Stranger in the Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

Maxwell demanded.
    “Leaving town,” Travis said in a cold voice that matched his father’s.
    “Forester can’t handle this deal.”
    “You’re the one who hired him.”
    “He’s a good number cruncher and he sucks up to the clients. They like him.”
    “Then when he tells them their jobs are gone, he can hold their hands,” Travis said. “I have to go.”
    “Where is it this time?” Randall muttered.
    “Watch the sports pages.”
    “If you get yourself killed,” Randall said, “I’ll—”
    “You’ll what, Dad? Not attend my funeral?”
    “I’ll say hello to your mother.”
    For a moment Travis froze in place. Why had his father spoken of her now ? Had he heard something? That a Lucy Cooper had been mentioned in a Richmond newspaper hadn’t been enough to alert him, had it?
    Travis decided to brazen it out. “You’re pulling out the big guns this morning. You must want something bad.”
    “I need you to go over this deal. There’s something wrong in this contract, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
    One thing Travis knew about his father was that his instincts were infallible. If he thought there was something wrong, there was. In the last four years there’d been a hundred times when Travis had wanted to say there was nothing wrong, that no one was trying to put one over on him. Travis couldn’t help thinking that if he screwed up, his father would let him out of his devil’s deal. But he knew that wouldn’t happen.
    Randall knew when he was pushing his son too far. “Give me this morning and you can take a couple of weeks off.”
    Travis was silent as he thought that his father knew him too well. But then, Randall Maxwell was a brilliant judge of character. Many years ago he’d rightly judged that Miss Lucy Jane Travis would be too afraid of him to do anything but comply with whatever he told her to do.
    “Take three weeks off,” Randall said. “This deal will take that long. Just figure out what they’re trying to put over on me in this contract and you’re free.”
    The last thing Travis wanted was to leave his father in anger or suspicion. The rage would come later when Travis helped his mother in the divorce. “Send the contract to me.”
    “There’s a man waiting outside your door now,” Randall said.
    Travis couldn’t see his father’s smile of triumph, but he felt it. The only thing in life that really mattered to the man was winning.
    It had been two in the afternoon before Travis got away. He’d wanted to call his mother and tell her he was coming, but he didn’t have a throwaway phone, and he didn’t dare use his cell.
    In the end, the second he finished with the contract, he left. He called his father from the car. “That old man is as big a crook as you are,” Travis said. “Page 212, last paragraph, says that if you don’t agree to his terms you’re in default and the company goes back to him.”
    “Terms?” Randall shouted. “What terms ?! What’s he talking about?”
    “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask old man Hardranger that.”
    “You have to—”
    “No I don’t,” Travis said. “Get Forester to find out what the old man wants. Or sic Penny on him. Anybody but me. See you in three weeks,” he said, then clicked off the phone. “Or not,” he added.
    It was difficult for Travis to imagine that possibly—maybe—he was about to get out from under his father’s thumb. If his mother had had enough time to get up her courage to actually go through a divorce, Travis would be free.
    The thought made him smile for most of the drive down to Edilean.
    It was eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and as far as he could tell, the town was dead. Every store was closed, no all-night drugstore, no one sauntering by walking a dog. All in all, he thought the little town with its old buildings was a bit eerie, rather like a sci-fi B movie where all the inhabitants had been abducted by aliens.
    It wasn’t easy finding Aldredge Road, but when he saw