just kind of squinted at me. "I didn't think you were going to keep him for a souvenir. That's not what I meant. What was Dad doing that someone would want to steal his body?"

She was angry with me, and she had every right to be. I hadn't wanted to share any of this with her. But I dared not keep it from her.

"I don't know who stole it," I said, "or when it was stolen. There were rope marks on his ankles. Whoever dumped him in the Chesapeake never intended for him to resurface. And I'm sure they didn't expect me to be notified. When a body like that washes up, autopsied, they assume it was a burial at sea and rebury it without notifying the family. They don't usually take the trouble to identify it."

"So why did they?"

"The tattoo. Remember a few years ago when he went missing for a while on that hiking trip through the Rocky Mountains?"

"As if I could forget. We thought he was dead."

When he showed up two weeks later, he said he'd lost his compass and become disoriented. But his clothes were clean and his beard was neatly trimmed. He was well hydrated and he didn't look to me as if he'd missed a meal.

"That was when they entered a photo of his tattoo in the FBI database, in case his body turned up," I explained.

"Someone checked it out. Guess it was still there."

"Terrific."

My thoughts exactly.

"So. We just bury him again and forget it?"

"That's my plan." God, how I wished it could be that simple.

"And let whoever did this get away with it? They desecrated his grave. I take that very personally and you should, too. We've got to call someone," Cara insisted. "The police? The FBI?"

"That wouldn't be wise." I didn't want anyone to know that we knew. It might buy us some time.

"Why?"

"Cara, we don't need to get in the middle of some investigation. I know you're angry, but the best that could happen for you, for me, is to let this pass and go on as though we know nothing about it. Trust me. Please."

"Trust goes both ways, Mom."

"Believe me, I know." I just wish Stephen had known it, too. "That's why I called you."

She nodded. Good. At least that gave me one point. "Have you gotten his things yet?" she asked. "Wasn't one of his coworkers supposed to be taking care of them?"

I would have flown out to do it myself, but Cara had a fear of my flying and made me promise not to go. She'd already lost one parent and wasn't about to lose another. And to be honest, I didn't want to go through Stephen's clothes, pack his books, his music, the items he touched every day.

"James is having them shipped out here from California," I said. "He had your father's things packed and put in storage. I called him the day before yesterday to say I'd rented a place, so he could go ahead and have them sent directly to that address. By the way, he said to tell you hello."

"Do I know him?"

I nodded. "James Lowell. You met him year before last when we went to California after your graduation."

Stephen had insisted we go, as though we were still a family, to celebrate Cara's milestone, cum laude from Georgetown, as if we were still one unit, as if we had never separated.

"Blond, six-two or so, good-looking in a frat-boy-into- lifting-weights kind of way. Three, maybe four years older than me?" she asked.

"That's the one."

"I'm surprised he remembers me," Cara said. "Neat guy. We spoke for fifteen minutes, if that. It's good that he's sending Dad's things out."

Actually I would have preferred to have all of Stephen's belongings burned. I had enough memories. But I knew Cara would never have stood for it.

"I don't suppose he might come out with Dad's things," she said. "He struck me as the dependable sort."

"I doubt it."

I'd only met him a couple of times. The first was several years ago. He'd helped Stephen find an apartment when he moved to California.

James hadn't come for the funeral, which surprised me, considering how involved he'd been in tying up the details of Stephen's life. As for the dependable part, why should he be? Stephen certainly wasn't. I didn't even know who they worked for. Stephen should have chosen a wife who didn't notice inconsistencies, who wouldn't call him on them, who was content not to know where he was when he left for weeks at a time, who didn't give a damn.

Every confrontation I'd had with Stephen had created another layer of lies that eventually caved in on itself. After a while I wouldn't have believed him if he'd told me his own name. Or mine.

Cara glanced at her watch and stood, letting out a mumbled curse. "I've got to go. I'm already twenty minutes over my lunch break. Let me know when Dad's things get here. This conversation isn't over."

She took a good look at me, in my jeans and tailored shirt with the tail out and the sleeves rolled to my elbows. Heaven only knows what my hair looked like.

"Aren't you going to class?"

"I called Mitch. He's taking my two-o'clock, and I told him to cancel the 3:10."

"An unexpected holiday. Your students will be thrilled."

"Yep. Nothing new happening in ancient Greece. It'll wait." She shook her head at me. She had no interest in antiquities and couldn't understand my fascination. "Are you going to be all right?"