All Day and a Night by Alafair Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

decorating, she had no preferences whatsoever. She’d never had the luxury to make choices.
    In Kansas, she’d always lived at home. The scholarship awards she’d cobbled together on the Kansas teen pageant circuit had barely covered part-time tuition at Wichita State. Then, when she’d followed her brother, Jess, to New York City, she had been one step above transient, moving from one ratty sublet to the next, waiting tables to cover rent.
    Her first year on the NYPD, she had a brief respite from the constant shuffling when she’d accepted her then-boyfriend’s invitation to let her sublease expire and stay with him. The boyfriend was an investment banker, and his apartment looked it. But it had been decorated, inch for inch, by a designer hired for the job, so it didn’t reflect his taste, let alone Ellie’s. Ellie had never even thought of the place as her own. In an entire year, she never got to the point of answering the apartment phone or getting a copy of the mailbox key. It was more like she’d been crashing there a lot. When the boyfriend made it clear that he didn’t understand why Ellie insisted on working as a cop when she could be not-working as an investment banker’s wife, she knew she had to get out.
    It was her brother, Jess, even less stable than she, who had come to the rescue. One of his three million friends was about to give up a rent-stabilized place in Murray Hill to try to make it in Los Angeles. The tiny, dingy place on East Thirty-eighth Street was nothing fancy, but it was affordable, and hers, and even had a separate bedroom. As for decor, though, she could list the pieces of furniture on one hand: a sofa that had been left behind by Jess’s friend, the old leather trunk that doubled as a coffee table, a chair that found its way back to her place after being marked for disposal from the Midtown South Precinct, a dresser from Goodwill, and a mattress set she’d bought new because the one thing she had really missed while she’d been subletting place to place was a bed that was truly hers.
    All five pieces of her furniture collection were still on Thirty-eighth Street, where Jess was now the sole occupant. Being in an apartment filled with Max’s belongings was perfectly acceptable to her, but Max was constantly looking for ways to make the place theirs —hence, the current photograph-hanging project.
    She looked at the notes he had jotted down. “You need math to hang pictures on the wall?”
    Now he was measuring the frames themselves. He took the paper back from her and wrote down more numbers. “You do if you want them to be level. I tried to get the wires even on the frames, but the middle one’s a little lower, so that nail needs to be a quarter inch higher than the other two. And to space them evenly over the length of the sofa, we need a gap of two and three-quarters inches between each picture.”
    “You’re giving me flashbacks to eighth grade geometry. I got daily hall passes from Mr. Rundle in exchange for bringing him back a Snickers from the vending machine.”
    “Admit it: if these pictures were hanging in a line and weren’t perfectly even, it would drive you crazy. And then your way of fixing the problem would be to shift the nails around the wall until you were satisfied. If we ever moved the frames, the wall would look as if it had been burrowed by a groundhog.”
    True, which is why she would have left them in the closet.
    As he measured the final photo, she could see that it was one she had taken of the old-fashioned gas pumps outside the Spring General Store in East Hampton. She remembered the smell of fried chicken on the store’s front porch. She remembered why Max had insisted on taking a weekend trip to walk the beach at Gerard Point: he wanted her to see the beauty in a place where she had been forced to kill a man shortly after she and Max had met. He had been the one to print out the photographs in black-and-white and have them matted and framed as