The Drowner by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

home.”
    “Aunt Jen, I might have to stay a few days.”
    “Why, child?”
    “There’s some sort of legal things.”
    “But can’t you tell some local lawyer to handle those things?”
    “I have to know what they are before I can tell him how to handle them, don’t I?”
    “Shouldn’t things like that be up to your mother and me?”
    “Aunt Jen, I’m not a child and I’m not an idiot. I’m twenty-five years old and I think you can credit me with some sense of responsibility.”
    “You sound like a snip.”
    “I might have to stay a few days. I will let you know, and I will come home as soon as I can. And… none of this is easy.”
    “I know, child. I didn’t mean to be grouchy.”
    After she hung up she stretched out again, knowing she would soon have to make the effort and take a shower. She hoped she had sounded more assured than she felt. The lie about legal things was flimsy. She wondered how Aunt Jen and her mother would react were they to know the real reason why she wanted to stay a few days. But it was impossible to subject them to that, when it might turn out false after all. It was horrid enough losing Lu without having to wonder if someone had killed her. If it was proven, they would have to know, of course.
    She was wise enough about herself to know that the suspicion of murder, ugly as it seemed, had helped sustain her throughout this incredible day of sacred words and burial. Somehow, were it pure accident, it made the world a nonsensical place. Lucille had deserved so much more, and had sounded in her letters as if she could be on the verge of finding it.
    Such an unreal day, riding in the back seat of the limousine with Kelsey Hanson, the two of them and a driver, the first car after the hearse, riding behind Lucille with the silent, suffering, estranged husband, through the hot glare of streets; where a few people stopped and stared.
    And the sudden geographical spasm made loss more endurable through making it less easy to comprehend. She had been taken from the narrow grubby orderly Maytime of Boston, held suspended in the placid jet over a pastel earth slowly turning, then pulled down into this rank and muggy place where the pretty people, under their tin palm fronds, buried her only sister and kept looking at her without anxiety as though to say, “See how nicely we do it?”
    She had finished her shower and she was tucking her thin white blouse into her dark skirt when there was a knock at her door. She went to the door and leaned close to it and asked who it was.
    “Stanial,” the voice said.
    “Just a moment please.” She stepped into her sandals, yanked a brush through her lively wiry brown hair, slashed her mouth quickly with lipstick, patted the bed smooth, dropped random clothing into the big bottom drawer of the bureau and let him in, performing all these actions without pause or hesitation, moving from one into the next with a balance and coordination that made it all a brief segment of a strange realistic dance.
    He was against the outside glare and she could not see him clearly until he was inside and the door was closed. And then she could not feel the confidence she had hoped to feel. He looked too ordinary. Just a rather bland youngish man of dark complexion, too carefully dressed for the climate and the area. As they met each other for the first time, shook hands rather stiffly, she thought, He could be coming to make an estimate. But not to sell anything, because he makes no attempt to be ingratiating. A man who comes to collect, or make out a form, and isn’t particularly interested because the account is so small. The only thing not quite ordinary about him was an impression of physical durability, not so much because of the heft of his shoulders as the deft and positive way he moved.
    There were two chairs. She brought the straight chair over from the desk and they sat by the window, facing each other across the lamp table.
    “It might be nothing at all,” she