Gentle Murderer Read Online Free PDF Page B

hurt you for the world.”
    She moved along with him in silence.
    “Marriage was spoiled for me. Everything was spoiled for me. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’ve spoiled everything.”
    She knew better than to ask him what he meant although the sudden thought that he might have been married hurt terribly. He walked along, looking at the ground. Suddenly he caught her wrist. He held it so tightly that it hurt.
    “But the world’s not going to be spoiled for you, Katie. And don’t let it spoil you. It’s going to try. But don’t let it.”
    She rubbed her wrist where he had released it.
    “Let’s get on another bus, and try starting over,” he said.
    She wanted that very much. Something had happened between them that had never happened before. But then she had never been farther from the house with him Ulan the church at the end of the block.
    “Let’s,” she said. “I do love starting over.”
    “So do I.” He drew a dollar bill and some change from his pocket and counted it. “Do you know what we’ll do? We’ll take the Madison bus and get off where we can walk to the park.”
    “What park?”
    “Central Park, foolish girl. Haven’t you been there?”
    “A couple of times. We went to the zoo when I was in grade school.”
    He looked at her. “When you were in grade school—you’re a child.”
    “I’m not. You said something like that to me last night.”
    They were in the bus before he spoke again. “What else did I say last night, Katie?”
    “Don’t you remember? You weren’t drinking or anything.”
    “If I remembered I wouldn’t ask you,” he said, rubbing his fingers over his eyes and forehead. “It seems like years ago … when I was seventeen maybe, and I already knew too much of the world and myself to be a priest.”
    “Priests know much about the world. They have to.”
    “They learn it out of books,” he said curtly.
    She looked out of the bus window, pondering his words. They stung less in their curtness than in what they told her of him. They implied that his knowledge had come from experience. In her mind she linked that with marriage having been spoiled for him. How quickly her prayer had been denied, she thought bitterly. But he had not actually said that he was married. If he had been, her mother would have found it out. She found things like that out in no time at all. More cheerful herself, Katie tried to think of something to say that would please him.
    “Are you working, Tim?”
    “An odd job here and there. Why?”
    “I didn’t mean that. I meant writing.”
    “No. But I think I’m going to be able to start again soon. Maybe today even.”
    “Did something happen? Did you get some money?”
    “Yes and no,” he said. “And in that order.”
    “Will you tell me about it in the park?”
    He smiled. “No.”
    “Will you let me read some of it when it’s written, then?”
    “Possibly.”
    She smiled and settled back in her seat, spreading the creases from her dress.
    “You didn’t tell me what I said last night,” he reminded her.
    “You didn’t say anything much. You just sat there grinning like a cat. You made Johnny play every Irish song he knew. And some he didn’t know, you hummed the tunes for him till he picked them up. And everyone, you’d say, ‘My mother liked that’ or ‘That was one of my mother’s favorites.’”
    “My mother was Irish,” he said, as though in explanation.
    “Your mother’s dead?” the girl asked.
    “Yes. Many times.” He glanced out of the window to see where they were.
    They heard then the gradual rise of police sirens behind them. The bus slowed down and pulled to a stop as two police cars and a police technical truck roared past them. The cortege turned left a few blocks ahead and the sirens stopped.
    “And once she died in bed,” he added, getting up. “Let’s walk from here.”

7
    “N OW, MRS. FLAHERTY, TRY and compose yourself. You’d be surprised at the number of violent deaths that