Read Online The Color of Light by Wendy Hornsby - Free Book Online

into a dozen numbered zones. “Mondays and Fridays are commercial pick-up and delivery, restaurants, mostly. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are home delivery. If someone needs something off-schedule, they have to come in for it.”
    I pointed to my neighborhood, Zone Nine on his map. “Would there be any reason for one of your trucks to be here on a Monday morning?”
    â€œOn a Monday?” He scowled, shook his head, counted and wrapped another stack of napkins. “Never. On Mondays, besides half the restaurants in town, we pick up from the party rentals and caterers—after the weekend events, you know—so we have to scramble. If one of my trucks took a detour into Nine on a Monday, I’d be getting calls about late deliveries.”
    â€œDid you change the schedule after your dad retired?”
    â€œNope. Give him credit for that. He only had the one truck, and now we have three because we have more customers. But the schedule worked then, and it works now.”
    I took out my laptop, loaded Dad’s movie, fast-forwarded to the shot of Bay Laundry’s truck backing out of a driveway, and froze the frame. I turned the screen so he could see. He paused in his work to take a look.
    â€œWhere’d you get that?” he asked, chuckling. “That’s Dad’s old van. If it’s still around, it belongs in a museum.”
    â€œThis is an old film,” I said. “What does it tell you?”
    â€œThat’s upper Zone Nine,” he said with a little shrug. “So that was taken on a Thursday between eight and ten.”
    â€œIt was shot on a Monday around eight A.M.”
    He shook his head. “Not possible.”
    â€œCan you think of any reason why the truck would be there on a Monday?”
    Again he shook his head. “Like I said, we keep a tight schedule.”
    The second of his delivery trucks backed into the loading bay and the off-loading, reloading scramble began anew. I saw the driver slip into the men’s room.
    â€œWhat happens if one of your trucks breaks down?” I asked.
    â€œWe take good care of the rolling stock so that doesn’t happen very often. But when one does go down or goes in for regular servicing, we bring in the truck from the dry cleaning shop. They do a pick-up here in the morning and a delivery in the afternoon, so in the case of a breakdown, we just hang on to it for the day.”
    â€œIs that truck the same as the other two?”
    â€œIt’s an Econoline, yeah. But it’s unmarked. The Richmond plant is in a crappy area, so we try to keep a low profile up there.”
    I took another look around before I offered Joe my hand. “Thank you for your time.”
    â€œSure thing.” He pulled my card out of his breast pocket. “Mind putting your John Hancock on here? For the wife, you know.”
    â€œA pleasure.” I don’t at all understand the appeal of autographs, especially the signature of someone like me, who has, at most, minor celebrity. But I scrawled my name on the face of the card and handed it back. “Say hello to her for me.”
    As he walked me back toward the front, I asked Joe where he was on the date Mrs. Bartolini died. The question seemed to puzzle him, but after a moment to think back, he said, “I was in the navy, stationed in Japan.”
    I thanked Joe again, said good-bye, and started off again toward home. On the street where we had faced down Larry Nordquist and his gang all those years ago, I stopped and looked around.
    Funny how two disparate events, the “rumble” and Mrs. B, became inextricably entwined in my memory. For me, the link was more than a coincidence of time. It was also the words that Larry yelled at me that day as we stood toe-to-toe in the middle of the street; his words still seemed to hang in the air at that place. “Gook kid and his gook whore mother. Saigon slut.”
    I remembered the way Larry’s