Read Immoral for Free Online Page A

tell Rachel about Tommy’s weak heart, but Rachel didn’t want to hear anything.
    “Daddy always said that if he died, it was you who killed him,” she said.
    So began the war.
    Emily, lying in Rachel’s bed, picked up the silly stuffed pig.
    “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “What did I ever do to make you hate me so much? How can I make it up to you?”
     
     
     

Chapter 5
     
     
    Stride lived in an area known as Park Point, a crooked finger of land jutting out between the southern tip of the lake and the calm inner harbors of Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin. The peninsula was just wide enough to drop a strip of houses on either side of the road. There was only one way to get to the Point—across the lift bridge over the canal—which forced the people who lived there to structure their lives around the comings and goings of the ore ships.
    He gave no thought to the bridge as he glided on autopilot, his eyes barely open, toward the Point at four in the morning. At first, when he heard the raucous warning bell, he thought his tired brain was playing tricks on him. He turned down the Sara Evans song on his stereo and listened. When he realized the bridge was really going up, he accelerated, but he knew he was too late. Disgusted, wondering how long he would be marooned, he pulled to a stop at the guardrail and shut off the engine.
    He got out of the car, leaning on the door, letting the cold air wash over him. He reached back inside to the cup holder, found a new pack of cigarettes, and lit one. So much for willpower. He didn’t care. Smoking, exhausted, listening to the groan of steel as the bridge climbed above him—this was his life. And it had been that way for the past year, ever since the cancer took Cindy away. The city that had always been his home, and that he assumed he would never leave, had begun to feel different to him, darker and more menacing. The familiar things, like the hulking lift bridge and the smell of the lake, now seemed consumed with memories.
    Back in his youth, Duluth was a one-industry town, capital of the northern region of the state known, for good reason, as the Iron Range. It was a city where trillions of pellets of taconite belched into the hulls of giant ships, which sank low in the water and then shouldered their way through the cavernous troughs of Lake Superior toward the northeast. It was a hardscrabble, hard-luck city, filled with brawny miners and seamen like his dad.
    He didn’t recall that life was particularly good back then, but the city had a small-town feel, and people weathered the ups and downs of the ore industry together, living fat, living poor, working, striking. For nine months every year, until the lake froze, the rhythm of the ore industry governed the city. Trains came and went. Ships came and went. The bridge rose, and the bridge fell. The raw elements of steel that built skyscrapers, cars, and guns around the world began their journey under the clay soil in northern Minnesota and eventually traveled through the seaway in the holds of the great ships.
    But the taconite industry waned, eaten up by overseas competition, and so did Duluth’s fortunes. Ore couldn’t pay the bills anymore. So the wise men who ran the city took a look at its location on the lake and said: Let the tourists come. The ore industry became a kind of tourist attraction itself, drawing gawkers to the bridge whenever a ship slid through the canal.
    Not now, though. Not in the middle of the night. Stride stood alone, taking long drags on his cigarette, watching the rust-red hull creep under the bridge. He saw a man standing on the deck of the ship, also alone, also smoking. He was indistinguishable, little more than a silhouette. The man raised his hand to Stride in a casual greeting, and Stride returned it with a wave. That man could have been him, if his life had gone as he expected when he was younger.
    He climbed back into his Bronco as the bridge settled back into place. As he drove