Live and Let Grind by Tara Lush

Author:Tara Lush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

Chapter Fourteen

My eyes peeled open fifteen minutes before my alarm went off. Stanley was snoozing next to me, and I had a fuzzy memory of him leaping out of bed around five and hearing Erica open the door in the backyard so the dog could do his early-morning business.

I petted his soft fur for a while, and my mind immediately snapped back to what I’d been thinking about when I fell asleep.

The letters.

I tore the blanket away. It was almost seven in the morning, I had to be at Perkatory in two hours to meet Julian, and I was alone in the house.

It was a perfect time to steam those envelopes open. But why? What would I gain? Possibly the truth. Or maybe nothing, and draw a heap of scorn from Noah if he found out.

I shut my eyes, hoping sleep would take me away for another thirty minutes. My mind wouldn’t allow that, and I thought about a conversation I’d had once back in high school with Dad, right in this very room. (I’d redecorated when I moved back and had removed the N’Sync posters, replacing them with tasteful art by a Haitian-American painter friend.)

Back when I was sixteen, I hadn’t been sure what I wanted to do with my life. Being a journalist spoke to my soul, but even back then, I knew it was a precarious career choice.

“Maybe I should be a therapist,” I’d said to my father.

“Lana, you’re the most curious person I know. And you’re like me. You love to talk about the things you’ve discovered, and you need to get to the bottom of mysteries. Do you really think you can keep secrets as a therapist? Or ignore your desire to get to the truth?”

Dad had been right then and was still right now. Maybe some folks could set aside a mystery. I wasn’t one of those people.

Grabbing the letters from the bureau, I marched into the kitchen and fired up the kettle, still feeling a little uneasy about taking the plunge into committing a possible criminal offense. This was obviously a serious matter, since I was tackling this even before drinking my morning coffee. Still, I could multitask and boil water for my French press coffee and to steam to open the letters.

When the kettle began to boil, I selected the letter with the oldest postmark, dated two weeks ago. My curiosity clearly hadn’t extended to my own correspondence; otherwise, I’d have noticed that this letter had been misdelivered long before Gus’s death. For a second a pang of guilt throbbed in my stomach.

What if I’d spotted the letter when it was put in my mailbox and given it to Gus? Was there a chance that he’d still be alive? I knew that sometimes, people’s lives hinged on seemingly trivial events and choices. What if this letter contained something so important that it would have altered the course of events, and Gus would somehow not have fired up his leaf blower on a random Sunday evening?

No, I couldn’t think that way.

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