In The Falling Light Read Online Free

looking.”
    “ Rosie!”
    “Yes, Rosie. I’m looking.” He spotted a
cluster of photo albums, pulled one out and held it up. “This?”
    “No! Cock asshole…” she shook her head, and
seemed to lose interest as she poked at a mole on the back of her
hand. Cesar wasn’t surprised by the outburst or the language. She
was batshit, after all, and he’d heard it from her before. He
started to put the book back.
    “The red one,” Rosie said.
    There was only one that color, a big book
with a cracked, dark red leather cover. He pulled it as she
unbuckled herself – he didn’t know she could do that – and
tottered towards a flower-patterned love seat, carefully lowering
herself to the cushions as if the very act of sitting down could
fracture her bones. And likely it could, he thought.
    Rosie patted the cushion beside her. “It’s
very large, I’ll need you to hold it for me, Lyle.”
    “Yes ma’am,” he said, keeping from rolling
his eyes. Now he’d have to sit for the next hour or so and look at
old photos of people she wouldn’t remember, listening to rambling
stories about the ones she did, and all the while not giving a
flying fuck. He sat and opened the book.
    Cesar didn’t know much about history, but
the way people were dressed in the old black and white photos
looked to be from the turn of the century. The previous century, and he wondered again just how old the bitch might be. The
photos in this book appeared to be from her childhood, and he
endured her stories, patiently turning the pages when she asked,
holding back sighs when she trailed off into the fog of memory,
having trouble recalling names or places, watching her get
frustrated at times as she studied long-gone faces and tried to
remember who they had been. He barely heard her.
    “This is me with Pumpkin,” she said as a new
page was turned.
    Cesar was thinking of a stripper he had
known in LA with the tattoo of a tarantula on her inner thigh, and
remembering the way she looked up and batted her long black
eyelashes while her mouth was occupied. He glanced down at the
page, and instantly forgot about the stripper, looking instead at
where the old woman was pointing. It was a faded image, brown with
time, of two little girls playing on a wooden floor with a
collection of dolls and tin toys. Sunlight was streaming through an
odd, circular window set in an alcove, dust motes heavy in the air
and giving the scene a mystical look. In the background he could
see a pile of trunks, a heavy wardrobe, a wire dress dummy with a
frilly hat on it and a stack of paintings partially covered with a
tarp. A large object stood just inside the shot on the far right,
tall and smooth, a pair of side by side doors on heavy hinges, each
with a large handle, and one with a big dial.
    A vault. A big, free-standing vault.
    Rosalyn was babbling about someone called
Pumpkin, but Cesar didn’t hear her. He was staring at the vault, at
the objects in the room behind the girls, and at the window. He
recognized the unusual shape and design of that window. The house
had half a dozen of them which could be seen from the outside, all
set in dormers. That was an attic window. Rosie’s vault was in the
attic.
    “Such happy days,” she crooned, fumbling to
turn the page. Cesar let her do it, his eyes staying on the image
of the vault until it disappeared into the book.
     
    It was eight-thirty, and the old woman had
been asleep for an hour. Cesar climbed the narrow stairs from the
third floor to the attic landing, the baby monitor clipped to his
belt, its red light flickering as she snored softly in the
background. He carried the Maglite in one hand, and had a dozen
pillow cases draped over the other arm.
    The landing’s boards creaked as he stopped
before the single door, the flashlight throwing a white circle on
the plain wood. He reached for the cut glass knob and turned,
expecting it to be locked, fully prepared to shoulder it open if it
was. It wasn’t. The door