The Cavanaugh Quest Read Online Free Page B

about what happened yesterday, haven’t you?” Her voice eased out in a long phony chord of consolation, exaggerated. She didn’t really care, I’d always thought, but pretended that she cared. She was the Spirit of Gossip; she would have fitted well into The School for Scandal.
    “Ah …” My mind wasn’t really connecting yet. I was trying to hold my robe together. “I don’t know …”
    “In the lobby, Paul,” she said accusingly, “Larry Blankenship killed himself!” She found another Kleenex in her alligator bag. She was wearing a striped Peck & Peck knit, lime green and yellow and blue, with matching blue shoes. She always looked like that, perfect in a rather hideously premeditated way.
    “That, yes, I heard about that.”
    “Such a tragedy,” she said reprovingly, as if I weren’t properly saddened. “He couldn’t have been more than forty and he had every reason to live …” She was edging toward my doorway, and it was inevitable. I asked her if she’d like to join me for my morning coffee. She said she certainly would and she could use a few minutes, sitting down, ignoring for the moment her own doorway not more than thirty feet away. But her husband was behind that door, dribbling cream on himself.
    I’d put the fresh-ground coffee into the top of the Braun Aromaster before my shower and it was steaming and ready. I poured two mugs and we went out onto the balcony, where the morning sun had dried the green Astroturf. The world looked fresh and clean. It was nine o’clock and Minneapolis was moving below us.
    “Shot himself in the head, poor man,” she began again, determined to get on with it, and I didn’t stop her. It was all coming back to me and I was curious. She repeated what I already knew about the circumstances of the suicide, item for item; she always had her sources. Her sorrow, her pity, they were all on the surface, in gestures and movements of her eyebrows and vocal intonations which conveyed another strong message: Somehow Harriet Dierker was above and impervious to the problems of lesser mortals. She sorrowed for them as she would for a dog struck by a bus.
    “What made it all the worse is that he’d just started his new job, he’d just moved in here, oh, my …   and he had that lovely new Thunderbird, the green one parked down by the fountain. Everything seemed to have finally gotten all straightened out for him.” She pursed her lips. “And he was finally free of that woman!” The expression on her face reminded me that birds are killers. Only a few days before, I’d stood by the bird sanctuary at Como Park and watched a graceful, terrible swan rip a baby duck to pieces while the mother stared frantically, helplessly on.
    “Which woman is that?” I asked, sipping my milky coffee and watching the morning duck inspection far below in the pond.
    “His wife, of course, that Kim person—oh, she was lovely to look at, beautiful, but, Paul, she was the sort of woman the word ‘bitch’ was invented for …”
    “Really?” There was no need to prod her. She was moving ahead under her own power.
    “Worse, Paul, worse—you wouldn’t understand, no man could unless they’d known such a woman. A hellion. A witch!” She was working herself up to some pinnacle of ladylike disgust but words failed her and she made an alert, quick face of undisguised revulsion.
    “Hub Anthony said some people thought she was a little pushy, maybe,” I said, “but he couldn’t see it himself. Said she was always making herself useful—”
    She shivered as if Hubbard’s frailty made her flesh crawl.
    “Oh, Hubbard Anthony should know! He certainly should know!”
    “What do you mean? What are you implying?”
    She clammed up; she always did when someone stood up to her line of accusation, innuendo, half truth. She knew she’d gone too far and switched back to the subject of Kim Blankenship with awesome, practiced ease.
    “Did you know her, Paul?”
    “No. But I understand