American Appetites Read Online Free

discovered that Sigrid Hunt lived not in the house on the street but in an apartment above a garage at the rear.
    A small yellowed card with SIGRID HUNT in childlike block letters had been tacked beside the door; beneath it, a wicker basket stuffed with advertising flyers. The door itself had been painted a bright robin’s-egg blue, now covered in patches of grime and cobwebs. Ian peered inside its window but could see nothing except a narrow flight of stairs leading up into shadow.
    He knocked loudly, but no one answered; knocked again, and called, “Sigrid? It’s me, it’s Ian.” He peered up at the second-floor windows, whose blinds were drawn; no one responded. His heart knocked hard in his chest; he dreaded some sort of terrible revelation: a sudden scream, a smashed window, a man’s footsteps rushing toward him down the stairs.
    But no one appeared. Nor was any car parked in the drive.
    â€œHello? Sigrid? It’s—”
    He had the uneasy sensation that he was being watched, very likely from the house at the front, which, like other private residences on the street, wood-frame, shingled, shabby, had the look of a place in which welfare recipients and old-age pensioners lived. He felt exposed, a fool. An incongruous figure in his camel’s-hair coat, black Astrakhan hat, green scarf: items of clothing bought for him by Glynnis. “Sigrid? Are you home? Come open the door,” he called, cupping his hands to his mouth. He was quite alarmed by this time, envisioning Sigrid Hunt lying dead upstairs: partly clothed or frankly naked, strangled, stabbed, raped, murdered, her golden-red hair fanned out about her, as in one of those lurid photographs in detective magazines he’d examined surreptitiously as a junior high school boy. . . .
    How sad, Ian thought, that a woman of Sigrid Hunt’s beauty and pretensions should live in a place like this: above a garage of rotted shingles, peeling paint, broken and carelessly boarded-up windows, opaque with the grime of years. Trash had been strewn about the yard; broken concrete and glass were everywhere underfoot. Untrimmed trees and overgrown bushes, lightly touched with snow, were given a startling and rather inappropriate beauty, as in a Japanese watercolor of skeletal trees and snowy-white blossoms.
    Ian tried the door again, could not think what to do—summon the caretaker, if there was one? Call Sigrid Hunt’s number from a pay telephone? Call the police?—when, finally, a figure appeared on the stairs, descending slowly and cautiously, like a sleepwalker: leaning against the wall and gripping the railing with both hands. It was Sigrid Hunt, drunk or drugged or seriously ill, her face pale and drawn, her hair in a tangled braid behind her back. She wore an ill-fitting white robe that opened carelessly about her bare legs; her feet too were bare, despite the cold; though by now she must have recognized Ian, she did not open the door at once but rubbed the gritty window with the palm of her hand and peered out at him. Without her glasses her eyes looked raw and reddened.
    Ian rattled the doorknob impatiently. “Don’t you know who I am? It’s Ian McCullough; you called me,” he said. “Unlock the door.”
    Sigrid Hunt stared at him, seemed at last to know who he was, began to work the police lock, which took some time. When at last she managed to get the door open and Ian stepped inside, she flinched back from him and muttered, “Damned lock, works so damned hard,” and turned away with no further greeting or word of explanation. She began to climb back up the stairs, again gripping the railing with both hands. “Watch the stairs,” she said, “they’re rotted; it’s that kind of place. You can see, can’t you, it’s that kind of place ?” Her voice rose on the last word as if on the edge of laughter.
    Ian followed her upstairs, staring at the young