Hemlock Grove Read Online Free PDF Page B

anything to do with it?” he said.
    “Why thank you, Olivia,” she said. Her accent was careful British with continental traces. She had been in her time an actress of some favor on the boards of the Lyceum and even at their most extemporaneous her words had the ring of her craft.
    He regarded her evenly. His composure was volcanic.
    “Don’t think, answer. Were you or that walking God complex in any way involved?”
    “Norman, you’ll really have to be a little more goddamn specific,” she said.
    “Letha’s pregnant,” he said.
    “Oh.” Her lips were a perfect formation of the syllable. “Well, I’m afraid you’ll find me inadequate to such a task, and as for Johann, I think we both know his … proclivities lie elsewhere.”
    “I am not fucking around here,” he said. The bartender looked over.
    “Lower your voice,” she said. “Sit down.” She patted the stool next to her. Come come.
    He sat. “You will drop that patronizing tone right now,” he said.
    “Well, you have to admit that’s a fairly astonishing accusation to respond to in a civilized fashion.”
    “We haven’t reached the accusation stage. Right now it’s just a question and you will give me a straight answer.”
    “No, Norman, I had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Nor, to my knowledge, did Dr. Pryce, and frankly that you would feel compelled to ask would be beyond outrageous were it one iota less mystifying.”
    He tilted his glass one way and the other regarding the level plane of the liquor.
    Her tone became delicate. “Has it occurred to you she may be … reluctant to share with her father the specific circumstances of conception?”
    He tapped the glass on the bar top in punctuation of a private punch line and laughed bitterly. “Reluctant? No. Not reluctant,” he said.
    She looked at him.
    “She says she’s still a virgin,” said Godfrey.
    She was quiet. He responded to her silence.
    “She says,” said Godfrey, “it was an angel.”
    She was quiet.
    “She says it visited her this summer,” he said, “and she didn’t say anything at the time because she didn’t want us getting all bent out of shape—her words—but she felt the time had come she needed our help with the … child. And she took a pregnancy test, so she’s not hallucinating that part.”
    “Has she got a boyfriend?” she said.
    “None lately.”
    “Has she been going to church?”
    “When have you known this family to go to church when someone hasn’t died?”
    “What’s your … professional evaluation?”
    He looked at her. Was that a real question.
    “Rape,” he said. “She was raped and her mind bricked it over with this fantasy. The clinical term is psychogenic amnesia .”
    “Have you contacted the police?”
    “With what? My suspicion of something that would have happened in July that she won’t corroborate? At this point my hope is to talk her out of keeping it.”
    Her eyebrows arched. “Is that for the best?”
    “As opposed to encouraging her to carry to term a child she’s convinced is a product of immaculate conception, at seventeen, when at any minute the actual event could come back to her after an irrevocable decision has been made?”
    She nodded the point.
    “Now might I ask what could possibly give you the notion I could have any involvement in this?” she said.
    He regarded his reflection in the wall mirror across the bar. He had found that when his hair had begun to silver, maintaining a neat beard conferred on him a certain archetypal authority: I have things under control. The fact was he could provide no rational explanation for why he was here. Last night his crying wife had left the room and he had remained seated and his child had taken his hand across the table with the grace of the sunrise, and in that moment when there wasn’t another comprehensible thing left to him he had a feeling. Darkly and obscurely and defiant of any rational analysis, he felt Olivia’s hand in this. And that