A Chill Rain in January by LR Wright

Author:LR Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781631940088
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2015-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

ALBERG, tying his tie in his Calgary motel on Monday morning, studied his receding hairline with dismay. Blond hair was good, at least it didn’t show the gray, but at this rate he soon wouldn’t have hair of any color at all up there.

In July he would be fifty. His stomach did a kind of flip whenever he thought about that.

Still, he knew that a lot of women preferred men who’d reached a certain level of maturity.

He had to lose some weight. Fifteen pounds anyway. Maybe twenty. No muscle there anymore, he thought, distractedly hitting himself in the diaphragm—he’d always prided himself on his ability to take a blow to the stomach. He was pure fat now, pure damn fat. Of course that wasn’t true, he thought, staring into the mirror. There was muscle there. Of course there was.

A guy like Sanducci, girlfriends strewn all over the peninsula…that was all well and good, fine, but what did a guy like that have to offer a real woman, an adult female, someone seductive, yes, and attractive, sure—but someone who was discriminating, as well.

He squirted something called European Styling Foam into his hand and rubbed it on his hair and combed it and patted it until it decided to stay down. Now he had a wet spot on the top of his head. It’ll dry, he told himself, long before I get there. He realized that he wasn’t looking forward much to the afternoon, and this dismayed him.

He had enjoyed spending the previous day with his daughters. But it had made him sad, too, and resentful. Who the hell knew when he’d see them again?

Why couldn’t all of them have ended up in Central Canada, near his parents, instead of way the hell and gone out here in the West, near Maura’s? It wasn’t fair to Diana and Janey not to have the steadying influence of their other grandparents, who possessed a bit of damn dignity, who saw things clearly, as they really were, not as they damn wanted to see them. His kids had grown up thinking of themselves as Westerners, just because they were born here, and this despite the fact that they had a whole damn clutch of relatives in Ontario, despite the fact that their own damn father had been born out there.

He washed his hands and dried them and put on his jacket.

On a day like this everybody should be there, he thought. All four of their grandparents should be here, not just half of them. But Alberg’s father wasn’t well, and his mother wouldn’t travel without her husband.

Alberg placed another call to Sechelt.

“She hasn’t turned up yet,” said Sokolowski. “We’ve been checking the house. No sign of her.”

“Damn,” said Alberg. “We better do another search of the area, Sid. Maybe she went for a walk, fell down, broke her hip or some damn thing.”

“Yeah. I’ll get on it.”

“Any word from Gillingham?”

“No. Why?”

“He’s got a bee in his bonnet over this Strachan thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, hell, nothing.

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