The Family Trade by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

felt clean, as if she’d succeeded in stripping away all the layers of dirt and paranoia that had stuck to her the day before. It was still only lunchtime, so she dressed again: an old T-shirt, jeans that had seen better days, and an old pair of sneakers.
    The headache and chills subsided slowly, as did the lethargy. She headed downstairs slowly and dumped her dirty clothing in the washing machine. Then she poured herself a glass of orange juice and managed to force down one of the granola bars she kept for emergencies. This brought more thoughts to mind, and as soon as she’d finished eating she headed downstairs to poke around in the gloom of the basement.
    The basement was a great big rectangular space under the floor of the house. The furnace, bolted to one wall, roared eerily at her; Ben had left lots of stuff with her, her parents had passed on a lot of their stuff too, and now one wall was faced in industrial shelving units.
    Here was a box stuffed with old clothing that she kept meaning to schlep to a charity shop: not her wedding dress—which had gone during the angry month she filed for divorce—but ordinary stuff, too unimportant to repudiate. There was an old bag full of golf clubs, their chromed heads dull and speckled with rust. Ben had toyed with the idea of doing golf, thinking of it as a way up the corporate ladder. There was a dead lawn mower, an ancient computer of Ben’s—probably a museum piece by now—and a workbench with vice, saws, drill, and other woodworking equipment, and maybe the odd bloodstain from his failed attempts to be the man about the house. There on that high shelf was a shotgun and a box of shells. It had belonged to Morris, her father. She eyed it dubiously. Probably nobody had used it since Dad bought it decades ago, when he’d lived out west for a few years, and what she knew about shotguns could be written on one side of a postage stamp in very large letters, even though Morris had insisted on teaching her to use a handgun. Some wise words from the heavyweight course on industrial espionage techniques the Weatherman HR folks had paid for her to take two years ago came back: You’re a journalist, and these other folks are investigators. You’re none of you cops, none of you are doing anything worth risking your lives over, so you should avoid escalating confrontations. Guns turn any confrontation into a potentially lethal one. So keep them the hell out of your professional life! “Shotgun, no,” she mused. “But. Hmm. Handgun.” Must stop talking to myself, she resolved.
    “Do I really expect them to follow me here?” she asked the broken chest freezer, which gaped uncomprehendingly at her. “Did I just dream it all?”
    Back upstairs, she swiped her leather-bound planner from the desk and poured another glass of orange juice. Time to worry about the real world, she told herself. She went back to the hall and hit the “play” button on the answering machine. It was backed up with messages from the day before.
    “Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn’t have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.”
    Andy was a junior editor on a rival tech-trade sheet. He sounded stiff and stilted when he talked to the telephone robot, not like a real person at all. But it still gave her a shiver of happiness, almost a feeling of pure joy, to hear from him. Someone cared, someone who didn’t buy the vicious lie Joe Dixon had put out. That bastard really got to me, Miriam wondered, relief replaced by a flash of anger at the way she’d been treated.
    Another message, from Paulette. Miriam tensed. “Miriam, honey, let’s talk. I don’t want to rake over dead shit, but there’s some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?”
    She hit the “pause” button. Paulette sounded severely messed up. It was like a