Lost Past Read Online Free PDF Page B

person.
                  It was even considered that he might have done some research for someone else and “sold” his results for murdering his wife. He produced spectacular results every three or four years, but had a dry period that ended with the paper he was presenting when Natalie disappeared. Nothing was published by anyone else in his field that was a reasonable candidate for this bizarre scenario.
                  The police were polite to Arthur, because he was an important person, but they investigated him thoroughly. Arthur didn’t resent this, because he realized they wouldn’t spend much time searching for other leads, until they eliminated him as a suspect.
    John asked Linda if her dad told her this. She said he hadn’t, with a mulish look that suggested further inquiry would be unproductive. He asked her what happened next, rather than pursue the source of her information.
                  Mary Chen came into Arthur’s life three months after Natalie’s disappearance, and she moved in about five months later, but as Linda said, “Dad told me a few weeks after Mom disappeared that there was no hope of her being alive. He knew she wouldn’t have left voluntarily. She never would have deserted us. Besides, even if she did, she would have told all of us. She must have been kidnapped and killed by someone who wasn’t doing it for ransom. The body was disposed of somehow.”
                  After hearing that, John wondered about Arthur’s character. He was unable to build a picture of him. He had a photograph from one of Tom’s emails, but it didn’t help. John saw a small man with dark hair and a pointed nose who looked his age, which was fifty-one. By all accounts, they were best friends, although they were nearly a generation apart. 
    ***
                  “I don’t think I want to stay here,” Linda said to Tom. They were in her bedroom, which was Arthur’s study when they were gone. Linda sat on the captain’s bed whose drawers were full of the possessions she didn’t bring with her to graduate school.  Not being overly sentimental, she wasn’t sorry that her property was ruthlessly pruned when her father sold the home she grew up in. She recognized the reality that she didn’t have the storage space to keep what she didn’t need. The move gave Linda an excuse to discard her mother’s well-used gardening gloves and dictionary. These mementoes had no use because Linda used an online dictionary and didn’t garden. She kept photographs of her, but they took little space. Her mother didn’t wear jewelry and her clothes wouldn’t fit Linda. She kept her collection of annotated gardening books, enjoying looking through them to see comments such as, “This didn’t work,” or “Does well in a southern exposure.” Mom considered knick-knacks to be dust catchers and owned nothing that wasn’t practical.
                  “It will be crowded,” Tom replied. Linda knew Tom was referring to John’s apartment. Mary previously told them that her mother and brother were flying in from California the next day. There was no discussion of where they would stay, but Linda and Tom both assumed Mary would prefer to have her family in the condo.
                  They both paused. Linda didn’t want to say what she was thinking, but the channel opened, and she heard Tom thinking the same thing. Saying it wouldn’t make things better, but worse. Usually, she told Tom when she read him, but there seemed no point this time. With their father almost certainly dead, they lost all connection to Mary. She was their stepmother in name only. Arthur was their father, but he was so involved with his research that he spent little time with them. Since Linda was twelve and Tom was fifteen, John had been their parent.
                  As Tom pulled out his cell phone, he glanced a question at Linda. She nodded and the