Joel's wife answered in a sleep-slurred voice, "Honey?"

"Irene, this is Nora Lure."

Irene asked, "What's going on?"

"Is Joel with Fred?"

"I don't think so. Joel called earlier. He's participating in a raid tonight. He mentioned Fred's new partner got shot today. Something to do with that, but he didn't say what. He's closed-lipped about his active cases, even to me. What do you want with Fred at...Hey, it's almost one in the morning. Nora, I've got a class to teach at eight am!"

"I'm sorry to wake you, but I'm really worried."

Irene irritably commented, "Fred's a big boy who can take care of himself."

"He blames himself for what happened to Sharon. Plus, he killed a high school kid today."

With the anger about being woken disappearing from her voice, Irene said, "The evening news said the kid was shot, but didn’t say he was dead."

"Fred shot him through the head and chest. He’s dead. Now, I can't find Fred."

"Don't worry. Fred's as solid as a rock. Maybe he went out to a bar. It's still another hour until bar time. Since the war, Joel doesn't drink alcohol, but he's been out with the other officers without drinking a few times to be polite."

Nora skeptically commented, "I don't think of Fred as a drinker, although I've seen him have a little wine."

"He's not much of one, but he's not a teetotaler either. Neither am I, as far as that goes. It sounds like he deserves something to unwind. If you want to check, I know the favorite place for the cops to hang out when off duty. He's probably there. Some things cops will only tell other cops, not even their own spouses," Irene said resignedly.

"Please tell me the place."

Irene told her the name, plus instructions to find it.

Nora said goodbye and hung up. She dressed and went out to her blue sports car. She drove by Fred's place. His car wasn't there. She tried the doorbell anyway, but that got no answer. She drove to Gail and Lana's house. She did not ring the bell, but took that his car was not there as sufficient evidence that he was elsewhere. She drove to the bar that Irene had mentioned. Nora circled the parking lot, but didn't see Fred's car.

A thought came to her. She put her car into gear. She was soon driving through a wrought iron arch. A white metal sign visible in the headlights said that the place was closed between sundown and sunrise, but she proceeded on in anyway. Up ahead, she saw Fred's Mercury sedan, looking black rather than red in the faint light. She pulled her car in behind it. She climbed out.

A man stood by a certain tombstone. Although he was in silhouette with no features visible since the only light came from moonlight and distant streetlights, she immediately knew him. She ran and hugged him hard.

Fred said, "Good evening, Nora. Hey, you're crying. What’s wrong?"

"You are, you big idiot! You scared me half to death. And it's not evening, it's nearly two in the morning."

Fred pulled an arm up and looked at the luminescent dial of his watch, then said, "One thirty-eight am. Just a few minutes before the drunks get kicked out of the bars. It's later than I thought, but I often lose track of time here."

"Later than you thought? Fred, this place was already closed when I dropped you off at your car, and that was almost four hours ago. You aren't supposed to be here. It's against the rules."

Without much concern, Fred said, "A patrol car will swing through about an hour from now. I know those officers. I also know the cemetery owners."

Nora held Fred even tighter, causing him to complained, "Ease off. My ribs hurt."

Loosening her grip on him, Nora said, "Sorry. It’s just that this place is creepy!"

Fred said, "It's a good place to think."

Nora retorted, "Not at two in the morning! Are you drunk?"

"Haven't had a drop," Fred said. "Why would you think that?"

"Irene suggested you might have gone to the bar after a day like today. Drowning your sorrows and spilling your soul to other off-duty cops."

"I'm a little old for that."

"I've been searching for you. I called Joel, but only got Irene. She said that he's out on a raid."

"I can guess exactly where, but we need to stay away. That place is far scarier than this graveyard."

Nora said, "Given what happened today, I thought you came here to...be with your wife."

"Well, sure. This is Carrie's tombstone."

"You still have your gun," Nora said as she had felt his gun belt when she had hugged him.

"I still have my uniform on too. I haven't been home to change. I always wear my gun when I'm in uniform. In fact, I'm required to."

Nora said, " I thought you were so upset that you would want to be with your wife...forever."

Fred started laughing. Nora pulled back from him.

Wiping his eyes, Fred said, "You thought I might hurt myself? It never even occurred to me!"

