Case, John by The Genesis Code

Author:The Genesis Code [Code, The Genesis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-26T15:41:08+00:00

Suspects, gossip. Tell her his own story about Kathy and Brandon.

See if she noted any similarities.

He cleared away the coffee cups, rinsed them and set them in the drainer. He went toward the refrigerator, to put the carton of cream away.

The refrigerator was enormous especially for England, where small appliances were the norm. Its surface was entirely covered two or three levels deep, with papers. It was a virtual museum of sketches, snapshots, invitations, newspaper clips, recipes, postcards, aging and curled Post-it notes, scraps with telephone numbers but no names, traffic tickets, a child’s painting.

The door stuck when he pulled on it, and somehow he knocked against a magnet and a clump of papers fell to the floor. He picked them up and began trying to get them to stick on the refrigerator door anywhere when he saw the postcard.

He stared at it, rooted to the floor. He’d received the same postcard from Kathy years before. It was a photo within a photo, the background was of an Italian hilltown, seen from a distance, its jumble of buildings perched on a rocky mount, surrounded by a medieval wall.

The photo within the photo was a monocular blowup, depicting the pretty little hotel that had commissioned the card. “Pensione Aquila,” it read.

He still recalled the back of the postcard that he’d received, and his mixed feelings at reading it. Not reading, but looking, because it was a sketch, one of Kathy’s stupid puns. A series of four panels showing a plain door, and a hand knocking on it. From left to right the knocking hand was in a different position. In the first panel the fist rapped at the bottom of the door. In the middle panels, it ascended. In the right panel the fist rapped the top of the door. He got it, all right, Knocked up. Kathy had signed with the old sideways A of the Alliance.

Before the trip to Italy, he’d wanted Kathy to give it up. The baby chase. By then, she’d spent almost sixty thousand dollars and three years pursuing motherhood. It was wearing her out, both physically and emotionally. She seemed increasingly fragile. The thought of her going to some obscure clinic outside the country had worried him although he’d checked up on the place and found it had an excellent reputation.

After he’d gotten the postcard, he worried that Kathy’s happiness would end with yet another disappointment. This had happened once before, when her first pregnancy implanted at a clinic in North Carolina ended in a miscarriage. Kathy was devastated, almost inconsolable. He hadn’t wanted that to happen again.

When Kara Baker came back through the kitchen, he was reading the back of the postcard from her refrigerator, Dear K Beautiful here and so peaceful. Fields and fields of sunflowers, heavy heads droopy.

Keep your fingers crossed. LoveTils “Ah” Kara Baker started, and then closed her mouth in an odd expression, as if she couldn’t believe his bad manners. Her mouth smiled thinly but her eyes were cold. “You know I really think you’d better go.

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