Read Online Sundance by David Fuller - Free Book Online

then, across the room from each other, Longbaugh still in shadow.
    â€œAre you hungry?” she said, as if remembering her manners.
    â€œKind of you.”
    â€œI’d fix a plate for the Kaiser himself if he was cold and lonely and happened to knock on my door.”
    â€œI didn’t knock and it’s quite pleasant out there.”
    â€œYou’re here because you’re family.”
    â€œThank you.” After her small kindness, he thought to return it. “I don’t know who they were, Mina, but I’ll find out.”
    Mina perused the letter. “She was associated with do-gooders, Henry Street something, it’s somewhere in here, Settlement, Henry Street Settlement. A woman created it, apparently some kind of nurse.”
    â€œLillian Wald, and she started it to help immigrants.”
    â€œOh. So Ethel wrote you about that as well.”
    He saw the return address on the envelope. There she had written “Etta Place.” Place was Longbaugh’s mother’s maiden name, an alias that provided protection from the authorities. Longbaugh realized Etta had been cruel to use that name on letters to her sister, which meant she was still angry that Mina didn’t approve of him. Etta could hold a grudge.
    â€œMost of her letters were about the Settlement. I can’t imagine why it meant so much to her. After all, it is in a tenement.” Mina shuddered. “But she did like to shock me. Don’t argue, Harry, it’s not my imagination, she avoided personal feelings when she wrote to me. I suspect she thought I would judge her. But now she may be in trouble.”
    Longbaugh was sorry for Mina’s pain.
    â€œShe loves you,” he said. “You’re her big sister. She doesn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
    â€œYou always had her heart, Harry. I tried to protect her from the bad things she loved, but you had her heart.”
    â€œI’m sorry—”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter now.” Mina turned away.
    Longbaugh knew that it did matter.
    â€œI’m afraid for her,” said Mina. “Maybe this time it’s good that you are who you are, maybe you can do something. I know I can’t.”
    Mina turned back and offered him the letter. Her lower eyelids held back her tears, just the way her sister’s did when she was about to cry, but he had no empathy, as he was greedy to hold Etta’s words in his hands.
    Seeing the smudged, torn envelope up close made something rise in his blood. He knew Mina had not defaced the letter. Someone else had treated it shabbily, and probably not the two men who had come to threaten her. It was as if Etta herself had been violated. He feared for Etta and what the last two years had brought. He turned his attention to the letter itself.
    It was written just after her last letter to him. He brought the pages to his nose and breathed her scent, stronger here than in the letters she had sent him, but he had left those envelopes open too many times. The special hold she had on him returned in a rush of thrill and melancholy, and his cheeks burned. He had a terrible premonition that she was dead, and that if he didn’t preserve her smell in this letter, she would be lost to him forever.
    â€œWhere will you go?” said Mina.
    â€œYou know the answer to that.”
    â€œWill you find her?”
    He said nothing.
    â€œDid you actually kill that boy?”
    Again he said nothing.
    She stared at him, somehow knowing there was more to the story than what LeFors had told her.
    â€œIf you didn’t go to South America, why do they say you’re dead?”
    â€œI used a different name in prison. And I’m guessing Parker went down there with some of the other boys, so they thought it was me.”
    â€œParker?”
    â€œCassidy. Butch. His real name was Robert Parker.”
    Night had swept in around them. It was time to go.
    â€œThis is the part you’ll