"It seemed a natural assumption. Especially in a place like this," Nora said grumpily.

"You do not know me very well, then," Fred said.

"That's right, I don't! We've been dating for a couple months now. However, you don't tell me how you're feeling," Nora complained indignantly.

Fred said, "Even when Carrie was alive, there were things I couldn't tell her about how I was feeling either. It comes with the job."

"It isn't healthy to be emotionally closed off," Nora protested. "I remember what you were like when we started college. You had long hair, a goatee, and wore a necklace."

"A peace amulet," Fred cut in. "We didn't call them necklaces."

"An amulet, then. You weren't afraid to express how you felt back then."

"I'm embarrassed by the immature whining I did back then. I thought I knew everything, but hardly knew a thing," Fred responded.

Nora stated, "You expressed your anger about the war in various protests. That was good."

Fred let out a deep breath, then said, "I was mainly concerned about not getting drafted. All these years later, I still don't know what that crazy war was about. I’ve read books about it, but only ended up more confused. Even if I did the right thing, my motives were selfish. I did so many stupid, selfish things back then."

"I did stupid things too. I transferred to UCLA without ever saying how I felt about you," Nora said, with the darkness making her feel she could say things she otherwise couldn't.

Fred snorted unsympathetically at this revelation, then said, "Whatever you felt back then, don't lay a guilt trip on me. You followed your boyfriend Ted, who'd transferred the previous semester."

"Yes, but you were already dating Carrie. If you hadn't been..."

Fred said, "That is something that I don't regret."

"I didn't mean it that way," Nora retorted, crossing her arms.

Fred replied, "It's water under the bridge anyway. That was thirty years ago."

Nora hesitated, then revealed, "I thought you were making a big mistake sticking with her."

Fred looked over at his wife's gravestone, then said, "Carrie didn't much like you, but her views softened later."

"I sensed that. I thought she regarded me as a rival."

Fred shrugged and remarked, "Maybe, but she also didn’t like your political views. Politics seemed so important back then, but so much of it was so oversimplified, at least among the college students I knew. Remember the saying, Don't trust anybody over thirty?"

Nora giggled, then said, "Everybody who said it is far older than that now. Guess we can't be trusted."

Fred said, "For the people I knew, anybody who was old was not to be trusted. Also, everybody rich was automatically evil. That included you. You went to an expensive private high school and had a brand new sports car. Blue, just like your current one."

Nora indignantly claimed, "Dad was a very successful lawyer. What was he supposed to do? Not get paid? Not spend money on me, his only child?"

"After you left, Carrie and I learned how stupid we had been with our attitudes. That was because in 1971, we joined a commune."

"A what?"

"A commune," Fred repeated. "We were in it for only half a year."

Nora asked skeptically, "You mean where the root word communist comes from?"

"Yes, but it was not quite like it sounds three decades later. It was just a large house about a mile from campus. A dozen students...including Carrie and me...combined their resources to pay the rent and cover utilities. It had a large yard where we put a huge garden, but nothing ever grew but weeds. So much for growing all our own food. The place was supposed to be even cheaper than living in the dorms. It was also a political statement. We were living in what we called a commune, which expressed our contempt for a war that was supposed to be against communism."

Nora tightened her arms around her chest and shook her head as she said, "I'd guess somebody charismatic took over, talking sweetly about how everybody had to sacrifice for the group, then ripping them off."

Fred turned from looking at the gravestone to looking at her, then said, "How'd you know?"

"I was a lawyer in California for years before moving back east. I had cases involving cults, as there are many of them out there. For example, one case was a wife trying to protect her assets as her husband joined a cult and was trying to give them away."

Fred recalled, "Stephen came to be the de facto leader even though we were all supposed to be equal. He was stealing from the rest of us. I exposed his crimes in a group meeting."

"I'll bet that didn't help," Nora said.

Fred gestured at the grave and said, "It depends on how you judge success. I convinced Carrie, but nobody else. Convincing her was a success to me. She and I quit the commune."

Uncrossing her arms, Nora asked, "Is the commune still around?"

"The house still stands, but it's not called a commune anymore. It's just a large house. The commune aspect fell apart when Stephen died in 1973."

"What of?"

