Rain Girl Read Online Free PDF

talked for a minute. I was busy with a patient. He said he’d be away for a few days and we needn’t worry. He would explain everything when he got back, and he’d have a nice surprise for us, something we’d be happy about. Something along those lines. It sounded promising, as if he’d made a decision.”
    Franza took a sip of the wine and looked at the meat, which had been on the grill for far too long now. It would be dry, which was just the way they liked it—one of the few preferences they had in common. “Really?”
    “Yes, absolutely.”
    Max put the pieces of chicken on two plates and set them on the table. “Come, let’s eat. Help yourself to salad.”
    He took the ketchup, squirted a big blob on his chicken, and looked pleased.
    Franza cringed and felt her hunger disappear. “Hm!” she said.
    Max took a long drink of his wine and leaned back, sighing contently. On the patio, they were sheltered from the gentle breeze wafting through the garden, while the wall behind their backs radiated the warmth it had stored up from the sun during the day.
    “Wonderful, these summer evenings after the rain. Smells so good!”
    Franza nodded.
    “How does it taste?”
    She nodded again. “It’s excellent.”
    He squeezed her hand briefly. I’ll probably grow old like this, she thought. And at eighty we’ll still be fighting over who gets the ketchup from the gas station.
    Crickets were chirping in the garden, and it was getting dark.
    “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
    “A girl who was murdered,” she said.
    He didn’t respond. At some point he had lost interest in her cases. They were all the same to him. He didn’t understand what for her was the basic rule of her job: death, when it happened, was always new and always different.
    She knew he didn’t understand and felt a sudden surge of tenderness toward him because he lacked this important knowledge. She looked at him and noticed that his hair was thinning and his shoulders slumping forward. On an impulse, she lifted her hand and touched his cheek gently. He looked at her in surprise. Then she thought of her lover and his director, and of the girl, and of the tears she hadn’t yet shed, and she longed for Port’s shoulder. She smiled.
    “He called you, too, by the way, but your phone was turned off,” Max said. “Why?”
    She didn’t react right away, but she saw the alert look in his eyes and took a forkful of salad before answering.
    “Why what?”
    “Turned off. Your cell phone.”
    “Oh, yes!” She dabbed her mouth and lifted her glass, aware that she was annoying him. “Was it? This morning? Oh, yes. The battery was dead. I had to charge it at the office.”
    She tried to sound casual and could sense she was failing and that he didn’t believe her.
    “How is Felix?” he asked.

13
    “You still haven’t cleaned this place up!” she said every time after she had to visit the morgue. She walked into his room and sat down on his bed, sighing. “You live in a pigsty. You come and go as you please. Your life is running through your fingers.”
    Now that, he thought, would be bad . . . if life were running through his fingers. Which it wasn’t. Clearly not. Not anymore. Because Marie had noticed him. Finally. And she loved him. Life was good. Marie loved him. Finally. He scribbled on the paper.
     
    Marie in the streetcar,
    Marie, the lovely.
    Marie, the tiny.
    Marie in the streetcar.

    What was that supposed to be? A poem? A love poem?

    Only Marie has the key to my heart. Mouse rhymes with louse rhymes with Klaus.

    What a bunch of shit! He laughed, shook his head, turned in his chair and made the room spin.

    “It still isn’t cleaned up,” Franza would say. “You live in a pigsty; you come and go as you please. Your life is running through your fingers. Oh, Ben! Ben!”
    She was away a lot. She’d had this job even while he was still very young.
    “Chasing the bad guys!” his father always said with a touch of