The Wandering Soul Murders Read Online Free Page A

licked. Think of it as accepting the inevitable gracefully.”
    “Same thing, eh?” I said.
    Her smile grew broader. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “it’s the same thing, but this way you get to look like a good guy.”
    We walked home arm in arm, like chums in a 1940s movie, and as we settled into our old pattern of comfortable, aimless talk, I was filled with gratitude.
    When Mieka hesitated at the back gate of our yard, my first thought was that she wanted to tell me she was grateful, too. But as I watched her square her shoulders and take a deep breath, I knew that whatever was coming was not happy talk. When there was bad news, Mieka never wasted time in preamble.
    “Christy Sinclair came into Judgements yesterday,” she said. “I wasn’t going to mention it because I knew it would upset you, but considering everything else that’s happened …” She shrugged her shoulders.
    “What did she want?” I asked.
    “She wanted to know where Peter was.”
    “Did you tell her?”
    “Yes, I did,” Mieka said. “She made it sound so urgent, and there were other people there. Bernice, and Greg’s mother, and poor Blaine was waiting outside in the car. It just seemed easier to tell her.”
    “Damn,” I said, “I’d hoped Christy was out of your brother’s life – out of all our lives.”
    “Maybe she is,” Mieka said wearily. “Christy has always been unpredictable.”
    “I wish that’s all she was,” I said. “Her problem’s more serious than that. I think it’s a pathology, and it scares me.”
    Mieka was silent. Suddenly the magic had gone from the evening. The light faded, the wind came up, and someone on a bicycle yelled at the dogs. If you believed in omens, the signs accompanying Christy Sinclair’s re-entry into our lives didn’t bode well.
    When Peter had begun dating her before Christmas, we had all been ecstatic. He was nineteen years old and painfully shy. There had never been a girlfriend. Christy was exuberant and outgoing – just the ticket, it seemed. She was his biology lab instructor, and when it turned out that she was not twenty-one, as she had told Pete at first, but twenty-five, I took a deep breath and tried not to let it worry me. But as the winter wore on, other things started to.
    Christy’s lie about her age had not been an aberration. She lied about everything: where she’d eaten lunch; the names of the people with whom she had spent the weekend; the way her superiors in the biology department assessed her work performance. That winter I had been teaching political science at the university where Christy was working. She must have known the lies she told about her daily life would come to light, but it didn’t seem to alarm her. In an odd way, it seemed to make her more reckless. As the winter wore on, her lies became more transparent, more vulnerable to disclosure. It was a frightening thing to witness.
    There was another thing. I had been touched at first by how much Christy liked us, but it began to appear that her need to be part of our family was obsessive. She wanted to be at our house all the time, and when she was there, she wanted to be with me. She was an educated and capable woman, but she followed me around with the dogged determination of a tired child. I tried to understand, to sympathize with whatever privation had brought about this immense need, but the truth was Christy Sinclair got under my skin. When I was with her, I itched to get away; when I got away, I felt guilty because I knew how much being with me mattered to her.
    As the winter wore on, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one Christy was making miserable. She was crowding Peter, too. Night after night, I could hear her, pressing him for a permanent commitment. Peter was, in many ways, a very young nineteen-year-old. I was almost certain that Christy was the first woman with whom he’d been intimate. He was an innocent kid. My husband used to say that innocence is just a step away from