77 Shadow Street Read Online Free Page B

the flu, the day was not hectic. There wasn’t much movement in either equities or commodities, and when the major exchanges closed, at 2:00 his time, it proved to be a treading-water day.
    Normally, Bailey possessed a sharp focus and singular powers of concentration, which served him as well on financial battlefields as in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As he worked that Thursday, however, his mind repeatedly drifted to the memory of the mysterious figure in the pool, and the sense of peril that he had felt back in the moment rose anew and lingered, though not as acute as it had been during the encounter.
    Computers off, working by the light of a single lamp, he was still at his desk past three o’clock when shatters of rain against the north-facing windows drew his attention. For the first time he realized how dark the day had grown. Dusk had crept in two hours ahead of schedule. The lowering clouds were as plush and gray as the coats of the Cupp sisters’ cats, seeming not only to belly over the city but also to curl around it as if settling in for a long dreamy evening.
    Serial lightning flashed, flashed, flashed. The bright flares caused geometric shadows of the French-window muntins and stiles to flutter through the dimly lighted room and briefly print themselves upon the walls.
    The quick-following crash of thunder, loud enough to suggest Armageddon, did not bring Bailey up from his chair. But as his desk lamp dimmed, he bolted to his feet during the subsequent barrage of lightning because this time, among the flung grids of window-frame shadows, another shadow moved. Sinuous and fleet. It raced across the room not as if it might be a silhouette of something inanimate projected and set in motion by the storm light, but instead as if it must be an intruder revealed.
    Man-tall when it leaped, the featureless dark figure seemed more pantherlike as the leap became a lower lope. Having spun in his chair even as he sprang up from it, Bailey turned to follow the specter, if that’s what it was. The thing eluded the eye, swift and quicksilvery, its motion smooth and continuous while the lightning-inspired shadowsof the window frames flickered and twitched in the stroboscopic pulses of the storm.
    The black form didn’t print itself upon the wall, along with the window grids, but seemed to pass through the plaster. The chain of lightning cast out its last bright link, the brass desk lamp grew brighter, and Bailey hurried from the study in pursuit of the thing that walls could not contain.

6
    Apartment 3-C
    A fter he stood staring for a moment at the Pendleton-related files on the kitchen table, Silas went to the coffeemaker. He filled a white ceramic mug and took down a bottle of brandy from a cupboard shelf and spiked the coffee. The clock showed 3:07 P.M., and though Silas never took a drink earlier than dinnertime, if at all, he felt the need to be fortified for a meeting at five o’clock.
    He leaned against the counter, with his back to the double sink and to the window above it. Lightning flared, enlivening his shadow, which sprang forward and leaped back through the half-dark kitchen, forward and back again, as if the distorted silhouette were an entity with a mind of its own and with a keen desire to be free of him.
    He sipped the coffee, which was as hot as he could tolerate, perhaps a cure not just for his unsteady nerves but also for the chills that plagued him. He was of half a mind to skip his scheduled meeting, to remain here and drink spiked coffee until his eyes grew heavy and he could no longer stay awake. Even in retirement, however, he was a lawyer who respected not just federal, state, and city laws, but also and primarily natural law, the code with which he believed that allmen were born, a code of responsibilities that included the duty to love truth and always to pursue it.
    Sometimes truth was elusive.…
    After Tolliver, the butler, murdered the Ostock family and his fellow workers in 1935,