Read Online The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly - Free Book Online

never existed, a litany of achievements, a great song of his triumphs. Harry suffered them in silence, just as he had endured them throughout his life. That was why, when his mother’s end approached at last, he had left Erin in bed, put on his clothes, and driven for two hours to get to the hospice on a miserable fall night to be with her. He simply wanted to be certain that she was dead, and few things in their relationshiphad given him greater pleasure than feeling the warmth leave her body until just the withered husk of her remained. Only consigning her to the flames of the crematorium had been more rewarding.
    “You still awake there?” said Morland.
    “Yes,” said Harry. “I’m awake.”
    He didn’t look at the chief as he spoke. He saw only his own reflection in the glass. I resemble my mother, he thought. In Prosperous, we all look like our parents, and sometimes we look like the children of other folks’ parents too. It’s the gene pool. It’s too small. By rights it shouldn’t be deep enough to drown a kitten, and every family should have a drooling relative locked away in an attic. I guess we’re just blessed, and he smiled so hard, and so bleakly, at his choice of the word “blessed” that he felt his bottom lip crack.
    “You’re very quiet,” said the chief.
    “I never had to bury anyone before.”
    “Me neither.”
    Now Harry did look at him.
    “You serious?” he said.
    “I’m a cop, not an undertaker.”
    “You mean nothing like this has ever happened before?”
    “Not to my knowledge. Seems this may be the first time.”
    It didn’t make Harry feel any better. There would be repercussions. This trip with the chief was only the beginning.
    “You didn’t tell me what happened to the girl,” said Harry.
    “No, I didn’t.” The chief didn’t speak again for a time, stringing Harry along. Then: “Ben Pearson had to shoot her.”
    “Had to?”
    “There was a truck coming. If she’d stopped it—well, we would have had an even more difficult situation than the one we’re currently in.”
    “What would you have done?” asked Harry.
    The chief considered the question.
    “I’d have tried to stop the truck, and I’d have been forced to kill thedriver.”
    He turned his gray eyes on Harry for a moment.
    “And then I’d have killed you, and your wife too.”
    Harry wanted to vomit, but he fought the urge. He could taste it at the back of his throat, though. For the first time since he had gotten into the car with Morland, he felt frightened. They were in the darkness out by Tabart’s Pond, just one of many locations around Prosperous that was named after the original English settlers. There were no Tabarts left now in Prosperous. No Tabarts, no Mabsons, no Quartons, no Poyds. They’d all died early in the history of the settlement, and the rest had seemed set to follow them before the accommodation was reached. Now Harry was about to dig a grave in a place named after the departed, the lost, and a grave could accommodate two as easily as one.
    “Why?” said Harry. “Why would you have killed us?”
    “For forcing me to do something that I didn’t want to do. For making life harder than it already is. For screwing up. As an example to others. You take your pick.”
    The chief made a right turn onto a dirt road.
    “Maybe I’ll have another look at that lock on your basement when we’re done,” he said. “Something about all this doesn’t sit quite right with me. Kinda like the lock itself, it seems.”
    He grinned emptily at Harry. The beams of the headlights caught bare trees, and icy snow, and—
    “What was that?” said Harry. He was looking back over his right shoulder.
    “Huh? I didn’t see nothing.”
    “There was something there. It was big, like an animal of some kind. I saw its eyes shining.”
    But the chief was paying him no attention. As far as Morland was concerned, Harry’s “something” was just a ruse, a clumsy attempt to distract him from the