F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 Read Online Free PDF Page B

was killed a year after we
were married. His car got caught between a granite cliff and a jack-knifing
tractor trailer on a snowy night on the Penn Turnpike out near Pittsburgh ."
     
                "Jeez, I'm sorry."
     
                She was looking at him, a hint of
wonder seeping into her expression.
     
                "You really are, aren't
you?"
     
                "Of course. I mean, that's
awful. How could I be anything else?"
     
                Her mouth worked. For a moment he
thought she was going to cry, but she blinked her glistening eyes, swallowed,
and seemed to get herself under control again.
     
                She said, "That was a perfect
opening for a cheap shot. And you owe me one of those."
     
                Rob understood. One of her reasons
for leaving him had been her fear of being a young widow.
     
                "Maybe," he said,
"but a dead husband and father should be off limits, don't you
think?"
     
                Kara nodded, swallowed again, and
looked out the window, saying nothing.
     
                In the silence, Rob's thoughts
tripped back to the time they had spent together here in the city a decade ago.
Had it been that long since he was a rookie and Kara was a Kelly Girl? After a
two-year drift through CCNY, he'd finally settled on a field that really
interested him. Despite all his mother's pleas to find something else, he'd
decided to go into the family business—police work. And when the Wade twins
came to town, he found a woman he could really care for—Kara.
     
                Kara and Kelly, identical in
appearance, but so opposite in attitude. Kelly, the free spirit, open to
everything, she took to Manhattan like she'd been made for it, as if all her
life she'd been waiting to be set free in The City That Never Sleeps. Kara, the
thinker, the muller, did fine until her run-in with the necklace snatcher in Central Park . After that she began to see danger lurking
in every corner. She started calling Rob's police career a death wish. Their
last months became an endless argument, one long tug of war with a fraying
rope. She wanted him to quit, go back to school, get a degree of some sort, and
move out to the suburbs—Jersey, Connecticut, Upstate, anyplace but here.
     
                He couldn't go. Rob the rookie loved
the job, the excitement, the challenge, and loved the city. It was his city. He'd grown up here. He
couldn't see what was so frightening about it.
     
                Finally there was nowhere to go but
apart. The immovable object stayed in New York . The irresistible force moved back to rural Lancaster
County , Pennsylvania , saying she didn't want to be a widow at
twenty-five.
     
                Somewhere a dark god might be
laughing at the irony of it all, but Rob found himself unable to squeeze out
even a tiny drop of satisfaction.
     
                Even now, after all these years, he
found he still cared.
     
                What a jerk he could be where she
was concerned.
     
                "I'll drive you to the
station," he said.
     
▼
 
                Rob drove her crosstown at a
leisurely pace on Thirty-fourth, staying in lane instead of doing his customary
bob and weave through the traffic. All around him on the street the cabs were
playing their usual game of chicken with each other, while on the sidewalks the
three-card monte players were set up and waiting for their daily quota of
lunch-hour suckers. Rob badly wanted a cigarette.
     
                "What are you doing with
yourself these days?" he said to break the silence as they crawled past
Macy's.
     
                "Writing."
     
                "Really? Novels?"
     
                "Non-fiction. I do reviews,
articles, criticism, that sort of thing."
     
                "Would I have seen