Too Close to Home by Andrew Grant

Author:Andrew Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Back in the car, I watched Rourke saunter down his own driveway, then I checked my phone. There was no word from Robson or Harry. I thought I’d return to the city anyway, but on the spur of the moment I decided on a different plan. To go see Mrs. Vincent. I hadn’t been in contact in any meaningful way since she told me about my father’s death. I guess I’d been associating her with the bad news, and I knew that wasn’t fair. She was just the messenger. Now. But growing up without a mother, she’d been a huge influence on my life. Bigger than my father had been in some ways, given the amount of time he spent working. Now that he was gone she was the closest person to a relative I had left. I felt a pang of guilt that it had taken a bunch of talk about using furniture from the house to spur me into visiting her.

Ten minutes later I heard the familiar crunch of gravel under my tires as I pulled up in the parking area at the end of the path that led to my father’s—Mrs. Vincent’s—front door. Last time I’d been there I was surprised by how old the house looked. The cedar siding had been more silvery than I’d remembered, and the sharp angles of the walls and the roof had looked dated. It didn’t seem that way now. Maybe the sun was warmer, softening the color and smoothing the lines. Maybe the anticipation of how my father would receive me after so long away and so few words between us had hardened my perception. But whatever the reason, I climbed out of the car, took a breath of the warm air, which was heavy with a welcoming blend of flowering shrubs and aging, sun-bleached wood—pure nectar after the residual fumes at Klinsman’s fire scene—and followed the uneven cracked bricks up to the front of the house. I pulled the thick iron handle that rang the bell and listened to the deep clang echo around inside the house. I stepped back and waited for Mrs. Vincent’s thin face to appear as she hauled open the heavy door. A ladybug was bustling over a frond of flowers that was overflowing from one of a pair of terra-cotta urns, the petals even brighter than the insect’s scarlet body. It reached the end of the blooms, its wings unfolded, and away it flew. I rang the bell again. There was still no answer.

I moved to my left and looked in through the living room window. The white fabric couches were immaculate. The books were perfectly lined up on the shelves within the tall built-ins my father had designed with profiles that resembled his favorite buildings in the city. There was no sign of Mrs. Vincent, so I continued around the side of the house, stepped up onto the deck, and tried the dining room window. The room was narrow with a long oak table running along the center and four high-back gray suede chairs on each side.

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.