Read The Prettiest Feathers for Free Online Page B

my Rimbaud, then I opened the front cover to see how secure the pages were—and that’s when I noticed the bookplate glued inside:
From the Library of Maxine Harris
.

John

    M y next encounter with Sarah was over lunch at a place called Harrington’s. It was close enough for her to walk there from the bookstore, but she had to pass from one ethnic pissing ground to another, making it unlikely that she would be seen by anyone she knew.
    From the moment she arrived, she was talkative, contributing a wealth of detail to the broad outline I had already sketched of her life. All in all, it was pleasant, although I was annoyed by her attempts to discover more about John Wolf than I wished to manufacture at that moment.
    “Where do you live?” she asked.
    “Landgrove,” I said, naming an upscale suburb in Connecticut.
    “That’s really out in the country.”
    “Birds in the morning and all that,” I agreed. “Why do you stay in the city? I find it such a dreary place. I’m reluctant even to come in on business when I have to—all the crime, the traffic.”
    She sipped her iced tea. “I’ve tried other places, but I always end up back here.”
    “What other places?”
    “Chicago for one. That was a strange time.”
    “How so?”
    “Have you ever been married?”
    “Divorced,” I lied.
    “Then you’ll understand.”
    Sarah told me about her paranoid ex-husband, the keeper of the arsenal, the elusive Robert Sinclair—homicide detective. I marveled at my ability to pick them. She went on about Robert’s dalliance with his partner, Lane Frank.
    “My doctor’s receptionist knew Lane—said she was a nice person, but with a hard edge,” Sarah said.
    She seemed to drift off into private thoughts, then added, “But she’s a cop. I wouldn’t have expected her to be running around in ruffles and lace. But even if she had, Robert wouldn’t have cared. If she had walked naked into his office, carrying her badge, the badge is the thing that would have turned him on. Cops are like that. They seek each other out, stick together.”
    “My ex is a psychiatrist,” I said. “She’d been involved with a colleague of hers for several months, thinking it was all some kind of intellectual thing between them. She told me about him right from the start—how much they had in common, the long talks they had. By the time she had it all straight in her head, I was seeing a psychiatrist, too, but I was paying mine a hundred bucks an hour.”
    “Lane’s father was some sort of psychiatrist, I think. He’s supposed to be famous or something.”
    “I went to see this guy named Street,” I said.
    I was watching for a reaction, and she didn’t disappoint me. It was momentary—just a change in her eyes—but it was there.
    “How did you handle things when you and Robert split up?”
    “Not well, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s crazy, really. I thoughtI wanted to be alone, but once I was, I wasn’t so sure anymore.”
    Alone. What about the kid?
    “We didn’t have any children either,” I said. “It’s just as well, I guess.”
    “Robert and I did have a child,” she said, the color in her face draining away. This business of the kid was more of a minefield than Bob the cop.
    “Oh,” I said.
    “We had a daughter,” she went on. “But she died.”
    I think I managed to say most of the right things—sudden infant death, tragedy, loss, and all that. I’m pretty good when it comes to sounding sympathetic. With the mystery of the child solved, another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. But I still had a lot of unanswered questions, and didn’t want to waste a lot of time wailing over a dead kid.
    But Sarah had her own agenda. There was a lot of unfinished business surrounding the death of her daughter that she needed to deal with. No doubt she had bent Street’s ear about it, and I had accidentally reopened that can of boring worms.
    “You’d think in so short a time you couldn’t possibly become