A Song of Shadows Read Online Free Page B

Farther along the strand, two figures walked – one tall, one smaller, their backs to him, their fair hair blown behind them by the breeze: the Winters, mother and daughter, out for a stroll by the high dunes.
    Movement came from the house below, and the detective appeared on his porch. He was carrying a stick, and took the steps down to the beach carefully, and at an angle, using his free hand to support himself on the railing. It was only when he was already on the sand that he saw the woman and the girl walking north along the beach. Soames saw him stop and turn to go back to the house. He paused as he glimpsed the car on the road above. Soames raised a hand uncertainly in greeting. After a couple of seconds the gesture was returned, and then the detective was gone.
    ‘They’re nice people,’ said Soames to himself. ‘Wouldn’t have hurt you to say hi.’
    But who was he to judge?
    He got back in his car and left the detective to his solitude.

4
    A manda Winter did not fully understand why she had been forced to move to this house by the sea. She was aware only of an argument between her mother and grandmother, although she was not privy to the cause. She had simply learned to judge her mother’s moods, for the two of them were close in the way that only a mother and daughter could be who had grown up without a man in their lives, and she understood that questions about the fight would not be welcomed.
    Amanda’s father had died while she was as yet unborn, and her mother rarely spoke of him. Amanda knew only his name – Alex Goyer – and that he had been a mechanic. Her grandmother had once used a funny word to describe him: ‘feckless.’ Amanda had looked it up online, and found that it meant irresponsible or worthless. There were other words too, but those were the ones that she understood. She didn’t like to think of her father as having no worth, for if she was part of him, then it meant that something of her lacked worth too. Her mother had tried to reassure her on that front. She insisted that her father wasn’t worthless, no matter what Grandma Isha said.
    Now that Amanda was older and growing accustomed to the nuances of adult speech and behavior, she had learned – mostly through Grandma Isha – more about the relationship between her father and her mother. She knew that Grandma Isha had been angry because Amanda’s mother had become pregnant outside marriage, and her father hadn’t wanted to marry her when he found out, instead cutting off all contact. The fact that her father had abandoned her mother while Amanda was still in the womb made Amanda sad, and seemed to confirm Grandma Isha’s view of him.
    Someone had murdered her father – shot him at the repair shop where he worked. The revelation was recent, and came from Grandma Isha. Amanda wondered if that might be one of the reasons for the big fight. She wasn’t sure how she felt about her father’s murder. Grandma Isha had mentioned drugs. Did that make her father a bad man? Amanda hoped not. Being bad was worse than being feckless. Her father didn’t seem to have much family of his own: his mother was dead, and his father, again according to Grandma Isha, wasn’t much better than the son. Her father’s father – she couldn’t really think of him as her grandfather – had died when Amanda was still a baby. His liver didn’t work right, and then it stopped working altogether. Her mother went to his funeral, although, like so much else concerning the Goyers, Amanda didn’t find that out until years later.
    So Grandma Isha was Amanda’s only grandparent, because Grandpa Dave, her husband, was dead too. Amanda could just barely remember him. He had gray hair and wore thick glasses. Her mother said that Grandpa Dave used to call Amanda ‘Manna’, like the bread from heaven. Sometimes her mother would call her that too, which made Amanda happy.
    Grandma Isha loved Amanda. She doted on her, spoiled her, and inhabited every facet