77 Shadow Street Read Online Free PDF

one mirror and then in another, as if a reflection of the space might reveal something that could not be seen by looking directly. Because the mirrors faced each other, he stood among multiple Silas Kinsleys who were either advancing toward him single file or receding from him with their backs turned.
    A long time had passed since he had studied his face in a mirror with full self-awareness. He appeared far older than he felt. He had aged ten years in the three since Nora died.
    He glanced from face to face, half expecting to discover that one of them was that of a stranger, a malevolent Other hiding among the infinity of diminishing Silas Kinsleys. What a curious thought. The images were of course all identical old men.
    As he returned to the hallway, a low and menacing rumble arose, not thunder, from underfoot, as if a subterranean train were passing beneath the building, although the city had no subway system. The Pendleton shuddered, and Silas swayed with it. He thought Earthquake , but in the fifty-five years that he had lived in this city, he never felt a temblor and never heard of a major fault underlying any part of the state. The shudder lasted ten or fifteen seconds, and then it faded away, leaving no damage in its wake.

    In the study, Witness turned in a circle, wanting first to get the feel of the space. He might be there only seconds, a minute or two at most. This was a man’s room but warm, with one wall given to a gallery of photographs showing Silas Kinsley with some of the clients he had so ably represented; Silas and his late wife, Nora, in different exotic locales; and the two of them with various friends on celebratory occasions.
    In the hallway, Kinsley walked past the open door, toward the kitchen. He didn’t glance this way. Witness waited for the attorney to reappear, belatedly alerted by peripheral vision, but domestic noises in the kitchen suggested that no confrontation was imminent.
    How would he react to finding a stranger—a strong young man in boots, jeans, and sweater—in his apartment as if by magic? With the fear of an old man weakened by time or with the calm authority of a lawyer still confident after decades of courtroom triumphs? Witness suspected that this was a man whose composure wasn’t easily shaken.
    Two walls of the room featured floor-to-ceiling shelves packed full of books. Most of them were books of laws, of cases that were significant for the interpretations of laws that set precedents, and thick biographies of important figures in the history of American jurisprudence.
    With reverence, Witness slid one hand lightly across the spines of those books. Where he came from, there were no laws, no attorneys, no judges, no juries, no trials. The innocent had been swept away by a brutal tide of belief in the primacy of the primitive, by faith in the wrong things, by rebellion against reality and the elevation of idiot conviction to the status of the single Truth. He had killed many people in his time, certain that he would never be held to account for the blood he spilled. Nevertheless, he held the law in high regard, just as a man who lived in godless despair might esteem the idea of God that he was unable to embrace.

7
    Apartment 2-A
    T he storm was a gift. The lyrics of “One Rainy Night in Memphis” needed a melody with bounce but also with a melancholy edge, which was not an easy combination to achieve, especially for Twyla Trahern. The bounce part gave her no difficulty, but melancholy was for her a secondhand experience, something that happened to other people, and though she had written a few melancholy songs before, she needed a moody environment to inspire her. With her guitar, she sat on a stool by a window in the study of her apartment on the second floor of the Pendleton, gazing at the timely rain, at the city lights twinkling in the premature twilight that the thunderheads impressed upon the day, picking out notes and trying various chords, seeking the sound of