After Dachau by Daniel Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

talking about eating, I’m talking about getting out of here!”
    Still standing outside the front door, I gave her a confident, manly smile and said, “Look, Mallory, we can do both those things. Let’s get out of here and go find someplace to have breakfast, okay? You may not need sustenance, but I do.”
    “All right, I’ll get a coat—but don’t come in.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’ll sit down or something.”
    So I stood there on the stoop till she was ready. I was so flummoxed that it didn’t even occur to me that I could have waited in the car, where I would have looked and felt marginally less ridiculous.
    Though she claimed to have no appetite, she attacked a plate of eggs and bacon as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Unfortunately, having a full stomach didn’t seem to improve her outlook a whole lot. I was beginning to wonder if Gloria MacArthur had died in childhood. It would explain Mallory’s evident lack of maturity, but I hesitated to ask, knowing how suspicious she was of every question.
    It came to me that a heavy irony was at work here. For the first time ever, I’d made my way into a case early enough to safeguard the evidence, but precisely because I was so early, I couldn’t get anywhere
near
the evidence. The subject was preoccupied with more elemental matters, and it was going to be days, if not weeks, before she was ready to help me with the investigation I’d come to make.
    I asked what she was thinking about her future.
    “What do you mean?” she asked in reply—evasively, I felt, since she was plainly thinking about nothing else.
    “Well, for example, do you plan to go back to your job at the library?”
    “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to find the goddamn place, much less do the work.”
    “Then how are you going to make a living?”
    “There’s some money in the bank,” she told me. “Mallory was a saver.”
    “That’s nice. It gives you some time to think.”
    “Yeah,” she agreed sullenly.
    “Your family may be able to help.”
    She gave me a disgusted look. “My family’s dead.”
    “Mallory has a family, and as far as they’re concerned, you’re Mallory. You’ve got to get used to that. It’s a fact that’s not going to go away.”
    “It can go away as far as I’m concerned.”
    “What have you got against them?”
    “They’re—” she started, then caught herself.
    “They’re what?”
    “Weasels. Warts.”
    I wanted to tell her they couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath.
    We were on our third postprandial cup of coffee. I had no idea what was supposed to come next, and she didn’t seem disposed to enlighten me. I considered telling her I was going back to New York City and she could get in touch when she felt like it, but I was afraid she’d think that was fine.
    Finally I said, “I take it you don’t want to go back to your condominium.”
    “That’s right, I don’t.”
    “Then what do you want to do?”
    “I want to find someplace else to live.”
    “What kind of place?”
    On that point she was standing mute.
    “Where do you want to look? Here in Oneonta?”
    “What’s the point of that?” she wanted to know.
    “I don’t know. It’s here, it’s handy, and, like it or not, you’ve got all sorts of connections here, including a bank account and references.”
    She shook her head.
    I signaled to the waitress for the check. “Look, Mallory, I’m glad to help, but I can’t read your mind. We can’t just sit here drinking coffee for the rest of our lives.”
    “I know,” she said, giving me an anxious look. “What would happen if we went to New York City?”
    “What would happen? We’d be there instead of here.”
    “Then let’s go there.”
    At last it was my turn to shake my head. “Maybe someday, Mallory, but not now. Not unless you get together with your parents and let them know what’s going on. I’m not taking you outside