Firefly Rain Read Online Free Page B

puttered and fidgeted and took all of the useless stuff in, one small armload at a time. Some of it I found places for, some of it I just dumped in what I pretended was a neat pile in the guest bedroom. There was no need to find a permanent home for anything, so mostly it was just a matter of figuring out new definitions for “not underfoot” and “out of the way.”
    It was getting on nine by the time I’d shifted the piles of goods to my satisfaction. When the last trip had been made, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, then went into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich for dinner. The movers were due to arrive late that evening, and I thought that once I’d finished eating, I’d sit out on the porch and wait for them.
    But as the dark crept up with no sign and no phone call, I got restless. A couple of glasses of water gave way to a couple of beers, which didn’t help my mood any. Eventually I resigned myself to the fact that they weren’t coming and took myself for a walk.
    The property was large enough that a man could ramble a good ways in any direction he chose, though most of the land had long since been left to grow wild and could be tough going as a result. The plot where they’d buried both Father and Mother was about as far back as the cleared land went. The rest was all tall grass clear to the edge of the woods, and if it had been left to me, no doubt the weeds would have claimed the graves as well.
    Carl hadn’t let that happen, though. I walked past the curtain of pines and saw he’d been diligent in keeping the gravesites clear. Green grass cropped close was all that grew there, that and a flowering vine that wound its way up Mother’s stone. There had always been a rumor that Carl had been sweet on her, and I didn’t doubt it, not that I cared.
Didn’t do either of them any good
, I thought. Instead, I just let myself drift as I walked along, and I didn’t think about Carl or Mother anymore.
    I was almost feeling peaceful when the jangle of my cell phone brought me back to myself. Hastily I dug it out of my pocket and answered “Logan.”
    A woman’s cold voice answered me and let me know I had new voice mail. The light on top of the phone blinked red at me, slow and steady. With a shake of my head, I dialed up the message and put the phone to my ear.
    “You have. One. New message, recorded today at two. Thirty. Five. PM.” That’s what that robot voice said this time, and then it spewed out a gibberish phone number as the source of the call. I took a deep breath and silently cursed the voice-mail system for taking its own sweet time to get the message to me. Then, all thebest profanity out of my system, I punched up the message itself and wondered why my gut was suddenly twisting.
    The call turned out to be from the moving company, as I had been hoping, but that was where things turned grim. They had some bad news for me. The truck with my furniture on it had been involved in what the man on the phone called “an incident,” where “incident” meant “getting caught too close to a jackknifing tractor trailer.” The truck, and just about everything on it, had been wrecked beyond any hope of salvage. The man, who gave his name as Jason Proctor, hastened to add that their insurance would cover the value of the goods I had lost, and that I was welcome to drive up to Baltimore, where the crash had occurred, to look through the remains myself. He was, of course, very sorry for the inconvenience. He also left a number I could call any time, day or night, to discuss the matter. A few more apologies followed, and then he hung up.
    Before saving the message, I said a small prayer for the man who had left it. The poor bastard sounded like he was about to start crying by the end of the message. I wondered if he’d had anything on that truck himself, or if he’d just had to deliver the bad news to one too many customers over the years. I resolved to ask for him by name, and I dialed in the