The Breathtaker by Alice Blanchard

Author:Alice Blanchard [Blanchard, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 0446531391
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

11

SOPHIE WORE an oversize football jersey to bed. Her face was bruised and covered with little nicks, and her arms were wrapped in bandages. It broke his heart. “She’s nice,” she said, looking up at him with narrowed eyes, as if she were peering at him from the bottom of a well. “Ms. Mysterioso.”

He smiled and nodded. Long strands of damp hair clung to her forehead, and he smoothed them away with his thumb. “Get some sleep,” he said.

She turned to face the wall, and he could tell she was still nursing a sullen grievance against him.

“Want the door open?”

“Nope. G’night.”

He closed the door and walked through the empty house, then draped his jacket over the arm of the sofa and went into the kitchen for a beer. The refrigerator whined and rumbled. It would probably break down one of these days. If it did, he wouldn’t be able to fix it. He was happily ignorant of all things mechanical—electrical wiring, mechanical tinkering. A great disappointment to his father, whose only response to Charlie’s announced intention of becoming a cop was a blank, fixed gaze.

Now he worked two beers out of the cardboard container and joined Willa on the back porch, where the air was cool and dense, the stars twinkly bright. Today’s clouds were mostly gone. They sat on the creaky wooden swing in the faint glow of the bug zapper, and he felt both weightless and heavy at once.

“You okay?” she asked. “You look all squeezed out.”

“I was accused of being a bigot today.” He rubbed his face hard, then leaned forward on his elbows. “Thanks for looking after her.”

“No problem. She’s a great kid.”

“She takes after her mother.”

“Oh, I can see a little bit of her father in her, too.” She kicked off her mud-covered clogs and rested her bare feet against the painted wooden floor.

He smiled. “She’s her own person, that one.”

“At Sophie’s age, I had zits, no boobs and a skateboard that I worshiped. I was the weird girl in school. I used to draw penises in the margins of my English assignments, then spend the rest of class erasing them before we handed our papers in.”

He leaned back in the swing, making it rock just a little. It felt good to be smiling. Her long black hair shimmered in the purple light of the bug zapper, and he could make out the outline of her breasts beneath the bulky pullover sweater.

She put the beer bottle to her lips and tilted her head, revealing the sandy underside of her chin. He could see the swallowing mechanism of her throat, her Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. She waited an appropriate beat before she said, “So what happened today?”

“A double homicide in Texas.” The corners of his mouth grew pinched. “Nice people. Not an enemy in the world.”

“How old?”

“A couple in their fifties.” He could hear the honking of the wild geese, a haunting sound. A magnificent sound. He loved the wildness of the Oklahoma night.

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