The Dead Circle Read Online Free Page A

amazing pianist. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you play a wrong note.”
    “Yep. I’m a piano machine. Practically perfect in every way,” a tiny bit of bitterness sneaks into his voice, but he masks it by playing ‘Jolly Holiday’ from Mary Poppins. “But nobody in New York or Chicago wants to hear a soul-less computer make music. So I’m stuck playing in Akron for three hundred bucks and a meal stipend.”
    “So I should cancel delivery on the Faberge eggs I was going to put on this shelf?” She climbs down the ladder and sits next to him on the piano bench.
    Chris laughs. He appreciates her poking him out of his impending self-pity tailspin. “Of course, when I married you, you were a fancy architect making six figures a year, not a struggling artist. If anybody should be complaining about not having a sugar daddy, it’s me!”
    “Touché!” She smiles and looks down at the strange square of contrasting flooring in the middle of the room. It was where the marble staircase connecting the balcony to the main floor was supposed to have been. Since it was never built, they tried to fill in the empty spot with matching hardwood, but it was still obviously not original. After considering putting a rug over it, they gave up and embraced it as a historical quirk. “Are we ever going to finish this?”
    Chris stops playing.
    “Finish? This place has been under construction for almost ninety years and it’s never been close to completed. I don’t know why we ever thought we could accomplish this.”
    “Cuz we knew we wouldn’t get waylaid by the Great Depression and lose all of our money. Crash away Wall Street! When you don’t have any stocks, your life is so much more secure.”
    “You know, when I said I wanted a fixer-upper this wasn’t exactly what I meant.”
    “You wanted space. You wanted character. You wanted something we could afford. King, embrace your kingdom.”
    Chris stands up and stomps around the room imperiously. “King? That sounds pretentious. I’d prefer to be a dictator.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “A benevolent dictator though!”
     “You’re such an idiot.” Sarah laughs, tossing a pencil at him.
    Chris jumps away from the attack, and sits back down at the piano. Without glancing at the music, he begins to play a section of Schumann, gliding his fingers up and down the keyboard with impressive dexterity and power for his relatively slight hands.
     “On the plus side, the acoustics in here are fantastic.” Chris says, repeating a difficult passage as Sarah climbs back up to her painting.
    “You know-” Sarah stops, knowing Chris can’t hear her.
    “What’s that?” He stops playing.
    “There’s plenty more sanding to do up here. I can’t do the next part of the mural until we scrape off all of this lead paint. You could come up and help me.”
    “I was helping! I thought underscoring would make it seem more dramatic.”
    Sarah rolls her eyes yet again as Chris climbs the ladder and picks up a Brillo pad.
    “Don’t eat the paint chips husband.”
    “You’re no fun.” He starts to scrape and sand the plaster until it is completely smooth, while Sarah follows behind with a bucket of primer. “You know, this mural is turning into a ton of work. Have you considered a nice off-white?”
    Sarah laughs. “I’m considering offing my husband at the moment.”

Chapter 2
     
    If a Detroit Tigers fan leaving after a game at the shiny new Comerica Park walked down Adams Avenue for two blocks, he or she would find themselves in an enormous vacant lot. It’s a strangely empty area in relation to the dense city around it. It looks as if someone came along and deleted almost twenty acres out of the middle of downtown. Stretching five blocks in each direction, all the way to the Fisher Freeway, sits an uneven spiderweb of empty streets breaking up abandoned blocks. There are no buildings, no bus stops or mail boxes, just blank space. Some of the streets are still relatively smooth