Blue Lonesome Read Online Free Page B

anything. Or maybe she just didn’t want to know.
    He stood looking at the meager pile, feeling irritated at himself and vaguely foolish. Forty dollars to paw through a dead stranger’s belongings. What was the point? The chance of his finding anything enlightening was slim to none. Jerking himself around, that was all he was doing. Why couldn’t he simply let go of her, forget that their paths had ever crossed?
    He knelt and opened the largest of the cartons.
    Clothing. Underwear mostly. Two sweaters, both of which he recognized from the Harmony Café. A Western-style shirt with fake-pearl snap fasteners in place of buttons. Three blouses. A stained suede jacket.
    The second carton yielded half a dozen tattered paperback books, a skimpy collection of cosmetics (but no perfume or toilet water), a street map of San Francisco, a half-full box of saltine crackers (inexplicable that Mrs. Fong would have put stale crackers into the carton), an old-fashioned, inexpensive pocket watch with a scratched cover and an imitation gold chain flecked with greenish oxidation, and a torn and dusty child’s panda bear minus one of its shoe-button eyes.
    The third carton: A pair of worn and badly scuffed boots that bore a scrolled cowboy design. A pair of sandals and a pair of flat-heeled shoes. Two skirts, one pair of slacks, one pair of Levi’s jeans.
    The small overnight bag was empty. The larger suitcase contained the thin cloth coat Mrs. Lonesome had worn to the Harmony most evenings, and nothing else.
    Pathetic lot. Remarkably so for a woman who’d had fourteen thousand dollars in cash in a safe deposit box. Looking at it spread out on the basement floor made him feel sad, depressed. The only personal items, really, were the pocket watch and the bear.
    He picked up the watch, worked the stem. The hands moved but the winding mechanism was broken. He slid a thumbnail under the dust cover and flipped it up. Words had been inexpertly etched on the casing inside, as if with a homemade engraving tool. Letters and portions of letters were worn away, but the full inscription was still distinguishable when he held the casing up to catch the light from a naked bulb overhead.
    To Davey from Pop.
    Davey. Husband, lover, brother, friend? There was nothing to give him a hint—to Davey’s identity or to the reason why she’d kept the watch.
    Same with the panda bear. It looked old: hers, from her childhood? Or had it belonged to a child of her own? He remembered the damaged photograph Del Carlo had told him about, that she’d taken into the bathtub with her for the last few minutes of her life. Did a child have something to do with her suicide—the loss of one, maybe? A little boy named Davey? Davey’s watch, Davey’s panda?
    The depression was heavier in him now. He told himself to put everything away, get the hell out of here; the toy bear’s one remaining eye seemed to be staring at him, for God’s sake. Instead, compulsively, he unfolded the San Francisco map to see if there was anything written or marked on it (there wasn’t), even poked inside the box of saltines before he dragged over the half dozen paperbacks.
    One of the books was poetry— A Treasury of American Verse. Three were thick historical romances, all set in the South before or during the Civil War. The fifth: a Western novel with a cover even more lurid than those on the romances. The sixth: a nonfiction self-help book called Coping with Pain and Grief . Odd assortment. But the last might be significant, he thought. Grief and loneliness went hand in hand, especially if a child was involved. So did grief and suicide.
    Messenger thumbed through the self-help volume. No dog-eared pages, no underlining, no personal annotations; and nothing tucked in among the pages. He riffled through each of the other five books, not expecting to find anything in them, either. But on the last page of the verse treasury, something caught his eye—stamped words in faded red ink.
    Beulah