Aurora 04 - The Julius House by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online

murmured.
    “That’s what I wanted to set up. Can he come out to the new house tomorrow morning?
    That’s where you’ll be?”
    I nodded. “Martin, what’s this man like?”
    “Shelby? He’s .. . trustworthy.”
    That wasn’t exactly what I’d expected to hear. A strange capsule biography.
    “I guess I wanted a little more than that,” I said. “Does he drink, smoke, gamble? Where does he come from? What did he do before he came here?”
    “He doesn’t talk much about himself,” Martin said after a pause. “I guess you’ll have to find out what he’s like from his actions.”
    I’d made Martin angry. Perhaps he felt I was questioning his judgment.
    “You know what I call the way you look now?” I asked.
    Martin raised his eyebrows in polite query. He really was angry.
    “Your ‘Intruder Alert’ face.”
    He looked surprised, then irritated, and finally he began laughing.
    “Am I that bad?” he asked. “I know I have a problem talking about some things. No one ever called me on it before.”
    I waited a little while.
    “I don’t talk about Vietnam easily, because it was dirty and scary,” he said finally. “And there are some people I don’t talk about, because they’re connected with that time ... I guess Shelby’s one of them. He’s from Tennessee, from Memphis. We were in the same platoon. We were good friends. After the war, we hung around together for a while. We kept in touch. Maybe once every three months I’d get a phone call or letter, for at least four years or so. Then I didn’t hear from Shelby for a long, long time. I thought something must have happened to him.”
    Martin turned to look at the floodlit church, the lights shining full on his face for a minute, making him look—old.
    “I got a letter from him about a year ago, and we resumed the connection. He had married Angel.”
    Martin stopped abruptly and I realized I had gotten all I was going to get.
    It was a start.

    * * *
I was at the Julius house by seven the next morning. I looked at each room, slowly and carefully, revising my room-by-room list of the changes that needed to be made. At 8:15 the carpenters came, followed me around, took notes, and left. At 9:00 the paint, wallpaper, and carpet people came, measured, and left. At 9:45 the plumber showed up, trailing a miserable-looking assistant with a cigarette stuck in his mouth.

    “Please don’t smoke in here,” I said as pleasantly as possible.
    The lanky red-haired boy, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, threw me a sullen look and retreated to the front yard, where I was willing to bet he’d leave his cigarette butt in the grass. After years at the library, I could fairly accurately predict which teenagers were going to behave and which were going to be problems. This one was a problem. I looked at my plumber.
    “I know, I know,” John Henry said. “I don’t think he’ll last long. It’s a pain riding in the truck with him. But his mama is my wife’s best friend.”
    We sighed simultaneously.
    John Henry and I discussed the bathrooms, worked out a schedule (as soon as possible), and then he crawled under the house to check out the plumbing. “I’m a little scared to explore too much here,” he confessed with a broad grin. “Who knows but what they’re all under the house?”
    “Oh, the Juliuses.” I smiled back. “Well, I bet the police checked that out pretty thoroughly at the time.”
    “Sure. Still, I bet you wonder if they’ll show up here somewhere. It’d give me the creeps, Roe.”
    “It doesn’t bother me,” I said dismissively, and turned to the open front door to see a stranger standing there. He was looking back over his shoulder at the red-haired boy smoking on the lawn. When he turned to me, I recognized the dark man who’d been sitting in Martin’s waiting room the day I’d returned from Ohio.
    This was Shelby Youngblood. He looked at me in that moment, and we had a good rude stare at each other.
    He was about