Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Online Free PDF

when she leaned into an attack. It was fun to watch but embarrassing to see her roommate being defeated.
    The water in the pool downstairs was cold. A few lanes were free because of the weather outside; only the dedicated swimmers were there. The funny thing about swimming, Maud reflected, was that counting laps to make the mile distance absorbed your consciousness so that you thought about the count even when the crawl stroke was the farthest thing from your mind. This, she knew, was an upside; it was boring but peaceful, and it strengthened her resolve in what she was about to do. After the laps she took a hot shower, toweled off and dried her hair. The few other girls in the locker room were aware of her.
    Walking across downtown from the Common, Maud had the sleety snow at her back. From the practice fields half a mile away she could make out the players’ voices. One of the sports teams, weather or not. The old seminary buildings were past what was once the thriving factory district of Amesbury. The area was more prosperous than in years before, but it was still shabby. Along the curbs of Camp Street stood ridges of soiled snow refrozen after a thaw, being layered over once again by the falling flakes. There was black ice scarred with skid marks near the curb and frozen dead leaves that clogged the street’s drains, peeled rubber in the gutter, blackened chunks of tailpipe, wands of aluminum siding. The last block was across an overpass spanning the railroad tracks. An art gallery and an Ethiopian restaurant occupied the street level of a two-story building that leaned against the seminary.
    Maud cut across the small quad where the
Gazette
lived and saw lights on. People stood just inside the door, out of the cold. She wanted the office to herself to get the job done. She walked out to the main street of town and went into Downey’s to nurse a beer at a table. It was a bar where most students didn’t go, a sort of townie bar. She was perfectly at home there unless some drunk hit on her. She was resolved not to let herself be swept into some scene or other. It was a night for serious business.
    The tired waitress knew her.
    “Hi, sweetie.” The woman lowered her voice. “No date tonight?”
    Maud smiled. “Late date.”
    From Downey’s, March Street took her to the falls, where the river that meandered deliberately along the edge of the Common coiled itself into the force that had long before spun a hundred wheels to make sailcloth for long-gone coasters. This was the far end of the old waterfront, the ungentrified part that never lent itself to any more development than a few microbreweries and loft sweatshops. Wheels here didn’t grind out anything but hard time for the poorest illegals in peonage, or the afternoons of young weight-watcher moms pedaling to music videos.
    At the far side of the bridge, the corners were ruled by gangbangers preparing for their prison time, in hoodies, pants low. The street talk was lame now, left to professional rappers; the Spanish was without color; the English was groping. What they knew the ghetto kids couldn’t say. What they said came out of streaming media and not from the dead streets. People who followed such things—among them grad students in sociology—said the small children in the old wooden tenements that Norman Rockwell liked to people with his folk didn’t know jump-rope rhymes anymore, couldn’t play stickball or hopscotch or choose up sides going one potato two potato. In summer the basketball courts were empty. Grandma weighs ninety pounds, she’s on crack, mom’s a slave or turning tricks at interstate rest areas, adolescent dad’s working on his prison tats or wearing curlers for his roomie. All the graffiti is black.
    Some might have thought that the two parts of the city—Maple Park the poor townie side and the college-Common area—didn’t intersect, but they did. Heroin had found a niche on both banks of the Mill River, its glint detectable to