Read Online Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory - Free Book Online Page B

least that much.
    Live a little Annie O’Neill, she told herself. Live a little before you die
.

FOUR
    From her bedroom window she could see Cathedral Parkway and the Nicholas Roerich Museum, beyond that Hudson River Park, and further on the water. Late at night, restless, perhaps seeking some sense of connection to the outside world, she would stand with her nose against the cool glass and wait until her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Then she would catch the reflection of the mainland lights against the underbelly of the sky. She imagined the source of that light – a hundred thousand homes, a million streetlights, alongside them the shops and stores and malls and hotels. And then she would hear the sound of the boats slipping effortlessly out of the 79th Street Basin and wonder who was on those boats, where they were going, and why. A billion intricate patterns of life, and in amongst all of this the six degrees of separation: the theory that each and every one of us is in some way connected to someone, and they to someone else, and on and on six times over until a map could be drawn between every single human being to show how they relate. But there were some, it seemed to Annie, who had fallen through the loop. The exception that proved the rule. The odd one out. And such an exception was she. Or so she believed. Sometimes.
    These were her thoughts in the early hours of Saturday morning and after a while, after returning to her bed and sleeping fitfully, she once again woke up as dawn water-colored the sky. She showered, she breakfasted, and then she walked out of the apartment. She did not take her usual route, did not approach The Reader’s Rest, and though a clock could have been set against Annie O’Neill’s tracks, though there hadnever been a Saturday in the last God-only-knew-how-long that the store had not been open for the hours between nine a.m. and one p.m. each Saturday, that morning – for no other reason than some sense of necessity – she walked the other way. Down Cathedral Parkway onto Amsterdam, out towards Columbia University and St John the Divine; slower than usual, a little hesitant perhaps, and had you seen her, had she passed you in the street, you would have seen nothing more than an attractive brunette, petite, her aquiline features almost implacable, and yet her eyes bright and inquisitive and searching. She would have appeared to be looking for something. Or someone.
    Annie stopped after a little while, went into a delicatessen and ordered coffee. She sat at a small table on the sidewalk and watched the world pass her by. Some people numbed with sleep, others purposeful and direct, and yet more of them seemingly absent-minded and without direction, a little like herself. The coffee was good and strong, and for the first time in as many years as she could remember she wanted to smoke a cigarette. She’d quit some eternity ago, had been determined never to start again, and yet always there seemed to be something vaguely romantic about it. The brunette at the sidewalk café, her coat pulled up around her throat against a bitter breeze, men walking by believing that such a woman as this
must
be waiting for someone. A rendezvous. The beginning of an affair. He’s late. She is wilful and certain enough not to care that he’s late. She is sufficiently single-minded to amuse herself with her own thoughts, and if he comes … well if he comes he comes, and if he does not, then there will always be someone else who can amuse her for a while. Very Marlene. Very Ingrid.
    And very imaginative
, Annie thought, and smiled to herself.
    ‘Annie O’Neill,’ a voice said.
    Snapped from her reverie she looked up. The sun was behind him, and with a step he moved forward. David Quinn stood nomore than five feet from her. He was smiling. Smiling like a child who’d found a long-lost friend.
    ‘David?’ she said, surprise evident in her voice.
    He didn’t hesitate to take the seat facing her.