Read Online Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes by Marcia Muller - Free Book Online

too much emotion swirling around.”
    â€œYou mean between Jack and Judy. And the mother and the adoptive father.”
    â€œAnd around the events of the case itself. Even in the trial transcript, I could feel it.”
    â€œYou’ve never been one to back away from emotion.”
    â€œMaybe I’m learning.” Yesterday afternoon I’d told Jack that I’d gotten over the previous summer’s violent events and put them behind me, but that wasn’t entirely true. And there had been other violent events up at Tufa Lake last fall that had left me newly scarred and tender.
    The truth was, I didn’t want to become involved in yet another case that would make me care; all too often when that happened, people around me got hurt. I’d already felt the pull of his case, in spite of the elapsed decades and the dryness of the court documents, and that made me distinctly uneasy. If I could be sucked in by events so many years in the past, how would I ever be safe from those of the present?
    But I couldn’t explain that to Rae, so I simply added, “Right now I’m not up to anything more than routine investigating.”
    â€œIsn’t that what historical research is?”
    I shrugged, stared at the dwindling flames in the fireplace. As they licked at the logs, the darker shades of the spectrum flickered: cobalt, emerald, amethyst, blood red . . .
    Blood red and amethyst. The color of murder, the color of memory. Perhaps the depths that harbored such memories as Judy’s were best left unplumbed. Or were they? Which was better—to probe them and risk the pain of unpleasant revelations? Or to keep the lid on and risk the spiritual infection that stems from repressed secrets?
    Similar questions, I realized, applied to my own life. Which was better—to tread a narrow middle ground on noninvolvement and remain safe? Or to let go, give myself to the investigation wholeheartedly, and risk the pain of unpleasant consequences?
    I kept on staring at the fire, feeling my emotional tie lines slacken. Their ends, already raveled, were disentwining, casting me adrift. Anxiety nibbled at me. I resisted, then I let it in. In time it would grow to a low-level fear that would constantly be with me and carry me through whatever lay ahead. Fear was my old companion—the only one, I’d recently had to acknowledge, that made me come fully alive.

CHAPTER SIX
    On Sunday mornings the Mission district undergoes a brief transformation. Church bells toll. Cars double-park along Dolores Street near the Mission. Neatly dressed families, old women in hats, and workingmen in their only suits crowd the sidewalks after Mass. Children run to corner groceries for loaves of sourdough and thick newspapers; young couples push baby strollers and window-shop at the cheap furniture stores along Valencia. And for a few hours the Mission is once again an old-fashioned place where God’s laws are supreme and no sin is so bad that it can’t be forgiven in the confessional.
    In contrast, the interior of City Amusement Arcade seemed seedier than usual when I entered it at a little after eleven. Stale smoke clogged my nostrils, and the reek of Lysol wasn’t strong enough to mask a stench of vomit. The young men who hunched over the machines might have been the same ones who were there on Friday. Oblivious to their dismal surroundings, they focused on the flickering screens; when stimulated by the images, they responded—rats in an unsanitary laboratory maze. It occurred to me that, for most of them, manipulation of such electronic devices might be the only skill they’d ever acquire, conquering such nonhuman adversaries the only triumph they’d ever claim.
    Unfortunately Tony Nueva wasn’t among them. I hunted up the arcade’s manager, a one-armed Vietnam vet called Buck, and asked if he’d been in yet. He hadn’t, Buck told me. Tony had a “real foxy lady” and