A Score to Settle by Donna Huston Murray

Author:Donna Huston Murray [Murray, Donna Huston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

THURSDAY NIGHT PASSED without any emergency dashes to the hospital, but none of us seemed to trust Friday. Each nursing our own emotional hangover, breakfast was consumed in solemn silence. Michelle and I set out to visit Elise Duffy’s Alanton home as soon as Doug left for practice.

The overcast sky reduced the obviously new white stucco house to a cold, forbidding gray. Blank arched windows stared up at the Spanish tile roof above. A crumbling fishing pier cluttered an inlet just across the street with motionless tall grasses bordering its banks. Seagulls squawked overhead, and the tang of ripe brown water tainted the air.

I insisted on holding my cousin's elbow as we approached, for the last of a lingering mist wafted off the inlet, and I feared the cobblestone driveway might be slippery.

Sheltered by an entryway arch, Michelle worked the brass knocker on the front door. Her lips were pressed hard with discomfort, and her breath came in short puffy clouds. She needed to sit down soon.

Last night I’d tried to convince her to beg off from this visit, but she felt strongly that Elise's flight so soon after the funeral warranted investigation. “It just isn’t normal,” she insisted. And, since I wouldn't get so much as a hello from the Widow Duffy without my cousin's introduction, here we were. I vowed to make our visit brief.

And brief it was.

Elise Duffy opened the door breathlessly, her young round face exhibiting several emotions at once–anger, frustration and sorrow perhaps the most predominant. Her dark hair had been secured with a high clip but wanted to fall back to her shoulders. The sweatshirt she wore was red and torn, the loafers old and coming unstitched. Tear tracks ran from her eyes to her jawbone.

"Come in," she said.

"Michelle really ought to sit down," I hinted as soon as introductions had been made.

"Oh, certainly. Come upstairs with me. There's a slipper chair in my bedroom that's pretty comfortable."

We followed Tim Duffy's widow across a vast expanse of floor to a staircase curving upward. Each tread had been carpeted in pale taupe top and bottom and appeared to be suspended in air.

"Where will you go?" Michelle asked. Suitcases were opened all over the bedroom, four of them on the bed alone.

Elise dumped a drawer of sweaters on the floor and began refolding them before she answered. "Florida, I think. My mother's down there. After that, somewhere alone, preferably a place without football."

Uninvited, Michelle shrugged out of her wool car coat. "Was the memorial nice?" she asked. "I'm sorry I couldn't get there."

"Yeah, peachy. Just me, Tim's family, and a few hundred of our friends from the network news."

So vehement was the young widow’s bitterness that I wondered whether she had been angry with Tim even before his demise.

"You don’t like football?" I was still trying to imagine where she could go that didn’t have it.

"Like it?" She threw a black turtleneck into a wastebasket. "The most insecure profession in the world? What’s to like? Tim worked his ass off.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.