Midnight Haul Read Online Free Page B

make it just a bathroom. I use it sometimes and don’t even think about her lying there.”
    He looked at Laurie. She was looking at the bathroom floor, blankly.
    “Laurie,” he said, guiding her back into the hallway. “Are you okay? I mean… are you really okay?”
    “You mean, am I gonna be next?” She smiled a little. “I don’t think so. I’m depressed. My sister just killed herself. I got a right to be. And, anyway, I got Brucie. I still got little Brucie. I live for that kid. You want to see him?”
    “I sure do.”
    She took him into her room, a blue room with a bed with ruffled blue spread, and a Jenny Lind crib with a blue blanket nearby. She peeked in the crib and began playing with the well-behaved child, who made cooing, gurgling noises back at her.
    Crane looked in at the child.
    Brucie was adorable, but it wasn’t hard to see why Mary Beth had been disturbed about the boy.
    He didn’t have any hands.

Chapter Five
    The street light on her block was out, but there were lights on in the downstairs of the big white two-story house. It was a gothic-looking structure with no porch and paint just beginning to peel. There were trees on either side of the place and the overall effect was rather gloomy. He knocked on the door.
    He put his hands in his pockets and waited. It was a cool evening; perhaps he should’ve stopped back at the motel for his jacket. There was no sound except the crickets. No sound from within the house, either. He knocked again.
    Finally a muffled voice behind the door, Boone’s voice, said, “Who is it?”
    And he felt another wave of embarrassment, like he had outside the church, after the funeral, and he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. He turned to go.
    He heard the door open behind him. Then: “Oh. It’s you.”
    He turned and she was still in the plaid shirt and jeans, her blonde hair pinned back, pulled away from her face, and it was a good strong face with hard cheekbones but very pretty. Her expression, though, was cold, condescending, and it pissed him off.
    His face felt tight as he said, “What did you mean?”
    “What?”
    “What did you mean by saying Mary Beth didn’t kill herself?”
    “Did I say that?”
    “You said it. And I want to know what you meant by it!”
    “Is that why you were walking away with your butt tucked between your legs, when I opened the door?”
    “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.”
    “Why don’t you just
go
? Go home, Crane!”
    The door slammed shut.
    He stood and looked at it, wondering what he was doing here, standing in front of this door, of this house, in this town, in this state… maybe going home wasn’t such a bad idea.
    But how could he, till he found out what Boone knew about Mary Beth’s death?
    He was raising his fist to knock again when the door opened. Boone leaned against the door and looked at his upraised fist, smirked, shook her head, sighed and said, “Come on in. You look like a horse’s ass just standing there staring.”
    The house seemed very big inside, but that was because there wasn’t much furniture, just a lot of dark wood trim and dark polished wood floors that reminded him of the church this afternoon; the cream-colored plaster walls and the secondhand-store furniture in the living room area she led him to reminded him of the duplex he used to share in Iowa City, where he and Mary Beth had spent their first evening.
    She motioned to a sagging red sofa and he sat down. She pulled up a hardback chair, which was one of the few other pieces of furniture in the room. The place did look lived in; in one corner was a portable TV on a stand; against one wall was a small stereo flanked by speakers the size of cereal boxes, with a stack of albums, one of which—“No Nukes”—was propped up against the wall; and in the middle of a floor covered by a worn braided rug was a red toy fire truck which clashed with the faded red of the sofa.
    “My husband left me the house and the kid,” Boone