Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Read Online Free PDF Page B

said.
    ‘Howard, you teach ninth-grade history. It hasn’t changed since last year. Here’s a hint: the North won the war.
    He knew that she didn’t mean to be nasty when she teased him about his job. To her, there was no shame in being an ordinary teacher in an ordinary school. Even so, her jokes bothered him. They reminded him of everything he hadn’t done with his life.
    ‘I’ll be up later,’ he muttered.
    ‘Okay, ’night.’ She wiggled her fingers at him.
    Carol would be asleep when he climbed into bed. That was how it usually was. They had sex a couple times a month. She was cheerful about it, but he knew she looked at sex as more of a wifely obligation than as something she did because she enjoyed it.
    His eyes went back to the photograph of Janine Snow. Blond hair, long and luscious. Icy blue eyes that made you shiver. Rich. Hands that brought people back to life. What would it be like to be someone like that?
    What would it be like to be with someone like that?
    Howard turned off his monitor, because her face made it impossible to think about anything else. He opened the high school textbook and tried to write questions for the test, but he couldn’t focus. Carol was right. History didn’t change. In the end, he would use the same test he’d used the year before and the year before that.
    He took a pencil from his desk and threw it across his office in annoyance. It landed on the pea-green shag. He got up and paced in front of the Easter Island poster. The empty eyes of one of the giant statues stared back at him. That was the place to take a vacation, on the storm-swept shore of some desolate island, examining the clues to one of history’s great mysteries. Growing up, he’d imagined himself as a famous archaeologist, doing digs around the world.
    Instead, he taught bored kids about things he’d only read about in books. He’d never done anything himself. Not really. At age thirty-two, he’d complained to the Super One manager about the annoying checker in the Express Lane who refused to ring up his groceries, and the manager had made her apologize to him. Carol had cried so hard that Howard asked her out for coffee as a way to make it up to her. One year later, they got married. Another year after that, they had their daughter Annie, who was now six. And that was that.
    Nothing about his life was going to change.
    He retrieved a juice box from the mini refrigerator under the bar. He stared at himself in the mirror as he sucked through the tiny straw, making dimples in his cheeks. Not a bad-looking guy, he told himself. Five-foot-ten, not tall but not short. Curly brown hair parted in the middle, but no gray yet. Long face, long chin. Clark Kent glasses, but those were fashionable again. He wore a striped Kohl’s polo shirt, and you couldn’t really see the paunch.
    He went to the file cabinet and grabbed a copy of last year’s Civil War test.
    This battle, fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, is also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg.
    A. Gettysburg
    B. Antietam
    C. Bull Run
    D. Saratoga
    It depressed him, after weeks of study, how many students usually chose D. Bad enough to get the wrong battle, but the wrong war? He didn’t blame them. Teaching the kids was his job, and he was decidedly mediocre at it.
    Howard knew why he was depressed. Six days earlier, he’d turned forty years old. Forty – the burying place for all of your younger dreams. He was celebrating with a pity party. Welcome to the Middle Ages , Carol wrote on his birthday card, which was another joke that he didn’t find funny. He was halfway through life, and it was February, and the gray Duluth winter felt as if it would go on forever. He defied anyone not to be depressed in the face of that.
    He sat down at his desk and turned on the monitor again. Janine Snow stared back at him. If you had a face like hers, if you had that kind of money, if you lived in a big house on the hill, it would never feel like winter.