Primal Fear by Brad Boucher Page B

she’d understood his motives and supported him in his decision, he couldn’t help but feel that he was somehow letting her down.  It was an opinion she’d never voiced, but he found himself wondering how badly the financial bite was affecting their relationship.
    They’d taught themselves to go without for so long, to pass up so much, that even the occasional night out seemed like an extravagant expenditure.  Through it all, Laurie stood faithfully by him, and he certainly felt as if the tough times had only strengthened the bond between them, but he knew inside there was one tender area of tension he could never fully heal.
    Simply put, Laurie wanted to begin a family, and he didn’t.
    And it wasn’t that he didn’t want children.
    He knew someday he would love to be a father.  It just seemed that there was always another reason not to take the leap into parenthood.  Ten years ago, when he’d first married Laurie, he’d wanted the two of them to have an opportunity to enjoy each other as newlyweds before having children.  After that, he’d landed the job as sheriff and his obligations to the force had tripled, leaving him little time for all the added responsibilities that came with fatherhood.  And finally, as he’d come to hone his department into a finely tuned machine, the Stratham Granite Works had closed and economic hardship had set in. 
    Now, it was a financial situation that kept them childless, and he knew Laurie was not taking it well at all.  The tension between them each time they breached the subject of a family was quite genuine and grew more heated with every discussion.  It was, in fact, the only thing he and Laurie had ever fought about in their entire ten years of marriage.  At thirty-six, Laurie had reminded him, he wasn’t getting any younger, and soon enough, she said, it would soon be his age he would use as an excuse.  She was four years his junior, and her impatience to experience motherhood had become a tangible area of friction in their lives.
    “No one’s ever ready to be a parent,” his brother Mike had once told him.  “Emotionally, financially, none of it makes a difference.  But once you start having kids, you make yourself ready.  It just happens.  You find ways to provide for them, you make the time to be with them.  It never gets any easier, not for a second, but believe me, it’s always worth it.  There’s nothing like it in the whole world.”
    Of course, it was easy for his brother to talk that way.  He had four children, and another on the way.  But he lived in North Carolina, where the economic climate was considerably stronger, and the financial future considerably brighter.  Harry felt that he didn’t have that luxury.  He’d even heard rumblings of a county-wide reduction of police officers.  If the axe fell on his department—or worse, his job—he couldn’t bear to drag a child through that sort of hardship.  Bad enough he would have to put Laurie through it; he despised the thought of having a child go without the comfort of a good home and a secure future.
    All of these thoughts crowded in on Harry as he pulled up to the Glen Forest Police Department and climbed out of his truck into the freezing afternoon air.  He managed to push them away, but he knew they would remain stubbornly at the back of his mind, just waiting to invade his thoughts again when the next introspective moment arrived.  For now, however, he forced the details of Marty Slater’s suicide to command his full attention.
    He stepped into the station house accompanied by a blast of frigid air from outside.  The wind had picked up substantially, a prelude to the threat of inclement weather.  And if the weather reports he’d heard on the radio could be trusted, the coming storm was going to be a whopper.
    Dana Tilton, the first-shift desk clerk, shivered as Harry pushed the door shut behind him.
    “Make it snappy, Harry.  It’s already cold in here.”  She