Hardscrabble Road Read Online Free Page A

year’s presidential race, and she didn’t care
     who won.
    She pulled through the driveway, wedged narrowly between two buildings that both looked as if they should have been demolished
     in 1966. She found a neat little parking lot in back, complete with overhead security lights and parking spaces marked by
     clean white painted stripes. She pulled in next to the only other car and opened her driver’s side door. It really was minus
     eleven degrees out there. There was a wind, too, and it got up under her long wool skirt.
    “Ms. Daniel?” the man in the overcoat said.
    Kate’s own overcoat was on the backseat. She never wore a coat when she drove. It got in the way of…something. Now she reached
     back and pulled her coat up to her, a good camel’s hair one she’d splurged for at Brooks Brothers after the first time she’d
     seen herself on CNN, looking like she shopped at the Goodwill Dumpsters, never mind the Goodwill store. She got out onto the
     asphalt and pulled the coat around her shoulders. She leaned into the car and got her pocketbook and briefcase. She locked
     the car door and shut it.
    “Hi,” she said. “I’ve got a suitcase, in the trunk. Am I sleeping here?”
    The man in the overcoat sucked in air. “Ah,” he said. “Well. We’ve got you booked at the Hyatt. I mean, if it’s not your kind
     of thing, we could always—”
    “It’s exactly my kind of thing. I love room service. I won’t bother to get the suitcase out of the car until I get over there.
     There’s nothing I need in it now. Are you the one who’s going to be my aide?”
    “What? Oh, yes. I’m, uh, I’m Edmund George, yes.”
    “Do they call you Ed?”
    He looked uncomfortable. “Most people don’t call me anything,” he said. “My professors at Penn call me Mr. George.”
    “Do you want me to call you Mr. George?”
    “No.”
    This was interesting, Kate thought. She got her pocketbook strap over her shoulder. She shouldn’t call it a pocketbook. It
     was at least as big as her suitcase. She looked around the parking lot. It backed on a vacant lot. The buildings around them
     were squat and dirty and mostly dark.
    “Well,” she said, “maybe we should go inside and you can lay out the situation for me. I’m sorry I got here so late. I kept
     trying to leave New York and getting held up by odd things happening in traffic. I should have taken Amtrak.”
    If Mr. George was thinking that any sane person would have taken Amtrak, he didn’t say it. He just gestured in the direction
     of the back door to the building and started leading the way there. They’d gone to all this trouble about security lights
     and painted parking spaces, but what they should have done was hire a security guard. At least her car would be safe. It wasn’t
     the kind of thing your ordinary cocaine addict was interested in breaking into.
    Inside, the halls were clean but narrow, and the ceilings were blessedly high. The place seemed to be deserted. Mr. George
     led her down a small flight of stairs—they’d bought a new carpet fairly recently, Kate noticed; she wondered if that was because
     they’d had a sudden influx of money or because the old stuff had gotten so awful they’d had no choice—and then around a corner
     to a tiny office that looked as if it had been entirely papered in manila legal folders. There was a desk and a chair. There
     was a phone, a black one, in a “princess” style that was at least two decades out-of-date. There was a single poster on the
     wall, advertising Leontyne Price in Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
    “We’re not going to ask you to work in here,” Mr. George said. “This is my office, actually. I’ve got all the files you need.
     We’re cleaning out a space for you up at the front. We thought you could mess it up for yourself without any help from us.”
    “We didn’t go there, why?”
    “Because it isn’t open.” Mr. George flushed. “It was supposed to be, but