He stood up. “Good-bye, asshole. Don’t forget to send me a bill.”
He started toward his car and was halfway there when he stopped and looked back at me.
“Oh, and one more thing,” he called. “Hiding Dr. Holyfield’s assets from his wife? That was Alison’s idea. I just thought you should know.”
I should have hated him, but I didn’t. I should have hated Dr. Holyfield and Stephen Emerton, too, but they didn’t seem worth the effort. Instead, I convinced myself that sooner or later they would all get what they deserved. Life would settle with them, just as it had with Alison. It was something I needed to believe.
I gazed at the bright, cloudless sky as I returned to my car, realizing for the first time that I had not heard the sound of a jet engine for over a week, hadn’t seen any planes at all. The realization depressed me, although I couldn’t tell you why.
After seating myself behind the steering wheel, I took Alison’s photograph out of its envelope. When she had been just a voice on a cassette, a face in a photograph taken years earlier, I found her fascinating. And Cynthia and Bobby Orman were right: I had fallen a little in love with her. But now I was surprised by how ordinary she had become. A common thief with just a dash of uncommon flair.
I tore the photograph into pieces too small to reassemble and littered them on the ground.
twenty-nine
I watched Cynthia stretch, pushing against the edge of my redwood picnic table, first one finely chiseled leg, then the other extended behind her. Watching Cynthia move, especially in jogging shorts and tank top, was like an ice cold beer on a sweltering summer day: always a pleasure.
She had asked me to go jogging with her, but I had declined, using my still tender shoulder as an excuse—although it certainly hadn’t bothered me when Cynthia and I were together the night before. But it was such a beautiful day, why ruin it by getting all sweaty and out of breath? Instead, I wished her well, sprawled out in my hammock, and read my Sporting News. It was hard going. I kept thinking of Alison. And the men who had killed her.
I told Anne Scalasi and Chief Teeters what had happened in Deer Lake. They didn’t take it well. Teeters threatened to arrest me for obstruction. Anne just wanted me to go away for a while. But at least Teeters wouldn’t be haunted by the one that got away. And Scalasi would be able to replace the red tab in her murder book with a blue one.
“There’s not a damn thing you can do about them,” Cynthia said after I told her the story. “You have no evidence, nothing that’s admissible.”
“I could kill them.”
“But you won’t.”
“No, I won’t,” I agreed. “Alison was dirty. That’s why she was hiding. She knew what she was getting into. It’s just that—”
“You want justice for her.”
“I don’t know from justice,” I admitted. “What the hell is justice, anyway? If you have a working definition, I’d like to hear it. I just want … I don’t know what I want. A happy ending, I guess.”
“Oh, Taylor, you of all people should know better. Not every story has a happy ending. Some of them just end.”
She was right, of course. The world is what it is, not something else. That’s one reason why I have so little patience with peace demonstrators. But I didn’t feel any better about it.
I hadn’t read more than a dozen pages of the Sporting News when Cynthia, mopping her forehead with a towel, returned to my backyard, carrying my mail.
“This ought to improve your mood,” she said guardedly and handed me an envelope with Hunter Truman’s return address. It contained a check for $12,800—thirty-two days’ work, counting my time in the hospital, one of the longest cases I’ve ever investigated. However, Truman had decided to ignore my $1,982 expense invoice, and I debated suing him before finally deciding against it. It would probably give him too much pleasure.
“Who’s Rosalind?” Cynthia asked.
“Hmm?”
“Rosalind Colletti,” she repeated, handing me a postcard.
A jolt of adrenalin electrified my body at the sound of the name. I sat up, my legs straddling the hammock, and snapped the postcard from Cynthia’s fingers. On one side was a spectacular photograph of the Split Rock Lighthouse overlooking Lake Superior just north of Duluth. The other side had my address, a Duluth, Minnesota, postmark, and this message written in long hand:
Dearest Taylor,
I’ve been told your first aid saved my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But you know, despite what Oscar Wilde had to say on the subject, living well is not always the best revenge. Sometimes dying is.
Rosalind
“Who’s Rosalind?” Cynthia repeated after I had read the postcard for the fourth time.
She’d done it again! I’ll be damned, she’d done it again! Sheriff Orman must have helped her … managed to get to someone in the hospital.… And when Truman and Emerton and Dr. Bob exhumed her body only to find that there was no body …
“Is it a secret?”
“Hmm?”
“Who’s Rosalind?”
I smiled. I couldn’t help but smile.
“Just the girlfriend of a painter I used to know.”
“She says you saved her life?”
“Nonsense,” I said.
And then I started to laugh. I laughed long and heartily until Cynthia was compelled to join in even though she didn’t get the joke.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1999 by David Housewright
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US: @openroadmedia and Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Videos, Archival Documents,
and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media
newsletter and get news delivered
straight to your inbox.
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
SIGN UP NOW at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters