Criminals by Valerie Trueblood

Author:Valerie Trueblood
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781619027527
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2015-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

aiken

Bridget’s parents had taken somebody from the soup kitchen home with them and installed him in their house as a tenant. A sure sign that the days of their independence were coming to a close.

Her brother Kieran, who saw them more often, called to tell her. “So now they’ve got this guy, what do they know about him, a guy who mooches off eighty-year-olds?” He paused. “Bridget? Are you listening?”

“Oh, sorry, I was looking at the rain. There’s a river in the street.” At the window in her nightgown, Bridget rubbed her eyes. She had gone back to bed after Nat left early for a weekend of hiking, even though the radio said rain was sweeping fifty miles inland all up and down the coast. Now it was skidding along the street in wide V-shaped ripples that made her building, from the window, seem to be riding steadily forward.

Kieran sighed. “I mean, of course, are you free to come up here?”

If she opened the window and hurled the flat staticky little phone out, away it would skim on its back—unless it snagged in the whirlpool over the storm drain—calling shrilly, while she shut the window and got back under the covers and reentered the dream Kieran had interrupted. She had been wading through a campground, under pine trees, pulling her feet up out of tree sap as she went. She was looking for somebody. One of those exhausting dreams in which a reason for the grief is not made clear.

“Eighty-year-olds!” her brother said again as if Bridget had denied their parents’ age, or perhaps caused it.

No, Kieran said, he would not describe the tenant. Bridget would see for herself. The guy was going away for a few days, and while Bridget was driving up from Portland—she did think she could leave? Nat wouldn’t mind? Or was he off “on assignment?” (this was Kieran’s phrase for Nat’s self-assigned efforts to write things that would sell)—Kieran would leave his family for the day and take their parents out so that Bridget could have a look at the house while they were out. They had to make a trip to the dentist anyway. The new one. It had been like pulling teeth to find a dentist who worked weekends—and then the only one who did was a woman—so that Kieran could go along to keep track of the two of them. Make sure they didn’t stagger out full of nitrous and get behind the wheel. That was how they were now.

Aiken, the man’s name was. Something Aiken, the kind of man people called by his last name. In a very short time Aiken had taken over, hauled things down to the cellar, made the house his own. Not her room? Not her Santana poster, framed by her father with strips of molding, not her frilled lamp and the rug she had hooked in Camp Fire Girls? No, Kieran’s room, not hers. Hers had not been touched.

“You read about guys like this, drifters.”

Drifters. Murder. That was the unspoken word.

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