The Boyfriend Read Online Free Page B

put some awful people away. Most of them were long gone; a few had been on death row twenty years or more, and a couple had been executed. But there had been some angry, psychotic men he had made more angry over the years, and he didn’t want to risk leading any of them to Holly’s house.
    Holly was twenty-eight years old already, and she’d been living at the house since she had finished school at eighteen. The house had been the idea of a couple he had not particularly liked. They were very rich, and their money had come from one of the many permutations of the film industry. The town was full of people who supplied some commodity or technical service to the movies, and it sometimes seemed to him that they all acted like directors or stars. But this pair had proposed that the parents of all the kids in the class chip in a monthly fee to keep the house going. They had also been generous enough to buy the house and set up a foundation, then pay more of the upkeep than anybody else. They’d been determined to provide a happy home for their son, Joshua, that had a chance of lasting through his life.
    It had been a brilliant scheme. The kids had all been attached to each other from the time their parents had noticed that something was different about them and found their way to the school, so they were like brothers and sisters. And the parents had known that they didn’t want to die and leave a child with Down syndrome alone and friendless in the world. He still thought of them as children, although they were adults now. In a few years they’d be middle-aged.
    He walked around the block and approached the house from the opposite direction to look for changes in the neighborhood and spot things that looked worrisome. It also gave anyone who had followed him a chance to show himself. It had always been one of his nightmares that he might lead one of the monsters he’d met at work to these sweet, defenseless people, searching for Jack Till’s daughter.
    He stepped up to the front porch, and heard Leah’s voice shout, “Hi, Jack!” through the screen door.
    “Hijack?” he said. “Hiya, Leah.”
    “Hialeah racetrack,” she said. It was an old joke between them, but she laughed again because she liked him and wanted to make him feel comfortable. She opened the screen door to let him into the living room. “I’m pretty sure I saw Holly come home from work a few minutes ago. Should I go get her?”
    “That would be really nice,” Till said. “Thanks.”
    Leah climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Jack sat down in the living room on the couch. He caught himself looking around the room searching for signs that something was wrong. It was much neater than his apartment, partly because the girls in this house were all tidy people, outnumbered the boys, and showed their scorn when anybody left a mess.
    “Hey, Dad.”
    He looked up and saw Holly coming down the stairs. She was like any other twenty-eight-year-old, walking carefully down the stairs, until a sudden attack of exuberance made her jump from the last step to the floor. She came and wrapped a tight hug around Till.
    It was impossible not to feel better when he saw her affection and her happiness. “How’s the gumshoe business?” she said.
    He grinned. “About the way it always is,” he said. “It keeps me from getting lazy and going broke. How’s the flower business?”
    “It’s going pretty well,” she said. “Mrs. Carmody and I are happy with the way people are coming in this summer. There aren’t any big holidays for flowers after Mother’s Day, but we’ve got a lot of business.” She leaned close to him and said confidentially, “Mrs. Carmody says it looks like a lot of men are feeling guilty for cheating on their wives.” She laughed happily.
    There was also that, he thought. The kids, including his daughter, were unembarrassed by sex, and sometimes seemed to him to have a more mature attitude than he did. It was still sometimes