Ghostheart Read Online Free PDF

bright new light of morning was peeling apart the shadows in her empty apartment.
    That had been her welcome to Morningside Heights, Manhattan, and Jack Ulysses Sullivan had never stopped talking to this day. They became close, they shared their time, their apartments almost – each possessing a key for the other’s door, each letting themselves in whenever the other was home to share coffee or insignificant details of insignificant days – and though there was never anything but a platonic relationship, there was still a closeness that Annie could only ever measure in terms of family. Jack, in some small way, represented the father she’d never known, and thus Jack, drinker though he was, could only ever be forgiven for his idiosyncrasies and irritations.
    Jack was there when she returned home that Thursday evening, the sheaf of papers clutched in her hand, thoughts of her father and who he might have been in her mind, and when he asked if she’d like to come in and ‘share a cup of coffee with the drunken fuck opposite’ she smiled and said she would like such a thing very much indeed. She took off her coat, sether papers down, and busied herself making a pot in his kitchen.
    ‘Someone came in today,’ she told him, as they sat at the small table in his front room. He looked back at her with the fifty-five-year-old face that never ceased to amaze Annie with its depth of character and life; a face created with origami and then carried through a storm. He was a handsome man, had been blond she figured, and now his hair was a salt-and-pepper gray turning white at the temples. His eyes were deep set, his nose thin, almost Roman, and when he spoke there was a light and a fire within the shadows beneath his brows that said everything that could be said without needing to say anything at all.
    ‘Someone came in,’ he repeated. ‘You had a customer?’
    She shook her head. ‘No, not a customer … an old man, a man who said he’d known my father.’
    ‘The mysterious and irrepressible Frank O’Neill no less,’ Sullivan said.
    Annie had spoken with Sullivan about her father before, had shared the little she knew and the less she remembered, and Sullivan had always perceived that deep sense of longing. She missed the fact that she had never really known him. Missed it like hell.
    ‘He brought something for me,’ Annie went on. ‘And he made me an invitation.’
    Sullivan looked up and frowned.
    ‘Robert Franklin Forrester,’ Annie said. ‘That was his name, and he told me that he knew my dad many years go and they had founded a reading club.’
    Sullivan turned his mouth down at the sides and nodded. ‘Seems logical, him owning a bookstore an’ all.’
    ‘He said he was back in Manhattan for a while and he figured we should revive the tradition … start the reading club again. He’s coming over Monday.’
    ‘Just the two of you?’
    Annie nodded.
    ‘Hell of a club you have there.’
    Annie smiled. ‘He seemed okay, lonely I think.’
    ‘And you said it was okay for him to come?’ Sullivan asked.
    ‘I did.’
    ‘You want me to come protect you … he may be a serial killer or somesuch, preying on beautiful young women working in run-down bookstores.’
    Annie waved Sullivan’s sarcasm away. ‘He brought something for me to read … my first assignment for the club, and he also brought a letter my father wrote for my mother.’
    Annie rose and walked to the door. She took the sheaf of papers from the chair beneath her coat and returned to the table. She set the papers down.
    Sullivan lifted the pages and leafed through them.
    ‘It’s a novel I think … something like that,’ Annie said. ‘This man Forrester said that one of the members of the original club had written it.’
    ‘Big novel.’
    ‘I’m sure there’s more,’ Annie said. ‘I thought he might bring it one chapter at a time or something.’
    ‘You’ve read it?’
    Annie shook her head.
    ‘You mind if I read it too?’ Sullivan