Run River Read Online Free PDF Page A

novels than of newspaper murder accounts, which he had read throughout his life with a disinterest born of disbelief. They had never seemed probable. Father Kills Daughter’s Swain, Argument over Car Keys. Wife Kills Mate, Wounds Child, Did Not Mean to Fire. Carhop Slain, Assailant Unknown . He could dredge from all those years of reading only the impression that dentists were frequently key witnesses when it came to identification; he had a further notion, even more dim, that no matter how advanced the decomposition an autopsy would show whether or not the cause of death had been drowning. The lungs either did or did not contain water, he could not remember which. Even if the body did not turn up for months, in that case, there would be inquiries, questions asked of all Channing’s acquaintances and particularly of him, particularly of him and of Lily. Everyone knew, everyone must know, about Lily and Channing, about Martha and Channing. Fifteen years.
    Anyway, it might be discovered tomorrow, next week. Nancy Channing would miss him, if nobody else did: she was suing for back alimony and had her father’s lawyers after him all the time. For all Everett knew a hearing was scheduled for Monday. Were Channing reported missing, they might think—would certainly think, in a summer when there had been three or four drownings a month—to drag the river; might drag up the weighted body, leaving no question of accident, no possibility that the generally disorganized details of Ryder Channing’s life had led him to drown himself. There were altogether too many variables.
    “Where’s his car?” Everett asked suddenly, and as he said it the variables began crowding in, the elements he could never calculate, the other factors overlooked. Channing’s car still on the ranch; China Mary, not at her sister’s as she usually was on Saturday night but maybe in her own cottage beyond the house, hearing the shot, knowing; the possible appointments set up for Monday. Not that suicides didn’t set up appointments; not that Channing, in any case, had made much of a practice of keeping appointments the past few years. But still.
    “Down the back road to the dock,” Lily said, calm, and the old resentment flared briefly, obscuring everything. (Parked just off the levee road, hidden in the trees and darkness along the old dock road; the black Mercedes still unpaid for. “I was down on the dock, baby,” she would have said in the same calm voice had none of it happened, had he simply come home from the party and found the house empty, simply waited upstairs as he had waited other evenings, listening for her high heels on the wooden verandah, listening for the screen door, for her humming. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses . “I was down watching the water. Didn’t Francie tell you I’d gone on home? Didn’t she tell you I had a headache?”)
    He could get rid of the Mercedes, all right, but it would be like sandbagging a levee already breached. Something else would keep turning up. There was still, however, Lily’s way, the almost straight way, the way which would still give them something to talk about but the way which would be, in the end, the easy way: he could call the sheriff’s office now—he could call Ed McGrath at home, they had gotten him at home the night Martha drowned—and tell him that he had shot Ryder Channing in self-defense. Or protection of property. Or whatever they wanted to call it. He had come home, heard Lily screaming on the dock, had picked up his gun and run down to investigate. When he found Lily struggling with Channing he had tried to break it up; Channing had gone for him and he had shot him. Rancher Shoots Friend in Row over Wife, Did Not Mean to Kill .
    It was plausible only if you accepted as given Lily’s alleged resistance. Get some hotshot District Attorney in there—who would it be? Everett no longer knew—he could make something of that, make it clear how many