[13] Rainbow's End by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-03-09T20:00:00+00:00

Abruptly, Jury snapped it shut, eliding the next words in that act. He did not want to read about lost innocence. Or roses turned to dust. Or dry fountains.

What Jury wanted to do was avoid the deep for the shallow water, which Eliot would no doubt consider as self-consignment to Purgatory. Well, at least it wasn’t Hell. Love. Love was rather terrifying. Something so hard to find should not be so easily lost. He closed the book and thought, again, of Jenny; he ran through his memories in that ominous state of mind that prophesies disaster. His memories of Jenny were, actually, few: on the other side of a grave; alone in that great empty house she’d been forced to sell; and in that pawnshop off Saint Martin’s Lane, where she’d tried on a ring Jury was buying for someone else; and, lately, in Ryland Street. Years had separated these meetings, making them that much more emblematic, rich with unstated, perhaps unconscious meanings.

Jury much preferred to skate on the thin ice of consciousness. And he was beginning to think that thin ice might be all the ice there was.

Opening the book again, he looked at the title page. Nils Anders had given this book of poetry to Angela Hope. Angela Hope was taking it all very seriously.

• • •

THE WOMAN who came into the shop and demanded to know his business finally introduced herself as Sukie Bartholomew. Her favorite posture appeared to be the one she now adopted: one arm across her midsection, one hand cupping the elbow of the other arm, the other hand holding a small black cigar. The two arms formed an L that might have served as a frame for the viewer to look at Sukie Bartholomew. She was fighting hard to project an image; she wasn’t winning. She was not attractive—raw-boned, thin, possibly in her late fifties, but still wearing blue barrettes to clasp and hold back her shoulder-length hair. It was mouse-brown and blunt-cut. But the color had been highlighted so that wispy little strands gave the impression of silver dust. Too many visits to the local hairdresser had resulted in hair the texture of straw.

Sukie Bartholomew was waging a war with herself over her looks. No lipstick, but there was that glimmery brown eye shadow; an uncompromising haircut, but carefully highlighted; an outfit that fairly screamed “I won’t bow to fashion,” but one that belonged on a girl of fifteen, not a woman of fifty-plus. Jury noted these contradictions because he inferred they spelled trouble. A difficult woman, uneasy with herself, dissatisfied, and therefore dissatisfied with the rest of the world. It was as if she eschewed the trap of femininity, the little embellishments that made women attractive to men. Jury had not really thought of it before, but the women he admired were not ones to do pitched battle with themselves over a bit of nail varnish or a dab of lipstick. He thought of Fiona, whose fountain of youth was gathered in her sponge bag rather than in her medicine cabinet, and that reminded him, again, of Wiggins.

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