Read Online What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online Page B

where they lived? They would have watched television as they did at home—each girl picking one program—then turned it off and read until bedtime. If the room had a radio, Dave might have tuned it to a jazz station, or Mr. Harley’s Saturday-night show of standards. She imagined them seeking refuge here during a storm, one not unlike Hurricane Agnes three years before, when the rising creek waters a few blocks away had briefly trapped them on Algonquin Lane. The lights had gone out, but it had seemed like an adventure at the time, reading by flashlight and listening to the news reports on Dave’s battery-powered radio. Miriam had almost been disappointed when the water had receded and the electricity returned.
    A key turned in the lock, and Miriam started. But it was Jeff, of course, returning with the filled ice bucket.
    â€œGallo,” he said, and she thought for a moment that it was some sort of play on “hello,” then realized he was introducing the wine he had brought.
    â€œIt will take some time to chill,” he added.
    â€œSure,” she said, although Miriam knew a trick to speed the process. One put the bottle in a bucket of ice and then rotated it clockwise one hundred times, exactly, and voilà—cold wine. It was when Miriam discovered herself rolling the neck of a bottle between her anxious palms at two o’clock in the afternoon that she decided she should get a job. Yes, they had needed the money—rather desperately, in fact—but that had been less urgent to her than the prospect of becoming a pickled, desultory housewife, boozy breath washing over her children as they ate their after-school snacks and recounted their days.
    Jeff stepped closer to her, taking her chin in his hand. His hand was still cold from carrying the bucket, but she didn’t flinch or pull back. Their teeth bumped painfully as the kiss began, and they had to adjust their mouths, as if they’d never kissed before. Funny, they had managedto make love so gracefully in a variety of tight and inconvenient locations—a closet at the office, a restaurant bathroom, the backseat of his little sports car—and now that they had space and, relative to what they were used to, time, they couldn’t be clumsier.
    She tried to shut down her mind, give in to her usual urgency for Jeff, and it started to work. This was, what, their seventh time, and it still amazed her how much fun it was. Sex with Dave had always been a little somber, as if he needed to prove his feminist credentials by making the act joyless for both of them, plying her with his endless earnest questions. Socratic sex, as Miriam thought of it. How does this feel? What if I do this? Or if I vary it this way? If she had tried to explain this to her girlfriends—if, in fact, she had female friends, which Miriam did not—she knew this would sound grumpy and ungrateful. She would not be able to convey her sense that Dave, in pretending to care for nothing but her pleasure, was actually intent on making sure she didn’t enjoy herself. He had always seemed to pity her, just a bit, and regard himself as a gift he had conferred on her, the dark, sheltered girl from the north.
    Jeff flipped her over, planted her feet on the floor, and placed her hands on the still-made bed, locking his fingers over hers and slipping into her from behind. This wasn’t new to Miriam—Dave was also a dutiful student of the Kama Sutra —but Jeff’s silence and directness made everything feel novel. Physiologically, according to Dave—yes, Dave was forever explaining her own anatomy to her—she shouldn’t even be able to come in this position, yet with Jeff it happened frequently. Not yet, though, not just now. With an entire afternoon to spend in a motel room, they were taking it slowly. Or trying to.
    Miriam had not been thinking of an affair when she entered the work world, or even an office flirtation. She