THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) Read Online Free Page B
Author: Jake Needham
she turned and walked away toward Orchard Road.
Tay noticed she didn’t look back. Whether he had been expecting her to look back or not, he didn’t know.
CHAPTER FOUR
THAT NIGHT, TAY went to bed early, but he couldn’t sleep. After a while he turned the light back on and looked through the stack of books on his bedside table, thinking that he would read for a while. He found a thick biography of Winston Churchill that was far too solemn even to consider, a recent Lee Child novel, and something by Richard Ford he had no memory of buying.
He flipped through the first few pages of the Child novel, but he couldn’t get into it so he turned off the light again and just lay there watching the soft glow of the streetlightsfiltering through the palm trees in his front garden. A gentle breeze rippled the big palm fronds and the shadows in his bedroom moved and shifted, becoming ghosts in the darkness dancing merrily around him.
Sometimes Tay wondered about all the people who must have slept in that same room before him. He had inherited the house from his parents so there had been his mother and father, of course, and then, after his father died, just his mother. The house had been built well over a hundred years before, however, so there had been many others, too. How many different people, he wondered not for the first time, had lived and died and made love and argued and fallen asleep burdened by sadness within the same four walls where he slept now? Sometimes Tay wondered if the spirits of those who had lived there before him regarded him now as a friend or as an interloper. Since he wasn’t sure himself which one he was, he sympathized with their uncertainty.
Tay didn’t believe in ghosts, of course, but he did believe when human beings died they left a sense of their presence in the spaces they had inhabited in life. He had never entered into the scene of a murder without feeling the victim all around him. In the air, on the walls, in every molecule of the places they had once been alive. If was as if the dead hung on as long as they could, clinging desperately to life until they were finally dragged out of it and away to whatever came next.
If anything came next.
Which Tay had no confidence it did.
Tay knew full well it was not abstract philosophical thoughts about the existence, or nonexistence, of the hereafter that were keeping him awake. The reason was much more secular, and far more immediate.
Tomorrow was his fiftieth birthday.
Tay had told absolutely no one, and he was nearly certain no one knew. He hated the ritual of birthdays and the mostly insincere congratulations and disingenuous expressions of warmth that came with them. He was willing to accept commendation for something he had accomplished, but not dying during the previous twelve months struck him as a poor reason for a pat on the back.
Usually he didn’t give birthdays much thought one way or the other. This birthday, however, was different.
It was the simple numerical value that was the killer. Fifty. Half a hundred. A number of such overwhelming roundness that he could not ignore it as he had every other number that had come before. Each man’s life was made up of a number of markers, and a fiftieth birthday was probably the most prominent of those markers whether he wanted it to be or not. It made him think about death far more these days than he ever had before. Almost without realizing it, his life had become a Woody Allen movie. Was it that way for everyone? Was fifty life’s Rubicon? Once you crossed it, was everything that came afterwards just an inexorable slide toward the end?
He wasn’t frightened of dying, Tay told himself, not really. He just couldn’t get his mind around the concept of ceasing to exist, that one day he would be sitting in his garden or going off to sleep, and he would slide away into the darkness never to return. It seemed… well, downright banal. Five or six or seven decades of living deserved a far
Tay noticed she didn’t look back. Whether he had been expecting her to look back or not, he didn’t know.
CHAPTER FOUR
THAT NIGHT, TAY went to bed early, but he couldn’t sleep. After a while he turned the light back on and looked through the stack of books on his bedside table, thinking that he would read for a while. He found a thick biography of Winston Churchill that was far too solemn even to consider, a recent Lee Child novel, and something by Richard Ford he had no memory of buying.
He flipped through the first few pages of the Child novel, but he couldn’t get into it so he turned off the light again and just lay there watching the soft glow of the streetlightsfiltering through the palm trees in his front garden. A gentle breeze rippled the big palm fronds and the shadows in his bedroom moved and shifted, becoming ghosts in the darkness dancing merrily around him.
Sometimes Tay wondered about all the people who must have slept in that same room before him. He had inherited the house from his parents so there had been his mother and father, of course, and then, after his father died, just his mother. The house had been built well over a hundred years before, however, so there had been many others, too. How many different people, he wondered not for the first time, had lived and died and made love and argued and fallen asleep burdened by sadness within the same four walls where he slept now? Sometimes Tay wondered if the spirits of those who had lived there before him regarded him now as a friend or as an interloper. Since he wasn’t sure himself which one he was, he sympathized with their uncertainty.
Tay didn’t believe in ghosts, of course, but he did believe when human beings died they left a sense of their presence in the spaces they had inhabited in life. He had never entered into the scene of a murder without feeling the victim all around him. In the air, on the walls, in every molecule of the places they had once been alive. If was as if the dead hung on as long as they could, clinging desperately to life until they were finally dragged out of it and away to whatever came next.
If anything came next.
Which Tay had no confidence it did.
Tay knew full well it was not abstract philosophical thoughts about the existence, or nonexistence, of the hereafter that were keeping him awake. The reason was much more secular, and far more immediate.
Tomorrow was his fiftieth birthday.
Tay had told absolutely no one, and he was nearly certain no one knew. He hated the ritual of birthdays and the mostly insincere congratulations and disingenuous expressions of warmth that came with them. He was willing to accept commendation for something he had accomplished, but not dying during the previous twelve months struck him as a poor reason for a pat on the back.
Usually he didn’t give birthdays much thought one way or the other. This birthday, however, was different.
It was the simple numerical value that was the killer. Fifty. Half a hundred. A number of such overwhelming roundness that he could not ignore it as he had every other number that had come before. Each man’s life was made up of a number of markers, and a fiftieth birthday was probably the most prominent of those markers whether he wanted it to be or not. It made him think about death far more these days than he ever had before. Almost without realizing it, his life had become a Woody Allen movie. Was it that way for everyone? Was fifty life’s Rubicon? Once you crossed it, was everything that came afterwards just an inexorable slide toward the end?
He wasn’t frightened of dying, Tay told himself, not really. He just couldn’t get his mind around the concept of ceasing to exist, that one day he would be sitting in his garden or going off to sleep, and he would slide away into the darkness never to return. It seemed… well, downright banal. Five or six or seven decades of living deserved a far
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