Murder Never Forgets Read Online Free Page A

Heimlich and part invention.
    I pick her up and shift her around. It’s almost like handling a child, a child with scrawny shoulders and a projecting ribcage. I think, Oh, my God, I hope I don’t break anything; her bones are bird bones only; here is a tiny frail rib, like a chicken rib; here is a knobbed curve of backbone. And the blood; blood coming down her face and into the creases in my wrists .
    I turn her partly upside-down, concentrating hard, staring at the jug of flowers in the middle of the table. “Don’t swallow now,” I say, and move my hands into position on her diaphragm and lift her into the air, half upside-down, squeezing.
    Behind me the dining room gets silent. Maybe my ears have clogged up, but the room seems to get totally still, and then there is the explosion of a lot of chair-scraping and feet coming our way. But I can’t pay attention to that. Mrs. Dexter pats the air; her little rump presses into my chest; the rest of her body hangs rigid and tensed, black-shod feet pointing outward, everything hanging from my squeezing hands. But finally she coughs, an awful, painful noise, wrenching, as if some part of her throat is coming up. It sounds final, as if she can never do that again. I turn her around and lay her on her back.
    A couple of waitresses have materialized nervously behind me. I feel them but don’t even look up at them; I’m busy.
    “Now don’t bite me, for God’s sake,” I say, kneeling over her. And winch and wangle her mouth open. She is good about the way I maul her; it’s hard not to gag when someone does this to you.
    A lot of blood has puddled under her soft palate. I feel something—a sudden triangular wedge of sharpness. I get a finger underneath and catch the sharp thing; she gags, but I’ve pulled this little sharp bit forward. Then I turn her over onto her face, and she spits the sharp object out, along with a gush of blood and oyster and moaning.
    A lot of people are standing around us now, including a waitress who says, “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” over and over.
    I reach for Mrs. Dexter’s napkin and wipe her face. “Oh,” she’s saying, “oh, oh,” drawing in a harsh, bubbling breath each time.
    “You were wonderful, wonderful,” I tell her, “Jesus X that must have hurt. Oh, poor Mrs. D.” I bend over and kiss her on her poor quivering blood-smeared cheek.
    I’m not sure what makes me pick that fragment of sharpness out of the blood and oyster mess on the floor and put it in my pocket. I tell myself something like, If the infirmary wants to see it, I’ll show them, but meanwhile I’m taking charge . I thought at first it must be a piece of oyster shell, but now, as I feel in my pocket, it seems more like a piece of glass.
    People are around us in a circle. Someone is saying, “Call the infirmary,” and someone else, “Doctor, get the doctor.” Poor Mrs. Dexter will hate this, being on display.
    I get up to go to my father, whose voice I hear threaded through the other babble; he’s saying, “If she lies there, they will come for her. When you lie down like that is when they grab you.”

Chapter 2
    I spend a bedraggled night churning across a Manor guest-room bed and staring up into a fluted ceiling. What’s going to happen to my poor confused father? And to gallant, paranoid Mrs. Dexter? And what’s with that piece of glass? Because it is glass; it sits now, wrapped in toilet paper, in the front pocket of my backpack, looking like a sliver of that microwave-safe milky stuff they use to make baking dishes.
    I don’t want to believe that Mrs. Dexter’s dramatic warnings are fact-based. Four A.M. flickers across the motel-type clock before I turn out the light.
    But the next morning I get up feeling okay and go off to find Daddy, who seems moderately glued to reality, although he wants to talk too much about Horus’s Eye, which is a hieroglyph of an eye with stylized markings below it. We have breakfast sent to the room, and he cracks the