Blood lure by Nevada Barr

Author:Nevada Barr [Barr, Nevada]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller

Chapter 13

Lester was doing what depressed and grieving people traditionally do: everything wrong. The curtains of his second-floor motel room were drawn. The room was overwarm and stuffy. He'd not showered or shaved or dressed. In a plaid flannel bathrobe he'd probably had since before his son was born, he'd been sitting in an unmade bed watching television.

When he opened the door to Harry Ruick's knock Anna was taken aback at how much he'd deteriorated since she'd seen him last. The thinning gray hair stood out in bed-wrinkled strands and colorless stubble highlighted the crease and sag of his cheeks. Puffy eyes rimmed with red attested to the fact he'd spent much of the intervening time weeping. That or he suffered from allergies.

Eyes watering at the sudden exposure to light-or reality-he said absurdly, "May I help you?"

"We'd like to talk with you for aminute," Harry said. He pulled off his straw summer Stetson and held it in front of him like a steering wheel. Anna didn't know if he did it from respect or good manners. Either way she liked him for the gesture. Her Stetson was at home on a peg in the closet in Rocky Springs, along with her service weapon and other needful things. Today she wore the goofy-looking green NPS billed field cap. It crossed her mind to snatch it off in deference to age or grief but the rules regarding women, manners and the wearing of hats had become blurred. One never knew, anymore, what was proper.

She left it on. Beneath its polyester squeeze her hair probably looked as bad as Lester's.

Mr. Van Slyke was baffled for a moment. Then his face cleared somewhat and he said, "Of course. Won't you please come in? Please excuse the mess. I…"

The brittle safety of polite platitudes fell away and his words dried up. Sidling by ahead of Harry, Anna looked closely at him. His skin hung loose over muscles devoid of elasticity; his was the face of a man who'd had a small stroke or was in shock. Taking his hand she shook it as if they'd just been introduced. "Good to see you again," she murmured. His skin was dry and warm. Not shock. Probably just old-fashioned depression. She shied away from a sudden memory of the weeks and months after Zach died when she'd moved in slow motion, pushing through a life grown thick and suffocating as Delta mud. But then Zach never beat her. Zach was the kind of guy who put mice out, then left the door ajar in case it got cold and they wanted back in.

Even without Carolyn's ghost, the room would have been enough to depress Anna. As Les had warned, it was a mess. The contents of a backpack and a suitcase were disgorged over the available surfaces, along with the remains of an uneaten fast-food supper. There was a single chair of that sterile motel hybrid between kitchen straight-back and easy chair beside a round table piled with the soiled and disorganized guts of Lester's day pack, and the bed.

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