Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

SORA. Maybe it meant freedom, or perhaps Sirius. I could sing it in my sleep if I knew the words, Jo always thinks before waking up.
    Shivering beside the science building, she stood among the student audience. In the cooling early winter dusk, the young people smiled and applauded. Jo stayed with them, listening until some of the students wandered off and the musicians stopped playing. She was still standing on the hill when a colder wind settled in the valley and the college students began to drift off. One of the musicians, a light-skinned, delicately featured young woman, was taking contributions from the audience in her large broad-brimmed hat, embroidered on the crown with what looked like morning glory vines. There were many bills forthcoming. Finally the young woman looked Jo in the eye, tensing with a small smile.
    She reminded Jo of someone she had once known. A pale man, eyes black as blood at night. Jo put the thought of him out of her mind.
    She gripped her own shoulders to keep from trembling. She remembered the excuses the well-educated people, native and foreign, had made for the movement. All of them she had tried to believe when belief had come more easily. The effort of belief, the replacement of it with sheer terror and a sense of what she thought of as her own cowardice, had cost her. One price she had paid was the almost nightly reliving of awakening to find abomination in the stars. Her favorite stars too, the brightest and most beautiful she had ever seen. Spying out the heart of evil in the sacred lines of heaven made her suspect that perhaps the religious life was not for her. On the other hand, she thought, maybe it was.

6
    A FEW DAYS LATER, Maud turned up at Brookman’s office door and tapped her secret signal. She had an envelope with some kind of printout inside. “You have to read this. I need your reaction.”
    “I haven’t time now, love.”
    He thought her look was suspicious. “Why?”
    “I have a meeting,” he told her falsely. He was anxious for news of Ellie.
    She stamped her foot a little. She looked genuinely pleading. Childlike.
    “Really,” Brookman said, “I have to hurry . . .”
    She handed it to him with what appeared to be a blend of anxiety and self-satisfaction. “Call me, Steve,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”
    When she was gone, he locked up and went home without a thought of the envelope. She was always insisting he preview her writings.
    In the Brookman house on Felicity Street—the larger half of what had been the marble-fronted Federal-style home of a single family—Steve Brookman prepared to grade and comment on his student essays. He was not particularly a drinking man but on this afternoon he poured a half snifter of Courvoisier, an expensive concession to his own self-pity.
    Smart kids were wonderful if they could keep it all together, he was thinking, if nothing bad happened, though every year, somewhere in the college, something did. Whereupon Dean Spofford would call the parents, and you had to give it to the guy who had to do that. There were always casualties, of drugs or madness in general.
    He was thinking of Maud and how utterly demure and innocent she appeared. These terms reflected the attitudes of his generation and she would probably be insulted by them. The young, young texture of her skin always astonished him. He was also wondering how he might be able to break things off with her, in spite of the fact that she was his advisee and had given up a junior year abroad for him. It was late in the semester. They were working on her undergraduate thesis.
    Beyond anxiety, he was aware of feeling a kind of reckless, mindless joy.
    Brookman had no native talent for intrigue. He had been careless and forgetful all his life. In twenty years of teaching he had never slept with a student before. College kids flirted, boys as well as girls. How could they not—the students had been the apples of their elders’ eyes from preschool. During