Redemption Street by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online

was.”
    “There were three girls, weren’t—”
    I cut her off. “Technically, there were three girls, but one had graduated Lincoln several years before and was just working at that hotel as a matter of unhappy coincidence. I don’t even recall her name. There was Karen Rosen and—”
    “—Andrea Cotter,” she snapped. “You don’t think I’d forget the girl you had such a big crush on, the girl who inspired you to write poetry, do you?”
    I was taken aback by Katy’s tone. “You almost sound jealous!”
    “Maybe I am,” she confessed, “a little. You know, I had an English-lit professor who used to say that no one would have remembered Romeo and Juliet if they got married and had three kids. Death made them eternal.”
    “This is the Catskills we’re talkin’ here, kiddo, not Verona.”
    “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?”
    I didn’t bother playing dumb. “Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but I feel like I owe it to him, to Arthur, to look. So I’ll go up there for a few days and find out what the world already knows, that his sister and sixteen other unlucky people were killed in a fire.”
    “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something else is bothering you.”
    She stared at me coldly. She did that sometimes, like a boxer sizing up his opponent. She watched how I moved, my gestures. She waited to listen to my voice, my inflection. Did I mean what I was saying? It put me on edge, the way she did that, how she waited me out. It was the only part of her father, I recognized in her. So I explained about my backseat visit with R. B. Carter and his attempt at checkbook diplomacy.
    “So which is it, Moe?” Katy broke the silence. “Are you going up there because you feel guilty or because you’re pissed off that someone thought they could buy you off cheap?”
    “A little bit of both, I suppose. A little bit of both.”
    Katy pushed herself away from me and got to her feet. “I’m going to bed.”
    I was momentarily perplexed by the anger in her voice and the abruptness with which she pushed herself away. Then it came to me: Katy was frightened, even if she didn’t quite realize it herself. Was she jealous? Yeah, maybe a tiny bit. There was, after all, a certain quixotic romance in the task I was about to take on. But mainly, I think, she was just scared.
    I was no longer a cop when we’d met, and Katy hadn’t had to deal with the silent fears every cop’s wife faces every time her husband works his shift. And though I know for a fact that she thought my having an investigator’s license was pretty cool, I guess it was cool just so long as it stayed in my sock drawer. Now I was actually taking on a case, crazy as it was, and leaving her and Sarah for the first time. I’d never thought it through before, because I didn’t think anyone would actually come to me for help.
    Explaining myself any further would just dig a deeper hole, so instead of talking I stood up and took her in my arms. I held her close, though she stood rigid in my embrace. It was Katy who had taught me that kind of physical reassurance. What my words could never say, my touch would. I loved her, and nothing, especially not some stupid high-school crush, could ever threaten that. I had already risked a lot more than a trip up to the Catskills to guarantee nothing would come between us. I had made a deal with the devil himself. I could feel the tension flow out of her, and we sat back down on the sofa. I guess we nodded off.
    I woke up still on the couch, alone. Katy, who must have moved up to bed or to check on Sarah, was gone. Gradually, though, I became aware that I was not alone. I heard him breathing. Seated diagonally across the room from me on a wooly blue recliner was my father-in-law, Francis Maloney Sr. Regardless of what people say, when you marry a woman you marry her family. And it was times like these, these quiet moments alone with Francis Sr., that were the only aspect of my married life I