Read Online After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online Page A

guys walked in, took one look at Julie and said she should be a dancer. A dancer . We may have been hicks from West Virginia, but it was 1972, we knew the score. One of the guys introduced her to his friend Felix and that was that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Love at first sight. I guess I should be grateful it was a respectable strip joint, where the girls wore pasties and G-strings, because Julie would have done whatever Felix asked her to. She was a goner. I never got it. Then—I never got men.”
    “You married, though?”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Isn’t Norr your married name?”
    “No, it’s our given name. I’m a happy spinster. Saxony was something that Felix hung on her. It wasn’t enough to give her that stupid stage name, Juliet Romeo. He had to rechristen her completely. She made it legal, down at the courthouse. Although—well, she was prone to that. Trying to make herself into what she thought Felix wanted.”
    He was stuck on that tantalizing although, wished she had followed it through. “Yeah? What else did she do for Felix?”
    A vague hand, waving at nonexistent flies. “Silly stuff. Not important. You know how women are.”
    No, he knew how one woman was, Mary. And, he supposed, Nabby, but he didn’t think Nabby’s behavior reflected on anyone but Nabby.
    “Did your sister know where Felix was after he left?”
    “No.” Fast, emphatic.
    “Did she know anything about the circumstances of his flight?”
    “No.” Too fast, too emphatic.
    “You know the statute of limitations is long past on that.” He should check to see if that was true. Might be important in dealing with people as he went forward. “And your sister’s dead. She can’t get in trouble for something she might have done in 1976.”
    “Not everyone is dead.”
    “You know there was always this rumor about Felix, how he escaped in a horse trailer.”
    “Rumors are just that. Rumors. It’s not my fault I work as a trainer, or that my sister dated that crook.”
    He let it drop. He didn’t want her as his antagonist, not at this stage.
    “Ever strike you as weird, the timing?”
    “Timing?”
    “Your sister disappeared almost ten years to the day. You think he came back for her?”
    “To kill her? Even I don’t hold Felix in such low esteem.”
    “No. But maybe someone else was looking for Felix. Someone who followed her that day—I mean, in 1986—in hopes of finding him.”
    “It was the government that wanted Felix. I don’t have much affection for the federal government, but I don’t think they kill people.”
    “Other people might have wanted him, too. Like the bail bondsman, for example.”
    Andrea laughed. “You didn’t do all your homework, Mr. Sanchez. Remember those guys who walked into Rexall? One of them was Tubby Schroeder, Felix’s best friend. He wrote the bond, he took the loss.”
    He did know. That is, he knew that Tubby Schroeder was a bail bondsman, a big fat guy, everybody’s friend. Sandy knew that Tubby had written the bond for Felix and been awfully philosophical about his best friend skipping out on him. Everyone assumed Felix had made good on the hundred thousand in cash. Sandy had thrown out the fact about the bond to see what she knew.
    “Thank you for your time,” he said. “And the tea.”
    “You barely touched it.”
    “I don’t eat between meals,” he said. “Nothing but water. Doctor’s orders.”
    “Well, why didn’t you say something?”
    “I forgot.”
    Fifteen minutes later, Sandy was at Chesapeake House, enjoying an early lunch at Roy Rogers. En route, he had passed the exit to Havre de Grace. The two sisters couldn’t have lived more than ten miles apart, yet they hadn’t seen each other for six months when Julie disappeared. Interesting. Nothing more at this point. Just another line in the geometry he was building, a distance between two points.
    He was even more interested in the fact that Tubby Schroeder had seen her first, brought Julie to