Read Nameless Night for Free Online

agreement and crossed the room to her side. He stepped into the semidarkness, grabbed the handrail, and disappeared from view. She stood and listened to the sound of his feet descending stairs.
    Dinner was meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and baby peas with apple crisp for dessert. It was also uneventful, which was fortunate because if it hadn’t been, Helen probably would have missed whatever it was that went wrong, as her preoccupation with the matter of Paul Hardy was nearly complete . . . what did he say? . . . Wesley Allen Howard?
    By 9:40, Helen Willis had locked up the ground floor, turned on the alarm system, and taken the elevator back to her rooms. By ten, she’d changed into her warm-weather nightgown, completed her evening bathroom ritual, and was seated in front of her iMac, her glasses perched at the tip of her nose, her fingers typing. She tried them all: Google, Lycos, Zabasearch, Peoplefinders, All Search Engines, Whitepages, and every other search engine she could find. Who was it said that too much prosperity was bad for people in the same way that too many oats were bad for a horse?
    Tolstoy maybe? Anyway . . . Wesley Allen Howard was all over the place. Three . . . four . . . maybe five hundred hits. An hour later all she knew for certain was that finding the right Mr. Howard was going to require a substantial narrowing of the field. Frustrated, she went to bed.
    6
    They arrived just after breakfast, rolling onto Arbor Street in a trio of rented Lincoln Town Cars, two black, one silver, eight passengers in all, everybody sporting sunglasses to ward off the morning fog. No loose talk, no slammed doors, all economy of motion and singularity of purpose. First pair out of the cars made its way up the driveway, past Ken Suzuki’s truck; a moment later another quartet split up and melted into the shrubbery on either side of the house, all but the small man, all but one wearing an overcoat and sporting one of those little radio earpieces with the pigtail of wire disappearing beneath the collar.
    The exception was the tiny gentleman in the gray summer-weight suit. Nice conservative maroon tie, no sunglasses, no radio in his ear. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and looked distractedly out at the street as the weight lifter standing on his left rang the front bell, waited, and then rang it again. When ringing failed, the big guy tried banging on the big brass door knocker, lifting the ring from the lion’s mouth and slamming down hard. Eunice Ponds opened the door. She was still in her white terrycloth bathrobe and fuzzy blue slippers. “Yeah?” she said. The big guy yanked the door from her hand and pushed it wide open. Eunice let out a yelp. In a flash, Benny the dog came sliding around the corner, his nails scraping for traction on the wood floor. Forty pounds of multicolored mutt began to show his teeth and bark in earnest. The hair on the back of his neck rose up like a mottled cowlick. His nails chattered on the floor as he alternately charged and retreated from the strangers.
    In a single deft movement, the big guy shoved Eunice aside and punted Benny the dog into the middle of next week, whence Benny then scrambled to his feet on the second bounce and, without looking back, three-legged it in the direction of the TV room, tongue lolling, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
    Unlike Benny the dog, however, Eunice was not so easily deterred. As a matter of fact, single-minded tenacity had pretty much been the story of her life up till then. While most people are able to make a distinction between the things that merely cross their minds and the things appropriate to act out, Eunice wasn’t wired that way. Once Eunice got a bee in her bonnet, it wasn’t going away until she acted upon it; no matter how malicious or mean-spirited the action might be, Eunice wasn’t giving up on the idea until either it reached fruition or she died in the attempt.
    Eunice was eight years old when somebody first got an