Read Online Voices in the Dark by Andrew Coburn - Free Book Online

Smiling through the bars, she said, “Do you remember me?”
    A strange expression diminished his features, as if he were debating his own existence. Then he brightened. “Did you bring me anything?”
    “Sorry,” she said, wishing she had. His eyes were coins spending themselves on her. “Are you in much discomfort?” she asked with real concern.
    “I want one of those,” he said, pointing at Sergeant Avery’s root beer.
    “Go get him one, Eugene.”
    “Hell, no,” Sergeant Avery said, “they’re Meg’s. One I’m drinking I gotta pay for.”
    “For God’s sake, I’ll spring for it.”
    He shuffled off with a grumble, and she peered through the bars. What was she doing here? What did she want? As we grow older, she asked herself, do we all drift into some kind of nonsense? Dudley was looking at her curiously, his signet ring catching her attention, and once more she wondered whether he had stolen it.
    “Are you a good person?” he asked.
    She was as good as the next but nobody special. In church she sang without a voice and at home played the piano without talent. She had never learned to knit, which prevented her from emulating Dorothea Farnham, who brought her needles to town meeting and gave the impression that her life was devoted to doing two things at once.
    “Are you a happy parent?” Dudley asked.
    What a queer question! “My children are grown,” she said. “I don’t see much of them.” She did not mention that her son, only twenty-six, was beginning to bald, which made her feel ancient, and that her daughter, living in California, had made a mess of two marriages.
    “Not everyone,” Dudley said easily, “should have children. Chronos devoured his. Agamemnon sacrificed his to make war. This isn’t anything I’m making up. It’s mythological fact.”
    The names sailed over her head, but his smile warmed her, as if he understood everything and judged not. Sergeant Avery returned and thrust upon her an unopened can of root beer, cold to the touch. She poked it through the bars. “For you, Dudley.”
    “Something for you to remember,” Sergeant Avery warned, working wisdom into his round face. “No good deed goes unpunished. That’s what the chief says.”
    May said, “Screw the chief.”
    • • •
    In facing chairs in her sitting room, Regina Smith listened to Harley Bodine talk in low and measured tones. He was in his dark lawyer’s suit, his back stiff, his legs crossed. His movements were formal. “Kate and I don’t fuck enough,” he said. “That’s one of the problems.”
    The crudity did not disturb her, merely surprised her, though the look she returned was impersonal, almost as if he were a tradesman. “Whose fault is that?” she asked.
    “I don’t think it matters.”
    “That sounds too casual.”
    “It’s not something I can talk about with her.”
    “There’s the real problem.”
    His face, monotonous in its grimness, looked used up. “We’ve never been truly open with each other. My fault, no doubt.”
    She could readily believe that, for people invariably summed him up as a tightass. Phoebe Yarbrough had speculated that his butt was a hairline fracture.
    “I’m not easy to get along with,” he added.
    She could well imagine him as one person at the office, another in the privacy of his home, and a third here. His work world, like her husband’s, was high up in one of those verticals of concrete and glass, in a suite of dark mahogany, stainless steel, rich carpeting, and abstract art. She had heard that he could wither an underling with a look.
    “I don’t know how to get close,” he said. “The sexual act is only an illusion of closeness. No one can truly get into another person. We die strangers, one to the other.” He flicked an ash into the dish she had provided. “Thanks for letting me smoke.”
    She had served iced tea. His was gone. “Would you like another?”
    He shook his head. “Does Ira know I’ve been taking up your