Habit of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

that was when it was a real bookstore. I myself worked at Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue at that time, and I thought that store would last forever. But nothing does. … Katherine Richards: I’ll ask around if you want me to, but I can’t think of anyone here now old enough to remember back then.” His pale eyes settled on a customer a few aisles away. He made a little sound of disapproval and then said, “Excuse me a moment. If I assist him now, it may keep him out of trouble.”
    “Thank you,” Julie called after him. A potential book thief was making tracks.
    “Come and see me. I’ll remember.” Then, “Miss …”
    She waited.
    “It occurs to me: why don’t you go and see a man named Morgan Reynolds in our main office? He used to be the manager here. A top man in the chain now, but he might remember.”
    Julie murmured her thanks and fled. The name Morgan Reynolds brought on a kaleidoscope of memory: a man who smelled of licorice and pipe tobacco who was often at their house. His laugh was silent except for a wheeze every time he inhaled. His fingernails were clean and shiny. He taught her to play checkers and then one day he had brought a set of chessmen. She remembered very clearly her mother saying no to his teaching Julie chess. She could have the pieces to play with, but that was all.
    Julie walked clear across town for the first time in weeks. She could smell the dust of the memory: coming home from college to find the chess pieces still lined up in opposing positions on the wide bedroom windowsill; they stood against a background of iron bars that gave an authentic feeling of dungeon, for the window overlooked the dark inside courtyard of the apartment on Ninety-first Street, where she had grown up. By then, Morgan Reynolds did not visit anymore, but she knew then and now that he had to be considered a benefactor of sorts.

FIVE
    J EFF HAD VISITED “THE shop,” as Julie called her first-floor rooms on Forty-fourth Street, only once. She said of it herself that it was an okay place to visit but she wouldn’t want to live there. So when Jeff phoned to suggest that she return to Sixteenth Street while he was abroad, she was briefly tempted.
    “Surely you’d be more comfortable here,” he said.
    Looking around at the thrift-shop assortment of necessities—dresser, a kitchen table, wall shelves, a couch and a clothes rack—she agreed that there was no question about that.
    “It’s important that you have a sense of well-being just now,” he went on, and then changed his approach when she was silent. “I don’t want the apartment left unoccupied, and I certainly won’t rent to someone I don’t know. Or for that matter to anyone I do know. …”
    So, Julie thought, his new woman wouldn’t be hanging around town waiting for his return. She’d be with him. “Thank you, Jeff, but I’m getting along just fine. I have friends in the neighborhood. I like it here.”
    “God knows why, but however you want it, Julie. We are not the first couple to divorce, you know.”
    “No kidding.”
    “When it’s convenient for you, you’ll want to collect your things before I close up.”
    “Tomorrow,” Julie said instantly. “Okay?”
    “I shall leave some bank forms on the kitchen table. They need your signature. I’m putting a sum of money in an account in your name.”
    She said nothing, but resolved not to sign the forms.
    “I wish there were something we could say to each other,” he said.
    “How about good-bye?” She was choking up. “No, wait. Jeff, in all those talks you and my mother used to have, did she ever tell you anything about my father?”
    “Not that I remember at the moment.” He thought a bit more about it. “I’d have told you by now in any case. You’ve asked before.”
    “I’d forgotten,” Julie said. “She flirted with you, didn’t she?”
    “I suppose you could call it that. I always thought of it as her mode of flattery. … I don’t know whether this would