Memorial Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

lane. Rush hour traffic had thinned out just enough that the cars were traveling at speed again, whipping along in the three lanes between the cousins. Molly froze, her hands at her mouth, staring across at Cassie.
    Cassie could see that her eyes were nearly blind with tears. "Wait there!" she called with the authority of a parent. "Get back on the sidewalk!"
    Cassie's legs twitched to be moving, but she forced herself to wait on the streetcar island until the traffic broke. She never took her eyes from Molly, her darling, clever Molly. Molly whose mind gave her no peace, who fussed forever over pencils and foot rule, over lists of state capitals and the great dates of history. Of all her cousins, or even sisters, Molly was the one most like Cassie herself.
    "Molly, Molly," Cassie said, enfolding her when finally she'd crossed the avenue. "What is it, hon?"
    But Molly only sobbed into Cassie's body. How thin she is, Cassie thought, pressing her own long fingers into her cousin's bony back. Molly was a girl who had nightmares over and over, but who on waking could never say what had so terrified her.
    "What is it, darling?" Cassie gently pushed the girl out of the corner her arms had made.
    Molly opened her mouth but could not speak. She seemed retarded or mute. A wave of worry washed over Cassie. This was the child, more than the others, to whom she'd given herself. Molly's intelligence had been evident early, and one of the things Cassie's salary had always meant to her was that Molly was not going to have to drop out of school. But Molly was as fragile as she was smart. She stared into Cassie's eyes now, a look of pure terror on her face.
    Jerry's face flashed into Cassie's mind. Jerry? Her brother, two years her junior, was the only one of her siblings who had a steady job, but it was a job Cassie had never liked. He worked in the carshops where the meat packers' refrigerated railroad cars were repaired. How many col
lections had been taken up at St. Gabe's for carshop men whose legs or arms had been crushed under the huge iron wheels of—
    "Pa's dead, Cassie." Molly's face collapsed around her mouth as she forced the words out again. "Pa's dead."
    Cassie's elbows stiffened, an involuntary reflex which pushed Molly away the length of her arms. It was like pushing off from the ground, a seesaw.
    "Ma sent me to wait for you. I didn't know—"
    "What?"
    "Pa's dead."
    "Pa?
Your
Pa? Uncle Mike?"
    Molly shook her head up and down, making the tears fly from her cheeks.
    Cassie pressed her cousin's shoulders, but really it was into herself that she was pressing, to force calm into her voice. "Tell me, Molly. You've been waiting here to tell me."
    But already Cassie knew she was not going to believe her. Uncle Mike? Dead? It couldn't be. Uncle Mike was the man who'd taken over the place in Cassie's heart, what her own Pa had left empty. But then an image shot into her mind of her poor, soft Uncle Mike sprawled face-down on the sidewalk outside Dooley's. Like most of his kind, Mike Foley was long unemployed and by now beaten down by the sense of his own failure. Unlike so many others, he had never turned that frustration against his wife, and his daughters loved him. Cassie loved him.
    She shook her cousin. "What happened?" And while she waited for the stunned girl to speak, she repeated to herself, It can't be.
     
    Sean Dillon stared at the cross. The figure of the crucified Christ seemed tidy, a man in vertical repose, a positively tranquil image compared to the bloated cadaver from the blood pipes. Moran's knuckle-draggers had taken their time getting to the box basin, but when they came they plopped the corpse onto an iron-wheeled hand truck and took it away without a word, as if they were carting off the remains, say, of a disease-ridden rejected hog. Where were the police? Where was a doctor to pronounce the body dead? Those questions had occurred to Dillon, but he had to get downtown.
    Now he was sitting in the anteroom of