The Hell of It All by Bob Kroll

Author:Bob Kroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2017-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

Peterson drove the shore road to the sharp curve near a beach where he had sometimes taken his wife and daughter. He pulled into the beach parking lot. It had been ploughed, but was slick with freezing spray. He lowered the windows and listened to the waves for a long time, then he got out of the car and walked back along the road to the sharp bend. There he said something out loud then turned around and walked back to his car. He leaned against the front end and listened to the waves some more.

When he felt the cold he got back in the car and sat with the windows down. After a while he took Tanya’s journal from his coat pocket. He turned on the dome light and opened the journal to the page he had read when sitting in her kitchen. A poem.

The sudden loss of you has left me hopeless.

The sudden loss of you has left me in fear.

The sudden loss of you has left me heartless.

The sudden loss of you I cannot bear.

He popped the glove box and pulled out the sealed pint of Johnnie Walker. He rubbed his face and cracked the seal and had one sip, then toyed with the bottle, tempting himself to have another, and maybe another after that. He put the pint back in the glove box and drove home.

Many of his neighbours had already put the trash out for curbside pick-up, and a few had left their window curtains open, letting the lamplight out. Peterson had no trash, just a dark house he hardly lived in.

He looked over the outside of the house but saw nothing to suggest the intruders had returned. He let himself in and inhaled the cool damp smell of emptiness. He flicked a switch and the overhead lighting accentuated the brittle feel of the living room that he seldom sat in, a room he had trashed a few times after his wife’s death at that sharp curve on the south shore road, and again when his daughter ran away after telling him she knew what he was.

As much as he hated the living room, he had not changed a thing, not the rose-coloured drapes and walls the colour of cinnamon, and not a stick of the blue damask French Provincial furniture. For him, the room was a bad memory, now merely a passage to the wood-panelled den that was his office and his bedroom.

In the den, between the brass-studded leather love seat and leather recliner, was a computer desk and an iMac that Billy Bagnall, the tech nerd at the police station, had revved up for him. There was a bar fridge on the far side of the recliner, and on the wall behind it were seven paintings of men’s faces, all set against dark backgrounds. Peterson draped his coat over the back of the recliner, turned on a table lamp, and sat at the far end of the loveseat outside the yolk of lamplight. He set the Ruger and Tanya’s journal on the seat beside him.

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