New Title 1 by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online Page A

years ago.
    The McNally place was a small white clapboard sitting in the middle of a green, green acre with a windbreak of shade trees and an aged but sprightly red barn in back. It was out on the north edge of town. The yard was carefully mown and well-tended, magnolia trees and apple blossoms charging the air headily.
    I knocked. Inside a dog barked, and then a soft voice shushed it. And then she was there, framed in the glass of the storm door. She looked to be about my age, and probably not quite at her ideal weight, maybe five, six pounds over on a very slight frame, with silken dark hair and silken dark eyes, the left one spoiled by the fading remains of a black eye. She looked scared and miserable but even so, appealing in a kind of sad way, the sort of woman you try hard to make happy because you suspect she's never been happy before.
    Of course, unhappiness was a tradition among pioneer women out here. Despite all the macho cowboy movies, women pretty much kept things running on the frontier. Sure, the men had to plow and till the fields and hunt the meat, but study up on pioneer women, and you'll see why the suicide rate was so high among them—eighteen-, twenty-hour days seven days a week during which they did everything from making dyes for coloring cloth from barks and berries and roots; making clothing on a loom; making all meals; tanning hides and cutting patterns out for shoes; washing, ironing, mending; taking total responsibility for a brood of kids that probably ran to seven or eight; giving her man sex on demand; being priest, doctor, teacher; and in her "spare time" pitching in and helping with the planting and, later on, the harvest.
    The woman in the doorway looked like a lineal descendent of those pioneer women.
    "Hi," I said.
    "Hi."
    "That's a nice dog." And it was, a golden retriever with a sweet-sad face that made you smile while it was breaking your heart. Beyond Eve, I got a glimpse of an inexpensively but very handsomely appointed home. The homey smell of baking came from the kitchen.
    "Sara. She's the gentlest animal I've ever known." She relaxed enough to lean down and pet the slender dog on the head. Sara's tongue licked her fingers pinkly with quick gooey love. "Why can't everybody be as sweet as you, honey?" the woman asked her dog. She stood straight and looked at me. "I've got some cookies in the oven, so I'm in kind of a hurry. Can I help you with something?"
    "I'm looking for Richard McNally."
    Fear became more pronounced in her eyes. "Richard McNally is my husband."
    "My name's Hokanson. I'm a free-lance writer."
    "I don't know what you could want with my husband. He sells gourmet honey."
    "But I understand he travels."
    "Yes," she said. Now suspicion joined fear. She seemed to stiffen her entire body inside her designer jeans and prim white blouse. "Of course he travels. How else would he make his sales?"
    "Well, that's why I'm in town for the next few days. I'm doing a piece on how small Iowa towns are becoming bedroom communities, with a lot of people commuting to their work."
    "Oh. I see." That seemed to calm her some.
    "Maybe I could find him at the office?"
    She shook her head. "No. He's—gone. Anyway, he doesn't have an office. He just works out of the house here."
    "I see."
    "What's your name?"
    "Hokanson. Jim Hokanson."
    "And you're with—?"
    "I'm a free lancer. I'm writing this for Fenroe Publishing. I'm on a kind of retainer setup with them."
    I dug out a card and handed it over to her. Obviously, she wasn't as yet completely satisfied with my little tale. She'd probably dial that Chicago number and probably talk to somebody at good old Fenroe Publishing, Inc., but she'd probably never figure out that it was nothing more than a small room in a small office building in a bad section of Chicago used by the Agency as a cover for many of its domestic people. Even though I was officially separated, they still let me use it when I needed to.
    She looked straight at me and said,