Love Kills Read Online Free PDF Page A

eat some fruit, and pack.
    Lottie was due to return to work, and if I didn’t join her I’d soon be living under a bridge. So we wasted no time. By two o’clock that afternoon our dusty taxicab was bouncing along a rut-filled road to the far side of the island to catch the three o’clock seaplane, one of three flights a week.
    The tiny plane skimmed blue-green waves for heart-stopping moments, startling dolphins and pelicans, then swooped us into a brilliant sky under clouds that pierced the cavernous lazuline blue like stalagmites.
    The pilot, a grizzled Vietnam veteran, said he hadn’t been back to the States in years. He had done mountain rescues in the Andes and then worked for a time as a seagoing repo man, stealing boats from deadbeat owners behind in their payments. The money was good but he wearied of being chased, shot at, and cursed. “Had enough of that in Nam and then after we came home.”
    We spent a few hours in Nassau, speed-shopped the straw market for souvenirs, and then went on to Miami aboard a plane packed with the same fellow travelers who seem to be on every flight: Howling Baby, Sneezing Senior, Coughing Man, and Overweight Woman Drenched in Noxious Perfume.
    Coming home, drinking in Miami from the sky, never fails to take my breath away, even though the city I love is gone now, replaced by a swollen, overbuilt metropolis, where the only remaining small patches of green visible from the air are cemeteries and sports stadiums. Endless rivers of traffic crept along every clogged artery. The surf snaked along the shoreline like a green river, while sky and sea blended seamlessly at the horizon.
    Homesick, heartsick, a little bit nauseous, I stepped back into messy reality, my heart pounding with anticipation.
    As we cleared customs, Lottie and I wondered aloud if we would ever identify the owners of the lost camera. I had left my number with several locals on the island, offering to send the photos should the owner show up.
    Lottie drove me home in the company car she’d left at the airport. Culture shock overwhelmed me: traffic noise, heat, and humidity exacerbated by the scorching pavement and miles of concrete barriers that block sea breezes. Construction cranes towered at every turn. Cranes have become the new state bird, I thought.
    Home, my little garden apartment—one of twelve in two rows facing each other across a tree-shaded lawn guarded by pink hibiscus hedges—had not changed.
    I’d left my dog Bitsy, my cat Billy Boots, and my house keys with Helen Goldstein, my landlady. Leaving my four-footed companions in familiar surroundings with someone they loved and I trusted left me feeling far less guilt. At eighty-two, married sixty-three years, Helen Goldstein is one of the youngest people I know.
    Welcoming aromas wafted from her kitchen as she threw open the door. There was flour on her hands and cheeks, and she wore an apron emblazoned with the words HARDLY ANYBODY GOT SICK LAST TIME I COOKED
    She had been baking rugelach, kugel, and kichel, little cookies with a sprinkling of sugar. Our surprise arrival delighted her. The hugs, happy laughter, and Bitsy’s barking brought her husband, Hy, rushing in from the living room where he had been watching the TV news.
    Bitsy, the little dog I inherited from a policewoman killed in the riots, had not forgotten me. Billy Boots, my black-and-white tuxedo cat, perched high on the embroidered back of an armchair, sneering disdainfully at the dog’s hysterical welcome. Tail twitching, the cat stared straight through me, as though I were an imperfect stranger intruding on his turf. He arched his neck, displaying a bright flowered collar and a silver bell that were new to me. Well fed and well groomed, both animals looked cleaner and shinier than on my watch, clear evidence that I couldn’t even properly nurture a cat and a small mop of a dog. What would Francie, who’d smuggled Bitsy into her patrol