Erasing Memory Read Online Free Page B

the resting place for most of the doors and windows, wood panels and plaster mouldings, cornices and ironwork, and even flooring of the century homes and factories torn down in the city. For anyone wanting to recreate the town the way it was, this yard was one big erector set. But then, no one had ever wanted to do that.
    He’d found the window that now occupied most of the eastern wall of his living room rusting away underneath the stair to the office. When the wrecker’s estate was settled, MacNeice purchased it for a hundred dollars, which, the wrecker’s widow told him, would go to the local animal shelter, because “no animal should ever go hungry.”
    J UNE WAS GIVING WAY to summer, and the dappled light through the stand of trees outside was so intense it made the whole room dance as if it was the happiest place on earth.MacNeice went to the kitchen, took out the grappa, poured a shot and took it back to the window. Through the trees he could see fragments of the deep blue lake in the far distance. He was aware of the birds, especially the swallows that came every spring to the birdhouses his father had built and mounted on the trees as a house-warming gift. But after the long night he found the light too much, and slowly he drew the drapes on the scene.
    Grappa. Even the word was comforting to him. He’d first tasted it in Italy with Kate, but it was years before he tasted a smooth grappa like the one he now enjoyed just before bed or occasionally combined with espresso in the morning. Easing into the old club chair he’d rescued from the lobby of an abandoned theatre, he held the narrow shot glass to his right eye. The details of the room twisted into vertical streaks—tall Giacometti shafts. MacNeice emptied the glass and, letting his hand drop, allowed the heavy cylinder to swing gently between his fingers before putting it down on
Birds of North America
on the floor next to the chair.
    He took out his cellphone and found Wallace’s number. It rang three times before he heard a voice say crisply, “Deputy Chief Wallace.”
    “Good morning, sir, it’s MacNeice.”
    “What can I do for you, Mac?”
    “I am requesting the lead on a case I responded to last night—the young woman found dead in the cottage on Lake Charles.”
    “I’m just reading Swetsky’s report. What’s so special about this one?”
    “I’m not sure, sir. I just think I have a feel for it.” MacNeice wasn’t sure that made a convincing argument but waited for a response, which came moments later.
    “Swetsky thinks you do too. I’m fine with that.” It sounded as if Wallace was outside, being buffeted by the morning breeze off the lake.
    M AC N EICE NEEDED TO SLEEP . He switched off his cellphone and put the glass in the sink on his way through to the master bedroom.
    In the three years since Kate had died, he had yet to sign a truce with the place. The rest of the house and property held traces of her—the garden she had planted and he maintained, the dishes and assorted cutlery, the painting she’d bought at auction because it reminded her of the lavender fields in the south of France—but they all co-existed with him. The master bedroom, and especially the bed, had betrayed him—comfort and intimacy stripped from them both—and only when he was exhausted, like now, would he go there.
    He opened the window by the bed so he could hear the birds calling as he fell asleep. Lying on his side, staring at the sky above the garden, MacNeice looked for patterns in the clouds going by. When he was eight, or maybe twenty, he’d imagined clouds as forms swimming in a superior sea while he, and everyone and everything he knew on earth, existed on the bottom of this ethereal ocean. He wondered how many people had fantasized in the same way about clouds.
    As exhausted as he was, his eyes refused to close, and images of the girl back at the beach house seemed safer to him than everything he feared in sleep. Panic hit him—he’d left