Read The Dead Past for Free Online Page A

out in a placating manner. "Thank you for stopping by, Franklin. I value your judgment."
    "Like hell you do, Anna!" He looked like Costello at the end of the Who's on First? routine. "You two are the most infuriating people I've ever met. Get this through your thick Kendrick skulls in case you're thinking of wandering around Felicity Grove with nothing better to do than pester the police and get into trouble—stay clear!" Anubis stood and eyed Broghin's yahoos as the sheriff grabbed his coat and beelined out the door.
    "How adorably sweet that man can be," Anna said. "He fears for my life."
    "Yes."
    "I believe it's time we attempted to discover exactly what it is we've been caught in the middle of, Jon.”
    “Good idea," I said.
    In the back of my mind I wondered what our second faux pas was going to be like.

FIVE
     
    That night I dreamed of making love to Michelle, which wasn't as strange as it might seem. Or maybe it was, but by now could be expected. Whenever I meet a new woman I'm attracted to she goes directly into my subconscious and winds up stirring a lot of silt.
    I met Michelle in my senior year of college when I returned to finish school after finding my parents' killer. She and I both happened to take a course on the unlikely subject of Dadaism and French Surrealistic Poetry . Needless to say, the class was canceled due to lack of enrollment, and Michelle and I wound up in line together at the registrar's office for three hours, trying to change our schedules.
    A couple of movies and dinners later and we were more than friends and occasional lovers; it kept on that way for most of the spring semester, right into our final weeks at the university, when we rapidly became more serious. She was a lifeline I held on to more tightly than I would have under different circumstances, and she was an orphan who liked the idea of having someone to take care of her after having to look out for herself for so long. I proved to be a composite father, mother, brother, and child figure, as well as her husband. Our marriage came shrieking like a newborn out of misplaced needs and wants.
    But needs and wants count. We lasted longer than we should have, more than two years. During that time I don't think we ever had so much as a fight, which only served to confirm that we didn't really give a damn what the other was doing. I opened the bookshop in the Village with the money I'd inherited, and Michelle worked as an aerobics instructor until she realized she could make a mint stripping at one of the Manhattan clubs that regularly featured porno stars and ladies who took baths in big tubs of champagne. Even that didn't bother me so much as her getting dropped off at five in the morning on the back of motorcycles driven by guys named Viper and Noose, the skin of her shoulders and breasts slowly filling with tattoos of dragons, orchids, and Iron Crosses. When she started getting tattoos of other men's names along her inner thigh, it was pretty obvious our marriage had come to an end and at least one of us should take heed.
    The only emotional baggage I still carry around is my resentment that she doesn't call me more often at four in the morning.
    I lounged in bed for an hour, writing scurrilous notes and making lists. I underlined Margaret's, Richie's, and Anna's names and circled them over and over, drawing arrows between them with big question marks across the page. Philip Marlowe had nothing on me. In the light of morning, I wasn't quite as sure as I had been last night that we had anything here. Even my suspicions about Richie's OD hadn't held up through the night. Broghin had been right—when you're partying, you'll take anything you can get your hands on: Quaaludes, amphetamines, coke, crack, even LSD and heroin were making comebacks in the city, giving cocaine a run for its money as the selected drug of stressed-out Yuppies.
    Nothing came easily, there was no sense to be made like this. I finally tore out the page and threw