The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery) by Reed Farrel Coleman

Author:Reed Farrel Coleman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Tyrus Books
Published: 2014-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I had been as surprised as anyone that Pam had willed me her Vermont house. Until the moment I walked through the door, I had, with the help of Dewar’s, avoided dealing with what owning it entailed. The place smelled of must and sorrow, not of death. There were no bodies here, just memories, and only some of them mine. Pam and I had grown into love as opposed to falling into it. Falling is so much more exciting than growing. Falling is all about the manic blur of obsession, the ache of separation, the joy in the exclusion of everything else but love as so much noise. Even at my age, the thought of falling could still make me dizzy. But gravity dictates that falling is always followed by a crash. Gravity is funny that way. Sometimes, like with my first wife, Katy, the crash could be twenty years in coming: inexorable and inevitable.

Pam and I had done it in reverse. We literally started with a crash; the front end of her car meeting the back end of mine in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. It made me laugh to remember that we had done many things in reverse. For not only did our love begin with a crash, it began with lies. Mary Lambert, an IT consultant from Boston, is who Pam claimed to be when I got out of my car to confront the idiot driver who’d rear-ended me. None of it was true. Even the accident was a convenient lie meant to catch me off guard. She was actually Pamela Osteen, a Vermont-based PI sent to investigate a paternity issue involving my old precinct mate, the long-dead Rico Tripoli. Eventually I got past the lies. I think the fact that she once saved my life kind of helped cut through the bullshit and endeared her to me. Besides, who was I to be indignant about lies? I had lied to Katy about her brother’s disappearance for twenty years. I had spent so much of my life lying to protect secrets—my own, yes, but mostly other people’s—that I feared losing the ability to sort out the truth. For some reason, the truth had become increasingly important to me the closer I got to the grave.

I switched on a light and noticed that my footsteps had kicked up a panic of dust, motes swirling madly in the shaft of light. Everything I touched was covered in a downy gray layer of dust. But instead of brushing it away, I found I was smiling at the notion that bits of Pam and I were mingled together in the dust. That even the most thorough cleaning in the world wouldn’t get rid of all of it, not ever. That even after I sold the place, we would remain here together forever. Forever, that was another thing Pam and I had done ass backwards. Having both taken wrong turns up the aisle, we’d pretty much started our relationship by declaring open warfare on marriage.

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