Read The Cavanaugh Quest for Free Online Page A

nothing; Larry seemed tired, drained. Not much after that we heard that they were living apart, then nothing. Pa had another coronary, then a third one, and we got rid of the house and moved in here. I don’t suppose I thought about Larry or Kim for quite a long time. Until a month ago, when Larry moved into this building. Pa acted so funny about it when I told him I’d seen Larry in the lobby … Larry dropped by to see Pa two or three times during this past month but Pa’s been so sick, you know. And now”—she caught her breath—“and now Larry’s dead …
    “Pa thinks I’m crazy; he wouldn’t even talk to me this morning … but I want to know why Larry Blankenship killed himself. I really want to know, Paul. What did she do to him? I know she killed him, as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger.
    “Why don’t you find out for me?”
    When I thought about it later, it didn’t surprise me that Harriet Dierker would ask me to do such a nebulous, largely fractured sort of thing. It was precisely the sort of thing she would ask, unhesitatingly, without giving the question’s implications any serious consideration. Her mind worked that way; she wanted to know and she asked me to find out.
    But looking back on it, tweezing through the effects which the search for her wretched answer had on my life, yes, I do wonder at my ever having gotten involved. Like a pulsing swamp, it sucked me in and set me wondering if I were in some way defective in my resistance. So many things have seeped up around me while I wasn’t paying attention. There is a kind of stickiness that overcomes you eventually when you realize that things have taken a peculiar turn. By then it has always been too late. Once, in an echoing, damp night I killed an elderly man in another country …   Once I married Anne. And just once I really paid attention to Harriet Dierker.
    It would be unjust to blame her, though. If there had been no more to it than our balcony-and-brioche conversation, I’d have to let it go. Larry Blankenship’s death would have given me pause and I would have doubtless remembered the story of Kim Roderick, but nothing more. I had other things to think about. I could have spent the summer reviewing the new movies, seeing what the Guthrie was doing, striking up hopeful acquaintances with moody actresses who would be there for a season and go conveniently away at the proper time. I had done most of that, as a matter of fact, and I’d interviewed the television personalities coming through and I played tennis and looked with dismay at my Porsche and lunched by the pool in the sunshine at the Sheraton Ritz. I pretended I was only thirty. I experienced the peculiar sensation of someone you recognize through a shifting curtain of people and realize with a flicker in your chest that it’s you you’re seeing, you when you were ten years younger, moving through time like a ghost. Not better, not happier, but more hopeful. Hope had been all around you then and more often than not it had looked like a woman.
    Which brings back the dying end of summer and the Kim Roderick thing. As I say, it grabbed me before I really knew what was happening and it wasn’t just Harriet. Pa got into the act, too. He called me later the same day when I was staring at a legal pad, pen poised, trying to think of something new and rotten to say about the Lou Reed album I was supposed to be reviewing. Lou Reed brings out the worst in me and I feel better for it.
    If you can imagine a hearty groan, you know what Pa Dierker sounded like. I could believe he was dying but I couldn’t quite take it seriously.
    “Paul, this is Tim Dierker. Ma said she was talking to you today about Blankenship’s mess. That right?”
    “She was,” I said, admiring the way Pa got right to the point.
    “Well, she’s just gone out and I want to disabuse you of whatever crap she was … telling you. Ma’s so full of crap most of the time. Get over here. I’ll set you