Hymn Read Online Free

Don’t leave home without it.
    â€˜Where were these found?’ he managed to say, his lips woolly and numb.
    â€˜They were found on the body of a white Caucasian female aged about twenty-nine, in the parking lot outside McDonald’s Restaurant, Rosecrans Avenue, at 11.30 a.m. this morning,’ said Houk.
    â€˜She was blonde,’ added Gable, trying to be helpful, trying hard to be sympathetic. ‘She was pretty, by all accounts, with blue eyes. She wore a red chequered shirt and blue 501s.’
    Lloyd didn’t look up, but rubbed his thumb across the white leather wallet again and again, as if he were expecting a secret message to appear. ‘Red chequered shirt?’ he asked.
    â€˜That’s right, sir. Red chequered shirt and 501s.’
    â€˜Outside McDonald’s on Rosecrans?’
    â€˜That’s correct, sir.’
    â€˜I don’t understand,’ said Lloyd, and he didn’t. He was so sure that Celia was in San Francisco that he was prepared to call her now, at the Performing Arts Center, even though he knew she was right in the middle of a lecture on reading operatic scores. Just to call her and say, ‘You’re there, aren’t you, in San Francisco?’ And to hear her say, ‘yes! of course I am!’
    â€˜And what did you say? Fatally burned? Dead?’
    Sergeant Houk sucked in his cheeks even more cavernously. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman, but it sure looks like it. I mean, there’s still a possibility it isn’t Ms Williams. Somebody could’ve stole your fiancée’s wallet. But I wouldn’t count on it.’
    â€˜What the hell are you talking about?’ Lloyd protested. ‘She flew out of here Sunday afternoon! I put her on the flight myself! She was giving five lectures on Wagner and operatic technique, and then she was coming directly back home! There’s no conceivable reason why she should have come back to San Diego before Saturday, none at all. And I can’t believe she wouldn’t have called me.’
    â€˜Well, there must have been some motive,’ Sergeant Houk said, gently. ‘The only trouble is, we don’t yet know what it was.’
    Detective Gable said. ‘She wasn’t under any kind of strain, was she? Worried about this lecture tour, anything like that? Some people crack up without any warning whatsoever, just crack up, and the next thing you know they’ve left their family and their friends behind and they’re riding lettuce-trains all over the country.’
    Lloyd slowly shook his head. Lettuce-trains? He couldn’t make any sense of what they were telling him. It was totally unbelievable that Celia was dead. On Sunday morning they had lain side by side in bed together with fresh coffee and the Sunday paper and the sun striping the sheets. She had leaned on her elbow, one hand thrust into her tangled blonde hair, and said to him, ‘We’re going to have babies, aren’t we?’
    He had finished reading Calvin & Hobbes and then leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘Sure we’re going to have babies. A boy like me and a girl like you.’
    She had smiled a distant smile. ‘One will do.’
    â€˜Just one? I want a dynasty!’
    â€˜One’s enough. If you have a baby, you know, you live for ever.’
    But she hadn’t had a baby, hadn’t even had the chance to have a baby. Now she was dead, impossibly and unimaginably dead. No life everlasting, nothing.
    The tears dripped down Lloyd’s cheeks and he didn’t even know that he was crying.
    â€˜When did this happen?’ he asked, trying to remember if he had experienced any unusual feelings during the day. Any feeling of coldness, any sudden sense of loss. But lunchtime had been chaotically busy, and for most of the afternoon he had been writing up his accounts. He couldn’t recall anything but frantic hard work and wondering how to keep laundry costs down.