Blood Music by Jessie Prichard Hunter

Author:Jessie Prichard Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062389282
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

35

The last light gathered at the apex of the sky like drops in the center of an inverted bowl. An airplane high up, on its way to Europe or Iceland, was lit white by the rays of the unseen sun, which had set ten minutes ago, leaving the crowd below in shadow and the trees in sharp relief against the darkening sky. Zelly sat cradling the baby on the spread of a blue woolen blanket that stood out unearthly against the deepening dusk. Certain shirts in the summer crowd stood out, red or yellow or green, a white beach chair like a beacon, a red plastic beer cooler seeming to float above the dark sea of the grass. Girls wearing pastel dresses, men in shorts or blue jeans, materialized out of the formless crowd like chalk-faced ghosts, walked by, and disappeared. Bits of conversation floated by, inane and compelling: “—the eighty-seventh one tonight—” “—two-bit madonna—” “—the beat was wrong, it should have been sliced—” The trees were papered with a saturnine face, a sharp nose and an uncertain mouth, hundreds of times duplicated in the deepening gloom. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

The baby was lying on her back looking at the sky, getting sleepy. Pat stood, a shadow against azure. Zelly watched him scanning the crowd, his sharp nose appearing and disappearing as he turned his head, a fox scenting the wind. He was a tall figure in his work overalls, all dark blue with a white stripe where his name should have been. He’d torn off all the name labels when he started his own business, he said having your name on the pocket was for flunkies. He looked almost military, precise, a dark blue silhouette. It was nice to see him interested in people, in being with people. Zelly didn’t even care when his eyes followed a pretty woman. All the women were pretty under the kindly rising moon.

It was the Schubert that had him so excited. He kept disappearing into the crowd and reappearing. But Zelly knew that when the music began he would sit and calm down; she had seen the music’s snake power, the way it hypnotized his restlessness.

He had been out late last night, at eleven-thirty when Leanore Haller died. He had been gone last night, but this morning he had been cheerful and ordinary. He had played with Mary while Zelly tidied the apartment, and he spoke several times of the concert that evening. He was anxious to get a good spot on the grass, up close to the orchestra. One niggling point of suspicion remained, like the last germ of a virus: it could disappear or it could fester and grow. Here under the moon, among the soft undulation of the crowd, suspicion almost disappeared.

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