All That Follows Read Online Free Page B

toward the street. It is a windy day as well as wet. The best of it is sorbus leaves, brick-red and orange, snapping free with every gust. The worst of it is beating rain. That morning’s blue has been misleading. It has been mischleading . He says the word out loud. Then, “Soaking day. Hugs, hugs …” He’s talking nonsense to himself. He’s walking through the wasteland mud in his beach cap, unprepared for anything but summer, and talking to himself.
    Leonard has imagined on the journey down that he will be able to walk past the house as closely and as innocently as someone exercising a dog, that he will stand outside and stare into the rooms. And then, will Maxie Lemon / Lermon / Lermontov be peering out, behind his mask and E-clips, and see him there? The female too. He dreams up recognition on that veiled face, an eyebrow lifting possibly, a hand half raised, a gun held out at shoulder height and pointed playfully at Leonard in the street. Kapow. You’re scathed. Kapow. You’re dead! But of course the streets around the hostage house are sealed and Leonard must, like everybody else, like all the curious and nosy, find a place behind a barrier and try to glimpse—beyond the fire engines and ambulances, beyond the little group of armed officers in flak jackets and armor coats, beyond the row of freshly naked rowan trees (no alder here, or beech), the cars, the city furniture—a skinny view of the house’s gable and its chimney pots, little more than silhouettes on this dusklike morning. When Leonard arrives, the know-alls in the crowd are pointing at an upper window where a landing light has been turned on and there is a shadow, briefly. Everybody watches for a while, until a helicopter catches their attention, and then a running man in uniform (but running only to escape the rain), and then some other movement at the curtains in another room.
    It’s tedious to stand and stare. Such scenes-of-crime are always more dramatic on a telescreen, when they’re well framed and mediated by a journalist. Here there’s very little to observe, and nothing to experience except the waiting. Leonard checks the time. It’s almost noon. He’ll stay till noon, six minutes more, and then decide on how to waste the afternoon. But finally and just in time there is a fresh development. Not in the street but on the television news, of course. Leonard’s neighbor at the barrier unfolds the screen and turns up the volume on his palm set for a headline summary. Maxie Lemon was identified, it claims, by an “estranged British relative. No more details at this time.”
    One of the curbside experts has the information, though: “It’s the daughter. That’s her, see?” How can he be sure? “I overheard.” He says it boastfully, as if overhearing is a talent. “She’s just a kid.” He points toward a group of officers and there, not blending in, a spot of uncamouflaged color among the khakis, blues, and blacks, is an adolescent girl in a red beret, her face made indistinct by the weather and distance, her back turned to the hostage house, either speaking closely to her cell phone or crying.
    She’s not a kid, thinks Leonard. She’s not a kid if she is who he thinks she is. He works it out. Austin in October 2006, and then some months. She would have been born in the summer of 2007, the summer of no sun. So that would make her not a kid and not a woman yet but seventeen. “Brave kid,” he says out loud. Yes, brave. Yes, valiant. While he hesitated by the phone last night—he will phone; he will never phone; he sleeps—Maxie’s daughter determined to put on her hat and go out in the rain to do what Leonard should have done at once. Name names. Again there is a reason to be disgruntled with himself, not quite ashamed but downcast, rather. He’s fumbled his opportunity. But still, as he knows well, an error can be retrieved and embellished in its retelling, and he is tempted to share his own information at once with this