Fred revealed, "Heroin overdose. Joel and I were rookie cops by then. We were at the house, although just doing the grunt work. Almost the entire force was there for crowd control. The commune had grown to about forty members by then, all living in that house, even though it was too small for that many. The place had been crowded when there was only a dozen of us. It was a pigsty inside, not clean like when I lived there. I guess getting drugs is why Stephen needed to steal. We hauled large quantities of various illegal drugs out of that house."

Nora said, "It sounds like a cult."

"It is not how it got started, but is how it ended up. I was so glad that Carrie and I had gotten out a couple years earlier. All this occurred more than ten years before Eric Lewis was born."

"Feeling old?"

"I suppose I could use the corny movie line about getting too old for this."

Nora remarked through giggles, "You should've been saying that for the past decade. You did just turn fifty, after all."

Fred left the gravestone and walked over to her. He put an arm around her, then said, "I've been a cop for twenty-seven years. I worked on many cases related to people in this cemetery. Carrie died of cancer, which makes it a little easier to deal with. The others I know here did not. Over that way is a wife who was beat to death by her husband."

"Was that the case where the husband later committed suicide, then the husband's family wanted him buried in the plot next to her while the wife’s family sued not to let him be put here?"

"That's right. He's not in this cemetery, so that shows how it came out."

Nora said, "It was an interesting legal case."

"Joel and I had to deal with the wife's body. She wasn't a pretty sight. Then, it was the husband's body we had to examine a short time later. Worrying about who got buried where seemed to me to be doing too little too late."

"I know about the legal issues, but haven't thought about what the bodies looked like."

"I've seen many bodies. I know of six men and five women in this cemetery who died of drug overdoses. We got a lot of those in the Seventies. Stephen's body isn't here, although a few of his former followers are. Stephen's parents retrieved his body and brought back it back to Wisconsin. I liked his parents. I wouldn't have thought they'd have a son who'd have gone so wrong."

"I've seen much of that as a lawyer," Nora put in.

Fred pointed to the far end of the cemetery and said, "Back there is the body of a hunter. He was in an unconvincing hunting incident that we were never able to prove wasn't an accident. Some cases we never solve."

"I'm sure you've solved many, though."

Fred walked away from Nora. He stopped at his wife's gravestone, then counted out as he moved to the right. Five gravestones over and one back, he stopped. Nora followed after him.

Fred said, "This is a grave of two young boys. One gravestone for both of them. They died in a fire. It was arson. We caught the arsonist. We got a conviction, which is very hard to do in arson cases, but we succeeded that time. It was for insurance money. If I really expressed how I felt about cases like this, I'd never stop crying."

Nora touched Fred's arm, then remarked, "Catching the arsonist and convicting him is accomplishing something. I never gave much thought to what you'd seen working so many years as a cop."

Fred said, "For all those years, this is the first time I'll have put somebody in here because of what I did."

Nora commented, "Eric Lewis might not end up in this cemetery. There are other cemeteries in town, or he might be cremated."

Fred said, "I meant killing somebody in general. I wish Eric's body could be donated for organs, to retrieve some small good out of this."

"Do you think Mrs. Lewis would go for that?"

"Eric has to be autopsied. It's the law for cases like his. His body will be useless for donation after the autopsy."

Nora remarked, "I should have thought of that. You know, before I transferred to UCLA, you really hated cops and called them pigs. Now, you've been one for twenty-seven years."

Fred admitted, "That is ironic, but most college students called police pigs back then. Everybody in the commune certainly did."

"I never did. Even back in 1970 when I left, I thought you might join the police someday."

"I didn't decide to become a police officer until a year after you transferred. That was after I exposed Stephen stealing and conning money from the others in the commune. To me, proving he was a thief transformed who I felt I was, even if the only one I saved from the commune...or cult, if you prefer...is Carrie. Why would you have thought that when I hadn’t thought of it yet?"

Nora said, "You were always large and strong. I saw how much you cared about others and tried to protect them, traits I associate with the police. For example, I remember what you did for Charlie Salt, when I was still here."

Fred remarked wistfully, "I still see him sometimes. Not as often as I should, but it's a long drive out to his farm."

"I remember that you tutored him for free."

"He still flunked out, then got drafted. All these years later, he still won't tell me about what happened in Vietnam. He admits he would've studied much harder if he'd known what it would be like. He thought when he left college, he’d work on his parents’ farm. He just didn't take the danger of being drafted seriously."

"You warned him that he could get drafted if he flunked out. I heard you do it. You did your best to help him in his classes. Even after he was gone, you wrote to him and to Joel every week."

"I only wrote once a month," Fred corrected her.

Fred thought back to how he'd get letters back from both Charlie and Joel, saying he'd been the only one to write them that month. Fred remembered that this included both admitting they seldom received mail from their own parents. All these years later, Fred was still mad at their parents for that.

Nora said, "That's doing more than most people did. Especially college students to soldiers. You were supposed to hate soldiers then."

Fred said, "What happened to Charlie I could sympathize with, as he was drafted. I was actively protesting against the war, then Joel joined the Army! Not drafted, but volunteered! He was so anxious to show his Dad he could be a war hero too. The Army showed Joel who's the boss."

Nora recalled, "The other war protesters gave you a hard time, as though writing to your friends in the Army was supporting the war. I admired you so much for writing anyway. I wish I had written them."

Fred held Nora a little tighter, then explained, "You didn't known them that well then. Joel and Charlie were my best friends in high school, although Joel was a year behind us."

Nora had gone to an exclusive and expensive private high school in a nearby city, although her father's law practice had always been here in Port City. Fred, Joel, and Charlie were together in the public high school in Port City, although a long bus trip for Charlie. They had known her, but not too well. Fred really got to know Nora only until after they were both in college together. Then, she had transferred to California.

Fred continued, "You know about Charlie lasting only one year in college because you were here. Joel graduated high school a year after Charlie and I did, but he immediately joined the Army, which was the same time Charlie got drafted. They were at boot camp together. Joel was probably the only one who wanted to go to Vietnam. With typical incomprehensible Army logic, Charlie got sent to Vietnam, but Joel didn’t."

"Joel was in Germany, right?"

"Correct. Joel tosses old mail, but Charlie still has my letters. If an old girlfriend saved my letters, that'd be flattering, but this is kind of embarrassing."

Nora insisted, "I think it's sweet."

Fred then said, "Other than boot camp, Joel spent the rest of his enlistment in Germany as a member of the Military Police. He says he mostly handled drunks on leave, dragging them back to their various bases. Why the Army made somebody as short as him, and he had the thick glasses back then too, an M.P. is beyond me. I couldn't figure out why they took him at all, except they were desperate for men back then. By the time he got out, Joel was happier than words can say that he never got sent to Vietnam. Joel told me that other than Charlie, all his other close friends from boot camp went to Vietnam and never came back."

Nora remarked, "Maybe all his time in Germany has something to do with why Joel had Irene buy him a BMW. It's a German car."

"It's his third BMW, actually. He had one in Germany. He lived off base his last two years, so I guess he was allowed to buy a car if he wanted. He sold that car rather than paying to ship it over the ocean. He got a used BMW soon after he came back to the States. That one eventually died, then Irene got him the current one. He knows perfectly well that car gives an image of being rich and a cop isn't supposed to do that, but he's deliberately obnoxious about it. Joel's car used to drive Carrie crazy! He teased that the VW Beetle we had back then was also a German car, so what was her problem?"

Nora asked, "You and Joel both ended up joining the Port City Police Department at the same time, didn't you? I was in law school by then."

"Yes. I’d taken five years to graduate because I switched my major a few times. Joel had never been to college, but had gotten out of the Army in four years. So, we interviewed at the same time. The other officers loved that Joel had been an M.P. so much that they gave him an offer before his interview was over! It certainly didn't happen that way for me."

"They did hire you too, though."

"I had to wait a couple tense weeks for a letter, but I was hired. Of course, we still had to go to the academy after being hired, but that didn't take long. It's amazing that all this was so long ago."

Nora pulled Fred down closer to him and whispered in his ear, "I remember another saying from when we were back in college."

"Hell no, we won't go?"

"Make love, not war," Nora said suggestively.

Fred replied, "For me, that can only be after marriage."

Nora complained, "You mentioned the commune practiced free love. Where you really so pure then?"

Fred said, "What I experienced at the commune brought me back to what are now called traditional values."