Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll Read Free Book Online

the morning sunshine.
    I turned away without answering his question and climbed the steps. I wanted to be inside my home—the one place I had always felt safest—and yet, just yesterday I had learned that it didn’t even really belong to us anymore. I stepped inside . . . and immediately began to shake. The presence of those three black-clad men was so palpable I could feel it like a heaviness in the air. Detective Kiernan passed me in the hallway and went into the kitchen. “The forensic lab has finished in here, so you’re welcome to clean up the rest,” he was saying. I started to follow him, but stopped in the doorway; I wasn’t yet ready to step into the room where my father had been shot. Kiernan came back, holding an object in a plastic evidence bag.
    “We found this on the floor. Do you recognize it?”
    “Yes,” I told him, “It’s my father’s service revolver from World War Two. And no, I don’t suppose it’s licensed. Frankly, I can’t imagine it even works.”
    “Uh-huh,” he said as if nothing surprised him anymore. “There’s one more thing. You said you were standing in this hallway when they passed you?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you weren’t blocking the front door?”
    “No. I don’t think they would have cared if I had been. They didn’t seem to take any notice of me. It was almost like they didn’t see me.” I stopped, trying to remember something. “There was something weird about their eyes.”
    But Detective Kiernan wasn’t interested in the burglars’ eyes. “Hm . . . so why do
you
think they didn’t go out the front door?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know . . . maybe they were afraid the police were on the way . . . or maybe there was something they wanted upstairs.”
    “Is there anything of value up there?”
    “Some keepsakes of my father’s . . .”
    “He lives on the second floor, right? The burglars don’t appear to have gone into his apartment. But the third floor . . .”
    I was on the stairs before Detective Kiernan could finish his sentence. The thought of those creepy burglars trespassing in my studio and bedroom made me feel sick. I sprinted up the two flights of stairs, Kiernan a few steps behind me. What had they done in my studio? When I reached the open door, I thought for a moment that a snowstorm had swept through the room. The floor was covered in white.
    I knelt on the floor and touched one of the flakes. It was dry to the touch and left a grayish streak on my hands. Of course. It was the paper that had come out of the silver box last night . . . only I was sure that I had swept all the paper debris up and put it back in the box. Then I had closed the box and left it on my worktable.
    I crossed the room in three long strides, the paper confetti crunching underfoot. My soldering torch lay where I had left it last night, but the silver box was gone.

Air & Mist
     
    “What’s wrong? Is something missing?”
    I looked up from the table to Detective Kiernan. I noticed that a flake of paper was stuck in a curl of hair that fell over his forehead. The paper was drifting around the room, buoyed by a draft from somewhere.
    “A silver box,” I answered, looking around for the source of the draft. “Something I was working on last night.”
    “Was it valuable?”
    “I don’t really know. It wasn’t mine.” I described how I had come by the box, as briefly as I could.
    “It doesn’t sound that valuable if the jeweler would just let you walk out with it.”
    “No, I suppose not.” I thought of the blue symbols I had seen scrolling across the inside of the lid last night, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell the police detective about
that
. It had been an ocular illusion, that was all, a new twist in my ocular migraine symptoms.
    “They probably just grabbed it on their way out.” Kiernan pointed up with one finger. I stared at him, confused. One might use that gesture to indicate a person had ascended to heaven,but the