A Song of Shadows by John Connolly Read Free Book Online

leave the house.

6
    O lesens – which Larraine Olesen always felt should more correctly have been ‘Olesen’s’, or even ‘Olesens’’ on the sign, since she and her brother Greg were joint owners – had been a fixture in Boreas since the midfifties, when Larraine and Greg’s parents opened the store while still in their twenties. They’d continued to run it until the turn of the century, at which point they decided that enough was enough, and it was time for younger blood to take over. Neither of their children was married. Greg was briefly engaged to a local woman, but the relationship had never really taken, while Larraine – well, deep down Larraine probably preferred the company of women, but was too shy and too Lutheran to do anything about it. She wasn’t bitter or unhappy, just a little lonely, but she loved her brother, and she loved books, and thus had found a measure of contentment in life.
    Like independent bookstores everywhere, Olesens had struggled to adapt to the new age of bookselling. A family argument had erupted between the generations when Larraine and Greg began selling ‘gently used’ books alongside new stock, which their parents regarded as a dangerous step down the slope toward not selling any books at all. But Greg had a good eye not just for a bargain, but for rare first editions, and the store’s Internet presence, along with a nice sideline in greeting cards, wrapping paper, and other materials that generated the kind of markup that books could only dream of, was keeping the store not only in business, but in profit. It had been Larraine’s decision to add the little coffee bar at the back of the store. It faced out over Clark’s Stream, which ran through the town, and the somewhat unimaginatively named Clark’s Bridge, a pretty thing of stone and moss that looked as though it came from many centuries past, but was not much older than the store itself. The coffee bar sold pastries and cookies baked by Mrs Olesen, and decent coffee. It turned out that no small number of folk, both tourists and local, enjoyed the ambience of the Nook, as it was called, and the markup on coffee put even greeting cards to shame. There had been some tension initially between the Olesens and Rob Hallinan, owner of the Moosebreath Coffee House further north on Bay, but it turned out that Boreas had just about enough customers for both of them, and more than enough in summer.
    Charlie Parker had started coming in shortly after his arrival in town, because Olesens prided itself on carrying enough copies of the New York and Boston papers to satisfy demand year-round. The Olesens knew who he was almost as soon as he arrived, of course. Most everybody in town who was worth a damn had an early inkling of the detective’s presence out on Green Heron Bay, and without exception they had become strangely protective of him. Even Chief Bloom had expressed surprise at how little muttering there had been, given that people in Boreas complained if the Brickhouse changed one of its draft beer taps, even if they never drank beer, and had debated for weeks about repainting the town’s welcome sign in a softer shade of white. Perhaps it was something to do with his past: he was a man who had lost a wife and child, and had suffered grievous injury just for doing a job which, as far as anyone could tell, largely involved putting his mark on the kind of men and women without whom the world was a much better place. The shooting made him one of theirs, and the town had quietly closed ranks around him.
    In the beginning Larraine and Greg kept their distance, allowing him his space to drink, and read newspapers, books and magazines, all of them bought at Olesens, with none of the books ever returned for a fifty percent trade-in, even though a big sign at the counter invited customers to do just that. But slowly they had tested the waters with him and found him to be gently, slyly funny, and aware of the strangeness of his