[Oxrun Station] The Last Call of Mourning Read Online Free PDF Page A

what you're doing."
    "I don't know, Father," she said candidly. "I really don't."
    He stiffened to say something, and she prayed he wouldn't. She couldn't stand a platitude now, and knew he was going to give her one. A platitude, a homily, some deathless fatherly advice that would cling burr-like to her forever. And when he didn't, when he only patted her shoulder gently and left, she could only twist to watch him, turning back when she saw several faces looking at her curiously.
    He's tired, she thought in puzzled explanation for his generous behavior. A long day in the city buying banks and selling countries. Or perhaps it was a long-term after-effect of his stay at the clinic. Each of her family, while she'd been in Europe, had been forced during bouts of serious illness to take a bed at the Kraylin Clinic out in the valley. No more than two or three days at the most, but each homecoming necessitated a day or two extra in bed. Only her father seemed not to have shaken off the pneumonia's debilitation; and considering her mother's newfound aversion to medicine, it was a wonder he had gone there at all, much less stayed.
    She emptied her glass in a swallow, deciding it was too late and too useless for puzzling. And though she knew she should have felt at least a modicum of elation at her father's acquiescence, there was only a sensation, a premonition, that she hadn't had the last word.
    "You think too much," she muttered to her reflection in the glass, dropped a bill on the table and hurried outside.
    It was full dark now, and most of the stores up Centre were closed. She watched as a policeman walked into the station house behind a young man whose head was bowed, a woman in a light cloth coat trailing and wringing her hands. An ambulance several blocks down darted across the avenue, siren stilled, lights blaring. There was no traffic as she crossed, walked north toward her car, only the faintly hazed neon of a few late-keeping shops, the muffled footfalls of a handful of pedestrians passing like autumnal ghosts beneath street lamps that had not been redesigned since they'd been fired with gas. Her car was the only one still parked on the street. The color seemed grey, and she postponed walking to it by standing in front of . . .
    She grinned.
    Her shop.
    Virtually all her savings transformed into plate glass, into a threshold, into the darkness beyond where there were black-wire bookracks forming three aisles back to front, and ceiling-high wooden ones she'd stained herself. The door was recessed, and she imagined it blocked so incredibly soon with brown cartons and brown boxes steel-banded and wire-taped, from which she would snatch glimpses of other worlds, other people, and sell them as dreams. Sections for lovers, for planet-hoppers, for clue hunters, for children; a nod to the classics, to the drama, to lines of poetic conscience. But mostly, she knew, there would be the dreams.
    Yarrow's Burrow.
    She grimaced and decided the name could wait.
    Turned, stepped off the curb and stopped herself with a shudder, glancing fearfully to her right.
    There was no limousine.
    She raised the collar of her raincoat to her cheeks, held it and hurried across to the car as she fumbled with her free hand for the keys in her purse. Unlocked the door and settled behind the wheel.
    Switched on the ignition. And sat there. Staring. Finally looking over to the place that was now her own and wondering if the Station was as bad as she thought. Or if it was only her—Cindy/Cyd/Cynthia—champing, snarling at the successes her brothers had had while she herself had not yet found the direction she wanted her own life to take. At twenty-seven she should have done, she kept telling herself; if not a career, then a family. But none of the professions she knew or studied interested her enough, and none of the men had been interesting either, to a degree that had made her want to learn if they were caring.
    Poor little rich girl, Ed had said once