Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

doing it, sipping his whiskey from time to time, some of the time half asleep. The mail came, Royce just behind it, chewing gum. Hannah slit open the envelopes and skimmed their contents, fat, pink Tom Meakins at her elbow. “What the devil!” she said suddenly. Royce looked over at them, red-eyed and grouchy; he’d been up all night—so he told them all—in pursuit of a young woman who in the end had cried and vomited. Tom Meakins leaned closer to read.

“What you got?” Craine called.

Hannah came over with the letter.

The minute Craine’s hand touched the paper the letter was written on, he was filled with a sharp sensation like anguish. He was not yet ready to admit it to himself, and later, when he was ready, he would have forgotten the event. Nevertheless, the letter came up through his fingers like a shock of electricity. If you’d asked him, he could not have told you that he knew who the letter was from; nevertheless, he knew. The first time he’d seen her—a passing glance—he’d registered her face more deeply than he’d registered anything in years. Who knows why? Perhaps Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, some powerful chemical affinity only a poet would risk belief in. Or perhaps, “scanning,” as Dr. Tummelty would say, he’d unconsciously locked on to something his consciousness could never have guessed. He’d thought her quite beautiful, as he would again think her, by the time he remembered (an objective observer would have said she was not)—though also he’d thought her dangerous, alien. From that moment on, each time she watched him he’d been dimly aware of it, though his drunkenness confused him. He’d been walking down a corridor, the second time, and, glancing past his shoulder, he’d seen her behind him. She’d been wearing a poncho, gray and black, and her hair was as black as coal, he’d thought— mistakenly. She had about her an alarming intensity, as if she were a creature from a collapsing planet, every pound of her body like a thousand pounds on earth, though she walked without a sound, light as air. He’d nodded, embarrassed. She’d nodded back, eyes widening. It had of course not yet occurred to Craine that she was following him, watching his every move.

In any event, he could now see that his sense of being watched, shadowed as if by spirits, was perhaps no more than this, an eerie combination of his whiskey-blur and the fact that he was, indeed, being shadowed, if the letter told the truth. (Why it made him furious he couldn’t make out. He was shaky with rage.) Hannah loomed silent and large beside his desk—one hand on her hip, the other on his desk top, small-fingered and elegant as the blue jade hand of some Oriental figure in the National Geographic—watching him read through the letter and waiting for his comment. He was aware of her as he read—faintly, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly distracted; fractionally drawn from the immediate to the timeless, from the mortal nuisance of the daily mail to the age-old comfort of beings with whom one feels at home, more or less unjudged. Hannah had no doubt been beautiful in her time. Tall, high-domed, queenly, full of confidence in herself. She had even now a sanguine, handsome face, eyes just noticeably slanted, nose like an Indian’s. She had beautiful daughters, handsome sons, all the color of her husband, coffee with cream, none of much account. T.J. was locked up in Menard Prison. He’d been there six years and on numerous occasions. If he ever got out, he’d be back within a month. Prison had become his philosophy of life. It was what he was best at, “a man’s world,” as Hannah had once said cheerfully. He knew how to duck the risks, draw maximum benefit.

Craine’s fingers tightened on the edge of the letter; his cheek muscles tensed. The sender’s handwriting was like a pinched, self-pitying female yawp. He could see her, not at all as he’d dreamed her—big, soft mouth slightly trembling, murderous wet eyes.

Tom Meakins gazed down at the hospital parking lot, undecided as to just what expression he should wear. His wife, Margaret, wrote fierce, illiterate, and God-filled letters to the Southern Illinoisian about Women’s Liberation. It led, she claimed, to promiscuity. “Could be,” Meakins had said when Craine had asked him what he thought. As for Royce, he sat in his chair, big-jawed, big-shouldered, clowning with his gun as usual, waiting for the coffee in the yellow percolator on the table by Hannah’s door, and waiting for Craine to give him his day’s assignment. Though it was hot in here—hot and dry, full of hisses and sudden sharp clunks (the office was steam heated)—Royce had his heavy leather jacket on. The front was unzipped and his work shirt was open to show off his iron medallion—some kind of religious medal—and curly, silver hair.

Craine reached over for his Scotch glass, then paused, lowered his eyebrows, and changed his mind, rereading. “In the Yellow Pages you’re the only detection agency in Carbondale that advertises male and female operatives,” the letter said, “and for this reason I’ve chosen your organization. I might mention that after personally shadowing your agency’s activities for several weeks, I’d like to know just where you keep your alleged female operatives.”

Craine sucked at his teeth and glanced up at Hannah.

“Go on,” she said. She was interested, pleased with the oddity of the thing, watching him with slightly narrowed eyes.

He read: “Someone is trying to murder me, as they murdered the lady across the street from our house in Evanston. I enclose a clipping that will tell you the story. It was a man, some stranger I never saw before.” Something tingled in Craine’s mind—déjà vu—but he couldn’t get hold of it. “I saw him running away, and he must know this, because he’s now here in Carbondale. He’s the psychopathic murderer of those women, I have reason to believe. I’ve seen him, in fact—same jacket, same