Read Online Vicious Grace by M. L. N. Hanover - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: M. L. N. Hanover
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Contemporary, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Horror, Paranormal
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her company, and I admire her intelligence. We have a lot of history, but we broke up for a reason. I’m pretty sure she was seeing someone else, even before she left Denver.”
A totally different kind of fear bloomed in my chest. It was stupid. Kim’s affair with Eric wasn’t even my secret, except that I knew about it. And still, at that moment I wished I’d spilled her beans a year ago.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” he said. “Not really. It was just the feeling I got. Some unexpected long nights. Some inexplicable crying jags. I knew she was unhappy, and when she decided to leave, I told her it was the right decision.”
I stopped in the concrete archway. Rows of tightly packed cars stood in the shadows. Aubrey paused, looking back at me.
“Would you want to know now?” I asked, trying to make it sound hypothetical. “I mean if you could know now what was really going on with her back then, would you want to?”
“What would the point be? We did what we did,” he said. “And I think we’ve got enough to worry about without hauling all that back from the dead.”
In the parking garage proper, we had a moment’s panic that the minivan was gone, but as soon as we figured out we were on the wrong level, everything went smoothly. We were back on the streets in a few minutes, and if Aubrey chose a longer, looping route back to the café rather than drive past Grace, I didn’t object.
I leaned against the door, watching out the window as we drove. Men and women stood or walked along the gray, urban streetscape. It wasn’t as gray and overwhelming as Manhattan had been, but had almost more of a sense of being a living, human city. A black man in a neatly pressed suit drove a sports car alongside us, his eyes on the street ahead even as he talked with a lighter-colored child in the car seat behind him. A painfully thin Asian woman sat at a bus stop, her arms crossed, her mouth set in a scowl. A pack of teenagers in matching black-and-orange uniforms that said Leo Catholic High School held up traffic by running through the crosswalk as the lights changed, bubbling with laughter and shrieking with delight at their danger.
The city was alive. Almost three million people with lives as complex and intersecting as my own, navigating the daily pulse of rush hour on the 90, the 94, the 290. Riding the elevated trains. Every day, they were eating their dinners and talking with their friends and cheating on their lovers. And in the middle of all this normal, rich, oddly beautiful human life, something was happening. Something at Grace Memorial. And the more I let my mind wander, the more a growing knot in my belly told me it was something very, very bad.
SIX
Looking back at my childhood, I couldn’t say my father had done me many favors. The lessons he’d tried to instill in me—things like “never wear a skirt that goes above the ankle” and “Jesus died because kids sneak into movie theaters”—never really took. But that’s not the same as saying I never learned anything from him. Throughout the weird, judgmental, just-barely-repressed Christian rage-fest that was my childhood home, I’d picked up quite a bit about how the world works. Not all of it had immediately applied, but some bits still came in handy.
For instance, when I was ten years old, the doctors found a suspicious lump on my big brother Jay’s spinal column. My mother called from the doctor’s office in hysterics, saying that no one was telling her anything, and they were running tests she didn’t understand. I could hear every word she said, even though my father had the telephone handset to his ear. He sat at the kitchen table, scowling and fighting to interrupt my mother’s litany of fear and confusion. He was in a white T-shirt and the battered canvas work pants he always wore on his days off. In the end, he told my mother to sit down, be quiet, and wait. Then he told me to find my little brother, Curtis, and get him in
A totally different kind of fear bloomed in my chest. It was stupid. Kim’s affair with Eric wasn’t even my secret, except that I knew about it. And still, at that moment I wished I’d spilled her beans a year ago.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” he said. “Not really. It was just the feeling I got. Some unexpected long nights. Some inexplicable crying jags. I knew she was unhappy, and when she decided to leave, I told her it was the right decision.”
I stopped in the concrete archway. Rows of tightly packed cars stood in the shadows. Aubrey paused, looking back at me.
“Would you want to know now?” I asked, trying to make it sound hypothetical. “I mean if you could know now what was really going on with her back then, would you want to?”
“What would the point be? We did what we did,” he said. “And I think we’ve got enough to worry about without hauling all that back from the dead.”
In the parking garage proper, we had a moment’s panic that the minivan was gone, but as soon as we figured out we were on the wrong level, everything went smoothly. We were back on the streets in a few minutes, and if Aubrey chose a longer, looping route back to the café rather than drive past Grace, I didn’t object.
I leaned against the door, watching out the window as we drove. Men and women stood or walked along the gray, urban streetscape. It wasn’t as gray and overwhelming as Manhattan had been, but had almost more of a sense of being a living, human city. A black man in a neatly pressed suit drove a sports car alongside us, his eyes on the street ahead even as he talked with a lighter-colored child in the car seat behind him. A painfully thin Asian woman sat at a bus stop, her arms crossed, her mouth set in a scowl. A pack of teenagers in matching black-and-orange uniforms that said Leo Catholic High School held up traffic by running through the crosswalk as the lights changed, bubbling with laughter and shrieking with delight at their danger.
The city was alive. Almost three million people with lives as complex and intersecting as my own, navigating the daily pulse of rush hour on the 90, the 94, the 290. Riding the elevated trains. Every day, they were eating their dinners and talking with their friends and cheating on their lovers. And in the middle of all this normal, rich, oddly beautiful human life, something was happening. Something at Grace Memorial. And the more I let my mind wander, the more a growing knot in my belly told me it was something very, very bad.
SIX
Looking back at my childhood, I couldn’t say my father had done me many favors. The lessons he’d tried to instill in me—things like “never wear a skirt that goes above the ankle” and “Jesus died because kids sneak into movie theaters”—never really took. But that’s not the same as saying I never learned anything from him. Throughout the weird, judgmental, just-barely-repressed Christian rage-fest that was my childhood home, I’d picked up quite a bit about how the world works. Not all of it had immediately applied, but some bits still came in handy.
For instance, when I was ten years old, the doctors found a suspicious lump on my big brother Jay’s spinal column. My mother called from the doctor’s office in hysterics, saying that no one was telling her anything, and they were running tests she didn’t understand. I could hear every word she said, even though my father had the telephone handset to his ear. He sat at the kitchen table, scowling and fighting to interrupt my mother’s litany of fear and confusion. He was in a white T-shirt and the battered canvas work pants he always wore on his days off. In the end, he told my mother to sit down, be quiet, and wait. Then he told me to find my little brother, Curtis, and get him in
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