Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

closed it again; the frown, fixed now, had narrowed her eyes into a myopic squint. The raisin-eyed woman was no longer browsing. She stood watching him, Messenger realized, with a peculiarly eager intensity.
    He asked the librarian, “Do you know anyone—a former resident of Beulah—named Janet Mitchell?”
    “No.”
    “Janet, then. Or Mitchell.”
    “No Mitchells around here,” the raisin-eyed woman said. She moved over closer to where Messenger stood, as if to get a better look at him. It allowed him a better look at her, too; the intense expression was gossipmonger’s hunger. “No Janets either. Never has been, that I know of.”
    “That’s what I was afraid of. Just a name she was using, one she made up.”
    “Why would she use a name that wasn’t hers?”
    “Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”
    “What reasons?”
    “I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”
    “You think she used to live here? On account of that book?”
    “It’s possible. I thought so, anyway.”
    “What’s she look like, this woman?”
    “Tallish, thin, ash-blond hair, striking gray eyes—”
    “My God,” the raisin-eyed woman said, “I knew it, I knew it!” Ada Kendall said nothing, but her thin mouth drew so tight the lips vanished into a crooked line, like a crack in an adobe wall.
    Messenger felt a prickling of excitement. “Then you know her.”
    “San Francisco. So that’s where she went. I never would’ve guessed a place like that, would you, Ada? A desert rat like her?”
    “No. No, I surely wouldn’t.”
    “What’s she doing there?” the gossipmonger asked him. “What’s she have to do with you?”
    “She was a … she was somebody I knew.”
    “Was? She leave Frisco, go somewhere else?”
    “She’s dead,” he said.
    “Dead? You say dead ?”
    “I’m afraid so. She—”
    “How? How’d she die?”
    “She committed suicide.”
    “Ada, you hear that? She killed herself!”
    “I heard,” Ada Kendall said. “Lord have mercy.”
    “Lord had His vengeance, you mean. How’d she do it, mister? How’d she kill herself?”
    “She cut her wrists with a razor blade.”
    “Oh my! Wait till John T. hears that!” And the raisin-eyed woman burst out laughing, an eruption of sheer, unrestrained glee.

6
    M ESSENGER WAS SHOCKED . He had never seen anyone react with such callous pleasure to the news of another person’s death. They hated her, both of them. Sad, broken woman like Ms. Lonesome … what could she have done to incite that much hate?
    The fat woman’s laughter continued unchecked, rising to an almost hysterical pitch. The sound of it echoed through the close, dusty spaces of the library. It put a coldness on his nape. And for a reason he couldn’t define, it caused apprehension to rise in him like bile.
    “You stop that, Sally Adams,” the librarian said. Her tone was schoolmarmish, as if she were speaking to a naughty child. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have a shred of respect? This is a library , for heaven’s sake.”
    Her words had the opposite effect: The gossipmonger’s laughter came even harder, in whooping spurts, like the shrieking of a madwoman. Sally Adams broke forward at the middle, gasping and whooping, arms clutched across jiggling fat as if to keep it from shaking loose inside her bright print dress. Tears rolled down cheeks flushed the color of fire-roasted peppers. Visible spasms began to rock her; her buttocks twitched and rolled. It was as though her ferocious mirth had turned sexual and she were in the beginning throes of orgasm.
    The look of her, as much as the sounds she was making, drove him out of there.
    He opened the Subaru’s sun-hot door. All his earlier good-to-be-alive feelings were gone; the undigested remains of his breakfast lay sour in his stomach. He felt confused, not a little incredulous. Ms. Lonesome’s suicide was a source of pleasure for Ada Kendall too, he thought. Both of them, two women in a town this size … delighted