Torch Song by Kate Wilhelm Read Free Book Online Page A

picked him up. The next day when Roy got here, I took him back.” She added bitterly, “He slept on the sofa that night.”
    She stepped into the hall to listen again, and this time when she came back, she checked the wall clock in the kitchen. “Look, why don’t you and your husband just leave. I told you he came here and then he went away. That’s all I know. I haven’t seen him or heard from him, and I don’t expect to. I’ve got to go up and see to Nathan and feed him some dinner. Just go away.”
    Almost as if on cue, Charlie entered the kitchen then. “Ready?” he asked Constance.
    She nodded. “We’ll come back tomorrow,” she said to Marla. “Just a few more details we need to clear up. It shouldn’t take long. Is this Roy’s usual time? Between three and five?”
    â€œGet out of here!” Marla cried. “Just get the hell out of here!” She hurried across the kitchen and punched in numbers on the microwave, turned it on.
    Charlie took Constance by the arm and they walked through the house to the front door and left. Neither spoke until they got inside the car and were heading back out the narrow black road. Then Charlie asked, “What was that all about?”
    â€œShe’s lying,” Constance said. “I’m not sure yet how much, or when she turned the lies on and turned them off. She alternated, I think. But she most certainly is lying.”
    â€œYou sure?”
    â€œYes indeed. She claims to be living in poverty and yet she’s wearing a five-hundred-dollar sweater and earrings that cost about that much. And she called you my husband, but no one mentioned anything like that to her at any time. Did we?”
    He squeezed her thigh lightly.
    â€œOkay,” he said when they were in their motel room. “Change of game plan. We can’t see Marla until after three, and there’s no need to ask too many questions around these parts, so let’s breeze over to Middletown in the morning and come back here in the afternoon.”
    She eyed him narrowly. “You turned on Roy’s talk switch?”
    â€œSure did, but you first. Give. Or do you want something to drink first?”
    The motel room was a minisuite, a king-size bed on one side and a little sitting room on the other, with a sofa, two chairs, and a low table, where Charlie’s feet now rested.
    â€œDrink,” she said, getting up to cross the room to their suitcase and a shopping bag. She took a bottle of wine from the bag and held it up for him to see. “No expense account, no room service. Right? I came prepared.”
    Then, as they sipped wine from water glasses, she told him in detail what Marla had said. “My problem,” she said when she finished, “is that I know she was lying, but not about what or when. For instance, I think she noticed that I had appraised her earrings, and she came up with a story that sounded plausible at the moment but really isn’t. A woman scraping by with three kids doesn’t give away jewelry that would bring in hundreds of dollars. And that sweater, not what you wear in the kitchen pureeing food. Splatters…” There were other things not quite right, she was certain, but she needed time to sort them out. “Your turn.”
    â€œRoy lives on the road between Cedar Falls and Tuxedo Park,” Charlie said. “He knows everyone in the county. He thinks she’s a saint and she’s blind to the truth about the boy. She gives him parties, puts up a Christmas tree, the whole thing. He has the brain waves of a vegetable, according to Roy, who is a hospital orderly, by the way. Up until two years ago, they didn’t have the ramp, and she carried him downstairs to take him outside, gave him his baths, and had in a handler when she had to go out, and for the five or six days she takes off. That’s what he says he is—a handler; the kid’s past