Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Author:Kathleen Ann Goonan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Nanotech Series 3
Published: 2011-11-09T01:34:07+00:00

* * *

Two Intervals of Overwhelming Distance

Zeb | Bridge of Lions, Washington, D.C. | 2034

There had been so many days, Zeb thought, during his anguished meander away from S Street—anywhere away from S Street. He did not know or care where he walked. Because he had spent so many pleasant mornings in Ellie Pio’s small venerable apartment on S Street, hashing over his ideas, giving her his notebooks for safekeeping. Though it was nestled among embassies, Ellie did not seem to notice that her place was slightly shabby compared with the façades of her neighbors. And she was too busy to care about housekeeping details. The small red and white can of McCormicks cinnamon was usually sticky when Zeb picked it up from the white-painted kitchen table to sprinkle cinnamon on the instant oatmeal she always forced on him, as if it were some kind of tonic. Inside the kitchen cabinets was an unorganized maze of crockery, much of it cracked and dating back to Ellie’s grandmother, the original owner of the apartment, and Ellie herself was sixty. But she always had fresh flowers in the kitchen window; they gave forth light on even the dimmest of Washington winter mornings.

Compared to the kitchen, her front room was startlingly stately, rich with mahogany antiques and a grand piano, papered with art deco wallpaper up to the foot-wide cornices. Ellie inhabited that room with easy grace and kept it beautifully in memory of her partner, a literature professor at Catholic University who had died fifteen years earlier, a woman whose vast library still occupied one room.

This morning he had gone to her apartment to find it locked. He went next door to ask what day it was, fearing he must have forgotten. “Ellie asked me for coffee—”

The neighbor, a heavy sallow man who talked to Zeb through the crack in his chained door, blinked. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she died last week.” He explained that the police had come—and some other people too—asking him questions. He hadn’t liked this much. “My parents came here from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It seemed a lot like what they had to put up with. That’s why I’m telling you—they were asking about someone that seems a lot like you. And also about that other man who used to come see her all the time.”

“What man?”

“How should I know? Not special-looking. If I were you, I’d get out of town.”

“How did she die?”

The man shrugged. “They didn’t say. Heart attack, they implied. With people like that, who knows? Now go before somebody else who likes the police more than I do sees you.” He shut the door. Zeb heard the lock turn.

Zeb didn’t believe him. He didn’t believe that anyone killed Ellie. That was ridiculous.

But she was still dead. He stumbled down the stairs and turned right.

It was drizzling. Zeb trudged along, his head gradually collecting moisture until it ran in rivulets down his neck. He was heading toward Georgetown in general.

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