The Grave Maurice Read Online Free

rails, listening for her name.

FOUR
    â€œY ou’re looking remarkably well this morning, Superintendent.” Dr. Roger Ryder looked at Jury’s chart again and smiled. “You’ve got real stamina.” “Good,” said Jury, “but now aren’t you going to tell me I’m lucky to be alive? Nurse Bell reminds me of that a dozen times a day.”
    Ryder laughed. “No, somehow I don’t equate three bullet wounds with good luck. You’re feeling okay, are you? I mean emotionally as well as physically?”
    â€œAbsolutely. When will you throw me back into the cesspool of police work?”
    â€œAh. As far as releasing you is concerned, I think another two or three days ought to do it. But as far as police work goes, uh-uh.” Dr. Ryder held up an admonitory finger. “Have to wait several weeks for that. Are you bored?”
    Jury held up The Daughter of Time. “I’ve this to entertain me; it’s a policeman in hospital working on the historical case of Richard the Third. Unfortunately, as he solves it, it doesn’t leave me anything to do.” Dr. Ryder, Jury thought, was hesitating over something. He kept looking at the door and not leaving. “Something wrong?”
    â€œI just wondered,” Ryder smiled, trying to contain his anxiety, “if you’d like a real case to think about. Fact, not fiction.” Ryder moved over to the one good chair and placed his chart on the floor.
    â€œOf course I would. Tell me.”
    â€œIt’s about my daughter. You might have read or heard about some of this. It happened nearly two years ago. She vanished.”
    For a second, Jury shut his eyes. Even though Melrose Plant had told him the story overheard in the pub, he was still unprepared. Vanished. Was there a word in any tongue, any language that was more affecting than that one? It chilled him. “My God. How old is she?” He would try to keep the girl in the present.
    â€œNow she’d be seventeen. Then she was fifteen. And Nell didn’t run away.” Ryder, in a voice that Jury imagined would be forever tremulous when he talked about her, gave Jury an accounting of what had happened. “It was bad enough before, but it got to be worse when there was no demand for ransom. That threw us completely.”
    â€œI can understand why. What about . . . Could you hand me some water? My mouth keeps drying up.”
    â€œA reaction to the medication. It’ll soon go away.”
    â€œWhat about her mother? Where was she?”
    â€œHer mother’s dead.”
    â€œI’m sorry.” Jury hesitated. “You’re quite sure your daughter didn’t leave voluntarily?”
    â€œShe didn’t run off, no.” Roger rubbed his hand over his cheek, a nervous gesture. “I know any parent would say that, but Nell was a very contented child. Unlike Maurice—that’s Danny’s son—who never got over his mother’s walking out. But why shouldn’t Nell be happy, given the life she led? For kids a stud farm would be, well, idyllic.”
    Idylls, thought Jury, have a bad way of banging up against reality, if, indeed, they were idylls in the first place. Roger Ryder struck Jury as a doctor who took nothing at face value, but as a parent, probably everything. Such parents, well meaning and loving, weren’t unusual. And actually could hardly be blamed for not knowing what was in their kids’ minds and hearts.
    Roger got up and walked over to the window, where he leaned his arm against the frame and bent his head toward the glass as if he hoped to extract some bit of knowledge from his reflection, but he said nothing.
    â€œHow did Nell react to her mother’s death?”
    â€œShe was quite accepting of it, quite cool.”
    No she wasn’t. She only appeared to be.
    â€œYour brother’s wife walked out.”
    Roger nodded. “Marybeth’s leaving didn’t really