The Stranger. Kathleen O'Brien

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary feet, had been so enraged when Aurora criticized Tender is the Night that she had stood up, sputtering indignantly, and yanked the feather right out of Aurora’s hat.

      A hush had fallen over the entire bookstore. No one, but no one, touched Aurora’s feathers. Wally said later that he’d been expecting a catfight. But Aurora was a lady. Instead of scratching Verna’s eyes out, she had merely taken her copy of Tender is the Night, torn out a page from the middle, and used it to wipe the cookie crumbs from her mouth.

      Frankly, Mallory had been surprised to see Verna show up again this week. But Verna probably enjoyed the rows as much as Aurora did. And, since the wealthy old ladies always paid for anything they ruined, it was lucrative for Mallory, so everybody came out a winner.

      “Gatsby? I’ll go look,” Mallory said obediently. No one who knew Aurora really minded her bossy tone. Underneath the haughty Queen Victoria exterior beat one of the kindest hearts in Heyday.

      But wouldn’t you know it? She was completely out of Gatsby. The high-school seniors were writing research papers on Fitzgerald this year, and they’d all come rushing in at the last minute and picked her shelves clean.

      She had her own copy upstairs. Rather than disappoint Aurora, Mallory decided to go get it.

      “Wally, will you watch the register for a minute?”

      Wally, who was shelving CDs, his favorite task, frowned. He was an artist—a budding film director, at least in his own mind—and he thought handling money was crass. But he was deeply in hock to the photography store down the street, so he didn’t dare annoy the one employer in town who would put up with his attitudes, not to mention his multicolored hair.

      “Sure,” he mumbled, and began to shuffle in her direction.

      Mallory’s shop was actually two storefronts combined into one large bookstore on the bottom. On the upper floor, though, the building was divided into two snug but charming apartments with porches overlooking the tree-lined, curving Hippodrome Circle. Mallory lived in one. The other had been empty ever since Christmas, when her neighbor, a local chef, had taken a job at a fancy restaurant in Richmond. She still missed the great aromas that had always seeped from his apartment to hers.

      Both apartments were accessed by the same outside staircase, so Mallory exited the bookstore, drank in a little of the sparkling Virginia spring air, and then climbed up to see if she could hunt down Gatsby in the jungle of books in her living room.

      She kept admirable order downstairs—customers had to be able to find books before they could buy them. But up here, where she stored everything that wouldn’t fit in the shop, as well as her own ever-growing collection of books, the situation was a mess.

      Gatsby…Gatsby… When had she last read Gatsby? Probably around the holidays…which meant it would be beneath the “summer reading list” books that had just been delivered, but not so far down as the “back to school” books from last fall.

      It took forever, so she wasn’t surprised when she heard footsteps on the outside staircase. Wally, undoubtedly panicked by being stranded with the Bobbies, must have left the register untended—the ultimate no-no—and come up here to drag her back downstairs.

      She grabbed Gatsby, knocking over three Pilchers and a du Maurier in the process, and hurried to the door. “Darn it, Wally, I’m coming,” she called. “Now get back down there before someone robs us blind.”

      But it wasn’t Wally.

      The lovely spring sunlight, so bright in her many-windowed living room, didn’t quite penetrate this narrow hallway that ran behind both apartments. She blinked as her pupils tried to adjust, but she couldn’t make out the person’s face.

      His back was to the open stairway door, and the sun haloed around him, leaving just a black silhouette, like a moving shadow. Still, she saw that he was tall, much taller than Wally. More substantial. Wally had a boy’s shoulders. This squared-off breadth belonged to a man.

      With no warning, fear tingled across her scalp, and she instinctively took a step backward, toward the shelter of her own doorway. This was Heyday, where dim corridors rarely posed a threat to anyone, and she was no coward, but ever since that call…

      Things had changed.

      Once again she asked herself…could this be the man, the faceless blackmailer with a distorted metallic voice?

      But then the man spoke and the fear disappeared, replaced by a sudden, flaring fury.

      He said just one word. Just her name.

      “Mallory.” The word was uttered softly, almost apologetically, as if he knew how she would hate seeing him and wished he could spare her the pain.

      “Mallory,” he said again.

      No, this wasn’t the blackmailer—it was someone she despised even more.

      At least the blackmailer was ashamed enough to hide his true identity. This was someone who made money by exploiting other people’s misery, but did it right out in the open, as if it were something to be proud of. The blackmailer at least announced right up front that he was just trying to weasel something out of you. This man masqueraded as a friend, drank your coffee and pretended to care about your problems.

      And then, like a kick to the gut, he betrayed you.

      This was Tyler Balfour.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      WOW. TYLER PAUSED in the half-open doorway. Three years hadn’t softened Mallory Rackham’s heart much, had they?

      The hall in front of him was dim, but the afternoon light behind him streamed in over his shoulders in two bright bands, one of which caught Mallory’s face and illuminated it. The venom with which she eyed him now was just as potent and undiluted as it had been the day she read his first story about the Heyday Eight and saw her husband’s name.

      At least she wasn’t holding a plate of greasy French fries this time. He glanced at the book in her hand. A small paperback. Good. He probably wouldn’t even bruise if she decided to chuck it at him.

      He guessed he had at least a few seconds before that happened. For the moment she seemed paralyzed with shock and the slow awakening of long-buried anger. So he slung his suit bag over his shoulder and moved carefully toward the apartment that would be his temporary lodgings, all the while fingering his keys, trying to locate the right one.

      When he reached the door, which was only about four feet from her own, she finally spoke. “What the hell are you doing here, Tyler?”

      Okay, that was a start. She had used profanity, which he knew she rarely did, and her voice was pointed and frosty, like a dagger of ice, but at least she hadn’t tossed the book. And she’d used his first name.

      About a six, he figured, on the hostility scale. Nothing he couldn’t handle. He’d once investigated a senator who’d been taking bribes, and though that guy had been hostile enough to consult a hit man, Tyler had still managed to get the story.

      He’d get this one, too, including her part of it. He couldn’t leave her out, even if he wanted to. She’d owned the café. She’d been married to one of the johns. Her little sister had gone to school with the Eight. СКАЧАТЬ