Dreams in the Key of Blue Read Online Free PDF Page A

first one coming, she didn’t feel that, either. She never struggled. She knew there was nothing she could do.
    He used his knife to let her know what would happen if she told anyone. He always drew blood—nicked her on the arm or the leg. She has scars all over her body.
    So do I.
    I pushed myself up from the muck, wiped the rain from my eyes, and struggled through the scrub growth. I found the road, and hiked the hundred yards downhill to the car.
    If you would like to draw a picture, I have finished with the blue.
    I will be using the red now.

I SPENT SATURDAY MORNING ARRANGING MY TEMPORARY living quarters to my liking. A seascape that looked as if it had been sold out of the back of a van parked on the side of a highway, had to be closeted. I trashed the bathroom night-light, a hollow plastic rendition of a dashboard deity, then tossed the blossom-scented soap and placed a bar of Ivory in the soap tray.
    The study also required attention. The last visiting professor to occupy the house must have been a writer, or at least a teacher of writing. At eye level beyond the desk was an entire shelf of how-to books—everything from character and plot to selling that first novel—volumes dedicated to homogenized expression.
    “Wonder if Anne Sexton read this shit,” I muttered as I swept the paperbacks into a carton.
    When I finished with the shelf, it held a small stone carving of an African lowlands gorilla that was a gift from my daughter, a photograph of Lane and her mother taken on Lane’s recent trip to Congo, a stack of CDs, and three books: Reid Meloy’s
The Psychopathic Mind,
volume four of
The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis,
and Mary Beth Rogers’s
Barbara Jordan: American Hero.
    At noon, Jaycie Waylon stopped by and invited me to lunch. “There’s this great little Portuguese restaurant on the flats,” she said. “They make the most incredible fish sandwiches.”
    “I’m sold,” I said, and grabbed a jacket.
    “My motives are not entirely honorable,” Jaycie said as she drove north on the causeway. “I have some questions.”
    “Quest away,” I said, enjoying the view. “I assumed you had an agenda.”
    “Did you work on other kinds of cases besides murder?”
    “A few. What do you have in mind?”
    “White-collar crime.”
    I glanced at her. “One case,” I said.
    “You don’t sound like it was the high point of your career.”
    “A bank retained me through an intermediary. My job was to examine several death threats sent through interoffice mail to a bank officer, to provide a personality assessment, probable motive, and assist them with focusing their investigation. When I realized that I hadn’t received all the information, I called my contact. Some of the threatening notes had been withheld because they alleged sexual involvements by the officer, dalliances which the bank deemed irrelevant to the case.”
    “That should have been up to you to determine,” Jaycie said.
    “I returned their materials and quit.”
    “Do you think it was blackmail?”
    I shrugged. “Never gave it another thought. I also never worked for a private corporation or a federal agency after that. It’s too much like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle that the cat’s been using for a sandbox.”
    Jaycie laughed. “What an image.”
    “Why do you ask about white-collar crime?”
    “I’ll explain over lunch,” she said, pulling into a gravel parking lot in front of what appeared to be a shack on stilts leaning precariously over the mudflats.
    A small, paint-flaked sign said only “Nuñez Fish.”
    “What it may lack in aesthetics, it more than makes up for with its food.”
    “I was thinking of architectural soundness. Let’s find a table on this side of the building. I don’t want to share my dessert with the clams.”
    The ambience was fishnet and buoys—seafaring in cramped quarters. My haddock sandwich on a homemade roll was everything Jaycie had promised.
    “Told you so,”