Fear at First Glance by Dave Balcom

Author:Dave Balcom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, mystery detective, high school reunion, journalist investigator, newspaper history, bird huntng, michigan outdoors
Publisher: Dave Balcom

CHAPTER 25

Sunday morning was so still the trees didn’t drip out loud.

We’d gotten home well after 2 a.m. Jan had played and sung herself into a hoarse cough; I had nursed one drink after another up to a total of four, three past my standard dosage.

I looked at the kitchen clock as I put coffee makings together and found it was 10 a.m. Judy was patient, as usual, and eager, as is her nature. I let her out, and she bounced from one end of the little yard to the other before relieving herself. Then she was at the door, patient once again.

I treated her to a biscuit and let her roam the cottage, knowing I’d find her on the floor beneath Jan’s head when my bride finally awoke.

The coffee in my cup tasted good. I took a place on the little porch and wondered at the absolute stillness of the world I was part of. The lake was absolutely flawless, a mirror reflecting the sky and clouds. A ripple from a bug that had become breakfast worked its way across the lake in an unbroken echo of the fish’s rise.

I realized I was thinking about the previous night, and my thoughts were focused on Paul Ralph. I kept coming back to that moment when I introduced him to Greg Blake. That look.

It had flashed so quickly through Paul’s eyes that while I saw it, I couldn’t catalog it. That was plaguing me. What was that look?

I closed my eyes and listened; there was nothing. Not a breath of breeze, not one of the ubiquitous chain saws in the distance, not a single outboard motor droning off across the waveless lake. I sat there, listening like that, and I heard Jan rise out of bed and pad to the bathroom; I heard Judy licking at her feet.

I found my center and tasted my pulse on my tongue, assuring myself that I was as calm as I wanted or could expect. I listened, and then a thought blossomed out of my subconscious – a thought fully formed in complete sentences and all the more shocking for its simplicity: Fear.

That’s what I saw in Paul Ralph’s eyes in that instant when he saw Greg Blake in the flesh. Stark, morbid fear.

I put that moment into replay in my mind’s eye, and I marveled at the speed with which Ralph had hidden that reaction. I focused on Blake.

I remained as silent as my tai chi and this still morning would allow and I thought about what I’d seen there, in that instant; parsing it down to the millisecond. And, again, the thought came to me in fully developed form, nothing to doubt or question: Recognition!

I was literally shaking when I stood up to pace about the cottage, trying to put my thoughts into perspective and finding little to grab onto.

I forced myself to be calm, and I sat back in my chair. My blood pressure and pulse went back to normal by training, but my mind was racing with the “so what” questions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.