Voices in the Dark Read Online Free Page A

right?”
    She took herself to a window and gazed at the traffic, which the city endlessly sucked in and dribbled out. Sometimes her head hurt thinking about it. Pedestrians herded themselves along a crosswalk, their steps quick and their eyes wary, for the change of lights did not guarantee safety. Without turning, she said, “Your girlfriend, Soldier, I’d like to meet her.”
    “You would, huh? Why?”
    “I’d like to do her.”
    “It’s not her thing.” He came up behind her and caressed her back with the heel of his hand. “You’re sad, aren’t you? How long has he been gone?”
    “Two weeks,” she said.
    His breath closed in on her. “You got different bedrooms. How come?”
    “That’s none of your business, Soldier.”
    “Don’t get mad, I’m just asking. When will he be back?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, unable to muffle the worry in her voice or cloak the tension in her shoulders. He rubbed her back in a circular motion. Leaning over, he brandished his unwanted face.
    “You know what I like best about you?” His lips went to it. “This little mark on your cheek.”
    She stepped away, nerve-worn, uncertain, vulnerable, all of which heightened her sense of the absurd. His splotchwork of clothes presented farce rather than force. His arms hung long. He was not tall, only middling.
    “You want me to go, just say so.”
    Her mind veered from one thing to another as she flung a final look out the window. “There’s no rush,” she said.
    • • •
    Holly Pride at the library may have been the first to take note of the fellow, his appearance scruffy then but not yet derelict. When he breezed through the twin doors, she knew he was no townie and surely no resident of the Heights, but where others might have seen merely untidiness and eccentricity, she went beyond the stubble and rumpled clothes and surmised refinement and poetry, a story within a story.
    “May I help you?” she asked when he approached the desk, bringing with him a bath of air, hot and humid. She was ready to rummage shelves for him, but all he wanted was a street map of the town, which she provided with a timidity that arose at vital times, a curse to her, a bit of amusement to him. Seated at a secluded table, he pored over the map and later scanned the town’s ill-written weekly,
The Crier.
    Only she seemed struck by him. Fred Fossey, the part-time veterans affairs officer, was deep into a war book and never looked up. Other patrons ignored the stranger, but occasionally, with bent brows, Fossey glanced at them.
    He stayed an hour and in leaving thanked her with the sort of smile into which she could have read anything. Shifting to a window, she watched him ambulate the green, pausing to admire the rockery of flowers lovingly maintained by the Bensington Garden Club. She was sure he would return the next day or soon after, but he didn’t.
    He did, however, reveal himself in the leafy little neighborhoods beyond the green. Mildred Crandall, the town clerk’s wife, answered a knock at the back door and laid eyes on him when his appearance had deteriorated to whisker and grime. He astounded her because she had not seen tramps in Bensington since Depression days, when her mother had hurried them away with table scraps. She sent him walking with a powdered doughnut cocooned in plastic wrap.
    May Hutchins let him sit a spell in her gazebo, where she served him a bowl of high-fiber cereal weighted with strawberries and drenched in low-fat milk. He wore a signet ring she hoped was not stolen. The best time of day, he told her, is when the dew is still on the grass. “Yes,” she said, “I’m an early riser too.” A robin’s egg, he went on, is more precious than a pearl. She shied away from the unpleasant odor that flew up at her but relished his words.
    Dorothea Farnham, whose husband was a selectman, would have no truck with beggars and threatened him with a bone knitting needle when he failed to move fast enough from