Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone Read Free Book Online

reached the window, she spoke sotto voce. “Will you please be careful?” She nodded at my glass.
    “I’m fine.”
    “Jay, please remember the strings Rowell had to pull to get your license back.” Jay was my childhood name, now used in emotional emergencies.
    “I’m fine.”
    Mother pulled away, her nostrils tightened, and she called out, “Look! It really is snowing hard. The ground’s completely white.”
    Briggs came over to watch the swirl of heavy flakes fall into the arc of floodlights. White streaked invisibly into the white sand and vanished into the lake. Briggs said, “I can’t remember the last time Hillston had snow like this.”
    Mother’s eyes blinked. “Six years ago,” she said. She ran for her coat. “Joanna, I’m going to leave here before it gets too deep. Justin, please don’t stay long. Rowell’s coming to go over some family papers, and I think you should be there.” She saw I was tempted to say something, and hurried away to the couch. “Stay off that foot, Joanna. And if that newspaperman pesters you again, why don’t I ask Rowell to call up
The Star
and have him stopped? Briggs, would you like one of Mirabell’s puppies? She had eleven! Isn’t that a very Irish thing for an English setter to do?”
    After Mother left, Briggs excused herself to go prepare a lecture.
    I said, “Are you old enough to be an astronomy professor?”
    She put another log on the fire. “I’m twenty-nine. How old do I have to be?”
    “You don’t look it. You’re only five years younger than I am.”
    She said, “You’re thirty-four? You don’t act it. Good night.”
    I poked at the fire with the iron prongs. “I don’t think the professor likes me, Mrs. Cadmean.”
    She smiled at me, the gray eyes steady. “She certainly gave that impression. Go ahead and smoke if you like.” She said this just as I was telling my hand to move to my pocket for my cigarette case, and wondering if I should.
    I sat down in the big bent-willow armchair beside her. “What would you like to know, Mrs. Cadmean?”
    “Please call me Joanna. We’ve met before. Not exactly met. You won’t remember. It was a very painful time for you. I was at the cemetery the day of your father’s burial. I liked your father. He was perceptive.” The eyes smiled. “Not a word I use lightly.”
    “Thank you.” I lit the cigarette. “Yes, it was a painful time.” If she had seen me at the cemetery, she had seen me hit Rowell Dollard hard enough to make him stumble back into a wreath of lilies, hit him when he told me that if it weren’t for my drinking, my father wouldn’t be dead, my mother’s life wouldn’t be ruined.
    Joanna nodded, as if she were following along with my memories. There must be that advantage in having a reputation as a psychic; you simply sit there and nod, and people believe you are seeing straight through to their innermost hearts, either because they want you to, or because they desperately do not. “You look much better now,” she said, “than that day.”
    “Thank you. Let’s hope so. I was a raving maniac back then.”
    “That’s not true.” She spoke softly and with a compelling self-assurance; all her remarks had this odd quiet authority. On her lap her long white fingers moved over the coarse wool of the blanket, like the fingers of a blind woman touching a face. “Tell me about Cloris’s death,” she said. And picking back up the sketchbook, she began to draw again.
    “Well, I’m not sure what you want to know. Do you mean police details? She was killed between ten and midnight, a week ago Sunday, at her home. In fact, she’d left early from the last performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the one my mother was telling you we did here in town.”
    “You played Bottom. I’ve always liked Bottom for feeling so comfortable in fairyland. I’m sorry to interrupt you. She left early?”
    “Sometime after the second intermission. She told someone then that she had an upset