A Dangerous Fiction Read Online Free PDF

there. Resisting the lure of the shady cottonwoods, I crossed to the portal and made my way down the line of vendors. I studied each one in turn, but if the seller was among them, I didn’t recognize her.
    Well, I thought, twelve years. Anything can change in twelve years. Isabel Delgado, Hugo’s friend and collaborator, might have sold her house on Canyon Road, though I hoped not, for it suited her so well. It had adobe walls a foot thick and rounded windows, hand-carved vigas, and kiva fireplaces in all the principal rooms. The terra-cotta floors were strewn with bright Navajo rugs, and niches in the walls displayed her collection of Indian pottery. There was a separate adobe outbuilding fitted up as a state-of-the-art music studio, where she and Hugo worked on the project that had brought us to Santa Fe: a rock opera based on his first novel,
Distant Cries
. Every morning, before they started working, the three of us drank coffee on the patio beneath a trellis of orange trumpet vine, surrounded by pots of periwinkle, sage, and desert marigolds. Afterward I’d leave them and go off on my own to explore the city.
    In the early days of my marriage, I had been wary of other women. Hugo was a famous playboy, and I did not yet feel myself an equal partner in our marriage; I didn’t even feel equal to the worldly, accomplished women who orbited around him. But Isabel Delgado didn’t worry me, because the composer was old, forty-five at least, well past the age of dalliance. (That Hugo was even older never occurred to me; in my eyes he was ageless.) She was a fine-looking woman for her age, tall and slender with strong features and long black hair, filigreed with silver, that she wore in a single braid down the middle of her back. Though she was as acclaimed in her world as Hugo was in his, she lived simply and without airs. And she was kind to me in an Auntie Mame sort of way. She gave me things: an embroidered shawl, turquoise earrings, and a Hopi bowl . . . When Hugo died, she flew to New York for the memorial service.
    I should call her, I thought. But somehow I didn’t care to.
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    I had checked in with the conference organizers and was just getting my room key when a hand clasped my shoulder. At once I flashed back to Sam Spade grabbing me on the street and, without thinking, I knocked the hand away and spun around.
    Max Messinger raised both hands. “Easy there, bruiser.”
    â€œMax!” I cried, and we fell into each other’s arms. Max was a legacy from Molly, but one I’d long since made my own. He was six-foot-two with a gleaming bald head, a trim goatee, and one gold hoop earring. Before he took to writing thrillers for a living, he’d been an FBI profiler, and before that a field agent. I kept expecting the sedentary life of the writer to take its toll, but the body pressed to mine was as soft as a refrigerator.
    He held me at arm’s length and inspected the goods. “You’re a breath of New York air.”
    â€œMy new scent: Eau D’exhaust.”
    He laughed. “Come have a drink.”
    I asked the desk clerk to send my bags to my room and hooked my arm in Max’s. We strolled out to the garden and chose a table beside a fountain. There was something so comforting about being with Max; it was like walking a mastiff.
    â€œHow’s Molly?” he asked.
    People asked me all the time, and I usually said she was doing fine, holding her own. I couldn’t lie to Max, though. “Not great. It’s in her bones now.”
    He said all there was to say, which was nothing. Dragonflies darted through the spray of the fountain. A waitress came and took our orders: white wine for me, beer for Max.
    When she left, Max said, “Barry sends his love and two pots of jam from our very own strawberry patch. Can you believe those words coming from a New York Jew? Life is so incongruous.”
    â€œWho