Mister X Read Online Free Page A

figured her accent made her seem more naïve than she was. She was twenty-five and had been away to college. She’d been around some.
    Right now, she needed some groceries, and a few things for the bathroom, such as toothpaste, soap, and shampoo. And that air freshener. When she was finished with shopping for those items and had put them away, she’d go out and see if she could find a place to buy an easel and some art supplies. That shouldn’t be hard to do in the Village. It was an artsy place.
    An artsy place with bars on the windows.
    Mary went into the L -shaped kitchen, gazed into the empty refrigerator, and decided to make a list.
    As she was turning around to go get her purse in the bedroom, she noticed the large blue ceramic canisters on the sink counter near the stove. They were lettered FLOUR, COFFEE, SUGAR , and so on. Mary liked them and might have chosen them herself.
    She was a tea drinker, so when she returned from the bedroom with her purse, she put her gun in the empty coffee canister.
    As she was going out the door, Mary glanced back and smiled. The apartment was nothing like the ones in those old Doris Day white-telephone movies. More like the apartments in Seinfeld , only shabbier. But it was already beginning to feel like home.
    This was going to work, Mary assured herself again, making sure the door was closed tight and locked behind her.
    Everything was going to be okay.

5
    “You’re tearing open old wounds,” Rhonda Nathan’s mother said.
    Pearl thought the elderly woman might begin to cry, but the unblinking gray eyes remained calm behind what looked like cheap drugstore eyeglasses.
    The Nathans hadn’t been difficult to trace, but the effort had been time-consuming. When their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Rhonda, had been killed by the Carver seven years ago, they’d lived in a spacious condo in the East Fifties. Rhonda’s father, who’d been struck and killed by a bus three years ago, had been the family breadwinner with a partnership in a Wall Street firm. His widow, Edith Nathan, had fallen a long way to this cramped apartment on the Lower East Side.
    Pearl did feel sorry for the woman. Her thinning gray hair was unkempt, her complexion sallow. The flesh beneath her chin dangled in wattles, and her figure, if she’d ever had one, had become plump in a way that reminded Pearl of infants still in the crib. Breasts seemed nonexistent beneath her stained blue robe with its mismatched white sash.
    The woman’s eyes were fixed straight ahead. Her soul seemed to have wandered.
    “Edith?” Pearl said softly.
    The unnaturally calm gray eyes trained themselves on Pearl.
    “We don’t mean to cause pain,” Pearl said.
    “But you do cause pain,” Edith said. “Like a scab being ripped from a wounded heart that will never completely heal.”
    Pearl glanced around the humble apartment. Geraniums in plastic pots on a windowsill were obviously dead, as were roses in a cracked vase on top of the television. Live flowers in another pot in the middle of the kitchen table, barely visible to Pearl, saved the apartment’s plant life from being a sad metaphor. On a shelf that ran along a wall near a cabinet full of glass curios, a color photograph of a young dark-haired woman with a bright smile was propped in a silver frame. Pearl recognized Rhonda Nathan from her photos in the newspaper clippings of seven years ago that had been delivered by Chrissie Keller.
    “Like most of the families of the monster’s victims,” Edith said, “I long ago accepted the reality that my daughter and only child was gone from the world. Nothing will bring her back. Not fate or a prayer or a deal with God or the devil. Not you reopening the investigation. Would I trade my life for the monster’s death? Yes. Would I gladly kill him slowly in the most dreadful way? Yes. But not in the heat of vengeance. More in the balancing of scales.” Edith sighed and leaned back into the flowered sofa cushions. “There is a