Practice the Jealous Arts by Delia Pitts

Author:Delia Pitts [Pitts, Delia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-07T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

SEVENTH HEAVEN

Deep into the next morning, I dozed on my office sofa, dodging nightmares.

Algebra equations twined around olives pierced by steel needles; yellow cats and gray-eyed panthers plunged through a blizzard of ivory writing paper. Wafting over them all, the scent of orange blossoms drifted in a captivating haze. When the call came in, its soft irrelevant buzzing nudged my consciousness, but didn’t rouse me.

Brina’s voice murmured in the outer office, humming without intelligible words. The droning stopped after a while, and I burrowed into the orange blossom blizzard again. I woke with a start to the sound of my own voice shouting, whether in a dream or for real I wasn’t sure. Brina crouched beside the sofa, her cool hand tracing patterns across my forehead, her voice coaxing me into consciousness. I sat up, scrubbing my eye sockets to drive out the sleep and the nightmares. She dropped onto the cushion next to me, her hip pressed into mine. Kissing the side of my head once, as if to assure me I was awake, she spoke in a low tone.

“Hey, you. Archie Lin called an hour ago. Said you weren’t answering your cell. I didn’t want to wake you, so I told him you were out of the office on a case.”

“What did he want?”

Sleep still clogged my throat, making my first words burst out with a harshness Brina didn’t deserve.

“He wanted to tell you what happened this morning.”

Without another question from me, Brina launched into Archie’s message.

“Anthony Barnett found his wife on the daybed in her home office around five thirty this morning. Unconscious. Daro died of an overdose of sleeping pills before the ambulance could deliver her to the hospital.”

“Was there a note?”

“Under her cheek was an envelope containing two letters, one to the police and the other to her husband. In the first, she confessed to murdering three women.”

“Any explanation?”

“Nothing. Her note was simple and plain. She didn’t give a motive or apology for her crimes, only a statement of facts. Like a laundry list.”

“And the second letter?”

“Daro pulled out all her poetic language to tell Barnett she cherished him and had loved him her whole life. She wrote she was sorry to leave him, but she had to go.”

“That’s all? Just the letters?”

“On the floor beside her bed, stacked in neat piles Daro left a collection of thirty new works. One of them was a cycle of twelve intertwined poems dedicated to her husband. She called it ‘Jealousy’s Sweet Tariff.’”

As she finished the account, Brina leaned into me and craned her head, trying to look at me straight on. I bent my eyes toward the floor, with only a brief glance to see if the acupuncture needle was visible on my desk. It wasn’t. I remembered slipping it into the shallow center drawer next to my pencil stubs and bent paper clips before I lay down.

“Did Daro say anything to you after I left last night? Did she give you a clue she intended to commit suicide?”

I’d prepared my arsenal of lies for this last use.

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.