Erasing Memory Read Online Free Page A

him, and showing signs of grey.
    As the wind blew the strands out of his grasp, he realized he was falling asleep. “Two hands,” he told himself sternly, shoving his butt into the back of the seat and pulling himself erect. He glanced down at the Sony. “I would love to have seen you play.”
    The sun was already warming up the hill below the escarpment where the hundreds of happy-looking houses of Pleasant Park defined the eastern end of the city. Beyond it lay the town of Secord, as quiet and bucolic as ever. PP, as it’s known over the two-way, had been finished three years earlier, and from a distance it admittedly looked lovely spread along the hillside. The development had been the subject of a community brawl between those who wanted the hill to remain a place of quiet beauty, of songbird, deer and fox—MacNeice’s perspective—and those who saw it as the best opportunity to expand the city and “take the pressure off the inner core.” He knew little about the design of successful cities but had assumed that compression was one aspect that made them work. In his travels with Kate to France and Italy, he’d never once felt that the narrow streets, or the shops, apartments and houses that had been builtaround and above them, lacked for anything, least of all space.
    MacNeice made a hard right up the long, winding lane towards the Cedarway Estate, which had sat for almost a century on a vast property that crested the escarpment. Easing to a stop in the gravel drive of the Gatehouse, the Edwardian folly a hundred feet below the top that he called home, he put the car in park and turned off the ignition. Electronic rolling fences and video security systems had long ago made the gatehouse redundant to the estate above, which suited MacNeice just fine.
    As a young patrolman he had arrested the gateman several times for drunk driving. Coming here each time to inform the man’s wife, he had grown to admire the solidity of the building. When the gateman and his wife retired and moved into town, the owner carved the building and the quarter-acre stand of pine and cedar that adjoined it from the main estate and put it on the market. MacNeice and Kate had put up everything they’d saved to make the down payment. The owner likely remembered his name, or his father’s, from the MacNeice Marina on Raven Lake, where as a kid Mac had pumped gas into the tank of the man’s sleek twelve-cylinder mahogany motor launch. Or perhaps he had a soft spot for young cops or violinists, because the estate agent told MacNeice and Kate that theirs wasn’t even close to the highest bid—it was just the one he accepted. They took that as a good omen for their lives, and for the most part it had been.
    Leaving his keys on the table inside the door, MacNeice went to the living room to set the Sony camera next to his computer. He looked out the large window at the trees. Its mullions broke the scene into a soft grey grid—good for a moment like this.
    The window—ten by six, with an industrial frame—was something he’d seen while checking out a wrecker’s yard onHarbour Street after the owner had been found—cold as slate, crack pipe in hand—sprawled on the floor of the yard’s office. Next to him was his Doberman. It had guarded him right up to the point when hunger overtook its desire to serve and protect. Most of the wrecker’s face and neck were gone, and when the first officer opened the door, the animal, presumably now protecting its food source, lunged at him. He put it down with two rounds from his service revolver.
    When MacNeice arrived, the young patrolman was leaning against the railing in front of the office, having a smoke. After warning him about what he was going to see, he said, “You know, I’ve patrolled by this yard so many times and that damn dog would always come snarlin’ and snappin’ to the fence, but he never came at me like that before. He knew he had some good eatin’ in there.”
    The yard was