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He’s driving them out to rural Oxford county for their newest investigation, the discovery of a body on a windfarm not being quite the industrial accident it first appeared. For the first time since her surgery, Dr Kimishima is accompanying him to the crime scene, if only to avoid the disaster that’s been investigations over Zoom call. The last attempt almost ended in IT having to repair her laptop and his cell phone.
Still. It was nice to have her company on the drive and nicer to see her increasingly getting back on her feet, even if he did expect her to crash out within two minutes of beginning the drive home.
The radio is playing some classic rock station that he stumbled upon, then never bothered to change back. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the doctor tapping her finger on the armrest to the beat.
"So…this Ben Frank then?” she asks, when the song switches to a commercial. “What’s so special about him that the guitar prompted such an…outburst?”
“He’s probably one of the greatest guitar players that ever lived.”
The doctor gives an unconvinced hmm. “Is that all?”
He hesitates. Somehow, he was still surprised when she read him like a book. “Growing up, we weren’t supposed to listen to rock music. My father was a Baptist preacher and thought we should only listen to hymns at home. He told his congregation that listening to any music that wasn’t spiritual was just inviting the devil into their lives. He told them to burn everything - we even had a congregational bonfire. He brought along everything he owned-”
“Let me guess. Everything except his collection of Ben Frank records?”
“You got it in one.”
“What a hypocrite.”
“Believe me, that was the least of his problems. He pretty much checked out after my mother died. But sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and find him in the living room drinking beer, listening to his Ben Frank records. And…he’d let me sit with him, and listen, and talk. Only about the music, never about anything real. That was the only thing that connected us.”
Her eyes are focused on him, looking for…something he was never quite sure of. Eventually, she responds, her voice unexpectedly soft. “I’m glad you had that.”
He gives a small nod of thanks. “He sank further and further into the bottle, and those talks stopped somewhere along the way. But when I was leaving for college, he was adamant that I took his record collection. It was the last thing he gave me.”
“He passed?”
“End of freshman year.”
“Do you still have them, the records?”
“Nah, I had to sell them during sophomore year to make rent,” he laments. “Always thought I’d collect them again after graduation, but I moved around too much for…work. I just never looked for them again.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
He shrugs. “It is what it is. Besides…I can listen to the entire collection through my phone these days.”
“But it’s not the same?”
“No. But it’s good enough.”
She nods, then returns to watching the Maine countryside go by. They make insignificant chit-chat for some of the journey, switching to theorising the case and back again. At the crime scene they find a packet of sleeping pills hidden in a canteen cupboard. And, as predicted, she’s asleep in the car before they hit the highway.
It’s more than a month later when he returns to his desk one morning to find a Ben Frank vinyl record, the cardboard jacket faded and the corners dogeared, and a handwritten post-it note.
Saw this while out for lunch. Thought you’d appreciate it. N.