Nobody Lives Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

call was transferred to him from motors.
    It was her birthday.

Four
    When everyone left, Harriet, the homemaker in Laurel, took charge. She shut down the central air conditioner and threw open all the windows. She soaked a thick bath towel in the sink, wrung it out and swung it around the room to cleanse and circulate the air befouled by cigar and cigarette smoke. Then she scrubbed every square inch of kitchen surface with Lysol. The guest bathroom was next. She hoped that the police technician with the greasy skin and bad complexion had not used it, but she was afraid he had. She had always been fussy about bathrooms, haunted by bad dreams and memories of one that had been full of blood.
    She hand-polished the ceramic tile floor. No mops, no applicators. She crouched on her only concession, a thick plastic kneeling pad, wearing a small smile as she scrubbed. She was sorting out and savoring every compliment on her coffee, her thriving houseplants and her home-baked muffins. Energized and elated, she was not at all tired. She loved this room—the kitchen was the heartbeat of this home, her home now.
    The shining floor bore no resemblance to the raw floorboards of the first kitchen she remembered. She would never forget its dank, smelly icebox, the pitted porcelain sink, the empty shelves lined with dust. She remembered balancing on a wobbly chair to stir thin oatmeal before she was tall enough to reach the burners on the cheap stove. She rubbed harder, as if to scour that first kitchen out of her memory. Elbow grease—that’s what her father had always demanded. “Elbow grease!” he would bellow. He wanted her to do everything —everything. She remembered his big soft stomach and his sickening smell. She remembered him coming into her room at night when she was alone in the dark. That son of a bitch.
    Odd that she could remember so little about her real mother now. Only the sharply thin naked limbs, sprawled ungainly in the tub. And of course the blood.
    Harriet got to her feet, kneading the small of her back with her rubber-gloved fingers, and reached again for the can of Lysol. She depressed the nozzle, spraying a diffuse stream of disinfectant across the room and then stopped to survey her domain. She regarded it with satisfaction, this kitchen with both a hooded gas stove and a microwave oven, with its gleaming stainless-steel twin sinks. When Rick’s parents had retired, they had remodeled the kitchen to enhance the value of the house they planned to sell. Then their bachelor son had decided he wanted his childhood home, the place where he had grown up. He did no cooking, so the kitchen had never been used when they had moved in. Left up to Laurel, Harriet thought, it would still be that way. But Harriet loved it and used it all: the spacious cabinets in pale pickled oak with state-of-the-art slide-out shelves, the white Corian countertops and the lazy Susan in the corner—perfect, light, bright and immaculate, the way she would always keep it. She had arranged her cookbooks on a shelf above the spice rack next to the philodendron with the shining leaves, polished daily with mayonnaise. Her Cuisinart, the crock pot that had belonged to Rick’s mother and his four-slice toaster were lined up like soldiers at attention. All their appliances and kitchenware irrevocably mingled together—forever.
    Harriet loved the house, the plants, the garden, but most of all she loved this room where copper-bottomed cookware glowed warmly from hangers on the wall. This was even more modern than the adopted parents’ kitchen and far better because it was hers. Being here meant everything to Harriet, which was why the shooting and Rob’s death, so close by, frightened and angered her. She did not mind the others so much, but she was furious at Alex. She wished she could stop him from coming out and doing these things. He was careless. He was stupid. Rushing into the shower, leaving Laurel with