Fire Will Fall by Carol Plum-Ucci Read Free Book Online Page A

if you just relax and give her a chance."
    I highly doubted that.
    "As for Mrs. Kellerton, perhaps she wants to be part of the restoration of your health, as she could not do as much for her own children."
    I smiled. I liked that idea. It was hard to talk about my mother—or to look into the dark, wandering eyes of Mrs. Kellerton, which resembled my mother's in their sharpness. But it wasn't hard to look into Mrs. Starn's eyes and take in almost ninety years of wisdom.
    Mrs. Starn went back to putting fresh flowers in a vase on top of the piano, and I walked aimlessly through the antique-filled rooms downstairs. Drifting back up the stairs, I found myself standing at Scott's closed door. I didn't hear him moving, and I forced myself to go and get dressed. I felt off center, pulled in many directions, and like I might find peace in this house by walking into it, like you'd walk into a hot spot in the road on a summer's night.

SEVEN
TYLER PING
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
8:30 A.M.
DINING ROOM
    H ODJI MONTU dropped in on Shahzad and me in the morning. In Pakistan, the two of them had been really tight. V-spy and bodyguard.
    Since Shahzad came to live on American soil, his relationship with Hodji is tricky. Hodji can't acknowledge what we do, or he could lose his job.
    I've noted to Hamdani many times how funny it is that he got both a bodyguard and money while living in Pakistan, but here in America, he's unprotected and working for free. But I don't think there's a line of reasoning in the Pakistani culture to capture the essence of "what the fuck." He refuses to complain.
    Hodji clomped his cowboy boots on my mom's hardwood floors and came into the dining room, where we were eating this concoction Nurse Alexa makes for us, which is scrambled eggs with blotches of spinach in it. Our tongues are healing. We try not to discuss the sorry state of our food choices.
    "I got word last night from an anonymous source that Omar is alive and well and hanging out in Mexico," he said innocently.
    "Anonymous sources are quite wonderful, yes," Shahzad noted.
    Hodji sat down at the head of the table and forced himself to look at each of us. He is as good a liar as Intelligence could create for working undercover, but we know him very well, so it's obvious that he forces himself to look at us. Nobody would
want
to look at us. He craned his neck back to see into the kitchen and listen for Nurse Alexa pattering about. The kitchen was silent. She retreats to her room behind the pantry sometimes and closes the door to read a novel.
    He watched Shahzad pick at his eggs.
    His face brightened. "You guys want to live somewhere else for a while? Are you up for a little change of scene?"
    I raised my hand as an enthusiastic
yes.
"I keep waiting for this place to get spray-painted, despite the rumor of some elderly couple living here. The news stations
had
to report our address when my mom was arrested for spying. They just
had
to come out here and shoot footage of our house. I'm surprised we haven't found a few crosses burning on the lawn already."
    "What means this burning of crosses?" Hamdani asked.
    Pakistanis.
I ignored him. "I don't expect the graciousness of our neighbors to last much longer. Where to?"
    Not that you could call any element of being poisoned fun, but I had thought it might come close to fun to live with the victims of the Trinity Falls water poisoning instead of in my Long Island house. In fact, Hodji had gotten us kind of excited early in March to go to this place on Great Bay near New Gretna to live with the Trinity Four.
    But a week later, Hodji got nervous. The only people outside of USIC who knew our status as v-spies were in jail. They were either ShadowStrike members or recruits who had been arrested at the same raid where Hamdani and I got discovered and scratched in the face. But despite high security, there were ways to get word out of prison, and Hodji was growing more and more concerned about ShadowStrike members who were