Read Online No Comfort for the Lost by Nancy Herriman - Free Book Online Page B

congestion. She’d always liked Hubert Lange and had thought him a decent man. Otherwise she wouldn’t have asked him to take on Li Sha. She wouldn’t have entrusted the girl with someone who would not be good to her.
    “I took him for the plainest harmless creature that breathed upon the earth . . .”
    “And I may also have been mistaken, Mr. Shakespeare,” she said, drawing a quizzical look from a shopkeeper in apron and shirtsleeves who was sweeping his doorstep.
    She hurried on, not liking her thoughts.
    • • •
    N ick pushed open the door to his rooms and was greeted by a cold, wet nose pressing into the bag in his hand. He grinned. “Hey, hey, hold on there, Riley.”
    After tossing the bag containing two baked potatoes onto the parlor table, followed by his hat and neckcloth, Nick stooped to ruffle the dog’s sloping ears. A shaggy-coated, speckled mix of greyhound and setter, Riley wagged his tail in response.
    “You hungry, boy?” Nick asked. “Well, it’s just potato peels and oats for your dinner tonight. Sorry.”
    After taking Riley down the steps and out into the boardinghouse’s tiny backyard, he returned alone to his upstairs rooms. He lit the coal oil lamp on the table, keeping dark the rest of his top half of the house—one parlor, one bedroom, one small storage room, and a space his landlady flattered by calling it a kitchen.
    “Riley’s comin’ up!” shouted his landlady, Mrs. Jewett, from the base of the stairs, and Riley trotted through the door Nick had left open. He followed Nick into the kitchen as he prepared a meal for the dog before sitting down to his own.
    Back in the parlor, Nick removed his coat and his belt holster and laid his notebook in the pool of light cast by the lamp. He dotted his pile of potatoes with a precious sliver of butter and studied his notes. As was typical at this point in a case, he had very few suspects.
    Make a list, Nick. Always make a list.
That had been among Uncle Asa’s earliest advice. So he did, jotting it down in his notebook.
    Tom Davies. Possibly angry Li Sha had moved out. Would be easy for him to lure her to the wharf.
    Wagner. Worked at the wharf and had a history of violence aimed at foreigners.
    The Langes. Too early to truly suspect them; neither seemed to have a motive, although it appeared Miss Lange hadn’t much cared for Li Sha, which he suspected had to do with Tom Davies.
    One of the “strange men” whom Lange’s neighbor had noticed around the store. Motive or means unknown.
    An unidentified member of the Anti-Coolie Association who’d decided Chinese women made good victims, too.
    “Not much here, Riley.”
    The dog lapped up the last scrap of his food and sprawled atop Nick’s feet. Nick leaned back in his chair, which creaked beneath him, and kneaded his left arm. The ache suggested he’d probably have another nightmare tonight about the war and a towheaded boy in an oversized gray coat.
    Nick tightened his hand around his arm, remembering that battle and that boy. The kid—thirteen? fourteen?—had materialized like a ghost among the smoke and the shattered tree limbs. The kid had frozen in his tracks, his crudely hemmed coat sleeves dangling over his dirty hands, a piece of twine wrapped around his waist to secure a knife to his side, mismatched shoes on his feet. Nick had wondered that they were sending children to fight. The boy should have been safe at home, not slogging through woods where scraps of combatants were trampled underfoot until the remains of men became indistinguishable from the sticks and leaves and stones. He had wondered that war had come to this. Wondered long enough for the boy to lift his bayoneted Enfield and pierce Nick’s arm to the bone.
    His closest friend had run to Nick’s side and blown a chunk out of the boy’s head, but not before he’d taken a bullet meant for Nick. Guilt. Lord, how it had bloomed. Kept him in a hospital longer than he should’ve stayed. Destroyed the