Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery Read Online Free PDF

turned off the machine.

Three
    Coffee and Donuts
    Dan’s heart pounded beneath the sheet. The phone was halfway through the second ring. The caller ID strip glowed green: bell payphone — 3:34 am . It might be Bill calling to say he’d finished his shift, though he usually crawled off to his own place and didn’t bother to call — if he even thought of Dan when he left work. Then too, Bill had a cell phone.
    Dan cleared his throat and picked up, but the answering machine got there first. A dial tone hung in the air. He stared through the blackness at the receiver. “If you’re going to wake me up, you could at least identify yourself so I’ll know who to be pissed off at tomorrow.”
    He smacked the phone down. Anyone in trouble would have left a message. Kendra certainly, and Ked was asleep in the next room, so it couldn’t have been anything to do with either of them. But you’d have to be desperate to phone at that hour. His heart was still doing a jazz number.
    His thoughts returned to Bill. He might’ve been arrested with drugs in his pocket at some after-hours club. Once he’d been stopped while driving on the verge of being impaired, but it turned out he’d operated on the cop’s mother and got off with a warning. Bill was lucky that way. What if he’d been in an accident? Dan tried not to think about it. In another minute he’d have himself convinced Bill was somewhere out there, hurt or in trouble, and that Dan had failed to be there for him.
    He rolled onto his back and stared at the darkness. Anonymous calls pissed him off. He might lie awake for hours wondering who it was. Part of him liked to think Bill would call to say he wanted to come over, screw the late hour. Even with Ked at home, Dan would’ve agreed. But that never happened. Bill didn’t sleep at other peoples’ houses.
    He tried to drop back to sleep, but with no luck. Sometimes he dreamed of Bill and woke up arguing aloud. They were usually on a train in a foreign city — London, New York, once Miami — headed somewhere that mattered to Dan, but never to Bill. Dan would try to impress on Bill the importance of the trip, but without success. The dreams always ended in confusion, with missed connections, lost tickets, and dashed hopes for arriving wherever they were heading.
    Dan’s therapist encouraged him to explore how he felt. It didn’t take a shrink to tell him all the signs of a heavily flawed relationship were apparent in waking life, never mind in la-la-land when he was asleep. Even intelligent people let themselves be deluded by their emotions.
    Bill seemed incapable of affection, elusive and ambivalent about his feelings. Commitment-phobe didn’t cover it. He’d make dates and cancel at the last minute. He had excuses — work commitments, family obligations, social networking. Despite the fact they’d been dating a year, they never seemed to get closer. When pressed, Dan found it hard to point to anything meaningful between them. In all that time, he’d met only a handful of Bill’s closest friends and not one family member.
    “We’re not close,” Bill had said of his four brothers and two sisters.
    In this case, “not close” meant sporadic telephone conversations with his siblings, and infrequent family gatherings of unstated intent. Dan was never invited. At least not by Bill. Even Christmas seemed a duty, though not one Bill felt required a spouse. When Dan pressed him, Bill would shrug and say it wasn’t important, shutting down the conversation.
    To Dan, the ideal relationship was an easy-going fusion of personalities that allowed both partners to remain healthily independent while knowing each could depend on the other. A state in which late night phone calls were a cause for joy, not alarm, and trust was a matter of course rather than fantasy. Bill was a constant challenge to that goal.
    And then there was the small matter of Kedrick. Dan’s dates were impressed to learn he was a father, but he