Read Online Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane - Free Book Online Page A

flush of my pastthree months with Grace, I’d remember with something like surprise that my partner was also out there living a life. Separate from my own. Her life with its attorneys and entanglements and minidramas and men who handed her pens in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning.
    So, who was this attorney? And who was the guy who handed her the pen? And why should I care?
    And what the hell did “soon” mean?
    I had ninety minutes or so to kill before Timpson called, and after I exercised, I still had over an hour. I went looking for something in my fridge that wasn’t beer or soda, and came up empty, so I walked up the avenue to the corner store for my coffee.
    I took it back out onto the avenue and leaned against a light pole for a few minutes, enjoyed the day, and sipped my coffee as traffic rolled by and pedestrians rushed past on their way to the subway stop at the end of Crescent.
    Behind me I could smell the stench of stale beer and soaked-in-wood whiskey wafting from The Black Emerald Tavern. The Emerald opened at eight for those getting off the graveyard shift, and now, close to ten, it sounded no different than it did on a Friday night, a gaggle of slurred, lazy voices punctuated by the occasional bellow or the sharp crack of a pool cue making impact with a rack of balls.
    “Hey, stranger.”
    I turned and looked down into the face of a petite woman with a hazy, liquid grin. She had her hand over her eyes to block the sun and it took me a minute to place her because the hair and clothes were different and even her voice had deepened since the last time I’d heard it, though it was still light and ephemeral, as if it might lift off into the breeze before the words had time to dig in.
    “Hi, Kara. When’d you get back?”
    She shrugged. “A while ago. How you doing, Patrick?”
    “Fine.”
    Kara pivoted back and forth on her heel and rolled her eyes off to the side, her grin playing softly up the left side of her face, and she was instantly familiar again.
    She’d been a sunny kid, but a loner. You’d see her in the playground scribbling or drawing in a notepad while the other kids played kickball. As she grew older and took her place on the corner overlooking the Blake Yard, her group filling the place my group had abandoned ten years earlier, you’d notice her sitting off to herself against a fence or porch post, drinking a wine cooler and looking out at the streets as if they seemed suddenly foreign to her. She wasn’t ostracized or labeled weird because she was beautiful, more beautiful by half than the next most beautiful girl, and pure beauty is valued in this neighborhood like no other commodity because it seems more accidental than even a cash windfall.
    Everyone knew, from the time she could walk, that she’d never stay in the neighborhood. It could never hold the beautiful ones and the leaving was entrenched in her eyes like flaws in the irises. When you spoke to her, some part of her—whether it was her head, her arms, her twitching legs—was incapable of remaining still, as if it were already moving past you and the boundaries of the neighborhood into that place she saw beyond.
    As rare as she would have seemed to her circle of friends, a version of Kara came along every five years or so. In my days on the corner, it was Angie. And as far as I know, she’s the only one who thwarted the strangely defeated neighborhood logic and stuck around.
    Before Angie there was Eileen Mack, who hopped an Amtrak in her graduation gown and was next seen a few years later on Starsky and Hutch . In twenty-six minutes, she met Starsky, slept with him, gained Hutch’s approval (though it was touch-and-go there for a while), and accepted Starsky’s stumbling marriage proposal. By the next commercial break, she was dead, and Starsky went on a rampage and found her killer and blew him away with a fierce, righteous look on his face, and the episode ended with him standing over her grave in the rain