Walking the Labyrinth Read Online Free Page B

laundered because he was too busy to go to a laundromat and had never settled down long enough to buy a washing machine.
    “Where is this paragon of virtue now?” Robin Ann asked.
    “Las Vegas, I think. Interviewing some Mob boss.”
    “Ah.”
    Robin Ann even disapproved of the books Peter wrote. They were the kind that were rushed into paperback and sold in supermarkets, unauthorized biographies of troubled royal figures or wealthy men married to starlets.
    If Molly tried she could remember a time when she had disapproved of them herself, back when she had first met Peter Myers through the temp agency and was typing his manuscripts. But it was getting harder and harder to keep things in perspective, to remember the person she used to be before Peter. In the ten years since she had dropped out of college she had traveled through the United States, had taken temp jobs to pay for her moves from state to state; she had been a clerk in a toy store and a cab driver, had worked in a fish-packing plant in Alaska. How had she ended up like one of those pathetic women she had met in her travels, the ones who did nothing but stay home and wait for the phone to ring? But she could not seem to break away from him; she felt that if she stayed she was being faithful to love, and that if she remained constant through all obstacles he would someday understand, and become faithful too.
    “Forget Peter,” Robin Ann said. “It’ll be good for him if you’re not home once in a while.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Definitely. Tell me where you were last night.”
    Molly laughed. “There’s this guy,” she said. “A private investigator.”
    “Great,” Robin Ann said, impressed.
    “No, it’s not like that. He’s kind of a jerk, really. He keeps asking me questions about my family.”
    “What kind of questions?”
    “Who they were. What they did. What happened to one of them, a woman he claims was related to us. I never heard of her.”
    “Did you ask your aunt?”
    “Yeah. She said not to answer his questions.”
    “Sounds like she has something to hide.”
    “Don’t you start. He thinks this woman was murdered. Murdered—I ask you. Who would murder her?”
    “Maybe you should visit your aunt. Find out what’s going on.”
    “Yeah, I was thinking of that. Maybe I will.”
    When Molly got home after drinks with Robin Ann there was a blinking light on her answering machine. She played the message back.
    “Hey, Moll,” Peter said. She felt a rush of pure pleasure at the sound of his voice. “I’m in town, back at the hotel. Give me a call, maybe we’ll have dinner.”
    She called his hotel, on Bush Street in San Francisco. No one answered. Who was he with now? No, better not to think of that. But all the names he had dropped so casually in conversation came back to her one by one, persistent as ghosts.
    Dammit , she thought. Robin Ann’s right. I’m going to visit Fentrice. Let him see what it’s like when I’m not in town .
    She picked up the phone again and made reservations.
    In her black dress and necklace of large amber beads Fentrice stood out easily from the more colorful crowd at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. They hugged, and Molly smelled her aunt’s familiar odors of perfumed soap and crinoline.
    “Let me look at you,” Fentrice said, holding her at arm’s length. She wore a bracelet of onyx and tarnished silver; it had turned her wrist a little blackish-green. “I must say California agrees with you.”
    “How have you been?” Molly asked.
    “Fine. Do you have any other luggage?”
    “Just this.”
    “Good. Lila’s waiting in the car.”
    They walked down the long airport corridor, Molly slowing as Fentrice began to lag behind. The familiar black Oldsmobile stood at the curb; Fentrice had had it for as long as Molly could remember. When Molly had gone away to college she had been amazed at how often people changed cars.
    Chicago was far colder than California. Molly shivered and drew her coat around