Read Online Deadly Welcome by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

have anything to do with love, and you should know that. When there’s love, the least you can do is give folks a chance to forgive, and you never even gave me a chance to go through the motions. I prayed for so long you’d come back, come to the door just like you did, and then I thought it would never happen and I guess I gave up praying. But there hasn’t been a day in all that time I haven’t thought about you and where you were and what you were doing. I’ll tell you, I loved Joe Ducklin every day of my life, but the way he carried on about you and getting them to arrest you and all, it was pretty hard to keep on loving. Somehow … after that happened, it wasn’t really ever the same between us. It was almostthe same, but there was a little something gone. And that somehow made it worse when he died, Alex. I don’t know why but it did.”
    “You make me ashamed of myself, Aunt Myra.”
    “Now let’s not get carrying on, boy. I can see how you were terrible hurt, the way Joe did you. And a wife has to share the way people think about her husband. You did a real foolish thing and it looked like it was a mean thing, but I knew better on account I knew there was no meanness in you. It was strong drink that did it, and bad company. There was a wild bunch of young folk back then, and I can tell you they seem to get wilder every year, so you don’t know what the world is coming to, and sometimes I think it will take one of those terrible bombs to make things clean again, but that is blasphemous talk. You just make it up now by telling me everything you’ve done in all the years you’ve been gone, Alex. I got to keep holding onto your hand to keep making sure you’re here.”
    “Aunt Myra, I wasn’t going to tell you this. But now I guess I should.” She listened intently while he told her, just as he had told Betty Larkin, about the robbery.
    When he was through she bobbed her head and she said, “Oh, if I could just be sure Joe Ducklin could know about this!”
    “I tried to tell him, Aunt Myra, over in the jail in Davis, but he didn’t feel like listening.”
    She looked surprisingly fierce for a moment. “He wouldn’t let me go with him. And he never said a word about that. Not even on his dying bed did he have the … common decency to tell me anything about that. All I knew was you said you did it, boy, and they let you pick the army instead of jail. Well, it’s all over now, but when you think on it, isn’t it a terrible waste, boy? The things folks do to one another. I didn’t even ask you if you’re married!”
    “I’m not married, Aunt Myra.”
    “That’s no kind of life, Alex. Bad hours and bad food, and you turn into a fussy old bachelor. There’s some nice girls right here in town.”
    “Don’t go so fast!”
    “Now you tell me what you’ve been doing.”
    He told her about the two wars, and far places. A young Negro woman, slim and pretty in a white uniform, came to the doorway and said nervously, “Miz Ducklin, I don’t want to bust in, but that Miz Stimson, she don’t look right to me. She breathing awful funny.”
    “Excuse me, Alex,” Myra Ducklin said. She trotted off and he saw her hurrying up the hall staircase. She came down in a few moments and he heard her on the phone, apparently talking to a Dr. Kearnie, a name Alex did not recognize. She went back upstairs and was gone about ten minutes. The door buzzer sounded and the Negro girl admitted a young man with a medical satchel and a bold, unkempt black mustache.
    A little later the doctor came down and used the phone and left. Myra came back into the parlor, looking tired and subdued.
    “She died right after Dr. Kearnie got here. Old Mrs. Stimson. Ninety-one, she was. I won’t be able to visit now, Alex. I got to phone the family, and then Jeffry Brothers will be sending over to pick her up. And then I’ll have to visit with the other people I’ve got and cheer them up. They get awful low when somebody passes