Stacking in Rivertown Read Online Free

were tall and airy, at the top of a warehouse he’d renovated. A wall of windows looked out over the East River. The water glittered on sunny days. I had a pair of binoculars that I used to watch the boats go in and out the river. Pigeons roosted on our window ledges. We had a small patio on the south roof where we could lie out in the sun. Ben thought the air did us good.
    I began to remember how Toni always tried to cheer me up with little gifts he picked up here and there. Matt was quiet, like me, but he always let me curl up in his lap when we watched scary videos together. For some reason I could never put my finger on, he reminded me of Vin.
    I thought of Kat for the first time in five years. Kat’s body and face came the closest I’ve ever seen to what I would call perfect. No man ever just glanced in her direction. But it was her inner grace, a sense of timelessness, of all the days gone by, that captured you. Kat was the one that mothered me, coaxing me back to life after Ben’s basement.
    As I began remembering them, I almost started to cry. I missed them so much.
    And we had Charles and Princess Di, two cats Matt found in a Dumpster one day. Eventually, we caught on that Charles was really a girl. It didn’t matter to us. Di was disappointed. And there was Buster. Good old Buster. He must have weighed in over one hundred pounds and was part mastiff, part St. Bernard. Ben gave it away as a reward to be able to take Buster out to Central Park. Ben had Buster trained as an attack dog. For our protection, he said.
    I have to keep my family safe, Ben said over and over. That’s how we said it. We said we were family. On nights we had off, we’d make popcorn and watch videos. We celebrated holidays and made up birthdays, spending weeks agonizing over gifts for one another. Kat posted charts of the cleaning duties. We bought groceries and cooked, spending mealtime niggling back and forth. And we cared for each other like our lives depended on it.
    I laid the gun on top of my keyboard.
    Why me? Why did I have to get a cult following and an undercurrent? Why couldn’t they have just ignored me?
    So that was when I thought to take out the shoebox again. I lifted the top off it and found Ben’s business card. Beneath that were all my old IDs, all fake. I pulled them out, staring in amazement, the wheels turning in my head.
    I couldn’t even remember what my name was when I lived by that river. But during my ten years with Ben, I was Elizabeth Boone.
    It reminded me (another chit) of Ben visiting me in that hospital, but I was in a different room from the one where I first saw Jeremy. This was a lockdown ward where I got off the smack cold turkey, soaking the bed with sweat and shaking like a baby. I was restrained hand and foot, which didn’t bother me at all. But Ben kept waving the new IDs before my eyes.
    “You’re Clarisse Broder. Remember that. And when the police ask, say you were Ekker’s girl. Don’t mention me.”
    I couldn’t get it in my head why, and I asked him if I had appendicitis. At first he laughed, but when I kept asking about the surgery, he got to looking pale. I’d never seen him like that.
    “Yeah. Appendicitis,” he said at last. And he took my hand with that gentleness that he showed sometimes, and told me the story about falling down the stairs. I remembered the ballroom and the black strapless, but I didn’t remember falling.
    After I had the police as confused as Ben about the appendicitis, they stopped bothering me and wheeled me into a regular ward.
    Ben came that last time and handed me my things. Thinking about it now, I’d almost say he looked sad. Then I met good old Jeremy and got married.
    In the shoebox beneath my old IDs was a savings account book. It showed that Elizabeth Boone had some twenty thousand dollars saved in First Mutual. That was a stunner. And beneath that I found a batch of folded papers of stories I’d written years back.
    So it started. The beginning