Tres Navarre 3 - The Last King of Texas by Rick Riordan

Author:Rick Riordan [Riordan, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780751554533
Published: 2013-12-03T09:24:08+00:00

Twenty-Five

I spent the rest of the afternoon by the phone at 90 Queen Anne, waiting for calls back from my contacts with the local press. I wanted anything on the heroin trade from the last seven years, any articles that might mention the Brandons, the Maras, Zeta Sanchez, Chich Gutierrez, or Detective Thomas Kelsey of the SAPD.

By the end of the day, my contacts hadn't returned my calls, and I'd been forced to actually grade a set of papers for UTSA. Robert Johnson, the lazy bastard, helped not at all.

Over dinner of homemade dolmades and spanakopita, my weekly allotment from Erainya, I read Sandra Mara's journal.

Sandra's cursive was flawless — delicate loops, perfectly slanted, page after page written in the same golden brown ink. It was the kind of cursive that would drive handwriting analysts crazy because it was completely devoid of anomalies.

Sandra didn't believe in beginnings. No Dear Diary or I haven't written in a while or Today I have something special to tell you. No dates on the entries or signatures at the end. It was difficult to tell where one entry started and the next stopped. Sandra merely indented for the next paragraph and started writing.

This to Sylvia Plath.

I want to cut your thumb a few more times. I want to leave off the gauze and make you squeeze limes instead. A thrill? Look at my brother's leg. Tell me what part of him is white. Only what the gun splashed open, melted into a star, smoothed out by a year with demons so that I could live. Don't impress me with your slip of a knife. Don't talk to me about soldiers. No one ever bought your life with an open wound.

Your typical light verse from a seventeen-year-old girl.

Several pages later.

I should have stayed inside this afternoon. The letter came. Acceptance. Full scholarship. Grandmother and I set a jar of raspberry sun tea under the apple tree and we danced. Grandmother with her cane and all. We laughed at the chickens. I thought of college. And then the car in the gravel drive and Hector walked up with Him. After two years. He was only larger, no less or more frightening. A devil like that can have only His fixed amount of horror, never more or less than 100% — as a child, as a man. I should have stayed inside. I knew His look, the weighing He did. I was naked on a scale. I took my letter and I went inside. My grandmother became old again, hobbling alongside and muttering encouragement about college, but I just felt His eyes on my back. I knew what He was thinking. I should have stayed inside.

The other entries were equally intense. Tiring to read, unsatisfying. They told me about Sandra Mara like an intravenous feeding.

I skipped to the end and read the last paragraph.

How could a few minutes in a hallway shake me so much? He's so unexpected. I still can't write about it without catching my breath.

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