Read Online The Digger's Rest by K. Patrick Malone - Free Book Online Page B

off
the wound in time. Oh yes, he was very ready.
    Alida opened the door and motioned with her
hand for the man to come in, and there he stood, in the flesh,
Julian Bramson the Third, dressed in a navy blue serge suit, white
shirt, conser-vative Foulard tie and camel-hair overcoat. He put
out his hand and smiled. “Dr. Edgeworth, so good of you to see me
on such short notice. I apologize for any inconvenience,” he said
in the polite social voice he’d been trained to use by his
governesses since early childhood.
    “ Not at all, Mr. Bramson. Please come
in,” Jack said, drawing on the polite voice of his own well-raised
upbringing and offering his hand to shake Bramson’s, but inside
steaming like a locomotive about to take on a long and strenuous
hill, fueled by the seething, red hot lava of a long dormant
volcano just then stirring itself to life. “Please, sit down,” he
said pointing to the chair in front of his desk and walking around
to take a seat in his own. Once they were both seated, Jack’s
curiosity got the best of him.
    “ Needless to say, Mr. Bramson, this is
quite a surprise. What exactly is it that brings you to the Met?”
Jack asked pointedly. “Can I offer you a drink?”
    “ No, thank you, Doctor. I’m fine, but
I’ll get straight to the point, I’m here is to see my
son.”
    “ I don’t understand, I wasn’t aware
that the Congressman had any association with this Museum,” Jack
said, toying with him, but still keeping his composure intact while
underneath his insides churned with blazing fury at the cavalier
way Bramson had used the words “My Son.”
    “ I’m referring to Dr. Mitchell Bramson,
Dr. Edgeworth, so let’s not play games with each other,” Bramson
said conde-scendingly, the crack in his veneer of gentility showing
itself at last as he tossed the copy of Time Magazine he’d been
carrying around until it was nearly pulp.
    Jack leaned back in his chair, a
smirking grin appearing on his otherwise placid face and laughed to
himself. This smug bastard has no idea who
he’s dealing with, but that’s alright, my time has finally come and
I’m going to make a real party of it. He put his
clasped hands to his lips, pondering briefly before he
spoke.
    “ What exactly happens to men who’ve
abused their wives and abandoned their children when they reach our
age, Bramson? Is it that, all of a sudden, they can convince
themselves that they didn’t really act as they did in the past and
that their wives and children have forgotten how badly they’ve been
treated by them, and all of a sudden those things vanish and it
becomes, ‘Oh my son, my son’!” Jack said mockingly, throwing up his
hands dramatically in a comic gesture of false paternal devotion.
“Are you sick, Bramson, dying maybe? Is that it? Feeling your own
mortality creeping up on you these days?” Jack asked him, his voice
somewhere between a sneer and a growl.
    The expression of shock that came over
Bramson’s face from Jack’s unvarnished bluntness could have
registered on a Richter scale. Too stunned by Jack’s shift from
staid Museum Director to scrappy street fighter to speak, Bramson
said nothing, but by then it was too late. Jack was on him like a
pit bull, the train was gaining steam, the hot lava lain dormant
for so long was rumbling furiously in his belly, working its way to
the surface, unstoppable.
    “ I mean, from the way you said that you
wanted to see ‘your son,’ one would never guess that you’ve never
even met him,” Jack said, landing another direct hit at the man
opposite him, and it felt good. The steam that was pushing his
train was gaining momentum, the molten lava inside him working its
way further up into his throat, determined to make its way to the
surface now the opportunity had come knocking. But now that the
battle lines had been drawn, it was Bramson’s turn to feebly try
and poke at the fire, struggling to hold onto his well trained
Boston coolness.
    “ I somehow