Double Image by David Morrell Read Free Book Online Page A

later told me, so my father would think that was how we’d gotten out of town. An hour later, she came back to the bus station, and for the next three years we were on the run, stopping in towns across the country, where my mother worked at any job she could find until she had enough money saved to keep running. I later reconstructed the route. From New Haven, Connecticut, to Trenton, New Jersey, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Youngstown, Ohio, to Sedalia, Missouri, to Boulder, Colorado, to Flagstaff, Arizona, and finally to Los Angeles.”
    Very thirsty, he finished the glass of champagne and poured another. He might as well have been drinking water. “We kept changing our names. My mother told me she looked for cash-only jobs, like housekeeping, that didn’t force her to pay taxes and get her Social Security number recorded in a government computer. She told me if we didn’t leave a paper trail, if we didn’t try to get in touch with friends and relatives back home, my father wouldn’t be able to find us. I still don’t know how . . .” Emotion tightened Coltrane’s throat. “One afternoon after my mother picked me up from a library where she always told me to wait after school till she was done with work, we went to get an ice cream cone, just one — we couldn’t afford two. Then we took a bus to the trailer where we were living, and when we went in, we found my father sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, playing solitaire.
    “As calm as I’d ever seen him, he got up, sighed, pulled out a gun, said, ‘Togetherness is next to godliness,’ and shot my mother in the face. Just like that. When my father made up his mind to do something, he was unstoppable. I felt as if somebody had slammed hands against my ears. The inside of my head was ringing, but somehow, I thought I heard my mother moan as she fell. Maybe
I
was the one moaning. I felt wet, sticky stuff all over my face. The next thing, my father pointed the gun at
me
. He gave me a funny little frown, looked at my mother’s body, looked at
me
again, shook his head, and blew his brains out.”
    When Coltrane lifted his glass to his lips, he realized that it was empty once more. “They told me I didn’t speak for a year.”
     
13
     
    COLTRANE BRACED HIMSELF TO CONTINUE. Packard’s intensely sympathetic gaze was eerily compelling, urging him on.
    “After my grandparents flew to Los Angeles to get me, after they packed up the clothes and things that my mother and I had in the trailer, after they took care of the bills and arranged for the bodies to be transported back to Connecticut, after all the legal technicalities were out of the way and I went to live with them in New Haven, I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like. I used to spend hours at a stretch, hiding in the basement, trying to remember her face, but all that came to me was the image of her blood splattering when my father’s bullet hit her. I desperately wanted to remember her voice, but all I heard in my mind was the sound of the shot. That was my reality, not what was going on around me in my grandparents’ house. I must have eaten and slept, bathed and dressed and watched television and gone to school, but the images and sounds I actually experienced were in my memory.
    “I had no idea of time passing. Eventually I found out it was a year later when I heard someone crying in a room above me while I hid in the cellar. A fog seemed to clear as I crawled from behind the furnace and made my way upstairs, following the sobs through the kitchen to the living room, discovering that they belonged to my grandmother. She was hunched forward on a chair, her face in her hands, sobbing so hard that tears dripped through her fingers and landed on the clear plastic sheets that protected photographs in an album lying open on the coffee table.
    “I came around her chair and peered down at the photographs. One of them had been taken in blazing sunlight that made everything overbright