Read Online Beware the Solitary Drinker by Cornelius Lehane - Free Book Online Page A

glitter.
    We’d completed our trek to the top of the hill, so Janet sat down on a bench we found there. “I like to walk,” she said. A combination of words and action I thought was at least as contradictory as my basketball analogy.
    â€œIf you think the police will find who killed my sister, why did that detective say you wouldn’t help him?”
    â€œNumber one, I don’t know much he won’t find out anyway. And number two, I don’t know what he’s looking for.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œIt has to do with being cynical.”
    Janet looked at me significantly. “You know more about Angelina than you told him or you’re telling me. Why won’t you tell me about my sister? Don’t you trust me either?” Her tone wasn’t angry, but she looked into my eyes the way Sheehan did until I stopped looking at her.
    â€œIf you won’t tell me about her, I’ll tell you.” She liked to talk, this big sister from Massachusetts. Under the blue sky, in the declining autumn sun, on a park bench above the Sheep Meadow, Janet Carter blurted out her story.
    â€œMy father took care of me before he died. He left money for me to go to college in a trust fund. He didn’t leave anything for Angelina…He never really cared about her. …Angelina didn’t even remember him because he left my mother right after she was born, so my mother wouldn’t let him see Angelina after he did that.” She sighed.
    â€œThey had a pretty stormy relationship. My mother is very demanding and high strung—and I guess my father had a temper. Angelina came along when they already hated each other. My father left us and said he wasn’t Angelina’s father. That’s how the poor kid started out in life, something for my mother and father to fight over.
    â€œWas he? Was your father Angelina’s father?”
    â€œMy mother said he was, and there weren’t any other men in her life. My mother doesn’t like men very much, so I’m sure he was. He just hated my mother so much he didn’t want to believe it—so he ignored Angelina.” Janet looked down at the stubble of grass beneath her feet.
    â€œHe loved me, though. He began telling me when I was five that I would go to college. Then, after they broke up, he told me that whenever I saw him, all through grade school. My mother really hated that.”
    Janet raised her eyes. “A big part of their problem was my mother really thought she married beneath her. She thought she was the perfect everything. She thought my father should have a better job and make more money. She went nuts when she discovered he’d saved so much money for me. He worked in the post office. Then he died when I was sixteen…. My father was the only thing in my life I didn’t share with Angelina. I regret that now…I should have…She always wanted to be with him, but I liked having him for myself.” Tears seeped from the corners of Janet’s eyes, so I left her with her memories for the moment and watched the edge of the city beyond the park.
    She gathered herself together after a few minutes and started in again. The older sister by almost ten years, she’d more or less raised her baby sister until she went to college. Some of what she told me I knew already from Angelina: the molestation that was the centerpiece of her life. But Janet told me something Angelina hadn’t.
    â€œI know this is impossible to believe but the boy who molested Angelina wasn’t a terrible ogre…I mean, he was an ogre…but he wasn’t a pervert who jumped her as she walked down the street. Angelina knew him. He was a college student who met her in the park. It was past the dying days of the Sixties, past the end of the hippie days when everyone loved everyone. But Angelina loved what she knew of the Sixties and wanted so much to be grown up and part of it. When she was